BEST OF 2010s

It’s the last day of the decade, so what better time to count down my favourite films of the last ten years? A decade is as arbitrary a time period as any other, but there’s something memorable and immaculate about the number ten. Though we’ve still not come up with a catchy name for the past decade (‘Teens’ doesn’t quite cut it), it’s not hard to say it was an eventful era, both geopolitically and cinematically. I won’t profess to having a comprehensive view of the last ten years of film – my ‘to-watch’ list is nearly as long as my ‘watched’ one – but here are the ten films that impressed me, stunned me, spoke to me, or just plain entertained me the most.

Note: these are all English-language films by white, male directors. I fully admit my prejudice and tunnel vision, not that it makes it any better.

Top Ten Tuesday: New York City

While the Cannes Film Festival is currently underway in the south of France, one of the darlings of last year’s fest, James Gray’s The Immigrant, is only just making its way across the pond for a domestic release. Starring Marion Cotillard as the titular Polish émigré who arrives at Ellis Island in 1921, it is just the latest example of cinema taking advantage of the historical beauty of New York City, arguably the most popular metropolitan setting in film history (only Los Angeles, London, and Paris can really dispute this claim). From the earliest days of moviemaking through to the CGI-saturated superhero tales of our contemporary times, The Big Apple and its five boroughs (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island) have been utilized for all manner of mainstream, independent, and genre cinema. In that spirit, with The Immigrant releasing this Friday, I count down my ten favourite movies set in New York, New York.