Critics Best Films of the Decade

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anonymous1980
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Re: Critics Best Films of the Decade

Post by anonymous1980 »

Sabin wrote:We didn't hold the Peter Travers contest because we all forgot that Peter Travers was a thing.
I was gonna do it but I remembered the tepid response to the last one where despite plenty of time, only had really two entries that I didn't even bother to count it. So I decided, why even bother.
Sabin
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Re: Critics Best Films of the Decade

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We didn't hold the Peter Travers contest because we all forgot that Peter Travers was a thing.
"How's the despair?"
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Re: Critics Best Films of the Decade

Post by Sonic Youth »

First thought after reading Owen's list: "I must remember to hold a contest about him 10 years from now."
"What the hell?"
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Critics Best Films of the Decade

Post by Sabin »

Owen Gleiberman just posted his list. I continue to think he's a fantastic writer (if he doesn't necessarily have the best taste in the world). This is his list.

1. “The Social Network” (2010)

It’s one of those perfect films, like “All the President’s Men” or “Dazed and Confused” or “Sweet Smell of Success,” that you can watch again and again and again. It hurtles, fascinates, scintillates, and resonates; every moment is nimbly entertaining and essential. Tapping into the tale of Facebook’s creation, this David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin masterpiece touches the inner story of our time: how the new mode of connecting to others via the Internet was invented by people — like the visionary geek Mark Zuckerberg, played with a magnetic fast-break chill by Jesse Eisenberg — who had serious problems connecting in any other way. So they invented a brave new world by syncing it to the spirit of their own detachment. “The Social Network” is bracing and funny, tragic and exhilarating, told with the kind of effortless high-wire panache that makes you believe in the power of movies.

2. “La La Land” (2016)

The most joyful movie of the decade, and joy is not a quality we should take for granted (especially these days). But in great musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Moulin Rouge!” or “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” joy is often the flip side of a kind of rapturous melancholy, one that allows us to take stock of how beautiful (and fleeting) life and love can be. And Damien Chazelle’s new-style version of an old-school Hollywood musical has a core of sublime sadness that lets it blossom into a bittersweet symphony. The film’s magic is there in its entrancing musical numbers (think Jacques Demy staged with the eagerness of young Spielberg), in the wistful tale of two lovestruck entertainers (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) who fall for each other yet can’t seem to get their passion on track, and in Chazelle’s devotion to the wonder of Old Hollywood, which makes every moment of “La La Land” feel like another day of sun.

3. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015)

A film so fast and furious that as much as I loved it the first time, on further viewings I felt myself learning how to watch it, training my eye to take in each razory leap and split-second cut. There has never been an action poet like George Miller, who returns to the hell-on-wheels grandeur of “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” to create a movie that builds on their nihilistic excitement, using speed, once again, not just to generate thrills (though God knows he does that) but to express a vision of existence — of men and women hurtling past the void, hanging on for dear life, wondering what besides the power of their velocity will save them. (In the Miller vision, speed = God.) In “Fury Road,” Miller creates a demolition-derby spectacle for the 21st century, as Max (Tom Hardy), a blunted shell, makes way for the women warriors (led by Charlize Theron) who now lead the fight for freedom as the rubber hits the road.

4. “Before Midnight” (2013)

“Marriage Story” is a great drama about divorce, but the third and most powerful of Richard Linklater’s ”Before” films is something even more naked and transporting: a journey through the emotional labyrinth of a relationship that is holding on even as it’s begun to hit the skids. After sharing a moony night of conversational bliss in “Before Sunrise,” then a reunion that takes stock of the love they didn’t have enough belief in in “Before Sunset,” Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) are now a veteran couple, with twin girls, a backlog of memory, and a love so marbled with affection and resentment that they can see each other completely … and, in another way, not at all. Linklater’s dialogue workds on the level of Bergman and Rohmer and ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” and the actors transform their descent from sunset to midnight into something miraculously spontaneous. They’re just two people in a room, their love flickering like a candle that may or may not go out.

5. “Hell or High Water” (2016)

Sheer genre-movie heaven. It’s about two brothers, one noble (Chris Pine) and one no good (Ben Foster), and it’s also about stealing, gambling, racism, the thorny destiny of family, and the stubborn mystique of West Texas, as embodied by an aging Texas Ranger (Jeff Bridges) who may be the most delectable slow-poke crime-solver since Columbo. The ultimate effect is that of a classic film noir told in sunlight, with a punch of humanity that will knock the wind out of you.

6. “Bridesmaids” (2011)

True confession: I don’t laugh out loud at very much screen comedy, because I always feel like I’ve seen the jokes before. But no matter how many times I watch this tale of friendship in the age of passive-aggressive one-upmanship and topsy-turvy class imbalance, I laugh uncontrollably. That’s because Kristen Wiig, who co-wrote the screenplay and stars as Annie, a bridesmaid whose old pal’s impending upscale wedding seems to be staged as a conspiracy to make her feel like a failure, has created a screen comedy of neurotic loserdom as masochistically uproarious as it is elemental and romantic. It’s not the first movie to prove that women could play the raunchy comedy game, but it’s one of the only movies to turn raunch into screwball art.

7. “Amour” (2012)

In most of his films, the Austrian director Michael Haneke uses his imperious ice-cold voyeurism to play funny games with the audience. But in this staggering tale of an octogenarian Paris couple, played by the legendary Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant, Haneke takes his drop-dead style — the probing silences, the gawking camera, the suspense built out of the fear of what’s coming next — to tell a tale of the mysteries of old age that’s driven by an alternating current of horror and heartbreak. After Riva’s character suffers a stroke, she’s both there and not there, and what unfolds suggests a dream play by Stanley Kubrick about how love finds its ultimate expression in death. It’s a film that will suck your breath away in empathy.

8. “The Tree of Life” (2011)

After taking a 20-year sabbatical from cinema, Terrence Malick came back with “The Thin Red Line.” But it was in “The Tree of Life,” a magnificent tale of growing up in small-town Texas during the 1950s, that Malick, at long last, made a drama that lived up to the dark incandescence of his two fabled films of the ’70s. The extraordinary creation-of-the-universe sequence — think the Book of Genesis meets “2001,” all done in 17 minutes — sets the stage for what is, in essence, a transcendent vision of everyday experience. Malick’s camera caresses each moment, turning life in the ’50s into a diorama of Proustian poignance, and the performances of Brad Pitt (as the sternly demanding father) and Jessica Chastain (as the mother whose tenderness makes his anger bearable) have the indelible effect of triggering primal feelings about our own parents when they were young enough to haunt us in their flawed innocence.

9. “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011)

When Tom Cruise, wearing electronic-suction-cup gloves, crawls like a spider over the towering glass surface of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai (and make no mistake, he’s really up there, on the tallest building in the world), he’s like one of Hitchcock’s ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances; like a comic-book superhero whose powers are of this earth; like a movie star doing the polar opposite of going through the motions — he’s living the motions, turning them into the measure of his stardom. That knockout vertigo sequence is an instant classic, but director Brad Bird, in his mind-bendingly ingenious “M:I” adventure, doesn’t rest on his set-piece laurels. He sustains the excitement of a caper built around a series of grand illusions that (like Cruise’s stunt work) may just be real. The result is the most exhilarating blockbuster of its era.

10. “Lady Bird” (2017)

Some viewers who didn’t hook into the splendor of Greta Gerwig’s drama about a Sacramento high schooler going through her fraught senior year said things like, “It’s a good coming-of-age film. But haven’t we seen that before?” Yes, but we haven’t seen it done like this: as a series of exquisitely staged memory snapshots, all leaping forward to create a whole sublimely larger than the sum of its parts. Christine, a.k.a. Lady Bird, played by Saoirse Ronan with a voluble charisma that’s equal parts love, confusion, and ferocity, goes from one boy to the next, blunders into confronting the loyalty that defines friendship, and wages a holy war against her mother (Laurie Metcalf) over the issue of whether she’s going to leave the nest of California when she heads off to college. What she’s really discovering, though, in a movie that turns out to be as religious as it is prickly, exuberant, and moving, is the glory of life itself.
"How's the despair?"
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