Watch Tower's best of the '10s

I wondered what would be my first big thread of the decade...maybe a top ten list if the best movies of the decade? No not yet...not yet.

Something just as important but maybe overlooked on end of year/decade talk is the actual performances which make our favourite movies so watchable.

This however is not a competitive list, just musings, post by post, on some of the best performances u have found over the last decade, a period of vast changes.

So here we go....


A transformative decade requires a transformative performance. This has been ten years heavily dominated by the cgi blockbuster, where technology has pushed the boundaries of film and performance at a rate we had never seen before. Marvel/Disney have been at the forefront of this technology since 2009. Their work has ranged from the cartoonish (Black Panther and Spiderman) to the sublime. The ultimate in the studios technological wizardry is Josh Brolins turn as Thanos in the two part Avengers finale.

Thanos, one of Marvels most iconic villains had been the foreboding terror behind a decade of story telling and the various film makers involved had experimented with the use of prosthetics, considered using a mixture of practical and visual effects and then ultimately settled on a full cgi creation. Work by Andy Serkis as Gollum and later Caesar in the Ape series finally swung it for the studio. This, however, was going to be more than mere motion capture. Most of Thanos is hand animated, still a difficult technique, yet Brolins performance is in the face and the voice.

He was cast perfectly and dived right into the role. Every clench if the jaw, every prophetic glance, every gravelly utterance is near perfect. It's odd that Brolins best performance, in my opinion anyway, is one where he is almost invisible...invisible all except his visceral emotion and subtle changes of tone. Balanced as all things should be.

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"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn"

"I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle"

Over the course of an eventful ten years, Emily Blunt managed to find herself as one of the premier actresses (yes I still use that term) of her generation. Provide the physicality in an action movie? That too alongside Tom Cruise? Tick. Be part of a lovable family picture? Tick. Try your hand at horror and make it work? Tick. In Sicario, Blunt is neitehr an action hard woman, nor a family friendly nanny she is a believable, understated and immensely likeable FBI agent. The role in the hand of countless other actresses could have been plain boring, or overly righteous, yet Blunt does something which is missing in the hands of so many new age women, combine strength with vulnerability, righteousness with instability.

It helps that Macer is written as a well rounded character, who knows she is flawed, who is confused, even scared but willing to at least try and do the right thing. She acts as the audiences eyes into a world of murky dealings and CIA operatives and somehow manages to paint the FBI as the good guys. As with all the best performances, it happens in the eyes, that look of shock at a betrayal, the uncertainty and fear while blindly working her way through underground tunnels and the fear of not knowing what she will decide in the face of certain death.

As far as technology has come and all the directions cinema has taken, some times the best performances are those that require no enhancement, performances in which the face tells a thousand tales.