“I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” So goes possibly the most well-known phrase written by Samuel Beckett, appearing in his 1953 novel The Unnamable.  The statement can be interpreted in two immediately discernible ways.  Firstly, it has been contemporaneously raised as a mantra for stoicism and perseverance in the face of hardship, and in this inspirational light the phrase is pasted onto pictures of sunsets and mountain ranges.  Secondly, it can be read as connoting the biological imperative to function despite whatever suffering overwhelms the mind – our frail and malfunctioning bodies have a certain autonomous lifespan which we, as conscious beings, are ultimately powerless to withstand.  This latter interpretation is more in keeping with Beckett’s existential bleakness; the former appropriation within internet culture strikes a humorous incongruity.  However, there is a third interpretation running between these two which is, rumour has it, closer to the truth than either: Beckett was actually writing about supporting Tottenham Hotspur.

In the last 10 to 15 years, no club in the Western world has promised as much yet delivered as little as Tottenham.  Runners-up in the Champions League in 2019, runners-up in the Premier League in 2016-17, third-place finishers on 2 occasions and 3-time runners-up in the League Cup.  Our best chance of domestic glory is now generally deemed the 2015-16 season, where Leicester overcame all odds to win a title no one expected them to – no one except, perhaps, those cynical Tottenham fans who saw their own club entering a title race and knew all-too-well their weak-kneed track-record for sticking a landing.  In that season, Tottenham capitulated and ended up third in a two horse race. 

Supporting Spurs through these near-glories has been relentlessly turbulent and emotional.  Unlike fans remaining ardently loyal to smaller clubs with more modest ambitions, we are teased with divinity year on year.  Our potential is not limited to an unlikely victory over a top 4 club, a surprise cup-run, survival from relegation or qualifying for a promotion play-off.  In fact, we perennially expect to have cup runs and to challenge the biggest and richest of all them all.  The last time such a challenge brought silverware, however, was way back in 2008 with victory in the League Cup, a prize routinely dismissed with the preface Mickey Mouse.  

Comparing the expectations with the actual results, one might deem Tottenham fans to be possessed with delusions of grandeur. To deem so, however, would be to ignore the glimmers of brilliance that have permeated the team’s performances in this era: Kane, Eriksen, Dele, Son, Vertonghen, Aldeweireld and Bale are just some of the world-beating players that have combined in various forms to deliver moments as good as any team’s in the country or continent.  The key word there, though, is moments.

The emotional turbulence of supporting Tottenham derives from these moments of frail brilliance. We are left to idly revere Lucas Moura’s hat-trick in the Champions League semi-final; we can watch YouTube highlights of Kane’s record number of Derby Day goals versus Arsenal (my personal favourite sees him masked-up and curling one in from a tight 25-yard angle); Son dribbling half the pitch and finishing in Puskas style; a first ever win against Real Madrid; Dele’s two winning headers against Chelsea.  We can surmise the Pochettino reign as Tottenham’s greatest in the modern era, wherein we established ourselves as the foremost North London club and a mainstay in the Champions League.  All this self-veneration, however, can be dismantled as easily as a house of cards with just one question: ‘But what did you win?’

Tottenham’s brilliance is dependable only in its ability to flatter to deceive.  If the club were a romantic partner, they’d be the type to arrange a spontaneous trip to Paris only to forget to bring both your passports to the airport; they’d prepare you a dreamy starter course and then give you salmonella for the main.  While Lucas’ aforementioned hat-trick has been framed as an historical Tottenham moment, there is a structure of disavowal involved: the memory of the final presses upon the frame; it must be suppressed for the frame to hold.  While we impotently remark that, actually, we dominated the final against Liverpool, and ruefully contend that, actually, we were hard done by conceding a penalty in the opening minute, there is a pattern of unreliability extending across years that overrides such arguments.  “Lads, it’s only Tottenham”, Sir Alex Ferguson reportedly once told his team in the White Hart Lane away dressing room, as United were trailing at half time; in doing so he articulated with brutal shortness the spineless niceness the club has become infamous for.  Just look up a definition of ‘Spursy’ online and you’ll receive further confirmation of this reputation.

This year has been particularly apt as an exhibit for Tottenham’s unreliability.  We have had no fewer than 4 managers in the past 12 months: Jose Mourinho, Ryan Mason, Nuno Espirito Santo and now Antonio Conte.  The diversity of these managers showcases Tottenham’s identity issues and the uncertainty of their prestige: the first and last are two of the most decorated in world football; Mason, meanwhile, had never managed a team before being entrusted with leading the side for the League Cup final, whereas Nuno’s greatest achievement was finishing 7th with Wolves one time.  We explicitly brought in Mourinho to win trophies, with whom we started 2020–21 season brightly – at the beginning of last December, we were top of the league.  However, in a cost-saving last minute operation, Daniel Levy sacked Mourinho the week of his first final with Tottenham, who then became the first club at which the Portuguese manager had never won silverware.  And of course, in the final, Mason’s side lost to Guardiola’s.

Tottenham’s decision to employ Mourinho was part of a wider series of gestures from Levy and co to establish the club at the highest echelon, along with building the new stadium, airing the Amazon documentary and entering into the European Super League, a revolting initiative from earlier this year that has been swept under the carpet remarkably quickly.  The world’s biggest clubs were caught cheating on the people and, as a coping mechanism, we’ve mostly chosen to just move on and forget about it.  While for the other clubs the motive was seemingly just money-oriented, with Tottenham one could detect a shadow goal: to contractually solidify their position amongst the leading European giants, as if to say to its own fans and everyone else’s, “Look, here we are! Do you believe that we’re a big club now?”  I’ll truly believe it when I see Kane hold a major trophy.

And so we come to the problem of Kane, the greatest English striker of his generation, second only to Rooney in this millennium.  He has fronted Tottenham’s efforts in all the aforementioned cup finals and league challenges, yet remains limited to personal rather than team accolades.  Since the 2008 League Cup victory, some 27 players have left Tottenham to win a trophy.  Seeking to be the 28th, Kane attempted in the summer to push through a transfer to Manchester City, a move blocked by Levy.  Locked in place thanks to a 6 year contract signed in 2018, City and any other interested parties were simply priced out.  There is something tragic in this turn of events: unlike most other major players, who are managed by ruthless sharks, Kane’s agent is his brother, whose firm arranged this protracted contracted without a release clause.  It therefore appears his humble decision to keep it in the family now keeps him at Tottenham against his will. 

Spurs fans hence find ourselves in a highly awkward position: our star player wants to break up with us, yet is held in place by a toxic dependency, necessitating on our behalf yet more mental gymnastics, so as to maintain support in the guise of normality.  Although there were rumblings of gripes towards Kane amongst fans, these could never really stick.  After all, who more purely embodies the frustrations we feel, emerging from the Pochettino-era empty-handed? Deep down, we understand and empathise with his mental state: not only is he a life-long Spurs fan, but one could scarcely deny his commitment to the team, a team which has failed to match his oft-unparalleled scoring records. He has come within touching distance of winning not only the biggest club trophies but also the Euros with England, and now risks having the status of ‘greatest player to never win a professional trophy’ lorded over him for the rest of his life.  Perhaps the congestion in Kane’s nose intensifies the more competitions he loses; I imagine the day he wins one, whatever is lodged up there will come flowing out and his voice will become as light and melodious as a piccolo flute.

While Kane can still attempt to move clubs in the future, Tottenham fans are held in place for life.  As supporters, we are born into a routine of unpredictability, of moments of sublimity accompanied by ones of crushing disappointment. The pain and frustration of these swings in fortune has often been deeply disenchanting, to the extent that I have, in certain periods, labelled myself a nominal fan.  The almost religious turmoil associated with Tottenham as a club is aptly captured in the film In Bruges.  Staring at Hieronymus Bosch’s The Last Judgement, Brendan Gleason asks, “What’s the other place?” “Purgatory,” Colin Farrell replies.  “Kind of like the in-betweeny one. You weren’t really shit, but you weren’t all that great either. Like Tottenham.”

With football supporting, it remains sacrilege to simply pick the team that would best serve your happiness, and unlike other social reservations on altering one’s personal identity, you would have to say this form of sacrilege is healthy rather than unjust or repressive.  If everyone picked a team that way, they’d just support City, and interest in the lower-league teams would dry up altogether.  For the vast majority of fans, there is a constant necessity to adjust one’s expectations – one cannot simply pursue pleasure and avoid pain, but must come to terms with the constant oscillations in fortune and in turn embrace them. With Tottenham, the volatility of these oscillations is, perhaps, unrivalled – such is life, and in enduring them, I find consoling parallels with keeping a faith.  At the time of writing, Conte has gotten Tottenham shining again.  Under his management, we are unbeaten in the league and have just delivered another magic moment for the YouTube ages, in Steven Bergwijn’s historic injury-time brace against Leicester. Given the mundanity of Nuno’s management with the very same team, the passion and intensity Conte has transferred to every player on the pitch, and every fan in the stadium, is remarkably tangible.  The fact of this development feels precarious, but it’s enough to rope me back in, to restore my belief.  We’re on the up again, but Lord knows for how long.

I can feel myself slipping into

Poetry because I’m slipping more and more of my

Bludgeoned days into the drawers of poems

Drawn from myself out of nothing between

Emailing and list-calling and cell-filling and during

Sleepless nights scanning the sheep-less

Fields of my memories excavating the buried scraps

All buzzed with insomnolent abstraction

Before finally sinking into dreams spiked

With fuzzy faces from wrenching places

Long since abandoned. Nothing comes true

Quite like ‘Your alarm will go off

In 5 hours and 37 minutes.’

…

Like morning mocha, words brew; the black tide rises

Before it decants, to glaze lethargy with twanging wakefulness.

Daze out the kitchen window towards cold Autumn sun.

…

My phone rings for the third time this

Minute and I almost throw a fist but instead

Press Alt-Tab and steal some time with a figurative

Smirk. VPN has crashed – what can I do?

Replacing a spreadsheet with a fresh one,

I begin talking to myself and now

You’re someone else’s. A knock at the door

Leads into some room that’s far from the biggest

You’ve ever seen, but to make up for that

The lights are well-spread and a sizable

Mirror has been placed near one of them.

Move to the worn chair, made to fit in.

Under an adjacent lit lamp there’s a notebook,

Its pages soggy with embarrassment but now

Dried enough to be legible: here we may be

Special. Detect a tapping of keys

And look to the corner: there’s a young

One eking out tweets for you know who.

And I’m afraid that’s all we have time for.

Originally published in Empty Mirror in May 2020: https://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/literature/pablo-neruda-virtues-of-laziness

As history progresses, writings from the past can often take on fresh and unexpected potency; for instance, returning to the ecologically-focused poetry of Pablo Neruda, I found new significance in two thematically connected pieces: ‘Ode to Laziness’ (1954) and ‘Lazybones’ (1958).  What with the current worldwide deadlock of enforced reclusion and the necessary shrinking of our engagement with social spheres and natural habitats, Neruda’s elaboration of idleness as virtuous proves particularly relevant for our unprecedented contemporary moment.  Neruda reconceives laziness as fruitful, thus offering a subversive riposte to perceptions of this state of behaviour as selfish and unproductive.  However, in a time where people are currently patting themselves on the backs simply for staying in and doing nothing, reading these works can further show us the way on our promising path towards reconceiving laziness. On a larger scale, reading these two delightful poems together provoke questions regarding ethical occupation of one’s environment, in the face of our ongoing exploitation of the planet’s finite natural resources.

          ‘Ode to Laziness’ forms part of Neruda’s Odas Elementales (1954) collection, wherein each poem revolves around a single topic and explores this topic’s significance, both to the poet and within our wider world.  These topics vary from elements of nature, for example ‘Ode to a Fallen Chestnut’ or ‘Ode to the Storm’, to human-made materials, such as ‘Ode to the Book’ or ‘Ode to the Clothes’.  Our focal poem is a relative outlier in the sense that it characterises a form of human behaviour, as opposed to the more tangible elements customarily played with.  Appropriately, then, the start of this ode takes a self-aware tone, as Neruda confronts the creative framework he has imposed upon himself with this present collection: “Yesterday it seemed the ode wouldn’t leave the ground. / It was time, it should / at least show a green leaf. / I scratched the earth, ‘Get up, sister ode’”.  This attempted arousal of his ode, however, proves “No use”. What becomes clear as the poem progresses is that this attempted arousal in fact restricts the ode’s emergence, with this forceful dictation of natural processes for purposes of poetry proving a betrayal both of the environment and his creative integrity.  Ironically for a poem about laziness, we have begun with Neruda commanding the earth to awaken and be productive, so as to provide him with poetic inspiration.

          Hence, following this failure, Neruda wryly portrays himself as soon being taught a lesson about ethical attitudes towards capturing nature in poetry:

            “Then

            high up in the pines

            laziness

            appeared naked,

            I got up in a daze, half asleep,

            on the sand I found

            little broken fragments

            of oceanic substances”. 

Strikingly, the topic of his ode has appeared without any particular creative exertion, with the poet at his most passive and unthinking; this lack of conscious cognition thus gives the ode its pureness, its rightness, as embodied by the nakedness of laziness.  The poem then begins to gather momentum: the items on the beach, in this awakening, have become poetic and worthy of newfound attention, simply through virtue of being there, or rather of arriving there through the processes of nature.  The poetic figure recedes from his own work, as these processes take hold:

            “The sea

            filled the spaces,

            wearing away towers,

            invading

            the coasts of my homeland,

            pushing forward

            successive catastrophes of foam”. 

Neruda’s chosen poetic form throughout his Odas Elementas collection, of short tumbling lines and sprawling stanzas, here aligns with the work’s imagery: the poem is pushed forward by the flow of the tide, which comes to fill the spaces of the page.  As with many of Neruda’s works, the dominance of the Anthropocene is resisted poetically, in this case through centring the form around the sea’s erosion of human-made structures.  As for the “successive catastrophes of foam” pushing forward, this image neatly conjures the creative-destruction of earthly cycles; foam is a significant catalytic presence in Neruda’s poetry generally, as shall be expounded upon when analysing “Lazybones”. 

          Beyond this point, the bulk of the poem conveys in relatively simple terms the natural world in transience, conjuring a flux of images and sensations, from following passing petrels, to feeling the smoothness of a stone, to noting an ever-changing wrestle between sunlight and the clouds.  By the time you reach this end, you could easily have forgotten that this ode was supposed to be about laziness, and the question thus provoked is, what’s the link between laziness and all of this natural imagery?  Neruda seems to perceive the adoption of idleness as an ethically sound move, with the poetic figure’s abandonment of diligence and ambition allowing the natural beauty of his environment to come coursing through, unsullied by human domination.  The boundaries of laziness as a concept have in turn been expanded to now encompass a wilful and humble relinquishing of agency to serve a greater good, as subtly conveyed in the poem’s last stanza:

            “At night

            thinking of the duties of my

            fugitive ode,

            I took off my shoes

            by the fire,

            poured the sand out of them

            and almost at once fell

            sound asleep.”

There is no need for Neruda to reflect on his day’s inactivity, for the poem has accumulated without any visible exertion on his part, instead by embracing laziness and allowing nature to engulf his agency (as symbolised by the sand infiltrating his shoes).  Of course, there has been poetic license buried underneath it all nonetheless, and so Neruda’s culminating reflections might also be interpreted as directly entailing his abandonment to sleep; he is actively processing the virtues of adopting a degree of passivity when occupying our environment and when conceiving nature in poetry.  The poem as a whole can be read as this process laid bare for the reader.

          With ‘Lazybones’, from the Estravagario (1958) collection, the ethical virtues of laziness are immediately given more political force, with Neruda passionately building upon what was mostly implied within the ‘Ode’.

            “They will continue wandering,

            these things of steel among the stars,

            and weary men will still go up

            to brutalize the placid moon. 

            There, they will found their pharmacies.”

In this opening, the virtues of laziness are not signalled directly, but rather through signalling the heinousness of (what Neruda conceives as) antecedent behaviour: harmful exploitation of the natural world.  Neruda’s lunar example here is powerfully provocative and, despite intending to take the imperative logic of capitalist incursions to a cosmicomic extreme, sadly not beyond the realm of current advancements: Donald Trump has recently signed executive orders to mine on the moon.  After all, it’s free real estate, right?  Opposing modes of tiredness are also established, with the weary men founding pharmacies representing a converse to the tired poetic figure of ‘Ode’, who innocuously “found” fragments of oceanic substance and in turn a simple poetry.

          Following this striking beginning, Neruda reverts to what he does best, i.e. invoking the replenishments of the natural world, the cyclical processes of which are, wondrously, beyond human control: at his time of writing, “the wine begins to come to life”, “cherries are dancing” while “The sun is touching every door / and making wonders of the wheat”.  As with ‘Ode’, the immanent beauty of earth is traced simply and without any overly-shaping hand.  Wine – compared variously to “the sweetness of a child”, “the voice of a sailor” and “a poppy and a fire in one” – comes to encapsulate Neruda’s pure-hearted engagement with the natural world, and one can easily imagine him sitting for hours on his porch, staring out over a landscape or seascape while getting proudly hammered on the swollen grape.  Laziness is therefore elaborated as a celebration of earthly delights, as modest observation and enjoyment, as opposed to trampling activity. Neruda then turns towards the conditions of his own existence, expressing humble gratitude for his house which “has both the sea and the earth” and his woman with “great eyes / the colour of wild hazelnut”.  The final succession of images is classic Neruda:

          “when night comes down, the sea

            puts on a dress of white and green,

            and later the moon in the spindrift foam

            dreams like a sea-green girl”

Foam, halfway between earth and sea, once more poses as an exciting natural element for the poetic, for how it can simultaneously convey an effervescent natural flux, light-hearted pleasure, feverish anticipation of an almost sexual type, or the washing away of impurities.  So great is Neruda’s excitement for the natural world, ‘foaming’ is the descriptive that perhaps best sums up the tone. 

          Following Neruda’s indulgent foaminess comes the conclusive line, which once more hammers home his elaboration of the humble virtues of laziness: “I have no wish to change my planet”.  While of course it’ll take more than individuals adopting idleness to begin reversing the damage done to the environment, these poems guide the way to considering how an ethic of resistance towards harmful laborious activity – whether that be cutting flowers or mining natural resources – should be maintained beyond the current circumstances of social isolation.

Rian Johnson reverses out of the Star Wars universe with a starry Agatha Christie-inspired murder mystery, which just about manages to transcend its somewhat cutesy concept through a cutting takedown of structures of privilege

In a sense, the murder mystery is inherently contrived as a genre, consisting of plot necessities and stock characters which are foundational to such an extent that the genre is  pushed beyond a set of storytelling devices and towards something more resembling a handcrafted contraption.  The pleasure of watching a murder mystery is in seeing the contraption gradually reveal itself in an unexpected way, while the pleasure in creating one seems to arise from surprising audience members who have witnessed the unravelling of countless other similar contraptions.  It is no surprise then that Johnson is trying his hand at a genre many consider themselves well-versed in, given his history of subverting tropes, with Brick a reworking of the high school drama, The Brothers Bloom a riff on heist movies, and Looper experimenting with the well-worn time travel genre.

Knives Out as a contraption is, ultimately, pretty formulaic: a highly successful murder mystery author named Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found dead in his office from a slashed throat, shortly after his 85^th birthday.  The next morning, an anonymous note calling for an investigation lands at the door of Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), an old-school detective from the Deep South.  Despite general proclamations of suicide from the family, Blanc and his associates (Lakeith Stanfield, Noah Segan) catch several breadcrumb trails leading towards different members of the Thrombey dynasty, with each soon betraying the various tensions brewing between the deceased patriarch and his array of entitled children and in-laws.  With Harlan sitting on a sizable fortune and a wealth of assets soon to be handed down – including the antique Massachusetts mansion which gives the movie its grand setting – it isn’t long into his investigation of this brattish, duplicitous set that Blanc begins to “suspect foul play”.

The fun of these whodunit movies often lies in witnessing an embarrassment of acting riches play off each other, and Knives Out is no different: Johnson has assembled one of the finest casts of the year. Craig’s goofy antics are initially distracting, what with the character’s drastic deviation from Bond, but he wins you over quickly enough, thanks to a canny ability to draw out sincerity or contempt depending on the suspect under investigation, and by the end his wacky yet morally shrewd characterisation is in fact rather iconic. Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, and Chris Evans are on slightly more one-dimensional form, as the detestable descendants with tunnel vision for Harlan’s will, yet their arrogant petulance generally makes for entertaining viewing, especially when Johnson’s script wittily exposes the complacency of their bourgeois privilege.  A particularly comic performance comes from the ever-great Toni Colette as Harlan’s daughter-in-law Joni, a lifestyle guru and self-styled woke merchant, whose potent hypocrisy serves to push Knives Out further into the realm of 2019 social commentary.  The ultimate star of the show, though, and whose presence proves most socially prescient, is Ana de Armas as Marta Cabrera, Harlan’s nurse and general family assistant. De Armas is wonderful in the role, radiating empathy and likability, and the way her role within the movie unfolds is Knives Out’s greatest feature.

Given Johnson’s wholehearted insertion of himself into the genre, what should be considered is the overall success of this murder-mystery as a construction: does it surprise us enough? In truth, the plot is somewhat lacking in twists, and those twists were, I thought, relatively easy to predict, while the final reveal was a little simplistic in how it unravelled.  Unfortunately, too, it was occasionally hard to shake off the sense that the film is a tad too contrived and on-the-nose, thanks to certain characters being given traits like a medical condition that induces vomit if they lie, or dialogue along the lines of, “it’s just like one of Dad’s mystery novels”.  Praise be to De Armas, then, for her spirited performance helps Knives Out transcend its genre-y conception to become something more compelling. On the whole, the most notable influence on the film appears, unexpectedly, to be everyone’s favourite GCSE classic An Inspector Calls, with a homicide investigator likewise deployed by Johnson to critically expose the webs of deceit spun by an upper-class set, to the detriment of those socio-economically below them.  Some frameworks, then, remain cogent and (unfortunately) relevant.

20. Drive (2011)

Ryan Gosling has, on reflection, been the decade’s most dynamic leading man, able to switch between genres – and between big-budget and independent fare – while repeatedly showing different facets to his ability.  The Driver deserves to stand as his most iconic role, with Drive (not La La Land) the movie in which he establishes himself as an authentically cool and captivating presence in the vein of Paul Newman.  He’s aided by the ultra-stylish and pulpy direction of Nicolas Winding Refn, while Carey Mulligan, playing the Driver’s neighbour Irene, likewise establishes herself as one of our era’s best actresses.

19. Bait (2019)

My favourite cinema experience of the year: shot in black-and-white and on vintage 16mm film, with the sound added in post-production, this Cornish drama is a real labour-of-love from its director and star, Mark Jenkin.  Tracing the decline of a fishing village at the hands of a burgeoning tourist industry, Bait is an entirely unique film that powerfully captures the sound and feel of the Cornwall region.  Optimistically for the fate of low-budget British cinema, it has been a relative commercial success nationwide, with the number of screenings vastly expanded after initially large theatrical attendances.

18. I, Daniel Blake (2016)

The quintessential ‘Up Yours to the Tories’ film, Ken Loach really hit a nerve with this Palme d’Or-winning story of an elderly man recovering from a heart attack, caught in an inhumane web of bureaucracy when he’s deemed fit for labour by a Workers Capability Assessment.  I, Daniel Blake is a sledgehammer of a film, hugely effective in riling up the viewer, and at 80 years-old, Ken Loach’s impassioned political cinema has reached a late apex.

17. Leave No Trace (2018)

A low-key, meditative film that gradually acquires more and more emotional heft, Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace has an urgent and timely feel.  Ben Foster and Thomasin Mackenzie play a father and daughter living in the forest, struggling to maintain their nomad lifestyle.  As these struggles play out, the film holds up a mirror to contemporary society and provokes questions on the ethics of urban life, while also poignantly connoting the coming-of-age of its female protagonist, struggling to conform to her father’s stubborn resistance to community.

16. The Favourite (2018)

The second Yorgos Lanthimos film on the list, The Favourite resulted in more mainstream appreciation for the Greek director, with the ever-brilliant Olivia Colman winning a Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Queen Anne.  Revolving around three women vying for one another’s love and attention, this is a pleasingly radical portrayal of British royals, and possesses a savage sharpness often missing from period dramas.  Lanthimos has taken the genre and made it his own, by integrating his perverse sense of humour and penchant for portraying unhinged violence with an arch aesthetic.

15. The Florida Project (2017)

Just beyond the boundaries of Disneyworld Florida lies the Magic Castle, a run-down purple motel initially conceived as an accommodation complex for the theme park, yet now home to an impoverished set of residents, including Halley and her six year-old daughter Moonee.  Taking the child’s perspective, director Sean Baker tracks the hardships of a single-mother through Moonee’s innocent eyes, to heart-breaking effect.  Willem Dafoe is on career-best form as the motel’s manager, struggling to maintain empathy for the financially desperate residents while bound to a professional duty.

14. The Master (2012)

Some of the best acting of the decade can be found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s intense post-World War II drama.  Joaquin Phoenix begun his career renaissance here, as aimless Navy veteran Freddie Quell, and he spars rivetingly against the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays cult-leader Lancaster Dodd – supposedly based on Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.  Amy Adams, though, is subtly menacing and commanding as Peggy, Lancaster’s wife and backseat orchestrator; Anderson has said that it is in fact her to whom the titles refers.

13. Submarine (2010)

Richard Ayoade needs to make more movies: it’s been 7 years since his also-great The Double and now almost a decade since this entirely charming Wales-set teen romance.  Its quirky characters and stylised camerawork align the movie with those of Wes Anderson, though it certainly has a sincere and offbeat identity of its own.  The solo-songs of Alex Turner ideally complement the film’s whimsical tone, too.

12. Train to Busan (2016)

The best zombie movie of the 2010s, Train to Busan places a range of characters on a train and coolly sets the scene, before letting loose its apocalypse and the tension barely dies down for a minute from there on.  By the end, I was emotionally drained yet energised.  Like many classic zombie movies, it also holds up as a social commentary, with the protagonist (played by the greatly charismatic Gong-Yoo) learning the virtues of comradeship in counterpoint to the selfish COO also aboard the train.

11. Roma (2018)

It’s a shame Roma was a Netflix film, as it deserves to be on the biggest screen possible, given Alfonso Cuaron’s incredible black-and-white cinematography.  Seen alongside 2019’s Parasite, the film perhaps doesn’t hold up as well politically, what with its more lenient presentation of a rich family and the maid working for them, but that’s also a slight injustice to the tenderness of Cuaron’s journey back into his childhood in Mexico.  Roma is, ultimately, an unforgettable movie.

10. Kill List (2010)

The last fifteen minutes of hitman thriller Kill List are up there as the most shocking of any film on this list, and yet the true thrill of this film is in re-watching and seeing that the signs for this denouement were there all along.  Perhaps the less you know the better.  What’s worth knowing, though, is that Neil Maskell and Ben Wheatley are one of the most formidable actor-director partnerships to emerge in the decade’s British cinema. 

9. Arrival (2016)

Dennis Villeneuve was one of the most consistently masterful directors of the decade, and his brand of thought-provoking sci-fi peaked with Arrival.  Amy Adams plays a linguistic professor called upon to communicate with aliens landed in Montana with unclear intentions.  Arrival manages to achieve a balance few contemporary science-fiction films achieve, in conjuring an emotional intimacy amidst the plotting and special effects.  Like the best of sci-fi, though, the otherworldly genre components serve to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of human nature, and out of its intricate storyline emerges one translucent and heart-wrenching message about love and loss.

8. Birdman (2014)

Perhaps the most eccentric film of the decade to win Best Picture, Alejandro G. Iñárritu shows a huge amount of technical ingenuity in constructing this ‘one-take’ wonder.  The camerawork is, importantly, in service of the story, effectively accompanying the frantic backstage movements of out-of-luck actor Riggan Thomson (Michael Keaton) and his Broadway theatre crew, as he tries to recapture glory by adapting a Raymond Carver short story.  The ever-hovering camera, moreover, comes to reflect Thomson’s alter-ego, Birdman, the voice over his shoulder which inflates his sense of self.  Edward Norton is also on particularly great form as the prickly method actor, Mike Shiner.

7. Parasite (2019)

Like 2018’s Burning, this is a terrific Korean-made Capitalist tragedy. An electrifying tale of a lower-class family sneakily infiltrating an ignorant bourgeois household;  hopefully, it’ll win the Best Picture Oscar this year.  Following Snowpiercer and Okja, Bong Joon-ho has emerged as the maker of the most captivating and incisive social commentary in contemporary cinema.  Parasite somehow manages to thrill and devastate at the same time.

6. Burning (2018)

For fans of Haruki Murakami, this Korean adaptation of his short story ‘Barn Burning’ is undoubtedly the best onscreen portrayal of his work, with many of the key ingredients present: a young man drawn into a sprawling plot beyond his immediate understanding; mysterious side-characters whose agendas are often never revealed; and, of course, an obsession with cats.  What elevates this film is its twinning of class commentary with components of the tragedy genre.  Burning starts innocuously and gradually builds to a third act of unbelievably tense proportions.  One of the greatest cinematic mysteries ever made.

5. Song of the Sea (2014)

A majestic hand-drawn animation by the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon.  Brendan Gleeson voices a lighthouse keeper riven with grief, raising his children Ben and Saoirse alone on an island after his wife died giving birth to their daughter.  When Saoirse begins to exhibit perilously magical powers, a hugely emotional adventure begins, deeply infused with Celtic folklore.   It’s hard to think of a more strikingly beautiful film from this decade.

4. Get Out (2016)

The sunken place, the twirling spoon in the teacup, the run-over deer, the separate fruit-hoops and milk: Jordan Peele’s comedy-horror is one of the most iconic movies of the decade, immediately ingratiating itself into public consciousness and cutting to the core of American racial tensions.  Get Out created an atmosphere in cinema screenings unlike any other in recent memory, by holding up a mirror to audience members and invoking nervous laughs and scares throughout.  Daniel Kaluuya, playing a young black man visiting his white girlfriend’s upper middle-class family, announced himself as possibly the best young actor working today, and he surely deserved the Oscar instead of a fat-suited Gary Oldman for his portrayal of Winston Churchill.

3. Sorry to Bother You (2018)

This is a rare occurrence: a properly Marxist American movie.  Boots Riley’s directorial debut manages to be both idiosyncratically entertaining and politically literate.  Lakeith Stanfield is rightly on the path to stardom after this starring role as a telemarketer in Oakland who learns to use his ‘white voice’ to progress to ‘Power Caller’ status, and yet leaves behind his struggling co-workers in the process.  An inter-sectional story of class and race in America, Sorry to Bother You exposes the inequality and exploitation inherent to working conditions in today’s Capitalist society.  The narrative takes some truly wacky and unexpected turns, though these turns always serve to strip away facades and realistically represent the hyper-rational profit-motive existing within hierarchical social relations.

2. The Lobster (2015)

Yorgos Lanthimos’ high-concept allegory for dating and relationships, in which people turn to animals unless they swiftly secure a life partner, is devilishly comedic, a dark satire of human behaviour. One of the weirdest films of the decade (in a good way), The Lobster is at once hilarious and deeply unsettling.  Lanthimos builds on the ‘love and hunting’ plot of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, yet with his arch framing and his characters’ stilted dialogue, the Greek director creates an entirely distinct aesthetic, the uniqueness of which is perhaps unparalleled amongst today’s foremost filmmakers.

1. Phantom Thread (2017)

This sumptuous romantic drama set in a 1950s London fashion-house is the movie no one knew they wanted – and who knew it would be so savagely comedic? Trading iconic burns throughout are three entirely lived-in characters: Daniel Day-Lewis as the man-child couturier Reynolds Woodcock, Lesley Manville as his icy sister Cyril and Vicky Krieps as Reynold’s enigmatic muse and lover, Alma.  Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘Russell Square relationship movie’ is an eccentric fairy tale in concept and yet piercingly subversive in its presentation of relationships, culminating in one of the most mesmerising and thought-provoking finales of recent cinema.  Visually, the film is exquisite, and Jonny Greenwood’s classical score is no less than enchanting.  This list has existed in the nether-space between what I deem the best movies of the decade and those which were my personal favourites.  I couldn’t quite say what the best film of the decade was, but the one I most enjoyed, for all its texture and indefinable richness, was Phantom Thread.

Reviews of film, literature, television, theatre and music, as well as general cultural critique, by an English graduate from North London