THE BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE: #41-50

Introduction

50. Of Time and the City
(Terence Davies, 2008, United Kingdom)

Davies's amazing found-footage documentary of the history of Liverpool is also a documentary of the youth and life of Davies himself, and it's personal enough to burn you. His youth, it seems, was not at all happy, both because society changed faster than he could keep up with it, and because he was really screwed-up by the Catholic Church - and his politely-expressed rage, all these years later, is so open and so self-lacerating and wounded that it's both thrilling and deeply embarrassing to behold. The film itself is a magnificently pure object, a grand achievement of the art of Cinema defined according to the old Soviet rules: it creates meaning out of the combination of detached images overlaid by sounds which possess yet another meaning, and it is the combination of this, image with image, and image with sound, that gives the whole its uncommon effect. (Reviewed here)


49. Saraband
(Ingmar Bergman, 2003, Sweden / Denmark / Norway / Italy / Finland / Germany / Austria)

17 years after Dokument Fanny och Alexander, a study of his own artistic process in the creation of his last true masterpiece, the towering master of cinema returned for one last effort, a sequel to Scenes from a Marriage with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson returning to their old roles in fine, touching form. If I say that Saraband is a minor Bergman film, I say nothing that the director did not know or intend; still, it is a fascinatingly structural work, built as a series of dialogues represented metaphorically as dances (hence the title). Besides, its overriding theme, of an old man looking over his life as he prepares to die: that could not be more Bergmanesque, and to see him confront those questions at the end of his own life, rather than as a 39-year-old making Wild Strawberries; that is something both moving and desperately uncomfortable. (Reviewed here)


48. The Little Matchgirl
(Roger Allers, 2006, USA)

Yep, it's a seven-minute cartoon. You don't like my rules, make your own list. Because this little masterwork - the third and final orphan from the abandoned Fantasia 2006 to be completed - is one of the great works of Disney animation since that company's Renaissance began in 1989: set to Borodin's String Quartet #2, it's a close adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's tale with enough genuine sentiment to make you choke on your tears at the end. And visually, it's a tiny slice of some of the most beautiful cel-style animation you will ever see: softer than typical of Disney, like there's a fine mist of powder overlaying it all, it has the fuzzy texture of a comfortable blanket, which makes the bittersweet final moments that much more gutting. Neither short-form narrative nor traditional American animation get much more tender and heartbreaking than this. (See it on YouTube, in annoyingly degraded quality. Far better if you can get to the 2-disc DVD of The Little Mermaid from 2006)


47. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004, USA)

Please, righteous fandom: it is not that I love Gondry's marvelous anti-romantic comedy the less, simply that I love 46 other movies the more, that I have ranked it thus. For it is, by every measure, a marvel of cinematic invention and writerly genius (belonging to Charlie Kaufman). The very different artistic temperaments involved led to a much greater result than either man has achieved since: from Kaufman, we get the bloodless admission that romance doesn't fucking work, spliced with a heaving romantic sigh that, oh, how we wish it did; from Gondry, we get a grab-bag of visual trickery that use the story's science-fiction trappings as the pretext for scene after scene of high-concept visual poetry. Nobody involved has ever been better: especially Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, playing characters who in real life would be borderline-unbearable, but onscreen are among the most touchingly understandable romantic protagonists in years. (Reviewed here)


46. Y tu mamá también
(Alfonso Cuarón, 2001, Mexico)

Sex in cinema comes in two basic flavors: veiled and curiously puritanical (American), or kinky and destructive past the point of any pleasure (European). It's usually not open, playful, and genuinely erotic, the kind of thing that actual human beings might enjoy experiencing - and this is the first reason that Cuarón's breezy, bittersweet road movie is such a thing to cherish. Another is that it's a crafty, inventive piece of filmmaking: from Emmanuel Lubezki's stage-setting depictions of the Mexican countryside to the subdued, thoughtful narration that constantly, quietly reminds us of the darkness edging around the three protagonists, there's not a second of the movie that could possibly be anything but, well, a movie. Such a heady, evocative movie, too, that speaks volumes about the characters, the country, and the world, just by standing still for a moment and watching. (Reviewed here)


45. No Country for Old Men
(Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, 2007, USA)

They'd done cool intellectualism before, but nothing else in the Coens' career is half as chilly as this oppressively fatalist neo-Western, adapted with very little alteration from Cormac McCarthy, a master of the form. "You can't stop what's coming" says one minor character, and every inconceivably perfect cut, immaculate Roger Deakins composition, and whisper on the soundtrack adds its single measure to our sense of impending apocalypse; so total is the film's creation of a hopeless world that it doesn't even bother to dramatise the climax (the book didn't either). But even in the depths of this nihilism, the film allows a sliver of hope in the form of Ed Bell, immaculately played by Tommy Lee Jones, the one man who refuses to normalise the world's evil. He's even given the privilege of the last word in an ending that, pace the film's critics, could not plausibly be improved upon. (Reviewed here)


44. Three Times
AKA 最好的時光 (Zui hao de shi guang)
(Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2005, (Taiwan / France)

There are some who sniff that Hou's three-part feature is a bit lazy: too reminiscent of his Flowers of Shanghai in the second sequence and Millennium Mambo in the third. I say to that, Bah! Part of this film's joy lies in seeing just how he re-contextualises his previous scenarios to dig a fundamentally new meaning out of broadly identical material (anyway, the third sequence is a distinct improvement on the sometimes listless Mambo). Each segment - set in 1966, 1911, and 2005, respectively - features the same two actors, Shu Qi and Chang Chen, giving the overall feature the sense of a multi-part case study of how love, freedom and youth transcend the trappings of space and time, while yet being bound by the specificity of a given moment. It's a densely intellectual film, but its heart beats with intense yearning and passion. (Reviewed here)


43. The Piano Teacher
AKA La pianiste
(Michael Haneke, 2001, Austria / France / Germany)

Isabelle Huppert is tremendous, giving one of the decade's absolute stand-out performances at the center of Haneke's meditation on sexual repression and its release, a discomfiting character study marked by horrifying bursts of sexual violence. It's no more pleasant than any of the director's films, though it's much more straightforward, lacking the self-conscious deconstructions of cinematic language that he's famous for. Really, it doesn't need them: Huppert's portrayal of the repressed, frightening Erika Kohut gives us quite enough to understand what's going on, and to react with a mixture of pity and abject disgust. Once viewed, it's never forgotten, a merciless treatment of the darkness of the human animal that is far more gripping and illuminating than it is icy and punishing, though make no mistake: this is about as far from a fun night at the movies as you're going to get. (Reviewed here)


42. Million Dollar Baby
(Clint Eastwood, 2004, USA)

Damn it for having those deeply unfortunate scenes with the White Trash All-Stars: otherwise, there's not another frame that I'd call imperfect, let alone bad about Eastwood's most sustained indulgence in the crisp filmmaking language of a bygone era. An old-school boxing movie with the decade's single best use of late-'40s film noir grammar, it would be possible to adore the movie just for Tom Stern and Joel Cox's unimpeachable cinematography and editing; but when the story jumps tracks, what had been "just" a top-notch '40s movie made with '00s technology becomes a haunting and unsettling exploration of morality and Christian iconography (I forget who showed me that the characters map exactly onto the Trinity, but I wish more people would encounter the idea) that does the most impossible thing of all: it makes good use of Paul Haggis's chronic inability to write with subtlety.


41. 12:08 East of Bucharest
AKA A fost sau n-a fost?
(Corneliu Porumboiu, 2006, Romania)

The youngest of the A-list Romanian New Wave directors is also the brashest: both of his features to date have mined belly laughs from topics as arcane and esoteric as the most daunting graduate seminar. Police, Adjective is a study of how we're all the puppets of semiotics; while here, in the finest of modern Romanian films, under-rated because it is a comedy, it's all about the reliability of historical inquiry, and the validity of using history as a source of personal identity. Of course, there's more to it than that: Porumboiu spends the first half of the movie introducing his characters in a brilliantly sarcastic slice-of-life story, while the second half is also a breathlessly hilarious parody of bad filmmaking, one of the funniest movies about moviemaking ever produced. It's that combination of gravitas and dry black comedy that gives this film a boost over its more sober cousins. (Reviewed here)