Three men and a decade

Three SN&R film critics. Ten years. Ten movies each. Thirty don’t-miss films—and not a single overlapping cinematic masterpiece. So it goes with Jonathan Kiefer, Jim Lane and Daniel Barnes; here are their top 10 films of the decade.

Best? Top? Favorite? I don’t know what to call them. I had enough trouble narrowing it down to as many movies as years. These annual reflective roundups always confound me (and you, probably), but the tyranny of 10 becomes even more outrageous when dealing with a decade’s worth of material.

So there’ll be no proselytizing here, just a sort of blurred time-lapse snapshot of one man’s (evidently, rather arty) moviegoing disposition.

You’ll notice a lot from Europe. And one American film set in Europe. And another that’s a documentary about an American made by a European. What can I say? By the time you read this, I’ll have left for a European vacation. I doubt that will get it out of my system.

You may also spot me feeling wistful about the relentless march of time. Well, as someone in a movie once said, “Memory is a wonderful thing if you don’t have to deal with the past.”

Before Sunset (2004): Writer-director Richard Linklater reunites the couple played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in his 1995 film Before Sunrise, with profound and moving results.

Caché (2005): A perfect little thriller that also happens to be a timely parable on colonial blowback and the inverse proportionality of surveillance and disconnection. Typically excellent actors Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil rise to a typically pitiless challenge from the austere Austrian auteur Michael Haneke.

Grizzly Man (2005): This exquisitely appropriate union of artist and subject—German madman moviemaker Werner Herzog reflecting on doomed Alaskan bear-watcher Timothy Treadwell—has been haunting me for years.

Let the Right One In (2008): If I could see only one vampire movie ever again, or one coming-of-age movie, both would be Tomas Alfredson’s film of John Lindqvist’s script of his own novel.

Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005): My Tower Theatre experience of writer-director-performance-artist Miranda July’s inspired, invigorating feature debut ranks high among decade-best movie memories. Its faith in artfulness and fellowship has since been guiding.

Russian Ark (2002): At last, a film on which Russian history buffs and tracking-shot fetishists can agree. Filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov’s technically and poetically astonishing stroll through St. Petersburg’s Hermitage Museum is a virtuosic correlation of content and form.

Saraband (2003): The late, great master Ingmar Bergman reunites the couple played by Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman in his 1973 film Scenes From a Marriage, with profound and moving results.

Sexy Beast (2000): Gangster chic had gotten tediously shabby when director Jonathan Glazer’s sinewy feature debut came along. Ray Winstone gives this brilliant black comedy its savory soul, and Ben Kingsley gives it a live-wire jolt. To borrow a line from the latter, “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”

Touch the Sound (2004): You might expect a documentary about a deaf percussionist to get gimmicky or shamefully schmaltzy. But Thomas Riedelsheimer’s innately cinematic portrait of Evelyn Glennie takes its subject’s example and defies all conceptual limitations.

You Can Count on Me: (2000) With serene intelligence, genuine warmth and great roles for great actors Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney, playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan’s directorial debut set a new standard for intimate character-driven drama. (Jonathan Kiefer)

How has the first decade of the 21st century shaped up, moviewise? Not bad, really. It’s easy to lose heart sometimes, awash in a flood of lunkhead comedies, martial-arts kickfests, demolition derbies and movies based on video games and 1970s toys; but after all, Theodore Sturgeon’s Law tells us that 90 percent of everything is crud. Besides, any decade that includes one of the towering achievements of movie history has to be a net gain.

Whether you see it as three movies or (like me) one movie released in three parts, the decade was dominated, almost from the outset, by The Lord of the Rings—Peter Jackson’s monumental, pitch-perfect filming of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic trilogy of Middle Earth. New Line Cinema’s $281 million gamble paid off in spades, with a worldwide box office of $2.9 billion and 17 Academy Awards (11 for the last installment alone). The real payoff, though, was artistic: Jackson’s unerring realization of Tolkien’s fantasy world was everything the old professor could have wished, a haunting and haunted film showing the awful cost of war even to the victors fighting on the side of right against unalloyed evil.

So for me, the years 2000-2009 boil down to The Lord of the Rings and everything else. Here are the rest of my top 10, in alphabetical order:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007): Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Ron Hansen’s nonfiction novel was long and slow, but a stark, clear-eyed picture of outlaw life in the real Wild West.

Downfall (2005): Hitler and his minions cower like rats in their bunker as Germany disintegrates over their heads; a gripping recreation by director Oliver Hirschbiegel, with Bruno Ganz brilliant as the unhinged dictator.

Finding Nemo (2003): Pixar has so dominated (indeed, virtually invented) the art of computer animation that one of their features had to make the list. I vote for this one, for its humor, suspense and visual dazzle.

Hairspray (2007): A movie musical to stand with the greatest classics of the Golden Age, pure fun from first frame to last.

Magnolia (2000): Paul Thomas Anderson’s exhilarating, exasperating three-hour epic was crammed with enough teeming life for six movies, and breathtakingly audacious right down to its jaw-dropping climax.

The Passion of the Christ (2004): Mel Gibson’s controversial film was grisly and often hard to watch, but a work of fervent religious art that felt like a time-machine trip to Roman Judea.

Sunshine (2000): Director István Szabó’s movie traced three generations of Hungarian Jews from the 1880s to the fall of Communism, driven by a superb three-role performance by Ralph Fiennes.

Topsy-Turvy (2000): Mike Leigh eschewed his usual blue-collar milieu for a different kind of realism: a detailed recreation of Gilbert and Sullivan writing and staging The Mikado in the heyday of the British Empire; one of the best-ever movies about the theater and the creative process.

United 93 (2006): The events of September 11 and the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, staged by Paul Greengrass with unnerving documentary verisimilitude. (Jim Lane)

1. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)

2. Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003)

3. About Schmidt (2002)

4. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

5. Spirited Away (2001)

6. I’m Not There (2007)

7. There Will Be Blood (2007)

8. The Rules of Attraction (2002)

9. Memento (2000)

10. Death Proof (2007)

After dropping out of film school in May 1999, I spent much of that summer dissecting a VHS bootleg of The Phantom Menace until it felt like George Lucas had defecated on a childhood photo album. I became irreversibly imbued with bitterness, cynicism and unhappiness.

In other words, I was ready to become a film critic.

My first published reviews came in early 2000, and in the 10 years since, Hollywood has fed us an unhealthy diet of sequels, series, trilogies and movies based on amusement-park rides. Never has the word “unwatchable” been tossed around so liberally, and with such aptness. The 10 films on my list are oases in a desert of convention and cliché.

Moral apathy is the most significant characteristic of the aughts, and Roger Avary’s The Rules of Attraction captured the wormhole of unchecked hedonism with dark humor and visual invention. There was nothing funny about Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, a graphic, needle-sharp look at the pitiless quicksand of drug addiction.

The gloriously outsized, “movie-movie” vision of Quentin Tarantino stood alone in an era of prepackaged franchises—no quality director is as excited about the possibilities of film. The first volume of Kill Bill is “pure cinema” fun, and Death Proof is an appropriately perverse, surprisingly personal exploitation flick.

Christopher Nolan’s 2000 Memento embedded a contemporary obsession with fractured identity inside a bold reworking of film noir themes. Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There is even more stunning and original in its attempt to capture the schizophrenic nature of identity, telling the Bob Dylan story through multiple refractions of the man and his various public personae.

A near-biblical piece about corruption and soullessness, There Will Be Blood is informed by our hard-earned mistrust of family-values-touting oilmen. Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away is a timeless animated fable about a petulant child whisked into a magical world, and a mature allegory about finding harmony with nature. In Alexander Payne’s squirmy-funny About Schmidt, a recent widower is marginalized to the point of writing soul-baring letters to a Tanzanian foster child.

Although released in 2001 and set in the 1950’s, the Coens’ The Man Who Wasn’t There is the decade’s strongest statement on our corroded conscience. Billy Bob Thornton plays a ghoulishly philosophical barber whose solemn remove masks the heart of an impotent sociopath.

The film is eminently quotable, and contains my favorite line of the decade, a tidy summation of Bush-era deception: “He told them to look, not at the facts, but at the meaning of the facts. Then he said the facts had no meaning. It was a pretty good speech. It even had me going.”

That’s the decade in a nutshell. We survived it; let’s just hope there isn’t a “squeak-quel.” (Daniel Barnes)