My Favorite Films of the Decade (2010-2019)

hey everybody today I'm going to be talking about my favorite films of the last 10 years the last decade and look I mean this list was not fun to put together because that's a lot of movies to think about and to go through and you know some of them I had to rewatch because I hadn't seen them in years to see if they still hold up so I was like it's complicated I don't like this is like it's kind of stressful but I have created a little list here it's not top 5 top 10 I really know how many movies are on here just a little list of movies that I came up with and movies that really influenced me that inspired me once that are complex and really hold up with repeated viewings things like that or what I'm looking for these are in no particular order except for the last one I always do this I talk about all my favorite films but I leave my very favorite one for last I'm gonna try to go through these semi quickly and we'll see how that works but let's just let's get into it my first film is holy motors and this came out in 2012 and it was directed by Leos Carax I really like movies that are about the very act of making movies not necessarily movies that take place in Hollywood but movies that are about the idea of what film can be film as an illusion all of that and that's what this movie is about it's about film and how it is a certain language it's deconstructing the very nature of cinema and of cinema structure but it's from a critics perspective because Leo's facts did kind of begin and film criticism and that sort of insight can really help you in it when you're trying to make a film like this one because you think about that stuff a lot as a critic you think a lot about the way things work in this movie I mean it's really hard to talk about plot because there's really not a plot nothing adds up nothing really makes sense in terms of logic this movie is in a sense studying manipulation the active of manipulating which is what film does obviously to elicit a certain response and any's using allusions to sort of comment on the essence of film and he's also jumbling with structure kind of inverting it so that we can examine it in a different way a lot of times when people do that it feels very grim and dystopian and well this is a dark film or an aesthetic I don't think it's a negative film at all actually I think it's quite a positive look at illusions and how they can evolve into something new and exciting it's saying yes things are changing they're evolving and a lot of what we appreciated about film in the past is is no longer relevant anymore but at the same time it's never going to completely die like the idea of a story being presented in some sort of way yeah for certain mediums can die out have become more novelties but the art itself is always going to live on and they're always going to be ways of expressing that through some sort of narrative in some way it's just that that way is changing and there will be new ways of expressing that depth and in that personal examination and there's something about that that I find to be really beautiful because this film you know while there's a bitter sweetness to it it's also a celebration of art and and film and just expression in general and I don't know there's something very liberating about watching a movie like this there there are sequences in it that are just so breathtakingly beautiful some of the most unforgettable that I've seen in the last decade for sure and when I walk out of it I'm left feeling surprisingly very touched and and very moved and I feel okay about the world despite some of the melancholy tone of this movie really examining that that mortality the motion capture sequence is one of my favorite because I does kind of have that coldness to it that sterile quality of the modern day and CGI and all of that you know the things that we have to do in order to to create all of these things in modern movies and yet there's some sort of performance our quality to that I love the scene I guess it's more of like the intermission it's that accordion scene where he's playing the accordion all the sudden all the other accordion players join in and you have a whole band I love it because it means absolutely nothing and yet it's just a celebration these people are reveling in their art and in their expression it's so simple and meaningless and yet it brings me to tears every time so I highly highly recommend it especially for people that are huge cinephiles because it's really it's special next I'm going to be talking about certified copy and this film was directed by Abbas caressed I had to revisit this one because I hadn't seen it in a number of years so I had seen it multiple times in the past but it always stuck with me as something that I knew I would have to return to at some point revisiting at this time I had a very very different response to it or I should say my relationship with it definitely change and either either I've changed or the movie itself is really that complex and I honestly I think it's it's a mix of both but what I do know is this movie is extremely complex so complex in fact that I I don't know if I'm smart enough for it there's still lots that I'm trying to to pick apart and understand when I was younger I I kept emphasizing um the narrative of it and trying to figure out where it was going in a more logical sense because this movie has a very strange narrative that is constantly shifting you have two main characters at the center of the story and your your your custody trying to figure out that what their relationship is to each other either it seems and it seems either they are two people that have never met and they decide they're mistaken for a married couple so they just start decide to play along and they create this whole story that they've been married for 15 years and they're on their anniversary or they actually are married this entire time and that truth gets revealed more as the movie develops that you don't see it right away and I remember being just fixated on that idea and I think part of it was because that's where a lot of the discussions were coming from at the time in regards to this movie but for me I kind of thought that that was the key that that was the that you had to figure that part out to be able to understand the proposed thesis that is at the beginning of the movie and it's that whole idea of you know like original art versus copies and the meaning the value of them but now returning to it this last time I have to say I that actually was one of the least interesting things about the film not to say that it's not interesting it's just that there's so much more going on that I found myself um kind of neglecting that aspect of it and I think when you look at it just as that as an either/or I think you're missing a lot of other potential possibilities that the movies going for but I think you can easily get fixate that worked the whole idea is just a conceit that's that's reviewing the thesis and a very black-and-white sort of way ya know this this film is I kept thinking as I was watching the word I kept thinking of some rich it's just rich rich authentic it has so much in it in every line in every mannerism in every shot it reminds me a little bit of Richard Linklater's before and after trilogy but yeah it's it's far more ambitious far more layered and I have to say it's it's it's trivia and I know maybe some people might not think about this movie is particularly trippy but it is the more that you watch it I think because if you really start thinking about it it is this very strange puzzle very abstract and as I said that the narrative you're always trying to figure out because it's constantly shifting into something it's almost like being in a dream you know like a lot of times when you you dream you'll be either in your house or maybe your family house sometimes you'll be in a house that you don't recognize and you walk around in it and it seems like the layout is constantly shifting that's a particular type of dream that reveals a certain psychology or like a mental state typically a stressful state but that's how this film feels in terms of the way that the characters are speaking what they're revealing about themselves to each other into us but through it all they are exploring the the facets of perception and particularly through art because really you know it's about that the thesis of art and what it means and they're and they're discovering it through their own relationship and also with interactions from other people it's exploring the idea of truth versus facades but there's so much that they're talking about and I could go on for hours and hours about this for real but it's also combining kind of that surrealist aspect of filmmaking where the concept of time and and logic just don't seem to matter very similarly to holy motors there are not two filmmakers of the past like luis manuel and and i do that in a very cool way which i don't want to reveal if you're gonna watch the movie because if your ass in a file i think you little you'll see that is a real treat but i think it says a lot of about Kiyosaki and what he's going for in certain aspects there's certainly appreciation of the past and for art but also all of the ways that can be interpreted and distorted but yeah I don't I don't know what else to say about maybe other than it is so intricately layered in the sense that I don't think I can give it a proper review because it is so complicated and I haven't wrapped my my head around it even after seeing it multiple times it's still revealing itself to me and that I find so intriguing and I was so hypnopompic hypnotized by this film the first time I saw it and it still has that quality and it's it's a masterwork next I'm gonna be talking about Phoenix and this is directed by Christian pencil this movie is going to be one of the more subtle movies compared to a lot of the other ones on this list and I think and I talked about this in my original review I had to go back and watch it because it had been years since I had done it but one thing that I said and I kept talking about is how this film is deceptively simple it is it appears so effortless and I think that is its power it is so perfectly structured there's not a hair out of place not a single line is a throwaway not a single scene everything is exactly where it needs to be and everything is essential to the whole story the film takes on that iconic premise that was used in vertigo and which is an interesting one somebody pretending to be a role in order to please another person in a relationship and that reveals many raw and toxic elements to both the women view women and the way women view men because it's based on on the romanticism that they project onto each other and what they expect each other to be whether from social expectation or whatever but this movie uses it that concept in a way that is is very much its own thing and I like that about it it's more using the concept in a way that is reflecting nationalism and how all of that was supposed to work in a post-war Europe that's one aspect of it but you know it's also as I said it's about relationships themselves and and the toxicity between men and women and the links that were willing to go to to maintain a certain illusion whether for the excitement or to be the person that you want the other person to see you as and I keep thinking about the idea of illusions I know that that's kind of a theme throughout this list I like that sort of stuff but that idea and the like performance are almost in a like like a David Lynch sort of feel it's always lurking in the background of this movie and maintaining the idea of as I say performance and how we often fall victim to those illusions even the wife and the husband and this are both performers and and he does the movie is called Phoenix which is that the club that she sees him in and the movie ends with a performance I mean really the whole movie is a performance and innocence but I mean it ends with an actual performance by the two of them the premise itself is quite far-fetched in a lot of ways and but I yet I look at this movie more as it's a suspension of disbelief sort of thing and whether that makes sense to you or not and whether or not you're going like oh come on how could he not tell that's her and she's got the same voice etc but I actually think that that's part of the symbolism of the movie it's the idea that he's probably maybe on some level he does know it's her but he's in denial about it they are all in a certain denial a denial about her and in a denial about the state of their country in the movie just in the way that it's shot and everything there is just a very melancholy very poetic sort of feeling and it's almost like a haze throughout it's calm but yet there's this turbulence that seems to seem from underneath it I think it's a movie that I said it's so simple yet I think that there's there's a lot within it I also think it's timeless and it does have a potential to be one of those classics that we look back on and I don't see it being dated anytime soon moving right along the next movie that is on my list is Enter the Void and this film came out in technically it came out in 2009 but it wasn't released until 2010 so it's going on the list because you know I had to sneak in a know a film in there I had to and this is the one that I'm gonna go with because you know as I've said I there are things about know and there's certainly things that when it comes to into the void that I struggle with it is a very flawed movie and it's sloppy at times it's it's unnecessarily expository in sections and yet it's an experience like no other and one of those movies that no matter what when I first saw it I didn't like it when it kept sticking with me and the more that I watched it the more I learn to respect it and even admire it and even really really like it I will never forget just how much it affected me I think it's maybe the second time that I saw the movie because it it was a very different point of view I was coming from at a different point in my life and when I did and the feeling the visceral feeling I had was was is so extreme it was like it was like the world melted away and I was almost like almost I became induced sighs I was like wrapped up in this whatever this was this this this ride this phantasmagoria this this fever dream it's it's DMT like drenched psychedelic world that it's exploring so much about life and about death and rebirth and procreation all in one and how it's all tied together in this sort of cyclical way it's a circle with no end and no beginning it's exploring time and how time can be relative we're all essentially trying to return to the womb to be connected to our roots throughout our lives I think of all the movies that gospel now is done and you know he's always interesting I think that this one is perhaps his most ambitious film I would say visually but also thematically it is just so bold I mean he is so unafraid to push the very edges of human emotion but especially in this one because it's almost like he's going past it as though you're on an acid trip when on an acid trip and you you push so far that you you transcend emotion and it becomes something new entirely and that's almost how it feels here because the movie at times is so intense that you you you push past it to something more toxic and yet at other times it's so meditative that it's almost like you're being willed to sleep it's like soporific you're like blending in with the experience it's also gut-wrenching and it's also disorienting it's it's melancholy a beautiful yet repulsive there's even a warning at the beginning of the movie that if you have epilepsy maybe don't watch this movie so yeah there's a lot going on there there's a there's a DMT trip actually in the movie at the very beginning it's one of the most abrasive experiences that yes it's so aesthetically driven and yet there's so much to learn about the self through that experience so much to fall in and absorb and it's never it's never simple it feels like it's it's right from the gut and and I appreciate that or maybe I should say for booboo this movie had a similar effect to me that 2001 had and I you know I think obviously 2001 is a heavy influence on in this film but it did have a similar impact on me where I just didn't I didn't know what I had seen I didn't know what I felt and it's been so exciting returning to both those films over time and realizing what it means for me next on my list is boyhood and this came out in 2014 it was directed by Richard Linklater this movie also is very very very ambitious in the sense that it was shot over a 12-year period and it's chronicling the life of a boy as he goes from being a child into adolescence and then ultimately adulthood I do think this is one of his best movies in the last decade for sure it's a movie that you know is it's similar to waking life in the sense that there's a lot of like existential like philosophical musings and we see that through all kinds of different people through their points of view in both movies and really there it's just like reflecting the struggle of of what it means to exist the struggle for contentment the struggle with with mortality and and time and what it means to us this movie is is very reminiscent to me of something like Joan Didion's the White Album which is actually a nonfiction written piece in one of my favorites in the sense that it it seems to be kind of commenting on the very idea of what what story structure is where it's more it feels more like it's just capturing a period in time and all these little little vignettes little moments that that she's emphasizing here and there that's creating ultimately like a mosaic it's like like just kind of little textures of life and and this movie feels that way it's sort of defying the idea of climactic moments and and the big things with the orchestra swells that were we're so used to in narratives whether it's winning a gold medal at the Olympics and having that big moment in the movie whether it's getting married whether it's having a kid whatever those are all the big staples of life that we look to in this film says no that's not all that life is about it's about the in between and how authentic life can unfold if you let it and it does this movie does feel like some great nonfiction work in in the Joan Didion sense it feels like a little Polaroid Polaroid czar or little diary entries so that we aren't looking at the big moments and we're not even looking for them we're just living in the moment even with it being shot over 12 years there's something about that you know that's not something we see often and it is sort of a commentary on time all that ambition completely comes full circle and it is done with more heart and more integrity than anything I think you're likely going to see from Linklater which is saying a lot because I think that a lot of his movies are very very personal and yet this one felt even more so this is a passion project it surely is and it moves me to tears it moved me so much when I saw it the first time and I loved it I loved it so much another film that is similar to that one that I often think her good companion pieces and there's also on this list is Tree of Life which came out in 2011 and that was directed by Terrence Malick similar to boyhood in the sense that it has a lot of that same philosophical contemplation about existence and the meaning of life but done in a very different way this is a very different type of auteur only Terrence Malick could make a movie like this I know a lot of people try to copy the sorts of style but it is his style it's a very celestial movie very very cosmic where a lot of the sensory moments the very tangible moments are focused on very similarly to boyhood this has more of a spiritual feeling to it and if we're seeing a person a child evolve and mature and as we're doing it the way that the film is it's the camerawork so fluid and the dialogue and everything is so so fluid and it feels almost like each moment is like a little breath or a little kiss it's a very spiritual very ethereal experience watching this movie it honestly it feels almost like you're taking psilocybin mushrooms in the middle of the woods that honestly I think that's a good way to describe this movie it fits with that sort of mentality and there's something so precious about it even if you think it's lofty or maybe overly ambitious some people have criticized it for being that but I think that there's something so deeply precious and personal about it's it feels like you know a summer night when you're a child and you're trying to capture a little dragonflies and put them in a jar it is so intimate and real like the thumb prints of a life they can't be recreated when I was younger I actually kind of agreed with a lot of that that criticism because when this movie came out I think I was like I was like 21 years old or something and I remember thinking that I didn't know if I felt that the big the more kind of space sequences of it fit in with the the story about the family but now I feel so differently I feel like that that's so important and so crucial to understanding the thumb because it's capturing the full range of possibility and and scope and it's also that part of perspective again like in a mushroom trip almost like stepping outside of your life for a second and I feel like looking at it's almost as if we're pondering that quote and I know I'm probably gonna get this wrong but it's this whole idea of am i a part of the universe or is the universe part of me is existence in the meaning of life and and all of this knowledge all really represented in a little family in Texas perhaps and I think the exploration of that is so remarkable I think that this is one of the most free and most creative special experiences you can have at the movies and I think it is terrence malick at his finest at least for this decade it becomes transcendent ultimately and it feels like you're watching somebody come to terms with something and accept something and how powerful that can be but right before their death right before their life is about to come to a close and there's a bitterness about that yet such a beauty it gives me chills next I'm gonna talk about not sure Amma which came out in 2016 and that was directed by Bertram vanilla and that director is perhaps one of the great discoveries I've had this decade and I actually have two movies on here by him I just think his approach to filmmaking is is very unusual and it so goes against what is typical in terms of instincts and how you would normally build tension in a sequence or how you would build characters there's actually little to no character development in this movie and there's very little information to go on in terms of these these people in the movie their intent their motivations and yet I have no problem with the strategy of not building the characters at all because I think that's kind of the essential core of it and the point of what he's trying to do or maybe explore but he's exploring things more in a like a visual sense I would say his movies are very abstract in tune and there's almost at times there's almost no linear coherence and it creates a feeling that's almost almost psychedelic and in dreamlike it's kind of refracting I always get a feeling of mirrors when I'm watching his movies and you do see mirrors as a common theme it's very dizzying yet at the same time very controlled and very precise it's like a chess game and it all works together so seamlessly to create a sort of tone that's insinuating a lot about the modern world but it never feels forced and I think part of that is because we never really know how he feels about it because he's never quite giving us a clear point of view it's more what we have to interpret for ourselves and I think that somehow the emptiness of the film but I guess if you want to call it that maybe the skeletal quality of the characters and all of that I think it seems to complement that that's feeling really well we don't need to know about these characters as singular types because they are in a way they work together as one nucleus as I often say when it comes to his films when it comes to the ensemble of characters they stand more for like a social symbol symbol they're like lab rats that were watching from above I think this movie says a lot about the Millennial Generation the loneliness of it the aimlessness of it and and certainly the disconnect but what draws these people together and there's a lot of things that I can think you could say but I think part of it is is wanting to to rebel and not really understanding why to gain attention not really understanding why there's so much that they don't understand and get in their way in over their heads because of it destruction and sacrifice and and ultimately death will be the the result of their actions and they in when you watch the movie it's like they have to know that um but yet they're still so gung-ho it's like they are leaping into the destruction almost like they're they're just they're they're putting on the accelerator like it's like Thelma and Louise there's something about that that feels very sad and very lonely about this generation about people that are so starved for attention and the movie captures all of that through the most expertly crafted visuals and even touches of surrealism throughout it's a very clinical approach but it's always aware of the conceit of what it means to make a film and how that is still a manipulative tool and that tool is really representing this community of people as though it's like a social experiment it's so intricate in its execution it is it's one of those movies where you've got to watch it twice like there's no if ands or buts you have to I saw the movie once and I saw it one more time right after back to back and that's that's a perfect way to do it and I'm finally gonna get to my favorite movie of the decade and that is a Bertrand Vanilla film it is House of Tolerance which came out in the year 2011 it's hard to capture I mean it's hard to talk about all these movies to be quite honest because they they are so great and to talk about them in little blurbs like this is really hard but when I think about this movie I think a lot about what people think about me in my life like my friends and they like one of my best friends said to me once you know I wouldn't want to watch movies the way that you do because he doesn't like the idea of things being so analytical when you're so analytical like that there you do lose something and I agree with that you lose that I'm that immersive quality to the movie that entertainment value you lose the manipulation which is what it's trying to do because we are more like people like me or more like mechanics where we want to pop the hood and look at the wheels nuts and bolts of how something is working I love that and I can't imagine my life any other way I wouldn't want to watch movies any other way but at the same time yeah there is a certain loneliness to it you do lose a lot I look at movies it feels a lot more like work because I'm doing it for this purpose a lot of the time when people want to see a movie for fun with me it's you know I really have no interest I'd rather do something else but this is one of the few films or I'd say of all the movies on this list and other movies as well because this you know there's many great films this decade this is the one I think where I relinquishing I analytical nature on a first viewing especially initial first viewing I think more than anything else this movie had such a profound impact on me in a way that I pretty much was speechless by the end of it and that's that's rare when I talk about this movie when I think about it I and I just think of Bertram vanilla both films not drama in this film it's it's the idea of Mears kind of intercutting and like they're kind of overlapping and cutting into each other as though I mean that's just kind of his philosophy it seems and his technique is its aesthetic what it the way he constructs this film like because if somebody walks past that you know you're gonna see that person you know repeatedly go through in different reflections but each one's gonna be a little distorted the angles gonna be a little different and your perceptions of what that person really looks like is going to be different and there's something surreal about that and I think that his his loop is his idea of time and the logic behind time and in terms of how it's structured in his movies works very similarly it is a very experimental sort of thing that he's going for here and I think it is kind of ultimate post-modernism there's a little bit in his in this movie there's a little bit of Lynch there's a little bit of gossamer no way there's a little bit of Kubrick but it's its own refreshing modern concoction at the same time and it is it even though it takes place at the very end of the 19th century into the 20th century it feels like it's removed from any time period at all and almost as though it's not even in this universe at times and again like dr. Ouma it's it's it's a different experience of watching moving where the characters themselves are not the focus and it's the skeletal nature of it that becomes the crux of why it works ironically when I said I'm talking about not trauma that it feels like one big nucleus that's what this feels like - it feels like you're experiencing the pure emptiness and isolation of a person like a mine that is slowly decomposing because of their sadness this is a film about prostitution essentially about a singular brothel but it's about the romanticism of it as well as the D glamorization of it exposes a lot of truths behind it and how it in assessing conflicts thinks about romanticism how romanticism is superficial to an extent and yet how that superficiality starts to begin to define you and that is through the symbol of sexuality and how sex can define you to a point where it owns you and then you lose that self-control this movie to me is about that about feeling boys through sex and how that is intertwined with the whole concept the whole idea of what it means to be a woman in particular a sexually active woman and it's also intertwined with the idea of social class and what is expected of a woman and how hard it is to break from your environment once it has seemed to define you wanting a sort of pleasure and wanting a sort of romanticism without the shame of sharing that identity that's projected onto you because of it the characters in this like yeah they do fit together almost like it's one stream of consciousness as though there are waves fluctuating throughout nothing in this film is concrete it feels like you're responding to two feelings and impulses it's feelings and abstraction and stuff that you're exploring within yourself and yeah I mean it did it in a way that made me feel extremely vulnerable and made me feel very sad to be honest with you as a woman who is very odd and is also struggling with their their sense of identity it is the most special and maybe the most intricate the most nuanced one of the most creative works it brought me to tears multiple times throughout and you know I know I'm saying that about a lot in these movies but I don't cry very often at movies so when I do you know it it really means something but this film really evoke that for me because it is it's just a tapestry of all these complex moods and emotions but through all of it through the pain there is a sense of evolution and strength when I saw this movie though I just remember thinking this is what it means to truly reach your potential as an artist as a filmmaker in every way this is it like we're there the end so yeah I mean how could that not be something that I'll always want to return to and a film that I think is one of the great films of the last 10 years but yeah those are my favorite movies of the decade and I realized as I was putting this together that I've been doing this for 10 years I've been on YouTube off and on of course but I started 10 years ago as a 19 year old and I realized at that point I was like holy that's a long time and I've changed a lot obviously as a human being but I've changed a lot like just in terms of my reviewing and the way that see movies and how seriously I want to take them and I think this channel has evolved a lot in that time but I do enjoy doing it it's something I do more for passion than anything else because it's not like I get paid a huge amount or anything but I really appreciate all of you guys for watching and please recommend two movies maybe that I haven't seen of the past ten years and go ahead and comment and I'm excited to see what the next 10 years bring and maybe we'll see how long I still keep doing this but anyway that is the video and if you'd like to follow any of my social media stuff it's all down there you can watch more videos here and you can subscribe if you want to catch you next time

Channel: deepfocuslens

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Length: 31min 14sec (1874 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 22 2020