In many ways, the inauguration of the new millennium coincided with my burgeoning awareness that there were modes of filmmaking beyond the confines of Hollywood, that narrative storytelling was not the sole raison d'etre for the movies, and that the pursuit of films that were not available at the closest multiplex or the neighborhood Blockbuster could and often did result in more interesting, enlightening, even entertaining movies than what “they” said were the cream of the cinematic crop. Until then, through middle school and my first two years of high school, I took for granted that what the AFI said were the hundred best movies ever made were the hundred best movies ever made, or what AMC regularly played were actually the American Movie Classics. It wasn't until I stayed up until two in the morning watching Bravo (back when they played anything besides reality shows involving modeling and personal fashions) and until I met a few inspiring mentors that I heard the names Fellini, Buñuel, Godard (and thereafter Sembene, Ozu, Fassbinder) that I realized my cinematic comprehension was seriously shortsighted. So while the year 2000 offered such mainstream-foreign films as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (no less great for its worldwide popularity), it also offered such obscurer nuggets as Edward Yang's Yi Yi and Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us. Things were becoming clearer—coming into focus. (The image of international and historical cinema was still disappointingly hazy, though, as I have a feeling it always will be—one's education about movies can never really be comprehensive.)
This isn't to say that foreign movies constituted the best of what cinema had to offer, or even that the more obscure American movies were innately superior to Hollywood. The knee-jerk dismissal of all things popular, all things sleek, all things entertaining, has always frustrated me, as though, of all the things that cinema can accomplish, entertainment is somehow less noble than sociopolitical analysis, aesthetic ingenuity, thematic complexity, or cultural impact. (True, no masterpiece can be content with pure entertainment, but it's equally true that no masterpiece can be boring—such a descriptor contradicts the very idea of art as a compelling and vital part of the human experience.) The last decade has seen a number of invigorating filmmakers working in Hollywood, and the work of one studio that's astonishingly consistent, and somehow improving with age.
But entertainment comes in a variety of different forms, of course. So while Zodiac and Wall-E can have places on a list of the fifty best films of the 2000s, so can durational arthouse exercises like Cafe Lumiere, The World, and Werckmeister Harmonies. While some audiences may decry such films as boring or needlessly plodding, I would contend that they are, in fact, “entertaining”—entertaining for the insights they offer, for the alternative forms of vision and storytelling that they encompass. The point is that the “best” kind of cinema cannot be simplistically labeled as Hollywood, arthouse, independent, American, foreign, experimental, etc.; vitality manifests itself in and among the boundaries between these categories, and a hasty categorization of movies can only lead to a suppression of critical discourse and, what's worse, a concealment of what's truly invigorating about movies today. As my selections below may suggest, I define the most electrifying movies as those which refuse to be pigeonholed into a given genre or mode. After a century of filmmaking, it's high time these rigid labels are done away with, and movies are experienced, thought about, enjoyed, in and of themselves. This may seem too common-sensical—what critic would deny that each film exists separately and distinctly, or that denying the right for Hollywood, independent, foreign, or experimental film to be great because of its category is too simplistic? Turns out this is exactly the assumption by which some critics do operate, as judging by yearly “best of” lists or individual reviews that deem mainstream entertainment as innately inferior, or “difficult” arthouse movies as pointless or pretentious drudgery.
The list below, I should admit, is highly subjective, as any “best of” list is. My enthusiasm for horror films, for southeast Asian cinema, and for particular directors will make itself apparent. It isn't so much a list of the most impactful or widely appreciated films as the work of a cinephile who wishes, somewhat narcissistically, to discuss his favorites, to reexperience the thrill I felt when I first saw these movies, and hopefully, ultimately, to convey exactly why they're so vital and why this first decade of the new millennium offers us much to hope for in terms of the continued vivacity of this comparatively young art form.
50. Pulse (d. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2001) What begins as frighteningly intimate, claustrophobically confined, eventually becomes apocalyptic: an explicitly allegorical plot, disconcertingly ambiguous to begin with, disintegrates into gloom-filled end-of-the-world portents, in which (typical to J-horror hyperbole) malevolent ghosts seem to seep out of every pore in our modern world. To be more precise, Pulse envisions the Internet and other digital forms of communication as the realm for lost disembodied souls, allowing for creepy images of text messages from deceased loved ones and websites that splay images of corpses' faces to alienated web browsers. No pedantic treatise on the coldness of modern technology, Pulse concerns the tenuous threads that hold individuals together, recognizing that technological networks can be as genuinely communal as more traditional forms of communication. But despite its obvious commentary on our digital age, Pulse really distinguishes itself as pitch-perfect horror, one of the scariest movies of the last decade. One sequence epitomizes Kiyoshi Kurosawa's brand of slow-burn horror: a lilting, shuffling corpse shimmies its way across a lengthy room until its rotted face is a mere inches away from the camera—from the audience. Eschewing jump scares, Kurosawa prolongs his setpieces, his camera unmoving or scanning his spaces at a glacial, inquisitive pace, until it seems that we really can't escape from the web of terror that surrounds us. He doesn't want to make us flinch; he wants to make our skin crawl, he wants to make us forget to breathe. His ambiguous, untraditional narrative reiterates the unease: all common sense disintegrates and the world becomes messy, unknowable, oppressive. It's arthouse as terror, and it's scary as hell.
49. Eastern Promises (d. David Cronenberg, UK/Canada/USA, 2007) Less subversive than A History of Violence, perhaps, but more unshakeable, more precise: Cronenberg's usual preoccupations (bodily transgressions, the physical manifestation of identity, repressed sexuality) receive what may be their most succinct elaboration yet, smuggled as they are into an electrifying crime story. The fact that the film was widely described as horrifically violent is a testament to Cronenberg's canniness as a director: in fact, there are only three explicitly gory scenes in the movie, although two of them open up the movie. The third—a knifefight in a London bathhouse frequented by Russian mobsters—is astonishingly intense, the scene that almost every reviewer recognized as the most impressive and meticulous. It is a benchmark of action filmmaking that will be long remembered.But there is more than aesthetic rigor going on here. As Cronenberg has done in the past (not only with A History of Violence, but also with movies like The Fly and The Brood), he turns what could have been a familiar if solid genre picture into something far more sinister and troubling. The story of Eastern Promises concerns Naomi Watts's half-Russian midwife investigating a diary that accompanies an infant whose mother died in childbirth, but the movie is just as much about repressed homosexuality, about the decisions that force humans to commit unspeakable and violent transgressions, and numerous like-minded themes. As always, Cronenberg's aesthetic is singular in the subtlest of ways: the precise medium close-up he chooses in a certain scene, an unexpectedly encroaching camera movement—these are the little things that transform his movies from solid thrillers into indescribable and perpetually haunting mindscapes. His more blatant authorial touches may be largely absent from this film and A History of Violence (for example, there are no monstrous manifestations of human flesh, no suggestively beastly metaphors for sexual organs), but there is still no questioning who made these movies.
As impressive as its auteur's touch is Eastern Promises' performances—particularly Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel as the bizarre couple that forms the movie's brazen emotional center. The fact that neither actor is Russian doesn't matter; they disappear into their roles with a tenacity and confidence that achieve the rare feat of surpassing questions of screen acting, entering a state of pure inhabitation that allows us to immerse ourselves in the film's world absolutely, and unnervingly.
48. Marie Antoinette (d. Sofia Coppola, USA/France/Japan, 2006) The decade's most misunderstood movie? Most viewers saw Marie Antoinette as a stuttering followup to the high point of Lost in Translation. I'd say the opposite: if Lost in Translation was about the plight of overprivileged people who feel alienated wherever they go—a movie hampered by a sporadic air of condescension and insularity—then Marie Antoinette magnifies this thematic concern to absurd, grandiloquently historical levels. Maybe it's untrue that Marie Antoinette is really about Sofia Coppola's youth, but it's undoubtedly true that the movie is about ludicrously wealthy young people who bide their time recklessly, impetuously, unable to play a decisive role in the world that surrounds them. This conceit is readily apparent: Marie Antoinette may be the Queen of France, but her life is filled with fashion, alcohol, candy, and elaborate feasts. She plays no role whatsoever in the social upheavals plaguing “her” country. To be sure, Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Molly Shannon, and much of the rest of the immediately-identifiable cast are awkward in their 18th-century getups. This appears to be the point. Out of place as well as out of time, these performers are transplants from our own era, just as the petty problems that plague Marie are instantly transferrable to our own time. Petty, but no less identifiable: as France collapses around her, Marie is concerned with friendships, love, ennui, the awkwardness of youth—the immediate problems that plague the majority of young people (for better or worse). How ironic that Marie Antoinette, by turning its gaze backwards several centuries, becomes more relatable than the resolutely modern Lost in Translation—it's every bit as emotional as The Virgin Suicides, and possibly even wittier in its broad thematic conceit.
47. Caché (Hidden) (d. Michael Haneke, France/Austria/Germany/ Italy/USA, 2005) By turns fascinating and infuriating, Haneke can at least be relied upon to shake his viewers out of complacency, whether through complex and haunting explorations of modern malaise (Time of the Wolf, The Piano Teacher) or pompous and grating exercises in shock art cinema (71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, both versions of Funny Games). With the possible exception of Haneke's most recent The White Ribbon, Caché is the director's best movie, and perhaps also—not coincidentally—his most entertaining. (Perhaps he would balk at such a claim; so be it.) Caché is a thriller that actually terrifies, despite—or maybe because of—the fact that we never discover who is responsible for the movie's central terror. (Many viewers have proposed that Haneke offers a tiny clue over the closing credits, but I disagree with this theory for a number of reasons.) Caché does not offer satisfying resolutions to any of its conflicts—the dread continues, as it does in reality after the movie is over.Haneke's film is about a stolid bourgeois Parisian family that begins to receive mysterious videotapes in the mail. The tapes document images that are uncomfortably personal for the family: their own home; the villa where the patriarch spent his childhood, and the site of a traumatic and violent incident; and so on. Cleverly and subtly, the footage upon these videotapes bleeds back and forth between the movie itself, forcing us to view the images with an anxiety and implacable guilt akin to that experienced by the family onscreen. Who is sending these videotapes? The father's absolute certainty of who the culprit is, and his vigorous accusation of this character, end, almost inevitably, in catastrophic horror. What's more important to Haneke is the fact that these anonymous videotapes never achieve their original goal: to instill guilt in the family and force them to reconsider their privileged social standing and the injustices that got them there. For this family, moving images mean nothing but hollow mediation; they cannot penetrate their upper-middle-class sense of security. Is the same true of our reception of Caché itself?
Haneke's accusatory themes remain under the surface (though they are almost impossible to avoid); this implicit, rather than explicit, social commentary is one of the many things that makes Caché superior to Funny Games. What really distinguishes the film, though, is Haneke's subtle and perspicacious linkage of the family's personal trauma to France's own tumultuous history, fleshed out through several significant Algerian characters and some canny news footage placed within the shot during one of the film's more intense scenes. This news footage concerns continued violence perpetrated in the Middle East as the result of ongoing Western involvement—news footage that should seem familiar to any viewer that has watched the news over the last decade. But the cynical and troubling idea running underneath this footage is that, like Caché's family, the majority of Western audiences receive these images simply at a superficial level, as mediation—a sense of greater understanding or self-reproach is rarely engendered through such real-life footage. The disturbing fact is that it takes the fictional world of Caché to make us question our reception of such pressing real-world imagery.
46. Songs from the Second Floor (d. Roy Andersson, Sweden/Norway/Denmark, 2001) The darkest dark comedy imaginable, Andersson's pastiche of absurdity and moral torment recalls a Monty Python sketch as directed by Ingmar Bergman. The movie's droll, witty atmosphere is rooted in its urban Scandinavian setting: the city's frigidity may or may not be afflicting its people, who are working towards genuine human relationships but are unsure of how to achieve them. Comparisons to fellow Scandinavian filmmakers—not only Bergman, but the Finnish Aki Kaurismaki, or Denmark's Lukas Moodysson, for example—may be warranted, but what sets Andersson apart is his bold narrative style, his elucidation of an eclectic and alienating urban space patched together from groups of disparate people, his prioritization of mood and theme over story in constructing the film. This last aspect is common in the arthouse cinema, but Songs from the Second Floor is a rare phenomenon: an arthouse film that's genuinely funny, even if its laugh-out-loud moments are simultaneously tinged with an undercurrent of pain and desperation. Many critics recognized that the film achieved some new kind of cinema through its pastiche nature: J. Hoberman called it “slapstick Ingmar Bergman,” Roger Ebert “tragic Groucho Marx.” Both appraisals are accurate, and both suggest that bold cinematic reinvention may be achieved by appropriating modes of cinema we thought we know so well. One of the few movies to actually convey the off-kilter pulse of the modern urban space (several other movies that do so are included on this list as well), Songs from the Second Floor resembles one of those old City Symphonies that was made in the 1920s—symphonic compositions without a story that turn the urban space into a collage of near-abstract sights and sounds (Walter Ruttmann's 1922 Berlin: Symphony of a City may be the penultimate example). But in Andersson's film, it is not purely sensorial sights and sounds that are abstracted, but a wave of malaise and loneliness that takes on hyperbolic cinematic form.
45. Hukkle (d. Györgi Pálfi, Hungary, 2003) Before he made 2009's arthouse-shock provocation Taxidermia, Györgi Pálfi made the superior Hukkle, an almost indescribable, patiently observational, absurdly hilarious murder mystery in which the mystery is almost wholly arbitrary. One of the only movies of the last ten years to genuinely subvert and reinvent storytelling tropes—unlike movies like Memento or Amores Perros, which shuffle the chronology but retain the basic arc of narrative movies as we know them—Hukkle floats by on the barest thread of a narrative, typically forging cause-and-effect patterns by visual rhymes and compositional puns rather than by a sequence of events in a story. (The funniest and most memorable of these compositional linkages in Hukkle: a pair of croquet balls in one shot matches sublimely to a huge boar's pair of gigantic swinging testicles in the next.) Perhaps it has become apparent that I'm a sucker for movies that set up the skeleton of a plot only to diverge from it wildly, almost obligatorily retaining elements of narrative if only to remind us that other aspects of filmmaking—theme and metaphor, aesthetic abstraction, immediate visceral sensation, elicitation of mood and atmosphere—may ultimately be just as important. This is because I find it possibly more impressive when a film strikes a balancing act between a discernible story and those other aspects, than when a decidedly non-narrative film (a completely observational avant-garde work like Ten Lakes, or a wholly conceptual modernist arthouse film like Koyaanisqatsi) eschews storyline altogether. All film is a pastiche; observation, sensation, sequence of events, thematic or structural concepts accompany every movie we watch, even movies that attempt to do away with one or several of these modes. When films realize this and attempt to forge something new out of this messy amalgam, at once utilizing and subverting these multifarious modes of moviemaking, the results can be electrifying, and we may feel that we're seeing a new mode of cinema, even after more than a century of the art form.
Hukkle achieves just this newness, this sense of vivacity. Set in a small Hungarian village whose residents are mostly grizzled, eccentric, gruffly photogenic old characters, the movie sometimes resembles the aforementioned Songs from the Second Floor: a floating portrayal of an eclectic community within a distinct space (the one rural, the other urban). But the glimpse of a murder victim in Hukkle also asks us to play detective: we thenceforward observe each character as a potential suspect, meticulously scanning each composition for visual clues to this suggested murder. Since there is no dialogue in the film, Hukkle's emphasis on intense visual decipherment reminds us of the nature of filmgoing and movie-watching: at its root, this is an art form in which we play detective visually, allowed to peruse each image for the elements of story, theme, pure visual beauty, whichever we choose. The fact that most movies in fact suppress our freedom in exploring each image in this way—instead directing our attention tyrannically, often subordinating it to story and spoken dialogue—is a simple result of the primacy of narrative cinema. And of course we like to watch stories played out in images: narrative is a no less noble goal for cinema than the other filmmaking modes I've just mentioned. But Hukkle makes us realize how lopsided cinema's endorsement of narrative is. If we choose to solve the narrative puzzle tantalizingly laid out by Palfi's movie, we must do so by meticulously poring over each image—and in doing so, we realize how little most other movies offer us this opportunity.
44. The White Ribbon (d. Michael Haneke, Austria/Germany/ France/Italy, 2009) At first I was dismayed that The White Ribbon, Haneke's portrayal of a small Austrian village beset by catastrophe in the years before World War I, was so entirely divorced from social and political interests. If the movie is about the rise of Nazism in its nascent form, as many critics averred, then omitting Nazism's societal roots initially seemed too simplistic to me, too evasive, a way of turning genocide into a philosophical quandary rather than a real-life happenstance that developed from very specific historical events. Watching The White Ribbon, though, you realize that Haneke's parable cannot be simply labeled as an allegory of Nazism. Its setting, of course, raises linkages between the horrific tragedies that Europe was about to face and Haneke's broader conceits, but the movie is really about the ambiguous nature of evil in general—how it is in our human nature to find a culprit, to determine who is responsible, to find a scapegoat. As societies, we are all too ready to succumb to authoritarianism in order to “prevent” violence, thus neglecting human compassion in order to atone for some perceived wrongdoing—a theme that then correlates not only to World Wars I and II, but also to the current War in Iraq, which was justified as some sort of deluded preemptive strike. And as a result, The White Ribbon reminds us, evil and violence is also a legacy passed down through generations, continually perpetrated by the children of those who made foolish, rash, inhumane choices in the first place.
Maybe most disturbingly, The White Ribbon is also about how evil and violence are about all of these things and none of them at the same time—that, sometimes, bad things happen just because they happen. Roger Ebert's review of the film, in his concise, populist fashion, is incredibly astute at recognizing Haneke's convergence of philosophies and ideas. In one brief sentence, Ebert totally encapsulates the existentialism that defines so much of Haneke's filmmaking—namely that the lack of a metaphysical or spiritual order to things that may have been used in order to rationalize good and evil should not lead to a crisis of humanity, but should instead encourage us to act rationally and humanely towards other peoples. The White Ribbon is one of Haneke's most unsettling movies because he suppresses his own authorial interjections more effectively than he ever has before: bad things play out onscreen in a matter-of-fact fashion, and Haneke rarely fleshes out a distinct moralistic interpretation of these tragedies, which could have partially assuaged our unease. This is to Haneke's immense credit: he does not want to neatly philosophize about the evil onscreen because he wants it to linger with the audience. We have to deal with it ourselves.
It's a happy coincidence that The White Ribbon came out the same year as Inglourious Basterds. Although, as I said before, Haneke's movie is not simply about Nazism or the World Wars, it does allude to impending genocide and evil in a stark, troublesome manner; more ably than most movies in recent memory, it makes us internalize the effects of horrific cruelty, mostly because the violence is never graphically depicted onscreen, and we are left primarily with the psychological repercussions. Tarantino's movie is a postmodern reinvention of one of the most horrific catastrophes of the twentieth century, and although I find it intelligent in the way that it recognizes the massive role that cinema plays in grappling with (and fictionalizing) real-world tragedy, the downside is that we may perceive of genocide as yet another relic of the past for Tarantino to re-appropriate. In a distantly related way, then, The White Ribbon may be a required corollary to Inglourious Basterds' clever but precarious self-reflexivity. Haneke's film reminds us that large-scale violence in reality is ambiguous, troublesome, impossible to reconcile and rationalize, and its horror does not diminish as time goes on—a brutal fact that we are indeed reminded of often outside of the movies, given the destructive conflicts that continue to play out on an international scale.
43. Werckmeister Harmonies (d. Béla Tarr, Hungary/Italy/ Germany/France, 2001) Probably the titan of modern international arthouse cinema, Béla Tarr makes movies the way Stravinsky made discordant compositions: hauntingly intense in the ways that they clash inwardly and slowly burn. Hence the title to this film, a reference to the Austrian theorist Andreas Werckmeister—who, one character opines, destroyed modern music by conceiving of a system of harmonics that clashed with the celestial melodies. Werckmeister Harmonies, like the music composed by Stravinsky and theorized by Werckmeister, is more about time than theme or story; specific occurrences are deemphasized as the simple, inexorable march of time is made disturbingly clear.Broadly, Tarr's film is about a rather nightmarish carnival that comes to a small Hungarian village, seemingly instigating a plague of existential crisis that culminates in a horrifying march upon and enraged destruction of a hospital. The philosophy that underlies much of the film is dark almost to the point of oppressiveness: like Tarr's earlier Damnation (1987), the animalism of man is made brutally clear, an inhumanity that is epitomized by the absurdity of Soviet politics immediately before, during, and after the U.S.S.R.'s breakup over the last two and a half decades. Strange, then, that much of Werckmeister Harmonies is also so invigoratingly ethereal—you are engrossed into the folds of its mysteries, and when the film occasionally makes you feel like you are witnessing something cosmic, oppressiveness is the last thing on your mind.
After a slew of raw, almost verite character studies in the 1970s and 80s (the best of which is the masterful Family Nest [1979]), Tarr began to turn to long, stately, mystifying poems that sought to question a greater existential state of being, instead of fleshing out a specific narrative or sociopolitical milieu. The grandaddy of this latter mode of filmmaking is Satantango (1994), which I still (unfortunately) haven't seen—probably because, at 450 minutes, it is hardly ever shown in theaters and has only recently been released on DVD in this country. Werckmeister Harmonies has been described as Satantango-lite, but that shouldn't necessarily be construed as a criticism; at 150 minutes, it's palatable but still grueling, unwilling to pull any of its philosophical punches. Beautiful and spare, exhilarating and terrifying in equal measure, the film accomplishes what really great films invariably do, yet which most movies fail to achieve: a sense of awe.
42. Zodiac (d. David Fincher, USA, 2007) 2007 may have been the most impressive year for American cinema over the last decade: singular works like There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Eastern Promises, No End in Sight, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Zodiac all represented the best that American movies could offer, overshadowing the most glaring shortcomings for which Hollywood and independent movies from this country are typically known (Juno, I'm looking in your direction). Zodiac was Hollywood's outstanding achievement that year, which is, perhaps, not all that surprising, as it comes from mainstream cinema's most remarkable auteur.I yield to few in my love for Fincher (I'm one of the few people who thinks The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was underrated instead of overrated), but I'm not alone in my enthusiasm for this disturbing and cryptic murder-mystery-of-sorts. In one excellent article for Film Comment, Kent Jones compared Zodiac to Vertigo (1958)—not only because of their shared San Francisco setting, but also because of the multifarious (though wildly different) unsettling ideas smuggled into their generic thriller genealogies. Both movies are partially about how violent crimes may emotionally obliterate bystanders more cruelly than they physically destroy their victims: James Stewart's Scottie Ferguson, as well as Zodiac's trio of distinct (anti)heroes, are all torn apart from the inside out because of their close proximity to violent tragedies. What Fincher's film is really concerned with, though, is the increasing difficulty of ascertaining the objective truth in our modernity of ubiquitous mediation: in Zodiac, we appear to give witness to the birth of an age where “the truth” about anything is perpetually up for grabs.
The most finely-tuned use of digital photography in the history of Hollywood, Zodiac somehow seems grubby and razor-sharp at the same time, which befits a movie in which nothing is ever what it seems, and an overflow of media is simultaneously alluring and destructive. Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey, Jr. give solid performances, and the ensemble cast that surrounds them is impeccable, but this is really Fincher's achievement: each aesthetic decision has a clear thematic motivation, and is carried out so meticulously and beautifully that the movie, by its protracted end, floors us with its ideas more than its story or its style. Once one of Hollywood's most accomplished, if skin-deep, stylists, Fincher has quickly become its most hard-edged cultural commentator.
41. Russian Ark (d. Alexander Sokurov, Russia/Germany, 2002) Russian Ark seemed like it was destined to become a singular but pedantic aesthetic gimmick: a time-tripping voyage through Moscow's Hermitage Museum shot on digital video in one 100-minute shot, Sokurov's experiment absolutely encapsulates the stylistic opportunities that are enabled by a new age of digital moviemaking, but does it amount to anything more than a cornerstone of Film Studies theses? Some may claim that it does not—many film buffs that I've talked to consider Russian Ark interesting in concept but dry in execution, more academic than cinematic. I firmly believe the opposite. Russian Ark is weird, fascinating, beautiful, and surprisingly funny, in an absurdly understated vein.There's no denying the beauty of Russian Ark, especially in the meticulous choreography of its camera movements, its sprawling cast of hundreds of extras, its leaps between disparate time frames complete with accompanying costuming, and its dynamic pacing. But it seems like its underlying themes need defending: using the concept of the museum as a backdrop for a commingling of historical events and legendary figures from Russian history, Russian Ark amounts to a playful and free-flowing comment on the creation of history. It conceives of the past as something that does not exist on its own, but something that must be fleshed out through mediating constructs like cinema and museums. Graceful and deceptively simple, Russian Ark continues to compound upon its central conceit throughout its running time, ultimately elevating itself far beyond the stylistic experiment that distinguishes it.
40. 2046 (d. Wong Kar-wai, China/France/Germany/Hong Kong, 2005) Wong Kar-wai's filmmaking gets you drunk on cinema, and while that inebriation is sometimes of the invigorating, pulsating sort (epitomized by Chungking Express), the drunkenness is sometimes more romantic, more melancholy. A continuation (of sorts) of In the Mood for Love, 2046 (like its predecessor) is one the saddest and most erotic movies I can think of. There may be no other director who is able to capture brooding lust more tantalizingly than Wong (maybe only Truffaut, Claire Denis, and early-era Fellini come close). 2046 is a swirling nebula of a movie, a kaleidoscopic bubbling brew of neon-colored potions, a cut-and-paste mash-up of epic, nutso hallucinations. It is impossible to talk about the movie without such grandiose descriptions. Check out, for example, Michael Atkinson's review of the movie in the Village Voice, which alternately calls Wong's film a meteor, a lonely fanboy wet dream, a life swarm, a post-millennial big bang, “a movie vision that would not be tamed into completeness,” and so on. That all sounds about right. Some criticized 2046 for its inevitable unevenness, its scattershot quality, but that is precisely what makes it so alive, so intoxicating. If In the Mood for Love was a plaintive elegy to lost romance, then 2046 resembles the fractured dementia that may follow a spectacularly bad breakup or extreme loneliness.
It may be somewhat accurate to call 2046 all texture, the absurd pinnacle of form over content, but that should be perceived as an enamored compliment. Here, form is content: in some ways, the movie is about how, for the fantasists and escapists out there, intense angst, loneliness, and confusion may be translated into bizarre sci-fi dreamscapes and painfully beautiful compositions you could not possibly find in reality. As Atkinson also writes in his review, the movie “demands your intimate surrender even as it refuses to let you get close”—a sublime appraisal that depends on this lopsided conflation of content with form.
To be more concise, though, 2046 can't really be described; it can only be seen and experienced. I wish I could say that about more movies, and if unevenness and elusiveness are the resultant “flaws,” I'd gladly accept the tradeoff.
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39. L'Intrus (d. Claire Denis, France, 2005) Yet another example of moviemaking that begins with the barest skeleton of a plot, only to depart from that story with bizarre, beautiful, dreamlike diversions that emphasize mood and pure visual sensation. I think the story has to do with an elderly man who lives alone in a secluded forest; needing a heart transplant, he seeks out a long-lost son who lives in Tahiti, while at the same time cruelly ignoring another son who lives close by and is struggling to raise his own family. A mysterious intruder is killed in the old man's home at one point. Brief lustful relationships are suggested with minor characters. A good deal of this may be fantasy. But actually, it doesn't matter all that much to me whether this synopsis is at all accurate. More memorable and striking to me are particular shots—a baby smiling in its father's arms; a church steeple visible through a light snowstorm; a pack of wild dogs leading a sled through the forest—that add up to the most sparing of glimpses into this man's private life, and the lives of those around him. It's as though Denis respects her characters so much that she accepts the fact that she, and we, can never know everything there is to know about them, and therefore is content to hint towards their pasts and their emotions rather than fleshing them out clearly. (I am reminded of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring, one of my favorite films, in which a scene that may be the emotional climax of the entire movie films two characters from a distanced perspective behind them. Ozu respectfully allows these two characters their own intimate encounter, treating them not as fictional constructs but as real people who deserve their privacy.)
L'Intrus is an adaptation (Denis has called it an “abduction”) of philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy's autobiographical depiction of his own heart transplant, and although story and theme are almost impossible to comprehend here, we at least know that we're observing a knotty collection of people, some relatives, some lovers, who are tentatively connected through struggling relationships. So, if we wanted to summarize Denis's movie, we could say that it questions the concept of the human heart, asking if it's a figurative wellspring of emotions by which we try to interact with the people we love (and hate), or if it's just a mechanically pumping feature of our anatomy. But summaries seem to do a disservice to L'Intrus (and to Denis in general). Not unlike 2046, it's elusive but hypnotic—a living, breathing thing that must be seen and experienced on its own terms.
38. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (d. Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2008) The New Wave of verite movies that has distinguished Romanian cinema over the last five years—movies of fascinating contradictions, somehow realistic and droll at the same time, subdued and impassioned—found its masterpiece with 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. The story of a young woman named Otilia who tries to help her friend obtain an abortion in late-1980s Bucharest—a time, under the reign of Nicolae Ceausescu, when abortion was illegal for all women—Mungiu's film is almost unbearably intense. Given the oppressive social context of the setting and the series of dreadful circumstances that the women experience, it probably would have been intense in any case, but the film becomes (among many other things) a masterwork of suspense thanks to the rigid aesthetic structure imposed by Mungiu and his cinematographer, Oleg Mutu. Each scene is comprised only of a single shot; the camera rarely moves. Not only does this require absolutely meticulous framing throughout the film (a requirement that Mungiu and Mutu flawlessly satisfy), it also turns the edges of the frame into a cage that perpetually imprisons the characters—besieging them not only with cruel characters, a draconic social regime, and astonishingly bad luck, but also with a rigid frame that consistently threatens to suffocate them. The most effective example of this is a lengthy dinner scene in which Otilia, forced by her insensitive boyfriend to dine with his family while her friend is in extreme danger somewhere in Bucharest, sits at the head of the table, listening to a gruelingly dull conversation. Her boyfriend's family is only barely visible at the sides of the frame, snippets of human bodies who are inadvertently prolonging Otilia's misery; for minutes on end, we observe her inability to escape her dire situation and to escape the edges of the movie screen. We are worked into an empathic frenzy along with her. What keeps the film from being unremittingly bleak is Mungiu's dark wit (several ironic interactions between oblivious characters allow us to chuckle amid all the tragedy), low-key and naturalistic performances, and an overwhelming humanism. Throughout the movie, we are primarily asked to observe the plight of people faced with callousness and insensitivity; we are asked merely to sympathize. This can be extended to a more overarching social commentary—not only in depicting the coldness of Ceausescu's regime throughout much of the twentieth century, but also in showing us two women who are forced to seek out an illegal hotel-room abortion and whose lives are endangered because of it—but 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (and many films from the Romanian New Wave) are so powerful precisely because their social criticism is wedded to a tremendously emotional sense of pathos and compassion.
37. The Last Mistress (d. Catherine Breillat, France/Italy, 2008) While some of Breillat's works (namely Romance and Anatomy of Hell) substitute hollow shock tactics for a serious analysis of human sexuality, others—such as Fat Girl and The Last Mistress—are among the most staggering and simmering depictions of lust, loneliness, carnality, etc., that are available to us in modern cinema. The Last Mistress is her best film to date, a ferocious, erotic, and extremely complex work that reminds us that the painful peculiarities of love and sex are often prone to larger forces that we are unable to control.This is the story of the aristocrat Ryno de Marigny in 1835 Paris. A notorious lothario, de Marigny feels pressured to abide by the changing moral scriptures that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in the mid-19th century. He is engaged to marry, and seems genuinely in love with, a young wealthy girl named Hermangarde, but seems unable to break off a passionate decade-long affair with a courtesan-like character named Vellini, played unforgettably by Asia Argento. Some have accused the film of being overly bleak, claiming that genuine love is impossible in the modern age, an interpretation that I believe is totally off-base. All evidence in the film suggests that Ryno de Marigny does in fact love Hermangarde and desires a family, social stature, respectability—he wants to “settle down,” in other words. But the sweet, if conventional, relationship between de Marigny and Hermangarde struggles against the heated passion that he feels for someone as fiery and intensely erotic as Vellini. The film isn't necessarily about the push-and-pull between love and lust; rather, I would say it's about two different kinds of love, and two different kinds of lust. Sexuality is a befuddling chameleon in The Last Mistress, a portrayal that seems more accurate than basically anything any romantic comedy has ever offered to us.
Breillat is also concerned with how our romantic decisions are effected by social and cultural changes over which we have no control. Breillat has claimed in interviews that she finds the 18th century more open, more tolerant, than the 19th—as capitalism and the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the middle class and division of labor in its modern incarnation, sexual politics became more restrictive and the respectable middle classes began to dictate social respectability. Ryno de Marigny, then, is not unlike the Prince Don Fabrizio Salina, Burt Lancaster's character in Luchino Visconti's The Leopard (1963)—a passionate aristocrat who is unsure of how to deal with the turbulent historical upheavals going on around him, and ends up mourning the disappearance of a way of life by which he's always lived. Powerful as Ryno de Marigny's passion is in The Last Mistress, it is no match for the transformation of the culture around him, and he finds himself entrapped by an age of increasing sexual intolerance. This is made explicitly clear by bookends which open and close the film: gossipy rumors about de Marigny and Vellini discussed by a respectable middle-class husband and wife traveling in a carriage, rumors that have already decided how de Marigny's passionate emotions will influence his position in a changing society.
More sincere in its depiction of human relationships than any other Breillat film to date, and fascinating in its correlation of turbulent sexuality to historical transformation, The Last Mistress is also Breillat's most aesthetically meticulous work so far. Resigning herself neither to the austere long-shot setups of most arthouse cinema nor to the flashy stylistics of many Hollywood films, Breillat utilizes the basic foundations of film grammar to avoid calling attention to the aesthetic of her film. This allows us to become enraptured in the story and to ponder its larger implications. A perfect example arrives about halfway through the film: a trio of moderately brief stationary shots (perhaps ten seconds each), edited together through simple juxtaposition, conveys an incredibly complex event and its emotional repercussions with staggering succinctness. A child; a scorpion; grief. The effect of the scene depends upon the theories of the moving image, montage, perspective, and chronology elucidated by writers and filmmakers as early as the 1910s—theories which continue to provide the foundation of film's power. By paring her aesthetic, her story, and her accompanying themes to an intense focus, Breillat is able to achieve the burningly powerful analysis of love and sex towards which she's been working for so long.
36. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (d. Tommy Lee Jones, USA/France, 2005) Most critics recognized this hard-edged Western as a solid genre picture but little more, paying lip service to Tommy Lee Jones' proficiency as a director (in only his second film) and to the hot-button themes lurking just beneath the surface. I'd go a lot further. This is the kind of deceptively simple B-movie that Sam Peckinpah or Samuel Fuller may have made in the 1950s: impeccably crafted on a minimal budget, offering blistering entertainment while ripping into its sociopolitical themes (remember Fuller's The Crimson Kimono?) and a tough-guy portrayal of honor and loyalty among men (remember, too, Peckinpah's Ride the High Country?). The movie is about the accidental (though still malicious) death of Melquiades Estrada, an illegal immigrant who had been hired as a cattle herder by Jones' character, Pete Perkins. A modern-day cowboy who operates by a code of masculinity familiar to us from decades of Westerns, Perkins, discovering that the local police force are doing nothing to solve Estrada's murder, ushers Estrada's corpse over the border to bring him home and obtain some kind of justice for his death.
With a plot like this, the movie's criticism of modern US-Mexico border politics is unavoidable, and it's made no less apparent by the film's B-movie trappings. Indeed, by employing a number of macho cliches from numerous American Westerns and action movies, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada cannily equates America's current immigration policies to the (often deluded) ideals that contributed to the myth of the American West in the first place: manifest destiny, freedom, frontier strength vs. the “civilized” justice of the penal system, conquering rugged terrain through equally rugged violence, and so on. This subversion of generic norms in order to comment on sociopolitical themes makes The Three Burials... more powerful as a depiction of unjust immigration policies than a million Babels put together (though the writer of that film, Guillermo Arriaga, ironically wrote Three Burials as well).
The movie cleverly contrasts the extreme economic poverty of numerous border towns in Texas and Mexico with the gorgeous scenery of the surrounding land, suggesting, primarily through form, that the United States' mythical ideas of the untarnished West have indeed been tarnished, at least in part, by our own arrogance and sense of entitlement. Like any great revisionist Western, The Three Burials simultaneously embraces and obliterates the numerous myths that comprised the Western genre to begin with.
35. Inside (d. Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury, France, 2008) For my money, Inside is actually the French film that viciously ripped at the boundaries of the slasher horror genre, much more than Alexandre Aja's High Tension. Inside is set on Christmas Eve. A pregnant woman whose due date lies within days—and whose husband died several months prior in a car accident—singlehandedly faces a demented villainess wielding a formidable butcher's knife who claims that the unborn infant is rightfully hers, and who is desperate to get it out of our poor besieged heroine in any way possible.Make no mistake, Inside is disgusting, tremendously gory. There will be castrations, graphic shotgun blasts to the face, impalements through the neck, and—SPOILERS HERE!—explicit natal surgery. Its gore can be wincingly enjoyed by hardcore horror fans, but there's more to it than mere generic indulgence. Inside is pretty nasty in its bodily violence but it's absolutely brutal in its psychological destruction: by the unforgettably disturbing final shot, we realize we can empathize with every character in the movie, including (maybe especially) the black-clad psychopath who we've spent the entire movie rooting against. The oozy, red-bathed gore, then, is especially powerful as a physical manifestation of the severe trauma going on inside of these characters' heads.
Aja's High Tension played with genre form by subverting its gender-coded tropes and narrative conventions; it was clever and juvenile in equal measure, and reiterated the conception that the horror genre is nothing more than a series of self-parodic cliches for fanboys to dissect. Inside, though, recognizes that horror is most effective when it comes from a very real (and, of course, very hyperbolized) psychological space; its nastiness is so disturbing because it's surprisingly compassionate.
Bustillo and Maury reveal themselves as hardcore fans of the horror genre: the terrifying killer, with her black coat and leather gloves, could have come from a Dario Argento movie, and she's introduced in a phantasmic manner reminiscent of recent J-horror classics. (The effect of this killer is aided immeasurably by the performance of Beatrice Dalle, stepping over from her usual arthouse terrain.) And one spectacularly bizarre and surreal moment even tips its hat to zombie movies; this particular scene (you'll know which one I mean if/when you see it) is never explained by Inside's narrative, but it somehow seems to make perfect sense anyway, given the royally fucked-up nature of the rest of the movie. All of this makes Inside one of the few neo-horror movies in recent memory that actually does seem new, and will actually scare you witless.
34. The World (d. Jia Zhang-ke, China/Japan/France, 2005) A synopsis makes The World sound like a dozen other modern arthouse abstractions: shot on digital video with extremely long, static takes, Jia's movie is set in an EPCOT-style Beijing theme park that offers the perfect metaphor for globalization. Detached views portray to us the workers who labor away in World Park, mundanely carrying out elaborate musical performances and awesome spectacles. These characters—profoundly affected by China's Cultural Revolution—have become so “modernized” that they find it impossible to interact with one another. The most lively moments in The World are cheesy animated sequences that originate as characters' cell-phone text messages; Jia's obvious point is that, nowadays, our connections to our technological accoutrements are more sincere than our connections to each other.What sets Jia apart from dozens of other modern arthouse filmmakers—and what makes The World entertaining and stimulating, rather than dull and deadening—is the director's wryly absurd sense of humor. Jia is closer to Jim Jarmusch than to, say, Hou Hsiao-hsien or Michael Haneke; there are several shots in The World that could have been in Stranger Than Paradise, if they had been shot on black-and-white 16mm film. And if Jarmusch's sensibility is ultimately (slightly) more optimistic than Jia's (some parts of Down by Law and Night on Earth suggest that genuine human interaction is possible, though difficult, to attain), Jia's is more intimately linked to his country's sociopolitical climate, which makes sense, given how completely transformative China's push towards modern capitalism has been over the last two decades.
The excitement that may be gleaned from The World's austere aesthetic and slow-moving pace is of a difficult kind, but no less vivifying. If a solid, quickly-paced narrative and dynamic filmmaking offer a certain kind of entertainment (which, of course, they do), then an endlessly complex filmic fabric that allows you to really dig into each image and scene offers another kind. The mix of irony, beauty, starkness, humor, and pain in The World keeps the movie dexterously alive, at least for this viewer: for Jia to comment upon his own embittered attitude to his home country with such litheness and oddball humor is an ongoing wonder to behold.
33. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (d. David Fincher, USA, 2008) As I wrote above, I'm probably one of the few people who thinks this movie is underrated instead of overrated. Although it was lauded with Oscar nominations and has the kind of epic pedigree towards which the Academy is usually inclined, the reasons that Benjamin Button is so good, so fascinating, and so different have nothing to do with the criteria that Oscar voters usually look for. Yes, it's a wonder of make-up effects, its cast is ludicrously elegant, its narrative spans decades and touches only briefly upon social crises in the United States, and it was written by the guy who scripted Forrest Gump, which is probably the most noxious Oscar-heralded movie ever made except for Crash. Ignore all that. The mind-bending themes that F. Scott Fitzgerald emphasizes in his short story are still here, though admittedly overshadowed by the movie's grandiose showboating; what I find so exceptional about the movie is that the broad conceits that attracted Fitzgerald in the first place are elucidated almost entirely through form, in a manner not unlike Fincher's Zodiac. The beginning of the movie offers us a montage that distinguishes the start of the twentieth century: images of clocks, warfare, movie cameras and projectors, and the modern urban space commingle. It is at this moment in time when the chronological pattern of humanity reverses itself, a cataclysm apparently sparked by the abrupt and overwhelming shifts in modern life engendered by the technology of modernity.The rest of the movie definitely subordinates the idea that the advances that distinguished the beginnings of the twentieth century obliterated our notions of time, culture, and human interaction. From here on out, the movie mostly is about Benjamin Button traipsing through the twentieth century with a distinct worldview (although this traipsing is filmed in typical luscious fashion by Fincher and his cinematographer, Claudio Miranda). But that distinct worldview continues to fascinate, as the general narrative pattern of the movie connects to that opening montage and the modernist themes that Fitzgerald wrote about. Cinema, instantaneous communication, modernized warfare, the overpopulation of urban areas—these symptoms of modernity turn life into a brief spark, one in which mortality seems forever imminent, lives seem indistinguishable from one another (even, ultimately, Benjamin's from everyone else's), and the things of greatest value (love, self-fulfillment) are subordinated to those things that are commonly believed to be the most gratifying (wealth, fame). Some of these ideas are hackneyed, definitely, but by linking them so intimately to concepts of time, they are made to seem revelatory.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button winds up being an incredibly emotional movie, almost in spite of itself, considering the schmaltzy scripting and Fincher's resistance to make this into a tragic romance (as he has stated in interviews). In not making the movie into a tragic romance, though—in making it instead a story about how the looming inevitability of death makes time infinitely more fragile—the movie makes life itself seem like a tragic romance. So much beauty and heartache, put, at a certain point, to an end. This is why I actually believe the greatest flaw of this movie is that it is too short, and that its final portion should have gone on considerably longer: the pain of a dying man in an infant's body, looking on the elderly face of the woman he has loved with the wide eyes of a newborn, is the emotional culmination of everything both Fitzgerald and Fincher are ultimately trying to say. Moments like this—and the moment early on in which the fabric of time is initially frayed—make it easy to overlook the movie's significant flaws and to recognize it as the most melancholy and philosophically trippy Oscar-beloved movie that's come out in decades.
32. The Twilight Samurai(d. Yoji Yamada, Japan, 2004) The most naturalistic period-piece samurai movie ever made? The Twilight Samurai is about a meek family man named Iguchi, a mid-level shogun bureaucrat in the 19th century who is mired in debt and forced to take care of his daughters and senile mother himself, after the death of his tuberculosis-ridden wife. Looked down upon by his coworkers, Iguchi seemingly has no desire to prove his manliness or elevate his status in life, and takes great comfort from being with his children. But when he demonstrates incredible fighting skills against the absuive husband of a former sweetheart, Iguchi is suddenly revered by his coworkers and others, even as the community dissolves into violence around him.Above, I mentioned revisions of the Western and horror genres; here, we have a subversion of the codes of honor, strength, masculinity, and independence by which so many traditional samurai movies operate. The Twilight Samuraireveals the majority of samurai during this era to be mired in poverty and petty internal squabbles, and it is precisely when one low-level functionary gains notoriety as an honorable warrior that the community and its dependence on economic disparity disintegrate. The movie is, then, a clever postmodern comment on the creation of history: the problems that overwhelm our current society were present, in nascent forms, in even the most nostalgically remembered eras of our pasts.
Just as impressive is the movie's ability to evoke Japan's Edo period of over 150 years ago as something naturalistic, almost verite; American indie dramas wish they could be as a realistic as The Twilight Samurai. The costuming and set design are immaculate, but the realism is about more than that: background conversations play out in believably low-key fashion, reactions and gestures between characters seem effortless even while they evoke an era of the distant (or not-so-distant) past. Being totally immersed in The Twilight Samurai's world makes you recognize the difficult task set before most period pieces: to make you feel like you're living in an immediate world that is simultaneously hypnotic in its total foreignness.
31. Lady Chatterley (d. Pascale Ferran, Belgium/France, 2007) Most movies about sex are either too timid or too shocking: some movies hold back from evoking the actual carnality or intensity of sex itself, dancing around it and turning into a coy teenager embarrassed to discuss the actual thing (an intellectual cocktease, as it were); some movies are just going for notoriety, indulging in vigorous fucking and explicit nudity just to gain word-of-mouth on the festival circuit. Lady Chatterley (like The Last Mistress, above) actually attempts to observe and ponder the difficult, knotty nature of human sex and love, via an adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's John Thomas and Lady Jane (a late draft of what would become Lady Chatterley's Lover, named after the two main characters' pet names for each other's sexual parts). Like Lawrence's novel, Ferran's film is partially an endorsement of sex as a pleasurable and tender act in itself, divorced from notions of marriage or monogamous relationships. The carnal lust of Lady Chatterley and the groundskeeper on her husband's estate (here named Oliver Parkin) is partially seen as a remedy to the war-steeped climate of the 1910s; after all, sexual passion is a preferred alternative to widespread bloodshed. This may be a partial explanation to why the sex scenes in Lady Chatterley are among the most erotic and sensitive ever put to screen, and why close-ups of genitals here seem matter-of-fact and mature rather than juvenile and tawdry: sex is seen as many things here, but maybe most of all it's seen as something beautiful. (As J. Hoberman writes in his Village Voice review, Lady Chatterley and Oliver are “just two characters following their best, rather than bases, instincts.”)
There are tragedies and heartaches to be had here as well—Ferran is not so naïve as to believe that a passionate affair between a married woman and her lover is without its hard truths—but mostly she has made a sublime movie that seems to encompass the entire trajectory of a passionate relationship that can be looked back upon without regret. Watching it, you feel like you yourself have reached the point after the end of a relationship when you can reminisce with a clear-eyed tenderness, perhaps even feeling a greater love than you had at any point beforehand. Without wanting to give in to any kind of gendered stereotypes, it seems telling that the two best, most sensitive, most mature movies made about sex and lust in the past decade were made by women: Catherine Breillat (with The Last Mistress) and Pascale Ferran have the ability to appraise human carnality with tenderness and honesty, making movies that are, in the most complicated sense of the word, “adult.”
