#10 - #1

Certain critics hastily dubbed this “a film that defines its generation” upon release. Ten years on that designation still feels premature, but also too narrow. Truth is The Social Network defines all generations in its examination of power, vanity, and misplaced ambition. While Facebook itself grows more populous and yet less relevant with every passing year (as do all platforms in our self-cannibalizing Internet culture), the film's keenly observed characterizations and ninja-like satire are ageless. Comparisons have been made to Citizen Kane, sometimes as compliment and sometimes as criticism, which may not be entirely fair. The Social Network did not rewrite the language of cinema after all – I suppose you could argue the cool Oscar-winning soundtrack by Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross was a step forward. But what it does share with Welles' edifying classic is its juxtaposition of an exponentially evolving medium against its own human proprietors, who (despite their entrepreneurial genius) tragically fail to grow. Oh, the hubris!

Whether or not you feel the Kane parallels are accurate, or warranted, this is a more briskly paced affair than anything the 1940’s churned out. Sorkin's rat-a-tat verbosity and Fincher's clinical direction prove a winning tandem, glossily showcasing career highlights from young talents Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield, Armie Hammer, Justin Timberlake (never thought I'd type that in my lifetime), and – with only three brief but perfectly performed scenes – Rooney Mara. Editors Kirk Baxter & Angus Wall find the best line readings and reverse cuts from this embarrassment of rich performances, crisply shot by Jeff Cronenweth, while sound designer Ren Klyce ensures every one of them is heard clear as a bell.

Yes, Fincher knows how to piece together a swell motion picture, and The Social Network will always be one I can comfortably sit down and catch up with like an old friend. But why #1?

Its foreshadowing of the teenaged Internet swiftly aging into a grouchy cesspool of contempt could hardly have been considered prophetic by 2010, and its perceived attitudes on splenetic Millennials arrogantly wresting control of the future away from Boomers who’ve outstayed their welcome may not be unanimously shared. The film that “defines its generation”?... Debatable.

But when I look back on this ‘Top 100’ countdown, when I contemplate the titles I included and the hundreds more I couldn’t, when I reflect on what the rapidly transfiguring world of movies showed me from 2010 until 2019, I’ll tell you what I see: I see new technologies mutating old ways of life at an accelerating rate; I hear new voices shouting to be heard by old, deaf ears; I feel new hands (young, angry, ambitious, and hungry to find their place) rattling the cages of the old guard, sometimes heedless of their own human frailty. These are the core themes that defined the cinematic decade, and the only new classic that tags all of them is The Social Network.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Original Score (Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross)

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Sorkin would pen a couple more corking scripts (Moneyball and Steve Jobs, both entries on this countdown) before making his first foray into directing his own material with Molly’s Game (2017). Built on the same structure as The Social Network by inter-splicing a tense legal drama with the flashbacks that led to it, and anchored by whip smart performances courtesy of Jessica Chastain and Idris Elba, it proves yet another virtuoso showcase for Sorkin’s impossibly on-point dialogue, but also exposes his limitations as a director.

Fincher’s next two projects – the Americanized remake of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) and Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of her own bestseller Gone Girl (2014) – saw him return to the pulpy thriller stylistics on which he made his name. While both keep us constantly on edge, the latter has aged best of the two. Its creepy 'massage parlour' atmospherics, jarring tonal shifts, and twisted sense of humour make for an inky genre soup. But of all the things Gone Girl tries to be – murder mystery, social satire, domestic tragicomedy, etc. – perhaps the only categorization it comes closest to fulfilling is that of a Rorschach Diagram. Different people come out on different sides of the degenerative rift between Nick and Amy (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, both excellent in tricky translucent roles), and most likely with different takes about the film's possibly problematic gender politics. Whose side would you take? Whether you love or hate its willful insincerity, Gone Girl is a film that merits sincere discussion about marital hypocrisy, compromise, and trust. It is ripe for revisitation.

The latest works from both these unmistakable auteurs are currently streaming on Netflix: Sorkin’s liberal (in every sense of the word) historical drama The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) and Fincher’s old-Hollywood throwback Mank (2020). The former is working in familiar milieus stylistically and thematically, while the latter embarks on a more adventurous departure, but both have managed (by happenstance) to strike a zeitgeisty nerve – Evoking political turmoil of the past to preface the societal uncertainty of our rapidly approaching post-pandemic future…

A two-hour car chase aboard a convoy of death machines through a post-apocalyptic wasteland, overseen by a septuagenarian who hadn’t been in the director’s chair since that ‘dancing penguin cartoon’ from 2006... This was surely George Miller's most unlikely masterpiece; A face-melting marvel of craft, heart-stopping stunts, and searing iconography, roaring though the movie screen with the sheer mind-shredding gusto that filmmakers half his age consistently struggle to inject into modern action movies. It could only have been made – indeed, conceived – by a madman.

The bombast was overwhelming at first, but multiple viewings have allowed its thematic shades of feminism and environmentalism, its economical character arcs, and the meticulous method in Miller’s madness to rise above the expertly orchestrated pandemonium. The composition of his painstakingly storyboarded images to fit multiple layers of activity in frame – yet without becoming the cinematic equivalent of a 12-car pileup – is a fine art that hearkens back to the days of Buster Keaton (one of his many Mad Max influences). The simplicity of the narrative also belies what is actually an exemplary world-building screenplay. The setting and characters are steeped in details that are never formally explained, but merely revealed with the trust that we the audience can soak them in and figure them out as they go. Everything, from the largest set to the tiniest prop, is of a piece with this demented Hellscape. So too are the actors, who grinded each others’ gears during that torturous six-month shoot in the Namibian desert, but were ultimately alchemized into a revving ramshackle engine. High marks to Charlize Theron, whose Furiosa now sits on the same shelf as ceiling-smashing badasses Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.

The film spent 14 years in development and cost 150 million dollars (every one of them evident on screen), but now it shall ride eternal, shiny and chrome.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Costume Design (Jenny Beavan)

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The other dormant action franchise to receive a major adrenaline shot in the arm this decade was the Mission: Impossible brand. Brad Bird gave the initial injection with Ghost Protocol (2011), which revitalized and reinvented this dated spin-off series for a new generation with its escalating action set pieces, expertly judged visual gags, and collegial spy-on-spy humour. Christopher McQuarrie kept the ball rolling with Rogue Nation (2015) and Fallout (2018), both continually upping the ante of the indefatigable Tom Cruise’s daring-do. Even the battered stuntmen and women of Fury Road would have to raise their hands in a Valhalla salute to the now 58-year-old star and his certifiably insane feats of death defiance.

Charlize Theron has continued chiselling her imposing charisma and statuesque silhouette onto other action roles, most successfully in David Leitch’s gritty Cold War thriller Atomic Blonde (2017). Its brutally choreographed fisticuffs provide the most memorable moments, but Theron’s platinum intensity gleams throughout.

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth... when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” Such is the Old Testament query that prefaces Malick's painterly, poetic, flawed, unforgettable masterpiece that probes humankind's search for God and the fluid relation between Nature and Grace.

Many remember the bravura sequence of cosmic grandeur that depicts – via some truly arresting visual effects – the creation of our galaxy, our sun, and our Earth. Operatic flourishes accompany the kaleidoscopic emergence of celestial orbs out of the primordial ether, the volcanic outgassing of the planet's core, the formation of the oceans, the wondrous machinations of the earliest cellular life, their evolution into terrestrial flora & fauna, and finally (with silent beauty) the asteroid impact that triggered the Cretaceous extinction. God giveth, and God taketh away.

Having awed and humbled us with the world's birth, to which all people are little more than background noise, he then returns us to the more microscopic (but no less miraculous) origins of the O'Brien family, from the birth of son Jack through to his adolescence. This meandering segment of the picture (given remarkable texture by naturalistic performances from Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, and Hunter McKracken, and crystallized by visual wizard Emmanuel Lubezki) is a rich stream of consciousness, laced with internal monologue that also seems to ask, “Where are you?”. It may be that Malick is less concerned with addressing God's rhetorical question to Job than he is with asking the same question back.

Coolest award or nomination:

Cannes Film Festival – Palme d’Or (Terrence Malick)

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After having sat in the director’s chair only four times between 1970 and 2010, Malick unexpectedly metamorphosed into a cinematic Clydesdale this last decade, cranking out no less than five features, three shorts and an IMAX documentary! Unfortunately, following up this magnum opus with critical flops To the Wonder (2012), Knight of Cups (2015), Song to Song (2017), and A Hidden Life (2019) has somewhat marred the mythic aura of the reclusive master. None of these self-imitations feel truly complimentary to The Tree of Life.

Of course, no film can adequately parallel such a singular work of genius, so to recommend Paul Schraders’ First Reformed (2018) is as much a stretch as any, but provides a fitting antithesis to Tree of Life’s ubiquitous divinity in its bleak dismantlement of a man of the cloth (Ethan Hawke) thrown into existential crisis, starting to see the world as a doomed, Godless planet. Though more formally distanced from its subjects than Malick’s piece, Schrader still evokes fraught, internal ruminations with an ascetic mise-en-scène and refined visual command.

Deceptively simple in concept yet ingenious in realization, Cuaron's ground-breaking invention of cinema about a woman adrift (in every sense of the word) reveals itself to be much more than mere blockbuster spectacle, but a spiritual exploration of human connection and the will to live.

Skeptics can quibble that the dead-child backstory is too easy (it is) or that the pre-natal imagery is a bit on-the-nose (again, it is), but these can only possibly exist as afterthoughts when the rush is this damn incredible! In an era when so many studio-backed tent poles clawed so desperately at whatever newfangled bells and whistles they could exploit to hike ticket prices, selling the promise of the “experience” more heavily than the movie, this was the only time I felt as though my theatre seat had truly slipped the surly bonds of earth. I had to go see it twice in IMAX during its initial run, knowing well that future viewings on any screen smaller than seven stories high, or with any fewer than twelve speakers, simply wouldn't cut the mustard (and no, it doesn't).

But I can still remember those two hair-raising screenings vividly: Those terrifying volleys of space shrapnel, the white-knuckle Earth re-entry, the breath-stopping interplay of sound & silence, Chivo's wizardry with kinetic LED colour, and the surprising emotional acuity Sandra Bullock brings to an otherwise straightforward character (it's much easier to stomach the Oscar she inherited for The Blind Side if you pretend she won for this instead).

Coolest award or nomination:

National Board of Review – Creative Innovation in Filmmaking Award

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Released the very same fall and already drawing apt comparisons was J.C. Chandor’s arresting 'old-man-and-the-sea' drama All Is Lost (2013), in which a grizzled Robert Redford (referred to simply as “Our Man” by the closing credits) struggles to keep a sinking yacht afloat in the Indian Ocean. Chandor's skeletal screenplay, which barely runs 31 pages due to its virtual absence of dialogue, is elegant in its simplicity. His premise may not offer much in the way of high-concept story, but is quite effective at submerging the viewer into a dour state of mind. One gets the sense that there's much to read between the unspoken lines; Possibly a metaphor for the 2008 economic crisis and the arrogance of big business. Redford gives a largely silent performance that captivates in its behavioral minutia and impresses in its physical daring, forcing the 77-year-old to perform all manner of stunts that would rattle even a young whippersnapper like myself!

“Who is you, Chiron?” Chiron himself doesn’t know how to answer except to mumble, “I’m me, man”, and how else could any of us respond to such a fundamental yet impossible question?

Lovingly nurtured from an unfinished stage script to screen with muted accents of aural and visual expressionism, Barry Jenkin’s humanist triptych about a young gay Black man grappling with his singular and fluid sense of self is not quite like any film you’ve seen. It may sound niche, but those willing to believe that crises of identity are universal to all will find themselves hard pressed not to be moved by this stunning portrait of an individual longing for connection.

This is a film of lingering soul-searching rather than bold galvanic developments, which are evoked sparingly for maximum effect. Editors Nat Sanders & Joi McMillon cut elegantly between James Laxton's smooth objective camerawork and his more intimate handheld shots to accentuate formative moments of Chiron's character. Several heartbeat moments and lengthy scenes take on a lucid oneiric quality through Jenkins' manipulation of sound and focus, drawing our attention to the soulful performances housed therein. All three versions we see of Chiron are beautifully interpreted from childhood to adulthood by the triumvirate of Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes. Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali leave impacts that echo longer than their limited minutes on screen. You feel their absence as strongly than their presence, their negative space forming an axial piece of Chiron’s whole.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award – Best Picture (Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Adele Romanski)

Also worth checking out:

Written in rapid succession with Moonlight, Jenkins’ adaptation of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Could Talk (2018) tackles a structurally tricky source novel with fearlessness and reverence. His lush swells of splendorous colour and mournful Harlem trumpets (hauntingly orchestrated by Nicholas Britell) cast a sensuous spell under which two souls fall into deep, unshakable love, even as it hastens them towards a crushing fate society has already sealed. Jenkins frames Baldwin’s critique of the systemic imprisonment of Black men as neither central nor peripheral to the many plot threads that funnel in and out of each other. In that regard, Beale Street would also make apropos viewing alongside a pair of 2016 documentaries 13th and I Am Not Your Negro, both cited earlier on this countdown.

Like a riff on an old jazz standard, Chazelle's unapologetic musical throwback to the age-old showbiz romance plays a familiar tune with a whole new set of notes. Shot, choreographed, and edited with a dynamism and bold Technicolor palette that would make the likes of Vincente Minnelli envious, it waltzes on clouds high above mere pastiche. The courtship of Mia and Sebastien (a luminous Emma Stone and dapper Ryan Gosling) wears its influences on its perfectly tailored sleeves, cognizant of the debt it owes to classics of many genres, and yet La La Land is still entirely its own creation.

In a way, movie musicals are the ultimate form of artistic expressionism: Song as conversation, dance as flirtation, heightened emotion writ in stardust on a canvas that would dwarf any stage. There’s the unbridled ‘Gap ad’ kitsch of “Another Day of Sun”, seamlessly stitched as a single take on the grid-locked L.A. freeway; Stone's heart-crumbling soliloquy “Audition”, shot in simple, fluent closeup; The introspective whirlwind “Epilogue”, which recalls the glorious cinematic ballets of Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen.

It all casts an intoxicating spell, but what’s less obvious is how Chazelle uses these effervescent charms to bubble wrap a spiky truth about the hurdles we face to fulfillment, intimacy, and happiness -- hurdles which can’t always be surmounted. At the end of the day, the fools who dream can either wake up and move ahead with their lives, or they can keep living in… (well, you don’t need me to spell it out for you).

Coolest award or nomination:

Toronto International Film Festival – People’s Choice Award (Damien Chazelle)

Also worth checking out:

In a textbook case of life imitating art, this decade saw the ascension of Emma Stone from hungry starlet to Hollywood’s most ubiquitous and beloved ingénue, mirroring the arc of her La La Land alter ego Mia. While her biggest breakthroughs arrived in the previous decade via strong supporting roles in Superbad (2007) and Zombieland (2009), the true launchpad for her leading lady superstardom was Will Gluck’s Easy A (2010), a tart and sassy high school comedy that may lean a bit too heavily on the shoulders of Mean Girls, but also flaunts all the prototypical hallmarks of Stone’s star persona: Her effortless gradation from spunk to pathos; Those eyes widened to the impossible diameter of a Disney princess; Her husky snorts of delight (or occasional disdain); The way she wraps her tongue around rapier sarcasm... Watching any of her work in the following years, it’s impossible not to detect those same performance tics that bejewel this waggish comic showcase.

Elsewhere in the extremely limited pool of original live-action musicals, the only other one that made as big a splash as La La Land was Michael Gracey’s The Greatest Showman (2017), also tuned by songwriter ‘it’ boys Benj Pasek & Justin Paul. It ain’t Moulin Rouge!, but its sequined music-video fervour still provided a guilty pleasure for many a ticket buyer (yours truly included).

Leave it to Pixar – the animation haven that made us believe a rat could cook, and a house could fly, and a robot could fall in love – to make arguably their greatest brainchild literally the brain of a child. While Docter and his thinktank of writers follow a familiar formula, the culminating effect here is potent. It does more than make you laugh and cry; It blithely examines the human condition, finding meaningful truths in a world of pure imagination. In a marvelous subversion of the status quo of mainstream kids movies, it crouches down and explains to children, at their level, that it's okay – nay, important – to feel all of life's feelings, including the unhappy ones.

That such insights are disguised as tot-friendly viewing doesn't make them any less profound, nor does it mean that youngsters are the only ones who can learn from them. There comes a moment when we finally glimpse the stealth movie hidden within this candy-coloured cartoon, the one that is as much about the joy and sorrow of parenthood as it is about the joy and sorrow of adolescence. For about 90 seconds or so, we can feel the filmmaker in place of the character: A parent lamenting the loss of their child's simple bliss. Even the most purely joyful of their infant memories must fade, but to be replaced in turn by feelings that are richer, more complex, and necessary for their growth as human beings. It's in this moment that Inside Out transcends high caliber entertainment, and becomes art.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Original Screenplay (Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve, Josh Cooley, Ronnie Del Carmen)

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When Pixar co-founder John Lasseter moved on up to the throne of chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios, he transferred much of the storytelling philosophy that had guided Pixar to prominence in the 2000’s, resulting in some decidedly Pixar-esque efforts from the House of Mouse. Most successful among them are Wreck-It Ralph (2012) and Zootopia (2016), both overseen by Rich Moore and Byron Howard, and both running the trusty Pixar algorithm: A vibrant community of [insert anthropomorphized beings here] that – aside from their cartoonish bodies and imaginative fantasy habitats – behave exactly like a community of real human beings. The latter is especially noteworthy for being a rare message movie that succeeds in spite of being a message movie, hitting that sweet spot between sincerity and satire. Drolly packaged as a brightly coloured L.A. noir with talking animals (the world-building here is as wily as it comes), it nimbly probes ideas of racial profiling, politics of fear, systemic bias and other such topical themes while neither sermonizing nor trivializing them.

Natalie Portman pliés into madness while Darren Aronofsky conducts a symphony of terror to the tune of Tchaikovsky in this freaky-deaky psychological spaz-out on sexual awakening, the self-consuming quest for perfection, and the dangerous liberation of embracing one's dark impulses.

To the casual moviegoer, Aronofsky is perhaps best characterized as a gifted but exasperating storyteller, whose projects often strain under the weight of his own ambition. I still feel that way even about films of his that I more or less admire (The Fountain, mother!), but the convicted focus he brings to every facet of Black Swan – his maneuvering of sound, music, light, reflections, smash-cuts, and his eye for every sly performance beat (don't blink or you'll miss those split-second punctuation marks of humour) – somehow gets every hokey cliché to pirouette in perfect unison. It all makes for a thoroughly rewatchable thriller, like a strobe-lit hall of mirrors that scares the bejesus out of you, then has you giddily lining up to walk through again.

None of this is to say that Aronofsky elevates the material, but maximizes it. Same can be said for Portman, who works wonders within the screenplay’s limited view of Nina as a stunted teenybopper (“Ooh prettyyyy!”) whose rebellious phase arrived ten years late. The music they dance to may be antique, but Aronofsky & Portman find a choreography that brings it to lusty, terrifying life. At the end, Nina stares straight through the fourth wall and describes the film herself with her dying breath: “It was perfect.”

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Director (Darren Aronofsky)

Also worth checking out:

Art imitates life, right? No wonder ‘descents into madness’ have been so prevalent on movie screens in the 2010's, with our world getting more cray cray by the day. Like Aronofsky, Martin Scorsese also began his decade by getting lost in a funhouse of paranoid hallucinations with Shutter Island (2010). Its gratuitous indulgences chafed many a critic, but Scorsese is arguably at his most memorable (if not necessarily his best) when he goes for broke.

Todd Phillips’ Joker (2019) does its own saute into insanity, mimicking Black Swan’s mentally imbalanced stage performer, squirming under their mother’s thumb, and imploding more and more as they crest the apex of their fame. It may be less elucidating about mental illness than it portends to be, and Phillips takes fewer creative gambits than Aronofsky or Scorsese, but his formal discipline is admirable. Joaquin Phoenix also does for Arthur Fleck what Portman does for Nina Sayers; Metamorphosing a thinly conceived schizophrenic into a darkly relatable monster, blurring the lines between antihero and villain to Oscar-winning effect.

“It's so metaphorical!” While the metaphors about economic inequality and the lack of upward mobility may be obvious, it’s the high-wire execution of this twisty, unclassifiable genre-buster that keeps us ever on edge with its shifting perspectives and perverse sense of humour.

Many will point to the centrepiece second act, and its memorable ‘wtf’ moment – around which the stakes suddenly skyrocket – as the moment when this movie won them over. But Bong was working the long con all along (sorry for the rhymes). His & Han Jin Won’s crafty screenplay has already laid the groundwork with the lure of an easily accessible underdog story, only to slam a secret door in our face with the question, “who should I be rooting for?”. All bets are off when the excruciating tensions between the ‘haves’, ‘have-nots’, and ‘have-even-lesses’ finally come to their shockingly macabre tipping point.

For a film saddled with the “one-inch tall barrier of subtitles” to have achieved the mainstream commercial and awards success that Parasite enjoyed was a rare pleasure to witness in our increasingly low-risk film market. But given Bong’s impeccable visual sensibilities, it’s perhaps unsurprising that it would translate well in any language. Every shot is sculpted with superb spatial awareness (crucial for any thriller-esque endeavour), making the most of Lee Ha-jun's inspired production design. Editor Jinmo Yang cuts every scene with an intuitive rhythm that moves at a clip and seldom uncoils.

Coolest award or nomination:

Screen Actors Guild – Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture

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Bong had previously dramatized the notion that everybody has their preordained place in life, and that stepping beyond one's bounds leads to a collapse in social order in Snowpiercer (2014), a pointed allegory of class disparity and ecological sustainability, all wrapped up in a propulsive sci-fi actioner with odd morsels of humour sprinkled in amongst the grisly combat set-pieces. Though the ultra-violence threatens to drown the subtext in gallons of gore, its world-building is sensational and its environmental message unmistakable. It can be no accident that for the film's memorable parting shot – staring directly at us through the camera, no less – is the creature that people most closely associate with the idea of extinction (specifically due to climate change).

Like the small animals Hushpuppy holds to her ear to reassure her that the pulse of the universe drums on, this poetic Creole fable has a mesmerizing heartbeat of its own. Melding social overtones of Hurricane Katrina with strokes of magic realism, Zeitlin & playwright Lucy Alibar fashion a profound child’s-eye view of the universe, underlain by themes of environmentalism, community, and above all, the implacable forces of change.

What stands to be seen is whether Hushpuppy (the mighty Quvenzhané Wallis) will resist these forces as her father has (Dwight Henry), or embrace and master them. Zeitlin captures their stormy father-daughter relationship with a scrappy verité shooting style that grounds his film in gruff, hard-won emotion. It is both harsh and heartbreaking to witness the whirlpool of feeling they share, ebbing and flowing from love to anger and back to love, as the role of caregiver shifts from old to young. Hushpuppy is king of The Bathtub. We may not know what lies in wait for her and her fellow bayou dwellers, but we know she is ready to face it.

Coolest award or nomination:

Academy Award [nomination] – Best Director (Benh Zeitlin)

Also worth checking out:

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent (2015) is an equally hypnotic but altogether different enviro-social parable of displaced peoples, also set in a sunken world and limned with fantastical flashes. The Amazonian river odyssey tracks two expeditions led by a tribal shaman decades apart from each other, offering choice glimpses into how colonialism has eroded indigenous culture, and the differing attitudes it had generated among Amazonia's native peoples. It starts as a straightforward dual journey narrative, but eventually takes as many unnavigable turns as the titular river itself.

As for Zeitlin, he waited until our new decade before releasing his sophomore feature, but now that Wendy (2020) has made its Sundance splash and flown to streaming, we can see that his gift for distilling poignant performances from juvenile actors hasn’t got a spot of rust on it.