25. Roma (Cuarón, 2018)
Alfonso Cuarón navigates a delicate junction of history, personal memory, and cultural specificity, yielding images and sounds that evince totemic power. Is its technical prowess more engaging than the interior life of its protagonist? Maybe, but its overwhelmingly beautiful all the same.
24. The Act of Killing (Oppenheimer, 2012)
Uniquely earth-shattering, even when its dicey gambles in perspective occasionally weigh the film down in certain ways. Joshua Oppenheimer's adroit judgment and formal authority keep the experience from feeling glib.
23. BPM (Beats Per Minute) (Campillo, 2017)
"More life." Robin Campillo's AIDS epic provides just that, allowing its troupe of activists a full gamut of emotions and situations. Grabs you from its opening frames, capturing the electric energy of the ACT-UP group at the center of the film. Lucidly bristles with tensions between in-fighting and unity.
22. Get Out (Peele, 2017)
Rich layers abound: tonal, thematic, emotional, political... Each revealing something madder, scarier, and funnier beneath its surface. Jordan Peele's satirical and formal convictions are precise yet unbound by expectation. A remarkable piece of entertainment that goes full-boar on pleasure and depth.
21. Happy as Lazzaro (Rohrwacher, 2018)
Magical synthesis of tangible naturalism and elliptical fable. As open-hearted and compassionate as its protagonist.
20. Arabian Nights Vol 1, Vol. 2, & Vol. 3 (Gomes, 2015)
The Restless One is probably my favorite of Miguel Gomes's riff on modern Portugal and One Thousand and One Nights, but the last two volumes have their own value that add to the trilogy as a whole. Concurrently links and alienates the contrasting tones, longueurs, and ecstasies of all three films, mirroring Portugal's own political and social turmoils.
19. 12 Years a Slave (McQueen, 2013)
Solomon Northrup's story continues to endure into the new decade, and Steve McQueen's vigorous artistry succeeds in the formidable task of preserving every traumatizing, unjust, and demoralizing facet to it and our most shameful moment in US history.
18. Shoplifters (Hirokazu, 2018)
Builds a tight-knit relationship between its characters and its audience, even when they become more difficult to embrace the more we come to learn about them and their choices. An understated sketch of a makeshift family and their status in contemporary Japan.
17. Lady Bird (Gerwig, 2017)Lovely, succinct, hilarious coming-of-age tale, made more precise and engaging by Greta Gerwig's sharp team of actors, editors, production designers, cinematographers, and costume designers. There isn't a detail in this film that feels wasted, speaking to the remarkable clarity of Gerwig's vision. Not to mention the ability to make a movie about teenage disarray without being muddled in your own aims. A tricky feat pulled off with total grace.
16. Son of Saul (Nemes, 2015)
Speaking of tricky feats. Plants one foot in the immediacy of its protagonist's disturbing position as a Sonderkommando and another in his tunnell vision fixation on burying his son. I get the aesthetic critiques that turned some people off, but I still maintain that this is a rare, nervy, and gut-wrenching angle on the Shoah.
15. The Selfish Giant (Barnard, 2013)
Erupts from Oscar Wilde's four-page allegorical children's story into a Loachian rendering of school-aged paternity, arrogance, and anger. Clio Barnard never draws the parallels you expect her to draw from Wilde's tale, keeping this grim but hopeful narrative surprising, original, and emotionally impactful.
Astounding intricacies in staging, narrative, performance, moral complexity... There isn't a shade or dimension to this story that Asghar Farhadi neglects. Every character, story beat, conflict, and tangled agenda reverberates off of and feeds into the core of the film, ultimately revealing itself as a quietly enraging social essay.
13. The Immigrant (Gray, 2013)
The most perfectly matched pairing of auteur and star since Todd Haynes's Far from Heaven? In terms of a director in complete debt to the film-anchoring power of their lead performance and a lead performance that magnetically serves the ambitious vision of their director, there isn't a lot else at the same level. Would love to see them work this magic again.
12. Amour (Haneke, 2012)
Michael Haneke's frankness and eerie tension serve this unflinching story of an ailing octogenarian couple, but the lived-in and surprisingly tender touches transcend it beyond Georges and Anne's tragic end. The dismount wouldn't be nearly as effective without Haneke's humane eye and Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva's honest evincing of these two's devotion.
11. Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015)
Looking at the state of blockbusters since the release of Fury Road, I've only come to value George Miller's insane, electric, pole-swinging spectacle even more. Not to use this slot that's meant to be in celebration of one awe-inspiring movie as an excuse to take shots at unrelated Disney products, but in an era where studios invest more in sameness and transparent audience pandering, it's pretty amazing that this was made with the apparent freedoms and audacity that it exhibits from scene to scene. Packs a variety of movement and creativity into every frame, while building a plausibly apocalyptic world around them. Designs, characters, setpieces have sturdy backbones.
And at long last, the final 10 films in the Best of the Decade countdown!
10. Things to Come (Hansen-Løve, 2016)
Mia Hansen-Løve crafts such bracing and intelligent films out of concepts that are difficult to dramatize. She was only in her mid-thirties when she made Things to Come, a movie about a middle-aged woman (an effervescent Isabelle Huppert) conflicted by the tensions between her individual choices and her radical ideals, and by the freedoms and disappointments therein. Never boils this conflict down to one simple form, showing us a woman drawn from competing intellectual and emotional pulls.
9. Moonlight (Jenkins, 2016)
Synthesizes the very personal and distinctive voices of director/co-screenwriter Barry Jenkins and playwright/co-screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney, the thoughtful and subdued influences of Claire Denis and Wong Kar-wai, and the three very different chapters of Chiron's story. Still amazed that all three actors who portrayed Chiron didn't collaborate in any way, with each bringing their own ideas while working to create a full picture of this character. Speaks to Jenkins' discernment with actors and to the tactful yet poetic acuity with which he approaches this story.
8. Certified Copy (Kiarostami, 2010)
Such a cerebral, prismatically engaging idea, executed with a spirited lightness in shape, tone, and performance. A copy may or may not be as valuable as the original, but Abbas Kiarostami (RIP) was an inimitable cinematic treasure, which is especially true in the case of this film. Reveals so many layers in its metaphysical concepts as it goes deeper into this maybe-maybe-not couple's encounter, including emotional layers by the film's wallop of an end. "J-J-J-James."
7. How to Survive a Plague (France, 2012)
Just goes to show that no matter how much good you think you're doing in the world, nothing can compare to the heroism of people doing physical, ground-level, results-oriented activism. Not to mention the type of activism that's aimed at saving the lives of marginalized people. The second film on my list to feature a chronicle of an ACT-UP chapter (though the only one that's a documentary), How to Survive a Plague shows the life-saving actions of ACT-UP New York's push for better AIDS medication and faster drug trials, in a time where President Reagan never publically mentioned the word AIDS. David France and his team possess an impressively large amount of archival footage, assembled in a way that captures the urgency of this group's actions. I hope more people watch this and are inspired by ACT-UP's brave work.
6. If Beale Street Could Talk (Jenkins, 2018)
Barry Jenkins isn't the only director to have more than one film on this countdown, but he is the only one to have two films in the top 10. He's just so good! I only managed to mention in passing in the Moonlight post how well Jenkins pushes his own distinctive style while remaining truthful to the voice of his collaborators (McCraney) and acknowledging his influences (Denis, Wong). The same can be applied here tenfold, only with James Baldwin. It's an obvious thing to point out since he's adapting Baldwin, but Jenkins is especially successful here for how trenchantly he retains the spirit of Baldwin's work. As with Baldwin, Jenkins has spent the latter half of this decade devoted to the all-too-rare elicitation of the profound emotional scope and range of black lives. His gifts with shooting, editing, sound, and color allow this adaptation to plumb these depths so fully and are just as indebted to Baldwin than to any of his other influences.
5. 20th Century Women (Mills, 2016)
A movie about the ways in which the people closest to us are unknowable on so many levels, yet Mike Mills still manages to exhibit a tremendous sense of warmth and roundedness towards every character in his remarkable script. It's the equivalent of experiencing a loving two-hour embrace from a loved one that keeps their most personal feelings deep to their chest. The narration, divvied up between each member of the film's central quintet, is simple enough to not be overbearing while acting as the soul that fuses each strand of ambivalent self-searching across Mills' superb ensemble. The work from Annette Bening in particular is possibly the best performance from the last decade, who's able to communicate so much about the unattainable idea of this woman and her own specific characterization. Like the film, Bening attains a focused, precise portrait while seeing from multiple sides.
4. The Tree of Life (Malick, 2011)
If not his best, this is easily the defining Terrence Malick movie of the 21st century (I'd argue the Malick of this century is somewhat different from the Malick of Badlands and Days of Heaven). The ethereal language of the camera and mise en scène are on full display in this one and the intercutting of memory, reverie, biology, and immediate space are the life-blood of this splendid, sprawling, breathtaking tone poem. The evolution of a family and a world, at once buzzing with life and stricken by hopelessness, grief, and death. As much as the movie's structure is guided by feeling and emotion, there's a surprising rigor to the focus Malick puts on individual details and events throughout the film. Opening with brief images of Jessica Chastain's character as a child then gradually transitioning to the discovery that her son has died gives its audience a lot in a succinct amount of time for a movie that's often described as meandering. The Tree of Life is a miracle on several counts, but its biggest asset is the balance it brings to the philosophical and existential questions at the heart of the film. Neither rejecting nature in the face of misfortune and global catastrophe or fully embracing grace, the movie plays as both ode and eulogy to a world nearing its end but still crackling with possibility.
3. Tabu (Gomes, 2012)
A dalliance of the heart and of a colony, bifurcated into two seductive, mysterious, and rapturous parts. The first half, set in modern day Lisbon, focuses on the diverging lives and viewpoints of a dying woman, her caretaker, and her neighbor, and our discovery that the dying woman, Aurora, used to have a farm in an unnamed African country. The second half, set in the 60s, is a silent (with the exception of music and narration) dramatization of Aurora's life on said farm with her husband and her lover. Miguel Gomes's remarkable third feature holds the distinction of being the first movie I ever saw at Nashville's invaluable Belcourt Theatre. I went with my mother and my oldest brother, both of whom shared a similar sentiment that other viewers have expressed, which is that the quieter first half pales in comparison to the beguiling magic and romanticism of the second half. It's an understandable criticism. To a lesser extent, I'm somewhat prone to this reading myself. But both "Paradise Lost" and "Paradise" make for enthralling and indelibly emotional sits on their own merits. Had Gomes made the choice to simply make separate films out of each half, I imagine I'd love them just the same, but the genius of Gomes's achievement is how he's able to use both to comment on and complicate the other.
2. Carol (Haynes, 2015)
"Dearest... You'll think it harsh of me to say so, but no explanation I offer will satisfy you." Such as an explanation as to why so many people don't love this movie. No matter, this entry isn't about those people (let 'em have their Revenants or their Big Shorts), it's about the mastery of Todd Haynes, the tremendously shattering notes of Carter Burwell, the unbending resolve and amity of Sarah Paulson, the lush romanticism and sensuousness of Ed Lachman, the expansive ability of Phyllis Nagy, and the adroit characterization and screen chemistry of Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett. Each of their boundless creative forces merged to craft the most moving and evocative love story of the 2010s. It's by no means an easy contest, but Haynes is the film's MVP among that stacked group of talents, extracting a vision of 50s lesbian desire that never feels trite or fussily determined to Make a Statement. Unlike Far from Heaven (a movie I love that is not guilty of any of the previous things I mentioned), the 50s setting of Carol is completely stripped of artifice, pulling the weight of its atmospheric feeling through the authentic, window-frosted textures and rhythms of the city. So much of the film's surroundings, however, are outlined by their inherent synthetic quality, from the toy store Therese works at to the restaurant where they have their first date to Carol's own home that was built on a loveless marriage. Haynes never leans too heavily into this paradox either, constructing a modest but fully realized world that mirrors Carol and Therese's own isolation and doubt.
1. Margaret (Lonergan, 2011)
To think we were nearly deprived of this. Life's funny that way. One minute you're stuck in a seemingly endless legal battle with Fox over the running time of your film and the next you're a critical sensation with an impassioned movement behind you to gain more visibility (#TeamMargaret forever and ever). Or in Lisa's case, maybe one minute you're looking for a cowboy hat and the next you're holding Allison Janney as she's dying in the street as a result of an accident you inadvertently caused. Life and people are fickle, turbulent energies is what I'm getting at, and Kenneth Lonergan's mosaic of human behavior and unpredictability expertly reflects this. It can be frustrating at times, sure, but that's also partially the point. And the "frustrating" aspects of Margaret (the semi-shapeless structure, the errant tonal registers) no longer feel like uneven means to an end to me. After having more time with the film, every contrasting scene and rhythm feels of a piece to each other and are all the more endearing for it. The same can be said of the acting ensemble, each of whom, convincingly, are alternately simpatico and at ends with one another, sometimes within juxtaposed scenes. As with a lot of moments in life, Margaret gains deeper nuances with more perspective and more chances to reveal itself to you. You grow more affection for it than you thought you had (which was already a lot) as it continues to wash over you and plays over and over in your head. Even if we had to wait six years for Margaret to see the light of day, I'm so happy it finally came along.
No comments:
Post a Comment