Lars von Trier’s 2011 magnum opus is a film about depression, and it’s a film about the end of the world, and more than anything, it’s a profoundly resonant film about how the two can feel indistinguishable from one another. No image from this decade at the movies has felt as radical-reverberant as that of Kirsten Dunst luxuriating - like a Grande Odalisque of annihilation - in the light of the rogue planet set to destroy humanity in Melancholia.
(Pictured: Melancholia, Mad Max: Fury Road, Tree of Life.) Photo: Magnolia Pictures, Warner Bros. (If you just want to see the Worst, click here.) Here are the films of the 2010s, ranked, for better and worse. It’s messy, and it’s filled with contradictions, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. On the other hand, we absolutely did plan for our bottom choices to be incendiary, and to speak to larger tendencies in the industry that have filled us with dread - except, of course, when they fill us with delight. The past 10 years have been marred by doomsday predictions about cinema, whether the harbingers are Netflix or superheroes or high frame rates. But when it turned out that way, it felt entirely appropriate. We hadn’t, for instance, planned for our top-three picks to be so … apocalyptic. (Is there such a thing as a definitive ranking?) But it does reflect the highs and lows of a tumultuous decade.
The list wasn’t a result of any consensus (to which the various annotations attest), and it certainly isn’t definitive. It’s more argument than science, too, which we proved over the course of a few mostly civil weeks of bickering and bantering over personal preferences, creating an appropriately chaotic point system for our ranking and then throwing that point system out the window - haphazardly moving things up, down, or off the top and bottom tiers entirely as we grew nearer to our deadline. Soon, we were permitting ourselves a few wild-card contenders, because list-making is more art than science. Of course, we’re critics, so we decided to allow any film included in one of our previous best-of-the-year lists to compete too.
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A movie released in less than four theaters could force its way into the mix, we determined, if it had been nominated for an industry award - from the Academy, the Directors Guild, the New York Film Critics Circle, etc. But were we punishing smaller films simply because their distributors deemed them uncommercial? Cue the guilt, and the exceptions. That cut down the crop to something slightly more manageable. Perhaps arbitrarily, we decided that for a film to be eligible for our ranking, it had to have played in at least four theaters in the U.S. The sheer amount posed the first and biggest challenge of putting together this list: deciding which of the movies that filtered through theaters and VOD services and streaming platforms qualified for a ranking of the decade’s best films.
Not everything has been marked by radical changes, even over 10 years and the release of so many movies. Toy Story 3 came out, and now we’re on … well, Toy Story 4. Netflix, which is likely to be competing with itself at the Oscars this year, was just starting to stream in Canada. Hypercool indie darlings Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart were the coupled-up stars of a lucrative supernatural teen romance. From celestial collisions to man-eating aliens to human centipedes, here’s to another decade at the movies.*
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