By and large, the decade in film was one of maturing talents, as opposed to new arrivals. We didn’t see a new Quentin Tarantino who could alter the way popular cinema saw itself, and we didn’t see any new, Brando-esque actors who blazed an original enough trail to change their craft forever. It was more a decade of expertise: of young filmmakers like Sofia Coppola, Joe Wright, Paul Thomas Anderson and Richard Linklater, who demonstrated a deep reverence for their forebears and an ability to process the wisdom of the past into new works of exceptional quality and beauty. (Almost all of them seem to have taken something from the departed Stanley Kubrick). Those directors who did blaze a path of their own tended to do so in such a unique and original manner, as in the case of Donnie Darko’s Richard Kelly, that no one will likely be influenced by the work.

It was a decade in which blockbusters were produced at ever-higher budgets and new extremes of quality: high in the case of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and low in the case of the unwatchable Transformers films. It was a typically lax decade for marginalized genres such as science-fiction, Westerns and musicals, while Oscar bait issue dramas, hastily-made biopics and portentous crime sagas like Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River were a dime a dozen. It was an excellent decade for European and Asian directors, with names like Claire Denis, Philippe Besson, the Dardennes, Hsiao-hsien Hou and Edward Yang all regularly topping critics’ lists. It was a decade of modest revival for greats like Scorsese, Coppola, and the Coen Brothers, while Spielberg more or less continued to tread water.

It was also a decade of uncertainty. The way films are consumed, the way they’re crafted by studios and by individual filmmakers, the way reviews are written and received by the public, the way technology has created new kinds of movie-watching experiences – it’s all led to a collective upheaval in the industry that still has yet to shake out. What we currently think of as a typical movie-going experience will likely – in fact, almost certainly – be far different a decade from now. The idea of trudging down to a local theater may seem quaint if the typical high-end consumer has a wall-mounted, HD viewing screen that’s 3D capable, and any new film can be downloaded with a few key strokes and a credit card number. The future awaits. In the meantime, here is my list of the best films of the past decade.

1. Before Sunset



Before Sunset is a blur of constant motion, with its central, early-thirties couple frequently walking towards and away from the camera at a brisk pace, catching rides in fast-moving cars and boats, and finally trudging up the stairs to a top-floor apartment. The point, unsubtle but valid, is that life’s forward momentum is as unstoppable as an ocean wave, and only the fools among us would let a chance for real happiness pass us by as we’re pushed inexorably along. This immeasurably superior sequel to Richard Linklater’s 1995 one-night-in-Paris romance, Before Sunrise, which clocks in at barely 80 minutes long, is so unusually knowing about the staying power of true love, the way dreams can affect our lives, and the reality of time never being on our side, that if you see it once, it may haunt you forever.


2. Three Times



The badge around her neck reads: "I suffer from epilepsy. Please do not call an ambulance. Just move me to a warm, safe place." She strums guitar on stage at night and engages in pointless love affairs during the day. Maybe she was happier a hundred years ago. Three Times, from Taiwanese master Hsiao-hsien Hou, shows us a love affair played out in three time periods, always with the same actors. In 1911, the young couple is confident and self-aware, but restrained by social mores. In 1966, an ancient order is crumbling and excitement abounds. An open doorway in a pool hall points to an unknown future. In 2005, freedom has dissipated again, into a morass of text messages and social confusion, while an ascendant, modern world is glimpsed as their motorcycle flies across elevated freeways. Who’s to say one era is more or less free than another?


3. L’Enfant



It’s been remarked that the Dardenne brothers’ masterpiece L’Enfant is told from a God’s eye perspective. If so, that’s a terrifying thought. A dying steel town in the heart of Belgium is the setting for this unusually absorbing crime drama, which follows, in a noticeably detached and nonjudgmental fashion, petty con man Bruno and his girlfriend Sonia as they deal with a new, valuable item that has fallen into their laps: their baby. Bruno’s decision to sell his newborn child to a black market adoption ring is only one several surprising decisions he makes throughout the film; we’re consistently taken aback by his actions because his moral center is a black hole, perhaps as random as the universe itself. L’Enfant gazes deeply into our modern, money-mad world and asks, without a hint of glibness, whether traditional morality has any place in it at all.


4. Donnie Darko



Philosophy of Time Travel is the name of the secret textbook at the center of Donnie Darko, and that book title encapsulates the main character’s naïve, but endearing belief: that it’s somehow possible to discover a theorem or formula for skipping directly over the pain of one’s high-school years. This amazingly complex science-fiction film, a rollercoaster of invention from first-time director Richard Kelly, follows the travails of angsty teen Donnie Darko, a reluctant prophet who beliefs himself privy to knowledge of the future – specifically an impending doomsday – and thus feels entitled to spend his remaining days fixing the world for the better. Donnie Darko has more to say about the horror film-scariness of being on the cusp of adulthood, and about the power of youth to shatter forever the outdated notions of their parents, than all of those 80s teen movies put together.


5. Marie Antoinette



For many of us, the key factor of our lives is not whether we’ll ever grow up, but whether we’ll do so in time. Marie Antoinette boldly appropriates the biography of a doomed French queen to tell the story of an essentially modern young girl who is being dangerously sheltered against the harsh realities of the outside world and yet slowly develops her own innate, rebellious instincts, which she needs more urgently than she realizes. Sofia Coppola’s ditzy, celebrity-and-shoe obsessed teen queen, who moves through 18th century Versailles to the beat of a pop-punk soundtrack (she might as well be wearing earbuds), only slowly comes to understand that those courtesans plying her with the latest fashions and gossip are actually trying to tamp down her true power – her political power. It’s a weighty metaphor for the state of our own deliberately distracted youth culture.


6. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu



We begin in the shabby apartment of Mr. Lazarescu, a Romanian senior played by Ion Fiscuteanu, who spends his time complaining on the phone to distant relatives. Most of them seem to have defected to Canada, maybe to get away from him. We end nearly three hours later, after riding shotgun with an angelic ambulance driver who has taken the stricken Lazarescu on a heroic, Stygian journey through a long, rainy night of visiting multiple hospitals, trying to find one that will admit him for surgery despite severe overcrowding. There’s never been a film like Cristi Puiu’s Lazarescu, which so expertly draws us into a mundane medical crisis and keeps our hearts in our throats at every turn. When Lazarescu finally dies, quietly, on a gurney in a prep room, we only know it because the film ends at that moment, without any cues. The story is over.


7. The New World



With Stanley Kubrick having departed just before the dawn of this decade, Terrence Malick is now our greatest living cine-poet. The New World, remarkably only his fourth feature film, takes the seemingly mundane phrase of the film’s title and invests it with startling vibrancy, restaging the arrival of the Jamestown colonists and their fateful first encounter with those for whom this world was not “new” at all. Like all of Malick’s masterpieces, The New World runs by its own internal chronometer, not by any preconceived notion of pacing for a feature film. It practically breathes in its environment, examining every blade of grass in an unspoiled Eden, which is populated by an ancient people called “the naturals” by the arriving English. Without judgment or political agenda, just an unparalleled eye, Malick frames this initial encounter as what it was: a singular, momentous event in human history.


8. Wendy and Lucy



Imagine having no safety net; no family or friends to count on, no job, no savings and no roof over your head, only $500 in cash and a barely-functioning old clunker. Then the car breaks down. Wendy and Lucy tells the gripping, no-frills story of a twenty-something girl in just such a situation, on her way to Alaska to work at a fish cannery when she’s waylaid by cruel fate and trapped in a featureless strip mall town with her hungry dog Lucy to consider and her options shrinking by the hour. Where can she turn? Influenced by Umberto D. and other classics of Italian neorealism, Kelly Reichardt masterfully dramatizes how terrifying life on the margins of American society can become for those who fall through the cracks. Wendy and Lucy is the kind of film they used to fear would spark a revolution.


9. There Will Be Blood



During a candid moment in this film, early California oilman Daniel Plainview expresses his personal philosophy: “I don’t like most people. I want to earn enough money to get away from them.” It’s that last part, the implied promise that once he has his own security, he’ll go away and stop siphoning off the resources of the poor and the credulous, which somehow sets him up as possibly morally superior to his religious alter-ego, Eli Sunday, a shameless evangelical charlatan with no such insights into his own black heart. America’s two founding lynchpins, big business and organized religion, are treated to their own masterfully-observed dual biopics in this, a huge but welcome departure for cinematic showman P.T. Anderson. The childish quarrel between Plainview and Sunday over who is the more righteous conman gets more soul-sucking by the minute and before it’s all over, see title.


10. Vanilla Sky



The most common question posed in recent sci-fi films: is it better to live in the real world or a dream world? While The Matrix unfairly stacked the deck by making daily life in the dream world a continuation of the regular work grind, Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky took an infinitely more intriguing tack: what if you could personally program that world? What if you could have an apartment, job and identity specifically tailored to your tastes; your choice of women, each of them completely “your type”; even the everyday backdrops of life designed to remind you of your personal record collection. Still seem like an easy choice? This exceptional sci-fi film, full of unexpected twists and searing cinematography, cuts straight to two of the modern world’s most pressing philosophical questions: What is reality? And why should we care?



Honorable Mention: Two Lovers, Waking Life, Killer of Sheep, Son Frere, Millennium Mambo, Home, Sweeney Todd, Julia, Inland Empire, Atonement