Top 100 Films of the 2010s - 50-41

50. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011)

Tomas Alfredson’s brilliant spy film – based on the John Le Carre novel is a complex film about a MI6 agent, coming out of retirement, to find a mole within the organization. It is the film that first got Gary Oldman an Oscar nomination (and would have been a much better winner than The Darkest Hour). Alfredsson, making his English language debut following the great vampire film Let the Right One In – is at once both a throwback – a 1970s style paranoid thriller – but one that seems increasingly relevant as the decade progressed. The period detail is great – the cast aside from Oldman (Tom Hardy, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, John Hurt, Benedict Cumberbatch – and on and on and on – are all wonderful. Hollywood seemingly forgot how to make these types of films, but for one film anyway, they remembered (too bad, based on the evidence available in The Snowman, Alfredson completely forgot how to do anything after this).

 

49. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2018)

The Coen Brothers’ anthology Western is a film that snuck up on me – I watched it once, and quite liked it, but thought it was fairly minor Coen. But then I couldn’t get it out of my mind, and watched it twice more over the first couple of weeks (if there is an upside to this being released on Netflix, it’s the ability to revisit immediately) – and then the film just grew and grew and grew – making it one of the Coen masterpieces in my mind. This is a very dark movie – all about death – which is approached and dealt with in each chapter in very different ways – from the comic masterwork of the first (and title) chapter with Tim Blake Nelson, to the cosmic joke of the second, James Franco starring chapter, to the allegory of the third, with Liam Neeson, to the irony of the fourth with Tom Waits, to the emotional wallop of the fifth – and longest – with Zoe Kazan, to the surreal inevitability of the final chapter. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs deserves to be viewed among the best of the Coens films.

 

48. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)

When Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island was moved out of Oscar season 2009 into February 2010 – you would have been forgiven for thinking that perhaps Scorsese had a boondoggle on his hands. What happened instead, is that Scorsese had made a mad genre piece – a grand guignol horror film, with psychological depth. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as a cop, sent to a mental hospital with his partner in search of a missing payment – and then gets sucked deeper into his own mind, and his own past. It is a film about PTSD coming out of WWII, and how it effects the home front. It is brilliantly staged by Scorsese, with great performances by DiCaprio and Michele Williams – with an ending that packs a gut punch. The Dennis Lehane book on which this is based felt flimsy – kind of cheap (and I usually love Lehane) – but Scorsese and his collaborators raised the whole thing by huge degrees. An underrated masterpiece that was an audience hit, but didn’t get the love it deserved at the time, and has sadly faded a little in the past decade in some minds.

 

47. Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is also one of the best horror films of the decade – an intelligent horror, coming out the month after Trump was inaugurated, which pretty much acted as the perfect start to the Trump era. Peele clearly knows his horror movie – he nails the aesthetics, the tones, the slowly mounting tension – but he has also let the film be funny – at least a little – around the edges – but it’s a laughter that sticks in your throat – one that makes you laugh, and then question yourself for laughing. It is a horror film of awkwardness. And it’s so well-acted by the cast, who never really go overboard with any of it – just ever so slowly get bent. And it leads to a great climax. Peele has already become of the best directors in the world – and one of the only ones who can sell a movie on his name alone.

 

46. Silence (Martin Scorsese, 2016)

Martin Scorsese spent 20 years thinking about Silence – his beautiful, challenging religious epic – about a priest in Japan (Andrew Garfield) who is there to convert the locals to Catholicism, and then has that challenged at every step along the way. The film is the most upfront with Scorsese’s religious beliefs of any film he had made in decades – it is the type of Christian film we need, rather than the cookie cutter ones we get from the God’s Not Dead crowd. Here, Scorsese is making a film about religious belief, and how much that means when challenged – what you’re willing to stand up for, to die for, and what you are not. It is also, of course, a film about religious imperialism – with the Catholics trying to export their religion to a people who may have no interest in it – and while the leaders may go to extremes to defend their way of life, you cannot really blame them. It is also a Christ film of course – with many characters acting as sort of stand-ins for Biblical characters. And it is beautiful and moving as well. People slept on this in 2016 – but it has already developed a following since – a following that will only grow.

 

45. Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

A trickier, and more ambitious film – although not one as instantly iconic – as Peele’s debut film Get Out, Us starts out with a wonderful horror movie premise – take the home invasion genre, and then make the invaders doppelgangers of the family being invaded, and see what happens. Us is at once one of the scariest horror films of the decade – with genuine moments of fright, and expert building of tension, one of the most entertaining horror films of the decade – the entire sequence at their friend’s house is a riot – and a troubling parable for America’s ability to paint over its past instead of dealing with it as they should – and the disastrous consequences that result from that. It also contains a marvelous performance by Lupita Nyong’o in the films deepest of the dual roles – one where you marvel all the more when the secrets eventually spill out. Peele is one of the greats of the horror genre right now.

 

44. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay, 2018)

With each passing film, British director Lynne Ramsay pushes her style further and further – with great results. In You Were Never Really Here, she takes what is essentially a revenge story in the vein of Taxi Driver, strips the narrative to the bone, and places us inside the head of its troubled protagonist – played brilliantly by Joaquin Phoenix. He plays a man who he is hired to rescue girls being traffic and/or abused by men – who he dispatches with brutal, bloody efficiency. But all this violence is taking its toll – he’s falling deeper into delusion and depression – while working on his biggest mission yet, with the most powerful people. The film is a masterpiece of cinematography, editing and sound design, and pushes this disturbing story into very different places, ending with a haunting, ambiguous shot. Ramsay is one of the best filmmakers in the world – and I’m a little tired of her not getting the attention she deserves.

 

43. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Blige Ceylon, 2011)

Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylon had a very good decade – Palme D’or winner for Winter Sleep and as well as The Wild Pear Tree – are both excellent. But for me, his masterpiece is his 2011 film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia – a crime thriller in which the closer you look, the less you know. The film is almost comic when it begins – it involves a group of police driving around the countryside with a man who has confessed to murder, who is supposed to lead them to the body of his victim – but he doesn’t quite know where it is. As the hour’s tick back, and it gets darker outside, it leads all the men into introspection, each taking things in their own way. When the body is found – and brought back for an autopsy, it places everything in a new light – the brutality of the crime snaps into sharper focus, and we are forced to confront what we saw before. What the doctor does to the body, Ceylon does to all of these men – delivering a haunting, brilliant examination of these men – and crime, in general. It belongs on a list with films like Memories of Murder, Zodiac and Police, Adjective.

 

42. Nebraska (Alexander Payne, 2013)

Alexander Payne returned to his native state to make this sharp, funny, sad film about a cross state journey by father and son. Bruce Dern plays the aging father, convinced he’s won the sweepstakes and will be coming into millions – his middle aged son, Will Forte, knows that’s probably not true – but drives him anyway, so he won’t drive himself. Along the way, they stop to see family, stop at in the old home town – and at least remember the past, even if they don’t really work through it all. The film is shot in stark black and white – the grayness of the countryside, the greyness of the lives being lived, becomes evident. But Payne isn’t looking down on his home state – or the people there – but instead looking at them with his eyes open, seeing the different sides to them. Bruce Dern has perhaps never been better – it was a role Payne wanted Jack Nicholson for, but his About Schmidt star suggested Dern, and he was right – it is a richer film with this performance. Nebraska was easily Payne’s best film this decade – one that stands along Election, About Schmidt and Sideways – at the top of his filmography.

 

41. BlackKklansman (Spike Lee, 2018)

It seems to me that Spike Lee has been written off countless times over the years – and then he returns with a bang with another masterpiece. It certainly happened before 25^th Hour in 2002 and undeniably it had been the case before BlackKklansman – the film that ended up winning a Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and finally land Spike an Oscar – sure, it was a screenplay Oscar, and not the director Oscar he deserved – but it’s better than nothing. BlackKklansman is an incendiary film about a black police officer in Colorado in the 1970s – who infiltrates the KKK. The film is delirious and entertaining throughout – but with moments that strike out directly at our current time with rage. The whole thing comes to a head – and we think we’re getting a happy ending, and then Lee delivers a final gut punch. The performances by John David Washington and Adam Driver are great – and Lee stages several sequences (the juxtaposition between Harry Belafonte’s story, and the KKK watching The Birth of a Nation is stunning). Spike Lee is not going anywhere.