Jinn's 100 Films of the 2010s

Well, I would have to, respectfully, disagree with you. To me, and I've spent a great deal of my 48 years studying, ruminating, meditating, and years ago even praying on the "meaning", meandering through all kinds of spirituality as a sort of lifelong quest.
Where I have landed, and I feel like I have, is that there is nothing more or higher to it all. We live, we die... and that's ok. It's fine, it's good, actually. It's certainly enough. The beauty of the world is there and the joy of life is there and it is up to me to see it and feel it or not and I do. No magic, no mysticism, certainly no deities (that concept has come to be just completely ridiculous to me), just the life we have.
But the idea that that is nihilistic, despite the definition of nihilism, does not gel for me. I find tremendous joy in life and love all around me, pleasure to be found practically everywhere. Letting go of mysticism and spiritualism was actually the key step to peace and happiness in this life.
For me, no, there is no meaning, absolutely none, and the energy spent searching, hoping, wishing for it is folly and counterproductive. But there is no malaise from it. And I felt like that was where she got in Melancholia. She got there from a dark, sad place, but she got there just the same and she was the only one at peace, even smiling when the end came.

And I think I will watch Take Shelter then because, even having not seen that much of his work, I agree I think he is used almost gimically (new word!) in the films I have seen him in. He's effective at it all, but I leave feeling like that's what he does.

Well You have certainly got me interested

Gotta love a movie villain that quotes Antonio Machado.
The script is fabulous, the photography is beautiful. But McCormac's violence always cuts me too deeply. Memorable and vicious

You gotta hold of a very Buddhist angle there which has also been mistakenly called nihilistic.

Maybe we're at a semantic impasse, since you're assuming a great deal of religious detritus ("deities"? not sure where I implied that) onto my use of the word "meaning" that is not intended or necessary. So I'll keep it simple using your words: joy, love, pleasure, peace, happiness - this is meaning. This is what makes your life meaningful. These things mean a lot.

No, Jinn, I definitely didn't mean that you had implied anything religious or deity-related, just that that is another place people (many, if not most) find themselves on the path to "meaning". In fact, most people use deities and religion as a way to check off the "meaning" box in their life so they don't have to think about it and can binge-watch their show.
As for the second part, I guess we actually agree on that.

I thought it was contextually evident that my use of "meaning" was philosophical - that which signifies one's existence. This is why I said it was fundamental to human experience and culture, as opposed to any particular sect or discipline. When I mentioned how this concept has been debased, a good example might be to show how many people are assuming that "meaning" refers to an exclusively religious or mystic experience, and how many people are subsequently averse to using the term because of that perceived association. It's become too easy to write off as "woo".


I don't really care much about these people with their check-boxes. If they aren't thinking about it, it doesn't really mean anything, does it?

13. Arrival (2016, dir. Denis Villenueve)





In a decade that saw a lot of high concept/big twist studio sci-fi releases, this may be the only one that mattered. Villenueve's touch is nearly immaculate here, Bradford Young's cinematography soars, Amy Adams is at her best, and, most crucially, both the concept and the twist aren't convoluted to overly impress. The concept is a clever linguistic puzzle concerning a plausible method of extraterrestrial communication (although similar to Contact). The twist isn't designed to blow your mind but does the rare thing that virtually no big twist can manage - actually enhance the emotional resonance of the film (and reveal its poetic structure on rewatch).

Yeah, I thought you were saying that concluding that there was no "higher" meaning was the problem. That our lives have to have some sort of higher purpose than, to keep it movie related, Live, Die, Repeat (though I don't personally believe in the repeat either). Obviously I think there is no purpose whatsoever to life it just happens and that's just groovy. Just a misunderstanding of your position on my part.

I love Arrival and I second all of your thoughts on it. It's a movie which is designed to be rewatched.

12. Phantom Thread (2017, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)





Paul Thomas Anderson stretches out stylistically again to make a film steeped in 1950s London fashion but still feeling oddly modern, playfully using cues as social red herrings (Woodcock's sexuality) or suspenseful distractions (allusions to Hitchcock's Rebecca and Suspicion) to finally land on an ingenious romance between a narcissistic artist, who craves control but demands nurturing, and a strong inspiring muse who can navigate his needs while still challenging his imagination and his work. Their co-dependency makes for one of the most lavishly twisted love stories on screen. Day-Lewis gives another pitch-perfect performance, menacing and vulnerable, but Vicky Krieps holds her own as well. One of those films where every detail feels remarkable.

I've been peppering some spiritually-tinged terms in some of the last few reviews, so that may have led you in that direction. But when I referred to the current, specifically but not exclusively American, cultural malaise, and tied this to "a loss of meaning", I meant generally the same kinds of values that you mentioned, subjective values about their satisfaction with life. In my own social observation, I think that people seem to feel more displaced and dissatisfied. Whether it's the economics, the opiates, the failure of consumerism, the realization of American decline, probably a combination of all of that, I think there's a direct correlation between this despair and apocalyptic wish-fulfillment.

Anderson frequently leaves me a bit cold even though I usually admire his craft, but I absolutely love this one. Never has been so intense, almost thrilling. A movie-length staring contest.

11. Knight of Cups (2015, dir. Terrence Malick)





Malick's own anti-Hollywood film is his strongest of his post-Tree comeback. Its thematic and symbolic structure is more sturdy than Wonder, the "fever dream" pace better attuned to its depictions of decadance and indulgence. The vapidity of vanity is a recurring motif as Rick shuffles through his cycle of romantic regrets and failures, and as his professional ambitions prove fruitless in this garden of garish desperation we call L.A., more aptly shown as a ravine of arid ego. Thirst is also a motif - the poster shows the title tarot card upside down for a reason. The image of dogs bobbing for balls in a swimming pool (undrinkable water) is an excellent allegory for the show business machine. And Bale is one of only a handful of actors who can carry this sort of film without saying very much. A beautiful and refreshing piece of work.


HM: Malick's Song To Song (2017) is the first film from him that I watched and felt like it was a retread. Filmed immediately after Knight, it shares so closely the same visual shapes and rhythms, as well as themes (transplanting the indulgence and decadance of Hollywood to the music biz in Austin; the complexities of romantic chemistry) that it never felt like it left its shadow. Would I have felt differently had I seen Song to Song first? It's hard to say. They are sister films in so many ways, and Song does have a clear model on the song-cycle concept album, each segment an emotional variation of the last. Both worth seeing, but Knight gets the awe-slot from me.


I guess I should go ahead and mention the other Malick film that didn't make my list, A Hidden Life, also worth checking out, but I felt was the least impressive effort. I felt his fragmentory, ruminative style, so effective at presenting dream and memory states, is a poor fit for this kind of historical drama in some ways. The second half of Life works much better, as the cinematic themespeak aligns with Franz's contemplation, but the first half needed more establishment. It's the first Malick film where I've shared the criticism that he really should develop some skill at mise-en-scene when it's appropriate.

10. The Other Side of the Wind (2018, dir. Orson Welles)





Is it cheating to include what is essentially a 40-year-old unfinished film by a long-dead director on this list? I believe I listed this one as my top film of 2018, and I like to justify it by thinking that it would have also would have been the best film of 1978 too.

It's hard to say what the 1978 film would look like exactly, since this recent version was finally assembled by no less than a dozen editors (including many famous contemporary directors), but we do have scraps of Orson's own rough cuts to compare. The style is similar to his F For Fake doc, a film that had stood uniquely among Welles' other films for its kinetic, vibrant montage editing style. In context of that film, it seemed like the perfect approach for a meditation of the illusory nature of media perception, but Wind suggests that this was actually a wholly new approach to narrative aesthetic as well. The film was made on multiple stocks (20 years before JFK) in order to stress competing subjective moods. In these two films, Welles proved to be a master of editing reaction shots, slyly layering unspoken character subtext with the keen eye of a professional face-reader, and you can't find too many better sources of sly-eyed suggestion than John Huston (the film's stand-in auteur) or Peter Bogdanovich (the film's stand-in inquisitor).

The film is split between a Hollywood party being thrown by old-school director Huston who feels out-of-touch and maybe a little impotent keeping up with the turbulently changing trends of the time. And, importantly, Wind feels like Welles himself wrestling with this dilemma, as his first film of that era (after Trial and Chimes) that attempted to adopt the revolutionary stylistic and subject matter shifts of the 1960s, as both a parody and as a sincere exercise. Channelling Fellini in his depiction of flippant Hollywood high society, French New Wave in its formal deconstruction and avant garde touches, New Hollywood in its emphasis of character over plot. Huston's film-within-a-film, also titled Wind, is appropriately also an unfinished, probably unfinishable, film that represents this aimless frustration. The film-within-a-film, shot in stunning panoramic widescreen, is more obviously modeled on Antonioni (a clear parody of Zabriskie Point), but one can see how Welles, using his mistress Oja Kodar as his muse, is inspired by the more liberal attitudes towards depicting sexuality. I would like to think that the final shot (however reconstructed for this release) is a shot that Antonioni would be supremely proud of, and as perfect a parting shot from the great and once-neglected magician pariah himself as we could ever hope for. Fake and Wind, both treated for decades as late-career failures in Welles' oeuvre, have finally been restored as the creative renaissance that they truly were.

9. American Hustle (2013, dir. David O. Russell)





Nothing too deep required with this one. This is just breathlessly excellent filmmaking, David O. Russell's best, as polished and comfortable as a mint copy of Rumours, hot-wiring Scorsese's sleekest and sexiest moves into a karaoke version of Marty's sharpest sardonic stabs at the American Dream. Just effortlessly entertaining and rewatchable, every actor to the nines. Bale's meticulouly constructed combover and shyster shades, Adams at peak sex kitten, Cooper showing his hilarious ass, Lawrence willing to trash-up her sweetheart image. But out of all of these caricatures, the film manages an enormous amount of empathy for them. (Maybe a little less for Cooper.) It's also Bob DeNiro's best role, other than the later Irishman, of the decade, despite its brevity. Just a face like stone death. I would like to believe that this film's use of "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart" single-handedly caused the recent surge of Bee Gee nostalgia.

I wasn't as big on Phantom Thread as some were; don't get me wrong, it was a good movie on the whole, but it was still too low-key an experience on the whole to engage me enough to be a great movie, and it felt a bit like PTA was over-correcting from the relative bombast of There Will Be Blood (which I preferred). On the other hand......I do agree that Arrival is a great movie, and one that only improves upon rewatch, which is easier than ever before to do, now that it's streaming for free on the IMDB app: https://m.imdb.com/play/video/vi2763...mdb_fdv-c18-t1

Ya got that right.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

Don't disagree with any of that.

Are you trying to monetize my thread with sponsorships now, Stu?