2010-2019 Top Ten Films

The following is a list of films that were moments of revelation when extremely important aspects of what contemporary cinema should be doing snapped into crystal sharp focus. Each film does something very different but collectively they form a diagram of why cinema can still be considered alive and essential in the 21st century.

1)   No Home Movie (Chantal Akerman)
2)   Welcome to New York (Abel Ferrara)
3)   Trailers (Rouzbeh Rashidi)
4)   Adieu au langage (Jean-Luc Godard)
5)   The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles) & The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
6)   90  años sin dormir (Juan Carlos Gallardo)
7)   Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Verena Paravel)
8)   Refrains Happen Like Revolutions in a Song (John Torres)
9)   Ballet aquatique (Raul Ruiz)
10) Sleep Has Her House (Scott Barley)

Special mention #1: All Andrew Kötting’s movies from this decade for demonstrating film as an art of living in a way that is, to me at least, uniquely energising and life-affirming.

Special mention #2: Carmelo Bene. Forget everything else, most of all that he died in 2002 and even then hadn’t made a film since 1973: Bene is the filmmaker we need most today. His handful of masterpieces remain unlike anything else in cinema. They have a matchless ability to shatter every aspect of filmic representation and surf the ensuing chaos with breathtaking energy and sophistication. They are devices perfectly geared to dealing with the contradictions of the 21st century, combining as they do huge contemporary relevance and its opposite. And this specific combination is explosive on a level that nothing I can think of being made today is.