![]() ![]() But beneath its gorgeous, grandiose surface is one wonderfully twisted parable about the power dynamics of relationships, made all the more romantic by the way the scale tilts before it evens out. “Kiss me, my girl, before I’m sick.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s journey in to the 1950s world of British haute couture is the sort of bespoke, finely tailored movie you’d expect from the meticulous filmmaker move Daniel Day-Lewis’ designer Reynolds Woodcock, someone so attuned to the tiniest details of his personal-to-a-fault garments, into a director’s chair and you’d have a self-portrait. There are only people - loving, flawed, best-intentioned and perpetually screwed up people. A major touchstone of modern Iranian cinema and a stunning example of how to mine drama from the simplest of conversational scenes, Farhadi’s breakthrough movie reminds us that there are no heroes and villains in these types of stories. The couple, played by Peyman Moadi and Sarina Farhadi, keep finding themselves running up against their respective bitterness and a mutual frustration with bureaucratic red tape an incident involving a carekeeper (Sareh Bayat) hired to care for the husband’s elderly father only complicates things further. ![]() The fact that this fight is taking place in Iran, of course, also means there is a different set of cultural rules in play. Long before Marriage Story let a thousand memes bloom, there was Asghar Farhadi’s take-no-prisoners tale of a union rent asunder by anger, custody issues, blinkered self-involvement, double standards and a need for relocation. But above all, they each reminded us that, over the last ten years, there were lots of films that cracked us up, broke us apart, scared us, comforted us and made us feel a little closer to our fellow Homo sapiens. Some reflected the times we lived in some helped us escape them for a few hours. 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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