It’s not easy, is it, distilling a decade down to a tiny little list of one’s sixteen favorite movies? (Feel free to try it yourself and post the results below.) What criteria do we use? I tried to focus on my own deeply personal reactions, on how I felt watching these films for the first time, on whether or not viewing them a second or third time offered up new pleasures, on how much difficulty I’d have leaving the house if they were playing on my television. I honestly tried to avoid thinking about balancing foreign and English language films, trying to impress or shock you (Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention on one end of the spectrum and Charlie's Angels on the other), or including a reasonable number of women filmmakers (which didn’t happen, though Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay), Friday Night (Claire Denis), and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow) were late and painful cuts.)
But of course, they are all painful. So many of my filmmakers are not represented here. There’s nothing by David Gordon Green, or Jia Zhang Ke, or Michael Winterbottom, or Hong Sang-Soo, to name just a few. Two weeks ago, I was watching School of Rock (Richard Linklater) on TBS or something with my mom and I was thinking, what a great movie. Mainstream Hollywood cinema at its finest. If Mike White had just written one funny line for Sarah Silverman, I think it might have made the list.
Not to say that the films below are perfect. They are just more perfect. And as personal as my choices for the year’s best films might be, these are even more personal. These films aren’t just marked by great writing, sharply honed performances, and a relative mastery of the form, but by the way they reached into my soul. Or altered my perception of my world in some small way. Or simply enthralled me. I walked out of a few of these films thinking that I’d just seen a masterpiece. My top three were like that. Most of them grew on me. And at least one, I hated on first viewing.
16) Offside (Jafar Panahi)
When they’re caught trying to sneak into Iran’s World Cup qualifying match, a group of women is held in a pen outside the stadium by hapless male guards. This is the Panahi film I love, because while it’s about women and their place in Iran, it’s also about soccer and duty and conflicted patriotism and youthful rebellion. Panahi gets his message across, but he also tells a great story about real, raucous characters.
15) A History of Violence (David Cronenberg)
Really, I could have chosen any of his three ‘00s films. Spider and Eastern Promises are also exemplary, but this graphic novel adaptation is my favorite, a rich and satisfying stew of changing identities and sudden brutal violence. A cutting examination of what it means to be American from our neighbors to the north.
14) Serenity (Joss Whedon)
Well, yes. I am one of “those people.” Those Joss Whedon people. I even love Dollhouse. But his Western-tinged science fiction epic, adapted from his excellent series Firefly, should appeal to those outside the fold. It has everything: a caught-on-the-fly aesthetic (later appropriated by Battlestar Galactica), witty dialogue, vivid characters, an all-time classic villain (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a compellingly subversive story about turning humans into monsters.
13) Happy-Go-Lucky (Mike Leigh)
“En Ra Ha, Poppy!” Leigh is another astonishingly consistent filmmaker. While his kitchen-sink-style depictions of working-class Brit life sometimes seem overly rooted in dourness, this is his most ebullient work in many years. At its core is the relationship between the jovial Poppy and her bitter, frustrated driving instructor, Scott. Sally Hawkins and Eddie Marsan deliver such vivid portrayals, we might as well be sitting in the car there between them as they clash.
12) Save the Green Planet! (Jang Jun-hwan)
South Korean maverick Jang ignores the boundaries of genre and good taste in this batshit tale of a schizophrenic kidnapper, Byung-gu (a convincingly unhinged Shin Ha-kyun), and his businessman victim, who Byung-gu believes is some kind of alien overlord. Torture can take the form of a hot iron to the nipples or a punk rock version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” The film has emotional force because, despite its disturbing extremes, it is rooted in genuine trauma, both personal and historical.
11) Monsoon Wedding (Mira Nair)
Nair’s brightly colored love poem to her city, her family, and her culture is a joy to behold. The film flits breezily through a wealth of differing points-of-view, encompassing a broad spectrum of Delhi life while maintaining a buoyant narrative drive.
10) Funny Ha Ha (Andrew Bujalski)
The movie that started a movement. Or not. But I say we forget labels like “mumblecore” and just appreciate Bujalski’s sly, keenly observed, impeccably acted (including by the filmmaker himself) tale of the romantic foibles of a charmingly discombobulated overeducated twenty-something (Kate Dollenmayer). As with his follow-up, Mutual Appreciation, every hem and haw of the dialogue is bracingly true to life.
9) Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
I went into this completely cold. It felt as though I was watching cinema being reinvented. Graceful and achingly tender, the film takes its time drawing you into the world of its characters. It’s an indication of its pace that the opening credits roll 45 minutes in, and of its gentle spell that the title theme is a Thai cover of Marcos Valle’s “Summer Samba (So Nice).”
8) City of God (Fernando Meirelles)
Great, propulsive filmmaking in the service of a socially conscious edge-of-your-seat thriller, set in a favela near the sunny beaches of Rio. It’s also a great companion piece for José Padilha’s engrossing documentary, Bus 174, another one that didn’t quite make the cut.
7) Late Marriage (Dover Kosashvili)
I really thought I hated this film at first, because I was so angry when I left the theater. This emotionally honest and bluntly erotic Israeli comedy-drama is about a feckless not-so-young man being pressured to marry by his tradition-bound family, which calls into question the seriousness of his relationship with his single-mother girlfriend.
6) Memento (Christopher Nolan)
A friend explains the popularity of films like this, Eternal Sunshine, and Shane Carruth’s Primer (another late cut) among the college students he teaches by dismissively pointing out that they succeed by flattering their audience’s intelligence. We get it, right? As a film critic, it may be true that I overrate the unusual, but this film is genuinely clever, formally inventive, and raises some disturbing questions about identity and truth.
5) Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)
Two old friends—one living on the margins, the other moving toward a respectable middle-class existence—try and fail to reconnect on a camping trip. Reichardt’s atmospheric, contemplative indie is gorgeous, well-observed, deeply personal, and slyly political. “Most people don’t see it. They don’t want to.”
4) Frownland (Ronald Bronstein)
Call it mumblecore if you want, but despite all the mumbling, muttering, stammering and general lack of communication on display, Frownland feels more like a pent-up spine-rattling sustained yowl of rage and despair. Centered on a marginally employed Brooklyn loner (a laceratingly uningratiating performance by Dore Mann), his hostile relationship with his roommate, and his failure to connect with other humans, it’s a brutal and resonant look at the underside of urban existence. And it’s funny. I don’t want every movie-going experience to be this grueling, but all independent cinema should be this personal and uncompromising.
3) The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson)
He’s one of our great auteurs, but for some, Anderson can do no right. The same critics that laud filmmakers like, say, Michael Mann or David Fincher for their consistency of vision and their visual fastidiousness somehow find those same traits annoying when they’re in the hands of a droll humanist. Tenenbaums is my favorite of his films because it’s got the best balance of humor and heartbreak.
3) Memories of Murder (Bong Joon-ho)
The decade was all about South Korean cinema for me—about filmmakers like Bong who make fantastic genre films while eschewing the typical boundaries of genre. Like his excellent The Host, Memories of Murder—based on a real serial killer case—is by turns frightening, darkly funny, and moving, with extraordinarily trenchant sociopolitical undertones.
2) In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai)
A perfect collaboration between Wong and cinematographer Chris Doyle, who creates a jaw-droppingly sumptuous visual palette for Wong’s achingly passionate tale of romantic longing. On a purely aesthetic level, one of the most beautiful films ever made.
1) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
This is that rare moment when a director and screenwriter are in perfect sync with one another. Only Gondry could have brought such magical energy to Charlie Kaufman’s gloriously mundane and depressive fractured romance.
And if the past decade had a theme, it was willed amnesia. That, and shifting and invented identities. And a few glimmers of hope, strategies for navigating an increasingly harsh reality. If America lost its innocence in the ‘60s, it lost its soul in the ‘00s. I can be a little optimistic because some of my favorites from 2009 (Collapse, In the Loop, Hunger, Where the Wild Things Are, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Pontypool, and The Headless Woman among them, none of which I’m ready to include in my best of the decade yet) are, to some extent, about pulling our collective heads out of the sand and facing unpleasant truths, or about the danger of ignoring or denying those truths.