Barack Obama Naked

End of the year, or in this case, end of the decade lists are, by their nature, as protean as they are personal. If composed a month, or even a week from now, this same list might’ve seen a change in its order and even its content. There are several unavoidable evils that come along with something as subjective as picking one’s favorite movies. Recent films are fresher in your mind, and some might have added weight from being watched again (and again) after their release. But even with these in mind, I have created a list based on my own moviegoing experiences in the last 10 years (which is considerable, but by no means comprehensive).

The aughts were an important time for film. Studios started creating smaller, independent production companies and financing braver, more interesting cinema. Advances in technology have ushered in an era of low-budget pioneers, making the medium more accessible (even if many of these films never find distribution). And, on the grander public stage, even mainstream cinema saw a measure of refinement, producing smarter blockbusters/studio pictures.

A few notable exceptions from this list include animated film (Pixar has had quite a decade) and documentaries (this choice was mostly due to my limited interaction with the genre).

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25. Bright Star – Jane Campion (2009)

The unlikely romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne, one whose epistolary manifestations have become infamous, is the subject of “Bright Star,” Campion’s best film in over a decade. Keats’s abridged life is given to us mostly in summer hours spent looking through or standing near windows, pursued by light. “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever,” begins “Endymion,” a perfect explanation for the endurance of both Keats’s and Campion’s art.

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24. Brick – Rian Johnson (2005)

A highly-stylized, hard-boiled noir set in high school shouldn’t work, but its resounding success in Rian Johnson’s “Brick” makes it even more enthralling, and is a testament to the director’s unique and fully realized vision. As Brendan (played with a tight-lipped smolder by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) navigates the seedy underbelly of his hometown to find his ex-girlfriend, he runs up against more than a few unsavory, if larger-than-life characters.

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23. The Hurt Locker – Kathryn Bigelow (2009)

One of the best movies about war ever made, Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” erupts onscreen, bringing both humor and sense to a situation (the Iraq War) which seems to have neither. Sgt. William James, a bomb squad leader played by the phenomenal Jeremy Renner, could so easily have been a cliché―the new guy who plays by his own rules, jeopardizing his life and others―that when everything goes well (and it does), the audience can breath a sigh of relief. But even when bombs and situations are diffused, the sense of urgency never leaves the screen.

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22. La Niña Santa – Lucrecia Martel (2004)

Lucrecia Martel is the best Argentinian filmmaker working today, and her labors stands alongside those of Lynne Ramsay and Jane Campion (or, in literature, Alice Munro), who specialize in the quiet, often uncomfortable business of chronicling the lives of marginalized, lonely, or lost women. In “La Niña Santa,” a young girl takes it upon herself to save the soul of a middle-aged man. Heat, sexuality, and even faith itself complicate this process.

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21. Punch Drunk Love – Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

Colors. Lens flares. Harmoniums. “Punch Drunk Love” is, like many of Anderson’s films, long stretches of quietness interrupted by loud, often violent conflicts. It’s also one of the only watchable movies with Adam Sandler. (In a moment of rare onscreen instinct, Sandler decided to play something other than “Adam Sandler.”) Philip Seymour Hoffman as the “mattress man” makes the film alone.

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20.  Kiss Kiss Bang Bang – Shane Black (2005)

Struggling through Michael Hoffman’s 1995 film “Restoration” recently disproved my oft spoken claim that I could “watch Robert Downey Jr. in anything,” but “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang” is such a smart comedy that it could have succeeded (in execution; the film did terribly in theaters) without him. But much better for the film, and for us, that Downey Jr. was able to bring his quick charm to Harry Lockhart, a down-on-his-luck thief who soon gets way over his head in a self-aware murder mystery.

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19. Shotgun Stories – Jeff Nichols (2007)

Jeff Nichols’s “Shotgun Stories” is more frightening than most horror films, and it achieves this through tense human drama and in the stoic face of Michael Shannon, behind which lies the trouble of an entire family. Two feuding families, joined by the recently-deceased father that left one to start the other, rush violently towards the film’s climax.

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18. All the Real Girls – David Gordon Green (2003)

David Gordon Green, until his associations with the Apatow camp, was a small filmmaker. He was concerned with small lives, small towns, and small moments, all of which bundled together to form significant changes in his characters. Green’s portrait of the American South, with its simple and direct dialogue, will break your heart before you’re sure what to make of it.

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17. Revanche – Götz Spielmann (2008)

After things go wrong in a bank robbery (do they ever go right?), Alex takes refuge in his grandfather’s country cottage, chopping wood and carrying a heavy guilt on his shoulders. What starts out being a film about love and crime soon transforms into a meditation on melancholia, and the abbreviated daylight of Austrian winter wraps its characters and their problems in a single, tragic bond.

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16. O, Brother Where Art Thou? – The Coen Brothers (2000)

George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson play escaped convicts in this reimagining of the Odyssey, encountering a number of fantastic elements along their journey home. Trudging through the South with a police at their backs and treasure out on the horizon, these three sing, dance, and laugh their way through one of the Coen brothers’ best films.

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15. The Station Agent – Thomas McCarthy (2003)

Thomas McCarthy’s films are primarily concerned with radically different and lonely people coming together to form an unlikely but surprisingly cohesive familial bond. “The Station Agent” follows Finbar McBride (Peter Dinklage) as he moves to rural New Jersey, reluctantly befriending Joe (Bobby Cannavale) and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson) and discussing trains, the weather, and irreparable loss.

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14. In Bruges – Martin McDonagh (2008)

Martin McDonagh is a name well-known in the realm of theater, but relatively unknown in that of film. His first feature, “In Bruges,” is a dark comedy filled with hilarious non-sequitur and politically incorrect slurs rattled off in thick accents. As two hit-men hide out in Bruges (of all places), one (Colin Farrell) gets increasingly annoyed with his location and increasingly guilty about his last job. Brendon Gleeson (the other hitman) and Ralph Fiennes (their boss) prove invaluable at dispensing McDonagh’s persiflage as well as his strange, somehow serious jocularity.

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13. Vanilla Sky – Cameron Crowe (2001)

Anyone who’s taken an introduction to philosophy class or seen “The Matrix” has been asked to wonder about the importance of reality in regards to happiness, and that if a machine could simulate happiness at a higher rate than we encounter it in our daily lives, would that machine be a good or a bad thing. “Vanilla Sky,” a remake of the “Abre los ojos,” evaluates what happens when that simulated happiness, that dream, becomes a nightmare. Bittersweet, the film came along in Crowe’s career before his love for music prevented him from making a watchable film.

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12. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Michel Gondry (2004)

Nobody can explore the human mind so forwardly and with as much poignancy as Charlie Kaufman. Michel Gondry’s masterpiece “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is a confluence of talents, emotions, and stunning visuals, one that evaluates the necessity of memory, pain, and loss. Gondry has proven to be far less rewarding a filmmaker after Kaufman stopped writing his scripts, but this 2004 gem remains a strong case for both of their talents.

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11. The Royal Tenenbaums – Wes Anderson (2001)

Wit and whimsy abound in Wes Anderson’s third film. Detailing the lives of two divorced parents and the three child prodigies they raised (who have become less remarkable upon entering adulthood themselves), “The Royal Tenenbaums” shows Anderson at the height of his cinematic fluency, with wide-angle lenses and shots borrowed from the French New Wave circling around his brilliant ensemble.

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10. The Wind that Shakes the Barley – Ken Loach (2006)

The Irish war for independence was not exactly characterized by glory, and Loach’s harrowing film “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” does not try to change that. It is dark, it is depressing, and even in the small and fleeting moments of sweetness or heart, there is a pressing danger that surrounds each and every one of the film’s characters. Even when an uneven truce is met, more problems arise. It is a tough but entirely rewarding film, one that speaks not only to the cause of history, but to the lives that endured it.

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9. Adaptation – Spike Jonze (2002)

Instead of adapting Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief,” Charlie Kaufman wrote a screenplay about how difficult it was to adapt the screenplay, writing himself into the movie in the process. In the hands of anyone less capable, this could have been a disastrous first-year film school mistake, but in Kaufman’s, aided by the deft direction of Spike Jonze, it is a complete success. Dealing with the difficulty of transposing a work across mediums as well as several-hundred neuroses that blaze through Kaufman’s head in the film, “Adaptation” is life-affirming in the strangest ways possible.

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8. After the Wedding – Susanna Bier (2006)

Susanna Bier’s films are not exactly happy, and “After the Wedding” is no exception. Melodrama at its very best, the film follows Jacob Pederson (Mads Mikkelsen) as he returns to his native Denmark to secure a grant for his orphanage in India, only to learn that it has several strings attached. A powerful performance by Rolf Lassgård grounds the film, even when he is thrashing about and yelling at the top of his lungs.

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7. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Julian Schnabel (2007)

Julian Schnabel practically reinvents cinema in order to tell the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the former fashion editor who was stricken with “locked-in syndrome,” able to move only one eye. The film grabs the viewer from its first startling moments, locking them in with Bauby for much of the film. Our only escape as viewers is found in his only escape as a man: in memory. The film crashes back through moments of his life, some profound and some deceptively banal, but all undeniably beautiful.

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6. The Barbarian Invasions – Denys Arcand (2003)

The Barbarian Invasions,” which continues 1986’s “The Decline of the American Empire,” may be the best sequel ever made (next to, of course, “The Empire Strikes Back”). Catching up with the ensemble cast that made the first one a success, “The Barbarian Invasions” focuses on the last weeks of Rémy, a college professor who learns he has cancer and gathers his friends at a cabin in French-Canada, essentially, to say goodbye. The film, like its predecessor, is one big, lively conversation, and is as funny and as genuine as it is heartbreaking.

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5. There Will Be Blood – Paul Thomas Anderson (2007)

Is there anyone better at creating larger-than-life, terrifying Americans than Daniel Day-Lewis? Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” adapted from Sinclair’s “Oil!,” is reasonable proof against the possibility. With discord both in the clashing strings of the soundtrack and the nervous, sweaty desperation onscreen, Anderson presents a portrait of the furiously emerging country and the egomania that shaped it.

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4. The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou – Wes Anderson (2004)

Anderson’s films have always been about reluctant, struggling fathers and the complexes they give their children, as well as all the people they surround themselves with to fight loneliness. Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is perhaps the most solipsistic protagonist Anderson has put forth, and he’s certainly the most concerned with abstractions like revenge and legacy. Diving through dead-pan and David Bowie, Anderson’s send-up to Jacques Cousteau is essential viewing.

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3. Children of Men – Alfonso Cuarón (2006)

Dystopian fictions are a tricky breed, but Cuarón’s masterpiece is able to make the end of the world feel not only jarringly real, but immediately human. During astoundingly long takes in a world massaged, not inundated, with digital enhancement, Theo (Clive Owen) tries to make sense of what’s going on around him, where, in a world where women have stopped being able to give birth, one suddenly has. Amid fascism and anarchy, the dangers of the world loom and threaten the new young mother, the first beacon of hope in almost two decades.

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2. Synechdoche, NY – Charlie Kaufman (2008)

The scale of “Synechdoche, NY” is almost indescribable; it spans almost half of the life of Caden Cotard, a theater director who feels himself hurdling towards death and, what’s worse, irrelevance. He loses his wife, is estranged from his daughter, and he feels every other meaningful relationship he has slipping through his fingers. The narrative speeds up as the movie progresses, and we lose larger and larger bits of time. Kaufman’s film, his directorial debut, is tough, and certainly depressing; it is among a handful of films that has the power to truly change the way you think about life and how you live it, and is one of the most valuable contributions to cinema, to art that’s ever been made.

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1. The Squid and the Whale – Noah Baumbach (2005)

Many of the best films are aggressively personal; Noah Baumbach’s semi-autobiographical work “The Squid and the Whale” is a perfect example. Caught in the center of his parents’―both writers―bitter divorce, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) tries to circumvent the pains of adolescence by imitating his father (see: poor role model) and reaching after some kind of literary precocity. He lies, he cheats, and he struggles against the anxiety of influence as his world makes less and less sense. At under 90 minutes, every single scene is essential; Baumbach’s wit has never been sharper than it is in this film, as the former lovers lob insults at each other behind walls of emotionally-detached double-speak and joint custody. With nods to Rohmer and Truffault, “The Squid and the Whale” articulates the difficulty of growing up and growing apart.