I drew up this list a little impetuously, giving some personal favourites pride of place over a few more critically respected titles. Look, I know the proper highbrow thing to do is to pick Syndromes and a Century, but as much as I like and admire that movie, I just don’t have the urge to revisit it the way I do 24 Hour Party People.
Here’s my list — please feel free to respond to it in the comments section!
Regular readers of this blog will know I consider the “Club Silencio” sequence — “There is no band!” — in David Lynch’s 2001 thriller one of the seminal scenes in cinema history, an encapsulation in miniature the central appeal of movies, and a celebration of our willingness as audience members to suspend disbelief over and over again, since that’s the only way to enter that seductive, scary fantasy world. But Mulholland Drive is more than one brilliant sequence, or eight or nine brilliant sequences; it’s a sad tale of lovers’ revenge, a surreal, hall-of-mirrors psychological mystery, a Hollywood comedy, an examination of female identity, a horror movie, and an acting showcase for the amazing Naomi Watts. Oh, and a softcore lesbian porn flick. And a super-annoying DVD, but I won’t hold that against David Lynch.
Every time I watch Werner Herzog’s 2007 Antarctica documentary, it goes up in my estimation. The first time I saw it, it seemed like a pleasant but minor Herzog travelogue, an unpretentious side project he took on to decompress from the more demanding Grizzly Man. Five or six viewings later, it seemed like one of the seminal films of the decade, a melancholy meditation on the looming extinction of the human race, expressing the fond wish that whatever species takes over the planet after we’re gone has a glimmer of humanity in their makeup — enough to make life worthwhile, but not so much that they ruin the planet as quickly as we did.
I guess Fantastic Mr. Fox has made it okay to like Wes Anderson again, but the truth is, I never stopped liking his movies, as precious as their tone could be and as overbearing as the production design often became and as initially off-putting as The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited could be upon their first viewing. But my favourite Anderson opus remains this 2001 film — a simultaneously arch yet heartfelt comedy/drama about a family of onetime prodigies wondering where it all went wrong. One of the most soulful, empathetic movies about failure ever made. Go, Mordecai!
Kelly Reichardt’s deceptively simple, artless 2008 neorealist masterpiece about a young woman, her lost dog, and her dwindling supply of money and prospects was almost more emotionally devastating than I was prepared to handle. It’s easy to wring tears from an audience by showing something terrible happening to a dog, but Reichardt’s story isn’t about what happens to Lucy the golden retriever; it’s the look Wendy (the sublime Michelle Williams) has on her face in the film’s closing minutes when she realizes she’s even more lost than Lucy is.
Mike Leigh surprised everyone by (probably temporarily) shedding his miserabilist mood and making this ebullient 2008 comedy, a character study about a perpetually optimistic schoolteacher named Poppy Cross (a brilliant characterization by Sally Hawkins). The film is laugh-out-loud funny, especially Poppy’s first couple of encounters with a sour, black-humoured driving instructor played by Eddie Marsan, but it’s also a film of rare wisdom, with some genuinely profound things to say about the nature of happiness. I don’t exaggerate when I say that it kind of changed my life.
David Fincher’s 2007 passion project is the greatest serial-killer movie ever made — and possibly the only great one. Perhaps that’s because it’s less about murder than the nature of obsession, the unknowability of truth, and the loneliest corners of the human heart. The recreation of 1970s San Francisco is masterful — Fincher knows that even in sunny California, there are plenty of houses with some very dark and creepy basements. John Carroll Lynch’s performance as the fey, unreadable prime suspect Arthur Leigh Allen is one of the decade’s finest, creepiest character turns. 
Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson may have been a terrible blowhard, and an even more terrible businessman, but give him this: he made things happen. He connected the right bands with the right producers, he spotted talent years before everybody else did, and for a while, even though he couldn’t sing a note or play a single instrument, he was able to put himself into the very centre of the hottest music city in the world. He also inspired Michael Winterbottom to make this wonderfully disrespectful 2002 film about him, a movie that manages to debunk every musical-biopic cliché in the book without ever seeming sour or making you doubt its enthusiasm for its subject matter.
Thom Andersen’s 2003 video essay about cinematic portrayals of L.A. isn’t just one of the decade’s best documentaries; it’s also one of the decade’s greatest pieces of film criticism. Learned, funny, sharp-tongued, and bracingly iconoclastic — Andersen even takes Roman Polanski’s revered Chinatown down a peg or two — it’s the kind of film that makes you re-evaluate the way you view movies. Andersen’s championing of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep arguably also paved the way for that film’s successful re-release in 2007.
Is it cheating to lump Cowards Bend the Knee, Brand Upon the Brain!, and My Winnipeg into a single entry? I don’t know; it kind of seems fitting, given the way Maddin’s films all tend to contain enough plot to fuel at least four normal movies. Maddin’s career seemed to have stalled in the 1990s with the troubled Twilight of the Ice Nymphs, but his imagination seemed newly invigorated in the Aughts — and this trio of bizarre, quasi-autobiographical black-and-white melodramas, full of overheated Freudian images, off-the-wall humour, and squirm-inducing sexual confessions are easily the best work of his career. Let’s hope he keeps oversharing for decades to come.
The structure of this 2002 documentary about eight kids competing in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee has been emulated by so many other films this decade — “follow a bunch of quirky nerds heading off to some offbeat national competition” — that it’s easy, seven years later, to undervalue director Jeffrey Blitz’s accomplishment, and how deftly he sketches in his eight subjects, each one more compelling than the next, with their insane study habits and their heartbreaking openness in front of Blitz’s camera. There were surely many more “important” documentaries made this decade, but none that I connected with as deeply as Spellbound.
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