This piece's lead image very much puts the modern landscape of blockbusters in competition with classic Hollywood. And the state of things can often feel that way, that film literacy is somehow a zero-sum game between popular film and "real film." But lo, this is just a fun way to visually represent eras of film competing for top placement on one person's ranking. I'm not here to add to any divide.
Rather than argue that one period of film is better than the other, I want to explore how the mutating DNA of cinema carries a base code of magnificence across its lifetime. The way that manifests will vary across each decade, and I'm organizing them in such a way that privileges how I personally favor any given variant, but the lifeblood of the movies is vibrant across the ages.
There is fantastic work in every time era, just as every era has its stumbles. But there are certainly periods where I feel more attuned to the work that Hollywood is putting out, and this is a chance to map out where these trends tend to fall--and why.
1920s is the earliest decade I feel comfortable ranking. It was by this point that what we think of "narrative cinema" had been running for a few years. We are also only halfway through the current decade, much of its story is unwritten. So I'll let it sit this one out, though I will conclude with some observations about the state of the union today.
I'm also going to try to use this to explore cinema (I can't believe I'm going to be audacious enough to say this) in its totality. At least, I'm wanting this to look beyond just mainstream Hollywood. Cinema wears more faces than we could ever hope to count, but I want very much to capture some suggestion of just how broad this artform is across genres, nationalities, and other such interests.
My personal arrangement will no doubt be confounding to many other cinephiles. Such is the nature of public discourse. I'd hope that even if this ranking surprises you, you'll still come away having gained some new insight into this chapter of film.
If it helps, imagine this as some out-of-sequence history lesson. A walk down memory lane that, like the nature of memory itself, follows no chronological, or otherwise logical, current of events.
10. 1970s
Dropping this at the bottom will surprise, even offend, many in the film world. For many film lovers, the 70s is considered the best decade for film, and I understand why. Modern cinema is very much riding many of the waves that were standardized here. I prefer to think of this as decade as "the one I find least rewarding" rather than some sordid designation like "the worst decade."
I'm not one for goodbyes or partings--and this period was just one long goodbye to a lot of things. It was goodbye to the styles and forms that had built cinema. And with that, this decade saw a lot of goodbyes to the people that had built it. Ingrid Bergman, John Wayne, and many others would give their final works here.
In their wake, the main architects of what we'd now call "New Hollywood" came into the arena during this time--a time when the auteur was starting to have more authority on par with studio heads. And their contributions began to standardize this "rawness" as the default mode of cinema.
The 70s gave us such classics as The Godfather or Chinatown. These sorts of movies were celebrated for giving a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate audience what it was after: realism. Or at least, the impression of realism. And the cynicism of the early 70s that seemed to cut through the simplicities of the older generation and preach harsh truths about happy endings and good guys.
My enthusiasm for these things tracks significantly behind other film scholars for a number of reasons. I remain in conflict about whether or not such voices are giving complete consideration to these things. "Realistic" or even "liberated" can also be much more palatable substitutes for words like "excessive" or "indulgent." This was a very violent era of film, and I think that's worth scrutinizing.
The end of the decade would see such movies as Star Wars and Superman, laying the groundwork for the 80s to leap head over heels into the fantasy wonderland that would lay the groundwork for nerd culture. The 1970s in all its anger all made for, I suppose, a necessary transition, and I suppose I can find some peace in that.
You couldn't really ask me for more from the decade that killed the musical.
Favorite 70s Film: Kramer vs. Kramer
9. 2000s
Someone in a Facebook film group I'm in recently proposed that a person couldn't help but deflect to the decade they were raised in as the best decade for film, and this is why the 2000s were his personal favorite. I don't know what's wrong with me. I was also raised in the 2000s, yet this decade ranks relatively low for me. And I don't really even feel equipped to explain why.
I lived through the Harry Potter craze, one of the most influential filmmaking sagas in film history, among other tentpole moments in culture, many of which I still savor to this day. Even so, the art of this decade carries certain qualities that create some distance between it and me.
Most of the inertia of the 90s CG boom went into concocting such summer pics as "The Transformers" movies. But following 9/11, the bubble of 90s invincibility had been popped. America knew just how little distance from devastation we had all this time. And so the country forced itself to marinate in that sense of dread and futility--but without actually processing it.
In the wake of this, the population started demanding ... a whole bunch of things that had nothing to do with each other but could all be swallowed by some vague definition of "realism." This dryness is probably the biggest stylistic difference that turns me off from this decade. This was a decade of such unforgiving "realness" as No Country for Old Men. It was also in this landscape that we got Christopher Nolan's "Dark Knight" movies, a shadowy spin on the superhero genre which captured the spirit of a post-9/11 America (while also paving the way for the incoming storm of superhero movies).
Perhaps the most punishing feature of this time was how this cynicism also saw a rising intolerance for human fallibility. This charge was more led by television than film, but even indie-flicks of the day took some solace in the idea that, if nothing else, at least there was someone dumber in the room that we could place the blame on, and who would inevitably make a fool of themselves for our enjoyment. This person was usually a coworker or a family member. Comedy went from punching up to punching each other.
Fantasy persisted in specific, often overseas, markets. But the dread of the time gave America an appetite for rawness. Anyways, it was during this time that the relative realism of things like "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "The Lord of the Rings" helped standardize even fantasy in the modern scene as a comparatively dryer genre.
The 90s animation boom also helped proliferate a wider interest in animation. It really wouldn't be until around the transition into the next decade that the medium was allowed to explore a wider range of styles and genres, but there was a dissemination of power here that was necessary for the artform to develop a healthy ecosystem.
Favorite 2000s Film: Finding Nemo
8. 1980s
A lot of double-edged swords would wedge themselves in this period generally, as well as many individual films specifically. The fact that The Goonies could never be made outside this specific window is both an indictment and a tender mercy.
The proliferation of home media fundamentally changed the way we thought about cinephilia. This is about where cinema started sorting audiences into distinct, binary markets--you were either a "serious" film person or you liked the popular stuff that didn't ask you to think too hard. This wasn't the first decade to premiere real duds, but it was arguably the first where the masses started insisting that these misfires were actually good.
After two exhausting decades of social unrest, the '80s saw America retreating to static and airbrushed images of invincibility. And just in time for the Hollywood blockbuster to really take off. Every day was summer.
And connected to that impermeability was also a certain rigidity to social change. There are certainly movies that have "aged badly" in every decade. But that particular transgression feels a little different when I encounter it in the 1980s than when I do in much earlier periods of film. Casual misogyny or racism have never been "okay," but that malignant seed would get to be encased in a sort of protective membrane that enshrined raw masculinity as the height of American aspiration.
One thing would separate the hits of this decade from more recent decades: not every "blockbuster" was a summer action movie. This was also the decade of John Hughes and the "teen movie." And by the end of the decade, we also saw movies like When Harry Met Sally bringing the rom-com back. Many of the central architects of the blockbuster hit their stride here, like Stevens Spielberg and King, whose works would profoundly influence how we defined escapism and community.
This time frame also saw a lot of nations, particularly in South America, who had missed out on earlier waves of cinematic development, to find some footing and plant the stakes for their own cinematic cultures. This decade saw Argentina's The Official Story, for example, emerge as the first Latin-American film to win for Best Foreign Film.
Favorite 80s Movie: Stand By Me
7. 1930s
This is a very unevenly weighted decade for me. The last third of the 1930s was significantly stronger for me than the bulk of the decade in my ranking.
And a lot of that has to do with this new thing called "sound." Cinema as a whole hit a big reset once sound was integrated into the artform at the end of the previous decade, and it took a few years for the medium to really hit its stride again. Film made tremendous strides in that front end of the decade. But while the first seven or so years has a lot of 8 star selections from me, almost all of the real honor hits came in those final years.
Once cinema knew how to talk, it quickly figured out how to sing--and I mean that both literally in the sense that we finally got musicals, and also in that screenwriters quickly discovered the joys of spoken conversation, especially when delivered by such scintillating stars.
The specific forms of many base genres would start to emerge here. Rom-coms, musicals, adventure films, gangster pics, and the like all planted their roots during this time. Early film movements, like French poetic realism, would lay the groundwork for things like film-noir as well as France's own New Wave in the late fifties and early sixties.
Favorite 30s Movie: Gone with the Wind
6. 1920s
Before movies could talk, the power of the moving picture worked more intimately with the imagination of the audience, not merely their capacity for sensory input.
Some movies were particularly keen on this. Fantastical adventure-epics like those captained by Douglas Fairbanks took viewers to thrilling, exotic locales that you could only find in the darkened halls of the theater. Early monster movies or German horror trips forced viewers to confront the deepest chasms of the human imagination--and without needing to show a drop of blood.
The comics of this day like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd would type the moving picture as a place where oddballs would have their day, while forcing us to ask why it hadn't been this way all along.
This is a difficult space to get even professed cinephiles to engage with. But '27 and '28 were honestly some of the best years for cinema. While I've never thought that appreciating film means eschewing any of the technological advances that would follow, I maintain that in order to really appreciate the artform, you have to be willing to look at moving pictures here in their infancy and say without complication that, yes, this is cinema. Everything that we would eventually come to love about the medium through its long lifetime, that was all visible here at the beginning.
Favorite 20s Movie: The Kid
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5. 1990s
Large parts of the 90s really annoy me. Those kids really don't know just how good they had it. But despite this isolationism, or even occasionally because of it, the culture gave us some true tentpoles of culture.
The Disney Renaissance continues to be underappreciated outside the circle of Disney enthusiasts, but this synergy gave us some of the loveliest arrangements of image and sound. The following decade would see American animation riding this wave and integrating the medium into the mainstream of movie culture.
After having a few decades to really hone his craft, Spielberg gave us his magnum opus with Jurassic Park, and Hollywood was never the same for it. His contributions were boosted by the likes of James Cameron, and everyone else who would follow in their suit.
4. 2010s
I remember the days of the 2010s as being somewhat stressful, but having graduated from this period of turmoil, I can appreciate the tremendous gains that were made during this time. I suppose there's a lesson somewhere in there.
Hollywood would never really recover from the meta-craze of the 90s. This kind of genre remixing would be carried through the YouTube generation. Intertextuality became a powerful form of currency, and studios were just beginning to figure out how to lean into that.
Marginalized groups had unprecedented access to the tools for taking control of their own stories. This decade saw America making honest efforts to make reparations with how historically marginalized groups were shut out of the conversation. And you could argue that this was all only because this was a brief time where being progressive was profitable, and I wouldn't disagree. But I also wouldn't dispute that real changes were enacted just the same as America really reckoned with what it meant to entertain people of all different walks of life.
In a similar vein, this timeframe also saw greater interest in things like the honest depictions of mental health. Cinema has obviously always been a space to explore that great interior world, but as society gained sharper tools for understanding these things, that conversation became more textured onscreen.
While nostalgia has always been a thread in how audiences exercise their dollar, the 2010s were basically slaves to the properties they consumed as a kid. Even as this became a popular talking point among the cognoscenti, nostalgia remained one of the most powerful forces in entertainment--mostly because no one wants to admit they are beholden to it too.
And this doesn't have to be all bad. Society is allowed to have tastes and preferences. And this specialization of genres gave the decade so many unique trophies. This was the decade of the superhero boom. But the question remains--whose childhood gets to be the most important? The most deserving of parading?
Favorite 2010s Movie: Silver Linings Playbook
3. 1940s
The years of the decade saw cinema at large reckoning directly with this ordeal called World War II. It was largely because of this overseas conflict (in addition to, you know, that other world war) that America would get to emerge as the leading force in moving pictures. The middle years of the decade would see actually see lots of films directly addressing the war. And why shouldn't America, "the greatest nation on earth," feel free to join in on the conversation?
A lot of these cinematic efforts made attempts to appeal to this idea of American exceptionalism in order to motivate them to put an end to all this violence. But the stains this conflict left on both America and the world at large would seep deep into the collective psyche. This was a decade where cinema really developed its capacity for sadness. Neo-realism, film-noir, these all represented movies trying to give visibility to the consuming despair that both America and the world at large were left to parse through in the wake of such devastation.
And yet, through it all, it also found such rich expressions of joy, laughter, of wonder. The musical, the comedy, the romantic drama, they all had their heydays here. Years out from the jump to sound films, the medium really had sufficient legroom to explore the delights of the spoken word and how these worked together with the moving image.
And I don't think that's some weird coincidence. Having a full emotional palette enlivens the whole range of human experience. It's a Wonderful Life is only so enrapturing in its joyful embrace because the narrative forces you to touch on true hopelessness and despair. The embrace of something like Meet Me in St. Louis feels so much richer because of how proximate the world was to hopelessness during this time.
The last half of the decade, I'll concede, is a little less robust than the first. It's a smaller, flipped version of my experience with the 30s. And I don't have a clear read on why. Just speculation that film as a whole needed a few years to decompress after the war kinda took the wind out of their breath.
Favorite 40s Movie: It's a Wonderful Life
2. 1960s
Cinema had been in its infancy across the 20s, learned to walk in the 30s, and had a beautifully traumatic childhood in the 40s and 50s. The 60s? That was cinema's rebellious teenage phase. This is a part of the life cycle where you try to find out who you really are, where you really test your limits. And film as a medium was all about that during this time.
A lot of the choices made during such a phase, they're not always useful. The dissolution of The Hays Code and certain expectations remains a very conditional blessing. Maybe the movies could be "realer" now, but I also think it's fair to question exactly what need is being served by filming the final bloodbath of The Wild Bunch like a Las Vegas waterfountain show. (That the '60s in all its brashness would immediately give way to the defeatism of my least enjoyable decade of film ... that does color how I see the leaps and gains of this decade.)
Mind you, change is a violent beast, and the 1960s was a decade of change--both for American society as well as for cinema as a form. Things like second-wave feminism and the Civil Rights movement saw America reckoning with its obligations to underserved communities. As a capitalist product, film doesn't necessarily get a lot of opportunities to truly be brave, but we would see quite a few instances of that here.
Meanwhile, all sorts of overseas markets were having all sorts of midlife crises. The Czech golden age and the Polish New Wave gave post-WWII Europe some much needed medication, while the French New Wave and Italian New Wave were giving Europeans creative new ways to belly-ache.
Many parts of moviedom died during this time. Some of them were killed off violently. Genres like the musical or the western started to sink, as I explored in my essay on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. But the things that would survive would prove cinema as a form in all its evergreen vividness.
Favorite 60s Movie: The Apartment
1. 1950s
The experience of this decade is sort of a flip of what we had from the previous decade. The 1940s sort of learned to smile through the pain, and the 1950s had to reckon with how to acknowledge the aching underneath the glitter. This decade saw the musical at its most liberated, for example, but the emotional palette of 1950s film painted with a much more vivid range of human yearnings. There was ecstasy, alright, but also such delicious agony.
The critique of this era of filmmaking will always be something about the rigidity of the studio system, the thing that the next two decades would work hard to cast off, or else the social mores of the time. New Hollywood would certainly give way to more pronounced personalities to be displayed in the voices of the films it produced (thus, it is also culpable for the rise of self-indulgent and self-referencing auteurs who sprung up in this wake, which were themselves enabled by things like the French New Wave going on at this time).
But it's also easy to underestimate just how much of the director's voice was readily visible during this time. Hitchcock, Ford, Minelli, and many others very much had distinctive styles and viewpoints that were easily discernible during this time. Good artists with strong personalities have always existed in Hollywood.
And as for the rigidity of the day, people also severely underestimate just how much America was doing to reckon with its own shortcomings during this time--the opposite of what was going down in the 80s. Film was a huge part in facilitating this internal examination. The decade that gave us players like James Dean or masterworks like From Here to Eternity absolutely trained America for what it was like to reject the status quo or the systems that be. For all the progress in the time since, there hasn't been a more profound exploration of violence, masculinity, and the American legacy since The Searchers in 1956.
Whatever transformation took place in the decades following, the seeds of that all were visible here. Sidney Poitier would get his first Oscar nomination in this decade. Farces such as Some Like it Hot showed us that dudes wearing dresses maybe weren't so scary after all. Vertigo displayed the intricacies of how male obsession mutilates the objects of male desire. Activists absolutely have things to be impressed by in the '50s.
As would individuals of all interests. Even audiences who consider themselves squarely in the market of mainstream Hollywood would do well to check out all that went down during this time. The early ancestors of the modern blockbuster were so readily on display here from the likes of both Hitchcock and Kurosawa.
With film now directly competing with television, cinema had to really dig into itself to find what it had to offer that The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet did not. A huge part of that was obviously spectacle, but because "franchises" did not really exist in the same way we understand them today, filmmakers were less able to skimp out on things like screenwriting. This decade was probably that time where spectacle and writing were both firing at their highest in equal measure--opulence and eloquence worked together hand-in-hand.
And it's for reasons like this that the 1950s remains the highpoint of cinema for me. Everything that has been bright about cinema--its craft or its personality--that has been brightest here.
Favorite 50s Film: Singin' in the Rain
Some Thoughts on the 2020s ...
The gods could hardly have crafted a more definitive way to demark the division between decades than to start the 2020s with a literal global shutdown. (And it's by some bizarre coincidence that this also marked the start of my whole writing ordeal.) We will be pulling ourselves out of the COVID hole for a while, but much of cinema's current plight has also been self-inflicted.
While streaming was always going to change the game, studios made a very foolish decision in prioritizing having their own specific streaming service or giving their projects a healthy exhibition at the theater first, even if no one wants to admit it. The prize that most studios are chasing right now is having the biggest streaming service on the block. And they have resolved to chase this trophy at any cost, including the lifeblood of the theaters they depend upon. What would King Solomon give to see this day?
Lots of voices are eager to cast certain developments--certain crashes, mostly--as evidence that the dawn is breaking and audiences are finally ready for artistic-driven storytelling that doesn't rely on IP. But this is also only true circumstantially. Just because live-action Moana flopped, one year after the Lilo & Stitch remake broke records, that doesn't mean audiences will stop obeying their nostalgic programming.
"Serious" film voices will flock to specific filmmakers or even just specific outlets to supply their needs. A24 addiction is keeping lots of YouTube channels alive as studios try so desperately to justify cinema exhibition for movies that don't come tethered to a pre-existing brand.
All of these issues were foreseen from the vantage point of the previous decade. Had we done a better job at addressing them, even the problems brought on by the pandemic would have been smoothed out by now.
Despite all this, cinema proves itself to be a fountain of majesty and profundity, but in large-scale epics as well as grassroots auteur pics. Film remains a space where we come to reckon with identify, individual and collective, and during a time when these things are under attack.
Based specifically on what I've seen so far, I'd probably rank this decade between the 80s and 30s. That ranking my change with some distance, particularly with a few years still remaining before we're out. I also remember 2010s cinema as being rather tedious, yet it's now in the upper half of my ranking. But I also don't treat film or cinema like it will just always be there, and so I don't see the successful resolution of these present issues as a foregone conclusion.
Favorite 2020s Movie (So Far): WICKED - For Good
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I'm dropping this very shortly after the summer box office yielded some much needed nourishment for the box office, and with it the assurance that cinema would not die in the wake of the upheaval of the 2020s. At least not yet.
And some will chortle at the sight of such panic. "Calm down, Chicken Little. The sky isn't falling. The movies aren't going anywhere, haha." And these people ... bring absolutely nothing to the conversation. They were burying their heads when Mike Sherrill, chief operating officer of dine-in cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse, shared at the end of last year, “There’s an unfortunate trend, which that we just can’t get the industry to $9 billion at the domestic box office. It looks like it’s going to be two years in a row that the industry flatlined.” Or when Cinema United told Congress earlier this year that “If Netflix’s proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. is not challenged, the threat to our members is grave —and possibly even existential — given its hostility toward exhibition. Netflix described theatrical distribution ‘outmoded,’ and restated their goal that they make movies exclusively for Netflix members distributed primarily on Netflix, not in theaters ... Theaters will close, communities will suffer, jobs will be lost.”
People who have not been at least a little panicked over the last five years simply have not been paying attention and should probably stick to Tik Tok.
Some more optimistic voices will put forth the idea that cinema is too bright to ever be snuffed out. This crowd has the better measure of the situation. Cinema is truly a glorious thing, and will always be deserving of our attention. You could no more extinguish them than you could cancel the stars in the sky. But even stars can have their light drowned out by human interference and carelessness. And it remains the responsibility of audiences to ensure that we never lose what cinema offers so freely.
And I honestly think the best way to do this is for us to familiarize ourselves with the history and legacy of cinema. For people, even people who don't consider themselves "film people," to talk with some eloquence about what each decade of film brought to the conversation, and which periods they respond to the most. Maybe that's a bit of an ask, but doesn't cinema deserve as much?
And I'll promise you, it's actually kinda fun.
--The Professor
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