The Decade's Best: #1-#10

My breath catches a little to realize what a bittersweet conclusion this represents for the countdown: Grizzly Man is the only member of the Top 10 to premiere as late as 2005, and you have to slide down to #18 to see anything that premiered any later. I'm suddenly left with the feeling, espoused by Bill Chambers in an earlier comment thread, that the decade has manifested a real law of diminishing returns. Granted, we are not inhabiting a desert at the moment. My forthcoming Top 10 of 2009 would look quite different if I could incorporate some festival titles from the past year or two that haven't quite achieved their Stateside commercial bow. They're films to look forward to, for sure, but are they enough to countervail the sense that we've seen fewer and fewer masterworks as the decade has evolved?

It's probably wiser to realize that I've had more time to let my feelings about movies like Dancer in the Dark, Morvern Callar, and Amores perros marinate for a longer period of time, and that after a few more years, a Lazarescu or an INLAND EMPIRE or even a Synecdoche or Hurt Locker could move up to those positions. Plus, it just seems incontrovertibly true that the artworks you embrace when you're newest and freshest to the form become more intimate favorites than later acquaintances. The decks may thus be stacked in favor of titles from the 90s and early 00s, often for reasons evoked in the Remembering series.

But also: these are ten astonishing movies, so it's a little strange for me to second-guess what any of them would be doing at the top of a decade review, or to feel remotely bad about it, no matter what other movies or moments in the decade they wind up displacing to lower rungs. It's a great note on which to end the decade and the year... and meanwhile, I hope you've enjoyed this very rare month of daily activity on Nick's Flick Picks. I'm so grateful that you read and participate, and I wish you all a tremendous 2010!

The Decade's Best: #11-#20

Whether you hear Lionel & Diana or Luther & Mariah when I say these soothing words, it's all about endless love by the time we've climbed this high in my Best of the 00s Countdown.

Even in a week that keeps forcing me into carpy, dyspeptic grumpiness—because some holiday classics just aren't as good as I had expected, and some current holiday releases are inestimably worse, and even some tried-and-allegedly-true mainstays of the American cinematic canon, whether screened alone or in auspicious company, strike me as sturdy but deeply flawed, although most people disagree—I'll always have some films to revisit in an adoring way, just like Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris.

From Korea to the Yukon, from Pakistan to London, from Romania to Iran, from North Carolina to, um, Virginia, and on one occasion in eleven different nations at once, the world is a better place with moviemakers like these working at the top of their game, having this much to show us, and this much to say.

The Decade's Best: #21-#30, and One Switcheroo

Even though these movies inspire me profoundly, I admit I'd been running low on inspiration for these posts. It's been so tempting just to toss the whole rest of the list onto the site ever since the first day, since I had it all written and formatted. Maybe I'm just worried that we're getting closer and closer to the point where the choices will be more predictable, if you've been following along with my yearly Best lists. I hate to bore you!

But, due credit to the value of waiting: I just caught The Hurt Locker again in its small theatrical re-release, and damn if the movie isn't even better than I thought it was. So, at the possible risk of heedlessness, I've had to promote it from its former position at #42. You'll see it again this time around, and oddly, it has the effect of bumping down to #31 the movie that otherwise would have been my #1 film for 2009. A real race to the finish line between those two. I've heard from a few of you who already fear that Hurt Locker is overrated, and I understand the inelegance both of changing the list after it's already started unfurling and of trying to form a coherent assessment of a virtually brand-new film, side by side with movies I've adored for almost a full decade. But there we have it. I really think Bigelow's film has durability and depth, and I'd feel even more wrong about keeping it lower than my gut feels is right. Chime in as you will!

Otherwise, I've been especially gratified by the folks who have reported that you're queuing and renting titles you'd never heard of, based on these posts. (I'm doing the same thing, based on other lists I'm reading elsewhere.) Though I know a lot of people who are even more documentary-obsessed than I am, it sounds like the nonfiction titles on my roster have been the freshest discoveries for a lot of you. So, happy to serve! There are two more doozies here in the high 20s.

The Decade's Best: #31-#40

This next grouping of ten shows me something about my own tastes, underlining how gripped I always am by films that worry the relationship between an individual, whether exceptional or unexceptional, and some personal or social collectivity to which they ostensibly belong. Maybe because that kind of drama can inhere inside any shot (who to frame, and who to leave out?), and keeps playing out at every expanding level of the film, I feel like I have an unusual lot to think about when a film engages that quandary in an inspired or unusual way. #40, #39, and #38 are all about collective endeavors, but the concert, the classroom, and the quest also proffer revealing lenses for perceiving the specific agents working at the heart of the action. After that, the bonds become even more elliptical: an unbelievable assertion and the scary desire to accept it, despite the distemper of a surrounding family; a resolute but quickly overwhelmed girl involved in a corrupt traffic; a marooned group, possibly standing in for the whole globe; the elliptical relations inside a hotel that is also a home; the dual but not simply opposed pull of one individual into a criminal life and an artistic calling; an individual who disperses into multiple avatars in different eras; and a pair of boisterous chums who are barely ready to examine their own bond, much less to realize there's a whole nation surrounding them, and it's more than a backdrop for their exuberant jaunts, though the film is gracious enough to welcome us into that exuberance.

And now, we will test my individuality against your collective will! How are you feeling about this group? The responses on all the earlier days have been a real kick to receive and to answer.

The Decade's Best: #41-#50

Heading into the top half of the list, with three famously scarlet-haired actresses giving the performances many consider their greatest work. I demur on Julianne, with respect to her first collaboration with the same director, and it's too soon to tell about Tilda, but could anyone argue otherwise about Julia? Except with the "scarlet" part: her most famous hair color, but bottle-born.

Anyway, keep reading for boxing blues, boys who aren't boys, bomb defusers, strikers, psychos, cops, and robbers.

The Decade's Best: #51-#60

Happy Boxing Day to all my people in the Commonwealth! We were a no-gift household this Christmas, but the presents just keep on coming on Nick's Flick Picks, where the next batch of the decade's best includes a whopping four documentaries. Love them now, non-fiction enthusiasts, because I've just noticed that there are none in the bracket to be posted tomorrow. And for those of you keeping up with the world-tour aspect of this list, one of the entries comprises a 'round-the-world journey of its own, though it hardly inspires its viewers to duplicate the experience. In fact, give or take the odd English estate and one bucolic hamlet in upstate New York, this group is pretty replete with places you might be loath to venture, geographically, sexually, and psychologically. But hang in there as best you can. The films more than repay your willingness to follow along.

The Decade's Best: #61-#70

Animation. Adaptation. Resurrection. Cannes sensations. Oscar winners. Up and comers. Old masters. Lots going on in the next bracket of ten, as we wend our way around Poland, France, Greece, San Francisco, Montana, Vienna, Australia, the Tex-Mex border, two trips to Japan, and one inside the ring.

And for those of you to whom it matters, merry Christmas! All I want from Santa is more good movies in the 10s.

The Decade's Best: #71-#80

Just like last time, a new filmmaker crashes the list with not one but two titles, and this time it's somebody that no one had even heard of till 2000 rolled around. Also, though it's unlikely to faze anyone else, I'm excited to have two films in this bracket that I never imagined would wind up on a list like this when I first saw them—one that I thought was perfectly fine but not much more than that (it's at #78), and one that I practically hated, even though I respected its proficiency. In that case, you won't have any trouble figuring out which title I have in mind.

The Decade's Best: #81-#90

In which gallery art and non-fiction filmmaking both make heavy inroads into this feature, and an unexpected figure emerges as the first double-listed filmmaker on the list.

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.)