This is the hardest movie list I’ve ever had to compose. Condensing a decades’ worth of great movies into a single “Best of” list that’s by no means concrete is a difficult task. According to Letterboxd, I’ve watched 698 films of the 2010s, and even then I’ve failed to catch some critical favourites making the rounds of decade-best compilations like Melancholia, Toni Erdmann, and The Social Network. But I knew I’d have to make this list, I couldn’t help myself. Siskel & Ebert used to do it (this is the first decade without a “Best of” list by Ebert), Cahiers du Cinema did it, as did numerous other critics and movie sites; it’s a popular thing to do and it’s a fun thing to do. But this is a list in flux, as any great movie list should be. Just as I’m constantly discovering and re-evaluating great works of decades’ past I will continue to do so with films of the 2010s. It was a decade full of amazing cinema, as evidenced by my list of twenty honourable mentions, which in itself feels incomplete:
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) -written by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman, directed by Bob Persichetti & Peter Ramsey & Rothman
- Little Women (2019) –written and directed by Greta Gerwig
- Holy Motors (2012) –written and directed by Leos Carax
- Snowpiercer (2013) –written by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson, directed by Bong Joon-ho
- Blade Runner 2049 (2017) –written by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green, directed by Denis Villeneuve
- Silence (2016) –written by Jay Cocks and Martin Scorsese, directed by Scorsese
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) –written and directed by Rian Johnson
- Moonlight (2016) –written and directed by Barry Jenkins
- Before Midnight (2013) –written by Richard Linklater, Ethan Hawke, and Julie Delpy, directed by Linklater
- Loving Vincent (2017) –written by Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, and Jacek Dehnel, directed by Kobiela & Welchman
- Frances Ha (2012) –written by Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig, directed by Baumbach
- Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) –written and directed by Taika Waititi
- The Farewell (2019) – written and directed by Lulu Wang
- Inside Out (2015) –written by Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, and Josh Cooley, directed by Docter
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) –written and directed by Martin McDonagh
- Sorry to Bother You (2018) –written and directed by Boots Riley
- The Artist (2011) –written and directed by Michel Hazanavicus
- The Breadwinner (2017) –written by Deborah Ellis and Anita Doron, directed by Nora Twomey
- Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) –written by Marc Haimes and Chris Butler, directed by Travis Knight
- Gravity (2013) –written by Alfonso and Jonas Cuarón, directed by Alfonso Cuarón
As to the very best movies of the 2010s, I spent a long time figuring it out and rearranging it (particularly the bottom half), but at this moment in time from the point of view of this one critic and with an even mix of personal love and professional admiration, these are the greatest films of the past decade:
10. 56 Up (2012)/63 Up (2019) –directed by Michael Apted
“It took me virtually sixty years to understand who I am.”
This might seem like a cheat on a couple fronts: it's two films and technically they're made for television, but if it's a good enough rule-bend for Cahiers du Cinema it's good enough for me. And these aren't just a pair of good movies, they're the latest installments in what's undoubtedly the greatest achievement of the documentary form, an ongoing film that's been in production since 1964. In '63, fourteen children aged seven from across England and from various socio-economic backgrounds were brought together as a glimpse into the country's future, and every seven years since, Apted has checked back in on them. As the projects' thesis evolved from determining whether or not the British class system foreshadows an individuals' future to being more about mortality, existentialism, and the transience of life itself, the films too became meditations on aging and shared humanity -and these last two have been the best thus far.
These people, who we feel connected to despite having never met them, are approaching retirement now. By 63 Up, one of them (Lynn the devoted librarian) has even passed away. And so we see them putting their lives in perspective -lives that we have glimpsed and seen in motion. These last two films especially are unbelievably provocative; seeing the participants approach old age, you're forced to think about your own life, where you've come from, where you're going, and what it all means. I also think a lot about my mum, who's the same age as the subjects, wondering what she would have said at each junction, what kind of person she was, and whether there is a semblance of the seven year old child in her. A living time capsule of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in addition to everything else, this series, and these late episodes especially are destined to live on in a way few other films have.
9. First Reformed (2017) –written and directed by Paul Schraeder
“Will God forgive us for what we’re doing to his creation?”
Climate anxiety has become a very real and immediate issue, especially among young people uncertain if they even have a future given how much of it has been stolen by governments uninterested in addressing concerns, industrialists unwilling to give up their power, and sectors afraid to evolve to a changing world. And in the midst of this, Paul Schraeder of all people distilled the fears of many much younger than himself by siphoning them through a priest, forced to grapple with a crisis of faith and unchecked mental health issues in addition to this pressing concern. First Reformed has a lot on its mind, as told to us through the voiceover journal entries of Reverend Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke in perhaps his greatest performance), though there is more to this Taxi Driver/Winter Light homage than those not insubstantial, and in fact incredibly potent themes on faith, responsibility, helplessness, dread, and anguish.
Pulling structurally from those aforementioned films (the former of which he wrote of course), as well as stylistically the work of Dreyer and Bresson, Schraeder offers up a mood that’s hypnotically captivating with a slow pace and a tendency to linger on shots, composed with an often minimalist attention to detail -his attempts to replicate the “transcendental style” he’s identified in such esteemed filmmakers and written at length about. The effect it has here is one of discomfort and awe, and immense apprehension as you feel every shred of frustration and hopelessness that Toller does. In a couple moments the film breaks from its stringent design: a moment of fantasy that itself is tinged with melancholy, and an ending that deliberately withholds an elaborate climax for one marked by ambiguity. Very classic art film stuff, but employed with such diligence and thoughtful tact that it works as well as the spontaneous touches of any of the masters Schraeder is evoking -possibly better.
8. Parasite (2019) –written by Bong Joon-ho and Han Jin-wong, directed by Bong Joon-ho
“They are rich, but still nice.” “They are nice because they are rich.”
What more is there really for me to say about this film? I already covered it in both my review and my Best of 2019 list. It is remarkable in just about every facet: funny and gripping and tragic and poignant and very very smart. It is Bong's greatest work as a filmmaker and a social critic, one that can be keenly felt by everyone who has struggled to even a fragment of the degree the Kims have. And it's a movie that doesn't let anyone off the hook, the natures of each family being relatively good, only warped by a system that requires someone else to fail for them to succeed. Nevertheless, there is a wonderful catharsis in seeing the Kims’ bluff their way into the Parks household with only their sharp wits and limited resources. And the cast is such a delight at every turn with Song Kang-ho and Park So-dam the greatest standouts, cold and bitter beneath their confidence and humour.
They convey the tone of the script and of Bong himself, fed up with class disparity and the capitalist mantra. The weird story elements and shocking violence when it rears its head feels like almost an absurd extension of the bubbling class tensions rising to the surface -but they are likewise appropriate and meaningful: Kim Ki-woo being done in by the very thing that was supposed to bring him wealth is too perfect a metaphor. At the end of my review, I commented that the final moments of Parasite are haunting. They still are. I’m still thinking about how this movie ends and what it means, and may well be thinking about it for months, even years. It’s an anxiety rooted in the circumstances we’re all isolated in in the developed world at this point in time, and Bong captured that better than anyone.
7. The Shape of Water (2017) –written by Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor, directed by del Toro
“When he looks at me, the way he looks at me, he does not know what I lack, or how I am incomplete. He sees me for what I am, as I am.”
The only Oscar Best Picture winner on this list is Guillermo del Toro’s captivating and sensational take on the Beauty and the Beast story. A Cold War-set “fairy tale for adults” as del Toro put it, it’s a film that intentionally adapts old monster movie aesthetics in addition to its creature, keenly recognizing their historical subtexts tied to race and sexuality, and reclaiming them in triumph on behalf of the ‘other’ often symbolically ostracized in such films. In addition to the literal Creature of this film, played with extraordinary virtuosity by Doug Jones, the heroes are a mute woman, a closeted gay man, a black woman, and a good-hearted Russian scientist. As these latter three, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, and Michael Stuhlbarg are tremendous, but it’s Sally Hawkins who carries the movie with such a quiet and effortless yet courageous beauty of spirit. In perfect opposition to her, the avatar of oppression, bigotry, the old world order, and American exceptionalism, is Michael Shannon as one of the most terrifically hateable movie villains in recent years.
The film has a look and feel all its own, the most entrancing visually of del Toro’s movies since Pan’s Labyrinth; poetic and otherworldly in the scale of its sets, its pacing, and shot choices, yet still grungy and dim in the context of the period and the environment, never letting you forget what the world and circumstances are like for its protagonists. The film is also refreshing for its open sexuality, both in the mature sexual agency of Hawkins’ Eliza and the less mature and threatening sexual frustration of Shannon’s Strickland. And like First Reformed, there’s a spontaneous scene of exquisite fantasy in the last act, delightful and romantic in its mesmerizing whimsy, and an encapsulation of a profound desire we can all relate to.
6. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) –written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, and Nico Lathouris, directed by Miller
“Where must we go… we who wander this wasteland in search of our better selves?”
Back in my first Best of 2015 list for UnCut, I think I ranked this film 6th or 7th out of fifty-odd movies I’d seen that year. But rewatching it this year and especially in the light of renewed attention to it as a decade best (the AV Club ranked it #1), I felt compelled to revisit it -and I realized it not only was the best film of 2015 but indeed among the best of the 2010s. One of the greatest, most consistently energized yet beautifully erratic action movies ever made, its’ combination of intense political and sexual commentary, gorgeous evocative imagery, stylish editing and profoundly rich colour schemes (not to mention subdued yet amazing performances from Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy) elevate it far beyond the conventions and monotony the genre usually offers. Much like Miller’s original Mad Max films, it completely redefined the pop culture idea of the post-apocalyptic wasteland -echoed even as late as this past years’ The Lego Movie 2.
But hand-in-hand with its high-octane pace, masterful stunt-work, and exciting elaborate practical set-pieces, the film is above all a passionate and powerful statement on womens’ rights and reproductive freedom; as well as to a lesser degree the importance of good allyship, represented through Hardy’s Max and Nicholas Hoult’s Nux, defying the chaotically masculine world order to help this band of abused though thoroughly courageous women escape lives where their humanity has been stripped. In this it was also an extreme condemnation of the culture of toxic masculinity years before the phrase entered the socio-political discourse. A visceral, thrilling metaphor for the fight for equality, illustrated through some of the most awesome visuals and technical choices of the past fifty years of cinema, Mad Max: Fury Road is the rare mainstream blockbuster that only becomes more impressive with age.
5. Song of the Sea (2014) –written by Will Collins, directed by Tomm Moore
“Remember me in your stories and in your songs.”
My favourite animated movie of the last ten years and everything a great animated movie should be: visually striking and interesting, whimsical yet intelligent, compelling, even funny, and with cross-generational cross-cultural appeal. Of course this is a film heavily entrenched in Irish folklore, as has been the bread and butter of its humble Kilkenney studio, Cartoon Saloon, who produced The Secret of Kells before it and the yet-to-be-released Wolfwalkers after (possibly my most anticipated movie for 2020!). However, much like classic Disney movies, its’ magic is of a kind that has a universal relatable theme to break through the cultural signifiers, yet maintaining them as core to the films’ identity. Helmed by studio co-founder Tomm Moore, it’s the story of a selkie girl, and her brother who must return her to the sea. Along the way he learns to love and look out for her and shed his resentments over her being the perceived cause of the death of their mother, also a selkie.
The story is strong enough on its own merits, grounded in children who feel incredibly real, and paced with a free-spirited, contemplative attitude to its fantastical elements that echoes the early films of Miyazaki. It’s richest perhaps most in its style, a design aesthetic seemingly made intentionally to be the polar opposite of 3D animation. Characterized by simple shapes and outlines, rigidly flat dimensions yet stunningly intricate details, it’s as much a living storybook as Into the Spider-Verse is a living comic book. And beyond that, the way it illustrates perspective, fills out the frame, and places context in literal terms is astounding. The movie is blessed with a voice cast that includes Brendan Gleeson and Fionnula Flanagan, as well as the exquisite Lisa Hannigan, who sings a couple variations of the titular song to raw Celtic perfection; as lovely and as captivating as this sensational film itself.
4. Shoplifters (2018) –written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda
“Sometimes it’s better to choose your own family.”
I did not know what to expect the first time I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters. I thought after all the praise it had been getting at international festivals that it would certainly be an interesting and enlightening bit of foreign cinema about petty crime and poverty in Japan. I was not at all imagining it would be one of the most moving and thought-provoking family dramas I had ever seen. The film about the lives of six unrelated outcasts forging a family of circumstance as they attempt to get by is extraordinarily beautiful, naturalistic to an almost Ozu degree, and utterly heartwarming and heartbreaking in equal measure. A comment on the state of the poor and homeless, the abused and neglected in contemporary society, Kore-eda’s biggest theme tied into all this is on the fluidity of the family unit and what makes a family, demonstrated through his characters having found love and acceptance with each other where it had eluded them elsewhere in their lives.
And in spite of their less noble actions (shoplifting being among the least of which) and deceitfulness with each other, it’s remarkably easy to fall in love with this family over the course of the movie. The individual relationships are sweet, from Lily Franky’s father figure trying to earn that parental designation from the boy he instructs (a nicer variant on the Fagin/Oliver Twist dynamic) to Sakura Ando’s matriarch tenderly caring for the little girl they kidnapped from an abusive household. Ando in particular delivers such a fantastic performance, with one devastating scene securing her place for me as one of the finest breakout performers of the 2010s. And speaking of emotions, Shoplifters also has one of the saddest endings that I can recall, but one that’s fully earned and earnest, a socially loaded circumstance that hits like a ton of bricks in a way few movies are capable of.
3. La La Land (2016) –written and directed by Damien Chazelle
“Here’s to the fools who dream.”
No Hollywood musical since the Golden Age has been as delightful and unapologetically sincere as La La Land. And no Hollywood musical that I can think of has been as critical of the world and system it simultaneously appraises, and have both sentiments land with such resonance and without contradicting one another. La La Land is a film about the power of what Hollywood pretends to be and what it actually is; how it’s soul-crushing and inspiring in equal measure and how the road to success is paved with sacrifice. But more than that the film is about artistic passion, celebrating that drive to create, whether through acting, music, writing, directing, singing, dancing, painting, etc. And as much as it succeeds in displaying the truth of how difficult pursuing such passions is, it powerfully reminds the artistically inclined why those passions are worth pursuing.
The songs still float around my head from time to time, as much as anything from My Fair Lady or Singin’ in the Rain, wonderfully written, blatantly joyous, and gorgeously shot by Chazelle with expert staging and craft far beyond his years. The performances are marvellous, with Emma Stone especially compelling as an avatar for every aspiring artist weighed down by years of rejection and bottled up insecurity. Blending reality and artificiality beautifully in evocation of the films’ devotion to dreamy ideals, the film is bedecked in rich colour and cinematography, even outside of the musical sequences; and that final one, a conscious homage to An American in Paris but capable of a dynamic visual splendour that film wasn’t, is nothing short of a feast for the senses, as proverbial a cliche as that is -though I think if any film deserves a pass in that department it’s this one. La La Land was the great musical of the 2010s, and one with a brilliance in design and execution that will be very difficult to top indeed.
2. Roma (2018) –written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón
“Mountains are old, but they’re still green.”
Quite simply, a masterpiece. Alfonso Cuarón’s intimate and profound love letter to his childhood nanny is as pure and noble a work of cinema as the art form has ever seen. The semi-autobiographical film about the indigenous maid of a well-off family in early 1970s Mexico City was not only written and directed, but shot and edited by the Mexican auteur to ensure the realization of this deeply personal vision. And every aspect of the film is beautiful as a result: the black and white photography that lends an air of nostalgia reflective of memory, the long takes soaking up the environment and moving tenderly with the utmost grace, the carefully detailed mise en scene and staging within those takes, even the breathtaking opening where soapy water on a cobblestone driveway gradually reveals a perfect mirror as a plane flies overhead -a plane which bookends the film poignantly.
At the centre of it all is Yalitza Aparacio in perhaps my single favourite performance of the 2010s. As Cleo, she is exquisitely natural, a mesmerizing force of subdued brilliance, powerful in her vivid emotionality yet entrancingly reserved, hinting at ideas and feelings of race and privilege structures left unsaid in the films’ text. She draws you into her life and world, her everyday chores and humility, her little joys and her immense tragedies. The scene where she loses her baby is still immensely difficult to watch, one of the gut-punchiest movie moments I’ve ever witnessed; only for it to be followed by her heroic rescue of the children from the waves at Tuxpan in the greatest single-take sequence since Cuarón’s own Children of Men. As Cuarón reflects on his childhood here, he also finds time to comment harshly on the poor state of indigenous communities and government land seizures, the social divide of race and class, as well as how larger political unrest impacts innocent lives, illustrated with raw brutality in his depiction of the Corpus Christi Massacre. A soulful, moving film of the highest degree and expert craft, Roma is an enduring credit to the art.
1. Boyhood (2014) –written and directed by Richard Linklater
“You know how everyone’s always saying ‘seize the moment’? I don’t know, I’m kinda thinking it’s the other way around. You know, like the moment seizes us.”
I didn’t intend to bookend this list with experimental films about aging, but I’m quite happy that is what happened. Like the Up series, Boyhood is a monumental accomplishment in the medium of film as a study of the human condition over time -it similarly compresses years into hours, though at a more literal rate, in an effort to explore the aging process and the myriad of ways in which we grow. What sets Boyhood apart and above those however is the manner of its evolution and how it allows us to bear witness to the gradual development of its characters and their lives; not checking in merely at specific stages separated by years, but seamlessly flowing through a childs’ adolescence, emphasizing the small moments of personal growth often with more weight than the typical coming-of-age staples. Shot over the course of twelve years (a fact often dismissed as a gimmick by the intellectually lazy), it captures the experience and emotions of growing up better than any other movie, simultaneously specific and universal in its outlook.
But I’ve already discussed the profoundness of its themes at length and the meaning it imparts to its viewers. Boyhood is likewise a masterwork of independent filmmaking; as authentically written, casually composed, humanistic, and bold as anything from Linklater, with added doses of intense emotional resonance and meditative stillness executed on a scale both colossal and minuscule that sets a high watermark for any Sundance-competing coming-of-age drama to follow in its not inconsiderable shadow. Its’ performances are extraordinary, from a resilient, formidable Patricia Arquette, in whom is the spirit of all our mothers, to an effortlessly charismatic and solemnly enlightening Ethan Hawke; but let’s not discount Ellar Coltrane as well, whose talents we watch develop over the course of the film, nurtured no doubt by those of his collaborators, until he is the very model of the artistically inclined, selectively sullen, existentially curious teenager we all recognize on their first day of college.
Boyhood was regarded as a miracle film, and it is as much as any. The true miracle isn’t in the long gestation period though, but in its sights: its meaning and values and insights which continue to strike a chord long after you’ve surpassed Masons’ age at the end of the film. What it accomplishes in that transcends and elevates the form. Cinema, as it ought to be.
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