We asked our editors – Brian Tallerico, Matt Zoller Seitz, Nell Minow, Nick Allen, and Matt Fagerholm – to write the capsule entries for #11-25. The list below was compiled from individual lists by Brian Tallerico, Matt Zoller Seitz, Simon Abrams, Nick Allen, Monica Castillo, Matt Fagerholm, Odie Henderson, Glenn Kenny, Tomris Laffly, Christy Lemire, Nell Minow, Sheila O’Malley, and Peter Sobczynski.
Honorable Mentions
“Annihilation,” “The Babadook,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Before Midnight,” “BlacKkKlansman,” “Blindspotting,” “Blue is the Warmest Color,” “A Bread Factory,” “Brooklyn,” “Burning,” "Call Me By Your Name," “Certified Copy,” “A Dangerous Method,” “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” “Dogtooth,” “Elle,” “Ex Machina,” “The Farewell,” “Fences,” “First Reformed,” “The Florida Project,” “Fruitvale Station,” “Gone Girl,” “Goodbye to Language,” “Hidden Figures,” "Holy Motors," “Inception,” “The Irishman,” “La La Land,” “Last of the Unjust,” “The Love Witch,” “Madeline’s Madeline,” “Marriage Story,” “Minding the Gap,” “Only Lovers Left Alive,” “Paterson,” “Personal Shopper,” “A Quiet Passion,” “Shirkers,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” “Stories We Tell,” “Toy Story 3,” “Zama,” and “Zero Dark Thirty”
The 25 Best Films of the 2010s
25. “Boyhood” (2014)
Watching Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" makes us such a part of the family on screen that we begin to feel like we are watching our own home movies. Filmed over a twelve-year period, the production process allows us to watch Mason (Ellar Coltrane) grow up in a continuous span of 2 hours, 46 minutes. Linklater filmed his cast for just a few days each year, giving us only a few short scenes to catch up with Mason’s life, including the evolution of his relationship with his father (Ethan Hawke) and mother (Oscar-winner Patricia Arquette) and the ups and downs of adolescence. There are glimpses of the cultural and technological touchstones of the era, from staying up until midnight to get the latest Harry Potter book to playing with the clamshell version of the Gameboy. As often is the case with Linklater, “Boyhood” feels so improvised and intimate that its tone resembles a documentary, but it never loses his sure sense of structure and direction. By the final image, we have grown up with Mason. (Nell Minow)
24. “Melancholia” (2011)
It’s a pity that the self-sabotaging words of tireless provocateur Lars von Trier doomed the chances of his masterwork to truly compete with Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life” for the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes. Conceived on an epic scale worthy of Stanley Kubrick, both films illustrate how our inner psychology is reflected by the behavior of the cosmos, with the timeless strains of classical music serving as a celestial soundtrack. The same foreboding excerpt from Richard Wagner’s opera, “Tristan Und Isolde,” plays at crucial moments throughout Von Trier’s picture, beginning with its extraordinary eight-minute pre-title sequence, depicting the doom-laden premonitions of its depression-addled heroine, Justine (an Oscar-worthy Kirsten Dunst), as paintings in deliberate motion. Whether it’s the rigid schedule of her wedding reception, the demands of her power-hungry boss or the earnest efforts of her husband to control their future, the oppressive forces weighing upon Justine are in direct conflict with her brain chemistry. Only in the film’s second half does her supposed “mental illness” prove to be a superpower of sorts, rescuing the young son of her sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg), from the awareness of encroaching annihilation by contriving the illusion of safety, a fitting metaphor for the vitality of dreams. (Matt Fagerholm)
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