TOP 10 Best Movies of the Decade

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 05, 2020

The Second Decade of the 21st Century has come to a close and we are left with 10 years of film to sort through.  Here I wish to got through my favorite of the decade of thousands of films, some good, some great, also some bad, some horribly bad.  I'll start with the down side first, the films over the decade that were disappointments.  In some cases there are just bad movies but in others, there are the ones you hoped would fulfill your expectations but sadly fell short or off the cliff entirely.

2010 started off on this new renaissance of 3D movies built off the shoulders of 2009's CGI 3D extravaganza, Avatar.  The resulting effect wasn't the greatest with many films missing the mark big time like the poorly executed The Clash of the Titans.  Sadly, most studios and filmmakers didn't quite understand what James Cameron was achieving.  Most filmmakers were slapping on 3D like a bumper sticker without ever understanding the point of what Cameron was attempting to get at in the first place.  Cameron wanted his audience to enter into the film as best as one could while sitting in their seat in an IMAX theatre.  Aside from Ang Lee's Life of Pi film, filmmakers misused 3D to splash images and worlds onto the audience like a fire hose. 

There are a number of films over the decade that I was really hoping would be great but sadly disappointed.  The Dark Knight Rises was a huge disappointment, not because it's horrible, which it isn't, but because it was such a massive step back from The Dark Knight.  Rises ended up getting so messing and convoluted that it was hard to care after a while.  The one part of the film I didn't think would be any good ended up being my favorite part of it, was Catwoman. 

Sin City: The Dame to Kill was a horrible sequel that limped into theaters this decade.  Jurassic World was a horrible return to the park,  Terminator Genisys was so bad it wasn't even laughable, unlike Independence Day: Resurgence, which was bad but actually laughably bad.  Fantastic Four was of the I'm-not-laughing-because-this-is-so-bad kind of experience along with Inferno, the third of the DaVinci Code movies. 

A Good Day to Die Hard actually had a direct negative effect on my soul while watching it.  Not only did Bruce Willis confirm that he really doesn't give a fuck anymore about his movie career, but the character of Detective John McClane was sadly misrepresented in this absolute wreckage of a piece of shit.  The Predator was also an insult to its heritage.  That botched clutter of cluster-fuck also didn't understand its own source material.  The 'Lady' Ghostbusters movie can join this club along with the monstrosity Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  All these scattered-debris-passing-themselves-off-as-legacy-movies have all missed the point, you expand the world but you don't change the rules of that given world.

More horrible film victims of this same process; Pixels, fun but poorly executed.  Spectre, fun but sad, the bar lowered and that's that, at least we still have the far superior Skyfall.  Star Trek into Darkness backfired hugely on serving up fan-service.  The A-Team, Jonah Hex, Battle: Los Angles, Assassin's Creed, Battleship, a couple of Underworld movies and Alien: Covenant all cover movies I'd hoped would be at least okay, guess what? you guessed it.....

The Hobbit movies............
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The Lord of the Rings films, to this day, stand up.  The only criticism that could be said about them is the length and that's reaching.  They are a piece of film history that will be taught a century from now.  The Hobbit movies are embarrassing, the editing alone ...... I have spoken.  Sorry, wrong franchise....

Inception is one of the greatest movies ever told without soul.  I don't mean in the biblical sense, I mean in the psychological.  Inception is cool and is immensely multidimensional but camouflages the heart of the film within its technology.  At the end of the day, this film is fun and is mind-provoking, not on the level of The Matrix, but stands as one of the great mind-twisters of this decade.  As for mind-twisters, The Favorite, The Lobster, The Cabin in the Woods, Nocturnal Animals and Shutter Island all stand (upside down) as some of the great, what-did-I-just-see, films of the decade.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a film about time.  It's so beautifully constructed because the main characters are without time, immortal, but they are still subject to time.  These vampires have to learn to be within the world, like we all do.  Vampires are usually portrayed as fantasies but now they are real....... These vampires have to learn to live in the world just as we do.  This film philosophically dismantles the romantic vampire mythology and replaces it with poverty and dread.  One of my favorite films of the decade.

The decade was filled with films and crazy lead characters running the show, according to them anyway.  Nightcrawler is a sad, yet beautiful portrayal of a sociopath, slithering his way through late night news, exposing the 'consumers' with all the blood and carnage that they desire.  We learn at the end that more blood and carnage is really what we all want.  Whiplash is about control and the lack of control.  The film uses music to illustrate the power struggle between the young and inexperienced and the old and a victim of experience.  The film is about building a bridge without quite accepting the reason to build it in the first place.. but damn does the music sound amazing.  Drive is quiet for a guy that drives cars for the movie industry.  What's special about Drive is, oddly given the name, is he actually knows how to take its time until the point there is no more time to be taken.  After that...........you watch the film. 

The Planet of the Apes trilogy was of the great action movies of the decade and a huge leap forward for CGI work with motion capture.  The Mission Impossible movies have been all exciting as hell this decade.  The John Wick movies were the best grounded offering for action movies in years, along with the closely connected Atomic Blonde. 

Midnight in Paris is an exercise in what we want and what we have.  The film also points out that we actually don't understand either anyway.  Okay..... so where do we start?  Where do we begin?  The film explores the present day of everyday life, albeit in Paris capitalism.  In the end the past informs the present, the present evaluates the past and creates a fantasy of what the future may be.  The point, you are here and you are now......

There were many laughs to be had at the movie theater this decade with crazy-what-is-happening-fall-off-your-seat comedies.  Look no further then McGruber but then there is This is the End and The World's End for you to shake your head at.  More crazy silliness can be found in Bridesmaids, The Other Guys, 21 Jump Street and Ted.  We're the Millers and Game Night were both funny, actiony comedies this year.  The LEGO Movie and Inside Out were defiantly my favorite animated movies of the decade but I'd have to say that The Nice Guys was my most treasured of everything funny about this decade.  I love them all.

There was a lot of great Sci-fi movies that were wonderfully creative, The Shape of Water is about what and why we love going to the movies.  The colors and the lighting alone are mesmerizing.  This is a romance story that will not be forgotten, it transcends the idea of romance.  The last time that happened to this degree was Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977).  This film examines every false understanding we have about love.  The symbolism that permeated throughout the film laid a liquid of knowledge of what it means to be different and most importantly, what it means to be the same among that simultaneous difference.  Edge of Tomorrow has got to be the best forgotten sci-fi film of the decade.  Gravity has got to the most beautifully shot while Ex Machina the most claustrophobic.  The Hunger Games series was the most big-brothery.  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story ended up being the best adventure to a galaxy far, far away where The Martian and A Quiet Place were both the most isolated.  Lucy and Transcendence both failed at capturing the problem of AI, where The Zero Theorem and Annihilation, both inspiring sci-fi outings, failed at getting an audience.  Her ended up being the most heartfelt, philosophical and ultimately the most personal love stories of the decade.    

Avengers: Endgame is without a doubt one of the best and most defining superhero movie of the decade, of film history for that matter..  All roads led to this monumental conclusion starting with Iron Man and forming The Avengers a decade ago.  Captain America: Winter Soldier, Guardians of the Galaxy and the first part of Endgame, Infinity War were some of the best along the way.  Iron Man 3 was okay in parts but disappointing, X-Men: Apocalypse sucked mutant you-know-what's along with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Venom.  Thankfully before Apocalypse we got, as it turns out, the last great X-Men movie, X-Men: Day of Future Past.  Logan is without a doubt the best film within the X-Men universe, even if it isn't, thankfully, a full on X-Men movie.  Joker was the best DC film of the decade with only Wonder Woman coming close.  Man of Steel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Justice League and Suicide Squad failed at narrative and storytelling, instead, these movies became about too many characters all saturated in CGI and suffocated in the studio controlled creative process.  They didn't even know how to have fun with their characters.  Deadpool was a comic book movie that knew how to have fun and simultaneously was heartfelt and action-packed.

There were so many great dramas this decade that brought up deep-into-the-snowy-lifeless-woods-with-a-killer-bear, The Reverant or the desert where you can get stuck between a rock and hard place, 127 Hours.  There were many films that dived deep into social and human rights issues that I enjoyed with Hidden Figures, Spotlight, The Help, 12 Years a Slave and The Butler.  Django Unchained and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ended up being off the wall fun and dramatic, along with Inside Llewyn Davis and Silver Linings Playbook.  From the more political side of drama we had great choices in The Post and Vice and social changes in The Social Network, Dallas Buyer's Club, Straight Outta Compton and The Imitation Game.  We had some great, you're-on-your-own films with Deepwater Horizon, Gone Girl, Wild, Blue Jasmine, Fences, The Master, The Witch, Get Out, Hereditary and You Were Never Really Here.

Best Performances of the Decade

BEST ACTRESS Toni Colette - Hereditary

BEST ACTOR Joaquin Phoenix - The Master

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR J.K. Simmons - Whiplash

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS Charlize Theron - Mad Max: Fury Road

My Top 10 of the Decade.

BLACK SWAN

This film was a brilliant albeit tragic, portrait of a young woman's struggle to go beyond herself.  Black Swan is about pain and suffering, sacrifice and failure.  The film explores the mental strain of being the best and manifests this sacrifice onto the physical body.  This dancer who, at times behaves like a little girl, is forced into the metamorphosis of a sexual adult woman, that is free of the innocence of a young girl, the white swan.  Nina is sexually repressed, avoiding healthy sexual desires she has.  Her mother forcibly keeps her daughter an innocent child in spite of her growing into a young woman.  Passion over control is what is pressed upon her, and growing up and embracing one's darkness.  Nina becomes consumed by her idealized image in the end, the Black swan, because she never fully matured to handle the pressure of the Jungian Shadow, that true part of us that wants to be free, without judgment, without regret.  

THE TREE OF LIFE

Who are we and where do we come from?  The Tree of Life isn't concerned with religion, it's concerned with influence, biology, heredity, spirituality.  Are we who we are because of our parents and their parents?  Are we echoes of our past experiences?  What defines our present, right here, right now in this moment?  What lead us on this path.... now?  Memories upon memories.  How do we accept this as a trajectory that was never in our hands in the first place.  We were born, born into a family, born into systems, born into a language, born into a religion, born into an idea of who we should become.  What do we own about ourselves that is...truly ours? 

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD

One long car chase that lasts pretty well the entire film, this primordial rock concert on wheels, is an absolute balletic symphony of existential destruction.  The best action-packed, high-octane, piece of insanity is Mad Max: Fury Road.  This film's craziness blows all our minds with all the death-defying action sequences and leather strapped world building.

THE IRISHMAN

Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street was all about the bottomless pit of greed and the exhausting endless effort to satisfy the need for greed without ever reaching satisfaction.  Scorsese's The Irishman is about the bottomless pit of seeking power, loyalty and burning bridges to the sad and lonely point at the end when there is nothing left.  The film is about the choices we make and how the consequences of those choices can hang around to our dying days like a gun pressed to the back of our head.  The film is masterfully shot and acted.  It's truly a poetic culmination of Martin Scorsese's long film making career.  

HELL OR HIGH WATER

Two bank robbing brothers being tracked down by a couple of Texas Rangers sounds like a movie we all saw many times over.   This modern western is about changing the social landscape where these outlaws fight for their own justice in a corrupt system.  The banking system in this film is the enemy, but the law and the lawless must still have their showdown.  The film is beautifully written and shot well with its witty dialogue and it's endless dusty landscapes.  It's about generations of poverty subject to a system controlled by the rich bankers.  It's about getting back what never really belonged to these bankers in the first place... our dignity.

UNDER THE SKIN

This film is a hypnotic film born from the same imaginative film stock as 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Under the Skin follows an alien hiding in the human form of a beautiful young woman played marvelously by Scarlett Johansson.  This alien has no emotional connection to the unsuspecting men she brings back to her 'absorption chamber' for processing, death in human terms.  The film is wonderfully shot for realism as this alien roams the streets of Glasgow, Scotland searching for more victims.  Eventually the alien adapts to human emotion and begins to struggle with getting more victims and feeling sorry for the victims she's supposed to trap.     

BLADERUNNER 2049

This film had everything in it that makes me love movies.  At a young age the 1982 Blade Runner blow my mind but it took a couple of years, like wine, for me to really see why my mind was blown.  2049 was simply beautiful in its dankness.  It was dark but was a portrait of film with its color and canvass.   

WIND RIVER

This film was simultaneously cold and warm with the weather and its characters that lived within it.  The film was calm and the vistas throughout the film were beautifully captured.  There is what's right in the law and it's court system and then there is what's right in the nature of people, where sometimes a group of guys that rape a young women in the mountains, get exactly what they deserve. 

BIRDMAN

This magnificent masterful film is a symbolic roller coaster ride through the subconscious mind of a washed-up actor.  Riggan Thomson struggles to find meaning and relevancy in a world where many around him are fighting for the same thing.  Michael Keaton gives a career best performance in a film filled with great performances.  Emma Stone and Edward Norton are among the standout actors in this wonderful, refreshing piece of cinema that will most defiantly become a cult classic and favorite for years to come.

ARRIVAL

"I used to think this was the beginning of our story."

Arrival is a mindful, intelligent film about an alien invasion, but not really about an alien invasion at all.  Arrival is about us, not them, its about our own internal fears, our fears about the unknown and mostly it asks the question whether or not we can all get along.  At its core, within its heart, the film explores the idea of time, life and memory, it asks us to consider the value of a life even if it is not our own.

"Memory is a strange thing.  It doesn't work like I thought it did.  We are bound by time; by its order." 

Is there true continuity from our past, up to our present and on to our future like a flowing biographical river?  Are we entitled to such an assumption that we are connected narratively along some linear path, supported by a long string of memories?

Can a person at one time be the same person at a later time if that later person has no memory of the person in the past?  Now reverse this; can a person in the present be that same person while simultaneously have memories of their future self?  Are these successive selves, selves of themselves or are they continuous selves.  Are we who we were?  Will we become who we currently are?  I would argue that the current self and the remembering self are part of a story that we tell ourselves and its a story that changes over time.  So this current version of yourself is essentially being dragged around by early versions of your current self.