Best Movies and TV Shows so far this decade

I agree with the critique of the spectacle, that movie and TV can’t be revolutionary, but I think they can provide a radical lens through which to view society. More to the point, they’re a legit artform that play an important role in creating and contesting culture, and they’re a far better way to spend a depressing day in this Hellworld than going on social media or playing games on your phone. You could even, I don’t know, break through the growing social isolation that’s smothering us all and invite a friend to watch something with you, then have a critical discussion about it!

I started out with five categories: 1. So Damn Good!, 2. Skillful or Touching, 3. Enjoyable/Fine but Unimportant, 4.High Quality, But Hurt or Ruined by the Ending or another Major Flaw, and 5. Highly Celebrated Movies that Were Actually Just Crappy or Horrific in Some Way.

But…

Two more categories insisted on being created. One is a special award that goes to Civil War, by Alex Garland. Oh Alex Garland, you beautiful airhead. Garland, despite his high budgets and clear talents, has only made one good movie on purpose (Ex Machina). Civil War is actually a really good movie, but somehow Garland, drinking the liberal Kool-Aid, thinks he has made a movie about how important journalism is to a free society. In fact, it’s a movie about how (political/conflict) journalists are actually trauma-addicted psychopaths who do absolutely nothing to make the world a better place, which is a bit harsh as a generalization but, in aggregate, tracks. So yeah, he deserves some kind of award for making a really good movie, somehow, completely by accident.

Finally, there’s the 0 category, movies and TV shows that were so freaking good, that hit me so dang hard, they needed a category above categories, because even though I have such a high opinion of everything in Category 1, these few are on a completely different plane.

If you see a movie or TV show you think should be in here, please let me know! There’s a good chance it’s one I haven’t seen yet. Also, yeah, this is an immense list, but please don’t worry about me: the last 6 years have included the pandemic with a very strict lockdown in the Spanish state, and for me some health problems that resulted in quite a few weeks mostly in bed or on the couch.

0. The Best

Sinners (I want to believe Coogler directed the highly reactionary Black Panther so he could get the money and status to direct something like this)

Come See Me in the Good Light

Aftersun

Dying for Sex

Heated Rivalry (After ep1, I thought this show was the hottest soft porn I’d seen, no more no less. By ep4, I was asking myself whether it belonged in categories 1 or 2. In ep5, that Wolf Parade finale, I was literally crying and shrieking with joy and R, next to me, was breathlessly saying, “that might have been the best TV episode of all time”)

1. So Damn Good

Coda

Tár

tick, tick… Boom

The Menu

Baby Girl

Drive My Car

Poor Things

Bottoms

Sound of Metal

Judas and the Black Messiah

Don’t Look Up

Dream Scenario

Bodies Bodies Bodies

Knives Out 1 & 3

Sentimental Value

Bogonia (I think many of the reviews of this movie really missed the mark. Lanthimos never makes prescriptive movies. He bathes us in the misery of contemporary society, and this film in particular is not just dark humor, it’s multilayered satire. (Spoiler!) By eventually treating Jesse Plemons’ absurd conspiracy theories as reality, the movie can lambast them on a far deeper level, leaving only one way out: absolute nihilism. And on the way there, we see Emma Stone’s girlboss feminism lampooned, we’re made extremely uncomfortable by the abusive impunity of the police, we see some of the ways capitalism grinds down an interracial working class, and we see how the current media landscape lends especially white men tools that make it impossible to ever engage in meaningful resistance and that instead make it easy for them to seriously harm those around them. But, since it’s Lanthimos, we’re grimacing and laughing all the way to the grave.)

Secret Agent

Bacurau (A 2019 movie, but I think it can ride Kleber Mendonça Filho’s illustrious coattails into this decade)

*** [movies above, series below]

Squid Game

Severance

Daisy Jones and the Six

Ted Lasso

The Bear

Ripley

Succession

Andor

Euphoria (Angus, we miss you)

* Award for Accidentally Really Good!

Civil War

2. Skillful or Touching

Sing Sing (really well done, but ending the story on the drive away from prison—with the protagonist getting released—and without all the trauma of living in a prison society after serving a long sentence, gives too much credence to the myth of rehabilitation: the story should have ended with the protagonist still in prison, no idea if he would ever get out, because that is the actual situation of most people in prison with long sentences, and it doesn’t give the viewer’s conscience an easy out, a comforting but they’re okay now. This sorta turns the whole movie into trauma voyeurism without demanding of the viewer, this is the society you live in, so many people are stuck in that place right now, what are you going to do about it?)

Anatomy of a Fall (I think some—primarily American—viewers completely missed the point and approached this movie with a confounding “did she do it?” mentality as though this were some pulpy What Lies Beneath)

Maestro

Anora

Barbie

Rustin

After Yang

Mickey 17

Nomadland

American Fiction

Nyad

Nightmare Alley

The Last Showgirl

Banshees of Inisherin (I’ll admit I had this in Category 1 until I heard some Irish friends from the actual “Inisherin” [which just means “the island of Ireland” but is based on an actual island which I won’t name because tourism] talking shit on it for how it exoticized particularly rural or western Irish people)

A Complete Unknown

A Real Pain

Women Talking (The parts where this movie bordered on allegory were borderline obnoxious, and it was best where the characters got to be actual people having real experiences)

Conclave

Zone of Interest

Belfast

May December

The Substance

Flow (This film was beautiful, but it’s also clinging to a bit of a life raft in order to ascend to this category)

The Friend

Materialists

Pee-wee as Himself

Mountainhead

Find Me Falling

Jules

The Iron Claw

Knives Out 2

Nosferatu (This was a really well done movie, but they missed out on the antipatriarchal ending the whole storyline was demanding, and instead favored the worst version of the Dracula myth. Did they not see it, or did the producers block it for something more conventional?)

Relay

3:10 to Yuma (What’s that you say, this movie is from 2007, a remake of a 1957 film based on a 1953 short story? Whatever, I don’t like rules, and I hadn’t ever heard of anyone talk about this one, and it’s really well done. Albeit meaningless.)

The Naked Gun (It may be strange to have such a stupid movie here, but they did a great job of resurrecting an almost forgotten sub-genre with all its now archaic archetypes. As such it was a skillful work in media history. And it felt good to laugh that much.)

One Battle After Another (It was a tough call whether to put this in Category 1 or 2. The acting is superb, it is more radical than most stuff Hollywood puts out, and it was exciting, a third of the way through, to realize it was based on a Thomas Pynchon novel (one of the greatest English-language authors of the 20^th century), but in the final analysis… (spoilers!) they really discounted and abandoned the Black women in this story, not realizing how important they were, and the conclusion was so weak, with an impossibly happy ending for the white protagonist (I’m sorry, but there’s no way Leo would have been able to go back to civilian life after all that: just look at what happened to the people in armed groups from the ‘60s and ‘70s who were involved in lethal actions. Decades later they were still being hunted, half a century later many of the survivors are still in prison.) They completely dropped the ball on the major themes Pynchon evokes in Vineland. And they’re doing cop work, for example repeating the lie about police provocateurs. The vast majority of rocks and molotovs thrown in riots are thrown by people, not by pigs; this conspiracy theory has gotten numerous rioters with legitimate reasons for rage locked up; and in no society I’m aware of do the cops need an excuse to attack a crowd. Sometimes they won’t even give an order to disperse before attacking with clubs, tear gas, rubber bullets, or even live rounds.)¹

Frankenstein (Because of clumsy writing that made this movie a bit of a slog, I only bumped this movie up to Category 2 after I watched the “making of” and realized the artisanry of the sets, costume, and design (no/very little CGI!)

Jay Kelley (I mostly ignored ER, which was also biggest near the beginning of the 15 years when I watched almost no television, but since O Brother Clooney can carry me anywhere)

***

White Lotus (It would have been at the top of the list in the first category if not for that third season. The direction, pacing, and shots are still superb, but Mike White really needed other people in the writing room. It’s less beautifully chaotic, less soul-destroying, more pat. I think Mike White has just become a rich guy and he no longer has much interesting to say. Hope I’m wrong.)

Reservation Dogs

Hacks (There are parts in most seasons where it drags or demands a lot of forgiveness for the repetition of plot devices, but certain episodes, like the penultimate of Season 4, blew me away with rending combinations of humor and sadness.)

Slow Horses

Silo

True Detective

Russian Doll

The Day of the Jackal (Eddie Redmayne delivers in one of an incredibly short list of mainstream shows or movies that realistically portrays modern methods of warfare, like NATO troops slaughtering a huge group of civilians, covering it up by calling in an airstrike, and laughing about it.)

Barry

The Pitt

Only Murders in the Building (excluding Season 2, which they acknowledge in 3 was really bad)

The Diplomat

Bad Sisters

Altered Carbon

Penguin

Task (I haven’t finished this one yet. R is telling me that after the finale I might bump it up to Category 1.)

3. Enjoyable/Fine but Unimportant

The Holdovers

Wicked

The Wild Robot

Dune: Part I

Nonnas

M3gan

***

The Mandalorian

The Perfect Couple

Black Doves

Nine Perfect Strangers

Cobra Kai

Shrinking

A Man on the Inside

Dope Thief

His Dark Materials (This might surprise some people since there’s extremely clunky writing for half of it and mediocre writing for the rest, but the story, the adventure… it’s also close to an anarchist tale)

Witcher

Dune Prophecy

Wheel of Time (Okay, I’m leaving these here, but you’re not wrong if you say this one and Dune Prophecy don’t deserve to be here… I’m just starved for good fantasy)

The Old Man (This show is just entertaining trash, but I do want to mention how MAGA seemed to sneak into the writers’ room, the way they worked in a racially coded put-down of the Black Lives Matter movement and movies with Black superheroes. Are Jeff Bridges or John Lithgow white supremacist Democrats or just politically illiterate artists? Shawkat seems to have a backbone and an awareness of, for example, ongoing genocide, but I don’t think she’d have the weight Bridges or Lithgow might to lean on the script.)

4. High Quality, But Hurt or Ruined by the Ending or another Major Flaw

Triangle of Sadness (Really good movie with a poor choice of ending.)

Everything Everywhere All at Once (99% of this movie is really well done and engaging, too, but the lack of character development for the daughter wrecked the ending.)

Kinds of Kindness (Guess which of the storylines I thought hurt the movie as a whole?)

Train Dreams (A failed rendition of an interesting idea for a movie)

Heretic (A great movie with an ending that demanded too great a suspension of disbelief)

K-Pop Demon Hunters (Amazing music and choreography in a movie about healing from trauma, however, I feel like the ending totally failed that message, as well as the anti-Christian tension they were building from the beginning. In the end, this was just another story of Good vs. Evil.)

***

Station 11 (a really good series, but the ending was kind of silly, a bit of a shitshow)

Beef (This would have been such an amazing series, without those last few minutes. Just close your eyes… and fade to black.)

Poker Face (After I think episode 5, the retirement home revolutionaries, I refused to watch any more of this show because of its snitch-ass bullshit, though some of the earlier episodes were great and the premise is fun.)

The Boys (They killed off some of the more interesting characters, but this show deserves some props for quality. And, they almost almost achieve what Watchmen did. Naturally, I’m talking about one of the best graphic novels in history, not the totally distorted movie (it was like some idiot Hollywood producer read the book and thought, gee, Übermenschen are pretty cool!) and then by TV series, which takes a completely different but equally idiotic take [DEI makes fascism cool!])

5. Highly Celebrated Movies that Were Actually Just Crappy or Horrific in Some Way

JoJo Rabbit (From 2019, but I have to mention it because dear god.)

Challengers (They had a good concept for a movie, and they had two good scenes, but otherwise this was badminton with a wet turd.)

Warfare (Alex Garland, at it again…)

The Whale

The Trial of the Chicago 7

All Quiet on the Western Front (Did they not read the book? Making an antiwar novel into an action movie is the pinnacle of Hollywood horror. Did you think it was too conscientious for an action movie? Compare the endings. Case, rested.)

The Brutalist (A bad movie (in so many ways) that could have been a great movie (in so many ways), and now I also want to cancel my beloved Adrian Brody after learning what a scab he is, using AI to improve his character’s accent. Newcomer Connor Storrie should give Brody some acting lessons.)

Oppenheimer (A poorly structured narrative that totally misses fails to understand the big ethical question of the story it’s telling.)

Killers of the Flower Moon (It’s always a bad time for a story about how the FBI will keep Indigenous people safe. This is a textbook example of the self-reflection and consciousness-cleansing that helps keep a settler state running.)

And let’s not even mention the movies that were marketed or even produced to portray Israel as a heroic state, while they’re carrying out a major genocide…

Thanks!

for reading my lists!

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1. In addition to the examples in the article I linked, there are cases from the 2020 anti-police uprising such as the white conspiracy theorist/internet sleuth Kristina Beverlin who got a Black person locked up, the conspiracy theories that aided in the arrest of Rayshard Brooks’ partner in Atlanta, and other cases and tendencies that I discuss in They Will Beat the Memory Out of Us and my two books on nonviolence.