A 2010s List for Those That Couldn't Wait

[swo17]

Also now we know what kind of Scorsese fan Swo is based on the naming of a certain one.

Well, it's the much better title! (I didn't include a Scorsese film on my list in the end, though I was tempted to vote for Silence.) Otherwise, I tried to present everything with its "true title" that was in one of the Romance languages, in German, or was a proper name or easily discernible cognate. Hopefully there's no confusion about anything

[therewillbeblus]

Also now we know what kind of Scorsese fan Swo is based on the naming of a certain one.

Well, it's the much better title! (I didn't include a Scorsese film on my list in the end, though I was tempted to vote for Silence.) Otherwise, I tried to present everything with its "true title" that was in one of the Romance languages, in German, or was a proper name or easily discernible cognate. Hopefully there's no confusion about anything

I meant to say something about this as well- an even bigger thank you to swo for picking the correct title!

[therewillbeblus]

I'm very curious who the other #1s for La flor and The Young Pope were (other than, I'm guessing, zedz and domino, respectively)?

[swo17]

No one voted The Young Pope at #1. It received two #2 votes and then one more lower range vote. I think I should leave it to individual participants to share how they voted

[therewillbeblus]

Oh, well that makes all of those speculative posts from earlier meaningless, I totally misread that. And yeah, I'm asking the forum member to reveal their self as a member of team La Flor

[zedz]

I AM SPARTACUS!

[zedz]

Thanks swo. It looks like only twelve films from my list made it to the top 100, with nineteen on the also-rans. A few of those were former orphans, so thanks to the adoptive parents, whoever they might be.

So here's my deconstructed list, according to where they placed:

Champion:
1. La Flor (Llinas, 2016)
3. My Joy (Loznitsa, 2010)
7. The Turin Horse (Tarr, 2011)
8. An Elephant Sitting Still (Hu, 2018)
9. Mysteries of Lisbon (Ruiz, 2010)
10. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Gan, 2018)
21. Certain Women (Reichardt, 2016)
25. Zama (Martel, 2017)
27. World of Tomorrow (Herzfeldt, 2015)
28. Phoenix (Petzold, 2014)
37. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Sciamma, 2019)
40. The Assassin (Hou, 2015)

Redhead:
2. Fish and Cat (Mokri, 2013)
4. Happy Hour (Hamaguchi, 2015)
5. Jauja (Alonso, 2014)
6. Norte, the End of History (Diaz, 2013)
11. Araby (Dumans / Uchoa, 2017)
12. Life After Life (Zhang, 2016)
14. Vivan las Antipodas! (Kossakovsky, 2011)
17. Cemetery of Splendour (Weerasethakul, 2015)
18. The Strange Little Cat (Zurcher, 2013)
22. The Son of Joseph (Green, 2016)
23. Le Quatro Volte (Frammartino, 2010)
24. Summer 1993 (Simon, 2017)
32. Tabu (Gomes, 2012)
35. Custody (Legrand, 2017)
38. Kaili Blues (Gan, 2015)
41. Chamisso’s Shadow (Ottinger, 2016)
42. The Blackcoat’s Daughter (Perkins, 2015)
46. The Tribe (Slaboshpytskyi, 2014)
50. The Clock (Marclay, 2010)

Love Leaves Its Abusers:
13. A Gentle Creature (Loznitsa, 2017)
15. Sick, Sick, Sick (Furtado, 2019) - The best Claire Denis film of the decade.
16. Exhibition (Hogg, 2013)
19. Les Demons (Lesage, 2015)
20. Sieranevada (Puiu, 2016) - I think this is Puiu's best film, and I wish it were more accessible.
26. Nana (Massadian. 2011)
29. First Cousin Once Removed (Berliner, 2012) - I rewatched this to check its placement, and it's such a formally accomplished, personal, confrontational documentary that I left it in the middle of the list. Berliner documents the decline of his brilliant uncle, a poet, into dementia, but jumbles the chronology so that we see Edwin Honig responding to the same questions and stimuli at different stages of his 'journey'. The process lays bare Honig's gifts and demons, as the last things to desert him are his poetry and a very early childhood trauma. It's a heartbreaking movie, but not a sentimental one.
30. Under Electric Clouds (German, 2015)
31. The Ground We Won (Pryor, 2015) - Stunningly shot documentary about a rural rugby team. I suspect this is far too Kiwi to resonate much abroad.
33. Aita (de Orbe, 2010)
34. Bill Direen: A Memory of Others (Ogston, 2017) - Same box as The Ground We Won, above. Direen's astounding musical talent will no doubt communicate very well, but the rest of the film is built upon a matrix of local historical and literary references that give it a particular richness and resonance for New Zealand audiences.
36. Koko-di Koko-da (Nyholm, 2019)
39. The Ancient Woods (Survila, 2017)
43. Fire Will Come (Laxe, 2019)
44. Song without a Name (Leon, 2019)
45. The Andes (Cocina / Leon, 2013) - These animators are simply remarkable. I put this on my list as it was the first example of their work that I saw, and it had an epic / intimate vibe that was hard to shake. This doesn't seem to be viewable anywhere, but their other shorts, or the feature The Wolf House, will give you a taste.
47. No No Sleep (Tsai, 2015)
48. The Five Minute Museum (Bush, 2015)
49. Our Time (Reygadas, 2018)

[DarkImbecile]

01. Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Céline Sciamma, 2019) 556/16(5)/1(x2)/--

Fantastic work, everyone!











The check’s in the mail, Swo

[swo17]

31. The Ground We Won (Pryor, 2015) - Stunningly shot documentary about a rural rugby team. I suspect this is far too Kiwi to resonate much abroad.
34. Bill Direen: A Memory of Others (Ogston, 2017) - Same box as The Ground We Won, above. Direen's astounding musical talent will no doubt communicate very well, but the rest of the film is built upon a matrix of local historical and literary references that give it a particular richness and resonance for New Zealand audiences.

The Ground We Won (available as an import DVD from Madman) is a striking B&W film (I love the shots in the fog) and from an outsider's perspective there was enough of interest culturally (like the intense tribal dance toward the end) to resonate. The Direen doc (available as a bonus with either a physical or digital purchase of this album) is as you say, but the local connection was lost on me, and the film isn't really trying to be visually memorable or anything. I'd probably get more out of it after being more familiar with the soundtrack.

I've gotten to this project much too late to make too much of an impact, but I hope you can set aside an hour and a half before you submit your list to watch The Bob Emergency (2019, dir. Jon Bois), one of last decade's most unexpectedly profound pieces of art from a silly premise: there used to be a lot of sports figures named Bob, now there are very few. From there, Bois finds Bobs who are legends of their fields and Bobs who failed so miserably that they barely register as blips on the historical record, and he finds in all of them pathos and strength even in their failures. It's both much funnier and much more moving than the average sports documentary, and it ranks very high on my (again, very tardy) list.

I need to sit with a film for more than a day before I'll consider making room for it on my list, but this was great and I want to watch more of Bois' videos to have a better feel for whether this is a high point. It's lacking the surreal speculative fiction of 17776 (aka What Football Will Look Like in the Future) (which, seriously, everyone should read/watch right now) but retains a lot of the humor, fancy, and heart

[therewillbeblus]

Black - Main List; Blue - Also-Rans; Red - Orphans

1. La Flor
2. The Young Pope
3. Moonrise Kingdom
4. Phantom Thread
5. Vox Lux
6. Manchester By The Sea
7. 20th Century Women
8. Ema
9. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
10. Assassination Nation

11. Twin Peaks: The Return
12. The Social Network
13. The Master
14. Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood
15. Margaret
16. Young Adult
17. Gone Girl
18. Boyhood
19. Inherent Vice
20. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
21. Detention
22. World of Tomorrow series
23. Caprice
24. The Wolf of Wall Street
25. Inside Llewyn Davis
26. Irrational Man
27. O.J.: Made In America
28. Magic in the Moonlight
29. The Blackcoat’s Daughter
30. Le Redoutable
31. Ad Astra
32. Colossal
33. List (I thought this forum liked lists)
34. Under the Silver Lake
35. Starlet
36. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
37. First Reformed
38. Inception
39. Nobody’s Daughter Haewon
40. American Hustle
41. Unsane
42. The Bling Ring
43. Smashed
44. The House That Jack Built
45. The Myth of the American Sleepover
46. Saint Maud
47. Alps
48. Foxcatcher
49. Out-Takes from the Life of a Happy Man
50. MacGruber

[knives]

Wow, you’re the other one who loves the Juice and American Hustle. Noice.

[therewillbeblus]

Wow, you’re the other one who loves the Juice and American Hustle. Noice.

I'm your fellow irrational man

[Balthazar]

Oh, well that makes all of those speculative posts from earlier meaningless, I totally misread that. And yeah, I'm asking the forum member to reveal their self as a member of team La Flor

I was the mystery third man. Very much set in stone at the top of my list.

Thanks swo. It looks like only twelve films from my list made it to the top 100, with nineteen on the also-rans. A few of those were former orphans, so thanks to the adoptive parents, whoever they might be.

As a longtime lurker who didn’t submit a list in the first round, I'd guessed that a couple of the orphans I planned to save were your picks. But I hadn’t thought of The Clock until seeing it on swo’s original list. It struck me as an ideal #50 (albeit a faintly uncanny choice given I’ve only seen half of it). Little did I know that too was one of your choices, and meant our lists started and ended the same way.


Anyway, half my list were also-rans; orphans were relatively few and as follows:


2) Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2019). A little surprised by this failure to rank. More fool me for not speaking up til now.

I have some sympathy with hearthesilence’s earlier comments about Jia’s 2010s work, and the gangster framework’s certainly more of a crowd-pleaser, but to me this brilliantly combines concerns old and new. Its sprawl allows him to revisit or reflect on favourite themes, and there’s a wonderful performance at the heart of it. It’s shot beautifully, too. Using different cameras (and old footage) for certain segments might feel a little on the nose, but the film pulls it off not least b/c we’ve seen Zhao Tao in these contexts many times before.

20) Western (Valeska Grisebach, 2017). Quietly powerful, and never goes quite where you expect.
25) The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, 2019). The stylisation is turned up to 11 here: elaborate choreography, ambitious set pieces, neon and more neon. All the same it never forgets the society in which it’s ostensibly set. Side note: if you want to blot out recent events via an altogether more pleasing scene of Wuhan market life, this is the film for you.
32) Century (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2012). An inevitable orphan. Of those I’ve seen, this is the Everson film that’s stayed with me the most.
33) Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham, 2018). I’ve always struggled with my native cinema’s various miserablist traditions, but the odd gem shines through. Though it’s not quite Terence Davies, it’s distinct enough to overcome my instincts.
34) I Was At Home, But… (Angela Schanelec, 2019)
48) To The Ends of The Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2019)



My list was notably skewed to more recent years - 18 from 2018 or 2019 - which I'm hoping isn't recency bias. The one big discovery of the project was at least from 2013: Stranger By The Lake, to which I finally got around after all this time.

Thanks to swo for compiling!

[therewillbeblus]

Oh, well that makes all of those speculative posts from earlier meaningless, I totally misread that. And yeah, I'm asking the forum member to reveal their self as a member of team La Flor

I was the mystery third man. Very much set in stone at the top of my list.

Thanks for coming out of the woodwork, Balthazar, you're on the right side of history!

[swo17]

How can one see Century?

[senseabove]

As always, thanks swo!

My list below, though I'm too lazy to sort into list-makers/also-rans/orphans. It was very rough and I intended to do some pretty thorough revising and fine-tuning...but I forgot to account for visiting family and being utterly exhausted after a week of playing tour guide.

Happy to see a few of my orphans rescued—Meek's Cutoff, Mildred Pierce, Nocturama, Eden, Grand Bizarre, Stranger by the Lake (thanks Balthazar!), and probably some others I'm overlooking. Myself, I'd love the fellow Eden fan to come forward!

I'm idly curious, now, which decade list has had the largest number of unique movies submitted, if that's an easily calculable thing...

SpoilerShow

1. Phantom Thread
2. Meek’s Cutoff
3. The Grand Bizarre
4. Tomboy
5. Tomcat
6. Nocturama
7. Carol
8. Inherent Vice
9. House of Tolerance
10. The Florida Project
11. Eden
12. Little Women
13. Saint Laurent
14. Ema
15. Stranger by the Lake
16. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
17. Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project
18. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
19. Things to Come
20. Mildred Pierce
21. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
22. Vox Lux
23. Lady Bird
24. 20th Century Women
25. Aquarius
26. Starlet
27. La Flor
28. Elle
29. Girlhood
30. Clouds of Sils Maria
31. Pain and Glory
32. Mad Max: Fury Road
33. Twin Peaks: The Return
34. Zama
35. Suburban Birds
36. Ham on Rye
37. The Chambermaid
38. The Assassin
39. Certain Women
40. The Young Pope
41. High Life
42. Mysteries of Lisbon
43. Caprice
44. Deerskin
45. Beginners
46. First Cow
47. Bastards
48. Widows
49. Shoplifters
50. Stray Dogs

[zedz]

As a longtime lurker who didn’t submit a list in the first round, I'd guessed that a couple of the orphans I planned to save were your picks. But I hadn’t thought of The Clock until seeing it on swo’s original list. It struck me as an ideal #50 (albeit a faintly uncanny choice given I’ve only seen half of it). Little did I know that too was one of your choices, and meant our lists started and ended the same way.

Yeah, I haven't seen the whole thing either, because there was no way to do so, as half the film was playing out inside a locked building. Which is why I couldn't really have it anywhere other that the Gus Visser and His Singing Duck spot.

[therewillbeblus]

The most heartening standout of the main list was how much love there is for Margaret, which I should have expected but just didn't anticipate in these volumes. I thought there were more of you who adored Vox Lux to include it in the top ten tho

Oh, and I totally forgot Mysteries of Lisbon, which I see is hovering around my top ten of the decade on an informal iteration of a decades list in an older word doc. Oh well, there's plenty of time to remedy this (and for the Larrain-loving stragglers to see Ema)

[domino harvey]

My Top Ten

01 Moonrise Kingdom
02 the Young Pope
03 Detention
04 Amanda
05 Jackie
06 Caprice
07 Another Earth
08 the Blackcoat’s Daughter
09 Inception
10 Everything is Terrible Does the Hip Hop

[brundlefly]

Good show, all.

Is there any way to highlight titles that aren't narrative features? Because there clearly aren't already enough ways the data's broken down.

[swo17]

I wouldn't really know if a lot of the films I haven't seen are non-narrative, but my guess is that they generally didn't perform very well. Basically every non-narrative film on my list (and there were a lot of them) ended up an orphan

[brundlefly]

Orphans can be the most interesting stuff, the titles people are most passionate about including despite knowing that they're unlikely to win rank. Totally understand, though, thanks.

[Maltic]

Correct, although three of his films received votes the last time we did the prior decade

I'm not one to complain since I didn't manage to do a list myself

I might've included these not-even-orphans, though:

Love & Friendship (Stillman)
Dragged Across Concrete + Brawl In Cell Block 99 (Zahler)
Drug War + Romancing in thin air (To)
In My Room (Köhler)
Richard Jewell (Eastwood)
Eega (Rajamouli)
It Follows (Mitchell)
Girl Walk // All Day (Krupnick)
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (Hyams)

I guess no one here is on the Late Ferrara train btw

[domino harvey]

Love and Friendship was a last minute cut for me. So funny, but just not enough room for it and I prefer Damsels, which did make my list

[therewillbeblus]

I guess no one here is on the Late Ferrara train btw

That's the only Ferrara train I am on. Tommaso is one of the greatest depictions of a recovering addict involved a 12-step program ever made, that is so esoterically populated with 12-step programmatic teachings and overall conditioned ethos that I'm surprised non-addicts have warmed to it. There's definitely a universality in its philosophy- which is the disguised secret of 12-step programs anyways, universal tools for living life only accessible for those who are willing to face raw truths after hitting bottom- but it's translated with plenty of idiosyncrasies that inevitably will be lost on non-members of those communities. It may make my list next time, but here's my personalized writeup if it's of any interest.