BEST MOVIES OF THE DECADE: #20-#11

Continuing on with my list of best movies of the 2010's:

#20 Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

From an earlier post:  The departure in tone, story, and style from the first one is akin to Christopher Nolan's evolution from Batman Begins to The Dark Knight.  The original story was a nostalgic look at the past.  This second film was a fish-out-of-water story.  But whereas Steve's old-fashioned ways were more of a punchline in Avengers, they served as a moral compass to The Winter Soldier.

What amazed me about the story was how relevant it felt without feeling preachy.  We instictively feel that there has been erosion of values in our country, but it is hard to pinpoint where.  And what was more amazing was that Steve's insight did not come off as simplistic in the style of Pollyanna or Forrest Gump.  The solutions to the problems presented were bold, radical, and costly.  I was shocked at how this movie attempted to change the Marvel status quo by not compromising with corruption. 

#19 Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

From my review: The insanity of the world created by writer/director George Miller belies an amazingly tight narrative.  Most action movies are a series of different explosive action set pieces.  Fury Road is essentially one long, exhilarating action chase scene...

Much has been already written about the epic car stunts in this film and they are not hyperbolic.  Much of the film was done with practical effects rather than CGI, which gives the action a rawness and weight and visceral punch.  You can feel the pressure of acceleration and you feel rocked with each crash.  This is a film of a young and hungry director, which is what impresses me so much about 70-year-old George Miller's fast and furious spectacle.  It is crazy in a way that should be outright silly.  But when the inmates run the asylum, normal logic is thrown out the window.  The production design drips with insanity that follows from some kind of crazed function.  Why is there a giant truck with 6 drummers and a flame-throwing guitar player?  Because this is the world that is broken!...

The world is violent, disgusting, and ugly.  The movie is R-Rated and rightly so.  The violence is bloody and over-the top.  But the movie ironically uses a great deal of discretion.  A key element of the story is the sexual enslavement of women and yet the movie never shows you the women being abused in this way.  The movie is an odd style of gratuitous violence that is not exploitative.

One of the things I was surprised by in this story was the emphasis on human redemption.  There are truly evil, despicable people in this movie.  And yet even those that appear brainwashed beyond any hope show signs of humanity.  Max himself narrates at the beginning that he has been reduced to one instinct: survive.  But despite himself, he cannot let go of his nagging conscience.  Even when it makes no sense, he must do what is right.

#18 American Sniper (2014)

From my review: This is the movie of young man.  It has the vibrancy and the energy of someone at the beginning of his career. But Eastwood, at 84, has infused his movie with a dynamic power that I haven't seen in his other films.  He is very conservative with his movie score, but in this case it serves to underscore the realism of the movie and when music does come up, it is heartbreaking.

The staging of the action sequences is great.  He doesn't cut it up and make it choppy.  Instead, he gets most of the excitement out of the rising tension.  Whenever Chris and his crew enter the war zone, you feel the danger.  A knot enters your stomach that doesn't let up until he's home...

But what really brings this movie together is the wonderfully stoic performance of Cooper.  I have never seen him better.  The great thing about what he does is his restraint.  He plays Chris as a very John Wayne-type man.  He is the strong, silent type in the classic sense.  His quietness is not portrayed as a flaw that has to be broken, but just a character trait.  Chris is who he is and he is okay with that.  Cooper plays portrays him with a simple honesty that resonates with anyone who knows the personality type.  But Cooper's performance has power percolating behind his eyes in a way that transforms him.  I stopped thinking of him as Bradley Cooper.

#17 Of Gods and Men (2010)

I did not think that modern European cinema was capable of a film like this.  Of Gods and Men tells the story of French Trappist monks living in a predominantly Muslim community in Algeria during their civil war.  These men have dedicated their lives to prayer and witness to the love of God.  They are not preachers, but instead live lives of quiet service.  But as the extremists make their lives more dangerous, they have to choose whether or not to run.

The movie is shot with such reverence and respect that I can hardly believe it.  The faith of these men is not held up for ridicule.  I cannot tell if the filmmakers are believers themselves, but you can see that they took the faith of the monks very seriously.  They are held up as a bastion of peace amidst horrid violence.  In one scene, a monk goes to town to excitedly make copies of new chants for the monks to sing, but the ugliness of the war that he sees brings him to stoic silence.  In another scene, the war helicopters hover near the monastery, so the monks join arms and sing their hymns as an act of defiance against violence.  This is a mostly gentle and meditative film that is broken up by the violence all too present in our world.  And yet it gives us a glimpse of the world to come.

#16 Little Women (2019)


From my review: Gerwig knows how to direct.  She makes life in the 1860's, even as difficult as it was, look nostalgic and beautiful.  Gerwig makes Jo's process of writing fascinating and draws us in so that even the shots of the book-binding are fascinating to watch.  That is because instead of making a "modern" movie, she engaged in classic film-making, showing us how not so much how this story speaks to our age, but how it speaks to all ages.

This movie casts a spell on you and doesn't let go.  She took Louisa May Alcott's novel, found it's heart, and gave it to us on the screen.  There is a reason that this story keeps getting retold and refilmed.  This is a universal story.  It is our story.  It is the story about how we have to grow up and how the lessons of childhood should mold us into adults who follow our dreams but never turn our backs on the family that God has given us.   This movie is a modern classic that I believe will be the definitive film version of Little Women for years to come.

#15 IT (2017)

From my review: This is a story that is straightforward and easy to latch on to.  Like the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, IT does a good job of translating the fears of transitioning from child to teenager.  They sometimes hit the idea of "facing your fear" a bit too hard, but they generally avoid being too heavy-handed, so as not to impede the enjoyment of the story.  And despite how scary the story it, Muschietti makes it truly enjoyable.

The second thing that the movie gets right is how they capture the nostalgia of 1989.  I happened to be the exact age of the main characters in 1989 and the filmmakers captured the feel for the era perfectly, down to the double billing of Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 at the local movie theater.  Yet they don't over saturate you with nostalgic references, but instead do a great job of creating the atmosphere.

The third thing that IT does very well is capturing that awkward transition into adolescents.  Our heroes are not little kids, but they are not fully semi-independent teenagers.  Our heroes feel the odd loneliness of responsibility creeping in.  And at the same time we sense their feeling of powerlessness at their youth.  The adults all come off as out of touch or slightly sinister, causing a greater sense of the kind of alienation you feel at that awkward stage.

#14 Joker (2019)

From my review: I usually try to avoid any reviews for a movie before I write my own, but I came across one that had such an amazing insight into how this movie works.  The reviewer said that human beings are naturally empathetic.  So at the beginning of the movie, our hearts go out to Arthur and we yearn for him to overcome his odds and be treated with dignity.  But the reviewer pointed out that Arthur doesn't become a monster.  He always is a monster who only slowly lets go of his inhibitions.  As this happens, we also slowly lose our empathy with him.  Arthur revels in his violence.  After his first murder, he takes a moment in a public bathroom to do a slow dance of triumph and ecstasy.  It is as lyrical as it is disturbing and ugly.  He is finding glory in literal and moral filth. While Philips brings into Joker's messed-up world, he is clearly not advocating for his deranged world-view....

Arthur is asked towards the end of the film if he is political.  He responds that he doesn't believe in anything.  More-so than his mental illness, this is the root cause of the moral void inside of him.  He believes in nothing bigger than himself.  He says at another point, "I used to think my life was a tragedy, but now I now it's a comedy."  That is actually a horrifying shift.  Life is tragic if the pain we experience is not the way it's suppose to be.  All suffering in this world is the tragic effect of Original Sin.  But there is hope because we know that there is a higher ideal, even if it is not something we are currently experiencing.  But Arthur's view that his life is comedy means that life is a joke: an empty meaningless practical joke that is playing out to his expense.  His only response to to return the pain of this practical joke in kind to those who dish it out to him.  This is what I see more and more in the world with those who act out in large-scale violence.  Life, to them, is a horrible joke.  And in their minds, the only way we will get the joke is when they lash out at us.  As good as this movie was, I cannot say it was enjoyable and I'm not sure I would want to sit through the whole thing again.

#13 Interstellar (2014)

From my review: This Nolan's most emotional movie.  That isn't to say that his other movies are cold, but there is a strong level of restraint to his character's feelings in films like Memento or Inception.  But this is new territory for him.  And McConaughey more than delivers on the part.  He conveys not only strong and believable intelligence, but his heart is on his sleeve, especially when it comes to his children.  You can feel the tearing of his heart as he is put into an impossible situation and must deal with the pain of leaving.  Cooper, like Cobb in Inception, only wants to get home to his children.  But Interstellar surpasses that catharsis because of the raw power of the father's love and his desperation to return home that we see because of Nolan and McConaughey.  These deeply emotional scenes are still sticking with me a week after seeing Interstellar.  He touched on something primal in the heart.

#12 Hacksaw Ridge (2016)

From my review: What I like about a Mel Gibson war movie is that he brings both the horrors and the heroism of the battlefield come to life in a powerful way...

Director Mel Gibson once again delivers a visually and thematically powerful film.  He is one of the few directors that can incorporate overtly religious themes and images without it feeling ham-handed and preachy.  Most "Christian movies" fail because they choose preaching a message over telling a story.  Gibson knows that his job is to tell a story, but he does not shy away from using the whole world of Christian art, culture, and symbolism to tell that story.

And Hacksaw Ridge brings up the relationship between violence, war, relgious faith, and conscience in an incredibly thoughtful and emotional way.  Too often war movies gloss over the moral consequences of war, even if it is for the noblest of causes.  And Doss is challenged by fellow believers about his absolute non-violence.  It is a good reflection and meditation on how the believer should approach the taking of human life.

#11 Teddy Bear (2012)

From my review:  I saw the trailer and then watched the short film Dennis, to which Teddy Bear is a sequel of sorts.  Both showed the wonderfully intriguing figure of Dennis (a stellar Kim Kold), as a lonely, gentle body-builder who lives with his over-bearing mother (Elsebeth Steentoft).  The short film is study in loneliness with an ending that is both a bit creepy while being tender...

In Teddy Bear, we pick up with Dennis' journey to find someone.  The film opens with Dennis looking at himself in the mirror during a big date.  The film is full of this self-reflection, with fascinating results.  Kold and writer/director Mads Matthiesen create a wonderfully subtle visual illusion: they make a giant look small.  Dennis is constantly absorbed into the background.  He uses his posture to emotionally shrink himself in scene after scene.  You never forget the power in Dennis' body, but when you see him shirtless, typing in a dark room in front of a small computer while wearing reading glasses, you get this odd mixture of potency and impotence all at once.  Dennis is a majestic stallion who has not been simply broken in, he has been broken...

Mattheson does a fantastic job of telling the story primarily with the visuals.  His use of light and color are wonderful.  But he would not be able to accomplish this without Kold.  Because his performance is not explosive and "showy," it may be overlooked for the accomplishment that it is.  A shy body-builder could come off easily as stupid.  But instead we see reservoirs of depth and sadness behind his eyes.  And every sliver of joy tugs at your heartstrings.

Stay tuned for my TOP 10 MOVIES of the DECADE