Best Films of the 2010s: Moonlight

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Moonlight

  

Moonlight is a film that is excellent in every aspect, emotional and smart in equal measure. It follows the coming of age of a young boy named Chiron, who is fundamentally disadvantaged growing up in America by his race, class and sexuality. Chiron’s story is split into three segments and in each the character is played by a different actor (Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Treyvante Rhodes). These sections are delineated by the names and corresponding identities he is afforded: Little, Chiron and Black. We might think of these as boy, adolescent and man. These identities are, of course, not self-contained but bleed into and overlay one another. Chiron gets called Little in the middle section and Black in the second section, for instance.

    The film does not preach to its viewers, but immerses them as surely as young Chiron’s surrogate father Juan (Mahershala Ali) tilts and rocks him in the surging ocean, teaching him how to swim. The three sections are patterned by liberating, almost epiphanic moments at the local beach and recurring, awkward encounters with a contemporary named Kevin who seems to offer a safe outlet for Chiron’s burgeoning sexuality. Director Barry Jenkins regularly uses the unusual and immersive technique of having characters conversing while looking straight into the camera lens, in close up. This implicates and involves the audience in the relationships on screen, breaking up the main flow of the story with something akin to visceral photographs.

        For all the raw power and immaculate structure of the script, this film is turbocharged by its all-star ensemble cast. Naomie Harris shows her full quality as Chiron’s mother, struggling with addiction and an inner wildness that often scares her son. Mahershala Ali is a quiet but powerful presence early on, but for me Andre Harris as the eldest iteration of Kevin steals the show. He has found his feet as a diner chef and, though troubled, has never lost his teasing humour or warmth. When he calls up Chiron after ten years of separation, he proves how powerfully love and care can be expressed just in cooking a meal for someone.

    This culinary compassion is something Kevin shares with Janelle Monae’s Teresa. I am high-key obsessed with Janelle Monae’s role in this film as surrogate mother Teresa, who is always ready to tease Chiron into talk with a glass of orange juice, a slap-up meal and her sardonic, warm eyes. Her album Dirty Computer soundtracked my own process of coming out to myself, so when she says ‘it’s all love and all pride in this house’ my breath hitches every time.

     These hugely talented, experienced artists orbit around the three Chirons at the centre of the piece; young Alex Hibbert, eyes so wide they almost pop from his skull; Ashton Sanders, gangly, eyes all skittish anxiety; and Treyvante Rhodes, outwardly macho, eyes too weary to be fully sad anymore.

     I have seen several reviewers who consider the transition between the scrawny Sanders and the bulked-up Rhodes implausible and to the film's detriment. The size disparity is shocking, but thoroughly intentional and Kevin comments on this upon his reunion with Chiron, openly stating, ‘this is not what I expected’. The change rings true to me. Many people do emerge bulked up after prison time because there is little to do there other than work out. I’m lucky due to racial and socioeconomic privilege to have never been close to prison and the sort of radical rethinking of one’s identity incarceration can force. Yet I do know that as a boy, not yet able to articulate that I was probably gay, the first time in life I felt safe from bullies was when I started to fill out and got good at rugby. The physical discrepancy between Rhodes and Sanders makes perfect sense, and Treyvante Rhodes delivers a note-perfect performance in the final section. He says that I ‘built myself from the ground up. Built myself hard’, but the film reveals that identity constructed from a place of fear is always built on shaky ground. Rhodes conveys with many a look that physical growth belies a shivering, shrivelling spirit.

     This film portrays modern, and specifically African American, masculinity like no other and that is why when I watch it, like Chiron, ‘I cry so much sometimes I might turn to drops’. It contains radiant moments that will hit viewers in ways that are hard to articulate. For instance, there is the point in the second section when Ashton Sanders’ hands splay on the beach in a moment of post-coital relief. ‘Sand angels’, I think, every time.

 

That concludes my list of the best films of the 2010s! If you've stuck with me all the way I'm slightly amazed and please do comment your own favourites if you like:)

Best Films of the 2010s: Interstellar

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Interstellar

  Her was the best example of the inward looking sci-fi that dominated this decade; with Interstellar Christopher Nolan delivered that shaggy, glorious old-fashioned beast: an epic. Inception may have been more innovative and Dunkirk tighter, but this is the Nolan film that combines heart and dizzying ambition to the greatest effect. The motivator for Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper to take to the stars is climate change- in this future almost every grain has been blighted and the natural world is suffering. Cooper’s time in space throws up all sorts of dilemmas about thinking as a family member versus thinking as a species. In some of the places he must go to seek a future for humanity time runs differently. This leads to an extraordinary scene where McConaughey must watch videos of his children growing up. Decades for his kids are elided into seconds for him. As we as people age, favourite films act as time machines transporting us back to the people we were at the time of previous viewings. It’s a marker of the rise and fall of new icons that when this film was released in 2014, no one (maybe his family had faith I guess?) knew that the younger of Cooper’s two children was played by Timothee Chalamet, and that he was going to be a star. In 2014 I'd never seen one of the main inspirations for this film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now it is one of my very favourite films and I'm so grateful to Christopher Nolan for leading me there.

    One foundation of what makes us human is the instinct to protect and love the people closest to us. Climate change demands of the characters in this film that they transfer that love to the species as a whole and start now. Beyond this potent relevance, though, the film features mythic imagery of two lone men duking it out in an icy hellscape, Michael Caine being Michael Caine (excellently) and a robot with sarcasm settings turned up high. Like the legendary onion, it’s got layers.

Next and FINAL time: compassion and home cooking must stand in for space rockets in the quest to heal. 

Best Films of the 2010s: Her

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Her

    

The thing I forgot about Her is that it’s really funny. It was perhaps the first arthouse movie I saw at the cinema, when I was 13, and I remember being left in something like emotional shock for the rest of the day. But as well as being a dazzling enquiry into the nature of love and consciousness, (and so much more than ‘the one where the man falls for his computer’) it is a quirky portrait of 21^st century masculinity. Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombley (‘Big Guy Four by Four’ to women online) is only half-joking when he says he struggles to prioritise between videogames and online porn. He makes his living working for a (digital) company called ‘Handwritten Greeting Cards’, essentially using his eloquence to articulate other people’s feelings about other people. Vicarious living is the cornerstone of this world.

    What makes this film great is that we are primed, like Theodore’s ex-wife to mock when he falls in love with his operating system Samantha. Surely this is a sign of his inability to connect with a real woman? There are some swipes about modern living, but this film is far better than to make the usual anti-Instagram jokes that movies made by old people seem to think are endlessly clever. His love for Samantha is real, or at least Scarlett Johansson’s tender, playful, inquisitive voicework makes us feel Theodore’s perspective makes a certain sense. The ups and downs of their relationship before the devastating final act feel true, and Joaquin Phoenix delivers his greatest performance: more nuanced and convincingly suggestive of damage than his Joker.

     But the humour of the world building! The Super Mom video game where if you’re not perfect the virtual kids scream and writhe, the other mums judge you and you lose ‘mom points’. Another game where the player is guided by a  blob-like creature that I can only describe as the demonic id of a modern man-child who swears, giggles and makes remarks like ‘I hate women, all they do is cry all the time’. Director Spike Jonze creates a world as fascinating, damaged and offbeat as the characters that inhabit it, lit up by his trademark satirical flourishes.

Next Time: less cyber space, more outer space.

Best Films of the 2010s: A Separation

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

A Separation

    The way George Miller detonates a stunt truck, Iran’s Asghar Farhadi explodes the fault lines within a family. A man leaves his father who suffers from Alzheimer’s in the care of a nurse. She seems to leave him for dead and in anger the man shoves her which later seems to have caused her to miscarry her baby. Little is what it seems, however, due to deception, mixed motives, guilt and shame. The shifting and interlocking bonds of gender, religion and class influence who will speak and what they will say in the public enquiry that follows.

    This film is as engrossing as a panic attack, complex but not overly complicated. Shot like a documentary so the camera seems invisible, this is a detective film minus an in-story detective, the revelations masterfully drip-fed to the viewer. Every character is right in their own minds and that’s what makes what happens to them so awful, and so true. If it wasn’t for Western cultural biases Leila Hatami and particularly Peyman Maadi would be lauded to the skies for their portrayal of the central couple torn between making the best life for their child Termeh and caring for a father. This film deserves to crossover into the Western mainstream conversation the same way Parasite has done recently, since it is perfect, scene by suspenseful and emotionally devastating scene.

Next Time: another troubled relationship, if not an entirely human one.

Best Films of the 2010s: The Florida Project

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

The Florida Project

 

This film’s keynote is the raw and heady joy of being left as a kid to roam without adult supervision. It is poignant and ironic that some of the poorest parts of America lie within a stone’s throw of Disney World; this is the world The Florida Project explores. An Orlando strip-motel is the most American of underworlds, painted like pop art with eye-smacking purples and oranges. Six year old  Moonee is our joyous tour guide (‘this man gets arrested a lot…this woman thinks she’s marriaging Jesus’), the kind of kid destined to be labelled a ‘bad influence’, swearing and starting fires, dripping sass and melted ice cream wherever she goes with her friends. Spitting on cars is fun, washing that spit up is fun when washing up liquid s transformed into water guns. The camera is situated at the kids’ eye level drawing us into their perspective.

     The kids’ world is plotless: their summer break is a blank canvas to paint (or spit) on. Structure is provided by the adult world of Moonee’s mother Halley which runs concurrently: the weekly grind of hustle and rent. Some of the best acting of the decade comes from first timer Bria Vinaite as Halley, whom the director spotted on Instagram. She is an affectionate and fun mother but has a defiant, sharp face ready for the rest of the world which has messed with her plenty. Also I 100% envy her pink-green hair and it would be dishonest if I didn't mention this. Brooklynn Prince as Moonee should with any justice end the careers of a raft of cutesie child actors. These two actresses together convince utterly as single mother and daughter, and it is one of the most joyful relationships I’ve seen in a movie. The final act of the film, though, will threaten this bond. The Florida Project sends the viewer into that place between laughter and tears where the world seems painted in particularly vivid colours.

Next Time: less Mickey Mouse, more Iranian psychodrama.

Best Films of the 2010s: We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

We Need To Talk About Kevin

 Every once in a while Lynne Ramsey directs a film and its one of the best, rawest and most direct films of its year (check out Morvern Callar please please please). This chiller was no different, combining one of the world’s best directors with a uniquely compelling actor in Tilda Swinton. Alongside Ezra Miller she crafts a mother-son relationship that is tortuous for both, making the sometimes icy mother-daughter bond in Lady Bird look like a daisy-filled pasture of unconditional love.

    Something has gone wrong somewhere. On one level this seems like the most unnerving of demonic horror films: the child’s eyes are full of maliciousness and hate right from the youngest age. Was he born evil, or was it grown in him like a dark seed? It is hard to answer because the whole film seems to take place in Swinton’s head, as she mentally skates around a traumatic event involving Kevin, time spooling backwards and forwards. In one scene the boy deliberately shits himself to provoke her with the most casual cruelty, and he has a violent tendency from a young age. On the other hand we gather that his mother didn’t want to get pregnant, is quick to anger and has a deep-seated resentment towards her son. Wherever Kevin’s darkness comes from, Jasper Newell and then Ezra Miller are magnetically watchable, even if it is like watching a car crash in slow motion. And the opening scene at La Tomatina, Swinton rolling in the red of the tomatoes, is one of the most extraordinary openings to any film I’ve ever seen.

Next Time: less bloody tomatoes, more waffles and Disney.

Best Films of the 2010s: The Great Beauty

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

The Great Beauty

 

After the tranquil Italian countryside of Call Me By Your Name, the flamboyant Rome of Paolo Sorrentino’s film: a world to get lost in. Toni Servillo’s journalist Jep is an urbane and mocking commentator on the art scene of the city. And what a scene! An ‘artist’ with the Soviet hammer and sickle shaved into their pubic hair, runs naked into a wall and then screams repeatedly ‘I don’t love you’ (literally on the rebound). A young girl essentially has a big screaming hissy-fit covered in paint, but the resulting canvas is admittedly gorgeous. Such impressionistic snapshots dominate for a while, but the banquet of delights do converge into a satisfying meal.

     Satire of modern art gets some easy laughs but tearing down the airy bullshit of others will only get you so far unless you have a solid alternative to offer, and Sorrentino does through his focus on the wonderful Servillo’s Jep. He is a big-hearted and funny man who is ageing and riven by grief and worse meaninglessness, but certainly does not go gentle into that good night, partying hard, searching for people who aren’t phony and making sure to let them know when they are. The film boasts a perfect soundtrack that glides from the devotional to the dancehall, and gorgeous cinematography, but my favourite thing about it is its tone of loving mockery. What makes these characters ridiculous is what makes them human. This movie taught me the italian word cazzuto, badass, and it fits the bill. If for nothing else, watch it for the mysterious elephant!

Next Time: less pasta, more tomatoes.

Best Films of the 2010s: The Selfish Giant

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

The Selfish Giant

  

The Selfish Giant introduces us to Arbor and Swifty, two boys with fragile family situations whose Bradford homes are in constant danger of being repossessed. Excluded from school, Arbor tries to help his mum pay her debts by stealing and selling scrap metal, dragging Swifty along with him. The tough, unscrupulous junkyard boss they deal with exploits their labour, sending them on increasingly dangerous jobs. But he also owns a horse and races it against a rival’s for money. Swifty is a natural with animals and looking after the horse offers him an uncomplicated, innocent bond. In a world dominated by drugs, violence and the relentless pursuit of cash, what emerges is the importance of finding something alive to love and clinging to it.

     Soundtracked by the air-warping throb of power lines, the film offers up indelible images, such as Arbor riding the horse and cart up to the doors of his school, a gobby little lord surveying his kingdom. For some unfathomable reason his teachers are not impressed. He loves these power games, later cheekily telling a policeman to take his shoes off while he’s in his family’s home. The brilliance of the non-professional child actors is everything here and makes this a luminous, beautiful slice of life, even as the narrative hurtles on towards its climax. Director Clio Barnard should be acclaimed for her mastery of all aspects of filmmaking.

Next time: fewer horses, but perhaps a rogue elephant. 

Best Films of the 2010s: What We Do in the Shadows

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

What We Do in the Shadows

    

 What would any list of the best of anything be without a vampire mockumentary from New Zealand? (NOTHING, that's what!) From his debut Boy, way back when in 2010, Taika Waititi made going to the movies a joy this decade, approaching Marvel blockbusters and threadbare-budgeted coming of age stories with the same inventiveness. For this list it was a tossup between this film and The Hunt for the Wilderpeople with its therapeutic haikus and battle for the ages against child services and warthogs. I’m giving the place to What We Do In the Shadows because not a moment is wasted in exploiting the spoof format to the full, and the co-direction and acting of the legendary Jermaine Clement from Flight of the Conchords adds another delicious layer. 

    Viago, Vladislav and Deacon are flatmates in Wellington, modern vampires of the city, avoiding daylight and squabbling over who was meant to take out the bins. They’re decent guys: they want their victims to have a nice time before their imminent doom, so invite them round for dinner first. I've learnt since starting clubbing at uni that people tend to find their tribe and stick with them on a night out; in supernatural Wellington this is more true than anywhere. Waititi explores a variety of nocturnal subcultures. A particular highlight is a group of werewolves who are determined to live their best lives, taking deep breaths to manage their anger, and repeating their determination to be ‘werewolves, not swearwolves’. They are locked against the vampires in an ancient dislike. Tragedy, and the possibility of reconciliation lie in a human IT expert named Stu who becomes involved with the gang. Zany and grandiose, What We Do in the Shadows established the Taika Waititi cinematic universe as the filmic territory with the best accents and the most fun. No other film has allowed a middle-aged female vampire to boast, ‘I can sniff a virgin at 100 paces’. More's the pity. 

Next Time: oh no the REAL vampire is capitalism.

Best Films of the 2010s: Mad Max Fury Road

Best Films of the 2010s: Call Me by Your Name

Lists are beautiful. Films are beautiful. Opinions are subjective. Some films that we see now- some made for kids, some made in other languages, some made in 'trashy' genres- will one day become classics. Which ones? Here's my entirely subjective gaze into the crystal ball with my picks of the best films of the 2010s...

Call Me By Your Name

  

 Could there be a more perfect combination of elements than Italy, Sufjan Stevens music, classical statuary, Arnie Hammer and Timothy Chalamet? This film dances (like a dad of course) on the fine line between artful and pretentious. The story is intended to make us as viewers fall in love with its lounging, lazy middle-class aesthetic- reclining by the pool is only interrupted by trilingual conversations-  as much as the characters and their emotions. In adapting his source material, though, director Luca Guadagnino makes one excellent decision after another, scrapping a wanky poetry reading from the book and giving characters that aren’t Elio more of a 3D reality outside of his intense perspective. Chalamet’s Elio is elfin and half-formed, seething too much inside to be graceful. He makes expansive movements that still have a awkward, jerky quality. For all his intelligence he is simple: an open book, who handily even writes his thoughts down on Post-it notes and abortive messages to Oliver. Oliver on the other hand is elusive. The whole film is an exercise in trying to know Oliver. Hammer outwardly is statuesque and placid but this is the result of his character’s inner walls and barriers (the screenplay hints at a repressive upbringing in the US). The moments of freedom he allows himself with Elio seem to spark a boyish joy in him, despite the undertow of fear.

    Some things are oft-mentioned when discussing this film, for instance, the brave ending of Chalamet staring into the fire. The score, too, is remarkable, and so much more than Sufjan (though this is peak, sensitive, plinky plinky Sufjan). I challenge you not to have Hallelujah Junction and Love My Way in your head for days after watching this. It is testament to the film’s greatness, though, that every rewatch draws out new details. Here are some that leap out at me. Elio is reading Heart of Darkness just before the famous peach moment (a seminal moment in the films of the decade, in every sense) , a ridiculous contrast that speaks so well to melodramatic teenage emotions. The first plangent chords of Sufjan’s Visions of Gideon,  which finishes the movie, play even the first time Elio enters Oliver’s room to make love; the film always has one eye on the end. Like the opening crawl of the Imperial Star Destroyer in A New Hope, the camera makes the train on which Oliver eventually departs seem to extend forever. 

    I can talk about the objective qualities of this film forever but for me (like any other honest critic) those are only part of the story. Imagine watching such a beautiful gay romance unfold while attending a secondary school where gay is a joke word. Imagine watching the scene where Elio’s father talks to him about love with your own father, at the end of a year when your parents’ divorce has uprooted your home life. The truthfulness of this film has meant that people see themselves there. Some have argued that this is the 'straight people's gay film' because in the scene where gay sex takes place the camera pans away (to a tree, and not even the sexiest of trees). But as an LGBTQ person I never saw it this way. Most of the physical romantic interaction in the film is portrayed as charming but clunkily awkward. This pan away allows the viewer's own imagination to supply a metaphysical perfection that physical reality cannot attain. And in a film that has been used to sell countless holidays, here is something not being marketed.

Next Time: less piano, more fire-spewing electric guitar.