No decade list is complete without one Western, but it’s too easy to do a film about how the West is dead, and many examples showed this decade the wrong way to do it. But Andrew Dominick’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is different in its approach. It is less a revisionist Western, than a diversion set in the area. The film, which wears Terrence Malick’s poeticism on its sleeve, examines the strange relationship between the most legendary figure of the West, and the man that would kill him. Mr. Dominick makes the film a potent piece of lyrical beauty by pacing the film’s adventures into darkness, making Jesse James less a figure of legends and more a man paranoid by his own cultural status, and in fear of normal life. As the film walks along through its meandering plot, and with gorgeous cinematography by Roger Deakins (who worked for three films on this list, and consulted on a fourth), Mr. Dominick finds a story about two men crossing opposite paths, set in a destiny that is unstoppable, as the title already tells us. The film’s large frame shots dwarf the characters in their environment, creating spaces not for their freedom, but for their imprisonment. In a way, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is a quintessential Western as the film dives between myth and legends, open spaces and closed cells, and essentially, the untamed plains against the domesticated home. Mr. Dominick has made a Western for the ages.
#19 The Departed (2006)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese, still one of the best living directors today, delivered three of his most ambitious projects this decade: a biography of Howard Hughes (The Aviator), a four hour documentary on Bob Dylan (No Direction Home), and a historical epic about his hometown (Gangs of New York). However, his best and most entertaining work of the decade was a populist choice, full of masculine energy and brutal violence: The Departed. Call it the action geek inside of me, but The Departed ranks among Mr. Scorsese’s best films because its complex themes are subtlety weaved into this Boston set remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (which itself, is largely influenced by Mr. Scorsese’s earlier work). The film, filled with great and bombastic performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen, Mark Wahlberg, and Jack Nicholson, The Departed is a film all about the essentials of identity and masculinity. The cop as a criminal and criminal as a cop shows the borderlines between defining what it means to be a man. Can one be a man if one acts subservient to one he detests, even if it is for a greater cause? While many critics detest the scenes with Vera Farmiga as a psychologist who becomes a romantic interest for both men, the scenes reveal the inner side of the two, their impotence or sexual ferocity, their inner rage and inner pain, and explain the difficulties of understanding loyalty to oneself. While not a typical Boston filmmaker, Mr. Scorsese, along with his truly talented editor Thelma Shoonmaker, races through plot twist after plot twist, throwing us around and around until we are lost of our own identity. The only solution for most of the characters is getting a bullet in the head. Only in our state of permanence, can we be sure of whom we really are.
#18 The Fog of War (2003) and Grizzly Man (2005)
Directed by Errol Morris and Werner Herzog
Documentaries focused on a single person can be dreadfully tiresome. Do we need another biography of a politician of sports star? This is why my list contains two documentaries here as a tie. Errol Morris’s The Fog of War and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man are more than simply portraits of their main characters, but reach for greater heights than explaining the facts of their lives. In The Fog of War, Mr. Morris gives voice to one of the most influential and maligned characters in the history of US Government: Robert McNamara, Secretary of the Defense and often considered the architect of the Vietnam War. Mr. McNamara is using the opportunity to free his soul of his demons, but Mr. Morris claws right back at him, challenging every claim, pushing him to where he doesn’t want to go. Even more bravura is Mr. Morris’s patented camera, which is positioned so when Mr. McNamara speaks, he looks directly at us. At sometimes, we loathe him, while often, we feel sympathy and pity for a man who is not misunderstood, but simply afraid of his own past, unable to truly reconcile for it. When he explains “the fog of war,” a phrase that means we can never know everything when deciding to go to war. The Fog of War is subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, and when released in 2003, the film had a surprisingly amount of significance as the United States began a campaign in Iraq. The lessons of war were unfortunately never learned by the leaders in charge of that campaign until years later, showing how history is doomed to repeat its mistakes. Grizzly Man on the other hand, is a much more cerebral film under Mr. Herzog’s careful direction. The film does not document a man who made much of an impact on the world, but instead looks at a real life story of a man who succumbed to the chaos of nature, something always evident in Mr. Herzog’s work. Mr. Herzog loves oddball stories, as evident in his other documentaries from this decade, as well as his narrative features, but none is more enigmatic and crazy as Timothy Treadwell, a man who set out to live his grizzly bears, only to be eaten by one. Mr. Herzog’s voice over narration explains his fascination with Mr. Treadwell’s bold approach to life, explaining his thoughts on the nature of the universe. It’s unclear whether Mr. Herzog admires Mr. Treadwell, or sees him as a failure to understand nature and losing his life because of it. Mr. Herzog chooses key moments from Mr. Treadwell’s own footage, which was over 100 hours of material. They are often not the greatest moments, but those that reveal Mr. Treadwell’s inner fear and love, and the madness that nature can create. These two real life stories are simply more than men and their works, but explanations of man’s fascination with what we are truly capable of.
#17 United 93 (2006)
Directed by Paul Greengrass
Paul Greengrass’s United 93 is one of the most beautifully crafted, yet harrowing films I have ever sat through. And I sat through it twice because unlike many might believe, it is never exploiting the event, but instead, creating the most wonderful cinematic memorial one could believe. Although Mr. Greengrass is a British filmmaker, it is his unique style that defines this truly American film. September 11th is a day full of tragedy, but the greatest story of heroism to arrive of that day was of that fourth plane, taken down by the ordinary people who took extraordinary measures. Mr. Greengrass never comes close to sentimentalizing these stories, or even giving them some sort of ark. With his rapid fire editing and constant camera movement, he captures real people in a chaotic situation in which not a single person could understand the consequences of their actions. He instead discovers—and yes, it feels as real as possible, which is why the film is truly one of the most difficult films to watch—people who can’t be described as heroes, because they never saw themselves that way. He finds patriots; people who love this country so much they are willing to fight, and die, for it. United 93, released five years after the events of September 11th, is a film that came out at the perfect moment only because of how Mr. Greengrass filmed the events. Its passion for realistic chaos creates a memorial for 40 individuals who were caught in an impossible situation, and rose above the circumstances of normal life to save countless lives, without even knowing the importance of their actions.
#16 The Fountain (2006)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky is one of the most unique voices in American cinema to emerge this decade. His two most celebrated works—2000’s Requiem for a Dream, a poetic and disturbing look at drug addiction, along with 2008’s The Wrestler, a brutalizing drama about a man on his way down—are gorgeously shot, passionately edited, and truly visceral works. But for me, the film I kept returning to as I thought of my favorite films was his most ambitious and often hated masterpiece, The Fountain. Combining three parallel stories that span over a millennia, Mr. Aronofsky shows why he is a passionate director. He understands the importance of visual symbolism and creates parallel shots to link the stories. He uses unique special effects to create science fiction elements—not using CGI, but using elements of nature. What I love most about The Fountain though is the passion that Mr. Aronofksy has for his story—it is the story of man and woman, and the importance of love, life, death, and everything in between. Mr. Aronofsky reaches for the heavens with his ambition, striving to give meaning to the world’s most passionate emotion, and the elements that deride it. He weaves the fantastical with the beautiful, the strange with the real. He confuses and pushes us to not understand the film on a bare plot, but to understand by the cinematic qualities—the visuals, the editing, and the lush and gorgeous cinematography. Mr. Aronofsky is out to make the alpha and the omega of love and death, a project simply flowing with ambitious passion, and wondrously achieved by a filmmaker above and beyond his wildest dreams.
#15 The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
Joel and Ethan Coen work best when they are examining and deconstructing genres by throwing them in strange locations. A murder melodrama set in Texas (Blood Simple), a police procedural in Minnesota (Fargo), or, as in one of their greatest works, a film noir set in the suburbs. Nothing fascinates the Coen brothers more than simple people in extraordinary circumstances, and in The Man Who Wasn’t There, the brothers craft a film that is enigmatic, beautiful, and best of all, filled with confusion and mystery. Billy Bob Thorton takes on one of his best roles as a small town barber who commits a murder and then tries to right his life as his wife is charged with the murder. A compilation of Dostoevsky with Double Indemnity, the Coens fill their film with mystery and intrigue, not in terms of what is happening on screen, but what they are doing in terms of their storytelling. Why this barber? Why this plot? Why aliens? Why sexual lust? I have heard a number of interpretations of The Man Who Wasn’t There, all of which are at some point curious but never satisfying, which in a way is perfect for the Coens. Their films defy explanations, but continue to fascinate. We watch the beautiful black and white look of the film, their examination of 1950s suburbia with intrigue and a hind sense of what has happened and what is to come. Instead they toy and humor us with their ability to flip the grotesque and the beautiful, as well as the laughter with the horror. The Man Who Wasn’t There, likes all great Coen tales, is a film that demands multiple viewings, not simply to understand it better, but to continuously be fascinated by what they strange filmmakers like to do with genre.
#14 Zodiac (2007)
Directed by David Fincher
David Fincher’s Zodiac ranks among the greatest films about serial killers ever made, and the killer in the film disappears about forty minutes into it, never to be seen or heard from again. The San Francisco set epic is less about solving the case than a meditation on obsession, following three men that drastically alter and destroy their lives to solve a notorious case. Mr. Fincher, a man who uses special effects to subtle effects, effectively details every little piece of this film, drowning the audience in the facts of the case as much as the people trying to solve it. In one particularly grandiose sequence, he shoots an interrogation sequence by layering it with the clues we have learned, making it so obvious that we are ready to put him in the electric chair (alas, his handwriting sets him free). He also does something magical with CGI, not using it to create magical monsters or epic battle scenes, but to layer his backgrounds in an air of authenticity. He captures the air of the city in the 1970s, not only in the look but the mood of paranoia and the need for answers. Like the real case, Zodiac has no ending. It simply drags on in on, ever closer, but ever further away from the truth. Mr. Fincher, along with screenwriter James Vanderbilt, never struggle through the third act, but make it a reflection of the case—a plot with multiple loose ends, none of them ever solvable. Mr. Fincher has made many dark and visually stunning films, most notably Seven and Fight Club, but on a thematic scale, Zodiac reigns supreme because it is the most centered and frighteningly true. It shows how clues can unravel hugely, shaping, forcing, and altering the life of the one who studies it till there is no longer a man but only a story.
#13 The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005)
Directed by Judd Apatow
I had a screenwriting teacher that told me Hollywood can make two types of stories: boys with toys, or women who fall in love. Tell that to Judd Apatow, who has constantly defied the barrier with his ingeniously hilarious films about men who fall in love. Of his many films this decade (whether writing, directing, or producing), none is as funny poignant, or heartfelt as the film that launched his career, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. As the film’s title suggests, the main character Andy, played by Steve Carrell in his career-best performance, needs to get laid, as it has been way too many years. Mr. Apatow’s attention to strong storytelling, along with his ability as a director to let his cast improv effortlessly, turns what could sound like a SNL skit into a wholly realized story about a man in search of love in all the wrong places. Besides Mr. Carrel’s effortlessly brilliant performance, the film introduced us to a number of great comedians, including Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jane Lynch, Leslie Mann, Elizabeth Banks, Kat Dennings, and Jonah Hill (Catherine Keener, who plays Andy’s love interest, is humorous and caring in the role). Its easy to miss what makes The 40-Year-Old Virgin so brilliant—it never feels forced or fake, and makes every note of its script a true situation, complete with jokes to do it. The genius of Mr. Apatow’s films is they take real life tragedies and turn them into comedies—we laugh at the pain. As Andy tries to find himself more than lose his virginity, we see the process that becoming a man is less about the sex you have and more about the people in your life you fill around you. It might sound a little conceited and obvious, but it’s a message that will always ring true.
#12 Brick (2005)
Directed by Rian Johnson
Of all the films about teenage life that came out in the last decade, the one that rings most true about the strange experience of high school culture is the one that is the furthest from it—Rian Johnson’s stunning debut Brick. Described by Mr. Johnson as “Chinatown-in-high school,” Brick finds itself in a cunningly clever tale of murder, mystery, and intrigued, complete with its own language, symbols, and prescribed rules. Joseph Gordon-Levitt puts on his best Bogart as Brendan, who is attempting to solve the mystery of why his girlfriend lies dead in an alley. The film is never a parody of film noir, but instead uses the genre as a storytelling device. Mr. Johnson finds a tone that is dark and clever, only rarely wincing at the camera. He’s the definitive film school graduate of the 2000s—he uses cheap tricks that payoff with great cinematic clarity, but keeps his composure by sticking true to his story. What makes Brick such a great high school film is not that Mr. Johnson is throwing film noir into a high school, but explaining high school as a version of film noir. After all, don’t all high schoolers have their own strange set of language and symbols, hidden from authority figures, and always trying to act much older than they actually are? Brick captures real teenage life my exaggerating it, and letting the small details that are essential to the plot but inconsistent with real life explain the culture of what its like to be a kid these days. Mr. Johnson might be looking at the underworld of a high school, but in reality he’s capturing what’s already on the surface if people simply look harder. Best of all, Mr. Johnson keeps you intrigued to the last frame, spinning a mystery as good as any classic film noir, and has plenty of fun and wit doing it too.
#11 Waking Life (2001)
Directed by Richard Linklater
What is this thing we call life? Is it just a dream? A test? What are we doing here? A series of strange and wildly imaginative vignettes make up Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, a truly imaginative film that is both a lesson in 21st century philosophy as well as a zeitgeist expression of our own fears, dreams, and doubts about the world today. Shot in Mr. Linklater’s rotoscope animation, in which real life footage is colored over in beautiful animation, Waking Life is a set of dialogues about meaning in the world today. They range from the existential to the linguistic, the scientific to the religious. It’s a film about dreams and dreaming, our quest for meaning in a world that sometimes feels less than real. Which is why Mr. Linkalter’s choice to rotoscope the story makes so much sense—besides making the film a visually stimulating experience unlike any other, the animation also allows it to be an expression of our removed sense of reality, in which everything feels like a dream inside a dream. We keep trying to wake up, but we are still stuck in the nightmare. As the film lingers through its characters, citing Kierkegard, Phillip K. Dick, Satre, Bazin, Plato, Decartes, and many more, Waking Life attempts to wake us up to our own future and realities. It never comes to a conclusion, but it becomes a call to action to discover our own path, to choose our own future, and either accept the dream life we are in or take charge to change it.
#10 Far From Heaven (2002)
Directed by Todd Haynes
Tood Haynes makes strange, curious films, but his masterpiece is something extremely familiar, yet disturbingly frightening. Far From Heaven is Mr. Haynes’s take on the classic 1950s melodramas and women’s pictures, mainly popularized from director Douglas Sirk (Far From Heaven is also a revisionist remake of Mr. Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows). Before diving into specifics, Mr. Haynes has brilliantly recaptured the magic of those films—the lush art direction and camera movement, along with the perfectly over directed sense of acting. Far From Heaven feels less like a revision and more of a found masterpiece never seen. But what makes Far From Heaven so different from the melodramas is Mr. Haynes is out to examine what was never examined in those films, and how little has change today. Mr. Haynes examines feminism, race, homosexuality—it’s essentially a film about the people who were marginalized during the 1950s, and Mr. Haynes finally gives them the voice they deserved. But strangely, Mr. Haynes comes to a stunning conclusion through the story of his protagonist, played in one of the decade’s best performances by Julianne Moore, that it is the woman in this era that is still left without choice. While Mr. Sirk’s films gave women a chance to escape, Mr. Hanyes points out that the women who watched his films actually were stuck in their place. He leaves his film on a note of tragic subtlety, leaving us to wonder how much has really changed. Far From Heaven is both strikingly familiar while strangely surreal.
#9 A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
A confession: I had not considered Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence for this list until a few weeks ago when New York Times critic A.O. Scott named this as his second favorite film of the decade. While Mr. Spielberg would have appeared on this list with his wildly crafted science fiction film Minority Report, a second viewing of A.I., my first since seeing it in theaters in 2001, led me to a shocking conclusion of how underrated and beautiful the film is, which ranks among Mr. Spielberg’s best films. Originally a project crafted by Stanley Kubrick, Mr. Spielberg took over the reigns a few years before Mr. Kubrick’s death, and then was finally inspired to make the project after the titan of cinema died in 1999. Some critics deride the film, hoping Mr. Kubrick had completed the project and citing Mr. Spielberg’s sentimentality as a problem. These critics completely miss the dark and chilling philosophical themes that ride under this deeply moving dystopia, wrapped in the fairy tale of Pinocchio, which tells the story of the first ever robot programmed to love. The robot child David only hopes to complete his mission of loving his mother, but the cruel and dark world around him take him into a nightmare of human exploitation, where his story becomes deeply unsettling, and a story about humanity’s inability to truly remain human. The reason Mr. Kubrick gave the project to Mr. Spielberg is evident—while Mr. Spielberg brings the coldly crafted filmmaking to the project, the film needs a huge heart at the center of it, something Mr. Spielberg beautifully accomplishes. As the film ends on its fairy tale ending, Mr. Spielberg may have an evidently happy ending, but the darkness underneath it is impossible to ignore, turning this into the director’s least sentimental and most tragic visions of our own nature, in which our most real and loved emotions can be programmed and recreated without any authenticity, making our entire experience as a species completely irrelevant.
#8 No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen
The only filmmaker(s) to appear on this list twice, Joel and Ethan Coen are truly talented filmmakers (A Serious Man and O Brother Where Art Thou? were serious candidates as well). No Country for Old Men, their dark, gritty, and nihilistically humorous neo-western is a film that puts them at the top of their filmmaking craft. Each small element—from Roger Deakins’s brutally realized cinematography, to the perfectly paced editing, to even the stillness and uneasy sound design—make this one hell of a perfect film. At its flattest, it’s a classic story: money gone missing, an innocent man who gets a bit greedy, and the price that must be paid. But like all their films, the Coens are too smart for that, and in adapting the novel from Cormac McCarthy, brilliantly realize the themes that are hinted, but never fully realized, in Mr. McCarthy’s words. The Coens keep us on the edge of our seat by creating truly memorable characters: Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin), the man who sees opportunity and steals it, Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) the sheriff trying to solve the case, and in his crazy, fun, and darkly chilling performance, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, a walking angel of death, complete with a cattle gun (It also doesn’t hurt that every tiny performance in this film, from the motel clerk to the gas station attendant, is just as good as the main cast). The Coens keep us guessing at every moment where their story is going, only to throw a third act curveball that forces us as spectators to take a step back and question the events we’ve seen. While the film’s narrative to that point might be the Coens at their most focused, they bring in the change because No Country for Old Men is not a typical violent shoot-em-up, but a mystery that attempts to explain all the violence we see today. Is it a generational thing? Is evil finally upon us? Is it our human nature to not understand? Or is it simply our imagination? No Country for Old Men is just as philosophically intriguing and fascinating as any other work by the Coen brothers, and worth watching over, and over, and over. It might be the most violent work the Coens have done, but its surely their most curious examination of what violence really is.
#7 Kill Bill (2003/2004)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Tarantino is a man who loves movies—every single one of his films focuses on the idea of cinephilia in some way. Whether its an examination of myth making in Inglourious Basterds or a look at the theory of the final girl in horror films for Death Proof, Mr. Tarantino truly places his stake in the quote by Jean-Luc Godard that the best criticism of a movie is another movie. Yet the reason I prefer his two-part epic Kill Bill over almost every other film he has made (Pulp Fiction will always reign supreme) is that Kill Bill is a testament that behind every cool burst of dialogue, or memorable action sequence, or visual trick, Mr. Tarantino is a storyteller at heart, and Kill Bill is his most passionate story he has ever told. Left for dead at her wedding by her former lover, a former assassin decides to take revenge. But as revenge stories go, it is never a simply process, or one even remotely easy to understand. Mr. Tarantino uses his great knowledge of cinema to infuse every genre he loves into his story—Chinese kung fu flicks, Italian spaghetti westerns, Japanese anime, French New Wave flicks—not to make homage and show he can do it too, but to use the elements to add to the overall impact of his story. Kill Bill is solely focused on its story, and led by two great performances—Uma Thuman as our heroine “The Bride,” and David Carradine as the titular antagonist—the film takes us along for an emotional ride, something no other film by Mr. Tarantino has even come close to. What adds up at the end of Kill Bill is a question of what is punishment and what is revenge. Consider the sequence in which Budd, Bill’s brother played by Michael Madsen, is humiliated at work before going home, in which we see the Bride is there to kill him. Does Budd deserve to die as much as Vernita Green? Revenge becomes more and more complicated as Mr. Tarantino dives deeper and deeper into the story, leaving us cathartic by the end, but as the same time curious. He keeps us glued to the plot of the story, and shows a beautiful sentimentality toward his characters that one can tell he truly loves. Thus Kill Bill, more than any other film of his, is actually his love note to cinema. It’s a film inspired by cinema, and made for people who truly love cinema in all its fascinations.
#6 Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Clint Eastwood reemerged as one of the best filmmakers working today after a lull of films in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but his return to form with Mystic River and then his masterpiece Million Dollar Baby, cemented him as a truly gifted filmmaker. While other filmmakers go for quirks and gimmicks to tell their narratives, Mr. Eastwood sticks to classical techniques, and creates one of the most moving stories of the American dream. He’s a subtle filmmaker, using a script by Paul Haggis to slowly explain his themes and ideas. His uses of shadows and darkness, showing people just along the edge, and capturing them often in portraiture rather than movement, give way to his expressive ability to communicate his story. He also gives one of the best performances of his entire career, one that might be classic Eastwood—a hardened boxing trainer who steps back into the ring by managing a naïve female newcomer—but its one that the director and actor has perfected. The performances by Hillary Swank and Morgan Freeman also rank among their own best, and give the film the type of beauty that only the best of actors can portray. As the film takes a strange turn in the third act, Mr. Eastwood, Ms. Swank, and Mr. Freeman give the film the needed heart to pull at our hearts without feeling manipulated. As a filmmaker, Mr. Eastwood turns the quietest of scenes into the most wild of emotions in our own feelings—we understand, because Mr. Eastwood beautifully communicates the film’s ideas of what is means to be someone in America, and what the dream can mean for different people, and who we want to have near us when we make those dreams. Million Dollar Baby is striking in how simple its story is while still being enticingly effective. We are taken by Mr. Eastwood’s evocative filmmaking into a story that is inside all of us—our deep desire to be beloved by the world, but more importantly have someone to share the glory with.
#5 WALL-E (2008)
Directed by Andrew Stanton
Four animated films appear between my two lists for the top films of the decade, each of them in a radically different style, which is a testament to showing how beautiful the medium can be. While CGI animation has become the standard in Hollywood, the company Pixar has made it their own personal effort to show that good animation can only take a film; storytelling is always a first. This is why Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E ranks as the best animated film made this decade, it also ranks among the best films made this decade. A number of Pixar films could have appeared on this list (Mr. Stanton’s Finding Nemo barely missed the cut), but WALL-E is their most complex and most ambitious work to date. The story of the last robot on Earth, lonely and without a single individual—robot or human—to communicate, WALL-E hides its themes about humanity’s laziness and stunning ability to waste underneath a wondrously realized story about a robot in love with another robot. The film opens in one of the most ambitious decisions seen in a Hollywood film—40 minutes if almost silent beauty, as two characters explore a desolate planet. Mr. Stanton, knowing how to tell a story, communicates the film beautifully by using his visual tone to explain the feelings and emotions better than dialogue could ever accomplish. The photorealism of the sequences, complete with shots that actually feel like shots instead of animated sequences, make the story even more compelling, and as the film launches into space and becomes a true adventure, along with a truly horrifying vision of our future. The sad statement that is hidden underneath WALL-E is that the titular robot is more human than any human is in the film, making us question our own connection to our actual nature, or whether we simply have given up on it due to the convenience of technology. And while the romance at its core tears at our heart, it is the dystopia that brews just underneath the film’s central narrative that makes it a masterpiece in filmmaking. Pixar has proven again and again to be able to make films not only for children, but for all ages by making their stories full of themes that make us question ourselves, while bringing us a well told story as beautiful and wondrous as anything we could imagine.
Read the original review here. Read an interview with director Andrew Stanton.
#4 25th Hour (2002)
Directed by Spike Lee
I have been thrilled to see Spike Lee’s 25th Hour appear on a number of best-decade lists. After being enjoyed but quickly dismissed when released at the end of 2002, I was immediately disheartened by the fact after seeing a truly ingenious masterpiece—the only film to truly capture the anxiety and fears of the post-9/11 world. Mr. Lee, working from a script by David Benioff (who wrote the novel in the 1990s but made significant changes after September 11th), crafts the story of a drug dealer, played with quiet precision by Edward Norton, on his final day before he must begin a seven year prison term. Besides its set location in New York and visual illusions to the attack on the World Trade Center, the film captures the zeitgeist of moving on after tragedy. Monty is going to prison, but how must every other person move on as well? Some are closer, others further, all are confused. The film uses the 9/11 backdrop as a setting for how these characters act—they are unsure of what is next, and confused about the future. Some try to be overprotective, while others are fearlessly reckless. The film is filled with career-best performances from not only Mr. Norton, but Brian Cox, Barry Pepper, Rossario Dawson, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. Its narrative quietly moves along till its thrilling final sequence, as Monty’s father imagines an alternate reality for his son, still hoping that there is some good in this world. But as Mr. Lee shows the car driving past the George Washington Bridge and upstate to prison, he suggests that the only way to better the future is to confront our past, which is why his use of the pains of September 11th play so flawlessly well with his film—he is confronting the pains, making us examine ourselves instead of our enemies. Mr. Lee, best known as a filmmaker of the black experience, has made one of his best films by capturing something he knows even better: the New York experience. This is a film about his own city, an homage to a city he truly loves, and the people who make it up, calling them to confront their own ways during a tragedy, instead of turning toward our enemies.
#3 Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Directed by Peter Weir
Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is one of the most entertaining films ever made. It’s an adventure story with no greater pretensions except to tell a thrilling story of the high seas. Released in the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean, the film was criminally overlooked, which is a true shame because it is simply a rousing good time. Inspired by the films of David Lean, this is a true boy’s adventure film, all about male companionship in a place miles from civilization. Mr. Weir crafts a stunningly beautiful looking film that is authentic and filled with details, and instead of going for humor, he uses realism to create entertainment. One great sequence has the HMS Surprise, led by captain Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe, one of his finest to date), attempting to hunt their French enemy The Acheron, in a frightening rain-soaked storm. The HMS loses the battle, not due to bombs, but because the storm is the true power here, and the Acheron is able to escape. The film is classic dog versus dog, with true majestic filmmaking but a small-scale story of two ships. But great authenticity and realism never create cinematic magic, which is why the heart of the story is between Captain Aubrey and his new companion, Dr. Stephen Maturin, played with crafty seriousness by Paul Bettany. Maturin is a Darwin-like scientific lover, while Aubrey only knows how to man the high seas. As the two try to come to some reconciliation, but more often than not at guard with each other, the film keeps its human element in check while delivering a true grandiose story of entertainment. Full of rousing action sequences, great performances, and a story that can simply described as great fun, Master and Commander is the unsung film of the decade—a rousing adventure story that may not be full of grandiose philosophical themes or worldly relevance, but its filmmaking at its best, and a film worth revisiting numerous times for its winning charm and love of adventure.
#2 Mulholland Drive (2001)
Directed by David Lynch
David Lynch is a lover of the mysterious and strange, the grotesque that is hidden under the beautiful, and the nonsensical explaining the real. All of these themes and ideas come together in Mr. Lynch’s reconstructed masterwork, Mulholland Drive. The project originally began as a pilot for a TV series for ABC, but when the studio rejected it, Mr. Lynch quickly found funding and crafted it into one of the best films ever made. The film, centered on Hollywood, is his essential examination of cinema and everything about it. One can tell how much Mr. Lynch pays attention to his mystery by his subtle hints of his influences, which include, art, music, and of course, cinema. The dream-within-a-dream structure makes for a mystery that even when not wholly sensible, is absolutely riveting. Major plot points are only hinted at, while minor events take the center stage. Mr. Lynch keeps us wrapped in a dream like state, constantly fascinated, while simultaneously revolted by the images we see. He is the controller of both nightmares and dreams, making us aware of that eternal state that Hollywood creates. At the center of the film are two amazing performances—Laura Harding as a woman unsure of who she is, and in her breakthrough and still best performance, Naomi Watts as a wide-eyed girl who comes to town. One can understand how great Ms. Watts is as a filmmaker by simply watching her two audition scenes. When she practices with Rita, its exactly how we expect. When she actually performs it, Ms. Watts delivers a complex performance of a film we know nothing about, while revealing secrets of her own past, which of course, is simply her imagined past. “It’s all an illusion!” a character shouts in a key sequence in Mulholland Drive, which is exactly how Mr. Lynch feels about Hollywood and its ability to make dreams. The film sets itself up as a dream, a recreation of events to make the protagonist justify her actions. But as the film winds down and is lost in its strange and perplexing events, one realizes that every dream in Hollywood becomes corrupt, and everything beautiful is lost to the grotesque. In the end, Hollywood, and even the medium of cinema, by making still images into movement, is all an illusion. What Mr. Lynch suggests though, is all of us love to walk down the streets where dreams are made, simply because we love that moment of dazzling beauty.
#1 There Will Be Blood (2007)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
No film screams American from this decade like Paul Thomas Anderson’s ravishing, thrilling, and visceral masterpiece There Will Be Blood, the best film of the new millennium. Mr. Anderson had made four great films before hand, all of them brilliant and bold in their own unique way, but in this brutal morality tale, the director finds his most unique and original voice, taking us down a spiraling story of greed, family, religion, and capitalism. Scene after scene, Mr. Anderson defies all expectation for what type of film this will be. The film diverts far from its source material, Upton Sincalir’s Oil!, as Mr. Anderson creates an intense character study around oil man Daniel Plainview. Plainview on paper is one hell of a character, but when brought to life by Daniel Day-Lewis, who gave two of the greatest screen performances of all time between this and Gangs of New York, who is an actor who does not simply play is role, but thrusts himself into every mad element. Some criticize Mr. Day-Lewis for being over the top—they are simply wrong. Mr. Day-Lewis knows his character; he plays big often, speaking in his silver tongue. But watch how Mr. Day-Lewis plays his face when not speaking, especially in a shot as Plainview sits upon a title wave, racing toward the camera. His face does not suggest freedom as the metaphor would imply, but instead a determined and unstoppable force, ready to do anything to achieve his capitalist nightmare. There Will Be Blood, despite as the title suggests, has very little blood. It is often a quietly pensive film about the struggles of power, the perversity of religion, and the horror of capitalism gone mad. Mr. Anderson knows when to blow his film up—he does it through performance, the pulsating score by Johnny Greenwood, and the dark shades of the cinematography by Robert Elswit. But more often than not, he lets the camera sit in an Ozu-like fashion, letting the formalist elements create their own meaning. He drives us as insane as his main character becomes, creating his narrative as a one-act dive into destruction, complete with a maddening epilogue that pays off the film’s major narrative confrontation. As Mr. Day-Lewis reaches the most forceful part of his role, while Paul Dano wondrously plays his foil without a single element resembling fortitude, Mr. Anderson sends us hurling down into the pins of desire and revenge. When the film finally calms in its final shot, and Plainview informs us, “I’m finished,” the relief is both him and us—we can finally breathe again. There Will Be Blood is filmmaking at its most austere and simply its most brilliant, as Mr. Anderson does not make us squirm by the grotesque but by his filmmaking and thematic elements crawling under our skin. We are left paralyzed by the film, shocked by its grandiosity, awed by its ambition, and chilled by its darkness. This is cinema at its best.
Read the original review. Read an interview with director Paul Thomas Anderson and star Daniel-Day Lewis.
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©2010 Peter Labuza
#20 The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)
Directed by Andrew Dominick
