My Favorite Movies of the 2010s

This past decade was an important transitional time for me. It began with me entering my final semester of college, and it ended with me finally moving out of my parents’ house. (Voice of a generation, that’s me.) In terms of movie watching, I made leaps and bounds over this ten-year span. Ten years ago, I’d honestly barely seen anything. Since then, I’ve more than tripled my total number of films seen. As I always like to say, I’ve reached the point where I know how much I don’t know. The hope of any list-making endeavor is, well, first of all, to impress the reader with the breadth and depth of my taste. But on the humbler side, I want to reach the point where my choices can be truly idiosyncratic, not just a reflection of consensus and the stuff that’s widely available. I’m not there yet, but I still feel really good about all 100 movies I’ve chosen for the list below, out of a total of 948 movies made between 2010-2019 that I’ve encountered so far.

List-making is contentious for good reasons, so another project I’ve been working on for months is a more egalitarian montage of all my favorite films from this period (199 feature films made the cut, along with 30 miscellaneous motion picture thingies.) There’s no telling the story of my development as a moviegoer without dealing with supercuts and video essays. I started watching the year-in-review videos posted on YouTube right around the beginning of the decade. I’ve since lost interest in that kind of smorgasbord of loosely connected trailer material. The quality of the videos seemed to plateau after a few years. But then I discovered David Ehrlich’s annual countdown of his favorite movies of the year, which reinvigorated the whole idea for me with its superior cohesion and narrative drive. I didn’t want to copy the same formula, but I think my own video shares a love for editing to the rhythms of music. See it here for yourself.

If this assortment of footage from all over the world is arranged to tell a kind of story, the story isn’t a happy one. Much has been said about dwindling theatrical audiences and the technological changes that call the whole idea of “movies” into question. In the future, will everything just be “content” that we half-watch on our devices, consigning cinematic art to museums and the homes of its remaining champions? Has my passion for the medium come about too late in the game? We’ll see. I have to say that I spent much of the past year looking ahead to finishing this video, without much thought to a future beyond it. I’ll keep watching new movies for as long as they make them, and maybe in ten years’ time there will be enough new classics to inspire another video. But this felt like something that had to be done now if it was to be done at all.

Now to the films in question. My number one film of the decade will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me well. I’ll forever regret missing my chance to see it in the theater, but my multiple viewings at the end of 2011 cemented its place as a crucial marker in my newfound love for impressionistic cinema. It might be my favorite movie of all time, but I still don’t like having one answer to that question. My pick for filmmaker of the decade, as it turns out, is this guy:

I’m as surprised as anyone by this development. Scorsese had not previously been a favorite of mine, but I learned to appreciate him more in the last several years, and he made four of my favorite movies of the decade, more than anyone else. The directors who contributed three movies to that larger list of 199 include Christopher Nolan, Hong Sang-soo, the Coen brothers, Johnnie To, Olivier Assayas, Richard Linklater, Sean Baker, Terence Davies and Terrence Malick. Those runners-up are, again, a pretty basic Film Buff 101 group for the most part, but they’re all great.

The year 2019 got a bit shortchanged in the final results, but that’s just how it works with the rush to get these lists done right at the end of the decade, if not before. Certainly the story of any given period of time is forever in flux. There’s always more to see.

One last note: as you can tell from my video, I make no distinction between films in the traditional sense and other video-based art. New technologies have collapsed those distinctions in many ways. But if you’d still like to be a purist and ignore the three instances on the list below of TV masquerading as movies, simply plug in my #101 (Hale County This Morning, This Evening), #102 (A Quiet Passion) and #103 (Museum Hours) to the end of the list.

100	Phoenix	Christian Petzold	2014
99	Paddington 2	Paul King	2017
98	Inherent Vice	Paul Thomas Anderson	2014
97	Train to Busan	Yeon Sang-ho	2016
96	mother!	Darren Aronofsky	2017
95	La La Land	Damien Chazelle	2016
94	Night Moves	Kelly Reichardt	2013
93	Cold War	Paweł Pawlikowski	2018
92	Uncut Gems	Josh Safdie & Benny Safdie	2019
91	A Ghost Story	David Lowery	2017
90	Timbuktu	Abderrahmane Sissako	2014
89	First Love	Takashi Miike	2019
88	Exit Through the Gift Shop	Banksy	2010
87	Community, Season 2		2010-11
86	The Favourite	Yorgos Lanthimos	2018
85	Tangerine	Sean Baker	2015
84	Pariah	Dee Rees	2011
83	Closed Curtain	Jafar Panahi & Kambuzia Partovi	2013
82	Homecoming	Beyoncé Knowles-Carter	2019
81	Goodbye to Language	Jean-Luc Godard	2014
80	Cosmopolis	David Cronenberg	2012
79	The Salesman	Asghar Farhadi	2016
78	The Wolf of Wall Street	Martin Scorsese	2013
77	Inside Out	Pete Docter & Ronnie del Carmen	2015
76	Don’t Go Breaking My Heart 2	Johnnie To	2014
75	Faces Places	Agnès Varda & JR	2017
74	The Secret World of Arrietty	Hiromasa Yonebayashi	2010
73	Taxi	Jafar Panahi	2015
72	The Grandmaster	Wong Kar-Wai	2013
71	Everybody Wants Some!!	Richard Linklater	2016
70	Her Smell	Alex Ross Perry	2018
69	The Beguiled	Sofia Coppola	2017
68	The Beach Bum	Harmony Korine	2019
67	We Need to Talk About Kevin	Lynne Ramsay	2011
66	Stoker	Park Chan-wook	2013
65	Mysteries of Lisbon	Raúl Ruiz	2010
64	Drug War	Johnnie To	2012
63	The Turin Horse	Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky	2011
62	Happy as Lazzaro	Alice Rohrwacher	2018
61	Lincoln	Steven Spielberg	2012
60	Black Swan	Darren Aronofsky	2010
59	The Irishman: I Heard You Paint Houses	Martin Scorsese	2019
58	Attack the Block	Joe Cornish	2011
57	Private Life	Tamara Jenkins	2018
56	Amour Fou	Jessica Hausner	2014
55	Mad Max: Fury Road	George Miller	2015
54	Zero Dark Thirty	Kathryn Bigelow	2012
53	The Work	Jairus McLeary & Gethin Aldous	2017
52	Bird People	Pascale Ferran	2014
51	Poetry	Lee Chang-dong	2010
50	Personal Shopper	Olivier Assayas	2016
49	The Skin I Live In	Pedro Almodóvar	2011
48	Kaili Blues	Bi Gan	2015
47	Support the Girls	Andrew Bujalski	2018
46	Nocturama	Bertrand Bonello	2016
45	The Forbidden Room	Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson	2015
44	It’s Such a Beautiful Day	Don Hertzfeldt	2012
43	Kate Plays Christine	Robert Greene	2016
42	True Grit	Joel Coen & Ethan Coen	2010
41	Life of Pi	Ang Lee	2012
40	Baby Driver	Edgar Wright	2017
39	Arrested Development, Season 4	Mitchell Hurwitz & Troy Miller	2013
38	Stray Dogs	Tsai Ming-liang	2013
37	Boyhood	Richard Linklater	2014
36	The Loneliest Planet	Julia Loktev	2011
35	Experimenter	Michael Almereyda	2015
34	Computer Chess	Andrew Bujalski	2013
33	Gone Girl	David Fincher	2014
32	A Separation	Asghar Farhadi	2011
31	The Florida Project	Sean Baker	2017
30	Silence	Martin Scorsese	2016
29	Inside Llewyn Davis	Joel Coen & Ethan Coen	2013
28	Gravity	Alfonso Cuarón	2013
27	Pina	Wim Wenders	2011
26	A Hidden Life	Terrence Malick	2019
25	Cameraperson	Kirsten Johnson	2016
24	Inception	Christopher Nolan	2010
23	Carol	Todd Haynes	2015
22	Let the Corpses Tan	Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani	2017
21	Interstellar	Christopher Nolan	2014
20	High Life	Claire Denis	2018
19	The Deep Blue Sea	Terence Davies	2011
18	Parasite	Bong Joon-ho	2019
17	Frances Ha	Noah Baumbach	2012
16	First Reformed	Paul Schrader	2017
15	Toy Story 3	Lee Unkrich	2010
14	Amour	Michael Haneke	2012
13	Leave No Trace	Debra Granik	2018
12	Take Shelter	Jeff Nichols	2011
11	Moonrise Kingdom	Wes Anderson	2012
10	Cemetery of Splendor	Apichatpong Weerasethakul	2015
9	Lemonade	Kahlil Joseph & Beyoncé Knowles-Carter	2016
8	Before Midnight	Richard Linklater	2013
7	Meek’s Cutoff	Kelly Reichardt	2010
6	Under the Skin	Jonathan Glazer	2013
5	The Ballad of Buster Scruggs	Joel Coen & Ethan Coen	2018
4	The Social Network	David Fincher	2010
3	Margaret	Kenneth Lonergan	2011
2	Twin Peaks, Season 3	David Lynch	2017
1	The Tree of Life	Terrence Malick	2011