Presentation: MAR's Top 100 Films of the 2010s [COMPLETE!]

Marriage Story is one of the best and most realistic movies about divorce I have ever seen. As somebody who has parents who have gone through the struggle and pain of divorce, I could relate to the movie’s message of growing apart. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver are terrific as a couple who as the film progresses get more and more volatile and hostile towards each other. So much of the movie surprised me, especially by how emotional it got, the argument scene in particular being a real gut-wrenching blowout for me. I could relate to that sort of experience, especially seeing two people who I love dearly as a six year old, basically tear the other apart into tiny memory sized pieces. Clearly Noah Bambauch built much of this film from prior experiences, and it shows. Even by his standards, it’s a very tender, well-put together film.

Whether you get swept up in the romance of baseball or have no interest in the sport, we can agree this is a great film -- it's here, right? The beauty of this film that Bennet Miller creates is that it makes this increasingly niche and wayward topic universal and that's the business of baseball. Led by Brad Pitt's -- in what is probably his best performance ever -- ability to let us in the inner thoughts of this general manager through his eyes and mannerisms that scream 'born in baseball'. It's an incredible portrait of somebody who wants desperately to leave a mark on the foundation of the very thing that person is passionate and romantic about. It makes this abstract topic of trying to change the way a person thinks into a delightful and entertaining biopic. It truly makes sense that this was written by the two heavyweights of adapting source material into screenplays: Zaillian & Sorkin. Most think this is a movie for people who keep a bat, a ball and a mitt in the trunk of their car at all times, but it's also a flick for folks who like the art of outstanding filmmaking.

Once you get onto its scrappy wavelength, with its mixed formats, and unsparing depictions, culminating into carnivalesque revelry (“Our revels now are ended?”) - you may find a most daring mea culpa from Orson Welles. This is Essential cinema, if only because it’s the last from one of its indubitable titans. That it’s lushly and gorgeously shot, like the film-within-a-film segments, and spiked with a vérité rush of Hollywood-type busyness and satiric swipes, that it’s hysterical and endearing — really quite sympathetic to its side characters and utterly damning of the Welles-stand-in lead played with sickly grizzled glee by John Huston — is just the icing on the cake that spells Welles Is A God. With some deservedly doffed chapeaus to the post-production team, namely editor Bob Murawski, who finished assembling Welles’ footage, off his ample noted directions, giving such an exactness to the looseness. Welles once said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” This is a man who saw Art like no other, mastered it like no other, dared like no other, failed like no other. We are stirringly lucky ducks to have another Welles movie - this one - that carries so much of Him, with as always the challenging of form, the self demythologizing, the revelry.

The very crux of the story of Sicario may seem familiar – a determined but slightly naïve character has to learn the realities of her chosen career path the hard way. But it is in the constant interplay of moralities that Taylor Sheridan’s tight script finds its true footing and puts the viewer through a whirlpool of emotions making Sicario an unforgettable experience. Directed in an enveloping slow-burn manner by one of today’s most vital cinematic voices Denis Villeneuve, shot with hypnotizing precision by Roger Deakins and featuring an instantly iconic (and often-copied) score by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson that simply exudes menace, Sicario is a thrilling neo-western which finds haunting and honest ways to cinematically explore one of today’s most pressing political issues and directly questions the sustainability of idealism in the land of wolves.

Winter Sleep is an incredibly powerful film, a piercing meditation on the complexity and defectiveness of human character. It shows how even the most mundane and ordinary circumstances are capable of bringing out facets of yourself that you didn’t even know existed and that you will always have doubts and reservations about yourself, your beliefs and the people you trust, no matter how sure you are about them. And that your personality is a dynamic composition, where each aspect of it is formed depending on your age, work, experiences, communication with others, etc. and undergoes constant changes.

“Not seeing a man for what he is, idolizing him like a god, and then being mad at him because he's not a god. Do you think that's fair?”