Lists of the Best Films and Performances of the 2010s: A Plague We'll Be Enduring For a While

[mfunk9786]

Wait, did I miss something again or was Amy Addams snubbed again? :-k

[BenoitRouilly]

Because the trend isn't moving in that direction and hasn't for well over fifty years?

There is no trend in Arts. There are cycles, peaks and rock-bottoms, golden ages and dark ages, high and slow times. But it only takes one genial generation to start over anew and surprise us. Even if they are dwarves standing on the shoulder of giants...
It is not even for JLG that I admire so much the 60ies!
I don't believe in "Death of Cinema", Cinema is a phoenix and will rise from its ashes, again and again. Shortsighted people call for the death of cinema, maybe nostalgic too.
It's like when someone says every story imaginable has been told already, or there are only so and so plots possible in dramaturgy, or it's impossible to tell a new story nowadays... I reject that. It is a lack of imagination. Not that there could be secret new combinations of the same pitch... But it doesn't matter if the same story is told twice or 500 times, it is how it is told (new form, new perspective, new style...), and by who (by a new auteur and by new performers...)

[mfunk9786]

People getting leapt all over for what they do and don't choose to spend their time watching moved here

[Noiradelic]

There is no trend in Arts. There are cycles, peaks and rock-bottoms, golden ages and dark ages, high and slow times. But it only takes one genial generation to start over anew and surprise us. Even if they are dwarves standing on the shoulder of giants...
It is not even for JLG that I admire so much the 60ies!
I don't believe in "Death of Cinema", Cinema is a phoenix and will rise from its ashes, again and again. Shortsighted people call for the death of cinema, maybe nostalgic too.
It's like when someone says every story imaginable has been told already, or there are only so and so plots possible in dramaturgy, or it's impossible to tell a new story nowadays... I reject that. It is a lack of imagination. Not that there could be secret new combinations of the same pitch... But it doesn't matter if the same story is told twice or 500 times, it is how it is told (new form, new perspective, new style...), and by who (by a new auteur and by new performers...)

It's not just JLG, it's dozens of new wave directors (and some not considered new wave) from around the world.

If another decade is "dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants," that implies that decade isn't quite as good.

Nobody used the term "death of cinema." Don't think anyone who's posted in this thread believes it's dead.

The analogy to stories doesn't work. Can't compare a specific art form to narrative, which has probably been around as long as human speech. People claim there are a limited number of basic plots -- like seven -- nobody's ever said there have been only seven (or twenty or a hundred) films.

We don't have to worry about films being destroyed the way they were in the first few decades of cinema.

[domino harvey]

Nobody used the term "death of cinema." Don't think anyone who's posted in this thread believes it's dead.

I did, and the reason he mentions Godard is because that's where my reference he's responding to came from



My claim is of course not entirely serious and I admit upthread that there's plenty of good films still being produced... just not on the scale there were in the sixties

[ianthemovie]

I'd say they're about even. Hoffman chews just as much scenery in that film as Phoenix does, and the penultimate scene is something I think about almost every single day because of Hoffman, not because of Phoenix (although, man oh man he is devastating in it too)

Co-signing this. Their performances are so symbiotic that they're impossible to separate, hence why they shared the Best Actor prize at Venice.

In spite of or maybe because of that fact, Phoenix's absence from this list is conspicuous.

[BenoitRouilly]

If another decade is "dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants," that implies that decade isn't quite as good.

Newton was "standing on the shoulders of giants" so he could see a little bit higher and further than them. He wasn't inferior to them afterall.

[BenoitRouilly]

[oops the post I replied to disappeared]
Well there is this concern about the end of cinema. Sound was supposed to kill the silent actors's work. Then it was the end of Modern Cinema. Now it's the end of film as a medium and the threat of 3D and motion capture CGI performance... There is always a concern for the end of an era as we know it.
Cinema is an industry for its making. But once it's made and paid for, movies can be considered art texts, art pieces, with art mouvements, influences, auteurs, trademarks, critics, history...

[Mr Sausage]

If another decade is "dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants," that implies that decade isn't quite as good.

Newton was "standing on the shoulders of giants" so he could see a little bit higher and further than them. He wasn't inferior to them afterall.

But that's science. It's a very different thing. Science has progress; art doesn't. In art, standing on the shoulders of a giant does imply you aren't quite as good.

[HJackson]

I’ve never heard the phrase used, in the spirit of humility, to mean anything other than the ability to see further because of the prior accomplishments of others. It doesn’t make much sense otherwise.

[Lemmy Caution]

Just watched the James Brown biopic Get On Up the other day.
And Chad Boseman does a pretty impressive job. I think the key is he gets The Godfather's vocal mannerisms down well, that you believe it when he lipsyncs to the real thing. And it likely wouldn't work without hearing James Brown and not some imitation. Boseman provides a nice energy and self-involvement. It's a good film and largely that's due to Boseman laying it out on the line.

Much of that list I haven't seen. And most of those I've seen wouldn't have made my list. But I do give them credit for a lot of non-obvious film choices (which hopefully will get folks to see them more).

[BenoitRouilly]

But that's science. It's a very different thing. Science has progress; art doesn't. In art, standing on the shoulders of a giant does imply you aren't quite as good.

There is very much progress in Art. Artists build upon their predecessors. And a newer art mouvement (often) could not exist without the history of art before it.
It is a matter of taste whether you prefer Classicism to Neo-Classicism, or Modernism to Post-Modernism... but there is a continuity and an evolution (which can produce greater or lower artefacts at each generation)

I’ve never heard the phrase used, in the spirit of humility, to mean anything other than the ability to see further because of the prior accomplishments of others. It doesn’t make much sense otherwise.

It's Newton's humility to use it, because we know he's greater than everyone who came before him.
But I use it to mean both the respect for past cinema mouvement that are greater, and the fact newer generations build upon the experiences of predecessors.


That is a lot of explaining for one analogy... thanks simile police!

[Altair]

Progress implies improvement though - medicine today has progressed/improved on medicine from five centuries ago, but we can't say the same about art forms. They've changed and evolved depending on what has come before, but we cannot say that they have 'improved', because that is a value-judgement.

[JSC]

For a variety of different reasons (some inevitable such as technological changes, others economical) I feel that the
cinema is a medium that has been gradually retreating from it's own potential. We seem to be treated to a parade
of flash-in-the-pan gimmicks, recycled nostalgia, franchises, and BIG SOCIAL STATEMENTS (often hyped in such a way
that you forget that the filmmaking itself isn't all that interesting). Not than any of these things haven't been a part
of the cinema throughout its brief history. It just seems worse.

I still think one of the main problems is distribution. More films are being produced now than at any time in the past,
and yet only a fraction of this work receives any kind of wide release. At the same time the output of the major
studios has not increased, since the 1990s the number of movies released in theaters each year has essentially flat-lined.

Online distribution is too fractured and the mainstream theater chains are not about to give up a part of their
weekend schedule or screens to anything apart from (at least in theory) a guaranteed moneymaker / blockbuster.
Yes, there are still art cinemas, some of them thriving, but there's no larger system of second-run movie houses
as there were in the past to provide an alternative means of distribution.

[HJackson]

Progress implies improvement though - medicine today has progressed/improved on medicine from five centuries ago, but we can't say the same about art forms. They've changed and evolved depending on what has come before, but we cannot say that they have 'improved', because that is a value-judgement.

It usually has that connotation but strictly speaking I don’t think it needs to. The history of art has progressed (ie expanded onward) with time and that progress renders the “shoulders of giants” phrase perfectly appropriate to this context, regardless of whether or not one thinks the general quality of artistic production in a society has degenerated - unless it’s degenerated to such a point that literally nobody is being nourished by the traditions of art history and building on them.

[BenoitRouilly]

I agree that Cinema evolution has been non-linear and scatered, unlike Science or Medecine (if we look at them globally from afar). But 124 years is very short for an artform...
Cinema grammar has evolved constantly building upon the new shot scales, edits, countershots, zooms, average shot lengths, and other cinematography devices. Not to mention sound, colour and 3D.
Yes. Some would argue that cinema was at its peak at the end of the 20ies before the advent of sonorisation, and that cinema downgraded ever after...
But Art history isn't linear either. There are dark ages, and even regression, for centuries (i.e. the rough Middle Age after the perfection reaached by Antic Greece). Nontheless there is an evolution. Some would say Cubism is a drawback from Classicism, others would say it supercedes it (symbolicly if not technically)
It's not because we don't like cinema of the second century that it means cinema stopped evolving, or cannot produce masterpieces anymore.

[Mr Sausage]

But that's science. It's a very different thing. Science has progress; art doesn't. In art, standing on the shoulders of a giant does imply you aren't quite as good.

There is very much progress in Art. Artists build upon their predecessors. And a newer art mouvement (often) could not exist without the history of art before it.
It is a matter of taste whether you prefer Classicism to Neo-Classicism, or Modernism to Post-Modernism... but there is a continuity and an evolution (which can produce greater or lower artefacts at each generation)

Er, well. I'd hoped everyone would know I meant progress in terms of gradual improvement over time, not merely the opposite of regress. Especially considering the point of comparison was "science".

Science is in a continual state of improvement as we add to what we know, discard what no longer seems the case, and strive for greater knowledge. Science has objectively improved from age to age, every addition helping spur new additions. A great new discovery is an avenue, not a closed alley.

This has never been the case in art. Otherwise, each age would be better than the last, and the earliest art would be mainly useless, a curio like the earliest science. There would be little point reading Shakespeare; each generation of playwrights would've bettered him: taken what he did, added some little extra bit to him, and made him obsolete. Much as in science. Vergil would've bettered Homer rather than being his brilliant but less accomplished son; Blake, Shelley, and Keats, with their century and a half extra knowledge behind them, would've supplanted Milton with their imitations of him; Beckett would've kept on writing Joycean novels and bettering the master instead of running headlong in the opposite direction to escape him, and Eimear McBride would've rendered Joyce superfluous instead of being one more disciple likely to be forgotten. Like science, the study of literature would be confined mostly to the latest developments, with the rest left to single History of Art courses.

Artists are always striving to get out of the shadow of their influences, and the more influenced a piece of art is, the less original and valuable it seems. It's not enough merely to add this or that small bit to a previous artist like a scientist adds a little something new to a previous experiment: for the artist, that would make them merely a footnote to the original and superior only to those who added nothing. To've added everything, to be totally original, that's the goal.

You aren't guaranteed a chance to overgo the previous generations of artists merely because you happen to've arrived a generation or more after them. If the history of art shows anything, the later you come, the harder it is. Art is characterized by hills and valleys, with no sure reason for the appearance of this or that pocket of intense and original creativity, and no assurance that the future will bring about anything as good as the past. There is no reason at all to suspect we'll better the 60s in terms of film any more than we can expect to have another Renaissance.

But 124 years is very short for an artform...

But it's a very late art form that has to make do with the cultural moment it finds itself in. We'll never get a cinema of the Renaissance.

[BenoitRouilly]

Then why can't we build pyramids today?
We lost the science of past civilisations : Stonehenge, Vikings, Polynesians, Easter Island, Egyptians, Aztecs, Romans, The Atlantide... and had to "start over" pretty much. History of science is more like a see-saw.

Sure, we'll never get a cinema of THIS Renaissance, but we can imagine another "renaissance" down the line, equally powerful. We haven't invented everything yet... our civilisation didn't even colonise its own galaxy yet!

[knives]

We could and do. They're just inefficient so not common.

[BenoitRouilly]

We could and do. They're just inefficient so not common.

I meant with their same technique (which we lost and only speculate about)

[DarkImbecile]

IndieWire's 20 Best Scores of the 2010s

Easily the best premature best of decade list yet, I'd argue

[Mr Sausage]

Then why can't we build pyramids today?
We lost the science of past civilisations : Stonehenge, Vikings, Polynesians, Easter Island, Egyptians, Aztecs, Romans, The Atlantide... and had to "start over" pretty much. History of science is more like a see-saw.

I think you're confused. What you're talking about is cultural transmission, not science as a discipline. Rest assured, we didn't lose any of that information because of some quirk of the scientific method (which none of those civilizations had).

Sure, we'll never get a cinema of THIS Renaissance, but we can imagine another "renaissance" down the line, equally powerful. We haven't invented everything yet... our civilisation didn't even colonise its own galaxy yet!

I love your optimism, but the way things are trending, we'll be lucky to even have culture in 200 years.

[BenoitRouilly]

I think you're confused. What you're talking about is cultural transmission, not science as a discipline. Rest assured, we didn't lose any of that information because of some quirk of the scientific method (which none of those civilizations had).

I love your optimism, but the way things are trending, we'll be lucky to even have culture in 200 years.

This might be our point of contention. Since the beguinning I'm talking about historiography : the historical evolution of cinema, its year to year (dis)continuity, periods after mouvements after auteurs.
And you guys are talking about Science like an abstract model, detached from its human context which is advancing step by step, and not necessarily in constant progression. The "scientific method" isn't a prerogative of modern science. Those civilisations had astronomy or medicine or mathematics or physics or engineering... Anyway, we're far from a simple analogy to giants and history of cinema.

You seem to be afraid of the end of humanity. But mammals survived the dinosaurs and an asteroid. We could lose everything, science and art, but start another civilisation if only a few couples survived. Science would have to be "reinvented" from scratch. But in 10000 years this event would be but a tiny notch in the history of humanity, like the dinausaurs extinction is to us now.
Whether it is global warming, nuclear warfare, overpopulation, biodiversity jeopardy, or just bad politics and desintegration of culture, what is a stake is the end of an era, not to end of humanity. There will always be survival of the fittest (natural selection). It's not fair, we would lose family ties, cultural background, most of everyone, but ultimately, our descendants won't care how they got there... Culture will rise again after an arid pause.

[Mr Sausage]

This might be our point of contention. Since the beguinning I'm talking about historiography : the historical evolution of cinema, its year to year (dis)continuity, periods after mouvements after auteurs.
And you guys are talking about Science like an abstract model, detached from its human context which is advancing step by step, and not necessarily in constant progression. The "scientific method" isn't a prerogative of modern science. Those civilisations had astronomy or medicine or mathematics or physics or engineering... Anyway, we're far from a simple analogy to giants and history of cinema.

You are swimming in a sea of just the most incredible confusion. You have no idea how hard it is to formulate a response to this many absurdities.

No one has or will ever claim that the history of science has been a pure, abstract teleology from start to finish. But whatever fits and starts it had, whatever constraints put on it by culture, superstition, or bloody-minded orthodoxy, it is founded on the idea of advancement and cannot work if it isn't about bettering the ideas that came before. And history bears this out. Free of most of the extraneous cultural or historical factors that impeded it in the classical and mediaeval eras, science since the 17th century (when the scientific method was codified) has been in a consistent state of advancement, generating new ideas and forgetting obsolete ones. This is why, when you study science, you study the contemporary research.

Art doesn't follow this principle, either historically or in the abstract. Art isn't about the pursuit of lawful regularities in the natural world like science. When great geniuses of science arise, they render past research obsolete. When great geniuses of art come along, if they were unlucky enough to be born into a later cultural moment, like as not they'll continue to remain in the shadow of previous great geniuses. Milton bragged of overgoing all epic poets before him. He achieved astonishing greatness and outdid Spenser, but Dante, Vergil, and Homer are still his superiors. Hemingway bragged of taking on Tolstoy; Tolstoy won. No wonder Ulysses was so Shakespeare haunted; no matter how many innovations Joyce packed into his great novel, it'll never be better than Shakespeare. Hence the study of contemporary literature is just a subsection of the study of literature, not the main focus.

Art is a history of artists trying to get out of the shadows of giants, not standing thankfully on their shoulders.

[moreorless]

For a variety of different reasons (some inevitable such as technological changes, others economical) I feel that the
cinema is a medium that has been gradually retreating from it's own potential. We seem to be treated to a parade
of flash-in-the-pan gimmicks, recycled nostalgia, franchises, and BIG SOCIAL STATEMENTS (often hyped in such a way
that you forget that the filmmaking itself isn't all that interesting). Not than any of these things haven't been a part
of the cinema throughout its brief history. It just seems worse.

I still think one of the main problems is distribution. More films are being produced now than at any time in the past,
and yet only a fraction of this work receives any kind of wide release. At the same time the output of the major
studios has not increased, since the 1990s the number of movies released in theaters each year has essentially flat-lined.

Online distribution is too fractured and the mainstream theater chains are not about to give up a part of their
weekend schedule or screens to anything apart from (at least in theory) a guaranteed moneymaker / blockbuster.
Yes, there are still art cinemas, some of them thriving, but there's no larger system of second-run movie houses
as there were in the past to provide an alternative means of distribution.

I would actually say the rather unambitious "BIG SOCIAL STATEMENTS" are the most significant shift of recent years seemingly pushing out more ambitious cinema into the arthouse market. I mean you look at someone like Jonathan Glazer, theres no way his work is ever going to come near the kind of attention Kurbick's did without a very significant shift in style towards the straightforward. In some respects I think you could argue there has been a bit of a trade off, you have arguably a more stable arthouse scene today yet there is also clearly much more of a glass ceiling than their was in the past where the odd such film could break into the mainstream cultural lexicon.

As far as these kinds of lists go the more people who are involved with them generally the less interesting they become for me, interesting personal taste gives way to blander moderation of opinion. Added to that as well this Indiewire list for me gives the impression of trying to play to a wider market in quite a clumsy/dishonest fashion in its inclusion of some politically hyped blockbusters and its omission of some previously praised but now "problematic" films.