Favorite Movies 2010-2019

Since we recently concluded a decade, there have been a few "best of" lists for those ten years.  Let's chip in!  Rather than go through the process of picking out the ten best movies regardless of where they fell (I have been very obsessive about ranking movies in the past), I figured I'd list my favorite from each year.

2010: Inception
I've been a big fan of Christopher Nolan since Memento.  I went back and watched Following when I became aware of its existence.  Memento was my favorite movie for a while.  The Dark Knight instantly was a favorite.  Outside of Batman, Inception became Nolan's most famous movie thanks to its trippy visuals (later replicated in Doctor Strange) and outstanding cast.  It singlehandedly revived Tom Hardy's career! 

2011: Warrior
Speaking of Hardy, Warrior was my favorite movie released a year later.  It's Hardy's Brando moment.  And he stars opposite Joel Edgerton in his breakthrough role.  It's an unspeakably breathtaking cinematic achievement on a strictly human scale, in a decade that increasingly belonged to spectacle.  Many dismiss it as an MMA movie, but if it is, then it's the Rocky of MMA movies, and nobody ever dismissed Rocky as a boxing movie. 

2012: Django Unchained
I thought Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz had engineered magic in Inglourious Basterds, but I hadn't seen anything yet.  Waltz has continued to be a significant presence in film, but he will never top the moment he tells Leonardo DiCaprio that the writer (Alexander Dumas) he was attempting to use to legitimize slavery was actually black.

2013: Saving Mr. Banks
The incredible story of how Mary Poppins was made not only gave Tom Hanks an unexpectedly brilliant role as Walt Disney, but Colin Farrell another career highlight as the inspiration for the title.  The whole thing is great insight into the creative process, besides.

2014: Interstellar
Here's Christopher Nolan again!  A lot of viewers, I think, were exhausted over his supposed genius.  They saw Inception.  They were wowed by Inception.  But for a lot of people, one towering achievement can never truly be followed by another.  So they saw Interstellar and thought..."Well that's not 2001: A Space Odyssey," a movie it superficially resembles.  I was never wowed by 2001.  I ended up reading all four Arthur C. Clarke books at one point, but I never thought the books, or the Stanley Kubrick movie, was really as great as they clearly want to be.  But Interstellar is truly great, and it achieves that status by being transcendent, which is what 2001 desperately wants to be, but instead is just one of those projects that grapples at big ideas but doesn't know what to do with them except toss them up on a page or the screen.  And as he always is, Nolan is in full control of Interstellar, and I still wonder if it's his best film.

2015: The Force Awakens
Okay, I'm a Star Wars nerd, but in the same way I'm a Star Trek nerd.  I generally like all of it, even the stuff most of the fans despise.  It's not because I'm indiscriminant, but that I don't choose to hate something just because it exists, which seems like the primary motivating factor of a lot of fans, even if they will never admit it and come up with a million things to defend their views.  So I really loved seeing another Star Wars trilogy begin.  And this was a great beginning.

2016: Arrival
Denis Villeneuve is about as close to the second coming of Christopher Nolan as we're likely to get, at least anytime soon.  I missed Prisoners when it was released, but was sufficiently wowed when I got around to it.  And he has never disappointed me.  And Arrival is a masterpiece (still want to read the original short story on which it's based), the best showcase Amy Adams has gotten in an already phenomenal career.

2017: Logan
After Dark Knight, this is the best superhero movie ever made.  Hugh Jackman was born to play Wolverine, and this is the performance he was building toward all along, and everything around him works, at last, equally well.

2018: Isle of Dogs
A hugely charming fable, exquisitely put together, a towering artistic achievement from Wes Anderson.

2019: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
I can't stop praising this one.  I've been a fan of Terry Gilliam since before I really had a personal reason to be (that was how much I loved The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), and so I was well aware of the tortured history to this becoming a reality, so it was a great relief to see how much it was worth the wait.  Especially having recently read and very much enjoyed the original Cervantes, to see how cleverly Gilliam updated it, with enough original charm, I'm still aghast at how little anyone else seems to care.