70. “The Souvenir” (2019)
Perhaps you’ve been unlucky enough to find yourself entrapped in a toxic, mentally debilitating relationship. Perhaps you’ve found yourself falling for someone who is prone to emotional abuse. Perhaps you’ve grown as a person in the wake of the breakup, even if the scars inflicted upon your soul may never leave you. Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir,” one of the finest films of 2019, is a refreshingly unsentimental snapshot about this very specific experience. The film is an uncharacteristically candid and autobiographical tale from a director who is normally known for her glacial, uncompromising portraits of the ennui and anguish experienced by the British upper crust (“Unrelated,” “Exhibition”). Honor Swinton-Byrne, daughter of Tilda, plays Julie: a posh, guileless film student and human work-in-progress who mistakenly falls into a rickety courtship with a thoughtlessly manipulative and loathsome heroin addict (Tom Burke). Hogg’s latest offers little in the way of easy answers, but it’s nevertheless an emotionally destabilizing powerhouse of a film— one that puts its protagonist through the wringer, but offers a sliver of reluctant hope in its gorgeously elusive final frames. – NL
69. “Suspiria” (2018)
One wonders if critics and audiences would have been kinder to Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” had the film been more obvious in aping the style of Dario Argento’s trailblazing giallo masterwork from 1977. While Argento’s film is an undeniable high point in an impressive career, Guadagnino’s version is ultimately the deeper, knottier, more complex, and ultimately more disturbing film. It’s a vision of operatic insanity from a director working at the apex of his skill set, fueled by some performances that are outright terrifying (Tilda Swinton in particular has rarely seemed more menacing) and a gorgeous, funereal score from Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. Some have accused “Suspiria” of being self-serious, and while Guadagnino’s remake is certainly thoughtful in exploring a variety of challenging themes, this reductive assertion discounts the mischievous, black-hearted humor at the film’s core. Guadagnino knows his film is ludicrous, grotesque, and over-the-top, and instead of apologizing for those things, he embraces them, turning this “Suspiria” into an unhallowed ballet of beauty and bile that defies pedantic critical analysis. – NL
68. “Tangerine” (2015)
Slowly building a strong, eclectic body of work for nearly 20 years, it wasn’t until the micro-budgeted Sundance breakout “Tangerine” that filmmaker Sean Baker really got the national recognition he deserved. Shot entirely on three iPhone 5S’s, Baker made one of the most groundbreaking films of the decade, and not just for its technical ambitions. The film cast two transgender actresses (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez and Mya Taylor) as sex workers making their way across Hollywood on a warm Christmas Eve in search of the former’s pimp boyfriend who’s been caught cheating on her while serving time. Especially in the wake of cisgender actors like Jared Leto and Eddie Redmayne stacking up awards for their performances as transgender characters, it was refreshing to see two trans characters played by actual trans actors. Technical and progressive achievements aside, “Tangerine” is also a wildly funny and entertaining buddy comedy, and the rare film that authentically captures life on the margins and many forgotten racial, societal and economic pockets of Los Angeles. — MR
67. “Upstream Color” (2013)
Described by Steven Soderbergh as the illegitimate offspring of David Lynch and James Cameron,” there is no one like filmmaker Shane Carruth. A polymathic entrepreneur who’s now a once-a-decade filmmaker so far, it only took Carruth nine years to follow up 2004’s “Primer,” but when he finally did with “Upstream Color,” he dazzled and confounded with delirious mind-bending ambition that feels as indebted to biology, molecular genetics, and advanced mathematics, as it does lyrical surrealism. To describe the abstract plot is nearly absurd, but one could argue that “Upstream Color” is about breaking down a clandestine cycle of life that has been discovered and exploited by both “Inception”-like larva thieves and an audiophile pig farmer with malicious intent. The “simple” version is two lost souls (Carruth himself and Amy Seimetz) who find themselves victims of this bizarre manipulation and then intrinsically (and romantically) intertwined in the dreamlike deception. Carruth’s masterful film is mystifying, but also a sublime and serene experience worth being bathed in multiple times. -Rodrigo Perez
66. “O.J.: Made in America” (2016)
What does it mean to be Black in America? This is the question director Ezra Edelman asks us in his towering eight hour masterpiece “O.J.: Made in America.” Released on the heels of Ryan Murphy’s entertaining, but goofy FX miniseries “The People vs. O.J. Simpson,” Edelman’s docuseries clearly had ambitions far beyond putting familiar faces in bad wigs. Instead of rehashing the familiar beats of the trial, Edelman set his sights on exploring the sociological and political ramifications of the controversial trial by untangling a complicated history of racial dynamics in American media and sports (yes, it was released as a mini-series on TV, but also an epic movie at film festivals and it won the 2016 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature). His vast scope covers everything from the unhealthy worshipping and monetizing of athletes to the ugly, underreported statistics of domestic abuse to the complex history of Los Angeles, a cultural melting pot living in segregation under the rule of a notoriously corrupt police department. Sure, Edelman still investigates the complexities of the case and the way it forever changed the 24 hour news cycle, but it’s his desire to understand what sort of society can create such a powerful, towering figure that sets it apart from so many other films covering similar ground. A devastating reckoning of the past and a tragic portrait of a city unraveling under a violent history of corruption and racism, Edelman’s film is a landmark cultural milestone. — MR
65. “Blue Valentine” (2010)
Perhaps no other romance film of the 2010s will leave you more devastated and less encouraged to find the love of your life than “Blue Valentine,” a movie that stars two of the most charming actors working today and yet reveals how grueling and punishing keeping a relationship alive can be. Put simply, Derek Cianfrance’s trademark film is unforgettable—“The Place Beyond the Pines” and “The Light Between Oceans” might be fantastic in their own respects, but neither captures the unhinged emotion of “Blue Valentine.” By channeling his inner John Cassavetes, Cianfrance captures two of the decade’s finest performances from Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, which not only illustrate the innately beautiful aspects of falling in love, but exemplify the heartbreaking barriers that sabotage the most beautiful connection between human beings with a mature ferocity. As a viewer, “Blue Valentine” is the equivalent of watching a slow-motion car crash from the backseat; everything on the screen is too real, raw and relatable to stay trapped within the confines of a fictitious film. Whether you are two months into a relationship or celebrating your twentieth year of marriage, you will likely see some of yourself in “Blue Valentine” and probably wince, cringe, and weep. – Johnathan Christian
64. “Portrait Of A Lady On Fire” (2019)
“Do all lovers feel as though they’re inventing something?” is a question that is asked about halfway through Celine Sciamma’s smoldering love story “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” It’s a valid question, and one that Sciamma’s film attempts to answer with exquisite ruminations on the immortalization of romantic memory. The sumptuous period milieu of ‘Portrait’ is a far cry from the street-level environs of this director’s previous work, much more Jane Campion than the aesthetic she’s known for, but the thematic concerns at play are very much the same. This is a film about female desire, and not strictly in the sexual sense. One of the film’s stars is the luminous Adèle Haenel, who also happens to be Sciamma’s romantic partner. The degree to which Sciamma’s camera adores Haenel is astonishing, with the camera savoring every nuance of her remarkable face (this is very much a film in love with the contours of faces and the stories they tell). “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” is bookended by instances of deeply felt remembrance, feaures a breathtaking middle sequence of haunting quality, and its show-stopper of a final shot seems explicitly indebted to the denouement of another seminal queer romance, “Call Me By Your Name.” This divine masterwork understands that our past romances loom large in our memories in ways that often allow us to overlook the pain that caused them to come to an end, and it similarly appreciates how meaningful certain mementos of any relationship, like paintings, can be. – NL
63. “Tabu” (2012)
The 2010s saw the boundaries between documentary and fiction erode further, with Portuguese maverick Miguel Gomes on the front lines of this transformation. His 2012 feature “Tabu” shares its title with F.W. Murnau’s silent classic, similarly telling a story of doomed lovers through a colonialist lens and under the guise of nonfiction. The story is split up into two parts, both rendered in supple black and white. The first is set during the holidays in Lisbon, 2011; in its second half, “Tabu” morphs from a wryly humorous slice of arthouse realism into a one-of-a-kind ethnographic study cum silent melodrama. While less ambitious than his subsequent “Arabian Nights” triptych, “Tabu” – with its gleeful homage to the silent era – is undoubtedly Gomes at his most playful. The film isn’t without substance, however, linking Portugal’s colonial past to its fingerprints in the present without coming across as overly didactic or compromising in its affection for film tradition. Special credit goes to Carloto Cotta (“Diamantino,” “Frankie”) as a young adventurer and one half of the ill-fated couple. Like a Portuguese Alain Delon, Cotta is the most underrated European heartthrob of the decade. – Bradley Warren
62. “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” (2010)
Distant, surreal, and known for long stretches of contemplation with no dialog save the song of nature, no one uses the sounds of crickets and cicadas to induce a transformative trance better than Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who has adopted the fan nickname “Joe” out of convenience). Joe is no stranger to bifurcated storytelling, but the singular filmmaker took his aesthetic to a new level with “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” the first Thai film to win the Palme d’Or in Cannes. While known for splitting his films into unique structural narratives, Joe’s work evolved into something the world had never seen before in the form of ‘Uncle Boonmee,’ the final piece of a larger Thai project about humanity’s potential to transfigure themselves into hybrid existence. Moving through the past lives of a man on his deathbed, the movie is framed in Joe’s trademark, minimalist manner, but shifts in style traveling across time, from cinema verité, to documentary-like stills. A woman is pleasured by a catfish and child militants pose for a photo with a man in a gorilla suit. It was unlike anything the film world had seen before, and, just like “Parasite,” the project felt akin to the culmination of a career in the form of an accessible, yet unmistakably auteurist masterstroke. – AB
61. “A Ghost Story” (2017)
If the cinematic landscape in the 2010s proved anything, it’s that simplicity is dead. Movies are devolving into spectacle machines that require higher budgets, multimedia tie-ins and years of hype, all of which increases the medium’s distance from its empathetic, interpersonal roots. So, you can easily imagine everyone’s surprise when David Lowery decided to make a movie about Casey Affleck walking around in a Halloween costume for 92 minutes. Luckily, it was wonderful and spellbinding. To be fair, this summary boils “A Ghost Story” down to its bare bones, but the movie can genuinely be enjoyed on multiple levels, since the film functions as an ambient palate cleanser and thought-provoking existential think-piece in an equivalent measure. Is “A Ghost Story” self-indulgent? The real question should be, who cares? Yes, the average moviegoer does not want to watch Rooney Mara eat pie in an uninterrupted long take for minutes on end, and “A Ghost Story” is admittedly not made for everyone, but everyone should watch it regardless. Lowery’s small-scale rumination on love, legacy, and life itself might be challenging for some, but the film capitalizes on what cinema and artists should always strive to do—say something that only you can say—and “A Ghost Story” whispers its manifesto to you with exceptionally beautiful words. – JC
