Jinn's 100 Films of the 2010s

24. The Handmaiden (2016, dir. Park Chan-wook)





This tranplanted Victorian tale has all of the hallmarks of a classic novel - a parade of character intrigue, psychological complexity, multiple timelines - set along the volatile pre-war East Asian ethnic tensions. Handsome production, strong performances and a genuinely erotic aesthetic (as oppossed to merely titillating) add to form a romance that marries the modern and the classical senses of the term.

23. What We Do in the Shadows (2014, dir. Taika Waititi)





I don't think there's been a better, more rewatchable or more quotable comedy of the decade. Maybe it's the overall dearth of quality comedy during the decade that enhances the thrill of getting one right, but I don't think any others come very close either. Waititi, Clement and Brugh make an immaculate troupe, and I understand that Rhys Darby's werewolf is getting his own film (PG, I assume).

22. Embrace of the Serpent (2015, dir. Ciro Guerra)





Gorgeous B&W, sparkling actually, that adds layers of contrast and mystery to this impenetrable Columbian jungle, the film is based on the true stories of two white botanists, decades apart, in search for secret Amazonian medicine with revealingly disparate motives. But the main story is the life of native guide Karamakate, who bookends these journeys first as a young man (Nilbio Torres) and as an old man (Antonio Bolivar) interspersed. The film touches on the thin line between the sacred and profane, both in the spiritual ethics of entheogens and in the preservation vs degradation of memory. In one of the film's more striking segments, this theme manifests as a missionary coup that devolves into a grotesque perversion of Christian iconography and animistic cruelty, "the worst of both worlds".


The most impressive feature of the film, even more than its cinematography, is Karamakate himself. It is beyond astounding that among the estimated 15-25 remaining Ocaina people of Columbia, director Guerra was able to find two - Torres and Bolivar - with such a natural on-screen command. (Sadly, Antonio Bolivar passed away this past year due to Covid at the age of 72.)

Ooops. Spelled 'Colombia' wrong multiple times.


21. The Irishman (2019, dir. Martin Scorsese)





There isn't too much difference in the respective fates of Henry Hill, Ace Rothstein and Frank Sheeran. They're all commuted to lonely, desperate and insignificant anonymity. But Frank's story is different, maybe because he was never quite as flamboyant a character or maybe because Scorsese chose to portray his story in a decidedly less flamboyant manner as his other epics of rock star criminal swagger. Perhaps audiences of Goodfellas and Casino were incapable of deciphering the spite running like a hot nerve through those films, instead being fascinated with their twitchy glamour and brazen energy. Maybe Scorsese decided to be a lot less subtle, cut out the superficial pizzazz, and show us the husk of this banality of evil, corruption so mundane, like an empty unfurnished house, he might as well be an actuary instead. The soundtrack is less Mick Jagger and a lot more Perry Como, a lot less marinara and a lot more mayonaisse.


All for a purpose, and maybe even stretching out to 4 hours is part of the joke. There's no payoff, no glory. Just an empty door, a black hallway, and an old friend who will never again arrive.

20. Take Shelter (2011, dir. Jeff Nichols)





One could say that the last decade, and indeed much of the 21st century, can be defined by a kind of eschatological anxiety that has manifested in some ugly otherwise secular ways. It's interesting how casually this anxiety has permeated pop culture, with multiple light comedies in the last decade based around the end of the world. Our current politics, frrom all stripes, is increasingly defined by various "storm"s and "reckoning"s, each invariably unaware, or unconcerned, with the religious archetypes in such language. Social dissolution and survivalism has become short-hand generic emetics of storytelling, from Walking Dead to Melancholia. It isn't so much the understanding of the anxiety itself (which is quite reasonable given certain social trends) but trying to understand the attraction that some people have to the promise of apocalypse.


Michael Shannon is one of the great actors of our time, and this is his defining role (maybe watch it alongside Bug for a real depressing evening), an average man who becomes convinced that the end is coming very soon. We don't really know that he's wrong.

loved this movie especially when Natalie portman is in it

Take Shelter is a great film. Personally I'd have The Handmaiden alot higher up but good to see it listed. Embrace of the Serpent too! Great choice.

Makes for a pretty good avatar too

19. Upstream Color (2013, dir. Shane Carruth)





So what if Malick ever did a sci-fi movie? More accurately, Carruth combines Malick's quasi-linear aesthetic and humanism with an almost Cronenbergian paranoia of the intersection of biology and technology. Either way, one of the most unique films of the last decade, strangely moving, perplexing and visually arresting.

18. The Lighthouse (2019, dir. Robert Eggers)





Fraught with peril, this claustrophobic monochromatic nightmare dips into the black, oily waters of paranoia and duplicity. Willem Dafoe gives another thanklessly perfect performance, and Robert Pattinson's skills continue to stretch eclectic. Despite the film's many allusions - Poe, Joyce, Coleridge, Prometheus/Proteus - the film is thankfully more immune from the more politically convoluted interpretations attached to Eggars' previous The Witch. Lighthouse is much more content to reside in the illucid lair of the murky, mythical debris within the subconscious psyche, rendering attempts at interpretation necessarily diluted in diffuse subjectivity. The ocean is quite a cold, dark mirror, after all.

That's one of my favorite discoveries of the 2010's. While I enjoyed Carruth's Primer, I had difficulties with forming an emotional connection to the film. With this film though, I'm not sure it could've been any more emotionally powerful.

17. The Counselor (dir. Ridley Scott)





This might be one I have to defend, given its icy reception on release and being largely ignored since. Some might see it as a common crime thriller with few thrills. I'm especially amused at reviews which dismissed the film as "wordy", given how the primary genius of the film rests on the marvelous script from Cormac McCarthy. (No doubt these same critics eagerly marveled over the mirage of depth in something like True Detective, airing mere months later.) The director's cut helps (restoring a crucial portion of Bruno Ganz's thematic tentpole of a monologue at the beginning), but there's little reason to misunderstand the film's inexplicit indictment of the Sinaloa cartel (identifying their trafficking hub in Chicago before it was publicly confirmed) and the larger sinister spectre of powerful, but largely invisible and unaccountable, spiders in our midst, and at a time when Sean Penn was hanging with El Chapo. Pitt's Westray lays out this cowardly hypocrisy in detail. But, you know, "words". (The DC also restores a line from Westray about the banking institution's complicity with the cartels, long before the public was aware of the extent of the HSBC scandal - I wonder why that was cut by the studio?)


But even taken as a film outside of the direct context of the contemporary era of unprecedented cartel violence, the film is still a dark, electrifying treat. The performances are all terrific (yes, even Diaz and Cruz, haters), McCormac's dialogue veers from poetically profound to perversely witty, and the sense of dread and fatality is paralyzing. I think it may be the most condensed account of sophisticated, unstoppable evil in modern American film, but all the more given its real-world basis. Easily Scott's best film in 30 years.

16. Holy Motors (2012, dir. Leos Carax)





Probably clear by this point that I definitely have an affinity for films that are unique, experimental or otherwise surreal, more than I do for formulaic "comfort" entertainment. Well, I'm not sure if there was a more surreal film this decade than this audaciously ludicrous slice of metaphysical madness.


HM: Post Tenebras Lux (2012, dir. Carlos Reygadas) was similarly persecuted for its pretension.....and, yeah, I like it too.

15. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul)





Those who find Malick's taoist tendencies tedious might need to steer clear of its Palm d'Or predecessor, a dreamy excursion into karmic cosmology. For those willing travelers, there are few other films wedding mind, myth and time into cinematic tapestry as elegantly as this. There is one film slightly better, of course, we'll get to eventually.

HM: Weerasethakul's Cemetery of Splendour (2015) takes on new significance in light of the pandemic, another film that takes life as seriously as it deserves.

14. The Dance of Reality/Endless Poetry (2013/2016, dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky)





The first two parts of Jodorowsky's autobiographical (or autohagiographical) series recalling his youth in Chile and his young ventures into what he calls "psychomagic". These films feature plenty of Jodorowsky's patented style of surrealism and alchemical parable. May not top the peaks of The Holy Mountain, but it's always welcome to see Jodorowsky making films again in his uncompromising way. I hope that the 92-year-old can manage to deliver a third installment someday soon.

I’m really liking this countdown, Jinn.
(Not that my opinion matters haha).
I especially enjoy your blurbs on them, and many of these I have heard of but haven’t had the chance to see yet. Uncle Boonmee for example.
And even then, there’s rhe films that slipped past my radar listed here, that have piqued my interest, and indeed I hope to someday watch as well.
Looking forward to the top ten, as we inch ever so closer to it.

First, I have to admit that I had to look up "eschatological".
Second, and this is an aside, I guess, my takeaway from Melancholia was nearly the opposite of this, that the person who was at peace with the end of the world was the person who understood that it all meant nothing and that was ok. But it's been a while and I may need to re-watch it. I did love it.
Third, I guess I should probably watch this movie because, while I have thought Michael Shannon was very good in the things I've seen him in, I've never seen him in anything that made me say "that guy is great", the word you use here and a sentiment I have seen before. If this is the movie that will convince me of it, I'm game.

Have you seen Pottersville?



Well don't. It's really bad, and Shannon looks like he's being held at gunpoint the whole movie.


Ron Perlman must have had some pretty sweet kompromat to have nabbed a cast like that for such a fiery turd of a movie.*

I think that this kind of nihilism, "it all means nothing", goes hand-in-hand with the kind of apocalypticism that I'm referring to. I believe that "meaning" is an essential component of human experience, and the finding or creating of meaning (via art) is a bedrock of human culture. It's the loss of meaning, the devaluing of meaning in our culture, that leads to the kind of cultural malaise that allows these world-negating fantasies to take root. It's the cultural equivalent of our opiate epidemic. We live in a very dispirited time, and maybe that shouldn't be ok. Maybe something's wrong that needs to be examined.


There have been a number of films which either misuse Shannon's particular talents or, maybe worse, turn them into a cheap gimmick. Take Shelter is his best performance, and I would recommend some earlier ones, like Bug (a really compelling conspiracy thriller) and Nichols' Shotgun Stories (a solid, well-written drama).

That combo of Upstream Color/The Lighthouse/Holy Motors, whew! What a golden dose of surrealism and what-the-****ery. Love all three.

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