I’ve added 20 more lists to this poll, which was originally published in 2020. We now have a total 105 lists tallied.
Read moreThe 10 Best Comedies of the 2010s
Starting in 2003, with the release of “Old School” then “Anchorman,” a comedy renaissance started with the boom of the Will Ferrell/Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen era (“The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “Superbad,” “Step Brothers” and “Walk Hard.”) Then, the immense success of 2009’s “The Hangover” and 2011’s “Bridesmaids,” which leads us to where we are now, which, while despite a few great chucklers having been released, most of the recent comedy releases this past decade have been safe “star-based” movies (think Kevin Hart or Melissa McCarthy).
Read moreQuentin Tarantino Says ‘The Social Network' Was the Best Movie of the 2010s
Back in January, Quentin Tarantino had mentioned that Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” was his second-best film of the 2010s. However, the famous filmmaker of such great films as “Pulp Fiction” and “Jackie Brown” wouldn’t reveal what his #1 movie of the decade was,. This all left us wondering, for months, actually almost 6 of them, when his top pick would be known.
Read moreFilm Comment's Best of the Decade Poll Topped By Lucrecia Martel's ‘Zama'
One of the best-curated year-end decade lists you will see is Film Comment magazine and their poll featuring around 300 voters which include directors, critics, professors, and industry type. This decade’s list has been topped by Lucrecia Martel’s “Zama.”
Read moreThe Best Actions Movies of the 2010s
Here are ten movies — all released within the last 10 years — that tried to change the game, succeeded and made it a lovely day for blockbusters.
Read moreThe 20 Most Underrated American Movies of the 2010s
As we continue to look back at the last 10 years of movies, it’s time to point out the ones that fell between the cracks. It wasn’t easy narrowing down our list of under-seen gems to just 20, but we are fairly confident about the ones we’ve chosen. The selection process stemmed from personal taste, word-of-mouth, lack of awards contention and the impact I believe these movies will have in the years to come. They may be going unnoticed as we speak, but there’s no reason why their greatness will be avoided in the years to come, especially as time slowly but surely builds a case for them.
Read moreCritics Poll — Best Movies of the Decade
The much-anticipated Best Movies of the Decade critics poll will be posted next Tuesday. Sorry for the delay, but a bunch of important critics decided to send me their lists at-the-very-last-minute. In other words, theamount of critics participating has risen considerably since last week, which is why I’ve been delaying the results being posted. The final total seems to be 201 lists.
David Robert Mitchell's “It Follows" is one of the best and most influential horror movie of the decade.
Any horror movie fan you speak to will tell you that the last decade has been incredible for the genre. And so, what’s the deal? Well firstly, everything that’s coming out seems to be directed by filmmakers that know their horror, cinephiles in fact. These are filmmakers that are allergic to clichés. The genre was in dire need of new blood, and we found it with new talented directors that seemed to be inspired by the works of John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick, and David Cronenberg.
Read more10 Best Films of the Half-Decade (2010s)
This decade has so far been a transitional decade for movies. We are living in an exciting, confusing time where superhero movies, sequels and popular book adaptations are becoming the foundation at the box office. If the notion of an original, creative, idea seems to be lost and forgotten, there are still – now more than ever – filmmakers pushing the norms and boundaries of what a movie can be. Filmmakers like these are few and far between, but they need to exist to make movies further progress and evolve just like they have in past 100+ years. To me, the following ten movies represent the most important of the decade thus far. They are the movies have marked my mid-decade, the movies I feel have further advanced the cinematic medium. As always, I write articles such as these to get the readers to chime in with their own picks. Looking forward to reading them.
1) The Tree of Life
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree Of Life” is a mosaic of a film that might test the limitations of its audience, but more importantly, the cinematic medium’s limitations. No matter what faults you may have with Malick’s movie, you cannot deny the sheer chutzpah and originality that went into its creation. There has never been anything quite like it and I highly doubt there ever will be. Malick tries to transcend the boundaries of life itself by trying to find a kind of meaning. This is his search for transcendence, in the little moments that make us and shape us. Death, mourning, rebirth, transcendence are just a fraction of the themes being tackled here. The mainstream might not have warmed up to the film’s non-linear narrative; for the rest of us, the symposium of abstract shapes and colors that pop our eyes out on the screen is just what the doctor ordered. This is the greatest cinematic experience of the decade.
2) The Master
P.T Anderson’s masterpiece is almost unexplainable. A reinvention of the cinematic language with a never better Joaquin Phoenix. The backdrop is scientology, but that’s only the backdrop for a much more complex movie. The surrealistic nature of the film was a hint for things to come in the Anderson cannon – “Inherent Vice”, anybody?- but here was a movie that had the best director of his generation at the peak of his powers, using scientology as only the background for bigger more complicated themes. I was more than riveted. Bold, innovative and infuriating, “The Master” is a landmark movie, but one that will likely divide its audience in half. Too bad, I was hypnotized by almost every single frame of its puzzling, schizophrenic narrative.
3) Margaret
“Margaret” is an absolute masterpiece. It thematically is going for the tone of a grandiose opera, but in a modern day context, filtered through the emotions of a teenage girl associated with a tragedy she witnessed and felt responsible for. It expresses the emotional teenage mind-set like no other. Every performance is astounding and every character in it so compelling and fully-realized. There’s no doubt in my mind that if this movie hadn’t been tangled up in lawsuits years ago, Anna Paquin surely would have been winning many awards for her performance. It’s such a shame that a movie of this size and scope was overlooked. Director Kenneth Lonergan asked friend Martin Scorsese for some help in the editing room and what you ended up getting was a movie that could not be explained easily and has only gotten better with time.
4) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Grasping a film such as this one may require some major attention from the viewer, and even when the attention is there, frustration may come about as a result of the film’s abstractedness and non-linear narrative. This is all not too surprising when you consider Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s filmography and his constant acknowledgment of nature and the way it binds to us as human beings. Have I lost you yet? Snoozing? That’s how some folks might react when watching “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives”. Coming out of the screening I attended, there was a kind of head scratching vibe in the air. It was as if Weerasethakul’s film had not only confused the general public, but actually angered them in frustration with what they had witnessed. I dug it the its mysterious setting and its dream-like episodes. If you’ve seen “Tropical Maladay” or “Syndromes and a Century” you know just how special this guy is.
5) A Separation
Filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s indisputably great “A Separation” is the portrait of a country in turmoil. Just like the marriage depicted, it is constantly caught in the politics and restrictions the society offers. In one memorable scene, a man tells his daughter to speak Arabic as opposed to Farsi. In another telling moment, a girl’s school textbook recalls a time in the country’s history when the only two classes that existed were “royalty” and “everybody else”. Every person involved in the trial of “A Separation” has the best intentions and their own honorable values to go by. It is the most truthful and unbiased depiction of Iran I have seen this decade. The characters in Farhadi’s film live their lives according to the same religion and guidelines that are asked for them to obey. Yet, in the end it is only our own personal experiences that can provide us with the moral compass for the story.
6) Under the Skin
What Glazer has accomplished here is quite remarkable and shouldn’t be forgotten. He’s made a picture that defies all the rules and, just like most films on this list, has reinvented a new kind of language. He showed real promise with his first film “Sexy Beast” back in 2000, a cerebral and intense film that paved the way for Ben Kingsley’s best performance. He followed it up with “Birth”, which was kind of all over the place and not as successful as I wanted it to be, but now he’s really surprised me with this one, an out of left field vision that stuns. More than two years after having seen it I still can’t get the damn thing out of my head. Its originality and absurdity is what I love the most about it, and of course Johansson, who is just perfect for the part of a murderous, seductive alien, was the perfect casting choice.
7) Holy Motors
Leos Carax. You have to give it to this wildly imaginative filmmaker. He’s allergic to formula and refuses to adhere to the norm. In this thrilling, visionary, frustrating, exhausting and masterful film, he decided to give a poisonous valentine to the cinema, splitting his film into a bunch of different genres. Episodic in nature and more than eye-opening, Carax gave us something we’ve never seen before: a surreal nightmare of the past, present and future of cinema. With unusual acting chameleon Denis Lavant by his side, this was a movie in which anything could happen, in which any image could get juxtaposed with any other. There is no three-act structure built upon a tired, overplayed premise. Carax pushes, pushes and pushes until he finds the existential, surrealistic nirvana he’s been looking for throughout the movie with a simple but awe-inspring final image that is as haunting as it is ridiculous.
8) Black Swan
Taking a cue from Kanye West’s 2010 album, this is Director Darren Aronofksy’s Beautiful, Dark, twisted fantasy. Natalie Portman gave the performance of the year in a film that was more than just about ballet; it was about the boundaries an artist had in order to push his or herself to the very limits of their art. The same could be said of Aronofsky, who’s never adhered to the conventional or acceptable. A potent, poisonous child of Emeric Pressburger/Michael Powell’s “The Red Shoes” and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive”, this was a campy, visionary, extraordinary mess that turned into the film that confirmed the filmmaker was the real deal.
9) Inside Llewyn Davis
There was a hint of reflective existentialism in the Coens’ Best Picture winner “No Country For Old Men”. Those kooky brothers were maturing before our very eyes and we had no idea what was to follow. “A Serious Man” was unlike any movie they’ve ever done: autobiographical, philosophical and damn near apocalyptic. “Inside Llewyn Davis” is where the Coens, the thinkers, make the masterpiece they’ve been hinting at this decade. A meditation on failure which just so happens to have as a backdrop the 1960’s Greenwich Village New York folk scene. This is the scene right before Dylan, when Folk was still square and the struggles for the artists were very apparent. Our Llewyn Davis doesn’t want to sell out, sticking to his artistic integrity and preferring a life without money than to sell himself to the devil. If only we had more artists like him today.
10) The Social Network
A film such as “The Social Network” relies on characters more than plotting. The characters populating the film stay etched in your head way after the film is done, which is in fact the highest quality of the film. There is an almost irresistible vibe created; Fincher uses low lit cinematography to enhance the dreary atmosphere happening throughout. The hallways of Harvard feel cavernous and nightmarish, whereas the look and portrayal of University life is nothing short of condemning. Although the movie can be seen as an entertainment first and foremost, the substance that drives its themes home is very apparent. After a second, third and even fourth viewing of David Fincher’s masterpiece, I discovered new things that might not have seemed as obvious or apparent the first time around. “American Beauty’s” advertising campaign told us to “look closer; the same goes for “The Social Network”.
Weak animation
It's kind of hard to make great animation. You got to not only craft some handsome looking stuff but you also have to put some heart into the story and have us -the audience- suspend our disbelief while watching what is essentially drawn out characters. However I have stated over and over again the pat few years that we live currently in the golden age of animation. Classic after classic gets released on a yearly basis. Astonishing art that will surely last a life time. Lately we've however been in a rut. 2011 was the first year in which I couldn't even find one animated film that I thought was exceptional. Many found lot to like in Rango, a tripped out ode to spaghetti-westerns with a main character in the form of a chameleon-cowboy voiced by Johnny Depp. Got that? many did, I didn't. Rango was -in these eyes- too self involved to work out on screen yet it was one of three animated films that got a "best animated film" nom for the Oscars. Pixar also struck out for the first time in their short 16 year history with Cars 2, a devastatingly dull sequel to a good, solid 2006 treat.
The other nominees? Kung Fu Panda 2? A follow-up to a decent 2008 movie that wasn't necessarily deserving to get made into a sequel. Puss In Boots? A movie based on a character introduced in the Shrek series? mixed reviews greeted it and I didn't even bother to watch it based on .. well just based on the fact that there was much more promising stuff to watch. Rounding out the nominees is Chico and Rita + A Cat In Paris, the academy's justifiable attempt to support hand drawn animation but these two films aren't the ones to rally behind a practically lost art form. Tin Tin -reviewed HERE- justifiably failed to get a nomination and proved once again that animated quality was quasi dead in 2011. Further proof had the prestigious New York Film Critic Circle erase the Best Animated Film category from their ballot based on a weak playing field.
However, ending on a positive here's the truly great movies in animation of the past 15 years of cinema. Most of these are ground breakers that have evolved over time into true classics.
1) Spirited Away
2)Wall E
3) Ratatouille
4) Les Triplettes De Belleville
5) The Fantastic Mr. Fox
6) Up
7) Waking Life
8) The Incredibles
9) Finding Nemo
10) Toy Story 2
11) South Park
12) Toy Story 3
13) The Iron Giant
14) Chicken Run
15) Shrek