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The ongoing shock of this global pandemic has affected us all in ways beyond our reckoning. What we do understand can't be communicated without cliche. We're too close. The implications need time to unravel. It's not just the big stuff; there are microtectonic shifts proliferating in our personhood that are nearly undetectable.
I lost the ability to watch new movies in a movie theatre, something that I held precious without even realizing it. For the first time in half a decade, I didn't feel like I watched enough new films in 2020 to put together a proper Top Ten List. To make right by that failing, I will here offer the ten film and film-like works that stuck with me the most from the year 2020.
10) The Platform - a limited allegory with an appealingly grisly design sense
9) The Old Guard - mediocre liberal propaganda dressed up in excellent stuntwork and fight choreography
8) Sonic the Hedgehog - a crap movie with crap effects and a crap plot salvaged entirely by an Oscar-worthy performance by Jim Carrey as the evil Doctor Robotnik
7) Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm - a return to form with an actual emotional core, and a matured political outlook to boot
6) Birds of Prey - an extremely colorful performance showcase for a bunch of cool folks
5) Invisible Man - although ultimately a bit hampered by its genre trappings, Elisabeth Moss's devastating performance and some wildly good suspense scenes make this a standout remake
4) Mank - Fincher takes his late father's story of a writer who takes another man's life story and makes it into a story taken by Orson Welles... all in lovely black and white
3) Opal - this formally experimental musical-horror youtube short is an impeccable stand-in for all of the amazing artistic work being done on that platform
2) Palm Springs - I could not have expected Andy Samberg's breakout existential drama/comedy to be so goddamn good on a molecular level, but the writing directing and acting are all exactly on point
1) "Fargo" S4E9: East/West - it's not a movie, but this sublime apex of a sublime season of television is rife with cinematic references, none more prominent than The Wizard of Oz
The upside is that the lack I experienced in 2020 spawned this project, a celebration of the riches of times past. Below are the first ten entries in my Top 100 Films of the 2010s list. I've seen hundreds of movies worth recognizing released between 2010 and 2019, so whittling that down to 100 standouts was long, arduous work. This was a labor of love all too long in the making.
These particular ten may have prominent flaws. They may not stick the landing the way better films do. They may be a bit awkward and gangly. But they are ten worthwhile examples of the riches this past decade had to offer us.
100. Velocipastor
Ahh, the bad on purpose movie. Ever since Sharknado the genre has become bulbous yet malnourished, for these films fundamentally misunderstand what makes bad movies great: earnestness, passion, and a truly warped perspective on reality. One of my favorite successful bad on purpose movies is The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, and I have struggled to find another made with such love. Imagine my delight when my friends and I popped on Velocipastor as a lark only to discover a gleeful tale of kung fu about a Cretacious Christlover. The filmmakers clearly have a healthy adulation and respect for their inspirations. After all, you can't learn from what you disdain. Velocipastor has learned enough to blend its components into a whirligig cocktail of cheesy action, loopy dialogue, and excellent visual gags.
But the reason Velocipastor was able to make my Top 100 list over other worthy competitors is simple: it contains, unironically, one of the best sex scenes I have ever seen put to film.
Dawn is messy. The human characters are flat, the plot mostly features folks trudging back and forth between two encampments to continue a conversation, and it is too long for its own good. These critiques matter little in the face of what is accomplished. Andy Serkis and co. make good on the promise of motion capture performance pioneered by Serkis a decade back in The Lord of the Rings. Caesar is a triumph of synthesizing classical acting with cutting edge technology. He may be a bipedal ape speaking in broken English, but the bleeding heart of his social struggle shoots through the movie with utmost clarity. Every philosophical and political discussion taken seriously eventually confronts difficult questions with unsatisfying answers. What does it mean to be a human? To be a person? To be a person at the end of the world? To be a person at the end of the world who must butt heads with other persons in order to survive? How do we define our tribe, our species, our selves?
Not bad for a movie with a climactic setpiece featuring CGI monkeys shooting guns and riding horses.
This movie, if I recall correctly, arrived at the apex of the idiotic clamor over whether women are as funny as men. This film predictably went unnoticed despite (or because of?) providing a definitive answer to that disingenuous question. Gillian Robespierre helms this Jenny Slate star vehicle about a woman wrestling with her decision to have an abortion. You can probably guess the greatest obstacle of the film's creation: how do you make comedy about an issue so taboo that it is vilified by large swathes of the United States' population? I guess the answer is to be really damn honest. That honesty requires a sharp ear for intimate dialogue and the natural rhythms of tragicomedy that arise when funny people are going through tough times. This film is worth sharing simply for its willingness to destigmatize an issue that desperately needs more open discussion. The cherry on top is how amusing the whole thing is.
I was most struck by the way Marriage Story portrays its central characters as victims of their social positions. This isn't a dismissal of 'toxic men' or 'crazy women,' this is an intimate exploration of two adults who love each other very much, agree to get an amicable divorce, then are beguiled into mutually assured destruction by soulsucking bureaucracy. No wonder the lawyers of the film are such prominent characters, boasting a trio of incredible performances by Laura Dern, Alan Alda, and Ray Liotta. These three give us a prismatic view into how our social structures incapacitate our private relationships. Love isn't doomed to fail, but maybe marriage is.
I'd say it's more of a B+ guiled.
Ha ha, all jokes aside, The Beguiled is a very fine Sofia Coppola period piece set in the Civil War-struck south. I use 'fine' here not in the sense of 'mediocre' but in the sense of 'delicate, focused, rich.' This drama sees a wounded enemy soldier taken captive by a well-meaning and isolated school for girls. Colin Farrell brings a disarming ambiguity of violent misogyny and gentlemanly charm to a character helplessly defined by his masculinity. The ensemble of girls, including Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, and Elle Fanning, generate a mesmerizing microcosm of social norms. The Beguiled is a layered exploration of gender, sexuality, and hierarchy that captures the aggressive hush of repression, and the tension contained in the calmest environments. The damned thing about repression is that it always comes back around, and those who are patient enough will witness a wild finale.
Us is almost a masterpiece. Jordan Peele's existential nightmare has the incredible performances, the punishing suspense, the mystery, the intrigue, the visual flair, and the thematic heft to be an all-time great... until the final act dives nosefirst into hefty expository storytelling that both cheapens the mystique and halts the momentum. Much unevenness can be forgiven for a story so packed with compelling ideas. Much more than that can be forgiven for an all-time great Lupita Nyong'o performance.
Sinister doesn't belong in the same conversation as this last decade's flood of art house horror movies. It has no such pretensions. It's a spooky jumpy middle tier frightfest with a basic plot and a serviceable cast. Yet it earns its spot here on the back of two extraordinary qualities. The first is the meta-threat of the supernatural villain Bagul. This is a being whose image itself can kill, a demonic presence that can reach through film, photograph, and illustration alike. The barrier between representation and reality is eradicated. This leads to some pretty sophisticated commentary on the nature of the Image, and what happens to the sanctity of self as it is breached by such images. It also generates a very productive sense of unease, since we as an audience are, y'know, watching Bagul's image the whole time.
The other elevating quality is the sound design. More than anything else, Sinister's sound gets under your skin. The sonic motif of a whirring movie reel projector does so much to teach us how, when, and why to be scared. We begin to feel personally implicated. That is why, even though Sinister is far from the best horror movie I saw this past decade, it is the scariest.
It's impossible to talk about this movie without at least gesturing towards the cultural and political upheaval that accompanied its release. So here it goes.
Although there are plenty of valid critiques about this film, and plenty of folks who don't like it for those valid reasons, the majority of reactionary takes attempting to scald The Last Jedi were the culmination of brewing misogyny and white supremacy within the Star Wars community. These critiques generally lack an understanding of cinematic language, dramatic storytelling, diegetic interpretation, and why putting an Asian woman in a movie is not a valid example of 'SJW politics ruining our franchises.'
I was crestfallen to see the fallout from The Last Jedi, but upon retrospect unsurprised. Rian Johnson's project is one of refurbishment. This is the only Star Wars film willing to advance the themes of the franchise in radical ways, and the innate conservatism of fandom was destined to receive innovation with vitriol. I respect The Last Jedi for actually having something coherent and compelling to say about legacy and lineage, and I respect it all the more for being a badass film stuffed with instantly iconic pop sci-fi imagery. The cherry red throne room fight, the abstract impact of the Holdo Maneuver, the calligraphic land speeder aerial shots... this is a megafranchise entry striving to be its best self, and for that it was brutally punished.
The precision and excess of David Fincher's style melds nicely to the world of paperback pulp. His story structure leads us by the nose, for the disappearance of Amazing Amy is not at all what it first seems. There is some really enjoyable moustache-twirling villainy in this film, but it all exists for an entertaining discussion about gender roles and social positions. Gone Girl breaks from a long history of hagsploitation cinema to point out that 'crazy bitches' aren't the enemy. The real villain is misogyny itself.
This decade saw a triad of Mission Impossible films, a franchise that has evolved into an ever-escalating series of dares for Tom Cruise. Although any of the three could have made the list, I single out Ghost Protocol for its propulsive sense of fun and its stunning Burj Khalifa sequence. Think of this as a stand-in for all three films, each arguably better than the franchise's initial triptych. I think this is because Cruise and co. have zeroed in on what makes these movies sing: the stuntwork. Until Stahelski and Leitch burst onto the action movie scene with John Wick, there was not another example of an American action franchise so insanely committed to thrilling practical stunts. It shows. These movies are visceral in a way unimaginable by its peers. You know, the peers that feature CGI Dwayne Johnson bouncing between earthquake skyscrapers. When Tom Cruise wants Ethan Impossible to scale the side of the tallest building in the world, he climbs the damn thing himself.
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