Favorite Films by Decade: the 2010s

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

       We’ve already covered the 1940s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and 2000s and continue now with the 2010s. These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      Some rules to keep these lists doable: 1) Only one film each decade by a particular director; 2) only English-language movies, due mainly to gaps in my knowledge about foreign-language films except for Italian neo-realism, French New Wave and the works of Akira Kurosawa, and 3) no TV miniseries.

      I’m sure I’ve missed some great movies that should be on these lists. Yet this still leaves hundreds, if not thousands, of movies to choose from.

      Let the arguments continue.

The 2010s:

“12 Years a Slave” (2013):

      Donald Trump and his cronies are trying to erase the real history of Blacks, women, Latinos and Native Americans in the United States and return to a more ignorant time. They seek to eliminate critical perspectives on important aspects of American history, such as our nation’s legacy of slavery and racial discrimination, and replace them with the old and discredited Southern viewpoint that slavery was a benign institution where Black people lived better than they did after emancipation.

      In cinematic terms, that means a return to the romantic paeans towards the Old South found in D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) and Victor Fleming’s “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Fortunately, as long as historians and filmmakers tell the truth, as British director Steve McQueen unflinchingly does in “12 Years a Slave,” the bullshit of these earlier epics will be exposed for all to see.

      In a story based on an 1853 memoir by Solomon Northup, Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a commanding performance as a freed man from upstate New York who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841. McQueen never looks away from the cruelty and sadism of slavery, the greatest stain on the legacy of our country.

      The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, especially Lupita Nyong’o as a slave who is both privileged and horribly abused, and Michael Fassbinder, Benedict Cumberbatch and Sarah Paulson as slave owners of varying temperaments and cruelties.

      “12 Years a Slave” was selected in 2023 by the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry as a “culturally, historically [and] aesthetically significant” movie. Let’s see if Trump tries to erase that honor as well.

      Close behind:

      “Hugo” (2011): Director Martin Scorsese has long been interested in the history of movies and in film preservation, and he showcases these subjects in this touching story of a Parisian boy (Asa Butterfield) who helps rediscover the long-lost early silent films of Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley).

      “Beasts of the Southern Wild” (2012): Eight-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis gives an unforgettable performance as a young girl trying to survive on her own in the bayous of Southern Louisiana, in this bleak but memorable drama from director, co-writer and co-composer Benh Zeitlan and co-writer Lucy Alibar.

      “Lincoln” (2012): The all-star team of director Steven Spielberg, writer Tony Kushner and actor Daniel Day-Lewis tell the story behind Abraham Lincoln’s successful effort to get Congress to approve the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery in America.

      “Midnight in Paris” (2011): Time-traveling in beautiful Paris with Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, meeting real-life characters Gertrude Stein, Salvador Dali and F. Scott Fitzgerald played with aplomb by Kathy Bates, Adrien Brody and Tom Hiddleston, and great jokes about the right-wing Tea Party and pompous professors make this Woody Allen comedy one of his best later films.

      “Paddington 2” (2017): I’ve loved watching the sweet and funny “Paddington” films with my grandchildren, where I discovered that they really are—cliché be damned—just as enjoyable for grownups as they are for kids. Hugh Grant’s deliciously malevolent turn as a has-been actor makes this sequel stand out.

      But, perhaps you’re wondering, how could he leave out “Get Out,” “Made in Dagenham” “The Social Network,” “Spotlight” and “Winter’s Bone”?

Coming next week: The 2020s

Bruce Dancis spent 18 years as the Arts & Entertainment Editor of the Sacramento Bee, after previously serving as an editor for the Daily Californian, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, M.I. (Musicians’ Industry) Magazine, Mother Jones and the Oakland Tribune. He also wrote about Film and TV History in a weekly column about DVDs that was syndicated by the McClatchy and Scripps Howard news services. Since 2003 he has co-chaired a summer film program at the Three Arrows Cooperative Society in Putnam Valley, NY. He is the author of “Resister: A Story of Protest and Prison during the Vietnam War” (2014, Cornell University Press) and appears in the documentary film “The Boys Who Said No! Draft Resistance and the Vietnam War” (2020). He lives in Cardiff, CA, and Putnam Valley, NY.