Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
Not the thrill of immortality, not the hunt, not the gothic romance. What it offers instead is two ancient lovers, the crumbling cities they haunt, and the slow pleasure of their company.
Films released between 2010 and 2019, the decade the shared universe took over the top of the market and the middle of the market went to streaming. The reviews here cover both ends: the tentpoles built to support the next tentpole, and the smaller films that found audiences because distribution stopped requiring a theater. The gap between those two kinds of production is the story of the decade.
2010sNot the thrill of immortality, not the hunt, not the gothic romance. What it offers instead is two ancient lovers, the crumbling cities they haunt, and the slow pleasure of their company.
2010sWhat We Do in the Shadows earns its 8.5 by finding a joke the vampire genre had somehow left lying on the ground for a century. What if immortal creatures of the night still had to argue about whose turn…
2010sAna Lily Amirpour's black-and-white Iranian vampire Western is the genre's most striking recent debut. The chador is the film's masterstroke of design.
2010sNeil Jordan returns to vampires with a feminist story of a mother and daughter surviving two centuries. The film's mythology is explicitly gendered.
2010sMatt Reeves remakes Let the Right One In with care and conviction. Let Me In earns its 8 by being the rarest of things, an American remake of a beloved foreign film that justifies its own existence.
2010sJim Mickle's Stake Land uses vampires as backdrop for a melancholy survival drama. Sometimes the vampires are not the point.
2010sMichael O'Shea's grounded debut uses vampirism as a lens for trauma and isolation. The film never says, and the ambiguity is the point.
2010sThe production received exceptional access to the otherwise sealed cave, with Herzog's small crew filming the paintings using lightweight equipment that conventional documentary could not deploy. Cave of Forgotten Dreams shows how documentary could function through treatment of material whose…
2010sJordan Peele's 2017 directorial debut. Daniel Kaluuya at his white girlfriend's parents' house.
2010sJennifer Kent's 2014 Australian grief horror. Essie Davis as widowed mother.
2010sJohn Krasinski directs the post-apocalyptic horror about a family surviving in silence to avoid blind monsters that hunt by sound. A Quiet Place is John Krasinski's 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror film depicting a family surviving in rural silence to avoid…
2010sDrew Goddard and Joss Whedon's meta-horror about college students at a remote cabin who discover their ordeal is engineered. The Cabin in the Woods is Drew Goddard's 2011 American meta-horror film depicting college students at a remote cabin who discover…
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