The Asphalt Jungle

The Best of the Decade - Runners-Up

February 28th, 2010 by Raj Ranade

Fareed and Raj are back to list the best films of the past decade, starting off with a runners-up list composed of favorites from a wide variety of genres.

Fareed:

Nowhere has Nicole Kidman exploited her perceived frigidness better then in The Others. Alejandro Amenábar complements her subtle work perfectly with masterful direction that makes the usual antithesis of horror, light, frightening. Jack of all trades director Brad Anderson uncovers the uncanny in the desolate halls of an asylum in Session 9, crafting one of the decade’s creepiest previous films. In the Swedish gem Let the Right One In, the story of a young boy meeting a girl-turned-vampire explores the horrors of childhood while delivering a truly haunting genre experience. The Descent (above) is pure claustrophobia captured on celluloid.

In the buoyantly exuberant Moulin Rouge, Nicole Kidman proves that she is one of Hollywood’s most charismatic actresses. Baz Luhrmann is at his spectacular best, and brings the most out of both Kidman and Ewan McGregor who has never had such sheer screen presence. The quiet love story Once brilliantly reconfigures the musical genre to expose the exhilaration of creating a song. The astonishing film My Summer of Love frames the birth of a sexual identity in sublime and almost horrific terms.

Paul Bettany delivers the best performance of his career creating a repulsive, yet utterly transfixing portrait of a man driven solely by ambition in Gangster No. 1 (above). This bold quasi-sequel to “A Clockwork Orange” is the best British gangster film of the last decade. Forget “No Country for Old Men”, the best Coen Brothers of the 2000’s was their delightful homage to classic film noir The Man Who Wasn’t There - an affecting and sometimes hilarious look at one’s man total alienation.

Stephen Chow proves in Kung Fu Hustle that he is the undisputed master of extended gag sequences that crescendo into mad hilarity. Michael Winterbottom perfects his manic comedy style in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, a strikingly intelligent and ambitious adaptation of a supposedly unfilmable novel.

Richard Kelly’s spectacularly underrated science fiction epic Southland Tales pulsates with winning chaotic energy. Kelly evokes an astonishing performance from The Rock that amplifies the actor’s larger-than-life charisma. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is a haunting spiritual successor to “2001: A Space Odyssey” that captures sci-fi at its purest, cultivating an almost transcendent sense of awe towards the unknown.

Raj:

Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked diptych Kill Bill is perhaps the best example of how post-modern mash-up culture could produce blazingly original works of art with true heart and soul. Steven Soderbergh’s audacious four-hour epic Che (above) recalled “The Battle of Algiers” in its fascinating nuts-and-bolts depiction of both successful and unsuccessful revolutions. In a rather scant decade for war films, The Hurt Locker stood out as the most meticulously constructed and heart-stoppingly suspenseful depiction of modern warfare.

Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People captured the Manchester post-punk scene with hilariously loopy self-referentiality, while Anton Corbjin’s biopic  Control brought brutal honesty and tragedy to the story of a key figure from that scene, Ian Curtis. Quentin Tarantino achieved the fullest expression of his artistic potential in Inglourious Basterds, a historical revenge fantasy that got Tarantino to try using discipline and moral complexity in his filmmaking.

Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her created a deeply moving story out of immensely troubling ideas through sharp writing and a trademark mastery of color, light, and sound. David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence peeled away the façade of Americana to reveal the hidden, brutal heart of American society by mixing violence and sexuality in a way that would make David Lynch proud. Martin Scorsese treaded familiar ground in The Departed (above) but managed to reproduce much of the same blackly comic and brutally violent spark that made his earlier pictures so engaging. Charlie Kaufman’s brilliance never seemed to cease during the decade, from the incredibly inventive meta-exploration of art in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation to the hauntingly beautiful investigation of love and memory in Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Michael Haneke provided seriously effective chills and potent allegory in Cache, which also contained the biggest jump moment of the decade. Lars von Trier’s Dogville was one of the decade’s most exciting conceptual art experiments, but it also packed true emotional vigor thanks to knockout performances by Nicole Kidman and Paul Bettany. Christopher Nolan suffused the form of the blockbuster with post 9/11 anxiety in The Dark Knight, giving us the decade’s most thought-provoking big-budget film and one of the finest villains in cinematic history in Heath Ledger’s Joker.

Entry Filed under: Best of the 2000s