Posted March 9, 2020

Before taking a deep dive into my choices for the best films that were released over the last ten years, let's look back and reflect on the moviegoing decade.

The movie industry was riddled with seismic levels of change unlike few other recent decades, which that saw the rise and dominance of one overwhelmingly popular genre (the super hero event picture).  Tied to this was the gargantuan rise of Disney, which single-handedly dominated the worldwide box office in previously unheard of and unseen ways.  Furthermore, the ascension of social media and the manner that people consumed films fundamentally altered the landscape - and some would say, the future viability - of cinema chains the world over. 

Super heroes reigned supreme during the 2010s.  They, like, totally manhandled the competition.  Those doubting that need only look at the facts: Comic book centric films occupied multiple spots on yearly Top Ten worldwide grossers, with MCU owning that category.  The recently released AVENGERS: ENDGAME became the highest grossing film worldwide in history, defeating the once thought of unbeatable AVATAR (the former made nearly $3 billion).  Nearly every major MCU installment crushed their contemporary releases, with BLACK PANTHER in particular - the first MCU film featuring a black protagonist - not only becoming the ninth highest grossing film of all-time, but also a darling at the Oscars, even being nominated for Best Picture.  Last year's JOKER also received widespread critical acclaim and Best Picture nomination accolades, and unfathomably managed to out-gross the last STAR WARS film in cinemas last year.  This was a pure dominance genre during the 2010s, and one with no apparent trail off in public interest in sight.  If you're one of the few that think it's on the verge of hitting audience fatigue levels...give your head a shake.

Of course, the unparalleled might of the MCU is inexplicably tied to Disney, and they perhaps made the most shockingly unexpected move in the film world by purchasing STAR WARS (and Lucasfilm and all ancillary properties associated within) from George Lucas early in the decade, furthering tightening their monopolistic stranglehold on the industry (and some would say for the worst).  Eight of the highest grossing films of the last ten years belonged to the House of Mouse, with four from the MCU, two from STAR WARS, two from Pixar, and one of their own animated films occupying those eight positions.  Roughly 38 per cent of the movies seen in mainstream cinemas last year alone were Disney led properties, and the studio had a record number of seven films in the same year that made a billion dollars each worldwide.  Those are some truly staggering - and scary - figures. 

Lastly, no discussion of the 2010s would be complete without mentioning the prominence of streaming and the ripple effects it continues to have on the movies.  As more and more consumers cut the cord on cable subscriptions and opted for services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and the recent Disney+, less and less people felt inclined to go out to the movies (despite the massive success of the aforementioned franchises listed above, movie theater attendance hit a 25 year low in 2017, and haven't fully or healthily recovered since).  On a positive, studios like Netflix - which began launching streaming content at the very beginning of this decade - started dabbling in financing and producing their own movies, which led to future Oscar nomination success stories like ROMA, MARRIAGE STORY, and THE IRISHMEN, with ROMA taking home statues for Best Foreign Language Film and Director respectively.  No streaming giant has managed to win a Best Picture Oscar...yet.  The debate about the Oscar worthiness of films produced for mainstream small screen consumption versus theatrical consumption is simply too large for the purposes of this article, but I imagine and fully believe that one of the major streaming giants will strike Academy gold in that high marquee category in the next ten years.  It's inevitable, as Thanos would argue. 

One last note: The individual write-ups for each of the following films have been essentially copied and pasted from my discussion of them - albeit, with minor alterations here and there - as they appeared in their respective Top Ten Films of the year articles.  I did this for the sake of time, and to get this article out as soon as I could. 

George Miller’s MAD MAX: FURY ROAD was easily the best two-plus hours that I had in a movie theatre in the 2010s, simply because this sort of sequel, sort of reboot of Miller’s landmark post-apocalyptic series did the most bravura job of transporting me as an escapist thrill ride.  Right from its opening few minutes, the 70-plus year old filmmaker's unbridled creative passion and boundless enthusiasm in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD shined through.  Everything here had a remarkably lived-in and tactile look and feel, showing Miller at his most cheerfully fetishistic in terms of conjuring up nightmarishly horrific costumes and makeup design, not to mention a ghoulish menagerie of vehicles that were the stuff of our most perverted collective car-porn fantasies.   And when the film unleashed its positively eye-gasmic orgy of vehicular mayhem – all choreographed astonishingly well with practical cars and stunts – I was in a state of action cinema Valhalla. 

This film will ride eternal...shiny and chrome. 

How could I not put Terrance Malick’s film as one of the very best of the 2010s?  It is, as I stated in my review, perhaps one of the most awe-inspiringly ambitious films I’ve ever seen.  

Here’s a drama that, on one level, appeared to be a semi-biographical meditation on Malick’s own childhood memories of growing up in 1950’s Waco, Texas.  It was also a searing portrayal of family strife, the innocence of childhood, and a commentary about unavoidably dealing with loss, death, and grieving.  Yet, THE TREE OF LIFE also managed to have the tenacity and daring aspiration of framing that story within the larger and more cosmic one of the very origins of the universe.  In what has to be one of the most visually arresting and impressively sustained sequences of visuals ever committed to film, Malick took great pains and time (twenty minutes worth and virtually silent throughout) to depict a God’s eye-view portrayal of the cold blackness of space, the eruption of the Big Bang, the early expansion of the stars and planets, the birth of Earth, and the very first stirrings of biological life on the planet.  It was quite simply the closest that film viewers will perhaps ever get to witnessing a camera crew capturing and shooting the beginnings of...everything.  

Then again, THE TREE OF LIFE was about the interconnectedness of everything.  No matter how tiny and inconsequentially small or universally large, Malick pointed out how everything is connected (all of God’s creatures, from dinosaurs to young boys in the 1950’s, are both capable of cruelty against much smaller creatures, as shown in two mirrored sequences in the film).  Then there is randomness: the death of one character in the film was depressingly random, but so too was the randomness of the Big Bang or the asteroid, for example, that impacted the Earth, killed off the dinosaurs, and irrevocably altered life on it.  When it comes to the larger scheme of things, an asteroid or a boy dying is miniscule compared to the vastness of the universe.

3.  BOYHOOD (2014)

I’ve been championing BOYHOOD since I screened the film earlier in the summer of 2014.  Richard Linklater’s pioneering film – a near three-hour family drama epic – was one of the great filmgoing experiences of my life.  On a basic level, the film could not have been any simpler: Linklater chronicled the upbringing a child from elementary school to his high school graduation…over the course of twelve years.  Here was the utterly fascinating hook, though: the character in question during this decade-plus time frame was played by the same actor.  No makeup.  No CGI special effects.  No movie trickery.  We get to see this child – and the actor that played him (Ellar Coltrane) effectively grow up on screen. 

How did Linklater achieve this?  He shot BOYHOOD every year over the course of 12 years and then edited the 39 days of shot footage together to create a rich tapestry of the lad’s upbringing.  Not only was this an endlessly audacious and courageous filmmaking endeavor (what if Coltrane – God forgive – died during the production?), but it also created a stark intimacy with this boy’s story.  We see this boy emerge from a precocious and inquisitive child to a somewhat rambunctious young adolescent to a thoughtful and independent minded adult on the verge of discovering what he wants to do in life.  And we see the adult characters grow – and age – on screen as well.  The results were nothing short of miraculous.  BOYHOOD cost just $5 million, which wouldn’t cover the catering of the last Michael Bay film.  Yet, it was a magical cinematic gamble that paid off.

BOYHOOD never felt like a three hour film; it sort of just rushed by at the blink of an eye.  Kind of, oddly enough, like life.  There has never been a film that has so meticulously captured the ebb and flow of life like this one.  BOYHOOD is a small-scale movie marvel of incalculable dramatic magnitude.

I guarantee you that this film was hardly on anyone's best of the decade radars.  

THE PLACE BEHIND THE PINES was my choice for the best film of 2013 - and is definitely one of the best of its decade - primarily because of the quiet and transfixing power that its vast and epically rendered storyline maintains.  It also cemented director, Derek Cianfrance as one of the most important and skilled filmmakers in American cinema.

He's the kind of inspired and intrepid new breed of director that only comes once in proverbial generation, and one that takes noteworthy risks, avoids criminally overused Hollywood clichés and conventions, and forges ahead by telling unique and authoritative stories that feel both familiar and novel at the same time.  Much like, as odd as this comparison sounds, THE GODFATHER saga, THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES was a sprawling family drama that chronicles how the sins of two sets of fathers have unavoidable consequences for their sons.  Cianfrance’s film was atypically bold in the way it told a multi-generational story – in three separate vignettes, covering a period of two decades – and, in turn, simply, but brilliantly, showed how the first story arc segues into the second and, in turn, into the third.  There was a dark undercurrent of Greek tragedy to the film, seeing as the unsuspecting sons of the narrative are forced to deal with the past indiscretions of their respective fathers, and it all comes to a head in the film’s mesmerizing final act.  There were so very few dramas over the last ten years that existed with the same limitless narrative ambition of Cianfrance’s film.  

Paradoxically, I've been one of Paul Thomas Anderson's biggest fans and harshest critics.  I felt that he couldn't artistically do wrong when he made BOOGIE NIGHTS and MAGNOLIA in the 90s (which I felt were two of the best films of that decade), but then came experimental outings in films like PUNCH DRUNK LOVE, THE MASTER, and, most recently, INHERENT VICE that, to be fair, still showed the director's supreme command over technical artifice, but nevertheless displayed a somewhat undisciplined narrative approach that left me feeling more than a bit hollow and empty after watching them.   

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s sixth film, THE REVENANT, came hot off the filmmaker’s multiple Oscar winning BIRDMAN, and it emerged as an unforgettably extraordinarily rendered outdoor survival thriller, set in the early 1800’s and loosely based on the fact-based account of a frontiersmen that was viciously attacked by a bear, left for dead, and then traveled across 200 miles of harsh and uncompromising wilderness terrain to survive.  

Inarritu and company have expanded upon this real premise by making it a larger tale of the survivor’s thirst for ultimate vengeance against the man the ultimately left him for dead.  Featuring an astonishing physical and mostly non-verbal performance by Leonardo DiCaprio (who finally won his first Best Actor Oscar trophy for it), absolutely breathtaking cinematography that paints the screen with the intoxicatingly foreboding beauty of the terrain that comes to haunt the film’s characters, and bravura direction by Inarritu – who frequently used ultra-long and unbroken shots (especially during action sequences) – that gave the proceedings a startling sense of realism and immediacy, THE REVENANT was a tour de force display of filmmaking craft.  It was also a spellbinding tale of perseverance, anguish, and the dicey relativism of savage eye-for-an-eye frontier justice.  This film was an endurance test to sit through, but it was a visceral experience like few others in the decade that was.

Just as he did with THE DARK KNIGHT in 2000s, Christopher Nolan made one of the the very best films of the 2010s in INCEPTION. 

Featuring the most wickedly ingenious script of 2010, shot on a grand and epic scale (with a reported $160 million budget) in six different countries around the world and featuring an all-star cast of respected actors performing at the top of their game, Nolan's masterstroke work here thoroughly and effortlessly transported viewers into this intriguing hybrid of the sci-fi fantasy, the tension-filled heist flick, and the riveting psychological thriller is noteworthy enough, but he also managed to immerse those genres into a dissection of some of the most prevailing themes of all fiction: the nature of reality and our perception of it.  All of it worked harmoniously together to create one of the most thoughtful, thrilling, and contemplative escapist films in a long time. 

The overall plot is far too dense to modestly disseminate: All you need to know is that it starred a rock-solid-as-ever Leonardo DiCaprio as a corporate raider that uses methods no other movie thief has ever attempted: he doesn't break into buildings and simply rob them, but rather he uses cutting edge science and technology to infiltrate the minds of men to steal their ideas that allow him to profit in the real world.  One last mission that he attempts involves the incredibly convoluted and dicey proposition of “inception”, which involves entering dream states upon dream states of his unsuspecting victims and then planting ideas within their subconscious.  Now that’s fiendish ambition. 

Just as she confidently did in 2008 with the multiple Oscar winning THE HURT LOCKER, director Kathryn Bigelow most certainly made the best film of 2012 year in ZERO DARK THIRTY, which chronicled the real-life decade-long manhunt to find and kill Osama bin Laden.  And it deserves worthy placement on this list as well.  

ZERO DARK THIRTY told a long, but briskly told story that we all know the outcome to, but it’s the manner that Bigelow and her writer Mark Boal (who collaborated with her on THE HURT LOCKER) manage to generate tremendous interest and suspense with building to its outcome that is the film’s crowning achievement.  We all know that SEAL Team Six killed the infamous terrorist on May 2, 2011 in a drab, dingy, but well fortified compound in Pakistan.  Calling ZERO DARK THIRTY anti-climatic misses the point.  It’s mostly obsessed with the obsessed CIA woman (played with supreme vigilance, authority, and raw guts by Jessica Chastain, in one of her best performances) that did the impossible by finding the ultimate needle in a haystack. 

The most recent entry in this list, THE IRISHMAN - a fact-based, Netflix financed and produced  crime drama - came out last year to unprecedented levels of anticipation.  It marked director Martin Scorsese's first return to the genre he made masterfully his own since his 2006 Best Picture and Director winning THE DEPARTED.  That, and it also showcased his first re-teaming with Robert De Niro since 1995's CASINO.  THE IRISHMAN also brought the long-in-retirement Joe Pesci back to the movies and alongside his frequent co-star in De Niro.  And finally, this film also astoundingly represented the first teaming of star Al Pacino and Scorsese...like...ever.  In short, and if you excuse the sarcasm and referencing to a very recent public movie controversy, THE IRISHMAN was the AVENGERS: ENDGAME of Scorsese gangster films. 

If this film were a person...I would hug it.   

SING STREET, the most modest and unassuming entry on this list, filled me with euphoric joy while I watched it four years ago.  The glow of that screening has never subsided.