Ten years ago, it seemed like we all had a pretty solid idea of movies — what they can do, who they’re for, and where they’re watched. That idea was inflexible, and supported by a century of precedent. It came with the added benefit of making the people in charge comfortable with the idea that cinema’s future wouldn’t look all that different from its past. DVD sales were strong, Netflix was still just a sad little envelope at the bottom of your mailbox, and China was starting to give studios the biggest safety net it ever had. Perhaps the arrival of James Cameron’s “Avatar” in the waning moments of 2009 could have been seen as a harbinger of strange things to come, but no one in Hollywood has ever lost sleep over a Movie that grossed nearly $3 billion. What about the 100 best movies?
Things have changed. Cinema is in a constant state of flux, but it’s never mutated faster or more restlessly than it has over the last 10 years. And while the decade will no doubt be remembered for the paradigm shifts precipitated by streaming and monolithic superhero movies, hindsight makes it clear that the definition of Film itself is exponentially wider now than it was a decade ago. Places. Products. Mirrors. Windows. Reflections of who we are. Visions of who we want to be. A way of capturing reality. A way of changing it. If the most vital work of the 2010s has made one thing clear, it’s that movies have never been more things to more people than they are today. And our week-long celebration list of the Best Films of the 2010s has us more excited than ever about what they might be to you tomorrow.
As the week goes on, we’ll be posting lists of the decade’s best performances, scenes, scores, and posters, as well as a timeline of the news stories that shaped the last 10 years, and interviews with the filmmakers who made it all happen.
But for now, IndieWire is proud to kick things off with our list of the 100 best movies of the 2010s.
“Inherent Vice” (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
So dense and hazy that it was probably destined to be the most under-appreciated of Paul Thomas Anderson’s films, “Inherent Vice” is a strung-out noir odyssey through the fog of late capitalism that grows a little clearer every time you watch it. A little sadder, too. Shot like a faded postcard, and as untethered from reality as its source material requires, this rare Thomas Pynchon adaptation borrows a lot from sun-dappled L.A. noir like “The Long Goodbye,” but it’s sillier and more sentimental than Philip Marlowe ever was.
Per genre tradition, the central mystery is actually several different mysteries all knotted together; good luck untangling what a heroin addict’s missing husband has to do with a real estate developer named Mickey Wolfmann and a drug cartel that calls itself the Golden Fang. But while the plot may be hard to follow, PTA compensates by making the film’s emotional underpinnings as clear as Doc Sportello’s view of the California coastline.
The lost love between hippie P.I. Sportello (a magnificently frazzled Joaquin Phoenix) and his ex (a bittersweet Katherine Waterston) is achingly well-realized in just a few short scenes, while the pervasive sense of a country in decline is suffused into the atmosphere like so many “patchouli farts” (to borrow one of the best insults from a film that has dozens to spare). Forget “Boogie Nights” and the illusion of American possibility, “Inherent Vice” burrows into the feeling that we’ve already let it get away from us — that we’re all out there chasing our own tails and waiting for the fog to burn off.—DE
“The Loneliest Planet” (Julia Loktev, 2011)
Julia Loktev’s narrative debut “Day Night Day Night” was a sharp revisionist approach to the slow-burn thriller that followed a suicide bomber wandering the streets of New York City. “The Loneliest Planet” transplanted the filmmaker’s unique storytelling instincts to a quieter setting, as a wayward couple (Gael Garcia Bernal and Hani Furstenberg) on vacation in the wilderness of Georgia encounter a sudden attack at gunpoint that changes the nature of their relationship. The encounter lasts mere seconds, but its unspoken impact lingers as the campers roam from one location to the next, uncertain about their future together and how to address it.
A few years later, Ruben Östlund would enter similar terrain with the masterful dark comedy “Force Majeure,” but Loktev probes her conundrum in pure cinematic terms: Her movie deals with the assumptions about trust and companionship that so often go unquestioned until they’re forced into the open, but it never states its themes outright. The tension bursts into the story and then sits there, like an open wound, while its extraordinary performances address the rich thematic depths of each disquieting scene. Loktev hasn’t made a movie since then, but her two features together speak to the unique anxieties of this present moment — what it means to experience a sudden shock to the system, and then linger in the fallout, uncertain what to do next.—EK
“The Great Gatsby” (Baz Luhrmann, 2013)
Baz Luhrmann’s movies have such a pulse that by the time you’re done watching one you feel like it’s in your bloodstream. No wonder some people hate them. But if you can get on their wavelength, there’s nothing more purely cinematic. “The Great Gatsby” is Luhrmann’s style distilled to its most potent essence, more a visual concept album riffing on Scott Fitzgerald’s novel than an adaptation; it has a lot more in common with “Lemonade” and The National’s “I Am Easy To Find” than the Francis Ford Coppola-adapted “Gatsby” from 1974. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jay Gatsby might as well be Jay-Z Gatsby (Jay-Z was a producer of Luhrmann’s film and contributed several tracks to it), a self-made gangster with a poetic streak, committed to outrageous experiences of sensation to fill the hole inside. Luhrmann crams enough sensation into his frames to overwhelm the retinas — this is one of three or four movies to justify a 3-D release this decade — and to put you in the front seat of a life, and a society, racing to a head-on crash.—CB
“All These Sleepless Nights” (Michal Marczak, 2016)
As the last 10 years have seen non-fiction cinema continue to untether itself from convention with bold results, forward-thinking figures such as RaMell Ross and Robert Greene have pushed the form and helped galvanize the idea that documentary filmmakers are bonafide artists, not just glorified reporters or historians. With “All These Sleepless Nights,” Polish director Michal Marczak didn’t just blur the line between fact and invention, he danced all over it until the sun came up. Free of binary or hybrid distinctions, his wandering portrait of beautiful and aimless Warsaw youths cohered into an unclassifiable wonder that sits comfortably somewhere between Terrence Malick and the restless spirit of the French New Wave.
Nothing else this decade quite tapped into the bittersweet euphoria that Marczak was able to capture through his camera, which the director wielded with a custom rig that he designed himself in order to trace the ephemeral moments that spark when his characters twirl down the empty city streets and dance through each other’s lives. Creating a cinematic language far more sophisticated and satisfying than the handheld aesthetic that so many of today’s scripted indies port over from documentary filmmaking, “All These Sleepless Nights” is a miraculous film that, decades from now, we will recognize as being light years ahead of its time.—CO
“Girl Walk // All Day” (Jacob Krupnick, 2011)
The 2010s promised a new era of run-and-gun DIY filmmaking, as the ability for regular people to shoot and share their own content was sure to wash away the old rules in a massive wave of micro-budget cinema. It didn’t quite pan out that way. While iPhones became an invaluable resource for documentarians (and a creative gold rush for generations of budding artists on platforms like Vine and YouTube), feature-length fiction was largely immune to the charms of consumer-grade digital technology. Sean Baker (and Steven Soderbergh with “High Flying Bird”) found a way to make it work on a big-screen level, but only because the raw and unvarnished immediacy of a pocket-sized camera served the story they were telling. Most creators were so focused on how smartphones and DSLRs can simulate traditional equipment that they failed to realize how this tech can do things that film cameras never could.
And then there’s “Girl Walk // All Day,” a visionary and euphoric work of lighting-in-a-bottle genius that only exists because director Jacob Krupnick recognized what the rest of the world had yet to figure out for themselves: In an age where the line between public and private spaces was about to be erased forever, art could happen at all times — anywhere and to anyone.
An endlessly re-watchable bit of Vimeo kitsch that uses Girl Talk’s mashup album “All Day” as the soundtrack for an exuberant modern ballet, and the whole of Manhattan as its stage, “Girl Walk // All Day” begins with a rebellious young dancer (the fearless, Moira Shearer-worthy Anne Marsen) escaping from a stuffy barre class and follows her across the city as she sparks a love triangle and injects some life into a city of automatons. Funded via Kickstarter, released directly online, and full of stolen locations (e.g. a ferry, an Apple Store, Central Park) that it bends to its will, the film is a joyous trip through the looking glass that separates physical and digital spaces — the world as it is, and the world as we have the power to make it.—DE
“The Arbor” (Clio Barnard, 2010)
Clio Barnard masterfully assembles narrative tropes with documentary tricks to tell the complex story of lauded British playwright Andrea Dunbar in a film that’s as fresh today as the day she conceived it. Named after Dunbar’s play of the same title, Barnard uses staged recreations and various actors to unspool a look at Dunbar’s exceedingly rough upbringing and her unshakable desire to succeed, all while lip-syncing to actual interviews from Dunbar and her family. Mostly focused on her fraught relationship with daughter Lorraine, “The Arbor” uses a seemingly basic story to frame a wildly original and unique storytelling conceit. Each drama can have its own telling, its own force, and Barnard embraces that it in rewarding ways that never fail to surprise. —KE
“Happy Hour” (Hamaguchi Ryūsuke, 2015)
“Happy Hour” is five hours long, but that only sounds like a lot until you start watching it. Launching writer-director Hamaguchi Ryūsuke onto the world stage, this gentle domestic opus eases into the lives of four middle-aged women in Kobe, Japan, criss-crossing their daily trivialities into a rich mosaic that stretches out like the kind of thing that Mikio Naruse would make if he were alive in the limitless age of digital video.
The movie is absorbing from the moment it starts, as Hamaguchi’s exquisite cast of actresses forge a palpable bond that immediately convinces you of their 25-year history. These characters are all working through their own stuff (one is seeking a divorce, another is struggling to accommodate her mother-in-law, and so on), but they’re working through it in the same way we all do: Quietly, as if trying to put on a show while keeping most of themselves hidden behind a curtain. Ambling from one tremendous setpiece to another, “Happy Hour” gives us the time to suss out the difference between feeling and expression. By the end of it, even the most fleeting and ordinary moments seem to contain entire worlds. —DE
“Mother of George” (Andrew Dosunmu, 2013)
Devastating and dazzling in equal measure, Andrew Dosunmu’s Brooklyn-set breakthrough drama tells the story of a Nigerian woman (a standout Danai Gurira) who’s struggling to conceive a child with her new husband (Claire Denis and Jim Jarmusch favorite Isaac de Bankolé). The rare movie to shine a light on the lives and customs of Nigerian immigrants, “Mother of George” is exquisitely staged by Dosunmu — who makes full use of his background as both a Nigerian-American and a fashion photographer — and lushly photographed by cinematographer Bradford Young, who would leverage his work here into shooting the likes of “Selma” and “Arrival.” The film’s beauty, however, is never self-serving. Dosunmu uses it as a lens through which to clarify the power of love and the possibility of betrayal as those twin energies flow through a woman who’s caught between the weight of tradition and the pull of modernity. Made for the big screen but still waiting for a big audience, “Mother of George” is not only one of the best films of this decade, it will also be one of the best discoveries of the next. —TO
“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman, 2018)
As inviting to Spidey newcomers as it is rewarding for diehard fans, this Oscar-winning curveball to the Spider-Man canon is hilarious, touching, and so thoughtfully crafted in regards to its eye-popping animation and layered storyline that it becomes almost impossible not to care for Miles Morales, the Afro-Latino Brooklyn high schooler at the center of the film. The thrilling, inter-dimensional journey on which Miles embarks is made all the more fun by the other Spider-heroes he meets along the way (including Peter Parker, Gwendolyn Stacy, and Spider-Man Noir), each of whom the script renders with purpose and care. “Into the Spider-Verse” emphasizes the idea that there’s no one way a hero needs to look or a specific background that they need to come from, and it does so in an effortless, non-performative way. In a decade where it felt like there was a new Spider-Man movie every other week, this was the only one that spun the character into something special.—LL
“Fire at Sea” (Gianfranco Rosi, 2016)
An intimate and sobering look at the heart of Europe’s ongoing refugee crisis, Gianfranco Rosi’s “Fire at Sea” still feels as urgent as the evening news — so urgent, in fact, that most films like it would probably have succumbed to their raw value as a public service. But this Oscar-nominated documentary is pure Rosi, which is to say that it’s rooted in the poetics of cinema.
“Fire at Sea” is told largely from the point of view of Samuele, a 10-year-old boy who lives on the sleepy Mediterranean island of Lampedusa. In the waters just beyond what Samuele can see from his bedroom, a near-daily life-and-death battle rages as rescue boats try to save hundreds of desperate refugees trying to reach European shores. For Rosi, this juxtaposition between Samuele’s self-contained universe and the humanitarian crisis that’s spreading across the sea — close in proximity, but a world apart — is a damning metaphor for modern-day Europe. It’s a simple connection on its surface, but one that Rosi cut into with his camera until he exposes the raw feeling lurking underneath.
The filmmaker religiously avoids expositional tools like title cards, voiceover narration, talking-head interviews, or any formal construct that might put the story in a larger context. On the contrary, Rosi thinks of his films in terms of color, light and composition. He studies his subjects and locations for months, so that once his skeleton crew finally begins shooting they know what they’re looking for, and are able to locate it inside a specific frame that’s capable of capturing a lifetime of focused emotions. “Fire at Sea” is a profound and unshakeable testament to the scalpel-like precision of Rosi’s approach; a harrowing masterpiece that will always be haunted by a horror that much of the world preferred to ignore. —CO
“Private Life” (Tamara Jenkins, 2018)
Given their tendencies to play New York City misanthropes, it’s a wonder Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti have never played opposite each other before; the only predictable thing about Tamara Jenkins’ “Private Life” is that these two are absolute fire together as a downtown couple struggling with infertility. An expert in rendering and observing the specific heartbreaks of contemporary life, Jenkins crafted her long-awaited third feature — a neurotic passion play of sorts — into a biting exploration of the indignities of aging. That process grows infinitely more complicated for these characters after their ennui is upended by their bubbly niece (a revelatory Kayli Carter), whose youth and adoration make all things seem possible. Jenkins’ nuanced script handles the discomfort with heartbreak, hilarity, and grace in a film that continues to grow inside you long after it’s over.—JD
“Support the Girls” (Andrew Bujalski, 2018)
Regina Hall is astonishing in Andrew Bujalski’s touching look at an earnest woman who manages a sleazy Texas “breastauraunt,” where many things go wrong over the course of a single hectic day. Bujalski’s typically subdued, character-based storytelling takes on a new volume of warmth and sensitivity with this striking examination of surviving difficult times through unbridled empathy. That might sound cheesy, but Bujalski’s such a wizard when it comes to scripting authentic dialogue that “Support the Girls” may as well be a documentary. Hall’s manager juggles each new challenge with a steely resolve that makes her one of Bujalski’s greatest characters, the indefatigable creation of a filmmaker who excels at exploring the nuances of human behavior.
Though it’s been lumped in with that non-existent movement known as “mumblecore,” Bujalski’s perceptive filmmaking has always existed in a class of its own. He excels at capturing quirky, alienated characters trapped by routine and insular communities (“Mutual Appreciation,” “Results”) but “Support the Girls” takes that skill to new symbolic heights. The image of its three central women hollering from a rooftop defines the zeitgeist with a blend of hilarity and emotional catharsis; it illustrates what can happen when a subtle filmmaker operates at the height of his powers.—EK
“We Need to Talk About Kevin” (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
Lynne Ramsay crafted one of the decade’s most unnerving nightmares in “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which the filmmaker adapted from Lionel Shriver’s 2003 novel of the same name. The non-linear story centers on a mother (Tilda Swinton) whose son (breakout Ezra Miller) commits a heinous tragedy of some kind, but the genius of Ramsay’s script is in how it buries the facts under layers of trauma, effectively fracturing the film between the mother’s emotional states before and after the violent act. Working with editor Joe Bini, Ramsay jumps back and forth between the timelines in triggering fashion to create an impressionistic yet palpable look at one woman’s psychological breakdown. Swinton’s delicate behavior is the only thing that orients each scene, turning her mental state into a tactile kind of geography that grows even scarier when you start to get lost in it. “We Need to Talk About Kevin” wasn’t billed as a horror movie in the strictest sense, but few films this decade offered more viscerally unnerving experiences. —ZS
“Her Smell” (Alex Ross Perry, 2018)
Alex Ross Perry’s work has always had the courage to be unpleasant, but none of his previous stuff prepared us for the incredible sourness of “Her Smell,” which is one of the most noxious movies ever made before it hits bottom and tunnels out through the other side. A pungent Shakespearean epic starring a feral, unforgettable Elisabeth Moss as the drug-fueled Becky Something — a sinking ship of a woman who seems hellbent on dragging the rest of her riot grrrl band down into the abyss along with her — “Her Smell” essentially takes the basic structure of Danny Boyle’s “Steve Jobs” and transposes it over the life and times of Courtney Love.
The film is a full-body experience from start to finish — a 360-degree nightmare that cools into a cold sweat. The relentless first chapters snake their way through a fluorescent, Gaspar Noé-like underworld of ego and addiction, while the closing acts condense into a kind of morning frost that’s cold enough to feel on your own skin. Moss stomps through the movie like a piss-spewing cross between Gena Rowlands and the Phantom of the Opera, while the supporting cast around her is stacked with brilliant actors who disappear into their characters’ double lives. Smeared together by Sean Price Williams’ queasy neon cinematography and Keegan DeWitt’s panic attack of a score, Perry’s magnum opus crescendoes into a cathartic portrait of personal demons and their collateral damage. In a risk-averse time when many filmmakers were too afraid of their own shadows to make great art, Perry’s poignant barnstormer warmed our hearts by setting fire to everything in sight. —DE
“Kate Plays Christine” (Robert Greene, 2016)
Wrapped inside the very conceit that drives Robert Greene’s “Kate Plays Christine” is a disturbing, immovable truism: It’s impossible to know for certain why anyone would kill themselves. And yet, Greene’s beguiling documentary and narrative hybrid challenged actress Kate Lyn Sheil to solve that mystery as best she could, as the film unspools a real-life tragedy while also following Sheil’s process of trying to understand why her “character” shot herself in the head on live television.
In 1974, Christine Chubbuck — a television reporter for a local Sarasota, Florida TV station — abruptly ended a lifetime of unhappiness by killing herself during the morning news. “Kate Plays Christine” takes an ambitious angle on Chubbuck’s sordid tale, mixing fact and fiction to present the story of an actress grappling with her preparations to play Chubbuck in a narrative feature that doesn’t actually exist. Sheil is tasked with embodying a heightened version of herself, and also Chubbuck in a series of re-enactments.
The film tweaks its many fundamental contrivances to its advantage, as the multi-layered structure emphasizes the elusiveness of the film’s underlying mysteries. The frustrating search, which includes an obsessive hunt for a rumored tape of the actual suicide, fuels Greene’s ultimate interest: The elusive nature of truth and the documentary form itself. All of Greene’s films are fascinated with the nature of performance in nonfiction, and here his collaboration and friction with Sheil builds towards the most provocative moment of his career so far, as Sheil is made to reenact the suicide in a way that forces the audience to confront our own need for hard answers. —CO
“The Illusionist” (Sylvain Chomet, 2010)
Sorry “Toy Story 3,” the most shattering ending to an animated film you’ll see this century is the haunting coda to “The Illusionist,” Sylvain Chomet’s hand-drawn adaptation of an unproduced Jacques Tati script the French comic master wrote between “Mon Oncle” and “Playtime.” Concerning the delicate bond that forms between a threadbare magician and an orphan girl who believes his magic is real, the story is thought by some Tati scholars to be his attempt at reaching out to the daughter he abandoned as an infant.
Controversy surrounded the film’s release because, not only did Tati choose not to make it himself (and otherwise never even publicly acknowledged the daughter he left behind), but the film seems to continue to erase her existence. Those are valid criticisms, but the film is so damn sad it seems to confront them head-on. When the magician finally abandons the girl, as Tati had in real life, he leaves her a note that simply reads: “Magicians do not exist.” Yes, that sound you hear is your heart being ripped out of your chest. The feeling that follows is subtler, sadder even somehow, and yet also hopeful: We still need illusions, especially when we no longer believe in them. —CB
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (Benh Zeitlin, 2012)
A dazzling ode to resilience and self-reliance that pops off the screen like a fireworks display, Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is grand in scope, and mind-bogglingly ambitious for a debut film shot on a modest budget. In a forgotten but defiant bayou community that seems to be leveed off from the rest of the world, a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (played wonderfully by then-newcomer Quvenzhané Wallis) is faced with more than any child her age should ever have to handle.
The audience is planted in this fantastical world and navigates it through the perspective of the film’s singular, curious young heroine; the film’s success depends entirely on the young first-time actress asked to fill the character’s tiny shoes. Wallis, who went on to be nominated for an Oscar, is a miniature force of nature unto herself, a tempest in a teapot brimming with raw charisma and a hunger for everything the world might throw her way. Along with the sweep of Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar’s story and the bombast of Dan Romer’s score (which Zeitlin also co-wrote), Wallis helped elevate “Beasts of the Southern Wild” into a new kind of modern American folklore. —TO
“Synonyms” (Nadav Lapid, 2019)
A singular misadventure about the violence of trying to supplant one self with another, Nadav Lapid’s “Synonyms” is an astonishing, maddening, brilliant, hilarious, obstinate, and altogether essential film. Not since “Waltz with Bashir” have the movies produced such a lucid and self-loathing portrait of Israeli identity. Co-produced by “Toni Erdmann” director Maren Ade, and loosely based on Lapid’s own experience as a young soldier who fled to Paris because he believed that he was born in the Middle East by mistake, the “Policeman” filmmaker’s disorienting third feature tightened his career-long fascination with the impossible knot that ties a person to their country.
First-time actor Tom Mercier delivers one of the decade’s best (or at least most exposed) breakout performances as Yoav, a twentysomething who arrives in Paris with a pledge to never speak another word of Hebrew. Alas, the rich young couple he falls in with don’t make it easy for Yoav to sort himself out. In broad strokes, his story becomes the unshakeable story of a man who’s grown tired of carrying the baggage that comes with being an Israeli, and who’s driven to the brink of madness by a world that forcibly identifies people by the place they were born. It’s a raw and intransigent tale, and one that’s sure to provoke a fascinating shitstorm when it hits theaters this fall. —DE
“Sunset Song” (Terence Davies, 2015)
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel “Sunset Song” had been swelling inside Terence Davies for more than 40 years, and the sensitive British filmmaker — who suffers an almost religious torment in the process of bringing his projects to the screen — had been trying to adapt the book for almost as long. Some things are worth the wait.
“Sunset Song” offers a plaintive War World I-era story of a tall Aberdeenshire farm girl named Chris Guthrie (a magnificent Agyness Deyn) who feels closer to her family’s land than she does any of the men who try to reap it with her, and gorgeous 65mm cinematography makes it easy to appreciate that attachment. The film accumulates a tender beauty as the narrative slowly melts into myth, and — as the war takes hold — Chris becomes less of an individual woman than an undying symbol of femininity and forgiveness.
It was a natural progression for Davies, who sculpts by omission and tells impossibly wistful stories in the time between time. His films are rooted in memory and swaddled by nostalgia, suspended between an acutely remembered past and the unbearably painful present that it left in its wake. With Chris, he found a character who feels that dislocation in her bones, and the ache of it would be too much to bear if not for the strength of her roots. “Nothing endured but the land,” she says, sublimating herself into the earth itself. “Sea, sky, and the folk who lived there were but a breath. But the land endured. And she felt in the moment that she was the land.”—DE
“High Life” (Claire Denis, 2018)
In many respects, the mesmerizing and elusive “High Life” was a first for writer-director Claire Denis: The first of her films to be shot primarily in English, the first of her films to be set in space, and the first of her films to follow Juliette Binoche inside a metal chamber that’s referred to as “The Fuckbox,” where the world’s finest actress — playing a mad scientist aboard an intergalactic prison ship on a one-way trip to Earth’s nearest black hole — straddles a giant dildo chair and violently masturbates in a scene that’s endowed with the tortured energy of a Cirque du Soleil routine.
An oblique and freeze-dried hunk of sci-fi that’s wrestling with the future (or the lack of it) and preoccupied with the obsidian darkness that stretches out before us all, “High Life” is as horrifying and monolith-black a space odyssey as you might expect from the mind behind “Trouble Every Day” and “Beau Travail.” But Denis’ genius is in her ability to find the tender spots in even the most apocalyptic of circumstances, and her best film of the last decade is all the more powerful for how it finds light and hope as it soars towards oblivion. Plus, it features a scene in which Pattinson warns us about the dangers of eating our own shit. The more you know! —DE
“No Home Movie” (Chantal Akerman, 2015)
The concept of home was always at the center of Chantal Akerman’s 40-year body of work, which is what makes her final film such a deeply felt exploration, and gave it the feeling of a culmination even before the filmmaker took her own life in October 2015. The documentary is a portrait of Akerman’s mother, Natalie, at the end of her life. In a series of intimate conversations — over Skype and in her kitchen — about Natalie’s experience as a Holocaust survivor and her experience as an immigrant in her adopted home of Brussels, Akerman attempts to capture her mother’s essence and memory on camera, as any number of people have done with their ailing loved ones since the spread of digital technology.
Yet “No Home Movie,” which Akerman edited from over 40 hours of footage after her mother passed away, is hardly just an act of preservation. On the contrary, it hews closer to self-portraiture, as the film poignantly erodes into another piercing examination of Akerman’s rootless existence. Tying together several of the threads that Akerman had always pulled at, “No Home Movie” nods at a lifetime of nomadism, and dissects the complicated role that her mother played as her constant; Akerman saw Natalie as a siren’s call away from her isolation (see 1977’s “News from Home”), and “No Home Movie” brings the two women face-to-face in a way that echoes with decades of cinematic tension.
A formalist if ever there was one, Akerman stated that “No Home Movie” was shot in the spirit of a home movie because, “I think if I knew I was going to do this, I wouldn’t have dared to do it.” Yet by embracing elements of the home movie form — regardless of what the film’s title tells us — Akerman crafted a film so clear and acutely mundane that it feels like an act of holding on and letting go at the same time. “No Home Movie” is a perfect distillation of how it feels to say goodbye, both to a loved one and an artist.—CO
“Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” (David & Nathan Zellner, 2014)
Nothing about “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” could have prepared audiences for its greatness. Not the oddball premise, about a lonely Japanese woman (Rinko Kikuchi) who believes the premise of “Fargo” is real and decided to hunt for buried treasure in frozen Minnesota. Not the quirky nature of her journey, which includes a rabbit sidekick named Bunzo and various eccentric characters who can’t understand a word Kumiko says. And not even anything else in sibling directors David and Nathan Zellner’s previous oeuvre. The Austin auteurs had been quietly cranking out surreal dark comedies for years before this somewhat larger-scale effort, but the movie takes their prankish storytelling to new tonal heights, with a melancholic look at one woman consumed by fantasy that sympathizes with her outlandish cause.
No wonder Alexander Payne signed on as an executive producer: Like his best work, “Kumiko” finds something weird and wonderful in the mythology of middle America, even as it acknowledges that giving into that myth can often lead to a harsh reality check. Kumiko’s ultimate fate is a brilliant encapsulation of what it means to live within the confines of popular culture until it eats you alive. Bunzo may often steal the show, but Kumiko is a singular character whose journey ranks as one of the most memorable cinematic plights of the past decade, building on the universe of one great story and forging another one in the process. —EK
“Inside Out” (Pete Docter, 2015)
It remains an inexplicable achievement that a film based on emotional caricatures — one that casts Lewis Black as the bright-red personification of anger — is among the most accurate and nuanced depictions of childhood in recent memory. Pixar elevates its “simple stories, complex characters” mantra to a new level as we watch Joy, Fear, Anger, Sadness, and Disgust interact inside the mind of a young girl. What could have been a clichéd “Herman’s Head” update ultimately serves as a celebration of the need for contradictory feelings to coexist. The perfectly-cast emotions are offered in just the right doses, the gags (“Congratulations, San Francisco, you’ve ruined pizza!”) are funny without grating, and the film earns its surprising-yet-obvious conclusion that sadness is an essential part of life.
At its best, Pixar produces animated films that delight children without ever condescending to them. But after a few rough years of sequels and cash grabs, audiences couldn’t be blamed for asking if the studio had lost its touch. Then came “Inside Out.” By showing an 11-year-old girl’s mind as complex enough to merit exploration, and doing so with an instantly-graspable plot device, the studio fulfilled its brand promise and then some. Wrapped in a Technicolor bow that never feels moralizing, “Inside Out” is the most compelling argument Pixar could make for its ongoing place in American pop culture. —CZ
“The Souvenir” (Joanna Hogg, 2019)
There’s never much doubt that the loutish Anthony (Tom Burke) isn’t a good match for the starry-eyed (a breakout Honor Swinton Byrne), spending their first few dates insulting her filmmaking ambitions to her face and dragging her around upmarket settings he has zero interest in engaging with. And yet. Based loosely on filmmaker Joanna Hogg’s own film school years, complete with her own wrenching romance, “The Souvenir” recreates the runaway feeling of being young, dumb, and totally unaware of how the choices you make when you’re still a child can impact the rest of your life.
Those are some lessons that Julie will learn the hard way, with Hogg cleverly opening the film with a bushy-tailed Julie pitching a film idea to an wary committee. She wants to do something following an underprivileged community, when it’s very clear she has no experience in that realm and is woefully unprepared for what she might find there. It’s a meeting that sets the stage for what’s to come, as Julie grows in fits and starts and Anthony reveals himself to be even more unsuitable than previously believed. In the simplest terms, “The Souvenir” is about an ill-fated romance, told through a late-blooming coming-of-age story, but it’s mostly about how we never grow out of those things, no matter how much popular culture — like movies! — force us to believe otherwise. There’s plenty left behind, the scars and the memories, a souvenir of heartbreak that will never fully heal, and perhaps shouldn’t. —KE
“Leave No Trace” (Debra Granik, 2018)
It’s tempting, these days more than ever, to want to stop the world and get off; you don’t need to be a PTSD-suffering war veteran like Ben Foster’s done-with-life Will to want to walk off the grid and leave it all behind. He and his daughter, Tom (the remarkable Thomasin McKenzie), live in the woods, uncorrupted by the pressures and compromises of modern life and the conformity it demands. But he’s deeply damaged, and Tom does deserve to have an education and a proper roof over her head. Granik’s only narrative feature since “Winter’s Bone” builds to one of the most powerful scenes of the decade, a moment which proves the filmmaker’s mastery of eliciting emotion from her actors’ most quiet gestures. She understands that seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time, and shows how that can become the key to empathy. —CB
“A Star Is Born” (Bradley Cooper, 2018)
Memes aside, the essential scene of Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” doesn’t involve a slightly exasperated Lady Gaga turning around to accept one last look from Cooper’s grizzled, gravelly Jackson Maine. It’s the one just before it, when a still-shy Ally (Gaga) pumps herself up enough to belt an original song in front of an already-hungover Jackson Maine (Cooper) in the middle of a midnight parking lot. You can see the songwriter debating the merits of what she’s about to do in the presence of one of the music world’s apparent great talents, downtrodden and whiskey-soaked and already at least half in love with her, and then she just…does it. A few movie minutes later, she’ll be doing the same thing in front of thousands of screaming fans, and knowing what’s to come — it’s “Shallow,” of course — doesn’t dilute a drop of the sequence’s power.
While “A Star Is Born” has, across four films, always offered up a two-pronged approach to the fame trajectory, following one star has she rises, the other as he falls, Cooper’s film is really about Ally more than it’s about Jackson. (That the film’s major twist, if you can call it that after three earlier films, is about Jackson does not detract from this bent.) Gaga is more than up for the challenge, but the generosity of the film extends to Cooper’s hard-won performance, alongside supporting turns from players as diverse as Sam Elliott and Andrew Dice Clay. This is a film in which every moment, every breath, every look matters (thank you, cinematographer Matthew Libatique), set to a stirring soundtrack and gorgeous scenery for added “oh, look, it’s my first film” jealousy points. There’s nothing to be jealous of here though, not really, because once the film wrings the tears from its audience — those too are hard-won — it’s hard to feel anything but wonder that this story still holds such a sway. Some stars shine forever.—KE
“Star Wars: The Last Jedi” (Rian Johnson, 2017)
“The hero generally gains little or no reward for his sacrifice — it is the community that gains,” wrote Howard Suber in “The Power of Film.” “To choose heroism is to choose pain, sacrifice, loss, and sometimes even death.” In “The Last Jedi,” the Star Wars saga grappled with the tragic underpinnings of the “hero’s journey” as it never had before.
Forty years after the original, the saga grew up — and some of its fans couldn’t handle it. In this most mythic of Star Wars films, rendered in the boldest of cinematic strokes by Rian Johnson, there was no happily ever after for Luke Skywalker. But he does live up to the purest ideal of the Jedi: Like he does in his final battle with Darth Vader, he throws his lightsaber away, realizing that a sacrifice of himself will distract his enemies and allow his beloved “community” to survive. John Williams mixed leitmotifs from all seven of the previous films with Wagnerian panache — try not to rock out when “Rey’s Theme” propulsively dissolves into “Attack of the TIE Fighters” from “A New Hope” in the final battle – and DP Steve Yedlin lavished the color red on several key setpieces to create an explosion of emotion. It’s tempting to imagine what the movies would be like if more blockbusters shot for this level of ambition, beauty, and resonance. It’s almost unfathomable that one of this size was able to achieve it. —CB
“La La Land” (Damien Chazelle, 2016)
Like Quentin Tarantino, writer-director Damien Chazelle is that rare, obsessively gifted writer-director who intuits how to merge past and present in a way that enriches them both. With the wistful reverie “La La Land,” his critically hailed follow-up to Oscar-winning jazz drama “Whiplash,” Chazelle magically modernized the colorful swirl of French song-and-dance musicals “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Les Desmoiselles de Rochefort” as well as backstage Technicolor spectacles like “New York, New York” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” Ultra-contemporary yet unapologetically retro, the film’s audacious show-business saga follows a jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling) and struggling actress (Emma Stone) whose passion for each other gets tangled up in their career ambitions. Justin Hurwitz’s luscious score and catchy yet naturalistic songs like “City of Stars” help the fairy tale find its groove, while a swooning epilogue brought Chazelle’s epic to a close with a deliciously bittersweet twist of the dagger. The third original musical to land a Best Picture Oscar nomination, “La La Land” tied the Oscar record set by “All About Eve” (14 nominations, six wins). And while the movie is destined to be remembered for the Academy Award it didn’t win, Chazelle earned his title as the youngest person to ever be named Best Director. —AT
“The Handmaiden” (Park Chan-wook, 2016)
South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook delivered one of the 21st century’s most devious and ravishing queer films with “The Handmaiden,” which seamlessly ported the Victorian England events of Sarah Waters’ novel “Fingersmith” to Japanese-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri bring palpable chemistry to the roles of the captive Lady Hideko and her two-timing (or is it three?) maid Sook-hee, whose twisted relationship is as dynamic and unpredictable as Park’s titillating and characteristically operatic camera.
Re-teaming with his regular cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon, Park and his collaborators elevated the tawdrier elements of Waters’ novel to fetishistic heights — even strapping them in a harness and suspending them into mid-air when he had to. The result is a cheeky erotic thriller that subverts classical tropes with giddy injections of sapphic energy; a soapy melodrama that feels dangerously alive with every frame. —ZS
“Goodbye to Language” (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014)
When someone shouted “Godard forever” before the premiere of the French New Wave Legend’s Cannes premiere of this astounding late period work, the audience erupted into applause. Who could argue? Jean-Luc Godard is the kind of resilient artist you want to cheer on each time out, but never know what to expect. What a welcome surprise to find that — more than 50 years after “Breathless” — “Goodbye to Language” once again took the medium in a fresh direction. Though it occasionally revolves aroudn the existential disputes of a wayward couple, the movie charts more of an exploratory path than any traditional narrative might offer up. It unfolds as an overwhelming montage that taps into the oversaturation of today’s media climate, a point that Godard renders explicit through many inspired bits: the recurring shot of a flat-screen television broadcasting static speaks for itself, as does a more comical bit in which two strangers tap away on their iPhones and exchange them several times over, trapped in a loop. At one point, as the narration samples highlights from philosopher Jacques Ellul’s essay “The Victory of Hitler,” someone holds up a smartphone screen showing off the essay’s contents.
It doesn’t require much analysis to comprehend Godard’s intent: He portrays the information age as the dying breath of consciousness before intellectual thought is homogenized by the digital realm. The filmmaker’s use of 3D technology in unparalleled; in one mind-bending moment, he splits the image across two lenses, then merges them, forcing his audiences’ eyeballs into a pretzel of confusion like nothing else before it. Eventually, the movie finds its true hero in Godard’s dog Roxie, who regards his aimless owners with boredom and eventually flees captivity in search of a better life beyond the confines of civilization. After years of calling humanity on its bullshit, Godard finally admits it’s too late, and one can imagine that the reclusive auteur can relate to Roxie’s triumphant escape. —EK
“Pariah” (Dee Rees, 2011)
Dee Rees grew into a force of nature over the last 10 years, but her debut feature — a gracefully rendered coming-of-age story that draws inspiration from her own — is still her defining statement. Humming with the electricity of repressed sexuality finally unbridled, “Pariah” follows teenage Alike (Adepero Oduye) on a raw and tender journey towards queerness and masculine gender expression. We witness Alike quietly change out of her baseball hat and t-shirt on the train home to Brooklyn, donning a girly sweater in order to calm her parents’ suspicions (Kim Wayans and Charles Parnell). We melt alongside her as she lights up with the first tingles of love, seeing herself as desirable for the first time through the sparkling eyes of Bina (Aasha Davis). Cinematographer Bradford Young (“Arrival”) films Alike’s first nights out at the club in rich, saturated colors, allowing the movie to pulse with the rhythm of first love and the cost of self-discovery. “Pariah” was ahead of its time, but it’s waiting to be found whenever people need it. —JD
“The Duke of Burgundy” (Peter Strickland, 2014)
A sumptuous and visually evocative tribute to ’70s European sexploitation films — and probably the only films this decade to come with a “perfume by” credit in the opening titles — Peter Strickland’s erotic drama flutters deeper and deeper into the sadomasochistic relationship between two lesbian entomologists. The film is as precise in its artistry as its dual heroines are in the humiliating ways they punish each other punishments, as Cythia (Sidse Babbett Knudsen) and Evelyn (Chiara D’Anna) exchange power in ways both lovingly tender and hardcore in their kinkiness. The lighting is sensuous, the camera charged, the chic and glamorous costuming titillating. Strickland understands the keys to eroticism are imagination and anticipation; most of the naughty business takes place offscreen, every touch adding to the Hitchcockian psychodrama that’s taking place just beneath the layers upon layers of festishistic beauty. —JD
“Jackie” (Pablo Larraín, 2016)
Jackie Kennedy has been portrayed plenty of times on the big screen, but in Pablo Larraín’s daring and original “Jackie,” Natalie Portman handily shed the expectations and assumptions attached to the perennially pillbox-hatted American icon to deliver her best performance yet. It’s certainly her most immersive, and while some might bristle at her accent and her mannerisms, “Jackie” only works because its lead so thoroughly throws herself into a role that goes beyond “warts and all.”
Mostly set in the weeks immediately following President Kennedy’s assassination, Portman is tasked with portraying a mourning, heartbroken Jackie who is also hellbent on establishing a legacy for her husband and family. She’s angry, just like the film she inhabits, but she’s also ruthless about the value of memory and truth. So is the film.
Larraín’s film neatly shifts between past and present, providing rich and often unexpected looks inside Jackie’s life and psyche during one of the worst times of her — and the country’s — life. There are no grace notes here, no redemption, no sense that everything will be okay in the end, but such honesty suits what actually happened, and while the film might take a few liberties (see: Jackie’s extended stroll with a shocked priest), it gets the emotions exactly right. It’s the kind of veracity — emotional, mental, psychological — that more fact-based features should strive for. For now, at least, there is “Jackie” and its inimitable leading lady. —KE
“At Berkeley” (Frederick Wiseman, 2013)
In hindsight, there will be any number of things we took for granted about the cinema of the 21st century. But, even now, it’s already obvious that we took nothing for granted more than sharing the world with Frederick Wiseman, who — well into his 80s — continued to bang out another masterpiece every 12 to 15 months. From “High School” to “Ex Libris,” the quality of Wiseman’s output has never wavered, while our understanding of our institutions (and ourselves) has only continued to deepen as a result.
It almost feels arbitrary to single out just one of the great observational documentaries that Wiseman made over the last 10 years, but his examination of the University of California at Berkeley — a spellbinding four-hour wonder set against the backdrop of a decrease in state funding — strikes a particularly resonant chord. Wiseman trains his lens not only on the ideals of higher learning, but also on Berkeley’s unique spirit of idealism, and how the school might struggle to maintain its values of activism and accessibility in the face of an unforgiving climate. Universities can be such vibrant places, and even the longest of Wiseman’s protracted scenes feels like it’s brimming with potential and hope for the future. But it’s the finale that leaves the most fraught and lasting impression, as Wiseman jettisons his discrete style of editing in order to cross-cut between the faculty and the students during a sit-in protest that feels like a microcosm of the paradox that defines Berkeley’s future. One way or the other, that future will be the product of a painful compromise, a subject that Wiseman captures better than anyone. —CO
“Force Majeure” (Ruben Östlund, 2014)
In a decade that flayed white male insecurity in public, Ruben Östlund’s wickedly hilarious study of masculinity in crisis took a natural place as one of the definitive comedies of our time. Right from this film’s famous inciting incident – in which a dad named Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) instinctively abandons his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two children during a false-alarm avalanche at a ski r
