Pride Unprejudiced: The 2000s

	..Top Tens of 2009 Scoreboard
	..Top Tens of the Decade Scoreboard

The 2000s

Sound and light and color and tempo and dreamscapes. Bursts of beauty, inexcusable, inexplicable stirrings of desire and satisfaction that can only be expressed in this lovely, unshapely catchall medium. A slap to our bottoms, a pinch to our cheeks that says, we are in this together. But mostly? I want suffocating beauty. As in beauty as paradox, irreconcilable, as in the Oscar Wilde observation along the lines, beauty is more valuable than science, for it requires no explanation. That's cinema. Stories.

In Wim Wenders' The State of Things (1982), the doomed Coppola-like producer, Gordon (Alan Garfield) tells German director Friedrich (Patrick Bachau), "The same old story, I keep telling you. Without a story you're dead. You can't build a movie without a story. Have you ever tried building a house without walls? It's the same. You can't build a house without walls. A movie's got to have walls, Friedrich." "Why walls?" replies Friedrich. "The space between the characters can carry the load." Does Friedrich believe that? Wenders? Do these movies? I compiled a version of this list in December and then expanded it to the version here. Somehow after the inundation of dozens of other brightly reasoned and lucidly observant lists, I ought to revise my early judgments. Doesn't seem likely: it'll take another decade at least. As with any ranking like this, taking into consideration any of a hundred shifting factors-personal thrills, social importance, relevance to changes in the medium-would shift things around if it were revised in a month or a year, just as I have for weeks on end.

1. In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-Wai, 2000
Story goes that WKW was his customary pushing-past-the-deadline self debuting this picture at Cannes in its closing days. The print arrives, barely done, the night before, a projectionist test is run. Wong has an idea and gets some scissors. He looks for the scene consummating the dance of desire between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. And then there wasn't. A beautiful man who can wear a tie, a beautiful woman in a battalion of successive high-collared cheongsam. Looks of desire, clouds, rain. Repetition, proximity, music, exchange of glances. Romance = cinema.

2. Yi Yi, Edward Yang, 2000
Perfection. It's taken for granted because it seems so simple, so easy, so natural. The late Yang's Yi-Yi is a tender masterpiece of the ways of the human heart. Family as lovingly detailed soap opera; at just under three hours, the Taiwanese master, a key influence on Japanese and Chinese film, made a multigenerational epic worthy of a novel. And, strangely befitting his background in computer science, he knew precisely where to place the camera for the most dynamic effect, in shots both wide and close. He died at 59, but as legacies go, this is a great one.

3. Before Sunset, Richard Linklater, 2004
Before Sunset has a perfect ending: an open-armed tease but closure, too. Thematically and emotionally, it's one of the sweetest and sexiest line readings of the decade, an ideal culmination of the flirt and tease of the whole enterprise. Linklater knows there's grandeur in the smallest of shared, skittery moments. This couple that never was, with dreamy memories of their one-night stand, are different people now, older, oft-disappointed, yet despite underlying melancholy, still straining for a moment of genuine contact. They talk and talk and it's cheek-flushing stuff, hesitation followed by boldness, richly considered philosophical stuff bordering on the pretentious followed by something giddy or sexually forward.

4. Once, John Carney, 2006
Were we talking about romance? One of the shittiest-looking great movies ever, Once is a singularity. Glen Hansard, Markéta Irglová, you shared an Oscar, don't go trying it again. Once had me at "hi-how-are-ya," The narrative strategy, built more around small misunderstandings and the making of songs, is similar. (Naked lyrics are quickly clothed in melody.) Layers peel away, the Boy and the Girl's preconceptions of each other (and ours of them) fall away, and their music, urgent and lovely, grows, a collaboration with someone who turns out not only to be a pianist, but a good lyricist and a fine singer. The Girl is not just a girl; they have talent to share. Let's make music together, all right? Fair play.

5. United 93, Paul Greengrass, 2006
And then it's all snatched away, the taken-for-granted romance, love, dream, family, legacy. After the knuckle-punch of United 93, Greengrass was Bourne again and cinematographer Barry Ackroyd devised the hand-held roundhouse style of The Hurt Locker. In the years after 9/11, with the months it takes mood to seep from streets to the movie screen, a weariness set into movies that weren't gimcrack whirligigs that escaped that nightmare. Greengrass hopes to plunge directly into that fearful day: bleak, necessary.

6. The New World, Terrence Malick, 2005
And what fresh world is this? I've seen two of three extant edits of Malick's splendid eyeful, and could imagine myself, having the time, to be like the Guardian's John Patterson, who just confessed to having seen it at least thirty times. As the British come to Jamestown, the natives discover them, as well. Nature and naiveté surround them all. Onrushing like a river, The New World is a heartfelt glossary of unutterable emotional delights.

7. Lilja 4-Ever, Lukas Moodysson, 2002
Moodysson began as a teenaged poet and his films, from Show Me Love to Mammoth, fix on our responsibilities to the children of the world. As 16-year-old Lilja, Oksana Akinshina has a heartbreaking face, innocent, still a child. In fallen Russia, she's prey. She's exploited and all she wants to do is die. How do you make a heartwrenching, beautiful film of this? Watch, find out, hear Rammstein on your way to heaven. Lost Highway meets Mouchette.

8. Beau Travail, Claire Denis, 2000
Man's fate as elliptical dance musical: The plaintive Beau Travail proves that movies don't need words. It's based, sketchily, on the goings-on in Herman Melville's "Billy Budd." French Foreign Legionnaires linger under the blinding desert sun of Djibouti. Inevitable masculine conflicts, whether violent or homoerotic, are doused in mood and inchoate myth. We are given motion, gestures, an enactment of anachronistic masculine ritual. The men work, strain, sweat; we are immersed in the routines of these sinewy Sisyphuses as they are weighted with inexorable fate. Not every movie could, or should, be like this, stubborn, obstinate, melancholy, laconic, cryptic. But she knows the rhythm of a heartbeat. (1999; U.S. release 2000.)

9. Regular Lovers, (Les amants réguliers) Phillippe Garrel, 2004
Garrel resented the portrait of Paris '68 in Bertolucci's The Dreamers, which co-starred his son, then he made a three-hour, black-and-white, full-screen portrait of his experience of Paris '68, which starred his son. Less mirror than emotional kaleidoscope, Regular Lovers also boasts a great dance scene at a party to The Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow." Wes Anderson wept.

10. Man on Wire, James Marsh, 2008
Unceasing delight: a child in France glimpses the plans for a building to be built in lower Manhattan and grows up to walk between its towers, the twin towers of the almost-finished World Trade Center after tears of clandestine plotting by a cell of artistic provocateurs. Philippe Petit is a ginger trickster, and Marsh's film, propelled by a library of Michael Nyman's music, captures romance, daring, innocence, yet never invokes the fate of Petit's complex edifices. In the world of Man on Wire, 9/11 never happened. <i>Jouissance</i>? It's the life force.

11. A Christmas Tale, Arnaud Desplechin, 2008
Christmas is coming and the buffet is getting fat: Desplechin is a major maximalist of the past decade, and his deceptively rich tapestries reward re-viewing. You could start with performances he gets from the likes of Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve… and… and… Tres belle.

12. The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, 2008
But what's more maximal than Chicago by night from the sky in IMAX? Few things: even Heath Ledger's Joker can't match its gleam. Why so delirious?

13. Millennium Mambo, Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001
An ever more druggy delirium: "This took place ten years ago, around the turn of the century…" Hou's fixations on youth culture, gangster culture and wide-eyed actress Shu Qi come to dreamy, hypnotic form in this languorous neon romance. Three Times, Café Lumière and Flight of the Red Balloon are terrific but this one's wallpapered my dreams.

14. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, Cristi Puiu, 2005
Man goes to heaven. An angel wishes him Godspeed, laving his ancient, overstuffed, nude form. It's the last frames of Puiu's three-hour descent into the lowest circles of Bucharest healthcare after nearly three hours of a man's slow expiration. Along the way, men are hapless, but the women, neighbors, EMTs, doctors, move him on his way. Tragedy has seldom been funnier. A leading light if the decade's most interesting New Wave, from Romania.

15. Reprise, Joachim Trier, 2006
Art, youth, mental illness, a visual style to outstrip Tom Tykwer at his twentieth-century ADD-est? Reprise, by a former Norwegian skateboarding champ, is a dazzling formal display, in sound, image and music, but it works best as a portrait of two writers in their early twenties who want success as novelists. Life, in the form of girls and madness, intercedes. As audacious in its time as Shoot the Piano Player must have been in its own.

16. The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006
A man listens. Camera watches. Ulrich Mühe, who died shortly after at 54, is one of the decade's great listeners. Like a scenarist or theater director, his East German spy diagrams the intrigues of the artists he shadows, knows intimately, can never know. Von Donnersmarck's debut is astringent in style, but Mühe's expressiveness in repose is minimal acting at its most memorable.

17. Head-On, Fatih Akin, 2004
But there is room for German maximalism: Birol Unel's performance as a middle-aged Turkish-German who gets involved with a Turkish woman (Sibel Kekilli) makes for a volcanic portrait of self-deception and self-destruction.

18. The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson, 2007
Bright colors disguise fragrant subtext. A tossed-off "Would you look at those assholes?" changes a world weighted by liberal-like guilt. A film about three jerk American brothers traveling India gains resonance for its underlying critique and simultaneous embrace of their puny follies, their hapless misunderstanding of exotic worlds beyond their reach. Life changes after a sudden death, but it doesn't dismiss the savor of "Hotel Chevalier," the James Salter-like wafer that raises the curtain.

19. Stevie, Steve James, 2002
Documentaries try to be about truth. Great documentaries are about lives. Through the Big Brother program while in graduate school at Southern Illinois, future Hoop Dreams director James had mentored a 10-year-old ball of confusion named Stevie Fielding. Years later, he follows up. Soon after, Stevie commits a crime. James continues to visit him for four years as his case progresses, hoping to understand the boy who became the man he cannot help. Faulknerian in the dimensions of its tragedy, there are still hopeful words, particularly on why "nobody should be lonely," a moment of radiance, even transcendence.

20. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, 2001
Transcendence from terror: Mulholland Drive was a failed ABC television pilot, abandoned, as broken as Lynch's spirit. But one day he had a dream… and shot additional material. If you know the film, you can tell what came anew: the sense of a self that can never be whole against the Hollywood backdrop: the madness of performance and the birth of Naomi Watts' career.

21. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Adam McKay, 2004
"I love carpet. I love lamp. I love lamp." Some days I love "Talladega Nights," but "Anchorman" may be the movie that out-Apatows Apatow for forging a distinctive contemporary comedy voice, taking only absurdity seriously.

22. Children of Men, Alfonso Cuaron, 2006,
2027 is a bit of a wreck: Cuaron's dystopic world, however, gleams, an imaginative hurtle through what comes after what comes next, a few years after Collapse, a few years before Avatar.

23. Donnie Darko, Ricahrd Kelly, 2001
What a movie to open in the weeks after 9/11. Just start with the airplane engine crashing into the bedroom. Kelly's puzzle-box of teen self-pity and self-formation entertains even while never quite coming to lucidity.

24. Demonlover, Olivier Assayas, 2002
A movie that adopts the perspective not of an ADDled boy but of the internet itself: a jangle of warring narratives fueled by chilly greed and cold-hearted lust. Or a dream shared by a dozen European satellite channels on an icy night… Assayas' gentler films like Summer Hours are fine, but his freak-outs are, too.

25. There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007
The height and death of auteur cinema in the studio system: a howling anomaly of sound, vision and non sequitur. Paul Thomas Anderson drinks your milkshake. And with Punch-Drunk Love, he milks your migraine. There will be cinema.

26. L'intrus, Clarie Denis, 2004
Dream is but a life.

27. Werckmeister Harmonies, Bela Tarr, 2000
The sustained opening shot is a masterclass in the moving camera. The mysteries begin.

28. My Winnipeg, Guy Maddin, 2008
At the confluence of the Red River and Assiniboine River lies the lap of Winnipeg and fever dream begins: a model for an everyman's apocrypha of one's own city and damn funny. Maddin's Hearts of the World, the 2000 short that brought him out of the wilderness, actually belongs on this list, maybe in the top 5; it's swell that across the decade he's found a way to let his fixations and stylistic tics breathe.

29. Zodiac, David Fincher, 2007
Man's work. It'll never satisfy.

30. The Brown Bunny, Vincent Gallo, 2003
Men? Self-pity? Self-loathing? That's our Vinnie. Masculine grief too readily slips into self-pity in Gallo's terrifying tale of loss.

31. All the Real Girls, David Gordon Green, 2003
A kiss.

32. Kings And Queen, (Rois et reine) Arnaud Desplechin, 2004
A breakdance.

33. Caché, (Hidden) Michael Haneke, 2004
A camera; a camera operator.

34. Still Life, Zhang Ke Jia, 2006
UFOs; unidentified futures.

35. Marie Antoinette, Sofia Coppola, 2006
"Hong Kong Gardens."

36. Amélie, (Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain), Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001
It's as swoony-spastic as Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player; as quartier-specific as the films of Prévert or Carné; and as forgivingly elastic of space as the films of Jacques Tati (the title Playtime would suit Jeunet's film as well). It's got the list-making of Trainspotting; Peter Greenaway's jam-stuffed frames, (but with a sense of humor); roguish pets with anthropomorphic longings out of Tex Avery; a box of long-lost boy's toys precipitating a cascade of nostalgia, as in Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men. See: another list.

37. Let the Right One In, Tomas Alfredson, 2009
"I'm not a girl."

38. The Son's Room, Nanni Moretti, 2001
"You talk to me as if from a distance and I reply with impressions chosen from another time, time, time, from another time."

39. Pola X, Leos Carax, 2000
Leos Carax meets Guillaume Depardieu meets Catherine Deneuve meets Scott Walker…

40. Primer, Shane Carruth, 2004
What are inventors thinking in that shed out back?

41. Morvern Callar, Lynn Ramsay, 2002
Musical, confident, gorgeous, barking mad.

42. Barking Dogs Never Bite, Bong Joon-Ho, 2000
Or The Host. Or a film by Bong's countryman Hong Sang-soo.

43. The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas Kiarostami, 2000
The "unfinished film" in splendid form. (1999; U. S. release 2000.)

44. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry, 2004
Cauterize the mind: "Fuck me? Forget you!"

45. The Best Of Youth, Marco Tullio Giordana, 2003
This was made for television? Epic yet intimate filmmaking from another dimension.

46. Team America: World Police, Trey Parker, 2004
"America, fuck yeah."

47. Brothers of the Head, Keith Fulton & Louis Pepe, 2005
"Ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't've fallen in love with?"

48. Irréversible, Gaspar Noé, 2002
His hand, her belly: fingertips soft as breath.

49. Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat, 2001
To my sister, indeed.

50. The Headless Woman, Lucretia Martel, 2009
A life, asleep. Listen, look, linger.