My Favorite Movies of the Decade
We’ve just lived through one of the best decades in film since the end of the Hollywood Renaissance.
Of course, such a statement invites immediate reevaluation of each decade that came in between. I hope I’m not in the minority when I suggest that the aughts were an unusually bad time for movies — aside from the stray Pixar or Christopher Nolan flick, the post-9/11 years were defined by cinema that pandered to the lowest common denominator, or otherwise engaged in bullish sobriety. (The track record of the 2000s reads like a series of wild Saturday nights and doleful Sunday mornings: Superbad and Brokeback Mountain… Wedding Crashers and Requiem for a Dream… Mean Girls and No Country for Old Men… Little Miss Sunshine and The Dark Knight, etc. The Hangover is the era in a nutshell.) And the 1990s were no artistic utopia, either: any decade where the two biggest gains in industry power belonged to the names Disney and Weinstein should automatically be suspect.
But the years 2010 through 2019 yielded most of the more interesting films released in the last quarter century. When the success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) kicked off the craze for 3-D at the start of the decade, it felt like a step back. But that film almost single-handedly ushered in the era of digital projection in commercial movie theaters, and signaled to studios that digital filmmaking wasn’t the way of the future: it was happening now.
In the years since, we’ve seen movie production undergo a seismic shift. It’s now easier for anyone to make a movie, and the proliferation of online platforms for new “content” has yet to die down. Filmmaking has become a far more egalitarian art, and Alexandre Astruc’s 1948 concept of the camera-stylo, or “camera-pen,” is now a living reality. With everyone producing content — whether for Paramount or Netflix or TikTok — cinema has evolved into “a means of writing just as subtle and flexible as written language.”
We are living in an age of not only unprecedented visual literacy, but mass visuality. This means that more people who’ve hitherto gone unseen within the annals of visual media are making their presences known. Thus the success of the #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite movements, whereby womxn and other people of color sought to dismantle the abusive status quo of an essentially all-white, male-dominated industry. We’re living through a Renaissance of movies created by people of color, and have witnessed major commercial feats like Wonder Woman (2017) and Black Panther (2018) against entrenched corporate claims that audiences are uninterested in stories about non-white or female characters.
We’re still far from an ideal (hopefully extra-Marvel) cinematic universe, but inclusion has become the new standard — both in ideology and, often, gloriously, in practice.
That said, I’m sorry to admit that my favorites of the decade weren’t often directed by womxn or other people of color. My hope is that with the passage of time, and the emergence of more marginalized talent, there will be more opportunities for me to fall in love with films that aren’t created by white cisgender men. I am very proud of my choices, because I believe that each of these movies is worth celebrating, but I also look forward to celebrating future narratives generated by people who don’t look or identify like me.
So for the time being: I started seriously going to movies when I was fourteen years old. Today, I’m twenty-four. This is the first time I’ve lived through a decade-long stretch as an active moviegoer; it’s the first time I’ve felt fully qualified to make a personal assessment of a cinematic era. My values and opinions have evolved somewhat since I began, but ultimately they’ve been refined into a more nuanced, careful estimation of what I feel matters in art and entertainment.
Which is… what? Humanity. Humility. A particular combination of vision and craftsmanship. A grace that supersedes limits of narrative and expresses something closer to conscious experience. Transcendence. Spirit. Truth.
If you haven’t seen some or any of these movies, please do yourself the service of watching them. They affirm all that is good in human life; that is the fundamental power of art, and especially of movies. They remind us how to live, as we live. They are the product of our time. They stand for what we’ve seen.
One last note: all of these films are English-language narrative features, and most of them had a theatrical release. I recognize the inherently conservative nature of this criteria, but it’s the only criteria through which I feel qualified to pass judgement. There were many beautiful movies released this decade that were not in English, or which appeared in shorter and/or online formats — but for me to include the few examples with which I’m familiar would feel presumptuous. I don’t pretend to be well-versed, for instance, in Taiwanese cinema, no matter how much I love and recommend The Assassin (2015). Furthermore, I feel unprepared to include documentaries — though that doesn’t change the fact that The Act of Killing (2012) is probably the greatest movie made so far this century, and Citizenfour (2014) the most important.
This is a list of favorites, and my heart remains tied to the two-hour narrative format. It’s what won me over to the cause in the first place; it’s the mode in which I still intend to work one day. “The movies” are one with my spirit; I will always be a disciple of story and imagination.
. . .
Personal Shopper. 2017. Written and directed by Olivier Assays. Starring Kristen Stewart. Cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Edited by Marion Monnier.
There are few occasions in life when one discovers a character that they feel encapsulates their essence; a character that embodies everything, whether fine or roughhewn, one feels inside. When I watch Personal Shopper, and Kristen Stewart, as Maureen Cartwright, strolls through a designer’s offices, running her hands over jewels and beads and grabbing at dresses… almost as if she were silently conversing with them… I find myself. Medium, empath, creative, historian, seeker: Maureen is the closest I’ve ever come to witnessing myself on a movie screen.
It would be beside the point, for a couple of reasons, for me to try to explain this movie’s plot. There are ghosts and text messages and espressos and gorillas; it straddles the horror, supernatural and psychological thriller subgenres with incidental abandon. But the spirit of Personal Shopper arises from Maureen’s personality: it is idiosyncratic and muddled, self-contradicting yet inexplicably true. Her journey toward self-acceptance is a study of grief; of mysticism in the modern world; of socioeconomics and gender expression. It is my favorite movie released since the year of my birth.
Wild. 2014. Directed and co-edited by Jean-Marc Vallée. Screenplay by Nick Hornby, from the memoir by Cheryl Strayed. Produced by and starring Reese Witherspoon. Cinematography by Yves Bélanger. Edited by Martin Pensa. Featuring “El Condor Pasa,” by Simon and Garfunkel.
If there are few occasions when one feels represented by a character onscreen, there are even fewer when one is so totally transported by a movie that they actually have an out-of-body experience.
That’s what happened to me while watching Wild: a gorgeous, fluid odyssey through the consciousness of Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) as she hikes the Pacific Crest Trail in the western United States. Obviously, there are stunning vistas of deserts at twilight and pine forests at dawn — but this film’s majesty arises from its juxtaposition of those views against Cheryl’s nagging personal memories and repressed traumas. What results is a highly intimate movie that displays like an epic; a poem made of dirt and sweat and sores and tears.
For a visual-literary culture that boasts such luminaries as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, it’s not often that we get a story about a solitary woman making her way through the American wilderness. Nick Hornby’s elegant screenplay, Witherspoon’s determined production and Jean-Marc Vallée’s perceptive direction result in one of the great Westerns of our time.
Lemonade. 2016. Directed by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Kahlil Joseph. Cinematography by Santiago Gonzalez and others. Edited by Bill Yukich.
Of all movies I’ve loved in the last ten years, it’s possible that no other made a bigger impression on my understanding of what could be accomplished in popular filmmaking. Released concurrently with her sixth solo studio album, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s tribute to the plights of black Americans framed within a narrative of marital infidelity.
Unfolding like a personal essay (Knowles-Carter reads the poetry of Warsan Shire in voiceover throughout), it jumps between locations, aspect ratios and color palettes to emphasize an all-encompassing view of black womanhood: girls run around and play inside a plantation; sunlight pokes through tree bows in a sweeping green bayou; a group of dancers lock hands and undulate against the bare contours of a parking garage. Through it all moves Beyoncé: a figure of humanity. A goddess, a representative. Vindicator of pain — both hers and others.’
The pairing of Knowles-Carter’s authoritative glamour with Kahlil Joseph’s impressionistic tableaus amounts to a showy yet incisive work; it’s a music video and an arthouse darling at the same time. Where else do we get a pop star driving a monster truck over vintage cars one moment, then strolling through the ruins of a Civil War fortress in the next? More than any other movie of its time, Lemonade articulates the variety and imagination of a people who have been long held from realizing their ambitions. Beyoncé is aware of her privilege, and she uses it to emboldening, mesmerizing effect.
Carol. 2015. Directed by Todd Haynes. Screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, from the novel “The Price of Salt” by Patricia Highsmith. Starring Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson and Kyle Chandler. Cinematography by Edward Lachman. Score by Carter Burwell.
What does love look like? That’s a question that, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage (a decision made in the same year as this movie’s release), has come to shape much of our current political discourse. For Therese (Rooney Mara), it comes in the form of Cate Blanchett, who plays Carol Aird — one of the most sublime, nervous yet regal beings to be depicted on film in recent years. (“Just when you think it can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes.”)
She approaches Therese, who works behind the counter of a department store, one afternoon leading up to Christmas. “I like your hat,” Carol whispers — referring to the younger woman’s Santa cap. Their interaction is brief, but it launches a series of events that will forever change both women. They fall in love, at a time when the world isn’t remotely prepared to read these two individuals — one an affluent housewife, the other an aspiring photographer — as lovers.
They shouldn’t be together, and they are.
Todd Haynes is one of the great directors of our time: he’s able to force attractive yet discordant visuals on his audience which, due to their irregular placement, feel chaotic — yet which also, united, speak for an inscrutable underlying truth. In other words, he is the consummate queer filmmaker. Working with Phyllis Nagy’s gorgeous screenplay, he and cinematographer Edward Lachman cushion Carol in sumptuous aesthetic while obliterating the pictorial codes by which we usually classify people and their emotions.
No one is better at emphasizing the imprisoning materiality of American society, while simultaneously testifying to the gruff determination of human will. That’s what Carol has to offer.
A Most Violent Year. 2014. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. Starring Oscar Isaac, Jessica Chastain, David Oyelowo, and Elyes Gabel. Cinematography by Bradford Young. Music by Alex Ebert.
Before he became a household name shooting down Imperial fighters in the Star Wars sequels, Oscar Isaac was building a reputation as the most compelling actor of his generation. Over the course of three years, he had leading roles in three exceptional movies: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013); A Most Violent Year; and Ex Machina (‘15). They’re enough to secure his place in cinematic history — just as his director on the second title, J.C. Chandor, will be remembered for his three masterworks released in the 2010s: this film, along with Margin Call (‘11) and All is Lost (‘13).
Their collaboration amounts to a classically-composed yet unpredictable commentary on race and socioeconomics in Reagan-era New York City. Isaac plays Abel Morales (that name!), the stylish and principled owner of a growing oil company who seeks to uncover those responsible for the hijacking of several of his trucks. Meanwhile, he faces scrutiny from a fresh DA (David Oyelowo) who’s cracking down on lawless local businesses. Bolstered by his Armani-clad, no-bullshit wife, Anna (Jessica Chastain, in her best role so far), Abel maneuvers to remain transparent and honest even as his environment eggs him closer toward taking duplicitous and even violent measures.
“I have always tried to take the path that is most right,” Abel says. That sentiment may be the closest a capitalist can come to an ethical worldview, but it also lays bare the dignity, integrity and humility with which America’s marginalized populations have sought to stake a claim in this proverbial land of opportunity. Better than any other movie I’ve seen, A Most Violent Year articulates the implicit, sometimes dangerous compromises so often required to get ahead in the United States.
The Social Network. 2010. Directed by David Fincher. Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, from “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich. Starring Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Max Minghella, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Brenda Song, Rashida Jones, John Getz, David Selby and Douglas Urbanski. Edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter. Cinematography by Jeff Cronenweth. Music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
“You’re probably going to be a very successful computer person.” So Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) prophesies to one Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) as she’s breaking up with him. Ironically, the breakup clinches her prediction, as Mark’s fury fuels his creation of a website where male students (we’re at Harvard here) can compare their female classmates’ “hotness” that very same night. This cute exercise in brute misogyny launches a Shakespearian series of events that will lead to Mark’s formation of The Facebook — a game changer in the realm of social media that recasts its “asshole” founder as the youngest billionaire in the world.
But is Mark the only person responsible for Facebook’s success? Is it possible that other people were waylaid on his blind sprint to glory? “You don’t get to five hundred million friends,” the movie’s tagline reads, “without making a few enemies.”
When I saw it during its initial release, at the age of fifteen, I felt that The Social Network was the greatest thing ever made. And it holds up: it’s the oldest film on this list, but its energy has not diminished. (Nor has its relevance. Back then, we were all worried that Facebook fostered antisocial behavior — quaint stakes by today’s standards of international hacking and political subterfuge.) Director David Fincher leads an astonishing roll call of editors, camerafolk, composers and actors; everyone melds together to realize Aaron Sorkin’s lucid, galvanizing script. How ironic that a movie about the end of human connection should be so articulate, and such an exemplar of collaboration.
It’s a breathtaking arrangement of talent. Electrifying, stylish and relentlessly smart — everything I hope for in entertainment.
Three starring Natalie Portman: Black Swan (2010. Directed by Darren Aronofsky. Screenplay by Mark Heyman, Andres Heinz and John McLaughlin); Jackie (2016. Directed by Pablo Larraín. Screenplay by Noah Oppenheim); and Vox Lux (2018. Written and directed by Brady Corbet).
Speaking of Harvard students…
By sheer coincidence, three of my favorite movies this decade feature the same actor playing variations on the same themes: fame, public image, idealized beauty. But these are things that Natalie Portman surely knows well; ever since her adolescent rise to stardom in Léon: The Professional (1994), she’s been held as an industry-standard in elegance, composure and refinement. She’s uniquely poised among working actors to explore the darker side of those qualities — and she hasn’t disappointed, delivering performances at once ambitious and marked with familiarity.
To watch her go from the grueling psychosis of Nina in Black Swan (2010) to the suffused agony of Jackie (‘16) to the wretched infantilism of Celeste in Vox Lux (‘18) is to witness a performer working within the limits of their abilities with intelligence and purpose. But even aside from Portman, these movies are masterpieces: Black Swan is an idiotic yet delicious parable about obsessive artistry… Jackie is a regal, aching examination of personal-ideological loss, featuring a lulu of a score by Mica Levi… and Vox Lux is a blistering indictment of twenty-first century media and its forced confluence of violence with stardom. (Plus, two of them were filmed at my alma mater.)
These films investigate the symbiotic relationship between performance and traumatic memory. I give Natalie Portman credit for choosing projects of not only philosophical merit, but deeply-felt emotional insight.
Columbus and Golden Exits. 2017 and 2018. Written and directed by Kogonada and Alex Ross Perry, respectively.
Two films; both quiet, reserved, undemonstrative. They passed under the radar without much fanfare — yet both feel more alive to me, more vivid, than most movies even think to be. “I feel like people never make films about ordinary people who don’t really do anything,” Naomi (Emily Browning) muses to Nick (Adam Horovitz) in Golden Exits. “They’re out there,” he assures her. “I can take you to some.”
Maybe that’s a bit of cheap self-reference on writer-director Alex Ross Perry’s part, but he earns it. Golden Exits is one of the best films about nothing I’ve ever seen: it follows a group of seven characters (Chloë Sevigny, Mary-Louise Parker, Lily Rabe, Jason Schwartzman and Analeigh Tipton round out the cast) as they pass through various states of resentment, curiosity, desire and suspicion towards one another. It spans the course of a summer, and practically yawns with that laid-back, breezy air one associates with hot mornings and draggy afternoons.
It focuses on a shallow, self-centered, hopelessly cerebral pocket of people yet speaks with unnerving clarity toward two fundamentals of human insecurity: the urge to do right by one’s life, and the wish to be well-thought-of. Ross Perry understands how hard it can be to make the right choice; he doesn’t hold back in revealing his characters’ blemishes, yet he forgives them for their imperfection, too.
The same is true of Kogonada. Columbus follows two people as they wander through the titular city in Indiana: Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a one-time-aspiring architecture student who forfeited her college education to watch after her recovering-addict mother; and Jin (John Cho), the son of a prominent architect who’s come to be with his father after the man falls into a coma. They bump into one another and start wandering, sharing uncertainties and traumas under the aura of Columbus’ lauded buildings.
This is a movie of unfailing good taste; it floats along like a whisper through fog. Richardson and Cho are gloriously present, calm — not to mention Rory Culkin, who plays Casey’s infatuated co-worker. Kogonada makes the brilliant move of pitting his characters’ undefined circumstances against the assured geometry of modern architecture; his movie’s atmosphere is at once wide-open, and contained. You feel as though anything could happen, even as you feel unusually safe.
Columbus and Golden Exits are modest masterworks of personal deliverance. They embrace you, softly, while sighing a considered observation in your ear.
Only Lovers Left Alive. 2013. Written and directed by Jim Jarmusch. Starring Tilda Swinton, Tom Hiddleston, John Hurt, Mia Wasikowska and Anton Yelchin. Cinematography by Yorick Le Saux. Edited by Affonso Gonçalves. Music by Jozef van Wissem.
Think Twilight, but for the post-punk set. (It’s the type of movie that I expect Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson would pay to go see.) Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is a brooding, centuries-old vampire living in an abandoned mansion in Detroit, nursing his emo-goth-rockstar sensibilities (he has oriental rugs, a vinyl collection and portraits of past buddies hanging on his wall: Christopher Marlowe, Edgar Allen Poe, Billie Holiday, etc.) while anonymously releasing music to the public. He’s visited by an old flame, Eve (Tilda Swinton), and together they get high off blood that Adam sources from a local clinic. (His inside man is a research scientist, played by Jeffrey Wright in a pair of funny, brief scenes).
They also take drives through the city at night — cruising past Hitsville U.S.A. and Jack White’s childhood home. Adam bemoans the city’s fall into decrepitude, but Eve speaks encouragingly of the impending climate crisis. “When the cities of the south are burning,” she says, “this place will bloom.”
Only a filmmaker as sly and self-aware as Jim Jarmusch could conceive of and pull off a movie like Only Lovers Left Alive. From Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), no other director has so consistently perpetuated the image of cool while simultaneously laughing it off. Here, he hijacks the vampire schtick to generate a reverent satire of hipster culture — essentially drawing a parallel between dropout connoisseurs and those bloodsucking princes of the night.
This is a movie dreary with elegiac resignation, played at such a minor key that, at times, you almost forget it’s a comedy. “Almost” is the crucial word — because Only Lovers Left Alive is like its protagonists in another way: it keeps coming back at you, to sink its teeth in further.
12Years a Slave. 2013. Directed by Steve McQueen. Screenplay by John Ridley from the memoir by Solomon Northup. Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Lupita Nyong’o, Sarah Paulson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Brad Pitt. Cinematography by Sean Bobbitt. Edited by Joe Walker.
It was my second semester of college. I was taking a course called Introduction to African American Literature, and we’d just finished reading Harriet Jacobs’ devastating memoir, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Our professor organized a class trip to see this movie, feeling it was pertinent to our group discussions; surprisingly, most of us came. We took shuttles to the theater and sat together in plush, roomy seats — ready with our popcorn and soda.
When the movie was over, and everybody got up to leave, it was as if someone had died: we moved along the theater aisles with the solemnity of a funeral procession. In the lobby bathroom, I washed my hands at a sink next to one of my classmates, Louis. I’m white; Louis is black. I couldn’t help recognizing, after sitting through two hours of history, the reality that he and I were free to wash our hands beside one another. Without concern.
I stared out the shuttle window on the ride back to campus, knowing that I would never look at this world the same way again. I resolved then and there to diversify my screenplays — to shift my focus as a filmmaker to include race as a central point of dramatic reference.
That was almost six years ago, and I haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave since. While I do plan on watching it again, I don’t need to be reminded of what the movie means to me. Never before and never since has a movie so completely, so instantaneously altered the ethos of my artistry. Never has a single screening so radicalized my understanding of my job as a storyteller, as a child of history.
Great movies change us; they make it impossible to look back. “There’s nothing to apologize for,” Solomon is reassured at the end of his torment — as if it were even possible to use words, let alone decorum, to approach such far reaches of agony… humiliation… despair… and horror.
Yet Solomon Northup did: he used words. He told his story.
For his sake, it is our responsibility to tell, and to watch, with care.
. . .
