MY ANNUAL MOVIE THINGIE: I have no idea what the best movies of 2020 might be, though I assume at least half of them are TikToks. Fortunately, I have a decade to figure it out: Here at The Perpetual Three-Dot Column we like to let these questions marinate a while before we answer them, so we wrap up each year with my picks for the best films of 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and so on.

When the Motion Picture Academy looked back at 2010, it gave its Best Picture award to The King's Speech, one of those middlebrow movies that check all the boxes that Oscar voters see as signs of quality without ever doing anything remotely interesting. These are all much better:

1. True Grit
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Written by the Coens, from a novel by Charles Portis

Portis finally gets the adaptation—and the adapters—that he deserves.

2. Tabloid
Directed by Errol Morris

A true tale of porn, Mormons, crime, cloning, and that psychic space where sexual desire mixes with paranoid violence.

3. Toy Story 3
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Written by Michael Arndt, from a story by Unkirch, John Lasseter, and Andrew Stanton

Ned Beatty plays a plush, purple, cute, and cuddly Stalin.

4. Winter's Bone
Directed by Debra Granik
Written by Granik and Anne Rosellini, from a novel by Daniel Woodrell

"Talking just causes witnesses."

5. Meek's Cutoff
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Written by Jonathan Raymond

I wrote a book about conspiracy theories, and I devoted the bulk of the second chapter to the white settler's fear of the Indian. But if you don't want to read that, you could watch this instead.

6. Four Lions
Directed by Chris Morris
Written by Morris, Jesse Armstrong, and Sam Bain

The best comedy about terrorism since The Third Generation.

7. Marwencol
Directed by Jeff Malmberg

A man loses his memory, builds a new self, and builds a small world for that self to live in.

8. Essential Killing
Directed by Jerzy Skolimowski
Written by Skolimowski, Ewa Piaskowska, and James McManus

"It would be about a man in chains, who runs away barefoot through the snow into the wild forest," Skolimowski later said, looking back at his plans for the film. "I would leave the question of whether he is guilty or innocent open and ambiguous. The political aspects of the situation didn't interest me: to me politics is a dirty game and I don't want to voice my opinions. What is important is that the man who runs away is returning to the state of a wild animal, who has to kill in order to survive."

9. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Directed by Edgar Wright
Written by Wright and Michael Bacall, from a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O'Malley

Forget The Social Network. (Seriously: Forget it. It's lousy.) This is the year's best movie about life in the digital era.

10. The Kids Are All Right
Directed by Lisa Cholodenko
Written by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg

"Why'd you donate sperm?" "It just seemed like a lot more fun than donating blood."

Honorable mentions:

11. Greenberg (Noah Baumbach)
12. Inception (Christopher Nolan)
13. Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn)
14. Carlos (Olivier Assayas)
15. Exit Through the Gift Shop (Banksy)
16. And Everything Is Going Fine (Steven Soderbergh)
17. The Secret World of Arrietty (Hiromasa Yonebayashi)
18. Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky)
19. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
20. Down Home Music (Dietrich Wawzyn)

Of the films of 2010 that I haven't seen, I'm most interested in Spark of Being.

posted by Jesse 12:18 AM

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