Not a Movie Snob - 10 Best Movies of the 2010's

Posted on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 at 06:00 PM

10 Best Movies of the 2010's

Movie Review by Not a Movie Snob X CalgaryMovies.com

This was the decade.

10. The Grand Budapest Hotel - The Grand Budapest Hotel could very well be the most purely entertaining and exquisitely made movie on this list. It looks like it was fun to make and is a hell of a lot of fun to watch. I literally just finished it and I can’t wait to watch it again.

9. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse - With the terrible title and the avalanche of Spider Marvel stuff this past decade, no one expected this to be as good as it was, least of all me. Instead what we got was: a kaleidoscopic crush of technicolour animation imagination; the coolest, most relatable protagonist in any Marvel movie ever; a great, touching story; a dope, endlessly playable soundtrack and...Jordans. There will never be a superhero movie this cool again. Promise.

8. Moonlight - The most touching, well constructed, important and quietly romantic coming of age story of the decade. This movie hurts me, uplifts me, sweeps me away and enchants me in equal measure. A masterpiece.

7. The Revenant - The woods, the bear, the blood, the Oscar.

6. A Separation - The moral of the story: the devastation divorce causes is universal. Asghar Farhadi is one of the world's greatest living filmmakers. Seek him out.

5. Spotlight - The single most important movie of the decade. This is not an attack on religion. It is an attack on sexual predators and the men who protect and enable them. I watch this once a year at least.

4. Arrival - If extraterrestrials made contact with us, it would not look like E.T. It would look like Arrival. But this isn't even a movie about visitors from outer space. That's the McGuffin. What this movie is really about is love, loss and choice. If you knew your life was going to be pockmarked with tragedy, would you choose to live it anyway? Think about that.

3. Her - You'd have a hard time convincing me that Spike Jonze doesn't have a time machine. He has seen the future, and it is the hipster dreamscape of Her. This film says a lot. About love. About humans. About relationships. About how to eat your fruits and vegetables. It sucks me in, chews me up and spits me out every time. And I couldn't be happier.

2. The Social Network - This movie is the defining document of our time. Hell, the tagline on the poster is the defining sentiment of our time! If homo sapiens are still here in a thousand years, they'll watch The Social Network to see how the super computer A.I. that will at that point control the world and everyone in it came into being. It would be like if Christians had a movie that showed them how God came to be, made by someone who was there. Wouldn't that be nice?

1. Drive - Drive is not the most important movie of the decade, like Spotlight. It's not the movie that documents the creation of the single most powerful thing in our current world, like The Social Network. It's not a commentary on the love that can or cannot exist between man and machine, like Her. It's not eye poppingly colourful, like Spider-Verse, or achingly emotional, like Moonlight. It's not even made with the same machine-like precision that Grand Budapest is. But goddamnit, it is the slickest, sexiest, smoothest and most sizzlingly hypnotic movie of the decade, of the century, maybe of my entire life. There has never been a more perfect pairing of music and motion. Of sound and picture. Of story and style. It maximizes its minimalism and finds a way to say more with the slight arching of an eyebrow, than two pages of hyperbolic Tarantino monologue ever could.