Honorable mentions (A - Z):
Blue Valentine - With a pair of powerful dramatic performances at its center, Blue Valentine is a deeply emotional and upsetting drama that's hard to shake.
Dogtooth - The movie that introduced me to the wonderfully twisted Yorgos Lanthimos, and it just might be his most messed up movie yet. Definitely not for everyone.
How To Train Your Dragon - Everyone knows this one, it's a lovely, wonderful fantasy movie with beautiful animation, likable characters and a genuine sense of adventure.
Inception - One of the biggest action/sci-fi epics of the decade, and Nolan's last genuinely good movie. The music alone is enough to set this one apart from 99% of its contemporaries.
The King's Speech - An overall fantastically shot, acted, written, etc. movie that's able to build tension out of something as seemingly simple as talking into a microphone.
Skeletons - An inventively clever sci-fi comedy with some great performances and more ideas built into its framework than nearly every other sci-fi movie around.
Toy Story 3 - They may have decided to drag the series along another time, but for me this will always be the finale: and a very emotionally satisfying one at that.
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - Apichatpong Weerasethakul's direction may be a bit sluggish at times, but the atmosphere he builds is terrific, and the visuals match it perfectly.
Winter's Bone - A straight forward character drama with a star-making performance by Jennifer Lawrence; too bad she wasted it. John Hawkes is absolutely riveting.
The Wolfman - A big, dumb, stupid attempt at revising the classic Universal monster movie that has plenty of flaws, but enough going for it to keep me wholly entertained.
Christmas horror movies are a dime-a-dozen at this point, but there's one special thing a great deal of these movies lack: an actual screenplay. Anyone can write a hackneyed script about evil elves, demonic Santa, killer gingerbread men, etc. But when someone actually puts the time into making these sort of ideas come to life and not just feel like a student film project, it's hard for the whole project not to stand out. You pair a strong screenplay with likable characters and some wonderfully eerie visuals, and you've got yourself a modern horror classic -- and one that's perfect to watch around the holidays.
Nicholas Winding Refn isn't a director I find myself capable of watching too much by anymore, but when he actually made movies and not just 90-minute music videos, he did some pretty terrific stuff. Valhalla Rising may sort of feel like an amalgam of other movies, but the stark visuals and raw brutal violence are enough to sway me from caring much about the more derivative ideas behind it. Focusing on a silent lead character (played well by Mads Mikkelsen) allows the movie to tell its simple story without distraction, letting the visuals and atmosphere wash over you.
While Valhalla Rising featured some physical brutality and violence that makes some people squeamish, it's the emotional brutality of films like this that I find hardest to endure. Javier Bardem is absolutely heartbreaking in this drama that I have only watched one time close to a decade ago and still not managed to totally shake. Inarritu is one of the best directors working today, and this was probably the best movie he had made up to this point in his career. It's technically pretty flawless, has terrific acting, and packs a real emotional punch.
It's taken me quite a while to warm up to this movie, as I have an issue with filmmakers who put themselves out there in such smug and overtly artsy ways, but not even my general distaste for Gaspar Noe and my aversion to seeing some of the more upsetting things I had to look at in this movie could take away from the massive accomplishment this was. The floating cinematography is incredible, and the blend of colorful lighting and depressing events on-screen create an odd sort of contrast that makes it both an incredibly ugly and beautiful movie at the same time. Only Noe makes movies quite like this, and this one is probably his best.
In case you were beginning to think I only liked foreign movies, here we have a hilarious "what if" horror comedy with a wonderfully subversive hook: telling a standard Hills Have Eyes-esque hillbilly slasher movie from the perspective of the hillbillies, who aren't actually doing anything wrong at all. The lead performances are perfect, the screenplay is witty, and most importantly, there is plenty of over-the-top gore. Not many satirical horror movies work quite as well as this, and it's still one I look back on fondly and revisit from time to time.
One of my absolute favorite documentaries, and ultimately a perfectly encapsulation of the hilariously stupid nature of the modern art scene. Banksy is the perfect person to draw attention to the madness of this subject, and the way the documentary unfolds is so seemless and natural, it feels like the polished work of a veteran documentary filmmaker. I don't generally think about movies as much as I think about this one, and still fairly frequently reference it to this day.
I think the trailer for this is what first introduced me to the idea of "so bad it's good" movies, but not even the hilariously awful effects found in that infamous coat-hanger clip could prepare me for the sheer scope of James Nguyen's filmmaking ineptitude. It's a nonsense movie with a horribly preachy script, some of the worst performances ever put to film, non-existent sound design, and hilariously inept visual effects. It sounds like a chore to get through, but I still find it thoroughly entertaining, even after having seen it probably a dozen times or more by now.
Edgar Wright is mostly known for his Cornetto trilogy (Shaun Of The Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World's End), but some of the most impressive filmmaking of his career can be found in this incredibly fast-paced and hilarious video game action movie. It's a super ADHD sort of experience with tons of visual flourishes and little details to discover on rewatch. It's almost overwhelming at points, but just like in a video game, you just need to give yourself over to the experience and allow it to suck you in. I didn't love it at first, but I like it a little more every time I watch it.
I recall writing about this movie upon its release, declaring it a superior film to Citizen Kane. And while I admit that was a very sensationalist thing to say, I still think I stand by that sentiment. It's such a uniquely pivotal movie for the modern time, and wound up being the movie that I frequently found myself using as a sort of gauge to determine the value of every "great" movie to follow it for the early part of the decade. To me this is David Fincher's greatest movie, and the Trent Reznor score still stands up as one of the best of the 2010s. Certain movies tend to stand out as representatives of their decade in film, and this is absolutely one of them.
While I consider The Social Network a superior film from a technical perspective, there's something about this movie that I just can't get enough of, and I ultimately had to put it at #1. Franco's the kind of actor that can either make or break a movie, and this is his best performance by a mile. Danny Boyle utilizes cheap cameras to give certain segments of the movie a sort of found-footage feel without ever sacrificing the visuals -- in spite of the cramped setting, this movie manages to stay visually interesting and features some genuinely great camerawork. It's a deeply moving character drama and features one of the most intense sequences in the history of film. There are plenty of movies wherein one or more lead characters find themselves trapped in a cramped setting and have to find a way to escape, but this one is so far beyond the rest of these movies. It's emotional, beautiful, intense, and even at times tragically funny. I haven't seen anything else quite like this, and I love it now as much as I did walking out of the theater nearly 10 years ago.
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