The Back Row: The Best of the Decade: 2010 to 2019

To Start Off With ...

Above my Top Ten, I’m listing the entire output of Terrence Malick from 2010 to 2017, which is undoubtedly my favourite cinematic work from this decade. I rewatched each of these movies, trying to settle on one to place at the top of my list, but Malick’s body of work amounts to a greater achievement than the sum of its parts, and the ideas, emotions, images, and stories that flow through each of them form threads that can start in one movie and run through another.

The Tree of Life is the movie that awakened me to the full possibilities of movies, of how great thought and feeling can be conveyed through sounds and images, and of how deeply and intimately I could be moved by any movie. Malick searches for and devises new ways of looking at every subject (and every object), and each image in his movies packs a concentration of meaning, a focus on the essence and potential of each living thing and the matter that surrounds it, and an abiding sense of the eternal and the cosmic scheme into which it fits. I look at my own world differently now after having seen through Malick’s lens, and it’s a wondrous transformation.

The Tree of Life (2011)

To the Wonder (2012)

Knight of Cups (2015)

Voyage of Time (2016)

Song to Song (2017)

The Top Ten

1. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, Martin Scorsese). Scorsese is the Brahms of modern filmmaking: he is deeply versed in the cinematic forms of the past, and he reworks them in his own movies, both with the devoted care and consideration of a classicist and the febrile self-awareness of a modernist, in ways that propel the artform forwards. The Wolf of Wall Street is the Scorsese film of the decade that most severely implicates its maker (and all the rest of us) in a furious vision of transgression, as well as his most ecstatic outburst of energy and imagination.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014, Wes Anderson). Anderson’s political vision is deepened by the layers of fantasy and stylisation laid on top of his historically-inspired fiction. The exquisite craft, lofty irony, and offbeat humour sharpen the movie’s emotions, rather than cover them up. Finery and beauty are accompanied by acute pain and profound sadness, as well as opening up a world of fleeting joy.

3. Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins). Jenkins’s great sophomoric feature reached and affected everyone who saw it, not merely for its unique representation of a gay black man or of the tense and traumatic experiences of childhood in poor black areas, but because of the deep personal emotion and psychic vision that Jenkins imparted. The movie is more about his own vast and tender inwardness than the characters’, and its power arises from that beauty.

4. Gone Girl (2014, David Fincher). Fincher found in Gillian Flynn’s best-seller novel a distressing vision of a modern marriage — where partners vie for power, where sex is a means more than an end, and where public masks only cover private ones. It also plays on the themes common to Fincher’s work, where power is derived from information, where information is distorted and disseminated through mass media, and where lives are spent in pursuit of increasingly unsatisfying objectives.

5. A Quiet Passion (2017, Terence Davies). As with Wes Anderson, Terence Davies’s exquisite stylisation brings heightened emotion and concentrated thought. An important start to making a great biopic is selecting the right subject, and here maybe is the most apt pairing of subject with artist, since both Davies and Emily Dickinson appear to concern themselves with the immediate world around them — family, houses, and relationships — but are keenly aware of the infinite spiritual world that transcends it all.

6. Us (2019, Jordan Peele). When I started this blog, four years ago, I dreamed of seeing exactly the kind of movie that Jordan Peele released this year: a fantastical drama, with a specific and detailed political framework and an artistic as well as historical consciousness, that turns objects and people onscreen into resonant psychological symbols. I didn’t know that there would be so many other kinds of movies to delight me in the meantime, and I wasn’t expecting the resounding power it would pack when I finally saw it.

7. The Mule (2018, Clint Eastwood). In the last decade, Clint Eastwood made what I saw as the most searing self-portrait in movies (with Gran Torino), and his The Mule holds the exact same place in this decade. On the surface, Eastwood’s movies seem to enjoy watching figures and customs of traditional macho strength and self-sufficiency; beneath that, they appear to deal with the dark legacy of violent Hollywood entertainments whose effects have spun out of control; but beneath even that, they take a narrow-eyed, self-critical look inwards and, in their calm and assured way, unearth the most intimate and painful parts of his own soul.

8. Phantom Thread (2017, Paul Thomas Anderson). I haven’t seen The Master, which may be just as well for my own state of being — Philip Seymour Hoffman was a far more terrifying actor than Daniel Day-Lewis — but Phantom Thread offered enough enormous thrills and a highly original vision of an artist’s passions and the fierce drive towards both beauty and love.

9. This is 40 (2012, Judd Apatow). Apatow transformed comedy in the last decade, and, with only two new features since 2009, turned his stinging wisecracks and gags inwards, with a darkly melodramatic comedy about the disappointments, frustrations, torments, and backbreaking difficulty of modern marriage. In some ways, it’s more optimistic than Gone Girl, but in other ways it’s precisely on par.

10. Good Time (2017, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie). This decade was remarkable for the new opportunities and methods of production offered to a new generation of independent filmmakers, and some of the best of them happily found their way into the mainstream (as Wes Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David Fincher managed to 20 years before them). The Safdie brothers brought an idiosyncratic aesthetic and background that made all other mainstream movies look staid and suburban in comparison.

And 27 more ...