Finally!!!
This installment, the final section of my series compiling my top 50- favorite films (plus a few extra) from the decade of 2010-2019, is at long last at its conclusion as I will now bring you my personal Top Ten! I honestly did not intend to have this series, which I began in the Spring, to have extended itself for this lengthy duration of time. But, with time, as it relates to life during COVID-19, becoming more elastic than normal to say the least, the months passed by in a flash and here we are in November. So, ensuring that the word did not turn to 2021 before I knew it, I am prioritizing this completion.
As always, these are just my opinions and I will post where you may find the full, complete review for each film. Are you ready?
First of all, this is not a film about Facebook. David Fincher's increasingly prescient film that surrounds itself around the creation of Facebook is a film about inspiration, innovation and imagination as well as it is a film about class warfare, race and racism, toxic masculinity, lost innocence, and the pursuit and wielding of emerging power, as filtered through the persona of Mark Zuckerberg (a brilliantly serpentine Jesse Eisenberg) during his Harvard set college years.
Secondly, this is a movie about Facebook, or rather the technological sea change that birthed our still increasing and simultaneous devotion and repulsion of the social media landscape. Structured as a hybrid between a series of Rashomon styled court depositions and Orson Wells "Citizen Kane" (1941), Fincher, aided superbly by Aaron Sorkin's whirlwind, mammoth screenplay and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' debut and Oscar winning film score, cultivates what amounts to a societal warning. To think, the idea of a virtual means to connect and re-connect with other human beings yet was actually created as a means to humiliate women does seem to serve our cultural quandary exceedingly well. The battle between our real and virtual lives and the toll it has taken upon our social core is nothing less than a plea for us to not relinquish our sense of humanity in favor of the instant, yet fleeting, gratification of synthetic rewards and our ensuing addiction to those rewards for what good is feigning inter-connectivity at the expense of our own souls?
This film is a powerful, still prophetic dark epic about our primal need for acceptance, validation, approval, understanding and empathy...and the lengths to which we will venture to attain it. By forcing us to confront our own instincts with his portrait of Zuckerberg, Fincher never lets us off of the hook.
(Originally reviewed October 2010)
In her undeniably deserved Oscar winning performance, Natalie Portman raised her own creative bar by taking herself and all of us on a swan dive into Hell in this astounding psychological thriller set within the unforgiving dance world of professional Ballet Theater.
As the aging dancer Nina Sayers, who in her desire to attain the coveted dual role of "The Swan Princess/The Black Swan" in her company's production of "Swan Lake," we witness an obsessive quest for ultimate perfection and all inherent confrontations towards realizing her dreams. From the jealous wrath of her peers, the pleasing of her imposing and sexually lascivious Choreographer (an excellent Vincent Cassell), intense competition and fear of replacement from a new dancer (a magnetic Mila Kunis) who exudes greater confidence and sexual energy, the suffocating presence of her Mother and failed former dancer (Barbara Hershey) and the punishing physical demands of her chosen profession and art. Yet, even all of that does not compare to the demons in her mind and her splintering psyche as she desperately attempts to "let go" and tap into her darkest tendencies in order to fully embody the role of "The Black Swan."
Aronosfky has unleashed a superior, hallucinogenic experience, filled with labyrinthine visual and aural juxtapositions, most notably, the motif of mirrors, to insert us directly inside of Nina's fragile mind, allowing us to see and hear only what she experiences and the effect is harrowing. But his cinematic touches would not be enough if not for the performance of Natalie Portman who does indeed "let go" (in a way she previously hadn't, to my perceptions), to the degree that she delivered nothing less than the opera for our nightmares.
(Originally reviewed January 2011)
One of the decade's most fearless, incendiary and nearly unclassifiable films was Writer/Director Boots Riley's debut feature, a dense, disturbing satire that fused elements of comedy, science fiction/horror and magical realism together weaving the dark spell of a cinematic bad dream from which our film's hero is unable to awake.
The odyssey of Cassius Green (the terrific Lakeith Stanfield), during which he discovers his "White voice" in order to propel himself up the telemarketing corporate ladder, hurls him and the audience into a tale that openly confronts the brutal dehumanization of capitalism and cultural appropriation, the subjugation and abuse of workers and of the act of passivity itself, which threatens to leave one trapped within a world they never made. Yet, for all of the deadly serious commentary, it is a playful film (although one packed with razor blades), that delivers wildly colorful and inventive perspectives with color schemes, costume design, cinematography, music as well as with the performances and Riley's unrepentant storytelling which flies face first into a surreal plot development that you will either fully accept or not (I thought it was ingenious) with a madhouse fury.
"Sorry To Bother You" is a film overflowing with vehement surprises that batter and bruise and is also a testament to the unfiltered creativity, imagination and originality that we so rarely even see anymore in our cinematic landscape of sequels, prequels, remakes and theme park rides masquerading as movies. Boots Riley's staggering confidence and tenacity produced a film experience unlike most and to which at the screening I attended, inspired one patron to loudly announce once the film concluded, an incredulous "JE-SUS!!" and I myself stood in the theater hallway afterwards wondering just what in the hell I had even seen!
(Originally reviewed July 2018)
7. "SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD" DIRECTED BY LORENE SCAFARIA (2012)
Essentially ignored upon its initial release (it played in my city for two short weeks before it completely vanished), this beautiful, aching, existential apocalyptic comedy, in which a 70 mile wide asteroid is headed for a direct hit to planet Earth ensuring the world's annihilation in three weeks was, and remains, one of the decade's most striking, heartbreaking and memorable films I saw, despite it being so sadly undervalued.
Starring a wonderful Steve Carrell (demonstrating a depth reminiscent to William Hurt or Jack Lemmon) and a dazzling Keira Knightley (fully liberated from period dramas) as neighbors, previously unfamiliar to each other, who join forces to navigate their final 21 days on Earth together (he to re-connect with a lost love, she to somehow find a plane back to her family in England) showcased Lorene Scafaria's masterful sense of tone and empathy via a knife's edge of concepts and styles from satire, thriller, poetry and romantic comedy in a superbly unpredictable fashion while helming a story aiming for a horrifically predictable conclusion.
I absolutely loved how Scafaria never let the audience off of the hook, so to speak. As her luxurious dialogue, sumptuous character development, building romance between our leading characters and often outrageous humor makes for an invitingly congenial experience, she upends you over and again with shocking yet skillful tonal shifts that always remind you that the world will come to an end and there is no getting out of it, keeping us all off balance as we, from characters to viewers, ponder existence and mortality.
"Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World," while often being a grim comedy of manners, is ultimately a warm experience that eloquently presents in a realistic fashion of what humanity ight look like is faced with is impending end. Hedonism, violence, despair and survivalism are as present as people still showing up for work and continuing to mow their lawns (one of the film's finest and most poignant images) for no other reason that we are just programmed to live our lives, makes Scafaria's vision so, well...life affirming. And the film's final moments, where two people finding the significance in each other and themselves just as the universe is set to render them and all living things insignificant is unforgettable.
And even more, I will never hear Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' "The Guy Is In Love With You" or The Hollies' "The Air That I Breathe" in the same way ever again.
(Originally reviewed July 2012)
One of our most original, innovative and unrepentantly fearless filmmakers emerged with possibly his most audacious project, and unquestionably, the one with his most openly presented moral outrage.
Quentin Tarantino's three hour epic chronicling the odyssey of the titular Django (a titanic Jamie Foxx) from slave to bounty hunter to slave emancipator as he attempts to find and free his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the plantation compound of Candyland as owned and operated by Calvin J. Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), was an outstanding masterpiece of cinematic revisionist history and genre splicing as he magnificently merged the slave narrative, Spaghetti Westerns, 1970's Blaxploitation films, a condemnation of the Hollywood slave opera and even German folktales into a sumptuously filmed and exceedingly, peerlessly written and constructed experience.
For all of the razzle dazzle, Tarantino ensures that the most important, crucial element of the film remains painfully intact, the unforgivable inhumanity of slavery. Unlike most Hollywood filmmakers who are afraid to get their hands dirty or are fearful of making potential audiences uncomfortable, Quentin Tarantino, by contrast, takes us to the wall in all of slavery's brutality, from abusive language to sadistic deeds, culminating in the full, complete and punishing catharsis of Django's unrelenting retribution.
Yes, much of what we experience within a film like this one is cinematic fantasy but it is wrapped in the reprehensible realities of what slavery was, the African-American Holocaust. where the painfulness and deliverance operated at its most primal. And to that end, Quentin Tarantino utilized the truth of our nation's original sin, and again proved why he is one of most original cinematic storytellers.
(Originally reviewed December 2012)
A film so ingenious that I was stunned that it had not been made sooner, and now that it has been made, it has invented its own cinematic line in the sand, influencing all that will arrive afterwards.
Jordan Peele's masterful debut, in which a young, Black photographer (a richly haunted Daniel Kaluuya) travels to visit the parents of his White girlfriend to terrifying results, completely upended and re-invented the horror genre by unapologetically making the nightmare of "post racial"/post Obama 21st century Americans as filtered through the Black experience the engine in which our story, and therefore, the horror developed and existed, making this film even more potent three years after its original release.
After multiple viewings, I am still amazed and slack jawed at how brilliantly Peele realized and controlled his vision, even when the film flies into its viciously surreal final third. For he never lets his eye off of the cinematic ball, so to speak. That the nightmare of "Get Out" is the nightmare African-Americans face each and every single day living in White America to varying degrees from the prevalence of daily micro-aggressions and undeserved suspicions which rightfully create paranoia to the rise of overt and rampant racism of police brutality and open-season styled hunting and murders of Black people by Whites who "feel threatened," all of which exacerbates the fear, incites the necessity for resistance and/or the submergence into "The Sunken Place" (itself a term now added to our lexicon when discussing race in reality as much as it is in pop culture).
Jordan Peele's "Get Out" is an honest and unmercifully creative work that fearlessly confronts White privilege, cultural appropriation, enslavement, eradication and emancipation with rapacious satire and the very moral outrage and catharsis that fully validates the on-going racial trauma that exists for Black people in White society.
(Originally reviewed March 2017)
Breathing the same rarefied cinematic air as the likes of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" (1985) and Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" (2008), Yorgos Lanthimos' debut English language feature film is a work of palpable existential quicksand filtered through a dystopian future that feels like a Wes Anderson film as filtered through the eyes of Stanley Kubrick. It is one of the decade's most singular, downright original films of which the response will not capture anything within the middleground. You will go with it or you just won't and Lanthimos is resolute and defiant in his unforgiving vision.
The story, set in an undetermined future during which single people are deemed to check into the Kafka-esque location known only as The Hotel and are given a duration of 45 days to find a lifetime romantic partner or otherwise be transformed into an animal, is a brutal satire about loneliness and the societal constructs of single vs. married people. Lanthimos gives us a world where bisexuality is no longer a viable sexual choice, masturbation is illegal, relationships are forged through matching physical ailments and not through honest attraction and emotinal connections, and singledom for males represents a life doomed to die alone after choking upon a meal while for women, it means they are destined to being raped solely because they have not become attached to the right man.
Colin Farrell elicits one of his most committed performances as a newly unmarried man forced to check into The Hotel and experience an odyssey that will propel him through his current lodgings, a stint with a band of renegades known as "The Loners," the threat of the Orwellian landscape The City and an emotionally white knuckle conclusion where he confronts whether love is truly blind. Lanthimos envisions his film through a nightmare logic as visualized through meticulously designed and framed visual perspectives, repetitive classical music that only grows increasingly sinister, cold and detached atmospherics...and somehow, it is a comedy.
A comedy where the honesty and fragility of the emotional human experience has been drowned in the bathtub.
(Originally reviewed June 2016)
And this is how the world ends...
The second film upon this list to envision our annihilation is one of the decade's furthest reaching films and for me, serves as a dark twin to the film that will sit just one notch above this one. Lars' Von Trier's devastating masterpiece, which is divided into two distinct halves, stars Kirsten Dunst, in one of her gravest, bristling performances as a woman, undone by crippling depression, destroys her own oppressively opulent wedding and afterwards, takes up a convalescence at her sister's (Charlotte Gainsbourg). Meanwhile, a newly discovered blue planet named Melancholia is on course towards Earth for a presumably wondrous astronomical event, when it is actually doomed to obliviate our planet.
From the apocalyptic imagery of the eight minute, Wagner scored prologue, to the chilling performances, the terrifying thriller aspect of the film's second half as Melancholia approaches, and the final scenes which left me in stunned silence, Lars Von Trier's nihilistic and empathetic exploration of the human experience and humanity's downfall can be taken both at face value or fully as a metaphor for the excruciating, planet crushing pain of depression, where the end of all existence may indeed bring on a calming effect of sweet relief.
Absolutely unforgettable.
(Originally reviewed December 2011)
Terrence Malick's esoteric, elegant exploration of essentially life, the universe and well...everything was a majestic work of art with a capital "A," "R," "T," yet it was also simultaneously primal in its sheer profundity.
While the bulk of the film centers around the birth, evolution, tension and destruction of a Texas family in the 1950's, which Malick covers with piercing intimacy and poetic grace notes, he surrounds that personal story with an imagining of the beginning and end of the universe itself, complete with intergalactic extravagances and prehistoric musings starring dinosaurs. Yes, this film was certainly confusing and confounding to many viewers. But trust me, what I really believe Malick has accomplished was to utilize the the story of the universe and the story of the family to showcase the inter-connectivity that exists between all living things over all of time itself, making "The Tree Of Life" a film about the life cycle--meaning EVERY story of EVERY living organism.
Where Brad Pitt, as the patriarch, gave a performance of towering command and Jessica Chastain elicited supreme grace in her ethereal and nearly wordless performance as the matriarch, the true star of the film is Terrence Malick's cinematic palate which delivered a resplendent, rapturous work of sound and vision from its first frame to its last, where every image could exist as a still photograph, and streaks of sunlight look and feel like the hand of God.
Mysterious and mystical, obtuse, cryptic and demanding of some seriously heavy mental lifting, "The Tree Of Life" is not a film where you can be remotely passive. It is a film designed to engage you with pondering the meaning of it all and Malick's vision is enthralling.
(Originally reviewed June 2011)
Exactly like how Cameron Crowe's "Almost Famous" (2000) sat at the very top of my list for my favorite films of the decade from 2000-2009, the placement of this film at the very top of this list was my easiest choice of all. In fact, I knew right away and I juts had to work myself backwards as the ambition, majesty and sheer heart of this completely unique film experience stood taller than all others over these past ten years.
Filmed in piecemeal over a period of twelve years, Richard Linklater's finest cinematic achievement in his illustrious and idiosyncratic career, exists essentially without a plot as we follow the life and times of Mason (exquisitely portrayed by Ellar Coltrane), from perhaps age 6 to all the way until his arrival at college, directly alongside his Mother (Patricia Arquette), sarcastic sister (Lorelei Linklater), and his Father (Ethan Hawke), long estranged from the family. Over three fully mesmerizing hours, the film follows the introspective Mason as he finds his way with his family, his friends, his loves, his experimentations, his expressions, his future and hoe he begins to interact with and view the world in which he co-exists.
Never at any point is there a moment that feels prefabricated or engineered. There is no hyperbole or manufactured drama. There are even no signals to the audience as to what year it happens to be for Mason, making the film flow like the passage of time itself. And of course, as previously stated, there is no real plot, as within our own real lives, our experiences are not scripted and designed to adhere to a pre-conceived follow through. It is a masterful achievement that Linklater has given to us as he asks of us to ruminate over the paths of our own lives just as we regard Mason's--and for those of you who happen to be parents, I believe the experience of watching this film must be something nearly inexplicable as you will be able to regard yourselves and your children along with Mason.
To that end, Linklater's "Boyhood" could have also been easily called, "Childhood," "Girlhood," "Motherhood," "Fatherhood," "Manhood" or "Womanhood" as absolutely ANY viewer from ANY walk of life can view this film and regard the passage of time over all of the film's characters, and therefore, Linklater truly has re-invented what it means when a film can be a "slice of life" to the point where the experience becomes relatively cosmic.
Philosophical, languid, engaging, overflowing with empathy, wisdom, a miraculous sense of time travel and a final moment that completely encapsulates the bittersweetness of simultaneous beginnings and endings, this film is a monument of absolute, transcendent truth and beauty because Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" is a film about what it means to be alive.
(Originally reviewed August 2014)
(Originally reviewed August 2014)
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