The Canon

“The news is momentary and ephemeral. But the artistic realm, this is something deeper. It can stay in people’s minds forever.” So said Konstantin Ernst, Vladimir Putin’s unofficial propaganda minister, in a recent profile in the New Yorker.

In that spirit, here are my 30 favorite movies of the last decade—the ones that, for better or worse, have burrowed deepest into my memory and absolutely refuse to leave.

1. Inside Llewyn Davis

A fable by Joel and Ethan Coen about an early-1960s New York folk singer (Oscar Isaac) who would rather maintain his artistic integrity while being poor, homeless and forgotten than sell out his talents and become rich, comfortable and famous. And then there’s the cat.

2. The Social Network

The origin story of arguably the most culturally powerful human being on Earth, Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg), written by Aaron Sorkin as not quite a villain but far less than a hero. We didn’t know the half of it.

3. Before Midnight

The deepest, wisest and most fraught encounter yet with Celine and Jesse (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke), as their 18-year relationship threatens to disintegrate during an idyllic vacation amidst the ruins of ancient Greece. Director Richard Linklater has not guaranteed a fourth installment in this saga, so the future of Celine and Jesse’s partnership may need to remain between them.

4. Moonlight

I cannot say whether Barry Jenkins’ meditative triptych accurately reflects the experience of being poor, young, black and gay in Miami in the 21^st century. All I can do is note the stunned silence that washed over the sold-out auditorium during the end credits on opening night.

5. The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson’s thinly-veiled depiction of the Church of Scientology features a volcanic performance by Philip Seymour Hoffman as the charismatic head of a mysterious cult and Joaquin Phoenix as his most troubled and vulnerable mark. Any resemblance to current personality cults is coincidental and more than a little alarming.

6. Django Unchained

Following “Inglourious Basterds,” in which we got to see the entire Third Reich massacred by a merry band of warrior Jews, it seemed only fair that Quentin Tarantino would use his artistic license to imagine a Nat Turner-like revenge plot against a had-it-coming slaveowner in the antebellum American South. Retaining the services of Christoph Waltz was a nice touch.

7. The King’s Speech

A thoroughly engrossing and hilarious recreation of the battle between King George VI (Colin Firth) and his fear of public speaking, with reinforcements provided by his wife Elizabeth (Helena Bonham Carter) and whimsical Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). Cinematic comfort food at its most sublime.

8. Hell or High Water

The half-despairing, half-comical journey of two brothers (Chris Pine and Ben Foster) who rob their way across West Texas in the hopes of paying down the mortgage that was issued by the very bank they’re knocking off. With Jeff Bridges as the over-the-hill ranger hot on their trail who, with his partner (Gil Birmingham), finds out the perils of ordering off-menu at a steakhouse that only serves T-bones and iced tea.

9. The Grand Budapest Hotel

Wes Anderson’s fun house of an adventure film concerning the history of a nonexistent hotel in a nonexistent country, which nonetheless turns the titular inn into one of the most indelible interior spaces in modern cinema, anchored by its prim, proper and priceless owner, Gustav H., essayed with juicy relish by Ralph Fiennes.

10. Can You Ever Forgive Me?

If you are not immediately tickled by the notion of Melissa McCarthy as a frumpy, alcoholic New York writer who sells forged documents to gullible booksellers in order to pay her rent and feed her cat, there’s not much I can do for you, pal.

11. Phantom Thread

Paul Thomas Anderson’s other recent portrait of a hypnotic, overbearing mid-century cultural influencer. This time it’s the legendary passive-aggressive (fictional) dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), who meets his match in a seemingly meek-and-mild waitress (Vicky Krieps), instigating a relationship that only grows weirder by the minute. Beware the yellow mushrooms; they’ll get you every time.

12. Boyhood

Except for Michael Apted and his “Up” series, no one but Richard Linklater would think—or dare—to spend 12 years following around an adolescent boy just to see him grow up. That the boy is, in fact, a fictional character (played throughout by Ellar Coltrane) doesn’t make the experience of watching it any less curious or profound.

13. Spotlight

Perhaps the best movie about journalism since “All the President’s Men,” and for the same reasons. It is well worth debating whether the Boston Globe exposé of industrial-scale pedophilia in the Catholic Church was ultimately more significant than the Washington Post exposure of the Watergate caper three decades earlier. It’s one thing to bring down a president; it’s quite another to bring a 2,000-year-old institution oh-so-deservingly to its knees.

14. Whiplash

Wesley Morris has correctly observed that no one can end a movie like Damien Chazelle, and while I would recommend the entirety of his absurd and slightly terrifying profile of a band teacher from hell (J.K. Simmons) and the drummer who won’t go gently into that good night (Miles Teller), the exhilarating final 10 minutes of this insane dive into raw artistic ambition are worth the price of admission all by themselves.

15. Lincoln

The dirty little secret about America’s 16^th president is that, in addition to being a moral exemplar for the ages, he was also a brilliant—and often ruthless—political tactician. As portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis, we are able to see how the former is useless without the latter. If you’re looking for purity in your leaders, you’ll never be anything but disappointed.

16. Call Me By Your Name

As raw, honest and messy a depiction of young lust as you’ll ever see in a mainstream picture. I’ll never look at a peach the same way again.

17. Parasite

A meditation about the gulf between the haves and have-nots in South Korea that begins as ironic social commentary and ends as…well, let’s just say the influence of Quentin Tarantino extends well beyond the Hollywood Hills.

18. Brooklyn

An utterly charming, unpretentious, old-fashioned love story between a sweet Irish girl and a nice Italian boy in New York City in the years shortly after World War II. I’d mention the girl is played by 21-year-old Saoirse Ronan, but you probably figured that out already.

19. The Florida Project

The trials and tribulations of impoverished, itinerant single motherhood from the point of view of a six-year-old girl and her friends, who have precious little sense of what trouble they’re in. As the motel owner who sees much and understands all, Willem Dafoe serves as the movie’s moral center and guardian angel.

20. Personal Shopper

Having never seen a minute of the “Twilight” series, I’m as surprised as anyone that Kristen Stewart has, at 29, become one of the boldest and most compelling actresses in contemporary Hollywood. Not just anyone can play an insecure, overworked psychic medium without looking completely ridiculous, but Stewart is considerably more than just anyone.

21. If Beale Street Could Talk

How does one follow up a work of unsurpassable beauty like “Moonlight” without letting the entire universe down? For Barry Jenkins, the answer could be found in a novel by James Baldwin and the most fruitful cinematic use of the color green since Kim Novak emerged from the fog in “Vertigo” in 1958.

22. The Hateful Eight

Quentin Tarantino’s most disposable film is also the easiest to enjoy, thanks to the Agatha Christie-like coziness inherent in a large group of homicidal maniacs hauled up in a haberdashery during a blizzard in the middle of nowhere in 1877. Remember: Don’t drink the coffee unless you know who brewed it.

23. Hugo

Whoever wagered that the most enchanting, heartbreaking and humane children’s movie of the last decade would be directed by Martin Scorsese—yes, that Martin Scorsese—step right up and collect your prize.

24. Krisha

A Thanksgiving dinner from hell, courtesy of the most volcanic—and underappreciated—performance in ages by one Krisha Fairchild, the aunt of the movie’s own director, Trey Edward Shults, in his feature-length debut.

25. O.J.: Made in America

While debate still rages about whether a seven-and-a-half-hour documentary that first aired on ESPN can properly be classified as a movie, there is little question that Ezra Edelman’s deep dive into the life and times of O.J. Simpson is among the sharpest and most entertaining examinations of race—and racism—in the United States ever committed to film or television.

26. Free Solo

The spellbinding story of Alex Honnold, the first person to successfully scale the face of Yosemite’s El Capitan without a rope or harness. They say you never feel more alive than when staring death directly in the eye, and Honnold seems to take this as a personal credo. So far, so good.

27. A Separation

Domestic drama of a high order, as multiple generations of a family in modern-day Iran come to blows in pursuit of their own happiness, which only causes further misery for all. Funny how often that tends to happen, in art and in life.

28. Marriage Story

Speaking of contemporary marital squabbles, here are Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver turning in the finest work of their careers to date as a soon-to-be-divorced pair of artists in the most Bergman-esque autopsy of a relationship since, well, Ingmar Bergman.

29. The Irishman

Speaking of Bergman-esque, who knew a three-and-a-half-hour crime saga about the inner circle of America’s most notorious union boss, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), would turn so elegiac and existential by its final act? While it’s likely that Martin Scorsese has several more tricks up his sleeve before he calls it a career, if this reunion of Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel proves to be the master’s swan song, it’ll do.

30. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood

Speaking of swan songs, Quentin Tarantino has vowed to retire from directing after his tenth feature film, which makes this revisionist paean to the Summer of ’69 his penultimate project. Considering how his entire oeuvre has been one long love letter to the history of cinema, the mystery is how it took him nine movies to concentrate explicitly on the cultural and geographical mecca of the movie industry itself.

For good measure, here, in alphabetical order, are 30 runners-up, any of which could find their way into the first tier, possibly before New Year’s Day 2020.

Amour

Baby Driver

Black Swan

BlacKkKlansman

Blue Jasmine

Bridge of Spies

Calvary

Carol

The Death of Stalin

Dunkirk

The Edge of Seventeen

Elle

Enough Said

Everybody Wants Some!!

Eye in the Sky

Faces Places

The Favourite

56 Up / 63 Up

Get Out

Hail, Caesar!

Her

Lady Bird

Leave No Trace

Life Itself

Moonrise Kingdom

A Most Violent Year

Paterson

Silver Linings Playbook

Twelve Years a Slave

The Wolf of Wall Street

Amend This

One of the more surreal moments of my four years in college was the evening Phyllis Schlafly came to town.

Although Schlafly, who died on Monday, was correctly known as a conservative Republican firebrand, the audience at her speaking engagement that night wasn’t necessarily any less liberal than the university’s student population as a whole.  As someone whose own worldview was at least 80 percent different from hers, I attended the talk out of sheer morbid curiosity, aware of Schlafly’s considerable historical significance as a 1970s right-wing ideologue, and I suspect that a large portion of my fellow attendees were there for the same reason.

Her spiel (I quickly gathered) was essentially the same speech she’d been giving all across the country for the past 30-odd years:  A broadside against feminism, liberalism, homosexuality, abortion, the sexual revolution in general, and any notion that, in matters of love and marriage, men and women should be treated equally.  In her time, Schlafly was often referred to as an “anti-feminist,” and in person she certainly lived up (or down) to that moniker, asserting, among other things, “Feminism is incompatible with happiness.”

Among today’s progressives, of course, hysterical opinions like that are increasingly viewed as relics of an ancient, oppressive regime that has rightly (if slowly) ground itself into dust.  Maybe it was socially acceptable to rail against gender equality and sexual freedom in, say, 1973, but our society has since gotten over itself and embraced legal equality of the sexes as a veritable no-brainer and a core American value.

Or so we would like to think.

Sure, most of the country has moved on from the misogynistic paternalism of the 1950s, but there is still a robust minority (i.e., the Republican Party) that feels differently about the respective roles of men and women, and it remains a force to be reckoned with.

And one reason for that is Phyllis Schlafly.  If her values have ceased to be America’s values, the residual strength of anti-feminism—the very fact that men and women are not treated equally in 2016—is thanks to her leadership on behalf of that powerful, lousy idea.

Above all, Schlafly’s legacy rests on her opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment throughout the 1970s.  First introduced in 1923—and on a regular basis thereafter—the ERA would have enshrined in the U.S. Constitution that “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”  If that sounds fairly uncontroversial to you, Congress apparently agreed:  In 1971, the House approved the ERA by a score of 354-24, followed by an equally overwhelming vote in the Senate and the blessing of no less than President Nixon to boot.  By then, all it needed was ratification by three-quarters of individual state legislatures and gender equality would’ve become the law of the land.

So what happened?  Well, it never quite got there.  While a bucket load of states ratified the ERA almost instantaneously—and a handful more tagged along in subsequent months—advocates of the amendment never reached the 38-state threshold they needed and the amendment ultimately faded away.  Why?  In short, because Schlafly and company persuaded those few remaining states that total equality of the sexes wasn’t such a hot idea after all, partly by arguing (wait for it…) that a constitutional right to equal protection based on gender would be irreparably harmful to women.

The continuing story of the Equal Rights Amendment is a true American classic, and it’s part of an engaging exhibit at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., called, “Amending America.”  With the Archives being home to original prints of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, this temporary exhibit looks beyond both documents to examine all 27 constitutional amendments that have been ratified to date, plus a sampling of 11,000 proposed amendments that, like the ERA, didn’t make it across the finish line.

You read that right:  American citizens—individuals, organizations and sometimes entire states—have attempted to change the text of America’s most sacred legal document on 11,000 separate occasions over the last 229 years and have failed 99.8 percent of the time.  If you ever wonder why things in America never seem to change all that much, there’s your answer.

The truth is that our founders deliberately made it very, very difficult to alter our Constitution once it was signed, figuring that the supreme law of the land should only be tampered with under extraordinary circumstances and with near-unanimous support from one end of the continent to the other.  In this über-polarized era, it’s no wonder we’ve only done it once in the last 45 years.

In the National Archives exhibit, we are treated to a contextualization of the 27 amendments that succeeded, with various explanations as to why and how certain proposals passed muster with both Congress and the states while so many others didn’t.

The first thing to notice—as this show does—is that more than half of our Constitution’s amendments in some way concern the question of individual rights—the right to free expression, the right to privacy, the right to due process and trial by jury, etc.  Indeed, no fewer than four amendments deal with voting rights alone, removing restrictions based on race, sex, age and ability to pay a poll tax.

Equally noteworthy is that among the amendments that address individual freedoms, only one—the 18^th, establishing Prohibition—had the effect of taking away freedoms instead of expanding them.  It can hardly be a coincidence that, a mere 14 years later, the 18^th Amendment became the first and only to be unceremoniously axed, following the nation’s collective realization that Prohibition was a terrible idea.

Beyond guaranteeing rights, the object of most successful amendments has been to tweak or clarify the way the government functions—a process whose extreme importance is matched only by its extreme dullness.  For every amendment that has granted mass suffrage or prohibited cruel and unusual punishment, there have also been those that have moved Inauguration Day from March 4 to January 20 or outlined when Congress can (and cannot) give itself a raise.

What’s the common denominator?  Not much, other than a critical mass of concerned citizens looking at a particular national imperfection and thinking, “You know, we really oughta fix that.”

Hence the rather hilarious variety of failed proposals over the years.  Among my favorites spotlighted at the National Archives:

• A suggestion in the 1930s that instead of banning alcohol, the U.S. simply ban drunkenness, instead.
• A plea, 100 years earlier, that no one who has engaged in dueling be allowed to run for public office.
• A more radical plan to abolish the presidency altogether and replace it with a three-person executive council.
• A similar scheme to divide the vice presidency among three people, ranking them, respectively, as Veep No. 1, Veep No. 2 and Veep No. 3.
• A proposal—just before the U.S. entered World War I—that every war be put to a popular vote, and that everyone who votes “yes” be automatically enlisted to fight it.

Certainly, not all of the 11,000 duds were that entertaining, creative or outright loony.  Nonetheless, no matter how reasonable and practicable the more serious ones have been, they have failed to win the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and/or three-quarters of state legislatures, begging the question of what sort of amendment could possibly succeed in 2016?

Personally, I’d love to see the Second Amendment canned as definitively as the 18^th, but I know better than to hold my breath.  Like much of America, I’d appreciate chucking the Electoral College once and for all, granting either statehood or basic representation to Washington, D.C., and getting big money out of politics, but is the status quo on those issues really so dire that we could muster a sufficient groundswell to actually get the job done?

I suspect not, and that points to the unfortunate truth that national consensus on a major subject—no matter how obvious in retrospect—tends only to occur once in a blue moon.  Lest we forget the immortal wisdom—falsely attributed to Winston Churchill—that Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing after exhausting all the alternatives.

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln enlightened us about the backbreaking work required to pass the 13^th Amendment to abolish slavery, and that was after four years of fighting a damn war over the issue.  For its part, the original Bill of Rights was less an organized coming-together of common interests than an elaborate bargaining chip crafted by James Madison to coax a handful of reticent states into ratifying the Constitution itself.

Indeed, in many ways, this entire country was haphazardly cobbled together in a dizzying confluence of happenstance, compromise and brilliant improvisation, leaving us, in the end, with a series of founding documents that practically beg to be given a second and third look.

And we have indeed done that from time to time, but always while fighting the urge to honor precedent and the founders themselves, as if the ghosts of Washington, Madison and Hamilton will descend from heaven and collectively smite us for going against their divine wishes.

We should tempt the fates more often, for our sake and theirs.  And finally ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment would be a damned good place to start.