New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

2009

The Hurt Locker

It still amazes me that Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker won Best Picture - not because it isn't a great film, but because it is so unlike the sort of films that win Best Picture. An unbearably tense film soaked in machismo, Bigelow cemented her position as one of the best directors when it comes to depicting male relationships. The sequences in which Jeremy Renner et al defuse bombs are amongst the most nerve shredding I've ever seen, thanks to Bigelow's fearless direction and a cast that make the inner lives of men doing the worst job in the world just as compelling as the job itself. It inverts the typical concept of an action film; rather than a film about how exciting it is when things blow up, it is about how horrible it is waiting to see if they will blow up.

Thirst

Another South Korean film (it really was a fantastic decade for South Korean cinema), this time from Park Chan-Wook. Whilst his 2003 film Oldboy is held in higher regard, and with good reason, I love the mad ambition behind Park's story of priest who turns into a vampire. Using his thirst for blood as a very, very thinly veiled metaphor for his sexual desire, the film starts out as an intense character study before turning into a ludicrously bloody and sexy story of souls doomed by their passions.

2010

The Social Network

The triumph of David Fincher's The Social Network is that, whilst it deals with themes that are pretty much timeless (e.g. greed, betrayal, the quest for power and/or acceptance) it addressed them in a bracingly modern context. The rise of Facebook is one of those stories that seems like it could be dry and uninteresting, even unimportant. Yet Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin saw that there was a compelling story and a fascinating group of characters at the heart of that story, and they turned those stories into a tragedy rife with dramatic irony (the foundation of Facebook involved one man isolating himself from most of his friends) and full of brilliantly clever, witty dialogue.

Winter's Bone

Debra Gronik's breakthrough film would be deserving of a place on any best of if it was just a great suspense film with a compelling mystery at its heart. What raises it up, though, is that it so beautifully creates a sense of an isolated, closed off community where everyone has secrets that stay buried, lest anyone who asks questions should end up buried along with them. That atmosphere, so important to making a young girl (Jennifer Lawrence)'s search for her missing father so engrossing, is so suffocating that every single scene feels like one in which something horrible could happen. It's one of the most exciting and tense films of the year, if not the decade.

Continued:       1       2       3       4       5       6