At the request of absolutely no one I compiled a list of my Top 30 films of the decade. And — again, no one asked for this, I know — I decided to draw a picture (well, creatively trace a picture) for each of them. I'll share them in this thread over the next couple of weeks.
And, look: I know these aren't good. But I'm enjoying doing them. Indulge a film enthusiast at the end of a decade, won't you?
30. MANDY (2018): I haven't been able to get this movie out of my head since seeing it. It pointed me directly toward my current book project. 
29. UPSTREAM COLOR (2013): I love some of the films on this list in part because they don't yield up their meanings easily. You can map out the plot of UPSTREAM COLOR, but it keeps many of its mysteries to itself anyway.
28. LADY BIRD (2017): This movie had me from the start, but the final stretch just killed me. It's a coming of age movie that reckons with what happens next, how family business never really gets settled, and how even necessary losses can sting.
27. THE ACT OF KILLING (2012): What happens when evil wins, stays in power, and gets to write history in a way that valorizes its atrocities? What kind of work does it take to un-warp the past? Do the damned sleep well? It's no exaggeration to say I think about this movie daily.
(Also, until putting this list together I missed that Anwar Congo died earlier this year: bbc.com/news/world-asi…)
27. THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017): Had a hard time choosing between this one and TANGERINE, the other great Sean Baker film about fragile lives on the margins of the American Dream.
(The above should be 26.) I misnumbered.
25. FIRST REFORMED (2017): What does faith mean in a world that gives those paying attention every reason to give up hope? Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
24. THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010): a film about the recent past whose final scene — a man alone at a keyboard searching for a connection in the new digital age — now looks like a vision of the future.
23. ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (2019): The long day closes.
22. INSIDE LLEWYN DAVIS (2013): Sometimes you grab onto the wrong cat.
21. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA (2016): This is such an overwhelmingly sad movie that it’s easy to forget how many funny moments it has. But in a movie about how pain and regret can overwrite everything else, that’s kind of fitting.
20. PARASITE (2019): What lies beneath?
19. MEEK’S CUTOFF (2011): A remarkable film both for the granular detail about the precariousness of settler life and for the way it helped tee up a decade of films questioning the authority of overconfident white dudes.
18. GET OUT (2017): Seeing this for the first time was one of the best moviegoing experiences I had this decade. It was a thrill to watch a movie working at every possible level but also to sense it had the audience in its grips from start to finish.
17. PATERSON (2016): “It’ll be like going back to the 20th century!” Toss-up between this and ONLY LOVERS for this slot. I really needed this one in the fall of 2016.
16. ARRIVAL (2016): Another film tangled up in 2016 for me. I saw this shortly after the election, maybe the day after, and its depiction of the fragility of the world and how much depends on communication, intelligence, and curiosity just broke me that day.
CAROL (2015): Maybe the only thing more daring after making FAR FROM A HEAVEN, a classic melodrama closely modeled after Douglas Sirk, was to do the same while taking off the guardrails of direct homage. The result is moving and timeless.
14. MOONRISE KINGDOM (2012): My wife (@smkuenn) likes point out if you see this at 15 it would look like the most romantic movie in the world. To adults, it looks quite different. Anderson’s love of Truffaut, who made the troubles of children central to many films, shows here.
13. INSIDE OUT (2015): No list is objective and it’s often hard to sort out where one’s appreciation of a film ends and where the points it’s gotten tangled up in your life begins. This is a great Pixar movie but also the movie we took our four-year-old to that she loved.
12. THE IRISHMAN (2019): Scorsese! De Niro! Pesci! Keitel! Plus Pacino! All the gangster boys are together for... a slow, somber, soul-searing meditation on time, regret and final things.
11. HER (2013): In some ways this film now looks a little quaint, a product of a moment when it seemed like we might have to grapple with the consequences of a tech-enabled utopia. But the questions it raises about the nature of being and loneliness haven’t aged a bit.
10. MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015): Thought of this with great skepticism given that it been so long since Miller had even directed a movie, much less this sort of movie. Went in thinking it couldn’t live up to Cannes hype. Left thinking, “Was that a perfect movie?”
9. ANNIHILATION (2015) My top 10 is dominated by films that I love in part because they keep their mysteries to themselves, few more than this one. I could probably watch it weekly and emerge with a different perspective and each viewing. Wish I had the time.
8. WINTER’S BONE (2010): Went into this not knowing what to expect and came away awestruck. I’d missed Granik’s previous work and knew nothing of the film’s young star who, well, things worked out for her. Here’s hoping it won’t be as long between Granik films in the ‘20s.
7. MOONLIGHT (2016): I really liked Barry Jenkins’ debut MEDICINE FOR MELANCHOLY. Then he kind of went away. Then he came back as a director of extraordinary emotional power that wasn’t evident in that debut. IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK could just as easily be on this list.
6. UNDER THE SKIN (2013): “Unsettling” can mean creepy, which this film frequently is. But it can also mean something that upsets your way of looking at the world on a deep level. This does that too.
5. BOYHOOD (2014): A movie I think about all the time, sometimes for the smart choices for each year (Harry Potter parties, iMacs) but mostly for the way it depicts relationships between parents and children as ever-changing, never perfect, but always binding.
(Got the date wrong in the drawing.)
4. THE MASTER (2012): “If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world.”
3. ROMA (2018): Journeys through the past are usually attempts to discover what shapes the journeyer. That’s part of ROMA, sure, but its richness comes from looking at the places Cuaron couldn’t have known or understood as a child and at the life of a woman he took for granted.
2. THE TREE OF LIFE (2011): My wife and I had a child days before I saw this movie. Would it rank this high anyway? Probably. But my feelings about that event and this film are too entwined for me to say for sure.
1. CERTIFIED COPY (2010): Another film whose mysteries I would never claim to fully understand. But its depiction of how love and movies can create sustaining illusions is as elusive as it is moving.
Postscript to that last entry: R.I.P. Abbas Kiarostami, a master whose depictions — and those created by other Iranian filmmakers — of an Iran teeming with humanity have helped make it impossible to see the country as an abstraction or its people as enemies.
