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2007

There Will Be Blood

I've been writing about multiple films per year up to this point, and even though 2007 was probably the best year of the decade for me, I'm only going to write about There Will Be Blood here because it is my undisputed favorite film of the decade, and I'd like to give it a certain amount of respect (though both No Country For Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly were great, great films released that year). Paul Thomas Anderson's epic tale of oil, greed, family and power does what so many great films do; it comments on the past, on the sort of men who built America, and in doing so comments on the society in which the film was made. It is an enigmatic film that means different things to different people and rewards subsequent viewings, and with its brisk pace and a devastating performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, those subsequent viewings are never a chore. It's rare to sit and watch a film and, almost as soon as the film begins, find yourself thinking, "This is a work of genius." But to have that same feeling sustained from beginning to end? That is nothing short of miraculous.

2008

The Dark Knight

Despite what the rest of this list would have you believe, I am at heart someone who loves big blockbusters. They tap into that reservoir of child-like glee that I always used to feel whenever I would go to the cinema with my family to watch the latest Hollywood epic, and regardless of how terrible those films end up being I still feel sense of excitement every time I sit in a packed multiplex, waiting for the lights to go down. The Dark Knight was one of the best films of the decade for me because it embodies that sort of action spectacle that I have always loved and marries it to an intelligent story that weaves ideas about anarchy vs. control, terrorism and the true notion of heroism. The moment when I realized that Christopher Nolan had the balls to include that sort of subtext in a $185 million sequel was the moment that I knew that he was one of the great mainstream film-makers of our time.





WALL-E

I was tempted to include a couple of Pixar films on my list, but decided to include my favorite of their output from the last ten years to stand in for the rest. (For the record; The Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, Incredibles, Ratatouille, Up and Toy Story 3 are all sublime. Cars, not so much.) I've been a big Pixar fan ever since I was bowled over by the original Toy Story in the theater, and I've eagerly awaited all of their films ever since. The last half of the decade saw them hit a creative peak which even I, an ardent supporter, would not have expected, and the zenith of that peak is, unquestionably, their story of a lonely trash compacting robot. WALL-E is by turns hilarious, bleak, achingly sad and truly uplifting. For me, it represents a pinnacle of computer animation in terms of both visual style and pure storytelling. The opening 20 minutes alone is truly breathtaking.

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