The Decade's Best: #91-#100

Well, now that I've gotten all that truculence out of my system, I feel better already. Though surely this has just as much to do with what you must have known was coming: my third and final series for December, an illustrated flyover of my 100 favorite movies from the decade now concluding.

Throughout December, I have reminisced about my fondest in-cinema memories of the 00s and catalogued the films that I am most eager to encounter or revisit. Sure, I longed to catch up on everything that eluded me earlier, and to reassess films for which I suspect, auspiciously or ominously, my first appraisal might have missed the mark. But this goal was hopeless and, I think, unhealthy: it's good to have things to look forward to, and lingering prospects for reacquaintance. It's silly to treat the end of any year as a now-or-never deadline for artistic enrichment. Besides, the 100 films I have collected here, whatever I omitted through neglect or misjudgment, are as thrilling a time-capsule as I could ever want of a decade's ecstatic pleasures.

Here goes with the first ten films, working as you surely guessed from the bottom of the list to the top. It already makes for an exhausting trip, hurtling from Boston to Korea to Mexico City to Australia to Africa to the American Midwest, twice over, to say nothing of our tour stops in Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell. Thank goodness that particular journey is organized in the opposite sequence, but don't get complacent. We've got zombies on our tail.

(And by the way, as we hit the road, tip me off whether you're digging the mosaic-style presentation of the main page, with frames, or if you're more of a non-frames person. I've structured each page so that the frames should be easily accommodated on any screen with display dimensions of 1024 x 768 or higher, but I do love my readers with the smaller monitors.)