Tag: Moonlight

The Best Movies of the 2010s

Featuring films by Richard Linklater, Terrence Malick, the Coen Brothers and Greta Gerwig

As I’m writing this, a huge swath of the Internet has attempted to gaslight the entire country into believing that “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” is a bad movie. Countless fanboys and dude bros have spent enough time decrying this movie as a failure and the movie that killed the franchise that if you admit you actually like or even love “The Last Jedi,” you won’t escape all the outraged haters letting you know how wrong you are. Preferring “Rogue One” or Baby Yoda are just the norm now.

The 2010s were the Twitter Decade, where every discussion about politics, sports or pop culture was filtered through what a bunch of people who spend way too much time online are saying about it. Anything that tried to be sincere was dead on arrival, and movies were judged based on how many memes or gifs they generated and how they seeped into the “cultural conversation” that is toxic Internet discourse.

So when I sat down to make my list of the 10 Best Movies of the Decade, I really had to step outside myself and figure out, “What do I actually think about these movies?” Not “what did they say about this decade” or “how important were they?” I tried not to care what the Reddit mob thinks. But of course, I didn’t have time to rewatch many of the movies I’ve loved and remembered over the last 10 years, so this list is as unfiltered as I can be.

Also, if you don’t feel like reading, please check out this podcast I recorded going over my Top 10 films. Zach Dennis and I got the band back together for a special reunion podcast of The News Reel, which you can listen to below.

 
Continue reading “The Best Movies of the 2010s”

The Best Movies of 2016

Conventional wisdom would have it that 2016 was an awful year. Gene Wilder, David Bowie, Prince and many more stars all passed away. Shootings at night clubs and a fire at an Oakland venue sent shockwaves through communities and brought into question where we as Americans can feel safe. And of course the election results were not only the opposite of what I would’ve hoped for, but they polarized the nation so deeply that facts and freedom seem to hang in the balance.

Since the election results, I’ve been far more guarded about projecting what I believe. What’s the use when either no one wants to hear a word, or it will only echo around in a bubble of shared values?

The same could be said of movies. I’m sure for many culture writers it’s tempting to rank the most “relevant” movies and present them as “best.” It would be films that aren’t so much “good” as they are reflections of the writer’s worldview and what they say about 2016 today (somehow I feel “Sausage Party” wouldn’t do so great on that list). But when I think about the consequences of writing that sort of list in the wake of the election, I ultimately have very little interest. I’d rather present a list of the movies I would most recommend to anyone right now and leave the rest for the would-be pundits.

And yet these movies do reflect America and 2016 better than I would’ve imagined when I penciled each into a working list. You could place these films literally on a map of the US and find unique swaths and identities represented across the board. They’ve all come from a new class of elite directors and artists rather than the auteurist veterans who have been shaping the conversation for decades. And best of all, they’ve carried meaning and value for me both before and after the election. How we interpret them may evolve, but their texts and their emotional power remain unchanged. Continue reading “The Best Movies of 2016”

Moonlight

A touching, beautiful story of a young gay black man struggling to give and receive love

moonlight-posterIf you look carefully, you can see “Moonlight” gleam. It’s a meek, but powerful story of a young gay black man in Miami struggling to give and to feel love. It contains deep wells of personality, empathy and intimacy, but visually and tonally, Barry Jenkins’s film is equally beautiful, a sensuous and ravishing look at romance and identity that envelops you in a hypnotic, soothing lunar glow.

We meet Chiron (pronounced Shy-RONE) at three stages of his life, first as a young boy, then as a teenager in high school, and finally as a 20-something adult (Ashton Sanders). As a kid (Alex Hibbert) he’s racing through a field, the camera dashing to keep up and careening from side to side as it glimpses a few other boys chasing him. It’s not a moment of frivolous fun, but something more violent and saddening. They’re trying to pelt him with rocks, and Chiron takes refuge in a burned out motel room. In it he finds a charred vial, a remnant of a junkie’s former squalor. His savior is a drug dealer named Juan (Mahershala Ali). He nicknames Chiron “Little” and despite the boy’s timid, apprehension, offers him a meal and a place to stay for the night, only to then bring him home to his drug-addled single mom. Juan emerges as a father figure in Chiron’s life, but the boy is caught up in a circle of dependency between his addicted mom and the dealer who keeps selling to her regardless.

In one of the film’s several achingly heartfelt moments, Juan takes Little into the ocean to learn how to swim. The camera bobs alongside as Juan carefully suspends him in the water to float, and the moment evokes a spiritual baptism. “At some point you got to decide who you want to be,” Juan says. “Don’t let no one decide that for you.” Continue reading “Moonlight”