I’ve been straining my memory for the past week in an attempt to articulate a dominant ethos of the 2010s. Does one exist? It was a decidedly elusive decade. Our initial impression was that it blended seamlessly with the first decade of the new millennium, and never really emerged with its own distinctive palette.
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In previous articles here, I’ve submitted my candidates for the best films of the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. So the laws of natural progression compel me to move forward with the next decade. Few would argue that the 70s, 80s, and 90s had their own distinctive flavor. But can the same be said for the first decade of the new millennium? I think it can.
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The 1990s is in some ways a unique decade. Sandwiched between the last gasp of Cold War mania (the 1980s) and the global “war on terror” (the early 2000s), it was a time of relative peace and prosperity. The internet had not yet permeated every facet of life; the isolation and atomization of the current era had not yet become a depressing feature of the social landscape. The movies of the 1990s reflect this energy and optimism. The cinema of the 1990s may lack the searing conviction and anger of 70s movies, but the decade’s film catalogue is a very respectable one. We must temper this generally positive picture with tones of darkness, however. In hindsight, the 1990s now seem to carry distinct overtones of Gen X delusion and ossified Boomer autocracy, a decade of smug stasis in which critical problems affecting the country were either ignored or downplayed. Perhaps the 1990s simply reaped the 1980s foul harvest of greed and self-indulgence. You will have to decide for yourself.
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It isn’t easy, of course, to reduce an entire decade to convenient encapsulations. But it is possible to put our finger on its corporeal pulse. The 1980s did not have the grim, disillusioned, bitter flavor of the 1970s; nor did the decade have the self-satisfied triumphalism of the 1990s. In some ways the 1980s was a period of recovery, hopeful interlude, and buoyant optimism. I think the movies of the decade reflect these generally positive sentiments. There was a collective feeling that the future would be bright, and that if a man rolled up his sleeves and took a deep breath, he could accomplish almost anything. Yet when speaking about an entire decade, things are never quite so simple. We find that, behind the optimistic façade of the 80s, there lurked more than a little foreboding and dread. The tension between these competing cultural emotions was responsible for some of the decade’s greatest cinematic art.
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More than any other decade, the 1970s laid the foundations of modern cinema. The 1960s were no better a decade for film than the 1950s; its experimental excesses could not compensate for a shockingly meager output of quality work. But something magical happened in the 1970s. Perhaps it was the arrival on the scene of visionary directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, William Friedkin, George Lucas, and many others. Perhaps it was a unique moment in the industry when—as in the early 1990s—studios were not so risk-averse, and financing for daring new projects by unknown directors and writers was not so difficult to come by.
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Why horror? What is it about this genre that exerts such a hold on our imagination? What psychological need is served by the human desire to be frightened or unnerved? Perhaps some residue of our prehistoric consciousness, in which our hominid ancestors were stalked by ancient predators on the African savannahs, demands to be recognized as an evolutionary survival sense; or perhaps the perception of fear awakens certain synapses in the brain, igniting the spark of creative impulses that demand some form of outward expression. I do not know.
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Someone recently asked if I could provide a reliable “core” list of movies. Sometimes two heads are better than one. So I spoke with my friend William Wolfe (who can be found at the Twitter account Zero Soy Pics), to see if he could give me a list of his own favorite films. I told Bill that I’d post both of our lists on my website.
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Someone on Twitter recently asked me to make a list of the top war films. The titles below are the result. I present them in no strict order, although I do believe the first five are superior to the remainder. There are a great number of war films, but my goal was to select the few that occupy a special category. Each reader, of course, may form his own judgments.
All right. Here are some of the latest. We review Glass (2019), What Still Remains (2018), Barbara (2012), and Goldstone (2016).
Quintus Curtius 
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