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

[Plain Old Tele]

^^ Recency bias.

[CoolioD1]

i had no idea Love Exposure could've been this decade. that would've been high on my list. ah well i'll save it for the 00s

[RealLyre]

8 minutes ago, CoolioD1 said:

i had no idea Love Exposure could've been this decade. that would've been high on my list. ah well i'll save it for the 00s

I think they counted it on letterboxd because it had its US theatrical release in 2010? but on IMDB it only shows that it had a limited release so not really sure.

 

https://letterboxd.com/crew/list/the-2010s-top-250-narrative-features/by/rating/

 

 

Edited April 20, 2020 by RealLyre
.

[CoolioD1]

3 minutes ago, RealLyre said:

I think they counted it on letterboxd because it had its US theatrical release in 2010? but on IMDB it only shows that it had a limited release so not really sure.

 

https://letterboxd.com/crew/list/the-2010s-top-250-narrative-features/

 

 

i just looked it up and yeah it seems like in the US it was just bumping around festivals until it got a little release in 2011. here in the uk it was '09 so i suppose that's where i got tripped up.

[RealLyre]

11 minutes ago, Plain Old Tele said:

^^ Recency bias.

very true but I don't think anything will dethrone Parasite on LBD anytime soon. after its Oscar win it became the highest rated feature ever on the site (including docus & mini-series like Twin Peaks and Planet Earth).

 

 

[Plain Old Tele]

5 minutes ago, RealLyre said:

very true but I don't think anything will dethrone Parasite on LBD anytime soon. after its Oscar win it became the highest rated feature ever on the site (including docus & mini-series like Twin Peaks and Planet Earth).

 

 

well yeah, Letterboxd. 
 

[CoolioD1]

Mommy is whatever but that letterboxd top 10 is pretty strong actually. better than ours is gonna be.

[lorddemaxus]

6 hours ago, CoolioD1 said:

i had no idea Love Exposure could've been this decade. that would've been high on my list. ah well i'll save it for the 00s

When's that list gonna happen?

[Joel M]

The letterboxd list looks very iffy to me, and not really representative of the community. They don't weight at all popularity they just go just with avg. rating and many obscure movies with 10k viewers that don't have the one sentence hot take reviews are popping up really high giving the impression that La Flor for example is all the rage in letterboxd. If you go by popularity (most seen, listed and liked) their top10 looks:

 

1.Parasite

2.Joker

3.Get Out

4.Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

5.Into the spiderverse

6.Lady Bird

7.La La Land

8.Infinity War

9.Inception

10.Fury Road

 

It's still not perfect but closer to the "truth"

[RealLyre]

3 hours ago, Joel M said:

The letterboxd list looks very iffy to me, and not really representative of the community. They don't weight at all popularity they just go just with avg. rating and many obscure movies with 10k viewers that don't have the one sentence hot take reviews are popping up really high giving the impression that La Flor for example is all the rage in letterboxd. If you go by popularity (most seen, listed and liked) their top10 looks:

 

1.Parasite

2.Joker

3.Get Out

4.Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

5.Into the spiderverse

6.Lady Bird

7.La La Land

8.Infinity War

9.Inception

10.Fury Road

 

It's still not perfect but closer to the "truth"

but this is a list of the most popular movies on LBD not the highest rated so that defeats the point. this is like picking the top 10 highest grossing movies at the box office and claiming those are the best movies domestically because more people watched them.

 

 

 

their rules for entry into the "official" top 250 is at least 1000 views by movie. which is a bit fair considering LBD is a smaller community than say IMDB (the latter requires a movie to have 25k views before being entered into the top 250).

 

 

 

[lorddemaxus]

17 minutes ago, RealLyre said:

their rules for entry into the "official" top 250 is at least 1000 views by movie. which is a bit fair considering LBD is a smaller community than say IMDB (the latter requires a movie to have 25k views before being entered into the top 250).

1000 is way too low. A crapton of films on letterboxd have 1000 views. I mean even this film https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fanatic/ has 8.8k views. I'd say top 250 should be 10k+.

[RealLyre]

54 minutes ago, lorddemaxus said:

1000 is way too low. A crapton of films on letterboxd have 1000 views. I mean even this film https://letterboxd.com/film/the-fanatic/ has 8.8k views. I'd say top 250 should be 10k+.

I agree that 1000 is too low but at the same time I haven't really come across many movies on the actual top 250 with low views that weren't at least "good" (granted I've only seen 27% of the list ).   except An Elephant Sitting Still which recently joined the top 250 and it only has 9k views, but that movie is more of a hard watch than anything and I'll prolly like it more once I finish it.

 

https://letterboxd.com/visdave34/list/official-top-250-narrative-feature-films/

 

[Joel M]

6 hours ago, RealLyre said:

but this is a list of the most popular movies on LBD not the highest rated so that defeats the point. this is like picking the top 10 highest grossing movies at the box office and claiming those are the best movies domestically because more people watched them.

 

 

 

their rules for entry into the "official" top 250 is at least 1000 views by movie. which is a bit fair considering LBD is a smaller community than say IMDB (the latter requires a movie to have 25k views before being entered into the top 250).

 

 

 

I didn't say the popularity is perfect but at least it takes into account more than one metric to level a bit the field between a movie with 500.000 votes and a movie with 50.000. As for imdb they have an algorithm that weights in how many people voted for a certain movie that makes it easier to compare the Godfather that has a million votes and a Bergman movie that has 1/10th of that.

 

Letterboxd doesn't have that and whether they have a 1.000 or 10.000 or 25.000 vote threshold it's still arbitrary. If they had an official vote with users making their own lists like we did here the results would 've been representative even if only just a part of their userbase engaged in the vote. As it is X movie with 30.000 votes has 0.1 better rating than Y movie with 300.000 votes, therefore is higher on the list makes no sense, at least to me.

[RealLyre]

3 minutes ago, Joel M said:

 

 

Letterboxd doesn't have that and whether they have a 1.000 or 10.000 or 25.000 vote threshold it's still arbitrary. If they had an official vote with users making their own lists like we did here the results would 've been representative even if only just a part of their userbase engaged in the vote. As it is X movie with 30.000 votes has 0.1 better rating than Y movie with 300.000 votes, therefore is higher on the list makes no sense, at least to me.

I see what you mean, users voting on their fav movies separately would probably give different results to some degree. 

 

they do a community awards every year organized unofficially by the users voting on their favorite movies of the year, which is maybe more in-line with you wanted, though unsurprisingly the winners are the more popular movies according to LBD (which still favors Oscar movies like Roma) .  but they haven't done one for best of the decade yet.

 

https://letterboxd.com/jvince/list/the-7th-letterboxd-community-awards-results/

 

[Jake Gittes]

Alright let's get to our ending.

 

Number 10

Spoiler

 

"This right here is the land of opportunity. This is America. This is my home! The show goes on!"
487 points, 27 lists

directed by Martin Scorsese | US | 2013

 

The Pitch: Jordan Belfort recounts his career as a Wall Street stockbroker, which saw his firm engage in rampant corruption and fraud.

 

Top 5 Placements: 4
Top 12 Placements: 3
Metacritic: 75
Box Office: $392m WW
Awards: 5 Academy Award nominations
BOT History: #5, Top Movies of 2013; #70, Top 100 Movies of the Century (2015); #88, Top 100 Movies of All Time (2016); BOFFY for Best Actor, out of 7 nominations
Critic Opinion: “When Jordan Belfort, the off-off-Wall Street stock pirate in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf Of Wall Street, addresses the vast bullpen at Stratton Oakmont, his firm on Long Island, his words are tossed out like generous chunks of elk carcass. This is the ring in Scorsese’s Raging Bull, a place where absolute savagery is not only encouraged, but required, and scripted cold calls are delivered like a roundhouse to the jaw. After filling their bellies with orders from the rich and dupable, Belfort’s men (and they’re nearly all men, save for a few thick-skinned warriors in Chanel) are treated to booze- and coke-filled bacchanals, complete with frathouse hazing rituals, dwarf-tossing, and hookers of many varieties and price points. It’s juvenile. It’s sexist. It’s criminal. And it’s also, in Scorsese’s view, capitalism at its essence.” - Scott Tobias, The Dissolve
BOT Sez: “This is the best comedy I've seen in years, the craziest major studio release I've seen in forever, and even in a year with Hanks and Ejiofor, DiCaprio gives what is without a doubt my favorite performance of the year and probably the best of his lifetime. That's a lot of hyperbole right there but my ultimate point is that Scorsese just did the cinematic equivalent of dropping the mic. A goddamn masterpiece.” - @Gopher
“The movie is a masterpiece. I like all of Scorsese's 00s movies but this really is his best since Goodfellas. I guess many people will find it 20-30-45 minutes too long but I wouldn't cut a frame. Also I think the debate about whether it glorifies Belfort's lifestyle is bullshit. The movie lures you in but there's always reminders that everything we see is kind of sick. Like in the first office party the way the camera lingers over the woman who shaved her head for 10.000 $ is disturbing or even the already legendary Lemmons sequence who starts as Laugh out loud funny and halfway through turns disturbingly funny. And even if someone can somehow miss these little touches spread throughout the movie, the brilliant final shot hammers home the point of the movie. In the hands of someone else this material could be an easily digestible message that pats the audience on the back and says "shame on you wall street douchebags stealing from us little people" so everyone can go home happy and vindicated. But Scorsese is interested in something more meaningful than that. He tells us that those guys did what they did (and continue to do so) because we, the not-privileged and not-wealthy, we really want to be rich and do whatever we want without consequences, we want to be THAT guy. Our greed is the fuel of capitalism, we create these guys. We talk about a fair world and about be happy with what we've got but at the same time we just so want to buy this pen.” - @Joel M
“I'm not a recreational drug user at all, but even I have to admit I wanna go into Cerebral Palsy state.” - @MrPink
Commentary: Our first top 10 entry, and the only one to make it in with fewer than 30 lists, is probably the most urgent film about the culture of capitalism and the world it has created made in the past decade - if not ever - and whether or not it's Scorsese's best movie since Goodfellas, it's certainly his most popular. Aided by Terence Winter's bullshit-free screenplay and an iconic turn from Leonardo DiCaprio, the then-70-year-old director produced the ultimate cinematic takedown - a three-hour bad-behavior comedy concealing one of the most righteously scathing and furious films you're ever likely to see - that takes on tragic dimensions once it arrives at the resolution of the obscenely rich getting more than enough rope to hang themselves and getting their happy ending anyway by managing to turn even that into something they could sell. The show does in fact go on.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 21, 2020 by Jake Gittes

[Jake Gittes]

Number 9

Spoiler

 

 

"Now, you're in the sunken place."
497 points, 34 lists

directed by Jordan Peele | US | 2017

 

The Pitch: An African-American man uncovers a disturbing secret when he meets the family of his Caucasian girlfriend.

 

Top 5 Placements: 4
Top 12 Placements: 6
Metacritic: 85
Box Office: $255m WW
Awards: Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, out of 4 nominations; Independent Spirit Awards for Best Picture and Director
BOT History: #3, Top Movies of 2017; #71, Top 100 Movies of All Time (2018); #9, Top 50 Horror Movies (2018); BOFFY awards for Best Picture and Original Screenplay
Critic Opinion: “For all its nods to its horror forebears, Get Out, above all, wants to ensure that you walk away knowing that the black experience can still teeter on the precipice of being a nightmare, even in 2017. That even surface-level “admiration” for black culture on the part of white people can give way to insidious interactions that are, at best, a persistent annoyance black people must learn to laugh off, and, at worst, the kind of fetishization that only conceals deadlier preconceptions.” - Aisha Harris, Slate
BOT Sez: “The movie felt like the embodiment of that troubling angst black people consciously or unconsciously experience while navigating their environment in a black skin inside the western world in which your appearance can awkwardly taint, impact and dictate your interactions (and ultimately your whole life) at a minute notice. But the devastating truth is that insidious awkwardness is a thinly veiled sneaky paradigm actually rooted in hard boiled prejudice that can trigger its ugly head exploding back into your face. (As a black guy born and bred in Europe, I can certainly relate to that experience).
And that's what makes it more frightening than most horror movies because those fucked up racial dynamics actually exist in the real world and have been for a long time. So at first, it seems like a typical modern horror movie with comedic relief then you realize you're watching a clever psychological thriller dealing with relevant contemporary issues that could have been made in the seventies full of social metaphors and allegories.” - @dashrendar44
Commentary: Up next, one more of the decade's most culturally/politically significant films, one that became possibly its most incisive take on modern-day race relations by locating its target in the "good" affluent liberals. Blending social satire with classic-influenced horror, it articulated concepts and fears like "the sunken place" for a mass audience that, for its part, turned it into a commercial smash, while Jordan Peele instantly became a name director and, soon enough, an Oscar-winning screenwriter. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Jake Gittes]

Number 8

Spoiler

 

"I'm ready."
510 points, 30 lists

directed by Alfonso Cuarón | US, UK | 2013

 

The Pitch: An astronaut must find a way to get back to Earth after a disaster leaves her stranded in orbit.

 

Top 5 Placements: 7
Top 12 Placements: 4
Metacritic: 96
Box Office: $723m WW
Awards: 7 Academy Awards, including Best Director; 6 BAFTA Awards; Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
BOT History: #1, Top Movies of 2013; #22, Top 100 Movies of the Century (2015); #42 (2014), #53 (2016), #92 (2018), Top 100 Movies of All Time; #18, Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies of All Time (2020); 5 BOFFY awards, including Best Picture and Director
Critic Opinion: “In one form or another, motion pictures have been with us since the middle of the 19th century, but there's never been one like Gravity. What's new in Alfonso Cuarón's 3-D space adventure is the nature of the motion. It's as if the movie medium had been set free to dance in a bedazzling zero-gravity dream sequence.” - Joe Morgenstern, The Wall Street Journal
BOT Sez: “Cuaron uses long, extended takes to create a completely believable environment—you are there in space along with the two astronauts—and the result is both vast and intimate. Bullock shines in a tough role; she's in almost every shot in the film and has to carry it all, while making the extremely complicated technical process seem effortless and natural. Dr. Stone's backstory is simple, and for some it was a little too Hollywood, but for me it struck home in a powerful way. If GRAVITY was about nothing more than an adrenaline-rush theme park of a movie, I would still enjoy it (it would've been the best summer blockbuster), but with Cuaron in charge it also becomes something more: our human capacity for rebirth, for forging success from failure, and our ability to confront our past and overcome it. By the end, as Dr. Stone re-enters the atmosphere in a fiery inferno, living for the first time in years despite facing an uncertain fate, I felt like standing and cheering.” - @Plain Old Tele
Commentary: One of the decade's most celebrated big-screen experiences, Alfonso Cuarón's space thriller that marked his triumphant return after a 7-year break following the commercial failure of Children of Men. Arriving as a stripped-down, superbly effective 90-minute one-woman-show survival ride, it was at once a welcome antidote from usual blockbuster bloat and an artful showcase for Cuarón's directorial craft; regardless of how much difference you believe watching it on a big or a small screen makes, the fondness for the film among BOT members in general clearly hasn't gone anywhere.

 

 

 

 

[Plain Old Tele]

This infernal Letterboxd chat killed our discussion. 

[Plain Old Tele]

Wait, I just realized you used my quote for GRAVITY. Who the hell was I back in 2013?

[Jake Gittes]

Number 7

Spoiler

 

"Despite knowing the journey... and where it leads... I embrace it."
556 points, 34 lists

directed by Denis Villeneuve | US | 2016

 

The Pitch: A linguist is enlisted to establish communication with aliens who have arrived on Earth.

 

#1 Placements: 1
Top 5 Placements: 5
Top 12 Placements: 6
Metacritic: 81
Box Office: $203m WW
Awards: Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, out of 8 nominations; Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
BOT History: #1, Top Movies of 2016; #11, Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies of All Time (2020); 5 BOFFY awards, including Best Actress and Adapted Screenplay, out of 9 nominations
Critic Opinion: “Arrival is a beautifully polished puzzle box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny. And like all the best sci-fi, it has something pertinent to say about today’s world; particularly about the importance of communication, and how we need to transcend cultural divides and misconceptions if we’re to survive as a species.” - Dan Jolin, Empire
BOT Sez: “So much of the film is based on the framework of how people perceive the world, and thus communicate.  How people with different mental frameworks trying to communicate leads misunderstanding.  How communicating is more than just sentences in grammar, but it's using empathy and changing your own personal mental framework in order to understand where another is coming from.
I think that was the point of the time plot in the movie.  It is structured to make you initially think of it being a flashback, because that's how your mental framework is.  The movie miscommunicates to you, to lead you to a false conclusion, until near the end where it reveals the time twist.  When this is revealed, your mental framework changes and you receive the message the movie was intending to send at the beginning.  Hence, even the structure of the film itself is used to drive forward the thought of a lack of human communication and pursuit to understand each other is what dooms humanity.” - @The Panda
“It fucking blew my balls off” - @Ethan Hunt
Commentary: The first and, so far, BOT's favorite of Denis Villeneuve's forays into science-fiction. An unusually contemplative, idea-driven example of the genre to get a mid-range budget and a wide multiplex run, it carved out a solid space for itself both in theaters and at awards shows during 2016's busy holiday season, with Villeneuve demonstrating his ability to work a much less dark and oppressive subject matter than usual even if his style remained more or less the same.