My Favorite Films 2000-2009

A beautiful masterpiece with great fights, gorgeous cinematography and wonderful performances.

Absolutely beautiful. The mostly silent first half is a cinematic feat. The second half gets a lot of criticism, but I think it only looks weak in comparison to what the film has already done - it remains a solid, fun, and visually stunning movie throughout its run-time. The conclusion is very Miyazaki.

This last rewatch, I finally decided that I clearly prefer vol. 2 to vol. 1 of Kill Bill. It's more freewheeling in its homages, and, as good as that battle is in volume 1, it's the verbal sparring where Tarantino really shines.

Masters mood and tone better than any film I can think of. An absolutely compelling world. The end crushes me every time.

Tarantino mashes together all of his favorite action genres and the results are fantastic. Uma Thurman plays a key role in the movie's success as well.

An exciting and intriguing mystery-thriller with an innovative structure that's also about deep questions of identity and epistemology.

As a historian, I could proffer up some complaints about the film's distortions of John Smith's character and relationship with Pocahontas, or even its overall motif of Indians as "naturals" and innocent (which is a synonym of "naive"). But, there's enough nuance in the latter that I can run with the allegory. More importantly, there's enough beauty here that I can look past all of the above - this is a gorgeous film, both in the sincerity of Malick's sentiments about life, history and nature, and also in Lubezki's amazing cinematography. And it's a masterpiece of editing as well - the final five minutes of montage is some of the purest cinema I've ever seen.

An entertaining portrait of the very familiar world of the Gen X male geek, warts and all (warts forward, even), but it also amazingly manages to capture real and believable character growth for its self-involved asshole protagonist. Hugely influential on 20-year-old me.

A depiction of anomie and loneliness that is layered and emotionally complex but also somehow casual, grounded, and relatable. Builds wonderfully.

Tarentino explores the power and meanings of film violence, from propaganda to slapstick to cathartic power fantasy. He does so with some masterful suspense and gorgeous visuals.

Brilliantly structured screenplay from Kaufman - midway on this rewatch I was going to complain that Charlie and Clementine have no chemistry, but it does build wonderfully as we work back in time through his memories.

Gondry brings some great visuals to the memory erasing process, but he lacks restraint, and I think Jonze might have been able to milk a little more greatness from this film (though it is pretty great nonetheless).

The memory-erasing cast if really great, huh? Wilkinson, Dunst, Ruffalo...

The mysteries of the universe explored through a very mundane '60s midwestern suburbs setting.

It actually tackles the exact same themes as No Country for Old Men (with a very different tone) yet few people seem to link them. I prefer A Serious Man.

Incredibly compelling visuals matched by an equally compelling story, this film really immerses you in a believably apocalyptic world. It does a better job at drawing contemporary parallels than a lot of movies of its ilk.

There’s also a pretty hefty cheesiness factor to all of these movies. If you get caught up in the action, as most any fantasy fan would, it’s easy to miss some of this. But, Peter Jackson has a lot of cornball maneuvers in his repertoire – jerky slo-mo, melodramatic slo-mo, characters gleaming in the sun, fake-out deaths, fake-out endings, to name a few. And, he gets some of the mushiest performances that I’ve ever seen out of his actors. As I said at the beginning of my Fellowship review though – it all works. It’s the perfect pairing of director and material. When adapting Tolkien, who self-consciously wrote a painfully sincere and old-fashioned story, this all works beautifully.

This film works wonderfully on lots of levels - it's absolutely gorgeous and full of inventive Fincher visual and editing tricks, but none of that ever gets in the way of a solid procerdural that can also work as a horror film and a tale of obsession.

Friendship, class, sex, and death - Cuaron layers it all in beautifully. Extra-super-beautifully, in fact, thanks to Lubezki.

As prickly as it is, I think this is Payne's sincerest film. Probably the best acted Payne film as well.

Also, I have a personal connection to the film, as I was taking frequent wine-tasting trips to Napa around the time it came out.

I've described this film as history porn - there's so much attention to detail in the production design and the script. It really evokes this world of Napoleonic naval battles. On top of that, it's built around a great, dynamic character relationship, and it's a rollicking fun adventure.

A fantastic layered puzzle movie. The key puzzle of the plot is incredibly obvious, and yet it managed to fool me. There's also a thematic layer to the puzzle, however - a sort of hall of mirrors of all of the parallels and contrasts between the characters. The central two figures have doubles, but they also double each other, and then there wives, assistants, Nikola Tesla, all add to the complexity, giving the viewer plenty to think about after they're done with the main reveal. Good performances and Nolan's crisp aesthetic round out a great film.

I liked this movie a little less than when I was 24, and I feel like that means something...but I still really liked it a lot.

A film this sweet and adorable should give you a toothache, but it actually goes down pretty easy thanks to clever direction and the depths Tatou brings to her character.

Beautiful and haunting, but somehow also fun at the same time. There's a political allegory going on as well that I only half got due to unfamiliarity with South Korean political history.

Wonderfully dense and esoteric...though perhaps too dense and esoteric, and there are a lot of anxieties and neuroses on screen as well.

But, I do think it adds up to a very moving experience in the end. As cerebral as this is, as much as it offers itself up to future thesis writers on questions of representation and authenticity, the best parts of the film are those that 1) play the absurdist dream logic for laughs (this film can be really funny in some really weird ways) or 2) get to the key, universal emotions of human experience. I cried.

The arbitrary, violent, uncaring nature of the universe has been a consistent theme in the Coen Brothers' work. While I always appreciated the craft of this film, I felt like they carried their pet themes a little too far toward nihilism here. Watching it again 7+ years later, I didn't care about my philosophical concerns as much; this is such a fantastic and haunting film that I had to reassess it. What the Coens do with landscape here is especially notable and hearkens back, as does much of the film, to Fargo. And Tommy Lee Jones does give the film a faint light amid the desperation.

My one complaint that hasn't changed is the ending, or lack thereof. It works perfectly, in many ways, for this film to just wind down and stop suddenly, but that doesn't make it satisfying.

A quiet but affecting film with great music and strong, understated performances. One of the rare films where I vividly remember the experience of seeing it (while I lived near Pasadena).

A clearly Scorcese-influenced film that rivals his best works by offering an energetic and compelling depiction of Rio's favelas. Captures the randomness and inevitability of slum violence. Could have explored women of the favelas more/better.

I count seeing this at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland in 2007 as one of my favorite theater going experiences. The matinee wasn't crowded, but the film created all the energy it needed.

That said, I don't think I fully appreciated what Tarentino is doing in Death Proof at the time. He pays tribute to '70s slasher films and car chase films at the same time AND he does the tropes BETTER than the films he's paying tribute to while also subverting those tropes in the second half. It's fantastic.

One of the most romantic films ever; casts a spell.

Warm film about trauma and family and finding your place, but not as sentimental as I just made it sound. I mean, this is Lonergan we're talking about, so there's plenty of nuance. Linney and Ruffalo are spectacular.

It says a lot about this film that I feel defensive and uncertain about only giving it a 9 out of 10 and not ranking it in the top ten of the decade. It feels like a 10/10 film with astounding visuals, often dialogue-free storytelling masterfully executed, and one of the most explosive and amazing performances ever by Daniel Day Lewis. It is a fantastic piece of filmmaking. And, it's about something - Daniel Plainview is the perfect capitalist, and watching him chew up the people and landscape around him says a lot. I even admire its lack of subtlety in conveying this message, which only increases as the film goes on. But I do think, in the end, this last point is why I give it a 9 instead of a 10; there's a humanist touch in most of my favorite films (including some of PTA's other films) that's missing here.

A grand mix of entertaining and disturbing with a great ambiguous twist. Great Bale performance.