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 2019

What is cinema?  Never mind...I'll leave that question to Martin Scorsese.

Every year in my TV list, I talk about trying to watch less TV.  With film, I'm trying to do the opposite.  And I did pretty well with that last year, watching a total of 104 new releases, way more than I ever had before.  That would be tough to top, but I at least wanted to stay somewhere close, as opposed to the 75 I ended up hitting.  Part of that is because this year marked the debut of the Criterion Channel streaming service and I chose to spend more time watching MGM musicals from the 1950s and Akira Kurosawa films instead of whatever new algorithmically generated movie Netflix released onto their system.  But another part might be that it was a weaker year overall.  It was very top-heavy in 2019, with many masters and soon-to-be masters putting out excellent work, but it just didn't seem to have the overall depth that 2018 did.  Even some of those aforementioned masters could barely get their movies shown in theaters.

Okay, maybe Marty was right.

The rules: As long as a film got an official United States release in 2019, 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 2018, 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 2019 will make it eligible.