Oh also real quick before I get going, here are my many honourable mentions. I love all of these movies and so many of them just about missed the cut, or would have gotten into the list on any other day. All of them are fantastic though, and I urge you to watch them all if you haven't already:
Manchester by the Sea
Her
Four Lions
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
The Love Witch
Kill List
Booksmart
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Moonrise Kingdom
Attack the Block
Hell or High Water
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Blackkklansman
Mud
You Were Never Really Here
Us
The Artist
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Alright, with that out of the way, let's end this decade with a bang!
25. Tyrannosaur
Paddy Considine's transition from an excellent actor to a great director has been a really exciting one to watch. Tyrannosaur, his first film behind the camera, is not an easy watch, but it is an essential piece of modern Brit cinema, a raw, completely unfiltered kitchen sink gem that hits like a sledgehammer and is totally unforgettable. Watching Peter Mullan's deeply wounded Joseph desperately wander up the road to redemption is already sobering viewing, but it's Olivia Colman's heartbreaking performance that lingers after the credits roll. She is a shining light in an increasingly harsh urban hellscape, and watching her become swallowed up by the toxicity of her surroundings is nothing short of devastating. Eddie Marsan is also on top form here, absolutely terrifying as an all too real kind of evil. The real star of this film though is Considine, who is an unflinchingly honest storyteller. He never plays it for shock value, refusing to sensationalise a story that needs to be told. His direction is delicate, allowing these deeply troubling scenes to play out one by one until they fit together in a bleak mosaic that exposes the cycles of abuse and violence that all too often go unnoticed. Tyrannosaur is powerful stuff, an intense and soul shattering scream of a film about a man's desperate final claw at something like hope
24. Brooklyn
Brooklyn could have easily been a basic period piece, slapped together and sent off for the sole purpose of winning awards, but it's to the credit of everyone involved that it's something much more nuanced, passionate and enjoyable. What could have been a two hour history lesson with a half-hearted love story in the middle is instead a uniquely cinematic recreation of one woman's life as someone stuck between lives. Its musings are gentle, its humour is natural and its sentimentality is earned, with a plot that feels like someone thawed out a history book until a story poured out in a blend of great heart and humanity. Brooklyn takes something that is all too often painted objectively and without personality and gives it a hefty injection of soul, until you're not watching a film as much as peering into a life as it was being lived. None of this would be possible without Saoirse Ronan, who is just absolutely sensational, wide-eyed, fierce and brimming with longing. This is a film full of wonder and enchantment, full of romance that is both entirely believable and utterly captivating, a spellbinding piece of historically rooted cinema that pulses with heart and energy
23. Phantom Thread
PT Anderson is a hard director to pin down, bouncing from film to film with a knack for eclectic settings and electric performances. He's also a fantastic judge of difficult men, which is exactly what this, a detailed, darkly funny, thrillingly erotic unravelling of a master dressmaker, played with panache by Daniel Day Lewis in his last(!) role, is. This is a ghost story where the ghosts are hidden, a fairy tale where the magic is unseen but ever present, and a story where love is an act of salvation, violence and chaos. Everything here is delicate, arranged just so, reflecting the careful, specific methods of Day Lewis' Reynolds Woodcock. It goes without saying that he's magnificent here, absolutely selling Reynolds' slow loss of control, but the real highlights are Lesley Manville as his steely sister and Vicky Krieps as his beguiling, chaotic muse, Alma. Phantom Thread is an odd beast, a beautifully dark creation from a director whose ability to make wildly different films from the same components is truly unmatched. It's everything you could want from Anderson, and his wonderfully sinister story matches with the lavish production design, sublime score and masterful performances to make this a film quite unlike any other, with an ending that is guaranteed to captivate and surprise. An utterly delectable study of the weird side of love
22. The Babadook
Grief is a weird thing. It's been portrayed a hundred different ways in a hundred different films, but in The Babadook, Jennifer Kent explores the sheer, life altering horror of it. Essie Davis is incredible as a scarred widow who's come to resent her son for being born the same day as her husband's death. The Babadook itself, like most horror monsters, is a metaphorical beast, embodying the dark destruction that grief can unleash. The film is absolutely terrifying, but it's only as powerful as it is because it draws from something raw, something real and primal. This is horror born of tragedy, full of doubt, and dread, and sadness, and pain, and hope. Kent isn't interested in glamorising misery, instead painting loss as complex and indefinable, and crucially, giving our heroes a note of hope and a way of moving forward. The Babadook is gut wrenching cinema, rejecting simple scares for something meatier, more disturbing but much more satisfying. The performances are wonderfully naural, and the style is effective because it's unvarnished. It feels real. This is a film about literally taming your demons, about coping, and getting by. The monster isn't something to fear as much as something to overcome, and as disturbing and as sometimes upsetting as Kent's film is, it has a deep level of satisfaction that few horrors this decade can match. Ba.....Ba....D O O K!
21. Don't Think Twice
Don't Think Twice is a film that I think kind of flew under the radar when it came out, and I don't really think that's fair. This is the rare film about comedians that's actually funny, with a cast that's beyond perfect. The balance of comedy and drama is absolutely superb, and although the story is far from original, the real strength of this film lies elsewhere. It's the small, intimate details that stand out here: the tiny moments of natural comedy, the quiet gestures that carry so much pathos, the completely human fear of failure that the film both laughs at and mines huge amounts of emotion from. Each of these people feels so real, and the film focuses on all of them kind of equally. There are no heroes or villains, no clichés and no forced drama. Just the highs and lows of a New York improv troupe, the struggle of balancing friendship with success, of dealing with failure. That scene with Gillain Jacobs preforming improv on her own is just so emotional man, and that's the power of this movie, to do so much with so little, to be so funny and so affecting and so clever. If this passed you by, seek it out. It's a cracking little comedy drama that suggests that everyone, is in some way, a performer, an idea that's as poignant as it is hilarious
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