Chris Evangelista's Top 10 Movies Of The Decade

(This article is part of our Best of the Decade series.)

Narrowing down a top 10 list for one year is hard enough. An entire decade? It's almost impossible. Almost. I hemmed and hawed my way through this task, debating with myself as to what titles would go where, and what titles would make the list at all. The bottom line: it was a great decade for film, and don't let anyone claim otherwise. As of this moment, I am happy with this list. But check back in with me in a week – I may have changed my mind by then.

Abraham Lincoln is one of those historical figures who has passed beyond the realm of being mortal and into something close to godly. History has changed Lincoln from a man into a marble statue, a being so far removed from us today that he might as well have never existed at all. So it's no easy task to bring him back to life. Yet that's exactly what Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis did with Lincoln. With the help of Tony Kushner's zippy, warm, and surprisingly funny script, Spielberg's Lincoln makes America's 16th President come across as an actual person. None of us can know what the real Lincoln sounded or acted like, but Day-Lewis' performance feels entirely authentic as if he's not so much playing the part but rather channeling Lincoln from the great beyond.

Rather than tell a standard biopic, Lincoln instead zeroes in on a specific time in Lincoln's presidency, when he was working to pass the  Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution and abolish slavery. Kushner's script shows that Honest Abe and company weren't above some not-so-ethical tricks to get the job done – another fact that goes a long way towards humanizing Lincoln. He's not a saint here. He's not even perfect. He's just someone doing what he thinks is right, doubters be damned.

Rian Johnson's Star Wars: The Last Jedi is arguably the best Star Wars film for many reasons. Its storylines are complex and sprawling. Its cinematography is breathtaking in the way it captures, and creates, whole worlds. The cast is great across the board, with Mark Hamill giving the best performance of his career. But most of all, The Last Jedi is so special because of how exciting and new it feels. The Force Awakens is a wildly entertaining film, but it was following a very rigid formula. Last Jedi blows that up almost immediately, instead expanding the galaxy and bringing in new tricks. At the same time, Johnson isn't saying what's come before is bad. Indeed, he's honoring everything up until this point while also asking, "Where can we go from here?" Best of all, The Last Jedi rips The Force away from seeming like something passed down through the Skywalker bloodline and reveals that it belongs to all of us. Even the lowliest of persons in the galaxy is capable of great things. On top of all that, this is blockbuster filmmaking at its absolute finest. Proof that a filmmaker can work within a mega-franchise and still manage to inject a real heart and soul.

Another Scorsese movie so soon? Yes, we're going there. The Irishman might seem too fresh to include on a list like this; too new. But it's an achievement that cannot be denied. While I hope Martin Scorsese keeps making movies for years to come, his new crime epic feels almost like his final bow; his grand finale. The film wherein he distills what he's learned over the years while also wrestling with his own mortality. On the surface, this may look like another gangster pic, but it's not at all. In telling the story of self-proclaimed hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), Scorsese is taking us on a trip through time. We watch Sheeran and his associates, including Jimmy Hoffa (a hilarious Al Pacino) and gangster Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci, giving a quiet, powerful turn), age before our eyes as the years go by. The first two-plus-hours follow Frank's life of crime. But it's the final hour that really packs a punch, as we get to the end of Frank's days and he learns that everything he thought was so important really doesn't matter anymore, and that he has nothing to show for it.

When The Social Network opened, there were several people who thought the film was being too mean to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Now, years later, in light of Zuckerberg's complete indifference to his platform's contribution to the destruction of democracy, it appears David Fincher's movie wasn't mean enough. When The Social Network was announced it sounded silly – a movie about Facebook? And yet, Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin ended up creating what might just be the defining film of the decade – a portrait of the beginning of the social media age that would, in a sense, pretty much destroy us all. Featuring an unbeatable score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross and a crackling script that never lets up, The Social Network is a film that will stand the test of time and serve as a reminder of a warning that we didn't quite heed.

A pulsing, rip-roaring reminder of how awe-inducing movies can be, Mad Max: Fury Road ride roughshod over the landscape, staging what amounts to a feature-length chase scene. Loaded with practical effects and stunts that look like they might have straight-up killed someone, George Miller's magnum opus is both a big, loud action movie and also a meditation on crushing the patriarchy. Miller effectively uses the Mad Max framework to tell the story of an abused woman (Charlize Theron) spiriting other abused women to safety while fending off violent, entitled male characters who want to maintain dominance. Miller knows exactly how to balance the action with big, emotional moments – moments of raw power; of anger and pain, but also of hope. "Where must we go...we who wander this Wasteland in search of our better selves?" asks the title card at the end of the saga, underscoring the ultimate goal of our main characters as they ride out of hell and into a future they hope will be better than the past.