Because I think I aught to: Top movies of the '00s - Part 4, 25-1

Because this is the time of year for lists, and the time of the decade for really big lists, I'm joining the chorus and have put together this not-so-little summary of my own 100 best movies of the past 10 years. Here are numbers 25-1.

25. Shaun of the Dead - 2004
The crew behind one of the greatest British sitcoms (if you're a pop culture geek, anyway) teamed to make their first feature film, and managed to put together the the best horror comedy ever made, a Ghostbusters for the 21st century. What made it work was the obvious love everyone involved had for the zombie genre they were poking good-natured fun at. They have too much respect for zombie flicks to spoof them; this is a wildly hilarious homage, with quotable lines in nearly every scene.

24. Up in the Air - 2009
The film could have succeeded as either the road comedy or romance, and would have been enjoyable in either case. It's a solid piece of entertainment on both fronts. But Reitman dresses his film up as slick Hollywood formula before revealing that it is something far more substantial, and something far darker, with George Clooney playing a professional bearer of bad news who seeks to avoid any emotional attachment when he finds himself forming a bond with a fellow traveler just as his own job might be made obsolete.

23. The Squid and the Whale - 2005
Noah Baumbach made a huge leap from his enjoyable early indie comedies with this autobiographical story of two boys dealing with the divorce of their parents in 1980s Brooklyn. Baumbach's smart comedic touch is still intact, but the edge to the wit is sharper, as everyone here seems intent on tearing everyone else in the family down.

22. The Royal Tenenbaums - 2001
Wes Anderson's most emotionally direct film, even if it is still populated by the unreal and quirk-defined characters that dominate his movies. The movie feels like it takes place both today, and at a non-specific point in the past, giving this bittersweetly funny drama about a dysfunctional family of prodigies a timeless quality. Gene Hackman would go on to do a few more films, but this is really the defining closing performance of his career as the patriarch trying desperately to get back in the good graces of his estranged family.

21. Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (Amelie) - 2001
Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet channeled unknown reservoirs of whimsy to tell the story of a cafe waitress who takes it upon herself to do good deeds for the downcast characters that populate her slightly too-colorful-to-be-real Montmartre neighborhood. A modern day fairy tale that could fail to warm the heart of only the world's most grumpy pessimist.

20. The Proposition - 2006
John Hillcoat's Aussie western opens with an aurally shocking shootout in a ramshackle Outback brothel, bullets puncturing the wood and corrugated metal walls allowing new rays of lights into the dim shack. It's a fittingly gripping opening to one of the best (and most criminally overlooked) films of the '00s, and one that, for my money, tops even Unforgiven on the list of the best modern westerns. Guy Pearce plays Charlie, one third of the Burns Brothers gang, a group of outlaws known across this section of the newly settled Australia of the 1880s for the shocking brutality of their crimes. His younger brother Mikey is a simpleton and obviously just along for the ride. His older brother Arthur is the psychopathic and soulless mastermind. When a small town captain catches the younger two following a particularly heinous rape and slaying, he tells Charlie he'll spare them both the gallows if he brings him the head of his oldest brother. The script, by Nick Cave (who also contributed to a pitch-perfect soundtrack), is no rock star vanity project; Cave imbues this story with the sort of nuance and complexity (as well as bloody violence) of his finest murder balladry. His story was hailed in Australia for being one of the most accurate (and, as it follows, disgusting and upsetting) depictions of the colonization of the continent and subjugation of its Aboriginal peoples ever filmed. Hillcoat displays an impressive talent for finding beauty in the bleak, and tiny rays of hope amid the most soul-crushing despair.

19. El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) - 2006
Guillermo del Toro's second fantasy set around Franco's spain, this one about a little girl who follows a faun into an elaborate underground world that may or may not be all in her imagination. Del Toro's film is the most fully realized vision of his amazing gift for fantasy worlds, but is also a touching film about the minds of children, and an effective political film about the ugliness of fascism.

18. Zodiac - 2007
David Fincher's forgotten classic, the studio dumped this movie in 2007 into the early year no man's land after test audiences found it too long, too slow, and too unresolved. It's a shame, because it's the director's best film, a carefully constructed police procedural about the hunt for the Zodiac serial killer in San Francisco in the 70s. Fincher allows reality to shape his narrative rather than the usual structural rules of historical drama, which does make for a deliberate pace, and, since the Zodiac was never caught, an ending that might feel like it lacks closure. But Fincher turns the genre around to make the film a character study of the people trying to unravel the mystery.

17. Lost in Translation - 2003
Sophia Coppola's film plays out a little like a dream, capturing the fuzzy reality of the insomniac Americans, played by Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray, in Tokyo with too much time on their hands. It's a romance, but it works largely because Coppola is intent on keeping these characters apart.

16. Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and The Butterfly) - 2007
Uplifting, but never sickly sweet, this is the true story of French writer Jean-Dominique Bauby's struggle to learn to communicate again after a massive stroke left him completely paralyzed, apart from the ability to blink one eye. With the help of his speech therapist, he is eventually not only able to communicate, but to write a complete memoir. Director Julian Schnabel's film is amazing in its ability to put the viewer inside the mind and consciousness of a man locked in his own head.

15. The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) - 2001-2003
It was a miracle anyone ever got around to having the vision to make J.R.R. Tolkein's beloved fantasy classic into a movie. Peter Jackson, then little more than a cult director with one bad Hollywood movie under his belt, seemed the unlikeliest of figures to wrangle a budget in the hundreds of millions and a shoot that often had multiple units working simultaneously in various parts of New Zealand. The biggest miracle is that they lived up to expectations, hype, and budget, as Jackson worked some magic of his own to create a cinematic world just as detailed and rich as Tolkein's books.

14. Fa yeung nin wa (In the Mood for Love) - 2000
Two neighbors discover that their spouses are cheating on them with each other, and strike up a sad friendship that seems always on the verge of becoming a full-blown affair of its own. Shot in rich colors by Christopher Doyle, the film is moodily romantic, even though the central love story remains unrequited, a bold and rewarding decision. Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung are mesmerizing as the leads.

13. La Fille le sur le pont (The Girl on the Bridge) - 2000
Speaking of unusual romances, this Patrice Leconte film would make a nice double feature with Wong Kar Wai's film from the same year. It's a gorgeously romantic meditation on fate and luck, featuring a circus knife thrower, and the suicidal woman he employs as a target. This film is so beautiful you will want to fall into the screen and live in this world forever.

12. Hurt Locker - 2009
The Iraq War has been going long enough that we've had no shortage of films about that conflict, but most of them have fallen flat. And not because Americans aren't yet ready to see this ongoing and controversial conflict depicted on screen. As a rule, the films simply haven't been very good, ranging from gung-ho action pieces to annoying liberal-guilt-induced hand-wringing. But with The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal have fashioned not only the best movie about that war yet released, but hands-down the finest American film about war in at least 20 years. Small in scale, the film focuses on a three-man army bomb squad working in and around Baghdad to defuse the many explosives planted by insurgents. Bigelow's talents as one of Hollywood's most skilled (but under-utilized) action directors combine in surprising ways with Boal's script, written based on his own experiences as a journalist embedded with an EOD squad in Iraq. Bigelow's talents make for a gripping, at times gut-wrenching time, while Boal's writing manages to convey the horrors of war while working in many standard action-movie tropes that usually don't have any place in a film this intelligent, yet work all the better for their unusual placement.

11. 4 luni, 3 saptamâni si 2 zile (4 months, 3 weeks, 2 days) - 2007
A gritty, anxious film about two college students in Ceauşescu's Romania in the late 80s, one of whom has an unplanned pregnancy and is seeking an illegal abortion. Director Cristian Munglu brings a harsh documentary realism to the winding story of the pair as they move through their day.

10. Michael Clayton - 2007
Clooney has never been better than in this gripping legal drama about a down and on-his-way-out lawyer trying to hang on to a life that seems to be spiralling out of his control. First time director Tony Gilroy's understated script echoes the quiet subtley of 70s political thrillers, and its muted colors and gloomy mood seem to reflect Clayton's sad-eyed desperation. The twists and turns of a plot that borders on overly complex without ever becoming unwieldy are held firmly in place by Clooney, who buries the charm that is often his stock and trade in favor of an exhausted and largely internally focused performance.

9. Traffic - 2000
2000 was a banner year for Stephen Soderbergh. He released two movies, both of which were box office hits, both of which were nominated for Best Picture Academy awards, and both of which earned him Academy nominations for Best Director. The two films are a rather fitting display of the dichotomy that makes up Soderbergh's career. One film was a crowd-pleasing, polished underdog story, Erin Brockovich. The other was a far more difficult film, sneered at by the major studios he was hitting up for money. In the end, Soderbergh made it much like an independent film, acting as his own cameraman and cinematographer (the latter a position he now assumes on all his films), and the result was Traffic, for which he did win the Best Director prize, unfairly losing the Best Picture competition to the Academy's affinity for period epics. The film, adapted from a British television series, looks at the drug war from four perspectives: politicians, police, traffickers, and users, and while it can be overwhelming in the sheer volume of information presented in these four distinct stories, Soderbergh and editor Stephen Mirrione keep the lines between the stories crystal clear while moving each forward at a breathtaking pace.

8. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 2004
Charlie Kaufman's best script met with the perfect match in director Michel Gondry, who had seemed a little more awkward in his work on Kaufman's previous Human Nature. The film blends science fiction and romance gorgeously with Gondry grounding the fantastical elements of the story by keeping all his effects in-camera and out of a digital workshop.

7. No Country for Old Men - 2007
From the first frames of the film, it is clear that the brothers Coen are back in territory they've long been away from. The dry Texas landscape recalls Blood Simple, the quietly measured menace Miller's Crossing. But there's a new element here that sets No Country distinctly apart from any of their work, and his name is Cormac McCarthy. The Coens take as little license as possible in adapting McCarthy's bleak story of a hunter who stumbles up on a satchel of cash from a drug deal gone wrong, the frightening, dispassionate bounty hunter searching for him, and the sheriff always a few steps behind the chase, witnessing the aftermath of the chase. Javier Bardem's turn as the bounty hunter Anton Chigurh is a force of cellulose malevolence for the ages, and the movie as a whole is full of as many nervous ruminations on fate and violence and growing old as it is full of breathtaking thrills. The calm, abrupt conclusion halts the inexorable freight train rush of the movie like a splash of icy water to the face. The Coens leave us cold, hopeless, and hollow, yet wanting to go back and experience it all over again.

6. Das weisse Band - Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte (The White Ribbon) - 2009
This period piece shot in stark black and white, and set in a small Austrian village just before the start of the first World War, follows the lives of these villagers as they try to determine the cause of a number of odd occurrences. As director Michael Haneke lets these people and their prejudices and power plays work their way toward ugly act after ugly act, he casually and subtly presents, in microcosm, the human source of fascism, terrorism, and religious oppression. Coldly and technically perfect, it's more akin to a massive sculpture, carved and polished in marble and in a museum, than a movie. Yet it is no less engrossing and a work for its dispassionate chilliness.

5. Mulholland Drive - 2001
David Lynch's failed television pilot was reworked into one of the director's finest works, a heady puzzle of a film about Hollywood, identity and dreams. Most people come out of a first viewing scratching their heads, but when, on subsequent viewings, everything becomes clear, it's an epiphany of massive proportions that suddenly allows every scene to fall neatly into logical place, where before it was nothing but scattershot chaos. A structural work of genius that perfects the eerie atmospherics that Lynch had been working with for years.

4. Dancer in the Dark - 2000
Lars von Trier is intent on reinventing the wheel with every film he makes, so it should come as no surprise that his only musical would take a genre that can usually depended upon for some emotional uplift, and turn it into the single most depressing movie of the decade. Björk shines as a European mother who has high hopes for her and her son when they come to the United States, only to find America to be a nasty and brutish place where her only escape is fantasies of being in those uplifting musicals. Tragedy follows tragedy in this wrenching movie, and Von Trier doesn't stop twisting the knife even after you've asked him quite nicely, then pleading with him, to stop.

3. There Will Be Blood - 2007
Paul Thomas Anderson goes diving into a deep well of influences, from the Upton Sinclair novel he bases the movie on, to John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which he reportedly watched incessantly while writing the script, to Stanley Kubrick, whose visual and auditory trademarks are found all over this film. They're all easy to pick out, yet the film never feels any less original for it. Daniel Day Lewis is riveting as a man of wild ambitions who cons his way to becoming one of the largest oil magnates in the early part of the century. By the end, it's clear that both he and his nemesis, the conniving man of the cloth Eli Sunday, are as evil as they come, yet you still find yourself unwittingly rooting for the allegorical corporate monopoly versus a the allegorical cultish strain of Christianity, in a legendary and blackly comic final scene. "I...DRINK...YOUR...MILKSHAKE!"

2. Caché (Hidden) - 2005
To date, Michael Haneke's crowning achievement, this taut psychological thriller stars Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche as a couple who are being watched. Constantly, it seems, but they don't know by whom. They just know that videotapes keep showing up at their door with long, unbroken recordings of goings on around their house, eerie because they don't know who is sending them or for what purpose. He begins to have an inkling as to what might be going on, and it leads him to shocking discoveries. It's Haneke's best because not only does it have the exacting perfection that typifies all his work, but the director is willing to get his hands dirty here in ways that allow more emotional connection than the director often permits in his work.

1. Children of Men - 2006
Alfonso Cuarón's film got little fanfare but much critical love upon its release in 2006. For the life of me, I can't figure out why the studio abandoned this amazing film, adapted from a P.D. James story about a dystopian future in which mankind has suddenly, and inexplicably become sterile, and a species knowing full well that it has no future is one that quickly descends into chaos and totalitarianism.

Cuarón, fresh off his contribution (which is still the best) to the Harry Potter series, is at the very top of his considerable technical skill, choreographing complex action sequences that play out in single takes. It might seem like showing off if the effect wasn't so visceral. Without editing to take you out of the scene, you find yourself in these frightful situations with the characters. If action was all there was here, it would be an attractive exercise (much like Avatar), but there's a confluence of the great visuals with gripping performances and a script that amazingly doesn't suffer for having so many names on it.

Go back to #50-26, #75-51, or #100-76.