BOT's Top 100 Films of the 2010s: The Countdown | List complete

[Jake Gittes]

Number 97

 

Spoiler

 

 

"That's the difference between East and West. One's life in the East is part of a whole. Family. Society."

134 points, 16 lists

directed by Lulu Wang | US | 2019

 

The Pitch: A Chinese-American family learn their grandmother has terminal cancer and decide to keep her in the dark, organizing a wedding as an excuse for one last family gathering.

 

Top 5 Placements: 1

Metacritic: 89

Box Office: $22m WW

Awards: Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and Best Supporting Actress; Golden Globe for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy

BOT History: #12, Top 25 Movies of 2019; BOFFY for Breakthrough Artist (Lulu Wang)

Critic Opinion: "The little dramas and themes that emerge during the reunion of the film’s far-flung brood become, like a family, more than the sum of its individual parts, and an incredibly satisfying meal of a film." - Emily Yoshida, New York Magazine

BOT Sez: "Lulu Wang crafts a film that shows why we need more diversity (in culture and gender) behind the camera, because we’re given a refreshing story that manages to both feel familiar and completely fresh.  It’s emotional, made me tear up, but it’s also never melodramatic (where this concept could have easily gone).  It’s a poignant, funny, moving and surprising exploration about both death and what it means to actually live." - @The Panda

Commentary: For her sophomore feature, director Lulu Wang took a "write what you know" approach and achieved a creative breakthrough, dramatizing her own family experience into a culturally specific, delicately written and acted story that became one of last year's best-admired movies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jake Gittes

[Plain Old Tele]

I’m looking forward to Transformers 4 and On Stranger Tides making the top 50. 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Plain Old Tele

[Ethan Hunt]

The Farewell is fairly low too

we might be in for an MCU fest

[Jake Gittes]

Number 96

 

Spoiler

 

 

"Humanity is just nasty and there's no silver lining."

135 points, 14 lists

directed by David O. Russell | US | 2012

 

The Pitch: A man with bipolar disorder forms a connection with a young widow as they train for a dance competition that he hopes will help him win back his estranged wife.

 

Top 12 Placements: 2

Metacritic: 81

Box Office: $236m WW

Awards: Academy Award for Best Actress; BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay; 4 Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Film

BOT History: #9, Top 25 of 2012; #2, Top 25 of 2012: The Revisiting (2017); BOFFY for Best Actress

Critic Opinion: "Family nuttiness, football madness, romantic obsession, and certifiable mental illness coexist happily in Silver Linings Playbook - a crazy beaut of a comedy that brims with generosity and manages to circumvent predictability at every turn." - Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

BOT Sez: "We do all have our breaking points. For Pat, walking in on his wife and seeing another man performing with his mouth on her private parts in the shower, while his wedding song was playing, was enough to push him over the edge. And if that is what it takes to send you over that precipice, how do you recover? This movie explores that journey, and it's not an easy one." - @baumer

"OH MY GOD JENNIFER LAWRENCE IS SO HOT IN THIS." - @Jack Nevada

Commentary: Concluding our portion for today is the 2012 romantic comedy/drama that found huge success putting an old-fashioned star vehicle in the clothes of an unhinged independent movie. One of the last true sleeper hits, it signaled the arrival of Bradley Cooper, Dramatic Actor (and general Hollywood creative force), capped off The Year of Jennifer Lawrence by winning her an Oscar, continued David O. Russell's commercial and awards hot streak, and became one of the final testaments to the distributing savvy of The Weinstein Company, which kept it in semi-wide release for two months before rolling it out just as the Oscar nominations were announced; in the end, it grossed over 10 times its budget.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jake Gittes

[DAJK]

I'm fully expecting the top 10 to include all of Inception, Fury Road, Parasite, and Dunkirk. 

[SLAM!]

Silver Linings Playbook should've won Best Adapted Screenplay over Argo in retrospect.

[WrathOfHan]

Yay, the last two were higher on my list!

[Joel M]

Didn't vote for Silver Linings but from the DOR is now an oscar guy era, it's the one movie I would keep. 

[MrPink]

Me trying to convince Jake to ensure Uncle Drew makes the top 100:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by MrPink

[The Stingray]

lol I had no idea that Kyrie Irving Pepsi commercial was a real movie.
 

[The Panda]

12 hours ago, Jake Gittes said:

Number 97

 

  Hide contents

 

 

"That's the difference between East and West. One's life in the East is part of a whole. Family. Society."

134 points, 16 lists

directed by Lulu Wang | US | 2019

 

The Pitch: A Chinese-American family learn their grandmother has terminal cancer and decide to keep her in the dark, organizing a wedding as an excuse for one last family gathering.

 

Top 5 Placements: 1

Metacritic: 89

Box Office: $22m WW

Awards: Independent Spirit Award for Best Film and Best Supporting Actress; Golden Globe for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy

Critic Opinion: "The little dramas and themes that emerge during the reunion of the film’s far-flung brood become, like a family, more than the sum of its individual parts, and an incredibly satisfying meal of a film." - Emily Yoshida, New York Magazine

BOT Sez: "Lulu Wang crafts a film that shows why we need more diversity (in culture and gender) behind the camera, because we’re given a refreshing story that manages to both feel familiar and completely fresh.  It’s emotional, made me tear up, but it’s also never melodramatic (where this concept could have easily gone).  It’s a poignant, funny, moving and surprising exploration about both death and what it means to actually live." - @The Panda

Commentary: For her sophomore feature, director Lulu Wang took a "write what you know" approach and achieved a creative breakthrough, dramatizing her own family experience into a culturally specific, delicately written and acted story that became one of last year's best-admired movies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Glad my top 5 placement pushed it onto the list

[Jake Gittes]

Number 95

Spoiler

 

 

"You're doing this because you're scared to death, like the rest of us, that you don't matter."

136 points, 12 lists

directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu | US | 2014

 

The Pitch: A washed-up Hollywood actor best known for playing a superhero attempts to mount a comeback by writing, directing, and starring in a Broadway production.

 

Top 5 Placements: 1

Metacritic: 87

Box Office: $103m WW

Awards: 4 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Original Screenplay; Golden Globe for Best Actor - Musical or Comedy

BOT History: #8, Top 25 of 2014; BOFFY for Best Original Screenplay, out of 10 nominations

Critic Opinion: "This is a remarkable feat, not only of cinematography, but of choreography. Just to film Michael Keaton and Edward Norton walking down a Manhattan street, everything had to be timed as in a dance — when the camera swirls ahead, when it goes behind, when it swoops back around. It’s all accomplished so smoothly that it would be worth doing merely as a stunt, except this is no stunt. This method carries the mood and soul of one of the best movies of 2014." - Mick La Salle, San Francisco Chronicle

BOT Sez: "A dizzyingly brilliant film unlike anything I've ever seen. It works not just because of its direction, but because said direction plays off the desperation and instability that all of these characters have. The movie make constant jabs at all levels of Hollywood, from the producer to the consumer, but at the same time, it's willing to call out the people who do said calling outs. [...] Either way, it ultimately reaches towards a more human level, with each character just trying to get by and find their own means of happiness and meaning in life. " - @Spaghetti

Commentary: The first Best Picture winner and 2014 film to make the list is also one of the more divisive ones. After spending the first decade of his career making miserablist everything-is-connected dramas, Alejandro G. Iñárritu switched gears with this maximalist comedy of egos and insecurities in the NYC creative world, a film that went up to 11 in every aspect to the annoyance of some and exhilaration of many. It also succeeded in giving Michael Keaton his own real-life comeback, which, in the most telling extra-textual touch, soon saw him playing a birdman supervillain in an MCU movie - a turn of events that, depending on one's POV, renders the film's critique of Hollywood either more incisive or more pointless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jake Gittes]

Number 94

Spoiler

 

 

"I know babies taste best."

137 points, 14 lists

directed by Bong Joon-ho | South Korea, Czech Republic | 2013

 

The Pitch: Aboard a perpetually moving train that harbors the survivors of a climate-change experiment that killed all other life on Earth, a group of lower-class tail section passengers revolt against the elite of the front. 

 

Top 12 Placements: 1

Metacritic: 84

Box Office: $87m WW

BOT History: #27, Top Comic Book Movies of All Time (2019); 4 BOFFY nominations

Critic Opinion: "Sprung from a 1982 French graphic novel and bearing its era's trickle-down tensions, Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy [...] Bong grabs onto the grungy conventions of postapocalyptic adventure with relish. He serves up claustrophobic action scenes (one largely shot in the dark) and ominous, messianic overtones as the band of rebels makes its way forward." - Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out NY

BOT Sez: "Every time someone tries and overcome these barriers of inequality, obstacles are thrown in their path causing them to stumble and fall. If they are able climb back up to their feet to overcome those obstacles, if it is manageable then they are accepted and become part of the same system of society. If however the contradictions become too severe and the inequalities between classes too great, then the only option remaining is to break the system, which in this case is represented as the train with the engine in the film being reverently compared to something akin to a king or a god [...] I also like how Snowpiercer showed us a glimpse of the raw emotion of desperation. How the people in the tail end fought to get on the train, how they cut off their own limbs as food and how they finally, driven to the brink, make a mad charge towards the front of the train. It made for a much more absorbing and edge-of-the-seat-viewing." - @Rsyu

Commentary: Before he achieved historic success dissecting inequality in the real world of today, Bong Joon-ho did the same within the framework of the post-apocalyptic comic book action thriller that marked his English-language debut. Having had its North American release infamously bungled by the Weinsteins, the film nonetheless instantly achieved cult status, and the subsequent years have been kind to it and its director both.

 

 

 

 

 

[Ethan Hunt]

Snowpircer made this list over... *checks notes* *takes deep breat* American Honey, The Witch, Crazy Rich Asians, Locke, Margaret AND Spotlight.

 

my opinion is decidedly fuck that 

[Plain Old Tele]

20 minutes ago, Ethan Hunt said:

Snowpircer made this list over... *checks notes* *takes deep breat* American Honey, The Witch, Crazy Rich Asians, Locke, Margaret AND Spotlight.

 

my opinion is decidedly fuck that 

We’ll take our victories where we can get them. 

[Jake Gittes]

Number 93

Spoiler

 

 

"I'm thinkin' I'm back."

141 points, 12 lists

directed by Chad Stahelski & David Leitch | US | 2014

 

The Pitch: John Wick avenges the death of his puppy.

 

Metacritic: 68

Box Office: $86m WW

Critic Opinion: "There’s a ruthless efficiency to the way Reeves moves in the movie. The way he kills people tells more of a story than the actual story does. He’ll punch someone, then shoot him, then punch him again. Sometimes, he’ll take a bad guy down in a leglock, holding him immobile while he shoots a couple of other bad guys, and then shoot the original bad guy while that guy is lying helpless on the floor. A scene like that one-man nightclub invasion is put together with absolute precision, ratcheting things up gradually until it becomes something insane and surreal. It’s beautifully lit and shot and edited, like Drive or something, but all of that atmosphere serves to highlight the action. There’s a scene near the end where Viggo, on the way to his final showdown with Wick, laughs maniacally. It’s not because he thinks he’s going to win. He knows he’s about to die. He’s just having so much fun watching Wick work. We, the audience, knows how he feels." - Tom Breihan, The AV Club

BOT Sez: "Very, very fun movie. Loved the way it was shot and directed- artistic bent, but not in a pretentious way. The action was shot incredibly clear and exciting. I hate to use the word the RT consensus used, but "kinetic" is just the perfect way to describe it- the pace, the music, the colors, the captions, the cinematography all lent to a unique style. Excellent job with world-building too. Really interesting establishing the hitman underworld without any real exposition. Keanu was great, of course. It's simple, but I didn't mind- someone kills Keanu's dog, Keanu kills everyone else." - @Cmasterclay

 

 

Commentary: To quote the October 2014 release from two spots back: "People, they love blood. They love action." John Wick gave people blood, and it gave them action, taking its genre back to the basics and demonstrating their virtues so successfully that it more or less managed to remake the American action movie in its own image. A $20 million B-movie directed by two stuntmen and starring an actor who hadn't been in a hit in a decade became the foundation of one of the decade's most impressive success stories. All hail.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Jake Gittes

[WrathOfHan]

Birdman and Snowpiercer were on my list. None of the Wick films were but they were bubbling. 

[Jake Gittes]

Number 92

Spoiler

 

 

"Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic."

145 points, 12 lists

directed by David Yates | UK, US | 2011

 

The Pitch: It all ends.

 

Top 5 Placements: 1

Top 12 Placements: 1

Metacritic: 85

Box Office: $1.341 billion WW

Awards: 3 Academy Award nominations

BOT History: #2, Top 15 of 2011; #84 (2013), #66 (2014), #97 (2016), #61 (2018), Top 100 Movies of All Time

Critic Opinion: "A worthy farewell that packs in as much action as its seven predecessors combined and manages not to stint on the emotional beats. Harry Potter leaves us as a quiet, bespectacled, corduroy-wearing hero for the ages." - Helen O'Hara, Empire

BOT Sez: "...an emotional rollercoaster that brought tears to my eyes. It was sad to finally let go of a series that has had a profound impact on my life and has been an endearing feature of my childhood. It was, in many ways, like finally saying goodbye to my childhood, almost as if this was the last part of my childhood that I needed to say goodbye to. " - @The Creator

Commentary: The countdown's first culmination of an enormously popular 21st century franchise, a film that broke box office records in the summer of 2011 and was generally agreed upon by fans as one of the best in its series. However, despite its success and the fact that it has reliably showed up on our Top Movies of All Time lists, this was an improbable underdog here: it appeared on only two of the first 30 lists that were submitted, and despite the late surge in appearances, it was only thanks to the very final list I received (that wasn't mine) that it secured a place among the top 100. 

 

 

 

 

[Kalo]

This.. kind of sucks so far. well see how it goes. Glad Deathly Hallows got in there though.

[aabattery]

Number 91

 

Spoiler

 

 

"Hold my nuts."

145 points, 18 lists

directed by (honestly dunno tbh) | US | 2018

 

The Pitch: Kyrie Irving is an old man who needs his nuts to be held.

 

Metacritic: 57

Box Office: $46.7m WW

Awards: Shortlisted for Best Comedy Movie of 2018 by the People's Choice Awards.

BOT History: Some of the questions on Week 10 of the 2018 Summer Game were based around Uncle Drew.

Critic Opinion: " Basketball players pretend to be old people for 2 hours. Aside from a few quips, that's the whole joke. Oh, and plenty of product placements. " - Matthew Lee, HeyUGuys

BOT Sez: "There's nothing redeeming about this movie.  It's rarely funny, horribly scripted and if what you came to see is some awesome basketball being played, even that is directed with such pedestrian flair, that it took me out of the movie. I liked nothing about this." - @baumer

"Hold my nuts." - @MrPink

Commentary: One of the most notable and well regarded films to enter the comedy canon of the decade, Uncle Drew represents a real turning point for basketball player-turned-auteur Kyrie Irving. While many doubted that what was originally a Pepsi commercial could sustain a full motion picture runtime, Kyrie's star turn as the epnonymous 'Uncle Drew' proved that he was more than just a player. Rooted by strong supporting performances, particularly from Nick Kroll ('Secret Life of Pets 2', Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie') and Reggie Miller ('Thunderstruck'), Uncle Drew managed to worm it's way into the heart of the nation and became one of the highest grossing films of 2018, accumulating a herculean $46.7m worldwide. It's legacy only continues to grow, and it should be interesting to see how much higher this film will climb on any other relevant lists that are lucky enough to include it in the future.