They involved aliens, postapocalyptic heroines, gangsters, literary icons, saints, sinners, killers, a monstrosity named Monsieur Merde and even, on occasion, normal human beings. The 50 movies we picked as the best of the decade covered a lot of traditional types - blockbusters, arthouse films, indies, studio-sponsored hits (and misses), foreign-language films, docs, star vehicles, director-driven projects - and spanned the globe.
No one knew that Disney would own all of them. No one might have guessed there would be 23 Marvel movies, and a new Star Wars trilogy with several spin-off films, and a whole slate of animated classics redone as live-action spectacles. It’s now the dominant Hollywood-studio model. In 2010, the notion of a “cinematic universe” seemed far-fetched. We started the decade with a drama about a social-media pioneer who’d help make the internet our primary mode of communication and ended it with a long, epic story by America’s greatest living filmmaker that most people will see on Netflix.
What was a “movie,” anyway? Was it a nearly eight-hour, multipart documentary that showed in a theater? Was it an auteur-driven pet project that debuted on a streaming service? Was it a TV show made by a director that film critics loved? (The answer to that last one is a resounding no.) (Though “A24,” “superheroes” and “now streaming” immediately come to mind.) You can argue that every that-was-the-era-that-was summary charts an art form in some sort of transition, but this particular 10-year span suggested that cinema - not just a New York word, for what it’s worth - was dealing with one hell of an identity crisis. It was the best of decades, it was the most WTF of decades - looking back on the movies that came to define the 2010s both critically and commercially, it’s nearly impossible to nail the particular arc of the medium in a few concise words or phrases.
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