Check out the entire series here.
Art is Revolutionary. It can entertain, explain, obtain, and remain, but the most lasting experiences come with some pain. Stories are breakages. Why break if not to build something better from the wreckage?
Electric arcs follow characters who strive. Often they strive against the flow, as when a preacher does his small part to fight climate catastrophe, or when a boy comes of age in a world that wants to erase him, or when a worker refuses to perpetuate the oppressive cycles they are born into. Art has a Revolutionary quality; this may be its most crucial quality of all.
10. First Reformed
New Atheism has poisoned our capacity to grapple with our place in the universe. To believe that we are the master of our own domain is to repress something fundamental about ourselves. Human culture, society, language, and consciousness cannot be conceived as separate from a religious ethos. To be fair, the New Atheism movement is an understandable response to violent, corporate, institutionalized religion. Contemporary Christianity is infected by the capitalist profit margin. Its job is to radicalize dupes.
No small wonder that mature, thoughtful, circumspect art about religion in the modern era is so difficult to make. "Christian cinema" is a shambles of imbecile propaganda, and deliberately dismissive atheist art is little better. Consider it a small miracle that First Reformed manages to engage these issues from a religious perspective without being reductive, or apologetic, or hectoring. The film understands that religion may be about faith, but it is not about certainty.
In a career highlight performance, Ethan Hawke plays a Protestant minister who has been stationed at a dead end position in a small "historically relevant" church that mostly functions as a tourist trap. At this point, even the tourists are few and far between. Reverend Toller's personal demons of illness and alcoholism intersect with a social awakening that lands him in opposition to his megachurch benefactor and their connections to the big money that is poisoning our earth. Always foregrounded are the Questions. Why are we here on this earth? What is our purpose? Are we entitled to happiness? Are we entitled to love? How can we call ourselves stewards of the earth while we pillage it for personal gain? It is Toller's uncertainty, not his certainty, that drives him to this beautiful and terrible arc.
9. Arrival
Denis Villeneuve is a visceral, aesthetically-gifted director whose films keep me at arms' length. Dune and Blade Runner 2049 are visually rich spectacles that leave me yearning for a little something beyond the surface. Arrival does not have this problem. Chalk it up to a killer script.
The film is nominally an alien invasion movie. Huge black obelisks descend from space to hover ominously over populated and unpopulated areas alike. For any other movie, this would be a lead-up to an Independence Day-esque inciting incident. Arrival takes a more thoughtful approach. We see the story of the scientists, military personnel, linguists, and politicians who attempt to communicate with the squidlike creatures accompanying these vessels. These creatures discharge inky black circles, runes just begging to be interpreted.
Amy Adams is tremendous in the role of a linguist hellbent on interpreting these signs before some world government decides that nuking the things is a more expedient solution. The characters believe at first that they are bringing an objective lens to this existential-political problem. The great achievement of Arrival is to show us that observation, communication, and even time itself are all psychosocial constructs, binding us in ways we are not remotely conscious of. The final stretch of the story folds back on itself to make an ouroboros of trauma, perseverance, and hope. It's one of the most ambitious and successful screenwriting gambits of the decade. If the famously divisive conclusion of Interstellar were emotionally, thematically, and intellectually coherent, it might come close to what Arrival pulls off.
8. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
Spider-Man is my favorite superhero. Sam Raimi nailed the spirit of the character in his now decades-old trilogy. "With great power comes great responsibility," a simple but resonant moral that permeates every facet of the films. Peter struggles with poverty, work/life balance, self-destruction, and love, but he always returns to that mantra.
Then the next four Spider-Man films happened, which positioned the character as a trendy ironic chosen-one hipster and an upper middle class charter school kid suckling at the teat of a narcissistic billionaire, respectively. What makes the character meaningful was reduced to a good-looking bullet point on a film studio's release schedule.
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is a corrective to all that, and so much more. If you had told me an overstuffed animated Spider-Man movie focusing on the multiverse would synthesize a century's worth of mythology in a way that resonates with the current moment, I'd have scoffed. The film does right by Miles Morales, a confused kid who finds mentorship in a series of alternate universe Spiders-Men. The story is one of universality, and can be boiled down thus: Anyone could be under the mask.
Spiderverse's computer animation sings like little that had come before. The primary art style makes vibrant a bustling New York, and perfectly captures the exhilaration of web slinging. It's buffeted by a half dozen other visual styles creeping in from these alternate universes, and somehow none of them feel out of place. It's also funny as hell, sharply written, and willing to slow down to make a point when it counts. This movie does it all, and I couldn't be happier to finally encounter another film that so deeply understands why people care about this down-on-his-luck hero from Queens.
7. The Witch
I still remember the lights coming up at the movie theater, and the baffled complaints of the audience around me. I don't blame them for feeling boondoggled. The Witch, Robert Eggers' debut film, is uninterested in holding anyone's hand. It doesn't care for cheap jump scares, and it doesn't need to be understood. This twisted fairy tale of a cast-out Puritan family is less invested in modern audience sensibilities than it is in the sensibilities of a different time. We're used to dealing with what we think is scary; how about what's scary for a 17th century ascetic?
The result is a world of incomprehensible threats. Witches are real, possession is possible, sin is omnipresent, and all of this is to be taken at face value. Eggers' gift for tension is so potent that he is able to make a static shot of a family praying before the treeline of a forest into an omen of pure dread. Then the peril really kicks in. The Witch rips into the anxieties of patriarchal colonial man, building up to a queasy quasi-feminist triumph.
6. Moonlight
"In the moonlight, black boys look blue." This single poetic line wraps its winding arms around the many threads of Moonlight. It references colorism, a racist mindset that causes so much pain based on ever-disparate refractions of light. It speaks to the intimate grief that peeks out of us late at night, or in the presence of great beauty. It also foregrounds James Laxton's incredible cinematography, thoughtful and tailored to its exclusively Black cast in a way that very little mainstream cinematography is. Moonlight is a story written with great care, and told with a burning fire.
The most exciting aspect from a filmmaking angle is the experimental tripartite structure, something previously (and clumsily) attempted in the 2012 film The Place Beyond the Pines. As with all gimmicks, being clever isn't enough to make it work. Moonlight insists upon its three parts not to be different, but because it is the only way to tell the story. A person is refracted, like moonlight bouncing off skin. To see a life with clarity, even for only a brief and shimmering moment, one needs to look through the murk of time. All of our selves contain our other selves as the flower contains the bud. Moonlight exists as it does because it must tell a story seldom told, and we are all the richer for its telling.
5. Hereditary
Hereditary moves like the film of a sure-handed maestro, but it is actually a first foray into feature filmmaking by a young up-and-comer. From its opening shots, in which a dollhouse is seamlessly occupied by our principal cast, the film breathes confidence. The confidence to linger achingly on an all-time miserable monologue from the great Toni Collette. The confidence to stage its scares with stillness and perspective rather than jumpy edits. The confidence to... uh... actually do that thing that it does partway through. You know the one...
Hereditary may be the only film to make me physically ill with anticipation upon rewatch, a reaction that sort of mirrors the characters' struggles with trauma, PTSD, and generational recursion. We see the splitting of the self and the splitting of the family unit, all under the tremendous weight of history. Hereditary shows that debilitating mental illness gets passed down culturally as well as genetically. Our trauma is like DNA, and this story is what happens when some of the nastiest dormant receptors become active.
4. Sorry to Bother You
I experienced such delight getting to know this movie. Sorry to Bother You situates us in the shoes of Cassius Green, an enterprising Black man living in a somewhat heightened version of Atlanta. The movie sets us up to follow the story of a man who learns how to employ his White Voice at a call center to achieve success in his field. The film is about that, to be sure-- for a good twenty minutes. Then it reinvents itself, and reinvents itself, and reinvents some more. As it sprawls ever outward, we catch a sense of freefall. We don't know where we're going, but we're headed there fast.
This sprawl is what lets the film make such exciting, wide-ranging, sociostructural commentary about late stage capitalism, contemporary white supremacy, class politics, and the social positions that bind us to our actions. Is revolution possible when our very desire is corporate mandated? For some folks the widening scope of Sorry to Bother You is too much, but it's exactly the sort of ambitious swing for the fences that I want to see more of. Maybe it's the seething comedy that keeps the film grounded, or the all-around phenomenal performances. Maybe it's the production design bursting with precise details about every single environment, telegraphing countless stories of class, race, wealth, and age. Maybe it's just damn good writing. But in any case, this is one of the richest films of the last decade, so eminently rewatchable because of its zillion hidden details, and because of its chewy thematic challenges.
3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
In a way, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is the inverse of Sorry to Bother You's ambitious sprawl. Everything is contained-- emotions, setting, movement, dialogue. It's all framed. The film makes it a mission to discover the unmapped terrain of depth to be found in the smallest implications, the most glancing glance. This is a story of repression, not oppression, though we are reminded by a late patriarchal incursion that the two are intertwined.
The sharp focus of Portrait's subject matter, a playful and melancholic love relationship, allows it to find meaning in texture. A choice of paint colors, the whipping sound of a windy beach, the feel of skin on water on skin. It's a contender for most sensual movie of the decade. The craftsmanship required to make the slightest gestures carry the mightiest import is mindboggling to me. Appropriate that the three most gorgeous and impactful scenes of the movie are centered around music, for music is the art form that most subliminally worms its way into our soul.
2. Parasite
A mainstream American film with proper leftist politics is something of a unicorn. It's hard to find filmmakers who are doing that work, and harder still to find ones who are well-funded for it (this is, again, why Sorry to Bother You is such a godsend). Bong Joon-ho has made a career of films that engage with themes of class consciousness and wealth stratification; he even managed to sneak one of these into the American studio system with Okja! Perhaps because he was working in the English language, perhaps because of mandates imposed by that studio system, Okja was a fun but imperfect manifestation of Bong's politics.
Almost as if alarmed by Okja's shortcomings, Bong Joon-ho gave us Parasite, a Korean film in the Korean language that sets its sights on Korea-specific class norms. Despite this specificity, or maybe because of it, Parasite is Bong's most universal film, as well as a synthesis of his entire wide-ranging career up until this point. The personal is political, and Bong invests this social fable with the fury and humor of one who has been through the trenches of poverty (and one who is expected to brush elbows with the rich now that he has found success).
Parasite is uncompromising. The film follows a poor family-- exhausted by the tedium of folding pizza boxes for pocket change-- and a rich family-- bored by the leisure that comes from being ceaselessly cared for. The real meat of Parasite crackles to life when their two worlds intersect. There's so much to dig through, from the religious reverence the poverty-stricken have for their oppressors, to the thoughtlessly manufactured boogeyman of 'poor people smell.' It's funny, it's sad, it's occasionally quite frightening, and it's all couched in some of the most robust cinematography of the decade. If I had to pinpoint a centerpiece sequence, it would be the downpour. At first we see the storm as a reflection of the protagonists' mood, but as they descend into the slums we notice a peculiar panic to their gait. This descent into the hell of the overlooked culminates in a tragic discovery of a flooded home, what little they own ruined by a callous lack of public infrastructure.
Parasite shows us that the downpour never ends. All the have-nots can do is fight to stay afloat.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road
A perfect movie does not exist. But, if you had to pick one...
George Miller tried for decades to get studio funding for this project. Originally Mel Gibson was attached to reprise his role! Despite the iconic standing of the original trilogy, Miller could not get a project so ambitious off the ground. This could be a blessing in disguise, as the intervening years made for fertile creative ground. Mad Max: Fury Road was not written like a proper screenplay, but an elaborate storyboard. That sort of treatment is usually reserved for animation. A look at any isolated scene in the film, and a longer look at how those scenes string together, reveals the fruits that come from obsessive precision.
Fury Road has become infamous for its status as a 'one long chase scene' film, which it does impeccably. Each distinct action beat broadens our understanding of the world, raises the stakes, puts pressure on characters' weaknesses, and clarifies motivation. The unimpeachably strong dramatic writing allows the stuntwork and cinematography to transcend. It's a movie that struts; such bountiful action imagery should not be possible without great risk of death or injury, yet here we are, thanks to professionals working at the height of their craft.
That could have been enough to make Fury Road one of the best of the decade, but the riches keep coming. Cinematography in melancholy blues and rancid oranges. Acting perverted enough to match the production design but subtle enough to communicate deep unseen wells of pain and loss. Themes both simple and devastating that are so well-sewn into the plot fabric that one never feels lectured to. WHO KILLED THE WORLD? the wives of Immortan Joe scrawl on their prison chamber before escaping. It is a furious question, yet the film insists again and again that it need not be a question without hope.
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