This is the first time I’ve ever made a Top 10 List of anything. I’m not one for rules, and trying to have a set number of things has always been very difficult. Reading through the Top 10 lists for the Aughts, however, reminded me of how many great films from the Aughts were beloved by me and just not represented well so it was time for me to take a stand. My list is in chronological order—there can’t be one best film of the Aughts, just as there can’t be one best day in June—and you may notice that some years are more heavily represented than others. Film always has its bumper years, when by sheer coincidence, a crop of unforgettable films find themselves screening at your local theater. Here, those bumper years are 2000, 2002, and 2007. The other two years represented, 2005 and 2006, have only one film each. This is in Sethland an accurate reflection of the landscape: the last years of the Aughts had great technical and formal precision, but no heart, and the early Aughts had lots of ideas but no direction.
Dancer in the Dark (2000) dir. Lars von Trier
"A film of so much daring, a film that takes so many chances, it's impossible not to be impressed." Chris Kattenbach, Baltimore Sun
Perhaps best known for the dress that Bjork wore to perform one of the film’s Oscar nominated songs, Dancer in the Dark is a long, obvious, painful journey of a film. The film starts with a four minute overture, both an allusion to the grand musicals of the 50s and 60s and a huge bore. But von Trier and especially Bjork make this story of a Czech immigrant who is going blind and loves musicals whose son will go blind if he doesn’t get a surgery by his 13th birthday and who runs afoul of the law an unforgettable and unshakable film. Even though you can see the entire film coming from 20 miles away, it will shatter you when it finally passes you by.
Recommended viewing: Breaking the Waves, Singing in the Rain, Joan of Arc (the one from 1927)
In the Mood for Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar Wai
"Probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever." Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
The most beautiful film on this list, its influence on cinematographers cannot be understated and made Christopher Doyle among the most sought after cinematographers of the decade. But the film’s visuals are just a means of accessing its deep and tangible sensuality. The tale of two neighbors whose spouses are having an affair, it is one of those films, so frequently seen in the independent cinema, in which nothing happens. But here, that nothing means everything because everything is so charged that the flick of a dress or a trip to a noodle stand can change the tide. This description sounds very high falutin’ and pretentious, and it is, but there’s no other way to describe it. Seeing this movie, potentially with someone you love, may be the best decision you’ll make in the new decade.
Recommended Viewing: Happy Together, Lust Caution
Spirited Away (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki
"It is plainly, though not simply, a masterpiece from an acknowledged master of contemporary animation, and a wonderfully welcoming work of art that's as funny and entertaining as it is brilliant, beautiful and deep." Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
Spirited Away is a little bit like The Never Ending Story except that is animated, Japanese, and it is a lot better. It is not only the best film by celebrated Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, like Almodovar’s Talk to Her, it is also the one that best distills and expands on his trademark narrative and visual style. Miyazaki loves the place where the world of Japanese folklore meets the contemporary Japanese landscape, which usually happens when precocious young girls are around. As with all auteurs who have made great films, the critical reception for many of his films is overwrought, but it is spot-on with Spirited Away. It is a fantastic, epic journey that is funny and touching, and almost earns every minute of its more than two hour running time.
Recommended viewing: My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Metropolis
The Closet (2001) dir. Francis Veber
"More sweet than savage, this amiable farce creates laughs with old-pro efficiency." David Ansen, Newsweek
Americans cannot make a good comedy of errors anymore, so the French have to do it all by themselves. In recent years, films like The Valet and The Dinner Guest have made it over to American theaters and been hailed as the new best French comedy since…The Closet. The Closet, starring French heavyweights Daniel Auteuil (their Tom Hanks) and Gerard Depardieu (their Jack Nicholson), is about a man who is about to lose his job. Or a man who would have lost his job if he hadn’t just come out of, you guessed it, le placard. A snowball rolling downhill ever faster, the errors just pile on during its brisk 90 minutes. It is the funniest hour and a half you’ll spend watching a movie all decade.
Talk to Her (2002) dir. Pedro Almodovar
"Like all great doomed affairs, "Talk to Her" is full of lovely, sweet suffering. And when it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart." Elvis Mitchell, New York Times
Talk to Her, the second film in the golden age of Almodovar that began with All About My Mother, may well be his masterpiece. The story of four intersecting lives, it focuses on the relationships that two men have with two women who are in comas. It is about love and circumstance and the wheel of fortune. It is also breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreaking, and achingly funny and suitably strange. It lacks many of Almodovar’s usual cast of characters, and the plots are less cleverly constructed than he usually likes. These differences may have freed his storytelling to create a sublime confection that should be seen by anyone who loves women.
Recommended viewing: Live Flesh, The Flower of My Secret, Volver
Lilo & Stitch (2002) dir. Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders
"This screwball comedy about a scrappy Hawaiian kid and the rabidly destructive little alien she mistakes for a dog is powered by ferocious joy. And, remarkably, it manages to incorporate traditional Disney values, such as the sanctity of the family, in a visually bold, subversively witty package that's as far from corporate as mainstream movies get." Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal
Lilo & Stitch is a film that has been underappreciated even since its first appearance in theaters. When it came out, some decried its washy, watercolor aesthetic (appropriate for a film set in Hawaii), but mainly, critics (and let’s be honest, as much as people hate critics, they curate cultural memory), have been distracted by the pleasures of 3-D animation too much since Pixar established itself as a powerhouse to effectively champion traditional animation.
Lilo & Stitch is something truly radical in traditional animation: it is a film about two sisters looking after each other after the death of both their parents, being watched like a hawk by a Social Worker, and in quiet ways dealing with the effects of tourism on a native culture. It is also a buddy film, as all Pixar films are, but the buddy here is a demonic space alien named Stitch who was created through genetic experiments. It’s also about a little girl who loves Elvis and dolls that seem to have been concocted by Tim Burton. It also features women who have curves and dark skin, and surfing montages. It’s a dazzling little film that will make you laugh, and cry, and does it with greater levity than any Pixar film that isn’t directed by Brad Bird.
Recommended viewing: Mulan, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Raising Victor Vargas
Murderball (2005) dir. Henry Rubin and Dana Shapiro
"You don't have to try to love this movie. It'll knock you down on its own. And speaking of topples -- something you see a lot of here -- there isn't a sentimental stumble in the whole film." Desson Thomson, Washington Post
Murderball is a name for quadriplegic rugby, and this film has a lot of scenes of people in wheelchairs playing rugby. Like at least two other films on this list, it’s also about how people cope with loss—in this case mobility—and maintain a sense of masculinity when you sit four feet tall in your wheelchair. It uses a mix of narrative styles (the competition arc, personal growth narrative, educational exposition, surreal animation) to present a documentary not only about murderball and the people who play it, but also one about the feeling of loss and of perseverance. Whenever I watch it, it requires great perseverance to make it to the end as I start crying an hour in.
Recommended viewing: To Be and to Have, Whale Rider, Rivers and Tides
Children of Men (2006) dir. Alfonso Cuaron
"Cuarón has created a dire warning of the world that could be, but he's also made a film about faith, love, sacrifice, and all the other hard-won virtues that keep the world alive. It's a heartbreaking, bullet-strewn valentine to what keeps us human." Keith Phipps, Onion A.V. Club
You’re either going to think that this movie is the first sign of the messiah, or that it’s unintentionally funny. People who fall into the latter camp tend to be nihilists, and people who fall into the former camp tend to be correct. Based on a P.D. James novel, Children of Men is about what happens when humanity can no longer reproduce. It’s an apocalyptic landscape, one similar to what Blade Runner or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road traffics in, but it’s almost impossibly real. As lensed by Emmanuel Lubezki (who unfairly lost the Academy Award for Best Cinematography to the fine but uninspired work done for Pan’s Labyrinth), it is filled with light and dirt and sometimes blood right on the lens. It has some brilliant set pieces—most famously a five minute, single shot escape sequence—but it even more effectively stacks the decks to make its almost impossible story have real weight and pathos.
Anyone with a need for context and an inability to suspend disbelief (people with CS degrees, take note) are not going to be happy campers. Cuaron, like most great filmmakers, is a sensualist: he believes in touch, texture, and faith. For him, seeing is believing, and all that you need to know and experience, you will be given.
Recommended viewing: Y Tu Mama Tambien, No Country for Old Men, The Corporation
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) dir. Julian Schnabel
"“The Diving Bell” surges toward redemption—a man fully realizing his humanity only when mobility and sexuality have been taken away. Imperially free and generous as Schnabel’s work is, the imagery—medical, erotic, religious—hangs together with enormous power. The birth of Bauby’s soul feels like nothing less than the rebirth of the cinema." David Denby, New Yorker
Julian Schnabel is a noted, but awful, painter, a sometime real estate developer, and an auteur of the highest order. His three films to date, Basquiat, Before Night Falls, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly are cinematically and narratively challenging, but you would never know it because of the keen eye and voice that Schnabel brings to his projects. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is the greatest challenge of the three, as it is the story of a man who has been trapped inside himself after a stroke and is based on a memoir made of memories and perceptions and reflections. Translating the human interior is the Everst of cinema, one that has become more and more important as films are increasingly based on books written in modernist prose. Schnabel, with the help of Steven Spielberg’s usual cinematographer, not only creates a potent and involving narrative, he makes it a story about beginnings, rather than endings using clever but not cloying visuals. Many compare this film to The Sea Inside, a Spanish film starring Javier Bardem as a quadriplegic who wants to end his life. The film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2004, but that film was about the trapped man as political martyr (and capital), whereas this is about how a man who is trapped finds a way into himself in spite of his condition.
Recommended Viewing: Before Night Falls, The Elephant Man, The Sea Inside
Ratatouille (2007) dir. Brad Bird
"A nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised." A.O. Scott, New York Times
Never has a film been so filled with the effervescence of creating something as Ratatouille, Brad Bird’s follow-up to The Incredibles. It is the story of a rat who is a pariah in the rat world because of his love of food, but is similarly outcast among the foodies of Paris because he is a rodent. When our protagonist Remy (voiced wonderfully by Patton Oswalt) and Linguini, a plongeur in a 3-non Michelin star restaurant (assumedly the equivalent of 1 Michelin Star),discover that they can communicate with each other, an entirely new world opens and so too does the film’s creative and narrative possibility. The central tension that arises in the film is not whether or not a rat can be a great cook—we already know within the first 20 minutes that this is so—but whether or not we have the capacity to accept that great things can come from less than gleaming surfaces. Incidentally, this is something that many critics argue is at odds with an animated film: disputations on the perception of art. But this film is merely animated with the effervescence of creation itself, and what a wonderful work it is.
Recommended Viewing: Synecdoche New York, Mostly Martha, Pollock
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