What Happened to Me in the Dark
By Jeffrey M. Anderson
A decade can seem like nothing, or it can be everything. Looking back, I
see that my life in 2019 is almost totally different from my life in
2010. I'm with a new partner, and I have a new dog. My son went from
getting his baby teeth at age 3 to getting ready for high school at age
13. Things seemed to improve, and I feel lucky every day for my life.
But on a larger scale, the decade began with hope and ends in despair,
and who knows how much longer it can all last? But through it all I have
been reviewing films, and I have seen over 2200 of them since January 1,
2010 (less than some of my colleagues, but likely more than most). I
have kept track of my favorites through the years, and the last six
months have been spent changing and re-arranging the list. To tell the
truth, it may take another decade to draw up a definitive list, but at
the end, this is what I came up with: ten, plus twenty-two strong
runners-up. Enjoy, and let's say a little prayer that the next decade,
beginning in despair, ends in hope.
- The Top Ten -
1. Roma
Of all the movies I saw, Alfonso Cuaron's Roma came the closest to transcending the limitations of cinema, getting
closer to the divine, to the realm of Bergman, Fellini, Welles, etc. It
told a simple story, a year in the life of a maid in Mexico, but the
telling of it was profound and cosmic, as well as intricate and poetic.
It's the kind of movie that will last generations, though given that it
was released on a streaming platform (could it have even been made by
one of the studios?), it could point toward some kind of new future of
cinema, as well as its past.
2. Boyhood
Shot over the course of 12 years, Richard Linklater's Boyhood could have been merely a gimmick film, but
instead it turned into a moving, existential masterpiece, effectively
tying its narrative about a broken family with the concept of the
passing of time; its achievement is even more impressive when you
consider that Linklater wrote the script in pieces, over the course of
that time, never quite knowing where it was all going. This turned into
a freedom that allowed him to get away from typical screenplay mechanics
and to find something much deeper.
3. Gravity
One of my usual rules is that, on lists like this, I allow only one film
per director, but this time I had to make an exception, given that
Cuaron, without question, made two out of the three films that affected
me the most strongly this decade. I went into Gravity with not much
expectation — I usually don't care much for "survival" films — and came
away with an astonishment I'd only felt a few times before in my entire
life (one of them was seeing Star Wars for the first time).
Again, this was a movie that upped the ante on what cinema could
possibly promise and deliver, and at the same time, it was a movie about
life itself.
4. Certified Copy
We lost Abbas Kiarostami this decade, in 2016, at age 76. He may not
have been a household name, but he was unquestionably one of the two or
three greatest filmmakers that has worked during my time as a film
critic. Far from his simple, poetic Iranian films, Certified Copy is one
of his most complex, enigmatic works, a multi-cultural film shot in
Italy, featuring a French star, and a British singer (making his acting
debut). It's an in-depth exploration of the concept of copies, in every
sense of the word, from art to offspring, and even to behaviors. It's a
rich text that's worth re-watching and re-considering.
5. The Turin Horse
Another of the world's absolute greatest filmmakers, Tarr is still with
us, but unfortunately announced his retirement after completing this
film in 2011. The Turin Horse ostensibly refers to a late 19th century
incident in which Friedrich Nietzsche tried to stop the whipping of a
horse while visiting Turin, Italy (and perhaps caused a mental
breakdown). The actual movie, relentlessly downbeat, consists of a
farmer and his daughter waiting out a howling windstorm as more and more
misery piles upon them, some of it seemingly unnatural. It's a dark poem
whose meanings lie underneath its black-and-white surface, or perhaps
just out the window.
6. Paterson
Here's a movie wherein, after it was over, I not only wanted it to keep
going, but I wanted to live inside it. I wanted to be in this world that
valued poetry, where characters had time to really look at things and
appreciate them, maybe appreciate the parallels (or circles) that are
everywhere in life. Jim Jarmusch's Paterson tells the story of a bus
driver in Paterson, New Jersey, who is also named Paterson, and writes
poetry just like his hero, former Paterson resident William Carlos
Williams. Curtains, cupcakes, a guitar, a dog, a box of matches, and
many other small things become important in beautiful ways.
7. Moonlight
At the end of 2016, I placed Barry Jenkins's Moonlight at #5 on my
ten-best list, but not long after I filed that list, I ended up seeing
the film twice more, and fell even more in love with it. There are any
number of movies about drugs affecting black communities, but this
movie, while veering scarily into violence, somehow remains so
enchantingly gentle and tender. Throwing into the mix the concept of
gayness in this community, the movie is elevated even more; the
characters are doubly outsiders. When acceptance becomes even distantly
possible, the mood is as delicate as a sigh.
8. Hereafter
This one will no doubt be my orphan pick; barely any other critics even
like this film, let alone picked it as one of the year's best in 2010.
It was my #1 film, and I still stand by that decision, although I
confess it's probably due in large part to what I was going through in
my life, and how Clint Eastwood's Hereafter lifted me up each time I saw
it. It tells three stories that eventually connect, set in France,
England, and San Francisco, dealing with characters that have been
touched in some way by evidence of an afterlife. Eastwood's direction,
as usual, is so classical and simple that the material is never
sentimentalized, and it even suggests in its confident, matter-of-fact
way that it's OK to believe in something more.
9. Somewhere
I admit I feel somewhat protective of Sofia Coppola, partly because of
the way she's always (lazily) accused of nepotism, or underestimated
because she's a woman, or because she tells stories about the wealthy
and/or famous, and because she's rarely given the credit she deserves as
one of the best filmmakers working today. She established a signature
style early on, a dreamy softness dealing in boredom and waiting around,
and yet finding the beauty and poetry in such things, the things between
the things that actually happen. Her Somewhere moves me even more now
than it did in 2010, almost lackadaisically tracing and repairing the
relationship between a divorced actor father and his teen daughter that
he barely knows.
10. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
At the beginning of this decade, a critic friend passed away at far too
young an age. I find myself thinking about how he used to save his #10
pick for something fun, something that he just enjoyed. In that spirit,
Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a debut film,
continues to fascinate me, not only because of its unique descriptor (a
black-and-white, Iranian, vampire Western), but also because it's
actually weird and bold enough to live up to that descriptor. I felt at
the time that it was like some art house thing out of the 1960s, perhaps
something by Godard or Resnais or Antonioni, that, as opposed to
soothing, offered a challenge to curious and fervent moviegoers.
22 Runners-Up (In Alphabetical Order)
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-hsien),
Burning (Lee Chang-dong),
Cemetery of Splendor (Apichatpong Weerasethakul),
Certain Women (Kelly Reichardt),
Faces Places (Agnes Varda & JR),
Get Out (Jordan Peele),
The Innkeepers (Ti West),
Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel & Ethan Coen),
Inside Out (Pete Docter),
The Irishman (Martin Scorsese),
It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt),
Let the Sunshine In (Claire Denis),
Leviathan (Vérena Paravel & Lucien Castain-Taylor),
Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller),
Mysteries of Lisbon (Raul Ruiz),
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino),
Parasite (Bong Joon-ho),
Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman),
This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi),
The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick),
True Grit (Joel & Ethan Coen),
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer)
