A Gentleman’s Top 10 Films of the 2010s

I have a couple of the major 2019 movies yet to see, so I’ll hold off on that “best of” list until sometime in January. I am ready, however, to make my voice one more in the chorus of idiots making their selections for the best films of the decade that was.

The necessary caveat: my effort in making this list was to not attempt to present a definitive list of the decade’s ‘best’ movies. The below is a pretty unscientific mix of films, some of which I thought were narratively, aesthetically, or formally important, some of which I found uniquely affecting when I watched them, and most of which are highly, highly debatable. There is no particular order to the below other than to put them in loose categories ordered by loose chronology.

Without further ado, then...

THE NO DOUBTERS: The Social Network (2010), Inception (2010), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

These are the only three films that I knew immediately would be on my list. I don’t think anyone needs me to explain why The Social Network is important. If there was any doubt about the film’s significance when it was released in 2010, the still-growing omnipresence of Facebook today, the spectacle of Mark Zuckerberg testifying before Congress, and the increasing understanding of social media’s dangers to both personal psychological wellness and the health of our shared political order has dispelled it. This movie understood the questions facing the decade before the decade had really even started. The film’s potency, however, doesn’t lie only in its immediate political and social relevance; it’s one of the most aesthetically accomplished films of these past ten years as well, a perfect combination of the talents of its writer (Aaron Sorkin), director (David Fincher), and stars (Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, and Armie Hammer).

Inception and Mad Max: Fury Road, as action pictures, don’t fall into a category of movie that I typically valorize, and at points I’ve had reservations about both. In fact, I find myself quite unable to articulate just why they’re ‘no doubters,’ other than that they represent to me the two highest achievements of technical and practical filmmaking of these past ten years. They’re an interesting pairing as well for how divergent they are tonally: Inception, cold and intellectual; Mad Max: Fury Road, propulsive and relentless. For all that, what they share is that they pushed the formal boundaries of what could be achieved on screen, and showed, yet again, that audiences would show up to see something they’d never seen before.

THE BEST THEATRICAL EXPERIENCE I HAD IN THE 2010S: Drive (2011)

I was twenty-two when Drive came out on 16 September 2011, in my final college semester, and I saw it at the now-defunct Harvard Square AMC in Cambridge. I still haven’t been swept along by a movie in the same way since. Is the movie as good as my twenty-two-year-old self thought? I’m not sure. I’ve since watched Drive a couple of times at home, and it’s a different, and worse, movie on the small screen. And yet – and yet – I can’t bring myself to deny the power of that experience, so often sought and so rarely found, of being utterly at the mercy of a film. If it only comes once in a decade, I figure I ought to recognize it.

THE MOVIES THAT MOVED ME THE MOST: The Descendants (2011), Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Despite their tonal and structural differences, this is another obvious and revealing double feature: two auteurs (Alexander Payne and Wes Anderson) taking a light touch to low-concept but serious stories. Moonrise Kingdom evinces all the characteristics of Wes Anderson’s films that usually annoy me – which is probably why I distrusted my reaction to the film when it first came out in 2012. The reason I come back to it, and the reason that it’s probably the most personal choice on this list, is its portrayal of Suzy Bishop, one of its two twelve-year-old protagonists. Suzy is sad and angry for reasons that no one can identify; in her assertion to Shakusky that she “want[s] to go on adventures,” it’s difficult to not read a desire to escape not just her surroundings but also herself. It’s a portrait of proto-adolescent depression that I related to strongly. The Descendants, meanwhile, is more stylistically grounded and concerned with more concrete issues: death, betrayal, the impossibility of closure. There’s very little that is formally or aesthetically interesting about it. Its power is not in its lovely Hawaiian setting or environmental message – if anything, these are distractions – but in its careful, sympathetic consideration of the questions of real life.

THE MOVIES I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT: The Great Beauty (2013), Phantom Thread (2017), Parasite (2019) 

Is it a surprise that both of the non-English language movies on this list fall into the “can’t stop thinking about” category? Asking for a friend.

Let’s take Parasite first, only because it’s a movie that, as a serious Best Picture Oscar contender for 2019, is very much within the current cultural conversation. Around the halfway mark of Parasite, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where it was headed. Instead, it took an abrupt, unexpected left turn and became something much more daring than the already pretty-good movie I was expecting. The movie’s greatest achievement, however, is in its sensibility rather than in its narrative or its aesthetics. It is that rare story that shows a situation without passing judgment; every member of the two central families is both deeply sympathetic and deeply flawed.

The Great Beauty, from the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, has some of the decade’s most indelible images; on first viewing, I was put off by the film’s episodic structure, but some of those episodes – I’m thinking in particular of Sorrentino’s satirical sketch of an artistic prodigy – are more incisive and truthful in scant minutes than most full-length features on the same subjects manage to be. The Great Beauty is characterized by a similar sort of excess and misanthropy as Sorrentino’s latest, this year’s Loro, but moves above and beyond accusations of cynicism by its overriding belief in the possibility of discovering the “grande bellezza” of its title.

Phantom Thread is the second collaboration between director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s less grandiose and more precise than the first, Anderon’s 2008 masterpiece-of-masterpieces There Will Be Blood, and Day-Lewis offers a less overtly theatrical performance, but the two films share a basic preoccupation with complicated, domineering men and the manifestations and limits of psychological power. Phantom Thread doesn’t reach the heights of There Will Be Blood, but it’s Anderson’s most perfect film – quite a different question – since Boogie Nights, and there is much to savor and ponder in the twisted relationship between high end clothier Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis) and his muse Alma (Vicky Krieps).

THE MOVIE THAT ISN’T A MOVIE: OJ: Made In America (2016)

OJ: Made in America is almost eight hours long, and it aired on ESPN in five parts. Can we really call it a movie? For once, I’m not interested in the answer. Rather than rehashing the OJ Simpson trial and giving us yet again the played-out arguments about whether or not Simpson was guilty, director Ezra Edelman and his team used OJ’s life and tragedy to tell a much bigger American story – and they did so without losing sight of the act of violence, and its victims, that made the OJ trial the cultural touchstone that it was. It’s an example of a documentary that’s just as gripping and powerful as the best fiction films, and it’s a movie that addresses many questions that have moved front-and-center in the American social and political conversation in the last half-decade.

THE REST OF THE SHORT LIST: 12 Years a Slave; Beasts of the Southern Wild; BlacKkKlansman; Bridesmaids; Cartel Land; Climax; Crazy, Stupid, Love.; Creed; Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; Dunkirk; Fruitvale Station; Jiro Dreams of Sushi; La La Land; Lady Bird; Manchester by the Sea; Spotlight; The Act of Killing; The Death of Stalin; The Intouchables