My 50 favorite movies of the decade
I wrote my first movie review when I was in elementary school. Using a sheet of yellow paper with the little dotted lines to help improve your cursive, I scrawled a few sentences about 1999’s Jake Gyllenhaal drama “October Sky,” giving it 3 1/2 stars.
It was the same rating The Boston Globe’s late film critic Jay Carr had given the movie, and to me, that seemed about right. Besides, he was the only film scribe I had ever read, and who was I to doubt his decades of cinema experience?
Twenty years later, as I sit in the Boston Globe offices trying to wrap my head around a decade’s worth of movies, I keep coming back to that review, and how it reflected my way of thinking, both then and now.
I’m the type of person who is soothed by the rigid certitude of rankings. Someone who, as a child, kept a semi-obsessive mental list of movies that had received a coveted four-star review from the Globe, and, as a party trick, could tell friends how many stars any movie from approximately 1998 to 2001 had received. Someone who shops for everything using The Wirecutter’s recommendations because having experts tell me what to buy is the only thing saving me from paralysis by analysis.
All of that is a roundabout way of saying that when coming up with this list, I tried to avoid doing what my numbers-focused, rankings-obsessed mind would normally do: consume every end-of-decade list I could find while mentally collating them into a list to call my own.
Instead, I dove into the Google sheets that contain the 500+ new releases I saw this decade, trying to wrap my head around how to choose my “favorites” from such a deep and varied list. Do I highlight the most important? The most memorable? The ones that meant a lot to me at the time? The ones I’ll watch anytime, anywhere? The ones so deeply scarring that I never want to see them again? Ultimately, this list has movies that fit all of those descriptions. It’s missing a lot of Great Works of Cinema that you’ll see on other lists that I have yet to see (my “to watch” list is currently more than 100 entries long), but it’s a fair representation of my decade of viewership.
I could go on, but I already feel like one of those online food bloggers who pens a 3,000-word preamble to their grandma’s green bean casserole recipe, so let’s get to the good stuff.
Here’s my 50 favorite movies of the past decade.
