Four Top 10s submitted to the annual ILX year-end film poll, plus a mid-decade Top 10, a stand-in for 2025, a year where I doubt I could generate a Top 3. (The ILX polls run on a very strange timeline that lingers from COVID; the results of the 2024 poll haven’t yet been posted, and voting for 2025 won’t happen for months.) I had to tweak a couple of the lists; I only submitted a Top 8 in 2020 (explanation obvious), and I ended up voting for The Zone of Interest in both 2023 and 2024—that strange timeline again—so I replaced it with The Apprentice on the later list.
I don’t think it’s been a great decade so far. The biggest story for me has been the aversion I’ve developed to many of the directors who made my favourite films from the ‘90s forward: Scorsese, the two Andersons, the Coens (one Coen now), Sofia Coppola (based on everything since The Bling Ring), Kelly Reichardt (based on her last two), Noah Baumbach (based on his most recent), etc., etc. Wes Anderson is the worst of them by far. The internet, where many of their films are immediately embraced as masterpieces, doesn’t help (and, if I’m honest, predisposes me to a degree to dislike everything they do now—but I continue to believe that a legitimately good film will break through the din regardless). On those rare occasions when someone does write something negative, like Greil Marcus on One Battle After Another—"it’s not a statement for our times (“An Antifascist Movie at a Fascist Moment,” as Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times piece was headlined), but a self-righteous comic strip that moves fast”—I want to stand up and cheer.
My top two mirror two of my favourite films from the century’s first decade: Todd Haynes’ Velvet Underground pairs up with Ric Burns’ Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, while James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown fictionalizes Scorsese’s No Direction Home (I haven’t kept up with everything, but I continue to take an interest in Scorsese the documentarian). So I’m still finding comfort, pleasure, and inexhaustible surprise and mystery in the shadows cast by narrow, long-gone windows in time. To quote myself (writing about John Coltrane a few years ago) quoting Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men, they’re a rebuke to the dismal tide of today.
In stark contrast to the century’s second decade, when I was finally catching up will all the foundational prestige television shows from the ‘00s—Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad—and staying current with many others I loved, television hasn’t meant as much to me this decade either. Succession? Well done, as far as it goes, but not a great deal of scope, to put it mildly. (Rest of the world responds: “Fuck off.”) The first season of Severance felt like a classic at times, then they lost their way. Again, the internet doesn’t help: if someone loves Severance, they’re not necessarily open to suggestions of imperfection. Anyway, I wanted to include some TV, so I’ve cheated a bit (above and beyond the cheating of wanting to include some TV): the three series I’ve listed all started in the ‘10s (Fargo as early as 2014) and finished up this decade. If Mr. Robot had delayed its final episode (Dec. 22, 2019) a couple of weeks, I probably would have snuck that in too. My television-viewing habits have become just like my movie-viewing habits used to be (but aren’t so much anymore, since leaving Toronto and all its rep theatres): instead of seeking out new stuff—the one thing you’re never short of is recommendations from friends—I watch the same series over and over.
Maybe I’ll have a list for
2025 at some point. I'm still waiting for someone to make a film that gets inside
the dismal tide as definitively as all those great American films from the ‘70s
did; maybe some has and I missed it. I found glimmers of that scattered through
many of the films listed above.
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