Those who know me well will tell you that I am an avid movie buff. If I’m being honest, I’d probably prefer the term “enthusiast” – More of an armchair critic than a savant or scholar, although my autodidacticism has served me well enough so far. Simply put, I know the artform well, and I know what I like.
Those who know me better will tell you that this hobby didn’t sprout overnight, but has been growing over my entire life to date.
As I child of the 90’s, I consumed the cinema of that age through the ‘miracle’ of home video and network television. Heavily syndicated prestige pictures (Forrest Gump, Braveheart, Titanic, etc.) and animated Disney staples (whose battered VHS cassettes still decorate my shelves) define my formative years.
As a petulant high schooler in the early 2000’s, I developed a taste for the oldies thanks to cable stations like TCM and AMC (at a time when it had no original programming to air, just old movies). So strangely enough, the true classics from the 30’s through to the 80’s define the turn of the century for me far better than the new classics of the aughts. I guess I was late to the party.
It was not until around 2007 that I started really bearing down almost exclusively on contemporary film, so the recently concluded decade (2010-2019) is the first one from which I’ve seen enough movies to even justify a Top 100. And for reasons that need no explaining, 2020 has provided me time to pore over the best of the last ten years, before we turn our attention to the future cinema of the 2020’s (in whatever form it takes…)
If you stumble upon this open book and deign to give it read, I hope you find it of some interest. I hope my selections may cause you to smile in agreement, snort in disapproval, and perhaps even spur you to seek out a title or two you haven't seen.
A new entry will be posted here every weekday from now until January 1, 2021, with capsule write-ups plus some other recommended titles that just didn't make the Top 1OO. Personal rankings are fickle and ever shifting, but I’ve committed to keep this list static and unadulterated; A crystalline time capsule of the one-hundred titles (and then some) that summarized my decade of watching flickering lights in the dark.