Professional critic or not, though, I couldn’t miss the closing out of the decade without talking about my favorite films from the last 10 years. I couldn’t see everything in theaters—thank you streaming services!—but I do feel like I saw almost everything I wanted, even if it was months or years after it was released. So here we go: so long, 2010s.
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20. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)
I saw this on a plane and was laughing like a maniac at the last 20 minutes, in which history is rewritten, dog food is thrown, someone’s bell is rung (and rung and rung and rung…) and Leonardo DiCaprio uses a World War II-era flamethrower, because of course he does. When it was over I scrubbed it back 20 minutes and watched it again. Director Quentin Tarantino finds a way to earn this kind of mayhem, and Once Upon a Time has a slow build that creeps forward at an agonizing pace. Some called it slow and said “nothing much happens,” but it’s all world building and the world is Hollywood in the 1960s, and it’s beautiful. Even without the ultra-violence in the last sequence, the film is a treasure to experience, with the call-outs to Old Hollywood, DiCaprio’s haphazard career of B-movies and villains of the week, that nail-biting sequence at Spahn Ranch and Brad Pitt’s cooler-than-cool stuntman who alters the course of history with a single can of dog food. No, this is not how Sharon Tate spent that fateful night in the summer of 1969. It’s a fantasy, but one that speaks to Hollywood’s ability to tell fascinating stories, both true and false.
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19. Lady Bird (2017)
If the 2010s only gave us Saoirse Ronan, then that would be a fine decade and I would have no complaints. Utterly captivating in everything she’s in, Ronan is one of those electrical forces that can jolt the screen alive with her presence. She’s tremendous in Brooklyn, another slam-dunk choice for the decade, and I’ve heard amazing things about Little Women (I have yet to see it), but it’s this Ronan-starring teen drama that has stuck with me. I knew people like Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson in high school—I think everyone did—and yet the film doesn’t feel like it’s about them. Here is a singular individual, confused and messy, trying to figure it all out as best she can. That’s a general sort of plot when it comes to teens and teen movies, but Ronan breathes new life into it with her poetic and yet cynical view of the world (or maybe just Sacramento, the film’s true villain). Writer and director Greta Gerwig absolutely nails this film in every conceivable way, as does co-star Laurie Metcalf, who was seemingly building her career to play this one magnifying force of a mother. It should also be noted that there was some other really terrific teen movies to come out of the decade, all worth mentioning: Booksmart, The Edge of Seventeen, Easy A, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the hugely underappreciated The Spectacular Now.
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18. The Lost City of Z (2016)
In the first month of the decade David Grann’s book The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon was released to critical acclaim. By 2016 James Gray had adapted the book, but jettisoned half of Grann’s double-sided narrative of a writer searching for a long-lost explorer, focusing solely on the adventures of Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), the famed explorer who ventured one too many times into the Amazon and never returned. Fawcett, some would say, was mad for risking exotic diseases, severe weather, impassable jungles and cannibals, but Gray doesn’t frame him as a nut. He stands with Fawcett and gives his ideas merit, acknowledging the important sacrifices he made with his family, his academic career and, ultimately, his life, all to search for a city that modern science has agreed did exist. Fawcett and his eldest son were last seen in 1925, and what may or may not have happened to them has become part of the legend. Gray has no answers, but his last shots are so effective, so moving and so gut-wrenching that it feels like an appropriate conclusion to a story that has been left untold for nearly a century.
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17. Ex Machina (2014)
As tech companies race to create artificial intelligence in one form or another, brilliant minds of the 21st century have quietly urged caution. Ex Machina came out screaming. Set in the near future, the film tracks the hubris of two men (Star Wars co-stars Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac) as they ponder the future with Ava, an AI creation that is two steps ahead of each of them. Alex Garland’s mesmerizingly paced and dramatically shot science-fiction “what if” came out at the perfect time: Tesla had an autopilot car, Amazon and other companies were slowly switching to advanced robotics on a massive scale, and a variety of virtual assistants with names like Siri and Alexa were on the market. Ex Machina codified the fear that many were having about AI, namely that creating life, even mechanical “thinking” life, was a danger we still weren’t able to grasp. And while robots are the villains in this technological shift in the real world, Garland’s film has a ringer that tips the scales in its favor: Alicia Vikander as Ava, the sentient machine who is slowly coming to grasp with her place in a human world. Vikander would follow this commanding performance with a string of films, some great (The Danish Girl) and some mediocre (Tulip Fever) and some just very loud (Tomb Raider), but in each one she is the most powerful element on the screen. And like his talented star, Garland would go on to exciting new projects, including Annihilation, a film that could have easily been included here.
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16. Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens (2015)
The future of Star Wars began right here with a whizz-bang entry 10 years after the conclusion of the prequels and 32 years after Luke, Leia and Han defeated the Empire in the original trilogy. Though the franchise would produce stranger (The Last Jedi) and more frenzied (The Rise of Skywalker) Star Wars films before the end of the decade, it laid a solid foundation right here with J.J. Abrams’ Episode VII, a film that hollers out to the older films while also setting its own path forward. And while the story is callbacky, self-referential fun, where it most succeeds is with its new characters. Stormtrooper traitor Finn, rebel flyboy Poe, brooding menace Kylo Ren, the rolly-ball droid BB-8 … we couldn’t have asked for a better generation of Star Wars characters. It’s all held together by Daisy Ridley’s Rey, who is the glue for the entire trilogy. The new batch of films would have lots of highs and lows later on, but the one constant through it all is Ridley’s eager and effective performance as a girl trying to make sense of her place in a galaxy far, far away. Also, big shout out to all of the other Star Wars films from this generation: Solo, Rogue One and the two other trilogy entries. None were perfect, but each brought something wonderful to a beloved franchise.
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15. Sicario (2015)
The single most important director of the decade, and I’m not willing to debate this point, is Denis Villaneuve. I could include every one of his films and that list would be great: Prisoners, Enemy, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 (see below). But Sicario stood out for me. It was certainly the pitch-perfect performances by Emily Blunt, Benecio Del Toro and Josh Brolin, all playing seemingly different roles in the fight against illegal drugs entering the United States from Mexico. It was also Taylor Sheridan’s economical less-is-more script, which allows the magnitude of silence to crush down on the characters like a vice. But mostly it was Villaneuve’s handling of all the parts. This is an expertly made movie. It knows what it wants to do and does it in the simplest, most effective way possible. And it shows in every turn, especially in that convoy scene as our characters drive back to the U.S. border with a prisoner in tow. At one point the movie just hangs there, waiting for what happens next. A lesser film would have rushed this along, but Sicario holds that suspenseful note as long as it can before the inevitable. And then, at the breaking point, there is a release that feels gruesomely cathartic. I’m getting chills just thinking about it. Also, bravo to Sicario: Day of the Soldado. It’s a slightly lesser film, but still quite good and worth the watch.
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14. Moana (2016)
Full disclosure, I had a 3 year old in the house when this was getting the most rotation. She loves movies, and was going between different phases, but when Moana was chosen I would always sit and watch the whole thing. It’s a delightful film, rich in culture and color, and the music is glorious. It also felt quite subversive for a Disney animated film: there is no love interest, some of the music is in another language and the main “villain” is dealt with through love, not violence. I also immensely appreciated the role Moana, voiced wonderfully by Auli’i Cravalho, has in her village. As the chief’s daughter she’s essentially a Disney princess, but she also has a leadership role that includes oversight of the fishing, farming, location of the village and exploration of nearby Pacific islands. She’s more governor than princess, and that aspect endears me to the film. Also, did I mention the music? It’s exquisite, from Dwayne’s Johnson’s “You’re Welcome” to Jemaine Clement’s David Bowie-inspired “Shiny” to Cravalho’s anthemic “How Far I’ll Go.” I know the world is still obsessed with Frozen and its hit music, but toe to toe I’d take Moana every day of the week.
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13. Upstream Color (2013)
Director Shane Caruth is no newcomer to this list. His time-traveling mindfuck Primer made the cut for the oughts, and here he is again with another film that unforgivingly mashes your brain into a pulp. I’ve seen Upstream Color several times, and it truly defies categorization. It’s certainly experimental, but more than that, it’s almost spiritual in its visual poetry. It’s about a blue organism that can link beings together across the void of time and space. That setup could easily swing to horror or science fiction, and yet Upstream Color is neither. It’s more emotional and contemplative, and also deceptively ambiguous. The film begins with the life cycle of the organism, which includes a thief using it to illicit a hypnotic and susceptible state from a woman, who empties her bank account and racks up a huge amount of debt under the organism’s influence. Eventually there’s a man who has had a similar experience, some pigs in a field and a bizarre collector. Your head will be swimming, but it’s intoxicating and beautiful, and certainly one of the strangest films of the last decade.
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12. The Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Of all the films of the decade, this is the one that I’ve seen the most—my best estimate is maybe a dozen times. It’s just so insanely rewatchable. And it has to be because of the structure of the first half of the movie. It was derided at its release for being “Groundhog’s Day with aliens,” but the movie wore that like a badge of honor. Tom Cruise plays a cocky military officer busted down to a private before an outright court martial. Later he wakes up with the grunts, goes off to war and dies in the opening minutes of a battle with tumbling, whipping space aliens. But then he wakes up and does it again and again and again. Seeing how Cruise’s character breaks out of that loop and slowly becomes a battle-hardened badass are some of the most rewarding scenes of Cruise’s career. Some of the fun comes from just watching him die over and over again, knowing each reset means he needs to fulfill a certain sequence of events to preserve the desired timeline. How long was he in the loop? The movie suggests months, or even years. I like to think it was even longer, possibly hundreds of years. By the end, Cruise’s time warrior is practically omniscient, an all-knowing God who’s conscious of every second from every conceivable angle. And then the movie flips it all on him by sending him adrift in a new kind of loop, which gives the final battle dangerous stakes. Emily Blunt also stars, and is great, but some love needs to be shared with the late Bill Paxton, who plays a sergeant with a short fuse. Paxton made every film he was in more enjoyable, and this one makes that point hard.
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11. Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and The Report (2019)
I’m cheating by picking two movies, but you really can’t talk about one without the other, especially after The Report featured Zero Dark Thirty within its own plot. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, Zero Dark Thirty came out first in 2012, roughly 18 months after the death of Osama Bin Laden, or “UDL” as the film refers to him. The film is both a police procedural and also an espionage thriller, capped off with some straight-up black-ops commando stuff in the final sequence. Anchoring the film is Jessica Chastain as a CIA operative who has taken an obsessive interest in the chase for the world’s most famous terrorist. This is a taut film that winds tighter and tighter until the final scene—it’s unrelenting, even knowing how the story ends. The (false) legacy of the film is that torture led to the killing of UBL. Watch it again and it expressly states that torture never worked, and it was clever (non-violent) interrogation that cracked the case. Its historical accuracy has been called into question on numerous occasions since its release, including by sitting members of congress, but I revert to Roger Ebert’s point of view on this matter. After a “tongue lashing” by Walter Cronkite for his positive review of Oliver Stone’s JFK, Ebert wrote: “He wants facts. I want moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares. As a general principle, I believe films are the wrong medium for fact. Fact belongs in print. Films are about emotions.” On that level Zero Dark Thirty captures the anger, frustration and bureaucracy of the years after 9/11. As for Scott Z. Burns’ The Report, there’s almost no emotion in it. It’s about one guy coldly conducting an investigation on the post-9/11 torture tactics the CIA used during the “war on terror.” Adam Driver stars as the lead investigator on the report, with Annette Benning playing Senator Diane Feinstein in a slippery role that has her second-guessing everything she’s handed. Where Zero Dark Thirty took liberties and played fast and loose with the facts, The Report adheres to history, even if it means slower and more methodical plotting within the sticky framework of the intelligence apparatus in Washington, D.C. What you get is an equally taut paper chase, but one that reveals one of the great failures of American leadership this century. It’s riveting filmmaking. Both of these films together tell different stories, but they share a kinship that’s hard to ignore. And they’re both brilliantly written, directed and acted.
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10. The Big Short (2015)
If you told me in 2008, during the implosion of the housing market, that the big villain in that story was something called “collateralized debt obligation” I would have shrugged and went on my merry way. Most Americans would have done the same. But give it up to The Big Short for trying to help us make sense of what happened, and why. Adam McKay’s diagnosis of the Great Recession was not only devastatingly informative and packed full of fun new economic buzzwords, it was refreshingly easy to digest. I mean, it was more than that—it was fun. You get Margot Robbie in a bubblebath, Anthony Bourdain cutting some fish and Ryan Gosling tossing Jenga pieces in a trashcan. Everything here is to serve the teaching aspect of the film, and it works. It’s entirely possible to come out of The Big Short with a basic understanding of not only the housing economy, but also mortgage-backed securities, sub-prime mortgages, tranches and why Lehman Brothers went belly up. Most importantly, though, the film gives a voice to the homeowners of America. Yes, time is spent with bank bigwigs and the Fed Chair, but we also meet regular folks who were victims of shitty mortgages and shittier banks.
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9. Winter’s Bone (2010)
Here’s something to think about: Jennifer Lawrence’s big breakout was barely 10 years ago. The story of the decade is essentially a story of Lawrence’s rise, and occasional dominance. She came out of Winter’s Bone primed for franchises (X-Men and Hunger Games). By 2012, she was ready for critical acclaim and Oscar glory with Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. She did several more Hunger Games, only then to emerge as the muse of Darren Aronofsky in his mother!, followed by a Russian super-spy in Red Sparrow. In the middle there was Joy, Passengers and a handful of other X-Men movies, all of questionable quality but still held together by her commanding presence. At several points she was the biggest star in Hollywood. And it all began here in Debra Granik’s grim drama about a daughter looking for her father who skipped bail after putting up the family trailer as collateral. Lawrence, playing a very mature teenager fighting for her survival, wades into the meth epidemic looking for anything that might save their home. This is a grimy, dirty movie. It’s the kind of movie that has the smell of cigarettes wafting from the screen. But Granik gets it, all of it. She knows how to frame Lawrence against these cruel meth dealers and their fiendish wives and girlfriends. And Lawrence knows how to hold her own. Even after 10 years, it’s a remarkable beacon of Lawrence’s talents.
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8. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Here we are again with Denis Villeneuve, this time in a masterpiece of science fiction. Fans were rightly skeptical of this sequel to Ridley Scott’s beloved Blade Runner from 35 years earlier, but the film was in lots and lots of good hands. Here is a picture that was cared for, top to bottom, by the best people in Hollywood. Roger Deakins’ cinematography is the stuff of myth, Joe Walker’s editing is on point throughout, Hampton Fancher and Michael Green’s script pays homage to the original but veers in exciting new directions, the costumes, the sets, the special effects, the locations, the future-tech…exceptional work seeps from every level of this gargantuan of a film. And at the center is Villeneuve, who almost makes it look too easy, which is making Dune fans rest easy for his remake late in 2020. The film itself is as twisty as they come, with lots of call-backs to the original and the persistent threat that someone we’re watching is not what we think. The original had us second guessing who was a replicant, but here the film creates so much paranoia about who is and isn’t human that I assumed at one point no one was. Ryan Gosling stars in this one, although Harrison Ford and a CGI version of Sean Young appear so we can circle back to 1982. Ana de Armas plays a smaller role that is so profoundly heartbreaking it almost needs an intermission afterward for the audience to collect its thoughts.
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7. Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan blew down the decade’s doors in 2010 with Inception and then immediately got to work topping himself with each movie. His projects got bigger, more technically complicated, more thematically complex and more culturally explosive. His films became events. Dunkirk could easily be in this slot, but lately I’ve been leaning more toward Interstellar, his beautiful journey into space, where time and love decide the future of mankind. My original review said it best for me: “In the great cathedral of space, no one can hear you scream, but the cosmic organs are imbued with an acoustic majesty all their own. Their thundering choruses leap and swirl to an audience of stars, supernovas, nebulae and that little speck of shivering matter we call mankind. Christopher Nolan’s bravely beautiful Interstellar establishes humanity’s insignificance, the universe’s vastness, and how human exploration will one day narrow the margins between them. The film obliquely dabbles with religion, philosophy, science, quantum physics and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, all under the umbrella of an adventurous space opera, emphasis on the word opera—the music is exceptional.” Let me focus for a second on individual scenes: there are bits in this film that are hard to top across any time period, genre or director. The scene of Matthew McConaughey viewing 23 years worth of video messages. Scenes of a father saying goodbye to his daughter, promising to return. The scenes inside the tesseract of time and space. Shots of spaceships shooting across the vastness of two different solar systems. And that docking scene that is absolutely riveting. I adore every frame of this movie.
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6. Spring Breakers (2012)
The youth of the world have always made for interesting cinema. Their failures, their successes, their passions, their crimes, their downfalls. When François Truffaut made The 400 Blows in 1959 he was tapping into an interesting phenomenon: youth in rebellion. We’re a long way from boys stealing typewriters with Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine’s hand grenade lobbed into the culture wars. Starring four young college girls—Vanessa Hudgens, Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson and Rachel Korine—the film is almost hallucinatory in its delivery. Images, music and dialogue are untethered to each other as they overlap, double-back and swirl around in a mesmerizing display of sound and light. The film is largely unbound by time, as well, as Douglas Crise’s masterful editing draws from a shared bank of memories stored in the sticky Florida ether. The girls plunge headfirst into the hedonism of Florida’s spring break scene: keg stands, beer funnels, pool parties, afternoon raves, trashed hotel rooms and public nudity. But after a minor arrest, the girls are bailed out by cornrow’d, grill-wearing rapper and drug dealer, Alien (James Franco), who leads them into the dark underbelly of south Florida’s drug empire. Some people still think this film glorifies the spring break scene and the actions of the four characters, but they’re missing the point. This is a brutal takedown of a generation, particularly some of its more vapid and narcissistic personality types. Other than one girl, the church-goer, these characters largely exist to look sexy, party and give the finger to each other and society. Korine is a smart director, and I think he knows what he’s doing here: nihilism run through an Instagram filter.
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5. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Action films needed a hard reset and this long-in-gestation Mad Max sequel delivered in every conceivable way. What’s funny is how one narrative that a lot of fans were pushing was, “Finally, a film with real stunts and no CGI.” Oh how wrong they were. Make no mistake, this is a CGI-heavy film. The reason it all works so well is because the CGI components and the live-action components are so seamlessly integrated that it feels fully formed and complete. And it just hums at a steady clip. There’s a brief chase in the beginning, some early world building and we’re off, careening through the sand in George Miller’s daring and bombastic re-invention of his hit franchise. Tom Hardy is great in it, but Charlize Theron is the real star as she hauls the stolen wives of Immortan Joe, a chrome-worshiping cult leader, across the apocalyptic wastelands. The cars, the chase sequences and stunts, the suicidal War Boys, the music…it’s all frantic mayhem of the highest order.
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4. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
This movie is about the pillaging and plundering of the American economy. It ends before the Great Recession, though there is no doubt in my mind that these characters were present in 2007 and 2008, when Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers plunged through the floor. And they’ll be back. They’re like cockroaches—they never really leave. Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street is the story of their ascent within the world economy. And Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) is their court jester. No movie has ever given the villain treatment so thoroughly to white-collar criminals. Even Oliver Stone’s Wall Street had shades of gray. Belfort, though, is all bad. Right to the core. The movie makes his lavish debauchery and moral depravity look downright enticing, which is Scorsese’s whole point: money is the goal, money is the solution, money makes the rules, money is the prize. This isn’t some abstract idea. New York stockbrokers aren’t fighting for make-believe bragging rights. They’re fighting for the same stuff in your wallet, in your bank account, in your retirement fund. Money is the great equalizer, and Scorsese manipulates that into the DNA of this film as Belfort spends, spends, spends. This is a funny, wise-cracking film made by one of the best in the business. It’s so on-the-nose that it feels like a revelation. Why? Because, of course these kinds of people are managing America’s wealth. Of course they snort long rails of cocaine, pop some Quaaludes, toss money at some strippers and then go off to scheme granny away from her pension check. All before lunch. Of course that’s the way this country works.
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3. Whiplash (2014)
If you want to see the raw, naked might of the cinema just watch the last 10 minutes of Whiplash. Nothing quite compares to power this awesome, this unrelenting, this magical. Damien Chazelle’s movie about two warring parties in a college jazz band—the ruthless director (J.K. Simmons) versus an intrepid and stubborn drummer (Miles Teller)—is a testament to how important music is to dramatic storytelling. The student wants to be the next Buddy Rich, but he can’t do a double-time swing or get to a performance on time. The teacher just wants to teach the next Charlie Parker, the next great jazz phenom, but he’s a vile hothead who flings music stands and eviscerates young musicians for not knowing if they’re in tune or not. How these two calamitous forces come to meet in the finale is a joy to experience, and then to watch it unfold is even more impressive.
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2. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
I miss movies for adults. Not sexy or violent movies. Just mature movies. Ones that don’t feel obligated to use rapid-fire cuts or car chases to tell their stories. It’s remarkable these still exist. Most have gone straight to HBO or Netflix, which is what makes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 spy thriller based on the John le Carré novel of the same name, so remarkable—that it was made at all. It’s slow. Methodical. Exact. Triumphantly focused. Here is a movie that knows exactly what to say and how to say it. Starring Gary Oldman as a retired spy chief, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy gives us a knotted-up problem—there is a spy at the highest level of the British secret service—and then slowly untangles it all to completion. But even the finality of the film doesn’t answer all of the outstanding questions since the plot is famously complex and hard to follow. Alfredson gives you all the clues you need to solve the problem, and follow-up viewings yield new surprises. Return viewings also reinforce the importance of the language of the cinema. How the camera moves, how the film is edited, how objects or people are framed within a shot, musical cues, the order of flashback sequences…the film broadcasts its intentions with careful filmmaking. That’s becoming a rarer thing.
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1. Under the Skin (2013)
Nothing in the last decade has given me the chills more than Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin. It’s the kind of movie that coils around you and slowly ratchets tighter until you can’t breath. It’s all claustrophobic dread. Starring Scarlett Johansson, the film follows a woman who drives around and seemingly stalks men on the streets of Scotland. She lures them back to her flat and the men are slowly, with no resistance on their part, submerged into an inky black water. Only after this happens several times do we understand what’s happening to the men, and why they are needed. What makes the film work so well is how it simmers on the screen. It takes its time. Large portions of it are of the nameless woman sitting in a van, asking men directions and looking for weaknesses in their responses. When she finds a suitable prey, she quietly lures them into the car, and to their doom. We see this happen several times, and then she begins to crack, the routine failing whatever it is that’s driving her. When she goes off the grid, she meets a man and has an intimate moment with him and is unsure how to react, until she suddenly discovers her own sex organs and her face seems to register, “Has this been here the whole time?” In another scene she goes to a restaurant, orders a dessert and is fascinated with the food that’s on her fork. She takes a bite and promptly vomits on the table, to the dismay of the other restaurant guests. Most viewers can figure out what’s happening here long before the reveal at the end, but that doesn’t take away any of the mystery or looming sense of unease. Adding to all this is Mica Levi’s horror-box score filled with percussion-like heartbeats, slicing string instruments and ambient dronescapes—if it makes you anxious and uncomfortable then it’s working. Glazer’s film builds on all this tension with Daniel Landin’s exquisite cinematography and Johansson’s appropriately lifeless performance. By the time you’re about out of air, Under the Skin yanks the floor from under you. It’s a release, but not the one you wanted or needed.
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Bonus Video: No list. No countdown. No snappy shenanigans. My favorite non-film of the past decade was Adult Swim’s Too Many Cooks.
