My 50 Favorite Films of the Decade: 2010-2019

I was a bit of a latecomer to loving movies.  I first got really interested in film around 2007 when I was a teen, but it wasn't until the start of this decade that I truly started watching films avidly.  And as the definition of who can make movies and how they can make them has expanded, there has been so much cinema to consume, and I've tried my best to soak it all up.  There are still blindspots on my list -- I wish there were more international films on it, as well as films directed by women and people of color -- but I think it still represents many different genres and styles.

The rules: My albums list had a limit of only one album per act, but that felt a little restrictive for films, so I loosened it up to have a maximum of two films per director.  There are a few examples of that on this list.  Did I make the right choice?  Who can say, I love my auteurs!  A small change from my year end lists is that I always use the American theatrical release date of a film to determine its eligibility.  Since that's a little harder to track and remember as time goes by, I'm just going by the year listed on IMDB, which will sometimes be the year before the theatrical release if the movie premiered at a festival.  With that in mind, the eligibility window is a world premiere between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.  This doesn't factor in often, but one example is Dogtooth, which had a theatrical release in 2010 but is not eligible because its world premiere was in 2009.

My 20 Favorite Films of 2018

This year, I saw a total of 104 new releases, compared to the usual 65 or so.  Part of that is because of a concerted effort to commit myself more to film, but it's also because of the increased democratization of the medium.  As much as critics and purists like to complain about Netflix invading the release market and ruining the cinema experience, they've made movies that often would have otherwise been relegated to the festival-to-limited-coastal-screening pipeline instantly accessible to everyone around the world.  Not to mention the types of films that are mostly seen only by critics seem to have gotten online releases much sooner lately, which allows for regular folks like myself to do more end of the year catch-ups.

For those reasons, I have less complaining to dish out about not seeing important films in time than I usually do in these intros.  I've seen a majority of the major films that are in contention for everybody's Best Ofs, aside from If Beale Street Could Talk and a few others.  So let's take a look at my favorites from 2018's crop of films.

The rules: As long as a film got an official release in 2018, it was eligible for placement on this list.  This is an important thing to remember, since some of the films that appear in my top 20 premiered at film festivals in 2017, but didn't get released in theaters until this year.  And in the case where a film got no theatrical release, then a VOD debut in 2018 will make it eligible.