Nick's Flick Picks: Top 100 Films of the 00s

<body text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFCC" link="#003399" vlink="#003399" leftmargin="115" rightmargin="115"> <br> <Font Face=Garamond Color="#003399" Size=+3><b> The Top 100 Films of the 00s </b></Font> <br><Font Size=+1><Font Color="#003399">Ranked in De<a href=best00sx.html style="text-decoration:none">c</a>ember 2009</Font> <Font Color=Gray>// <a href=best00s.html style="text-decoration:none" target="_top"><Font Color=Gray>Click here for snazzier version with frames</Font></a></Font></Font><hr> Throughout December, I have reminisced about my <a href="http://blog.nicksflickpicks.com/search/label/End%20of%2000s" target="_new" style="text-decoration:none">fondest in-cinema memories of the 00s</a> and catalogued the films that I am <a href="http://blog.nicksflickpicks.com/search/label/BwdFwd%2000s" target="_new" style="text-decoration:none">most eager to encounter or revisit</a>. Sure, I longed to catch up on everything that eluded me earlier, and to reassess films for which I suspect, auspiciously or ominously, my first appraisal might have missed the mark. But this goal was hopeless and, I think, unhealthy: it's good to have things to look forward to, and lingering prospects for reacquaintance. It's silly to treat the end of any year as a now-or-never deadline for artistic enrichment. Besides, the 100 films I have collected here, whatever I omitted through neglect or misjudgment, are as thrilling a time-capsule as I could ever want of a decade's ecstatic pleasures.<br> <br> <TABLE width=100% rules=rows frame=hsides border=1 cellpadding=15> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00morvcall.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300214/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 1. MORVERN CALLAR </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United Kingdom <br>dir. Lynne Ramsay <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because virtually the entire story, minus one impulsive vacation, is right there in the first handful of shots: a girl, a body, a book, a note, a tape. Forsaking voiceover, hitched to a character who eschews talk, every single thing we come to know or intuit or ask about Morvern emerges in ways completely unique to cinema. Against all odds, it's a tremendous amount. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00russark.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318034/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 2. RUSSIAN ARK </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Russia <br>dir. Aleksandr Sokurov <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Sokurov posed two huge, impetuous questions, about coming to grips with his country's painful history and about the lean chance that narrative cinema had anything truly new to attempt. Or was it <Font Face=Times><i>cinema</i></Font>'s history and the <Font Face=Times><i>country</i></Font>'s future that inspired him? Either way, he brilliantly pulled off a real experiment, and new horizons gleamed in every direction. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dancdark.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168629/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 3. DANCER IN THE DARK </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Denmark/Sweden/etc. <br>dir. Lars von Trier <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because even though the cinema at large and even von Trier himself mostly avoided the kinds of emotional, formal, and political dares that this film laid down at the dawn of the decade, <Font Face=Times><i>Dancer</i></Font>'s wild, divisive spirit, howled out with the same uncanny power as Bj&#246rk's inimitable tunes, hasn't remotely subsided. Saturated with color, sound, feeling, and conviction. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00etsunshn.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0338013/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 4. ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Michel Gondry <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because packed into every minute is some dazzling effect or narrative loop or blazon of the makers' quirks, but for all of those amazing and endearing convolutions, the emotions are played impressively straight. In good times and bad, in duck sauce and in health, it's the truest-feeling deconstruction of love in an American movie since <Font Face=Times><i>Annie Hall</i></Font>. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00werckmst.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0249241/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 5. WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Hungary <br>dir. B&#233la Tarr <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Tarr perseveres in believing that a film can have the scope, the daring grammars, the seriousness, and the compelling inscrutability of a great modernist novel, and though he fulfills all of those ambitions with power and finesse, it still feels like a "people's" movie: accessible, funny, tuned in to common questions and angers. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00mulhdriv.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287467/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 6. MULHOLLAND DRIVE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. David Lynch <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because as banal as it is to see picket fences, L.A. stuccoes, or a Hollywood "dream place" and suspect some malfeasance beneath, Lynch's underlayers of being and terror never work the way you expect, exerting strong, febrile claims on surface "reality" that no one can fully prepare for. Sound, image, sequence, performance, and temporality are stretched to their limits, as are we. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00talk2her.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287467/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 7. TALK TO HER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Spain <br>dir. Pedro Almod&#243var <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the auteur made good on his new rep for "maturity" without hugging the audience quite so often as he did in his prior outing, and in fact by push-pulling them through an illicit tale of the permeabilities between care and harm, beauty and outrage. Inspired by dance, music, color, and older film forms, but seriously, who else would ever have made this? And so perfectly? </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00amorespr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245712/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 8. AMORES PERROS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Mexico <br>dir. Alejandro Gonz&#225lez I&#241&#225rritu <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because before the decade overdosed on fractured narratives, Gonz&#225lez I&#241&#225rritu's blazing direction of a tricky script nailed global viewers to their seats. Somehow the movie swims in the blood and the dank without coming across as touristic or condemnatory, and it hops storytelling idioms without a hitch. Each thread makes the others more interesting. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00demonlov.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284034/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 9. DEMONLOVER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France <br>dir. Olivier Assayas <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the movie would atomize into ludicrousness if it lacked the carnivorous force of its framing and editing. Instead, from the fallen Olympus of the corporate jet to the last cathode hell and its lethal irrealities, <Font Face=Times><i>demonlover</i></Font> flays the skin off of media and finds desire, and flays the skin off of desire and finds money, and more media. Assayas keeps it honest with the stains of his own obsessions. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00grizzman.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427312/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 10. GRIZZLY MAN </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Werner Herzog <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because in a world that pathologizes almost every form of ardor, burdening romantic love with the combined weight of all of them, I learned a lot from Timothy's unwavering, fundamentalist love, in some ways because but also regardless of its object. Herzog's POV comes through indelibly, but this survives as a crazy, unpolluted emblem of a real character. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dethlaza.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0456149/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 11. THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Romania <br>dir. Cristi Puiu <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Dante Remus Lazarescu's allegorically loaded name cannot help him. His yen for drink and his sour, corpulent body can't, either, yet none of this turns the film against him. Puiu finds compassion in spaces where you'd settle for a good 60-watt lightbulb, yet it's not some sentimental paean; it holds fast to a pragmatic intelligence. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00blkbords.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246266/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 12. BLACKBOARDS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Iran <br>dir. Samira Makhmalbaf <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the paths taken by the two leads represent no tidy dichotomy, just two among a small menu of fates that two men in this situation might meet. The abstracted threat and other occluded elements of the story spark against the austere realism of the filming style and locales, yielding a drama of invisible bondage and arbitrary choice that Brecht would have loved. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00junebug.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418773/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 13. JUNEBUG </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Phil Morrison <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because two oft-presumed elements of any great movie, a totally fresh story or a distinctive style, are hard to claim for <Font Face=Times><i>Junebug</i></Font>, which is instead a great movie because every single cut, line-reading, ellipsis, and rhythmic beat serves to evoke these characters with increasing complexity. It's precise and wonderfully warm, even though its characters can turn cold. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00newworld.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0402399/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 14. THE NEW WORLD </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Terrence Malick <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it's a great subject for Malick, a marvelous if massively unrecouped use for New Line's sudden bankroll, and a tale that despite endless retellings has never quite felt like this: from the scuffed, rude, and suffering Virginians to the visually striking but evenly personified Indians to the diamantine rhapsodies of the grass, water, light, and sky. Just when you think the film is ending, in England, it comes alive in a new way. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00inworld.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0310154/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 15. IN THIS WORLD </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United Kingdom <br>dir. Michael Winterbottom <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because I cannot imagine a more moving chronicle of the refugee experience, or one rendered with more integrity to the lives it purports to represent. The film's guerrilla production and ethical conviction amount, pleasingly, to the same thing. It's also a feat of editing and location shooting, composed of the sorts of salient global environments that never seem to make it into <Font Face=Times><i>Baraka</i></Font> and its ilk. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00atanarju.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0285441/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 16. ATANARJUAT (THE FAST RUNNER) </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Canada <br>dir. Zacharias Kunuk <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this movie embodies a consummation of something new, the kind of high-quality and portable digital equipment that makes a film like this even possible in this environment, and something believably if not actually old: a heroic tale that the film asks us to invest with mythic grandeur. Kunuk's craftsmanship has made that an easy call to answer. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00110901.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328802/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 17. 110901 </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">11 Nations <br>11 Directors <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the world profits from having a record not just of the insights and artistic interventions prompted in the direct wake of the towers' collapse but also of the bathos, confusion, and asymmetries that flourished in that moment. Which is not to say that any version of this project would be foolproof. Half of the films are truly stellar; the sum of all of them is even stronger. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00inlandem.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460829/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 18. INLAND EMPIRE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. David Lynch <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because key actor Karolina Gruszka plays someone called "Lost Girl," and even though everyone watching knows just how she feels, Lynch's ability not just to marshal new aesthetics out of eccentric work habits and shifting technology, but to make those aesthetics ferocious, affecting, and coherent in their own unique way, remains a blessed enigma of modern film. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00corportn.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 19. THE CORPORATION </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Canada <br>dirs. Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because we know the dangers of treating any film, no matter how much aura of transparency it performs, as a substitute for researched facts, and yet <Font Face=Times><i>The Corporation</i></Font> has the detail, heft, breadth, and context of an invaluable textbook. That it's also pretty damn lively and ends on some notes of hard-fought optimism and encouragement is all the more wondrous. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00oasis.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0320193/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 20. OASIS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">South Korea <br>dir. Lee Chang-dong <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this movie keeps a hell of a lot of plates spinning: two high-wire Method performances at the center, including one by an unafflicted actress approximating cerebral palsy; a boldly lit realist drama with sudden splashes of magical realism; a resident's profile of a bright, nervy Seoul; and a vision of madness, all tied up in romance. Every bit of it soars. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00lovdiane.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0329321/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 21. LOVE AND DIANE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Jennifer Dworkin <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it's the movie that fans and non-fans of <Font Face=Times><i>Precious</i></Font> ought to see, if only it were easier to find: a multi-year saga of a hard-working mother and a despondent daughter, both on welfare, who are not "types" or enemies, though they sometimes make a very hard life even harder for each other. A paragon of socially conscious but humanly grounded documentary. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00syncdoch.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0383028/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 22. SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Charlie Kaufman <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2008</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it's the <Font Face=Times><i>Moulin Rouge!</i></Font> of total, congestive depression. Like Luhrmann, Kaufman knows that his intensest emotions rhyme with pathetic clich&#233s, so his strategies are to stretch them to a colossal scale and embed such creative nuance at every moment that the feelings reconnect. I love both movies, but this is the one that lingers. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00troubwtr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149405/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 23. TROUBLE THE WATER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dirs. Tia Lessin & Carl Deal <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2008</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it starts with the filmmakers meeting the couple who become its heroes and co-creators, and remains ever after an equal testament to Kimberly and Scott's resolute acts of witnessing and to the directors' determination to circulate the evidence of gross bias and ruin, but also of humanity's creativity, resilience, decency, and spunk. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00company.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0335013/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 24. THE COMPANY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Robert Altman <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it deftly showcases the artistry of the Joffrey Ballet while summoning that restive interplay of characters, plots, and peccadilloes that typify an Altman film. The ethos of <Font Face=Times><i>ensemble</i></Font> furnishes a lovely meeting-ground for these two sensibilities; the ballet is no sacred cow, but it does coax the director toward one of his most delicate movies. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00once.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0907657/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 25. ONCE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Ireland <br>dir. John Carney <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because with "real" indie film culture closer than ever to death's door, at least in terms of reaching an audience, <Font Face=Times><i>Once</i></Font> feels like an awfully rare gift. Building a movie atop an untested song is even harder than it looks, but the long takes, unbeautified light, and anecdotal, romantic construction make the film's form and its feeling impossible to separate. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best004m3w2day.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1032846/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 26. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, AND 2 DAYS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Romania <br>dir. Cristian Mungiu <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because one of the decade's greatest Palme d'or victors, despite being one of the least heralded in advance of the festival, has the combined air of unimpeachable excellence and fresh discovery, from its phenomenally assured acting and direction to its mature collapsing of any line between politics and "real life." </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00inmoodlv.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118694/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 27. IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Hong Kong/France <br>dir. Wong Kar-wai <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because, hard as it is to enjoy such gourmet sounds and images without worrying that you're being snookered, I can't see almost anything wrong, save a highfalutin finale, with Wong's formal and visual masterpiece. Plus, it doubles as an expos&#233 of how where, when, and how we live ultimately shapes the ways we fall in (or short of) love. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00circle.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0255094/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 28. THE CIRCLE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Iran <br>dir. Jafar Panahi <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because after a breakout decade of global hype, largely subsisting on male-authored and (often literally!) male-driven meditations, Panahi surged to the highest rank of an august pack of filmmakers with a movie that wastes neither a shot nor a second, and which marks its women clearly as individuals while encapsulating and decrying a crisis common to all of them. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00latmarrg.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0287471/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 29. LATE MARRIAGE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Israel/France <br>dir. Dover Kosashvili <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because most films that take such surprising views of sexuality make a more grandiose show of Challenging Ideas of Sexuality, and most avatars of a rarely filmed culture are a little more averse to such acerbic, harsh portrayals, no matter how funny and oddly affectionate. Kosashvili works so unfussily that many of the film's heroic idiosyncrasies only gradually reveal themselves. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00hurtlock.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0887912/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 30. THE HURT LOCKER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Kathryn Bigelow <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2009</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Bigelow has been a dazzling orchestrator of action and lightstorm for her whole career, but folks finally sat up and noticed her much-needed, ground-level view of American soldiering, of their dangers and head rushes and their contemplations of their lot, and of each other. The images of thought are as galvanizing as the images of threat. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00youlivng.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445336/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 31. YOU, THE LIVING </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Sweden <br>dir. Roy Andersson <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2009</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the movie's obsession with purgatory, even its anxiety about annihilation, never lures it into cheap-shot nihilism or empty detonations of violence. Andersson comes across as a conscientious objector to modern humanity but also a tough-love benefactor. No one who'd renounced all hope could be this funny, or so obviously dote on all these exquisite, unusual vignettes. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00ytumama.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245574/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 32. Y TU MAM&#193 TAMBI&#201N </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Mexico <br>dir. Alfonso Cuar&#243n <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the film sympathizes fully with the lusts of youth, not as an abstraction but as something bodies radiate when they fuck, move, and crave. Still, the dialogue, the character of Luisa, the visual and narrative POVs, and "peripheral" scenes certify how much more there is to life, and to this film, than chauvinistic hedonism. A core sample of modern Mexico, styled as a buddy romp. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00imnother.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368794/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 33. I'M NOT THERE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Todd Haynes <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the simple way to go, as though such a thing would ever interest Haynes, would be to offer Bob Dylan as someone whose uniqueness lifted him above his hidebound country and his narrow times. Haynes finds Dylan complicated because he both embodied and dissented from a polychromatic country and a rotating cycle of weighty, complicated times, rendered gorgeously via a kaleidoscope of filmic idioms. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00beatskip.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411270/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 34. THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France <br>dir. Jacques Audiard <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this ambitiously cross-cultural, cross-generational adaptation of an odd character study grounds itself in the wisdom that every person is actually many people at once. So what if this guy happens to be a grotty crook <Font Face=Times><i>and</i></Font> an aspiring musician? He hasn't got a move in him, tough or sonorous or tender, that Audiard and his helpmeets can't match. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00holygirl.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0300270/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 35. THE HOLY GIRL </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Argentina <br>dir. Lucrecia Martel <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the final shot confirms Martel's mastery of titillating endings, but further viewings may be needed to appreciate how dextrously she plots the centripetal forces that converge around that pool. She assiduously avoids anything like an arrogant or moralizing tone, and despite its highbrow polish, the film suggests that she's having a grand time telling this story. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00timewolf.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0324197/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 36. TIME OF THE WOLF </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Austria/Germany <br>dir. Michael Haneke <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this film's continued neglect, despite its creator's ever-rising stock, all but proves the intolerable force of its bleak, uncompromised vision of how human life would look in a state of total, abrupt fugitivity, minus any specifics of <Font Face=Times><i>why</i></Font>. Haneke's least sensational movie, I think, despite having the highest stakes. Its relative modesty is a thin cover on scary plausibility. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00mariagrc.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390221/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 37. MARIA FULL OF GRACE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Joshua Marston <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the white, L.A.-born, first-time filmmaker has the sense to tell this story in Spanish and hire a Colombian woman to act it, but more than that, <Font Face=Times><i>much</i></Font> more, he forges a full rapport with her subtle expressions and narrative plights, depicts New York minus the usual b.s., and directs the heck out of the supporting cast. <Font Face=Times><i>Gracias</i></Font>. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00birth.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337876/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 38. BIRTH </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Jonathan Glazer <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the film finds equal sublimity in romantic optimism and perverse longing, and then gradually darkens the mood with harbingers of self-deception, threats of poverty, cheated chances, and caustic rivalries, even beyond the grave. Kidman's performance, Savides's photography, and Desplat's magisterial score all belong on a short list of the decade's greatest triumphs. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00lordfell.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120737/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 39. THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">New Zealand/USA <br>dir. Peter Jackson <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it inherits, polishes, expands, and exalts what felt like a lost ideal of what Hollywood studios and generous budgets can achieve when fused to unhomogenized creativity, an uncynical team of artists, and a powerful but unstuffy respect for complex source material. The artform owes millions of new believers around the world to this movie. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00tobehave.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318202/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 40. TO BE AND TO HAVE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France <br>dir. Nicolas Philibert <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because a school in Auvergne turns out to be a Rosetta stone, revealing how patience is the bedrock of professionalism; how toddlers become youngsters; how youngsters react to incipient teendom; how kids coddle and berate themselves as well as others; how learning happens; how life is, in rural France; how life is, one way or another, wherever you are. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dcbparty.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0425598/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 41. DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Michel Gondry <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because no one on screen, the haves or have-nots, visibly lacks a strong sense of self, yet the film avoids the allergenic mien of so many music docs that presume your idolatry of the performers. Dave is on fire with his on-stage bits but the piece is rooted in his just-folks jocularity. As a gift to the 'hood, the film's right up there with the concert. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00oceans01.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240772/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 42. OCEAN'S ELEVEN </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Steven Soderbergh <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because these debonair outlaws slink up to a huge, impersonal, obscenely wealthy institution and rob it blind, with killer suavity and style... and Soderbergh is just as suave. He actually made money for the studio, but he and his irresistible chums have such cracking fun that it always feels as though they're getting away with something. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00weownigt.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0498399/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 43. WE OWN THE NIGHT </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. James Gray <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the movie attains the pungency of noir without the usual shortcut of ostentatiously mannered photography. Gray takes the tougher road, i.e., a confident, expressive mastery of every fundamental technique of scene construction, without letting his scrupulousness impede the velocity or the emotional vise of the story. A mood-piece that sticks. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00hunger.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0986233/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 44. HUNGER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">UK/Ireland <br>dir. Steve McQueen <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2008</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because while the film's persistent impulse to challenge itself doesn't always pay off perfectly, the refusal to abstract moral or political principles and impose them onto a narrative leads, thrillingly, to a host of inventive means for deriving complex insights from the evidence of bodies, spaces, movement, and light. A knuckle, it turns out, is worth at least a thousand words. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00julia08.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903627/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 45. JULIA </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/USA/Mexico <br>dir. Erick Zonca <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2009</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Zonca supersedes the dichotomous dramatics of his best-known feature with a new, more heightened style, indistinguishable as realism or expressionism given the hyperactivity and epically poor judgment of the lead character and many of her intimates. Tilda Swinton assumes the headspace, the physicality, the glands, and the bloodstream of a totally dissimilar person. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00thecell.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209958/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 46. THE CELL </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Tarsem <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the film pulls such a whopping bait-and-switch on the credibility of Lopez's protagonist that Tarsem's moderate grasp of narrative barely matters. Even the tiredness of the childhood-abuse trope gets ironically recuperated. And the visuals and soundscape are so heady and disreputably luxurious that these quibbles, settled or otherwise, barely register until days after the film ends. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00ernbrock.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0195685/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 47. ERIN BROCKOVICH </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Steven Soderbergh <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because almost everyone I knew was jiving to it in 2000, but how many people realized how sturdily <Font Face=Times><i>Erin</i></Font> had been built to last? I thought I got it, but I'm still awestruck by how electrically it holds up. You'd think it would need three different directors to nail the star performance, the communal cross-section, and the political platform, but Soderbergh works his own miraculous hat-trick. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00farfhevn.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0297884/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 48. FAR FROM HEAVEN </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Todd Haynes <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Haynes respects his audience enough to engage our intellects and our cultural memories, while caring enough about us to grasp and reward our emotional needs. <Font Face=Times><i>Heaven</i></Font> has a few built-in release valves where we laugh at outmoded manners and aesthetics, but mostly we hand over our hearts to Cathy Whitaker, in whose longings and failings almost every viewer has some stake. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00osama.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368913/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 49. OSAMA </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Afghanistan <br>dir. Siddiq Barmak <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because notwithstanding the indisputable topicality in 2003 of this Afghani drama (a genus that barely extends beyond this film), it's the form and style that allow the film to hold up: the segues between documentary reality and subjective perspective, the empathetic but unstinting attention to the young actress's face, the awful intractability of her dark destiny. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00mildolbb.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405159/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 50. MILLION DOLLAR BABY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Clint Eastwood <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Oscar can't be wrong all the time, notwithstanding that even stronger movies went unnominated in a uniquely majestic year. This was still the decade's worthiest Best Picture champ, and a late-breaking surprise to critics and audiences: lean, tough, and immediate in its storytelling and its sense of time and place, but radiating the delicate patina of an old-timer idiom, magically unearthed. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00gosford.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0280707/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 51. GOSFORD PARK </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United Kingdom <br>dir. Robert Altman <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because what read on paper like a gimmick&#151Altman moving his human-cornucopia schtick to an English manor, that favorite staple of the Stateside arthouse&#151showcased a tense and zesty chronicle of human foibles, delivered with gusto but not without sincerity under beautiful gaslighting. Every performance, especially by the women, honors the actors and the auteur. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00tdrunkhr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259072/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 52. A TIME FOR DRUNKEN HORSES </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Iran <br>dir. Bahman Ghobadi <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because since the 90s, the best Iranian films about children have rarely been the same films as the devastating, politically inflected tragedies, but <Font Face=Times><i>Drunken Horses</i></Font> furnishes an unforgettable overlap. When a film about a cute, disabled child foregoes almost any ounce of easy sentiment, you know you're watching something special. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00monster.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0340855/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 53. MONSTER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Patty Jenkins <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because as soon as Aileen begins narrating her scabbed childhood, the steady zoom defining her life as a strangling crush of constraints, we know the film has fully thought and felt its way into this terrorizing character. Backing away neither from horror nor understanding, <Font Face=Times><i>Monster</i></Font> thrives on paradox and goes courageously toe-to-toe with everything Aileen doles out. Which is <Font Face=Times><i>a lot</i></Font>. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00trmalady.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381668/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 54. TROPICAL MALADY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Thailand <br>dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because despite the director's enviable four-for-four track record, and despite the fact that I seem to have a different favorite every week, <Font Face=Times><i>Malady</i></Font> takes his trademark bifurcated structure into the strangest, most insinuating places, chronicling the tenderest amalgam of friendship and desire in any of his movies, as well as, to date, his only talking baboon. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00darkdays.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0235327/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 55. DARK DAYS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Marc Singer <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this non-fiction record of an entire society of homeless people living underground in the abandoned Amtrak tunnels of New York City ranks among the great shoulda-been hits of the decade. There is no substitute for the kind of documentary that emerges from years spent among one's subjects, and with their creative input. Even the (rare) flaws are suggestive; the peaks are dizzyingly high. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00upyangtz.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1114277/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 56. UP THE YANGTZE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Canada <br>dir. Yung Chang <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2008</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because this documentary has the grace to admit upfront that its intended subject has long ago vanished, visible only in fleeting traces, nostalgic myths, and commodified decoys. But what the film finds in the place of ancient China is a saga of profound social upheaval, simultaneously swift and lumbering, impressively captured on film. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00ycncount.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203230/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 57. YOU CAN COUNT ON ME </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Kenneth Lonergan <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because siblings deserve more of the frank, textured, good-humored, and compassionate dramas that are the usual birthright of parents and children and lovers and friends and enemies. Watch this movie and <Font Face=Times><i>prove</i></Font> that Linney and Ruffalo haven't known each other forever, and that Lonergan hasn't been witness to all of it. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00palndrom.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0362004/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 58. PALINDROMES </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Todd Solondz <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the movie has two ambitious, divisive, reciprocal subjects: the horrible things that can happen to American kids and the almost equally lurid way in which we fetishize children at an impossibly high standard of sentimental value. The bitterness of Solondz's critique is obvious, but I feel a real compassion and intelligence underneath it. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00zoo.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0874423/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 59. ZOO </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Robinson Devor <br>world premiere 2007 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because for all of the traditionally executed non-fiction films that dazzled throughout the decade, one hungers for more experiments that really revise the paradigm. Devor's necessarily elliptical approach to the topic of human-animal congress prompts an impenetrable but prismatic poetics that's eerie without being tabloid. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00deepwatr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0460766/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 60. DEEP WATER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United Kingdom <br>dirs. Louise Osmond & Jerry Rothwell <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because no matter how many forms of folly and madness emerge in the tale of Donald Crowhurst, there's quite a bit of valor here, too: in his bold lunge, however misguided, to save his family from ruin; in his wife's and his son's candor in confronting their memories and placing themselves in his shoes; and in the film's flawlessly plotted dramatic course. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00sprtaway.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0245429/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 61. SPIRITED AWAY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Japan <br>dir. Hayao Miyazaki <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it promptly converted a huge passel of no-account anime avoiders like myself into fervent fans, remaining a benchmark against which almost all animated features, and a number of fantasy films and children's adventures, would later be compared. Yet Miyazaki achieves this prominence (and an Oscar to boot) without visibly trying to curry favor with anyone but himself. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00wrestler.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1125849/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 62. THE WRESTLER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Darren Aronofsky <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2008</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because no amount of laying things on a bit thick at the end can override a performance and a movie with so much heart, it practically has veins and ventricles instead of shots and scenes. The whole cast gets the vibe, and the soundtrack and photography excel themselves. Even if, like me, you think Aronofsky was coming off his best previous film, he hit a new peak here. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00clean.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0388838/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 63. CLEAN </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Canada/UK <br>dir. Olivier Assayas <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because while comparably great filmmakers revised the maternal melodrama with Sirk as their polestar, Assayas did the same without relinquishing his fascination with modern art and commerce. Cheung and Nolte are unimprovable. The film had a rare aura even before it took two years reaching the States, and before we knew it would effectively be Cheung's last. Or will it? </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00melquiades.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419294/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 64. THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Tommy Lee Jones <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Arriaga's m&#246bius scripts passed from sensation to clich&#233 over the decade, but here he was at his most rigorous and resonant. Jones, in his helming debut, built more than an ideal performance venue; he took a starker, wittier, smarter look at his country than many veteran filmmakers even attempted. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00pianist.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0253474/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 65. THE PIANIST </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Poland/Germany/UK <br>dir. Roman Polanski <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Polanski sustains two precarious balancing-acts: he reprises all his trademarks of formal tension and chilly irony while nonetheless honoring a mainstream genre that often resists more individual styles; and he delivers scene after indelible scene of escaping the Nazis and avoiding the Holocaust, while somehow making a movie that all comes together in the closing sequence. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00prodgson.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1295068/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 66. PRODIGAL SONS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Kimberly Reed <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release forthcoming</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because unlike so many autobiographical documentaries, this one never crosses that palpable line into self-exploitation, and unlike so many filmic rejoinders to "traditional" sex, gender, and sexuality, this one refuses to cloister those issues apart from broader tapestries of personal identity and family life. If there's any justice, this will be a major hit in the coming year. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00pianotch.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0254686/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 67. THE PIANO TEACHER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Austria/France <br>dir. Michael Haneke <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because while Haneke has made more thematically ambitious and formally complex works, neither he nor virtually anyone else has offered such a resolute study of such an imposing character, whom it's impossible not to call "frightening," though one comes to pity her for this. Huppert's performance makes a strong bid as the best of the decade. Top ten, easily. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00eureka00.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243889/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 68. EUREKA </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Japan <br>dir. Shinji Aoyama <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because no matter how many films grappled with the slow, crawling process of recovering from traumatic experience&#151and sadly, the decade kept ratifying the relevance of that theme&#151few films made the catastrophe as well as the aftermath as memorable as this one did. Among its greatest assets are its unusual palette and extraordinary length, though it's hypnotic from end to end. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00jindabyne.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382765/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 69. JINDABYNE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Australia <br>dir. Ray Lawrence <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because I'm almost always game for an unexpected approach to adaptation, but what Beatrix Christian and Ray Lawrence have wrought from Raymond Carver's well-known story yields both a revealing cultural dissection and as generous a set of acute psychological profiles as anyone could ask. Extra points for such painstaking use of widescreen framing and all-natural light. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00wpmeadow.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0366721/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 70. TRILOGY: THE WEEPING MEADOW </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Greece <br>dir. Theo Angelopoulos <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because even though U.S. arthouses and critics would rather die than truly rally behind an Angelopoulos film, they are so painterly and prodigious that they single-handedly restore a sense of awe to the cinema. If his style rarely changes much between projects, its mythic muscularity is always welcome. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00blissyrs.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317171/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 71. BLISSFULLY YOURS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Thailand <br>dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the second half is so saturated with sex, the way I recognize real people having it, lying about it, hoping for it, and talking about it. Lest one forget, the first half is just as flawlessly wry and truthful about work, bureaucracy, and the mundane world of errands. The linking strength is the shrewd handle on human behavior and the playful manipulation of film form. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00croutigr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0190332/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 72. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Taiwan <br>dir. Ang Lee <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because I find the mix of <Font Face=Times><i>wuxia</i></Font> with sentimental romantic drama interesting and honest, given Lee's established strengths and point of view. I don't find either facet of the film dulled by the other, and indeed, the women's expressions of poignant restraint, unbridled anger, and fuming desire make some of the strongest impressions to be found anywhere in Lee's body of work. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00cienaga.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0240419/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 73. LA CI&#201NAGA </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Argentina <br>dir. Lucrecia Martel <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because already in her debut feature, Martel runs the show as though she simply isn't beholden to the usual rules of exposition, editing matches, inconspicuous sound cues, evident links among characters, and pre-set points of audience identification. Yet still, tossing aside all those protocols, she makes us interested, makes us laugh, makes us care. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00amasoeur.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243255/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 74. FAT GIRL (&#192 MA SOEUR!) </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France <br>dir. Catherine Breillat <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because I haven't succeeded in staying as furious as I frankly wanted to stay, after first experiencing its brutality and climactic nihilism. The zero-bullshit portrait of sisterly love-hate and of sexual brainwashing, including of oneself, resonate even longer than the horror and rage that Breillat quite deliberately evokes. And not a shot is out of place. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00bnfalls.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247196/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 75. BEFORE NIGHT FALLS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Julian Schnabel <br>world premiere 2000 <br>U.S. release 2000</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Reinaldo Arenas's prose is an inebriating, sometimes maddening blend of seduction, hedonism, na&#239vet&#233, and political lucidity, and the film blends unbashful doses of all those flavors into its bracing sounds and images. The rare film in which, truly, almost every still-frame would make for an arresting photograph. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00syndcent.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0477731/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 76. SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Thailand <br>dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because "Joe" was to the 00s what Kiarostami was to the 90s: pushing deceptively simple techniques into a disarming, fresh poetics, culminating in sad, playful stories, specific to a culture but breathtakingly accessible. Who else can pick up a dehumidifying tube and turn it into magic? Just by tracking up to it and holding still a while? </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00bfsunset.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381681/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 77. BEFORE SUNSET </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Richard Linklater <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Celine and I agreed that a sequel seemed like a dubious idea, but Jesse, Richard, Kim, Ethan, and Julie really pushed, and they had it right, delivering an intimate, persuasive post-date with all the friskiness and melancholy of the original. The characters are a little wiser, but in some ways just as endearingly foolish. Some things shouldn't change, even as they grow. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00mastcomm.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0311113/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 78. MASTER AND COMMANDER: THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Peter Weir <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it's so easy to think of corsets when you think of "historical drama," and so easy to think of vainglorious manly men when you think of action-adventure. And then comes <i>M&C</i>, with its remarkable envelope of period reality, its natural, lived-in performances, and just the right ratios of illuminating down-time and rousing spectacle. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00wundergr.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0343168/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 79. THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Sam Green <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2003</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because a documentary based around historical footage and talking heads is one of the hardest targets to hit in modern filmmaking, and could easily seem like the wrong format for a story about domestic terrorists. But the combo of coolness and heat, of young idealism, tempered reflection, and courage of conviction, translates potently. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00bournsup.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0372183/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 80. THE BOURNE SUPREMACY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Paul Greengrass <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it drains all the glamour and refutes the myth of imperviousness that so often attach themselves to tales of spy vs. spy, and yet it attains this bedrock of seriousness without tsking the audience for wanting a good time. The balance of vicarious entertainment and bitter medicine is smartly judged, and the craft on display is formidable. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00iraqfrag.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492466/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 81. IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. James Longley <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Iraq at long last ceases to be a visual, conceptual, and discursive impasse, springing to life as a deeply striated space that we sorely need to study. And Longley's color-rich images and evocative sounds make us <Font Face=Times><i>want</i></Font> to study it. And his solitary, revelatory brio in bringing off this film throws down the gauntlet to all the journalists who don't even try. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00drawres9.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446685/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 82. DRAWING RESTRAINT 9 </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Matthew Barney <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the warm, gummy waxiness of the <Font Face=Times><i>Cremaster</i></Font> films suddenly achieves a sharp, chic elegance, even as the film explicitly worries the tensions between the chic and the abject. From the gift-wrapping overture to the slicing climax, Barney has found a new host of objects to glorify and reshape, including Japan, including the sea, including cinema itself. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00code46.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0345061/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 83. CODE 46 </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United Kingdom <br>dir. Michael Winterbottom <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it furnishes one of the few sci-fi glimpses of the future that feels fully and plausibly realized, despite having a tenth of the budget this genre usually exploits. That wealth of detail is even more suggested than it is directly depicted, so the story has the fertile, impacted, kernelish feel of a top-drawer novella. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00anvil.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1157605/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 84. ANVIL! THE STORY OF ANVIL </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Sacha Gervasi <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2009</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because in this case the broad, committed, sympathetic vantage of the fan-filmmaker beats the odds of clich&#233 as fully as Anvil themselves do. Gervasi captures the hurting hearts of the band as well as the absurdity of both their struggles and their joys, and nothing outranks anything else. It's a whole portrait. Plus "Thumb Hang." </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00hfnelson.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0468489/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 85. HALF NELSON </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Ryan Fleck (& Anna Boden) <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the story, the look, the editing, and the splendid performances, especially but not only from Ryan Gosling, confound all those generic teacher-student dramas that never catch anything close to the pulse of a real classroom. Still, the film doesn't come across as a contrarian gesture, but as an honest, incisive study of character. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00scomfort.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276515/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 86. SOUTHERN COMFORT </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Kate Davis <br>world premiere 2001 <br>U.S. release 2001</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the cruel, unusual plight of a charismatic, belatedly visible Southern gentleman becomes a prism through which we perceive a community of friends who are also, for better and worse, a family, plus a social critique that warrants the air time, and a plainspoken snapshot of what happiness looks like, whatever its eventual tolls. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00crem3.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0321781/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 87. CREMASTER 3 </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Matthew Barney <br>world premiere 2002 <br>U.S. release 2002</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the (literally) monumental centerpiece of Barney's five-film cycle is also its ordinal and textural capstone, amplifying his interests in restraint and release, collision and expansion, solids and fluidity, terror and beauty, the human and its others. Bless him for ensuring that those are not just parallel dichotomies. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00sincotar.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0336264/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 88. SINCE OTAR LEFT </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Belgium <br>dir. Julie Bertucelli <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the three women in the movie make indelible individual impressions while also embodying an affecting but unprecious identity as a matrilineal line. And because stories of cultural transition, alienation, and contact are rarely this intimate or this subtly moving. And because of Gorintin's final solo scenes. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00kingsqun.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0344273/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 89. KINGS AND QUEEN </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France <br>dir. Arnaud Desplechin <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Desplechin persists in stretching character, incident, backstory, and velocity until his movies feel like eight-course novels, but the swooning soundtracks, nimble performances, and heightened style make clear that he doesn't want cinema to be literature, he wants it to be <Font Face=Times><i>cinema</i></Font>. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00sillorna.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186369/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 90. LORNA'S SILENCE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Belgium <br>dirs. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release 2009</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the controlled but restive camera found such probing, poignant poetry in a scenario that afforded no easy choices, and because for me, this is the movie where the Dardennes most allow the story to yield up the spirituality and the metaphysics, rather than the other way around. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dogville.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0276919/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 91. DOGVILLE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Denmark/Sweden/Norway/Finland/UK <br>dir. Lars von Trier <br>world premiere 2003 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because von Trier's splicing of Brechtian <Font Face=Times><i>Verfremdung</i></Font> and Greenaway vengeance-by-numbers yields a more productive set of prompts and constraints than Dogme ever gave him. And because you get three parables at once: of Grace, the ruthless victim; of Tom, the evacuated philosopher; and of that plummy narrator, the giggling overseer and the mordant, jubilant scold. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dndnight.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499455/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 92. DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Julia Loktev <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2007</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it insists on the difference between provocation and sensationalism, and doesn't predicate our empathy or interest on the constant provision of backstory. The protagonist has to memorize all kinds of fake "facts," while we react to the austere but plaintive truths of what she's doing, and to the riddles of why or why not. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00notremus.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360845/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 93. NOTRE MUSIQUE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Switzerland <br>dir. Jean-Luc Godard <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because there is no pejorative that scares Godard: not <Font Face=Times><i>pedantic</i></Font>, not <Font Face=Times><i>abstruse</i></Font>, not <Font Face=Times><i>sullen</i></Font>, certainly not <Font Face=Times><i>ambitious</i></Font>, and because he uses the frank, dazzling fact of his montage as an introductory credential toward doing whatever he wants. As daring or dry or kitschy or alarming as it gets, you keep wanting to finish the essay. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00wolfcrek.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416315/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 94. WOLF CREEK </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Australia <br>dir. Greg McLean <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because there is no sense to the trip, or the attraction, or the humor, or the breakdown, or the arrival, or the captation, or the sadism, or the deaths, or the survival. The single edit from unnerving mishap to ghastly catastrophe really knocks the wind out of you, and the whole film is shot and shaped with such precision that the arbitrariness of horror packs a punch. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00dawnded2.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0363547/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 95. DAWN OF THE DEAD </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States/Canada <br>dir. Zack Snyder <br>world premiere 2004 <br>U.S. release 2004</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the decade was positively rotting with millennial and apocalyptic visions, but there was no use being a genre snob, and no reason to, either: Snyder's stranded survivors made for an especially moving and well-defined bunch. And the filmmaking <Font Face=Times><i>popped</i></Font>. And the zombies <Font Face=Times><i>raced</i></Font>. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00capote.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379725/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 96. CAPOTE </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Bennett Miller <br>world premiere 2005 <br>U.S. release 2005</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because amidst an ocean of biopics that would have bored even Paul Muni, this one chased something thornier, riskier, and more humbling than Wikipedia profiling and virtuoso mimicry. The Faustian arc of Capote's soul traces itself in chilly, bone-stark whites, against a field of ink-ribbon black. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00rgsunsky.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1149604/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 97. RAGING SUN, RAGING SKY </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">Mexico <br>dir. Juli&#225n Hern&#225ndez <br>world premiere 2009 <br>U.S. release forthcoming</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because it would be terrible if Genet and Cocteau had lived for nothing, and the world was badly in need of a steamy, sinister, repeatedly circular surrealist epic of homo cruising and Aztec dream-visions. Or at the very least, queer cinema needed a shake-up like this, skirting parody, landing powerfully. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00jmaddog.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1042424/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 98. JOHNNY MAD DOG </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">France/Liberia <br>dir. Jean-St&#233phane Sauvaire <br>world premiere 2008 <br>U.S. release forthcoming</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because its coruscating look at West African child soldiers has all the harrowing vividness of <i>City of God</i> without veering into a romantic apotheosis of thug life and villainy. The neglect from U.S. distributors is hard to grasp, but the trenchant filmmaking casts a scary, unforgettable light where one is badly needed. </td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00departed.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 99. THE DEPARTED </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">United States <br>dir. Martin Scorsese <br>world premiere 2006 <br>U.S. release 2006</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because the film achieves a prodigious verticality, plumbing the depths of DiCaprio's and Damon's best performances of the decade, while at the same time it attains a dazzling horizontality, spreading its personality, energy, and force across a sprawl of thinking, wounding, hustling characters. Just a shame about Jack.</td></tr> <tr> <td width=37% align=center valign=center><img src=best00madeo.jpg width=270></td> <td width=63% align=left valign=top> <Font Face=Garamond Size=+1><b> <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1216496/" style="text-decoration:none" target="_new"><Font Color=Black> 100. MOTHER </Font></a> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> <Font Color="#660066">South Korea <br>dir. Bong Joon-ho <br>world premiere 2009 <br>U.S. release forthcoming</Font></b> <br><Font Size=-3> <br></Font> Because Bong starts his movie so broadly and eccentrically you barely know what to make of it, and though the movie is often loopy, it wrests something recognizable, something convulsive, out of its jagged story and defiantly weird sensibility. It never for a moment feels like anything else, and the finale, true to form, is a different kind of heartbreaker. </td></tr> </table> <br> <center> <Font Face=Garamond> <table cellpadding=12><tr> <td><b><a href=best00snoframes.html target="_top">Permalink</a></b></td> <td><b><a href=movarchs.html target="_top">Home</a></b></td> <td><b><a href=features.html target="_top">Features</a></b></td> <td><b><a href="http://blog.nicksflickpicks.com" target="_new">Blog</a></b></td> <td><b><a href=email.html target="_top">E-Mail</a></b></td> </tr></table> </Font> </center> </body>