The Projector #21: Listomania (Patreon)

by Keith Phipps

The first best-of-the-decade lists started to arrive this summer with an early shot fired by Indiewire. They’ve barely let up since. For the last month or so, each week has seemingly brought a new best films of the ’10s list (to say nothing of similar lists for TV and music). It can all be a bit overwhelming. Some titles appear everywhere. Some seem beloved by one or two publications only. But beyond the flood of information, the rush of time can be disorienting. Is it that time again? Are we really at the end of another decade already?

There’s also this: It’s certainly possible to create a best of the decade, list but it’s worth remembering how impermanent and unreliable such things could be. I’m not publishing or participating in a best-of-the-decade list (nobody asked!) but I’ve taken my own private stab at one that I may just publish on Twitter. My first step was to look back at my published yearly Top 10 lists, and while there’s nothing I’m embarrassed for having praised, they don’t necessarily reflect my current feelings on the best films of the decade. In theory, critics should just be able to pluck the top two films from each year and two from the current year and, voila… but it doesn’t really work that way.

The years shift opinions, and films that seemed like the films of the year don’t feel like quite as representative of What Truly Mattered About the ‘00s at the end of the decade. Then there’s, of course, the matter of personal taste. I don’t know if Mandy is a consensus choice for one of the decade’s best films, but it sunk its hooks into me deeper than most films I’ve seen in the last 10 years.

And 10 years from now the ’10s will look more different still, both clearer and fuzzier; we’ll settle on a sense of what the decade meant, but we’ll lose some of the finer details about what actually happened. And from that, we’ll find another set of films that will look like the best the decade had to offer. It won’t be any more right or wrong than the lists being published now. It’ll be a list for a different time and a different sort of moviegoer. I hope we can all talk about them together then.

Meanwhile, here’s some articles worth talking about:

At ScreenCrush, Rian Johnson talks about some of the secrets of Knives Out.

Everyone loves Knives Out, right? Well… For the New York Times Monica Castillo talks about how some of its good intentions backfire. (We’ll be talking about it on a future episode.)

At Polygon, Palmer Haasch discusses Frozen 2’s “Show Yourself” as a queer ballad despite how cloudy Elsa’s sexuality remains. 

For Uproxx, Brian Grubb gives everyone permission to cry watching A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (and any other movie they want to cry while watching).