AKA Cidade de Deus
(Fernando Meirelles, 2002, Brazil / France)
A feverish melange of stylistic flair and an urgent political tract in the guise of a crime thriller. Meirelles grabs tricks from just about every post-French New Wave filmmaker you can name, from Big Daddy Godard himself to Tarantino all the way down to González Iñárritu, but his appropriations never leave the film feeling stale or redolent; on the contrary, it throbs with so much invention you don’t half know what to do with it all. It should be a fatal marriage to apply this crazed battery of flash and glamor to a story about the hellish condition of life in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro – the old “all war films are exciting & thus pro-war” argument – but somehow Meirelles manages to have his cake and eat it too: in addition to being wildly exhilarating, City of God pulses with righteous rage against the abuses of poverty.
AKA แสงศตวรรษ (Sang sattawat)
(Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006, Thailand / France /Austria)
One of those miraculous creations that justifies the existence of the whole art-form, even the movies like Nothing But Trouble: no price is too great to pay for a medium that can enable Apichatpong’s tribute to his doctor parents. Divided into two halves, female and male, mother and father, rural and urban, the film bends all the norms of cinematic representation back around themselves (the use of offscreen space in particular is unlike anything else I can ever remember seeing, or rather hearing) until what’s left feels like a movie dreaming about what it’s like to be a movie. And all that’s before we realise that the story is going to tell itself twice, in two completely different registers. Making abstract poetry out of the simplest details of behavior and setting, it’s a treatment of everyday life that couldn’t possibly be more radical in conception and execution. (Reviewed here)
(Tarsem Singh, 2006, India / USA / United Kingdom)
Some of the films on this list are here for marshaling the vocabulary of cinema in the creation of powerful emotions or heady intellectual experiences; this one got a slot for being the prettiest fucking movie ever made. Compared to The Fall, Avatar isn’t even interesting as a collage of 3-D album covers from the ’70s, the Pixar folks are scribbling with crayons, and those monks who illuminated manuscripts in the Dark Ages are all so many lazy bastards sitting around with their dicks in their hands. There’s still a moving human element, in the story of a guileless little girl (Catinca Untaru) whose boundless imagination reveals by layers the ways that stories are made, and the film’s careful construction demonstrates beyond a doubt that it’s more than skin deep. But mostly, it’s just so gorgeous that I feel actively sad when the movie ends and reality kicks in again. (Reviewed here)
(Andrew Stanton, 2008, USA)
In making this list, I finally had to confront an unpleasant truth I’ve been ignoring for months: the last third of WALL·E is simply not in the same class as the rest of WALL·E, and thus it missed out on the Top 10. But that beginning is still so insanely excellent, especially the absolute, ecstasy-inducing perfection of the first nine minutes, that I just don’t give a tinker’s damn (besides, the end of the film is hardly bad, or even less than pretty good). The Pixar wizards delve deep into the tradition of silent film techniques to create two of the decade’s finest characters using nothing but gestures and beeps, while creating a staggeringly detailed world with truly elegant and noble efficiency, and topping it off with a love story of grand, swooning emotion, including one of the other greatest sequences of the decade: the “define dancing” scene. (Reviewed here)
(Steven Spielberg, 2001, USA)
The irreconcilable worlds of the instinctively friendly Spielberg and the late arch-intellectual Stanley Kubrick collide in a film that poses unanswerable questions about the very idea of “authorship” – which doesn’t make the asking any less valuable. The film itself is a sometimes very messy tale of a deeply obsessed humanoid robot, given sentience and desire and stripped of free will, and the things it says and implies about our own world are not at all comforting, even though the director can’t quite curb his own impulses to find comforting sentiment wherever he can. There’s no defending A.I. against charges of tonal dissonance, but it’s the implications about how we are to read and understand film that emerge from this patchwork, and not the durable but hardly groundbreaking genre story, that make the movie so endlessly fascinating. (Reviewed here)
(Terrence Malick, 2005, USA / United Kingdom)
Somewhere between historical romance (in both the modern and traditional sense) and hallucinatory dreamscape of unblemished nature, Malick’s fourth feature in 32 years finds the director in characteristically excellent form. Envisioning the familiar story of the Virginia Company and the founding of Jamestown in 1607, and the legendary romance between Pocahontas (the wholly amazing Q’orianka Kilcher, only just now in 2010 finishing her second feature) and John Smith (Colin Farrell) as a fable of world-weary men abandoning the decrepitude of the old world for the haunting purity of the new, but failing to leave it untainted in the exchange. We could sigh, “another Malick film about man’s contentious relationship with nature?” except that he does it so damn well; the beauty of Emmanuel Lubezki’s unparalleled all-natural-lighting cinematography is particularly enough to make this the greatest of all the decade’s movies about the spiritual element of nature’s beauty. (Reviewed here)
NB: the film exists in three commercially-released cuts: a 150-minute version prepared by Malick, screened for two weeks in New York and Los Angeles in 2005 for awards qualification; a 135-minute version prepared by Malick, released in 2006 to the rest of the world and replacing the longer cut in those two cities, currently available on DVD; and a 172-minute version, prepared for DVD and Blu-Ray in 2008, that is not referred to as a “Director’s Cut” but an “Extended Cut”, arguing that Malick did not oversee its creation. I have seen the latter two versions, and both are excellent; but I prefer the 135-minute cut, and that is the version you should assume is represented on this list.
AKA Les triplettes de Belleville
(Sylvain Chomet, 2003, France / Belgium / Canada /United Kingdom)
The greatest work of animation of the young century came not from the boundless imagination of Miyazaki Hayao, nor the unflagging geniuses collectively known as Pixar Animation Studios, but from a Frenchman with a warped sense of humor and a single, 25-minute short under his belt. Chomet’s masterpiece is equal parts Jacques Tati (virtually dialogue-free, masterfully using sound and visual choreography in the creation of nonstop gags), cultural satire (both fat, money-grubbing Americans and the wine-huffing, snobby French come under attack), and graphic design based in caricature, refined from the filmmaker’s The Old Lady and the Pigeons, but with a harsher edge of pencil to it. Neither family-friendly nor self-consciously adult, it has the feel of a really witty illustrator’s best work. Besides having just about the freshest look of any movie in the ’00s, it’s absolutely hilarious, and “Belleville Rendezvous” is the great movie song of the decade.
(Guy Maddin, 2000, Canada)
At the request of the managers of the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival, Maddin produced one of the truly original, watershed motion pictures of all time, a pastiche combining elements from Germany and Soviet cinema of the 1920s into six minutes of pure cinema, in the same way that cocaine can be pure: even in this tiny quantity you’re likely to overdose and die. There’s more to unpack in this bite-sized portion of tempestuous editing, images simultaneously familiar and unheard of, and sound that refuses to match up perfectly with the visuals, than in most movies 20 times its length; why not, in a movie about the torments of emotion that concludes that only the power of cinema itself can safe the world from heart death – a fair solution, since it’s the visionary madman filmmaker’s one-of-a-kind aesthetic that nearly kills the world in the first place. (The film can be seen on YouTube, but I’d avoid it; it’s in the wrong aspect ratio. If you can, find a film print, and if not, the 2002 “Guy Maddin Collection” DVD from Zeitgeist)
AKA Les plages d’Agnès
(Agnès Varda, 2008, France)
The first thing the 79-year-old Varda tells us is that she’s not interesting enough to be the centerpiece of a documentary. And though this is every inch a memoir, she makes good on that claim: this isn’t All About Agnès so much as it’s about the places and people who have been around her all her life (with particular attention to her great love, the late Jacques Demy), and the way that cinema has functioned in her life as a tool for capturing moments to be recalled – though conspicuously, not re-lived – in later days. Yet it’s also a tribute to the director’s quick mind, and her refusal to let nostalgia trap her in endless, ossified tribute to the bygone. In essence, it is about being contented with one’s past, and pleased with the present that has come from it; a more perfectly joyful film I have rarely seen. (Reviewed here)
(Richard Linklater, 2004, USA)
Its greatness is partially about context: without 1995’s Before Sunrise to give a contrasting portrait of the same characters in the full flush of youthful enthusiasm, this sequel could not have a trace of its power. But it’s so far beyond that wonderful Gen-X love story in narrative maturity and visual control that it is quite an experience all on its own. In 80 virtually real-time minutes, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) meet for the first time in nine years, walk around Paris catching up, and confront their feelings for each other. The script, by the actors and director, is unstructured to the point where it’s barely a story, but a filmed state of mind: wiser, more regretful, and too lived-in to be romantic. The moment when Celine doesn’t quite touch Jesse’s shoulder is more painfully honest than anything I have ever seen in a cinematic love story. (Reviewed here)