The 2010s was the decade in which my film-love blossomed, matured, underwent crises, ended and made a late reappearance. My disillusionment with cinema and cinephilia resulted in a break of over three years, which offered me other interests and discoveries. 2016-2018 was a period in which I didn’t watch films as anything more than the casual moviegoer—this has also meant that I have missed the developments in world cinema landscape. Though I did ‘catch up’ on a few films from this period this year, it remains a significant gap, a marker of an enriching rupture in life.

While my memory of most of these films below has all but faded, I do remember them as works that made a stark impression on my cinephilic journey. I watched the first film on this list in a mountainous small-town cinema hall with a handful of other people. It was a very cold Monday evening in January 2017. I recall remaining seated in the hall after the film, quite stunned, and texting my friend Yvon that it was a “chef-d’oeuvre absolu”. There was a spring in my step during the familiar, ten-minute walk back home. For the first time in a long time, I felt confident about my decisions, about the place I was in life at that moment. I was reassured.

 

1. Paterson (Jim Jarmusch, 2016, USA)

2. The Death of Louis XIV (Albert Serra, 2016, Spain/France)

3. Son of Saul (László Nemes, 2015, Hungary)

4. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011, Hungary)

5. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010, Thailand)

6. Film Socialism (Jean-Luc Godard, 2010, Switzerland)

7. The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira, 2010, Portugal)

8. Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2010, Chile/France)

9. The Truth (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2019, Japan/France)

10. Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami, 2010, Iran/France)

11. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho, 2019, South Korea)

12. Goodbye to Language (Jean-Luc Godard, 2014, Switzerland)

13. Cosmopolis (David Cronenberg, 2012, Canada)

14. Francofonia (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2015, Russia/France)

15. The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013, USA)

16. This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi, 2011, N/A)

17. Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012, France)

18. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011, Iran)

19. Nainsukh (Amit Dutta, 2010, India)

20. The Second Game (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2014, Romania)

21. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016, Germany)

22. Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa, 2019, Portugal)

23. Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, 2016, Germany/Ukraine)

24. Stranger by the Lake (Alain Guiraudie, 2013, France)

25. Pain and Gain (Michael Bay, 2013, USA)

Special Mention: Safari (Ulrich Seidl, 2016, Austria)

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Filmmaker of the Decade: Sergei Loznitsa