20. Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)
I think it’s fair
to say that no film emotionally wrecked more this decade than Kenneth
Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. It was designed this way, specifically to
wreck parents, and if you, like me, happened to have two daughters (aged 5 and
2 at the time), then all the better. And yet, despite the fact that the film is
designed to make you cry, it never feels like a cheat – never feels like its milking
tears out of you just for the sake of milking tears. Casey Affleck gives one of
the very best performances of the decade (I tear up just thinking of him saying
“I can’t beat it” as a lonely Boston handyman – living by himself in a crummy
apartment, drinking every night and while he is good at his job, he can also be
an asshole if pushed. His world is turned upside down when his brother dies,
and he is put in charge of his teenage nephew (Lucas Hedges, in the performance
that made him a star). Through the course the film, we get to know these two,
and their rocky relationship, as well as diving into Affleck’s past – and what
led him from what he was, to what he is. Michelle Williams is Affleck’s ex-wife
– and her few scenes are as good as any she has ever done in her stellar
career. The film doesn’t wrap everything up in a neat package – but does offer
a little bit of hope for the future. This is Lonergan’s best film to date – and
one of the best straight dramas of the decade.
19. We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay, 2011)
Lynne
Ramsay deserves to be mentioned alongside the best directors working today –
she is as great of a filmmaker as David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson or
anyone else you can name – and yet she never gets mentioned alongside them. Her
masterpiece We Need to Talk About Kevin is a parental horror film – about a
woman (brilliantly played by Tilda Swinton, in what is probably the best
performance of her amazing career) whose son Kevin commits a horrible mass
murder at her school, and she has to deal with the wreckage he left behind. The
film flashes back and forth in time to show her raising her son – and their
troubled relationship. Ramsay does a brilliant job of visually linking Swinton
and Ezra Miller – who plays her son – and just similar they are, which is, of
course, why she hates him so much. The film is difficult – almost impossible –
to watch and not be horrified, but it is so brilliantly told by Ramsay, who
finds a way to do the same thing the novel did – which is to tell the story
completely from the point of view of Swinton’s character – and make you realize
how flawed that version is. Ramsay is a master filmmaker – and I really wish
she was able to work more often. The film world would be richer for it.
18. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019)
Bong
Joon-ho’s best film to date was this film, that like much of his work, begins
as pure entertainment – a fun and funny movie about a family of scammers who
insert themselves into the lives of a rich family – and then descends so deep
into darkness and tragedy that it leaves you hopeless. It’s an effective way to
make a movie – because when the hammer drops, it kills you. You can mark when
this film does that – it quite literally descends into darkness at the same
time it figuratively does, and from there, even as the film remains as
entertaining as ever, it also takes on an added weight – leading to its bloody,
tragic, gut punch of an ending. Bong has been working towards something like
this for a while, and here, he pulls it off brilliantly.
17. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie, 2019)
With
Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers attempt to outdo what they did with Good Time –
one of the most propulsively energetic and anxiety inducing films of the decade
– with a film specifically designed to give you an anxiety attack while
watching it. This is a film that doesn’t slow down for a second – stacking one
intense sequence after another after another – and perhaps even more amazingly,
making it also hilarious. The casting of Adam Sandler was genius – he explores
the opposite end of his comic persona than he did in Paul Thomas Anderson’s
Punch-Drunk Love, and does so brilliantly as a jewelry dealer, whose life is
crashing down around him, as he tries to keep multiple scams going throughout
the film. There’s barely a moment where he isn’t in the center of the screen,
holding court, holding the wolves at the door – which he can only do for so
long. The Safdies are now among the very best working directors.
16. Inherent Vice (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2014)
Paul
Thomas Anderson is probably the best director of the decade – he made three
films in this 10-year period, and this is the lowest ranking one on my list.
It’s a fascinating film – a kind of stoner noir in the vein of Robert Altman’s
The Long Goodbye, the Coens’ Big Lebowski (and Mitchell’s Under the Silver
Lake, which came out later). This is the film with perhaps the most plot of any
film this decade – and yet, in the end, the plot doesn’t matter at all. This is
an end of an era film – about how the hope of the 1960s had become dashed by
the 1970s, and the rot has set in. Joaquin Phoenix is brilliant in the lead
role – it’s a nearly impossible role that goes over the top comic one moment,
to subtle emotional wreck the next. He’s a character we like – and yet see
precisely why he isn’t quite the easy going hippie guy he thinks – and why his
“ex-old lady” (Katherine Waterson) – feels as oppressed by him as anyone else.
Josh Brolin is kind of the equal, opposite to Phoenix – the flip side of the
coin that both hates him, and needs him. All this is wrapped up in the most exuberant
package Anderson has concocted since Boogie Nights. A masterwork – that keeps
one getting better with time.
15. Good Time (Josh & Ben Safdie, 2017)
The
Safdie brothers Good Time is a throwback to the films of the 1970s that have
become legendary – and yet at the same time, a portrait of white privilege in
the 2010s. Robert Pattinson gives a great performance as a petty criminal – who
spends a very long nightmarish night trying to rescue his brother – who is in
jail for a crime they committed together – out, and encountering one roadblock
after another. And yet, each time he is seemingly about to get caught, there is
always a person of color who is readily available for law enforcement to blame.
True, as the night goes on, and the noose tightens, it becomes clear he isn’t
going to get away – but he gets away with so much it’s unbelievable. This is
energetic, kinetic filmmaking at its best – a film that moves forward on
propulsive energy, and a great led performance. The Safdie like to make you
like their characters at first – and then slowly reveal just how awful they
really are – and in Good Time, they found their best chance to tell that story.
A brilliant, underseen film destined to become a cult classic.
14. Amour (Michael Haneke, 2012)
We can
hope that the now nearly 80-year-old Michael Haneke has another masterpiece
left in him. A key figure of European art house cinema in the 1990s and 2000s,
so far Haneke’s final masterpiece is 2012’s Amour – a film that in many ways is
very much like his other films, and in a few ways, a little different. Haneke
has always liked to punish his characters for the sins of their past – his
affluent man characters often see themselves as blameless and innocent, until
they are confronted with what they have done, and have to pay the consequences
of those actions. In many ways, that is what happens in Amour – a story of an
elderly couple, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) –
as she slips in dementia, and he tries to keep things together. And yet, their
main sin here seems to be growing old – and therefore, we are all committing
the same sins. The performances by Riva and Trintignant are brilliant – Riva’s
is scarily accurate as a woman who is slowly dying, and Trintignant has the
more difficult role of dealing with it – all leading to the tragic conclusion.
Amour was Haneke’s biggest hit – in terms of Box Office, and awards love – and
that is perhaps because it is more universal, and we can better see ourselves
in his characters. It isn’t quite as thorny as other masterpieces like The
Piano Teacher, The White Ribbon or Cache (my personal favorite) – but it is
every bit as heartbreaking and difficult to watch. Haneke has only made one
film since Amour – and while I like Happy End more than most, it is nowhere
near this masterpiece – one of the most heartbreaking, and difficult to watch
films of the decade.
13. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
Martin
Scorsese once again had a great decade, even as he is well into his 70s, he
continues to push himself – and his audience – to uncomfortable levels. The
Wolf of Wall Street is a triumph – a portrait of egotistical, misogynistic,
homophobic and greedy assholes that run Wall Street – basically doing whatever
they can to get their hands on other people’s money, and living a life of
enormous excess with it. It also features the best performance of Leonardo
DiCaprio’s career – as the ringleader of this group of grown-up man children.
DiCaprio goes full tilt from beginning to end here – it’s a daring, high wire
act of a performance that makes you hate him every second of the film, and yet
understand precisely why he got away with what he did for so long. The film is,
like GoodFellas, an entertaining film about horrible people (the film is
hilarious – the Quaaludes sequence is one of the greatest sequences of physical
comedy you will ever see). You will laugh throughout The Wolf of Wall Street –
and be entertained – and then you have to think about why you found this all so
much fun, as Scorsese implicates us all in this American Dream gone wrong. A
masterpiece that shows that Scorsese still has more energy, more ambition and
more skill that most other filmmakers working today.
12. Upstream Color (Shane Carruth, 2013)
It
sometimes feels as if Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color was a dream. It’s a film
that I saw at the Lightbox, knowing almost nothing about – and was completely
blown away with – it’s like a David Cronenberg film directed by Terence Malick
– and then it kind of disappeared as quickly as it appeared. It did well on critic’s
top 10 lists in 2013 – but it doesn’t feel like it gets talked about as much as
it should be. Carruth’s sophomore film – made 9 years after his debut (Primer)
– and sadly still his most recent film. It’s a wildly ambitious film – a film
that plays like a dream with its brilliant visuals and sound design. It
featured a great performance by Amy Seimetz, playing a woman who was drugged
and robbed – and left her a shell of her former self, and trying to piece
together her shattered life. This film is a marvel, an endlessly rewatchable
film where you learn more and more each time through. There is so much going
on, it almost feels like a different film each time you watch it. Carruth did
pretty much everything on this film – it’s a truly independent movie – a
personal vision from the director, who unfortunately has yet to follow-up this
up. If you haven’t seen Upstream Color, correct that right now.
11. Burning (Lee Chang-dong, 2018)
It was
more than a little gratifying to me that Lee Chang-dong’s masterpiece Burning
finally got the Korean master the respect he deserved in North America. His
2007 film, Secret Sunshine, had been a favorite of mine since seeing it at TIFF
that year – but it was a film that barely got a North American release – years
later – and even if it was added to the Criterion Collection, still isn’t as widely
known as it should be (ditto the film he made between these two – Poetry).
Burning really is his best film yet – a mysterious film about a young man from
a border town in Korea, who meets an old school friend in Seoul – and thinks
the two are dating, until she shows back up from vacation with a new boyfriend
(a great performance by Steven Yeun). He immediately dislikes this new guy of
course – and finds reasons to suspect him when she ends up going missing. The
film is a fascinating three-part character study – all from the protagonist’s
point-of-view, as at first, he examines her, then her new boyfriend, and
finally in the last act, himself. The film goes to dark, ambiguous places – and
never spells anything out for you. But it is fascinating character study and a
wonderful thriller, all rolled into one, and ends just about perfectly – and
right in the middle, has one of the very best scenes you will ever see.
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