Jess's TOP 50 of the 2010s

    It's lovely how much more personal film has become. You can catch glimpses of the artists' soul. A painting, shot-for-shot. With the entire experience giving off oxygen.
I wrote that while I was watching The Master. Of course everything is beautiful and challenging when you're watching that. In fact, I believe, that very few films belong in the same plane of existence as this one.

   When I was five, I saw Alien, and it terrified me so profoundly that I still have nightmares to this day. It changed the way I see things in the dark. Confined me in close quarters with real monsters that I could not escape. But then I got to be Ripley and sent that motherfucker off into oblivion. Kinda my favorite movie for a long time.

   When I was sixteen I got grounded for a month, for arguing on the phone with my mom, about the unfairness of having to come home from my date to re-clean my bathroom. My date, sympathetic to my position, and sensing my interest in Cinema, loans me an enormous duffle bag full of VHS tapes. The idea was to help pass the time. I saw many film 'firsts' from this arrangement: Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet, and A Clockwork Orange, just to name a few. Included was a double-wide VHS copy of Magnolia. At the rise of my puberty-induced hormones, coupled with the fact that I am the most emotional person that has ever lived, this movie was heroin. I never got tired of putting in that second tape for more feature - or of getting yelled at every day after school for taking my potato hash browns up into my room and blasting Aimee Mann. I played "Momentum" endlessly and obnoxiously loud. Just like she does in the movie. Kinda my favorite movie for a long time.

   Nothing had been better than either of those two. Works of genius, violence, grace, and beauty. Unattainable and triumphant masterpieces that changed my life forever. And then, an auteur out-achieves himself. To praise Paul Thomas Anderson, for giving us such a thing of pure light and darkness to gaze upon, would not be doing him justice. The energy from this work is physically vibrational, which, when you get down to it, is the most you can possibly hope for as an artist. If another human being can feel your creation in their very being, you are only then a true success. And I love the memory of getting to see this, for the first time ever, with my best friend Paul. Kinda my favorite movie right now.

-Jess

1. The Master (2012)

2. It Follows (2014)

3. The Lords of Salem (2013)

4. Her (2013)

5. Joker (2019)

6. Django Unchained (2012)

7. The Witch (2016)

8. Mud (2013)

9. Prisoners (2013)

10. mother! (2017)

11. Prometheus (2012)

12. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

13. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

14. Blue Ruin (2013)

15. Into the Forest (2015)

16. Frances Ha (2012)

17. Drive (2011)

18. Hereditary (2018)

19. Under the Skin (2014)

20. Phantom Thread (2017)

21. Take Shelter (2011)

22. The Place Beyond the Pines (2013)

23. Melancholia (2011)

24. Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

25. Midnight Special (2016)

26. Nightcrawler (2014)

27. What We Do in the Shadows (2014)

28. Seeking a Friend For the End of the World (2012)

29. STAR WARS: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

30. The Blackcoat's Daughter (2015)

31. Us (2019)

32. Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019)

33. Marriage Story (2019)

34. West of Memphis (2012)

35. The Devil's Candy (2015)

36. Rogue One (2016)

37. The Babadook (2014)

38. The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

39. Ex Machina (2015)

40. Loving (2016)

41. Arrival (2016)

42. Blue Valentine (2010)

43. 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

44. It (2017)

45. Hesher (2011)

46. Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

47. While We're Young (2014)

48. Short Term 12 (2013)

49. Super 8 (2011)

50. Black Swan (2010)