![]() This is one of many clichés that Creed infuses with an earnest, timeworn vibrancy. As Adonis shadowboxes with the ghost of his father, Alberti, Johnson, and director Ryan Coogler set up both the film’s primary plot and its meta-textual thesis: A legacy is both a burden and a privilege. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti has been rightly hailed for Creed’s mid-film, single-take fight scene, but hasn’t received enough credit for realizing one of the decade’s most complex and indelible shots, literally projecting the legacy of deceased fighter Apollo Creed onto his illegitimate son, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. ![]() If the modern franchise product is Lebron James, pummeling opponents and raking in billions through sheer might, then Creed is its Steph Curry, infusing a familiar formula with an uncanny and seemingly effortless grace. Mac, Niles Schwartz, Diego Semerene, Derek Smith. The Voters: Chuck Bowen, Pat Brown, Jake Cole, Clayton Dillard, Ed Gonzalez, Christopher Gray, Wes Greene, Glenn Heath Jr., Eric Henderson, Rob Humanick, Oleg Ivanov, Joshua Kim, Carson Lund, Sam C. Some of us saw most of these one hundred films in theaters, but they made their way to us in many different scenarios, on screens that were inches, feet, or stories high. A few entries on our list aired as TV miniseries here or in Europe ( Li’l Quinquin and Olivier Assayas’s Carlos) but were released theatrically in North America. The difference between the two mediums is becoming increasingly slippery, and for some unearthly reason a noisy portion of the internet never seems to tire of pedantic debates about which creators and which works belong in which canon. And works as unalike as Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America, Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Happy Hour, and Mariano Llinás’s La Flor reminded us that seemingly any manner of story can be worthy of a length most audiences reserve for a season of television. Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan and Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s Manakamana are sumptuously designed documentaries that reorient our sense of the cinema as spectacle, a word that must be associated with George Miller ( Mad Max: Fury Road) and Leos Carax’s ( Holy Motors) lone outings this decade. Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is a marvel of contradictions, diffusing a boisterous family drama into a patchwork of discrete asides. Surrounding the dozen-plus filmmakers making numerous appearances here are a string of works by both established and emerging artists that point to the continued innovation of both studio and independent film. Don Hertzfeld, conversely, puts his inimitable tragicomic stamp on two distinctly expansive animated visions. Robert Greene has developed a remarkable body of work scrutinizing the nature of performance, but this phrase does nothing to explain how one filmmaker could produce films of such disparate conceits and ideas as Kate Plays Christine and Bisbee ‘17. ![]() Maren Ade’s Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann are scabrous examinations of moneyed classes that are nonetheless immensely heartfelt. Most of the directors cited here more than once (including Lonergan, Kiarostami, and Kelly Reichardt) are firmly ensconced in the canon of contemporary auteurs, while a few have more stealthily entered the conversation. Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse and Aleksei German’s Hard to Be a God are twinned in their monochromatic, overwhelming shrugs toward the apocalypse, while other final films (Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames and Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie) mine the sublime from stillness. Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret began the decade spinning a city symphony out of a teenager’s first brush with tragedy today, its classroom scenes are a harrowing, uproarious omen of the discourse we trudge through each day. They offer insights and riches that are inexhaustible. Our top films of the decade contain ample proof that much of the most vital art being made today comes from a place beyond the ken of the algorithms attempting to control our attention. It’s up to us to grant them the attention they deserve. The story of the next decade is likely to be one studio’s stranglehold on the box office and the theatrical moviegoing experience writ large, but the sheer volume of new voices with fresh ideas and perspectives continues to grow unabated. While the increasingly tiresome bubble of online film discourse only seems capable of processing one or two works of art in any given week, the number of films released in North America each year has doubled in the past decade.
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