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

So it seems they've based an entire horror movie on that scene from many other horror movies where a person finds themself alone in a dark, sinister-seeming parking garage.



I think we can agree, that if you find yourselves in this position in a movie you are in very serious trouble. You will at some point break into a run and then, just at your moment of escape, you will fumble and drop your keys while trying to get into your car. Then you'll get stabbed in the neck and/or face region. Repeatedly.

The best you can hope for is that instead of a killer, and the above scenario, you'll meet a mysterious trenchcoated man who will give you some secret information. He will say stuff like, "Don't you see how big this is?" "Or, "This goes all the way to the top." Or, "Just who do think it was that paid for all those bagels?"

If you see this guy, relax, he'll be the one in danger. Just try not to get in the way of the blowgun dart or the black-gloved hand that stabs him through the fence he was standing in front of.

Here's the problem with these scenes and probably, this movie. I've been in hundreds of parking garages in my life and they all tend to be incredibly well-lit. Either that or they're open at the sides in which case tons of sunlight, moonlight, lamplight, etc., spills in. I'm assuming the exception is The Ukraine at like, 3 am. I'm sure there are some scary garages over there, however, a sum total of none of the films I see are set in the Ukraine.

Garages, even at night, also tend to have overly helpful attendants who point you towards spots you already saw. I'm sure in an attack situation they'd at the very least be able to call the cops or blow a whistle or something.

They're certainly not busy replacing the burnt out and flickering bulbs that help set that scary mood. Nor are they working on the world's loudest dripping pipes, whose drips collect into large oil-covered puddles. Two things sue-conscious owners tend not to let hang around for long in the real world.





TheCoolerKing begs you to avoid making jokes about how the real horror is trying to remember where you parked.

Movies about movies tend to be pretentious exercises resulting in films only appealing to critics or the creators themselves – unless those movies are about the movie business or better yet, Hollywood. The luster or lack thereof that oozes from this magical town has resulted in no shortage of films that both celebrate and tear down this city.

Join me in a walk down that boulevard of broken dreams for a quick compilation of the best films inspired by Hollywood.

The Big Picture
The saying simply goes, “Write what you know.” Well there are no shortage of writers who have been inspired by Tinseltown, and actor, director and comedian Christopher Guest must have had some experience of success when he made The Big Picture. This film stars a young Kevin Bacon as an aspiring filmmaker who shoots to the top… and falls just as fast. Martin Short is inspired as a gushing agent.

Best line uttered in the movie: “You’re gonna get an agent, a mother, a father, a shoulder to cry on, someone who knows this business inside and out. And if anyone ever tries to cross you, I'll grab them by the balls and squeeze ‘til they’re dead.”



The Player
Tim Robbins’ performance is chilling as a studio executive turned murderer in this Robert Altman modern classic. Perhaps the best film made about Hollywood and the perfect movie to show anyone considering entering this crazy industry.

Best Line: Griffin Mill (Robbins): “I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we've got something here.”



The Muse
Albert Brooks plays a successful screenwriter that has lost his edge and must seek out a Muse (hence the title) and finds it in a spiritual nutcase played by Sharon Stone. Brooks meeting with the nephew of Steven Spielberg named, well, Steven Spielberg is laugh out loud funny.

Best Line: (Brooks to the gate guard, after being informed that he may enter the studio grounds as a “walk-on”) “Let me ask you -- is this the lowest a human being can go? I mean, is there such a thing as a 'crawl on?”

State and Main
David Mamet’s State and Main takes a look at the inner workings of film crews and the result is brutal.

Best Line (Well, the best line that did not contain expletives): “Who designed these costumes? It looks like Edith Head puked, and that puke designed these costumes.”

Bowfinger
Steve Martin is a modern day Ed Wood as a hack filmmaker who makes a film with a celebrity doppelganger with both roles played by Eddie Murphy.

Best Line: Kit (Eddie Murphy): “White boys always get the Oscar. It's a known fact. Did I ever get a nomination? No! You know why? Cause I hadn't played any of them slave roles, and get my ass whipped.”



Swimming with Sharks
Kevin Spacey will is cruel as Superman’s arch nemesis Lex Luthor, but his turn as an agent ever in Swimming with Sharks will be remembered as perhaps his most evil role to date.

Best Line: Buddy (Spacey): “No offense to you, but you are just an assistant. Now, granted, you're MY assistant, but still just an assistant. Dawn, on the other hand, is a producer. Her car phone bills are more than your rent. So, just how far do you think you'll get?”

Get Shorty
Hollywood folks getting mixed up with Mafia types doesn’t seem like such a stretch these days, what with so many lawsuits over that Pelicano guy. John Travolta is flawless as Chili Palmer, a tough as nails hood who would make an excellent film producer.

Best Line: Chili Palmer (Travolta): “Whew, this movie business is tough. I might just have to go back to loan-sharking for a while to get some vacation.”



Full Frontal
Steven Soderbergh put his celebrity cast, including Julia Roberts, on notice that they would drive themselves to the set and do their own hair, makeup and wardrobe for this digital and decidedly indie look at Hollywood.

Best Line: “You can’t pretend that you are having sex with someone, when you are actually having sex with them.”

Ed Wood
Johnny Depp’s performance is enthusiastically over the top as he breathes life into the world’s worst director. As Ed, the story of the making of Plan 9 From Outer Space is as much a disaster film as a story of one of Hollywood’s most infamous characters.

Best Line: Edward D. Wood, Jr.: “No, I'm all man. I even fought in W.W.II Of course, I was wearing women’s undergarments under my uniform.”



S1mOne
Al Pacino is a desperate producer who needs a lead actress and fast. So, with some souped-software he creates the ultimate hot actress – she’s fantastic and all digital. Of course, this leads to complications as the industry suspects this actress may be fake. Hey, in Hollywood, what actress isn’t fake?!

Best Line: Simone: “Everybody always talks about the negatives of cigarettes, but look at the benefits. I mean you don't eat as much and you've got something to hold in your hand.”

Gore gone!

Chris_Gore is an author, a filmmaker, the creator of Film Threat, and in his spare time, protects the city of Los Angeles as a crime-fighting masked vigilante.