Reader JB mentioned yesterday that he’d be curious to know what my picks for the best films of the 2010s would be. Well Mr. JB, my list is out there on the internet, published on 12.23.19.
As with most lists dating back from a few years, some things have changed. For example, I find The Safdies’ “Uncut Gems” deserves top 10 consideration now. It’s aged very well and opened the door for the “gutter poetry” movement in cinema.
I’ve also lost count at the amount of times that I’ve seen “The Social Network,” each viewing expanding on the Next with depth Fincher infused in his zeitgeisty film. Looking back, I wonder why it didn’t crack my ten best list.
Then again, I decided to update my ten best films of the 2010s and still can’t quite fit them in there, so go figure … The indispensables for me:
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master,” Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s “Uncle Boonmee,” Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation,” Jonathan Glazer’s “Under the Skin,” Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Dogtooth,” and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return.”
If you asks me tomorrow, it would be an entirely different set of ten. That’s cinema for you.
What hasn’t aged very well? A good blueprint would be the massive critics poll I conducted in the summer of 2019. Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight,” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name” stick out. Both good films, but, in my opinion, not worthy of the acclaim they had garnered a few years back. And what to make of Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”? Still, a wondrous and unique experiment, and yet I’ve barely thought about it since the last decade ended.