BEST RECENT MOVIES PAST 5 YEARS HOW TO
BEST RECENT MOVIES PAST 5 YEARS MOVIE

“Marriage Story” is a great drama about divorce, but the third and most powerful of Richard Linklater’s ”Before” films is something even more naked and transporting: a journey through the emotional labyrinth of a relationship that is holding on even as it’s begun to hit the skids. (In the Miller vision, speed = God.) In “Fury Road,” Miller creates a demolition-derby spectacle for the 21st century, as Max (Tom Hardy), a blunted shell, makes way for the women warriors (led by Charlize Theron) who now lead the fight for freedom as the rubber hits the road.

BEST RECENT MOVIES PAST 5 YEARS MOVIE

There has never been an action poet like George Miller, who returns to the hell-on-wheels grandeur of “Mad Max” and “The Road Warrior” to create a movie that builds on their nihilistic excitement, using speed, once again, not just to generate thrills (though God knows he does that) but to express a vision of existence - of men and women hurtling past the void, hanging on for dear life, wondering what besides the power of their velocity will save them.

BEST RECENT MOVIES PAST 5 YEARS HOW TO

The film’s magic is there in its entrancing musical numbers (think Jacques Demy staged with the eagerness of young Spielberg), in the wistful tale of two lovestruck entertainers (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) who fall for each other yet can’t seem to get their passion on track, and in Chazelle’s devotion to the wonder of Old Hollywood, which makes every moment of “La La Land” feel like another day of sun.Ī film so fast and furious that as much as I loved it the first time, on further viewings I felt myself learning how to watch it, training my eye to take in each razory leap and split-second cut. And Damien Chazelle’s new-style version of an old-school Hollywood musical has a core of sublime sadness that lets it blossom into a bittersweet symphony. But in great musicals like “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Moulin Rouge!” or “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” joy is often the flip side of a kind of rapturous melancholy, one that allows us to take stock of how beautiful (and fleeting) life and love can be.

The most joyful movie of the decade, and joy is not a quality we should take for granted (especially these days). “The Social Network” is bracing and funny, tragic and exhilarating, told with the kind of effortless high-wire panache that makes you believe in the power of movies. So they invented a brave new world by syncing it to the spirit of their own detachment. Tapping into the tale of Facebook’s creation, this David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin masterpiece touches the inner story of our time: how the new mode of connecting to others via the Internet was invented by people - like the visionary geek Mark Zuckerberg, played with a magnetic fast-break chill by Jesse Eisenberg - who had serious problems connecting in any other way. It hurtles, fascinates, scintillates, and resonates every moment is nimbly entertaining and essential. It’s one of those perfect films, like “All the President’s Men” or “Dazed and Confused” or “Sweet Smell of Success,” that you can watch again and again and again. It may take another 10 years for the impact of those movements to be fully felt, whereas some readers will expect parity in lists like these, wherein Variety film critics Owen Gleiberman and Peter Debruge identify the best movies of the past decade. Audiences found their voice over the last decade, letting the industry know how they felt - and studios listened, or started to at least, as criticisms of #OscarsSoWhite and #TimesUp sparked seismic change in the industry.

Lest those descriptions make you feel nostalgic, keep in mind that, apart from “Twilight,” Hollywood movies were mostly being made by and about white men. The only celebrity to become President of the United States was “Bedtime for Bonzo” star Ronald Reagan, Amazon was a place you went to buy cheap books not the biggest spender at the Sundance Film Festival, and “the cloud” was something Carl Fredricksen’s CG house floated above rather than the way people screen Pixar movies. Ten years ago, Netflix was an innocuous DVD-by-mail company, the Marvel tsunami was just testing the water with “Iron Man” and “Thor,” and the “Star Wars” empire still belonged to George Lucas, not Disney.

Best recent movies past 5 years