Top 20 films of the decade 1999-2009

Is it the end of the decade already? The years have slipped by and it would only be fitting to list the films that have come to define the past 10 years – or have at lest in my own mind. I am not a fan of lists, but being that this new year will see the opening of a new decade, it is worth carrying out a tidying up exercise, clearing out the drift wood in order to see the trees.

In the end there will be those who will not agree with the list below, but I believe they will stand the test of time, and will still be seen as strong works of cinematic art in 10, 20 or 30 years’ time. It is for films like these that we watch film, waiting for the next astounding encounter with a movie that will stay with us for the rest of our lives. The last decade has been an incredible journey for cinema and I hope the next 10 will be even better.

All the films given in this list are available on DVD so if you want to check any of these out, they should not be to difficult to find. And I would recommended that you do check them out – come on it’s winter,  there’s no excuse, what with the depth of winter upon us. Turn the heating up, slap that disk in the machine and relax for a few hours. What more could any cinephile really need?

Here is the list in high definition alphabetical order.

American Beauty (Sam Mendes, 1999)
Kevin Spacey as Lester Burnham has become a major symbol of middle age malaise in American culture. Trying slowly to find a way out of the stifling conformity of the suburban nightmare. Sexy, funny, and tragic, Mendes’s film charts Burnham’s attempt to return to a life he had before he was caught in a cattle pen of job and suburbia. Only he will never get as far as Alexander Supertramp as his world slowly peels apart. Once trapped maybe we are always trapped.

Amelie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001.)
Amelie is by far one of Jeunet’s finest films to date, and is the film that launched Audrey Tautou in to the international scene. In fact, this dark moral comedy has been the most well-received French film by the international audience for many a year, invoking a Paris that may or may not be fact or fiction. But it is a Paris where love is to be found after a long struggle with the puzzle of life. In the end, if Amelie sends you to bed wondering how many orgasms will be taking place in Montmartre this evening, then most likely the film has done its job.

The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007)
It goes with out saying that this is the best costume drama of the decade, and quite possibly Brad Pitt’s career-defining role, as he plays the doomed amoral Jesse James – a man who can not accept that the American civil war had ended. This really is American film at its best. From the landscape to the details of the slowly closing American west this film packs it all in. Who really needs Merchant & Ivory – history is not always defined by those who wear corsets.

Bad Education (Pedro Almodovar, 2004)
There is no doubt by now that Pedro Almodovar is one of the greats of European cinema. His work over the last 10-15 years has assured him this accolade. Is Bad Education one of his best film? Quite honestly, I don’t know. But it is a film in which Gael Garcia Bernal plays three separate roles Angel, Juan, Zahara. The film folds in themes that are close to Almodovar’s heart, including the yearnings, tales and heartbreak, of Spain’s post-Franco generation as they try to make sense of who they are. This is Spain in melodramatic form, bleeding for all to see.

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)
If there was an award for the most crazy idea in modern cinema, then it would have to go to Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. It is the only film that has ever gone straight in to the head of an actor and seen the word from his eyes, while others namely, John Cusack and Cameron Diaz as the Schwartz’s, try to make money from the trip. Strange and wonderful.

Les Chansons D’ Amour (Christophe Honore, 2007)
This film can only be described as a realist, homoerotic, three in the bed, musical comedy. With a group of actors that are the new generation of French cinema, Louis Garrel, Ludivine Sagnier, and Clotilide Hesme. None of them seem to know what they want so it would seem that they are going to try a little of everything. Hurting each other as they try to find their own identities. Wonderfully directed by Christophe Honore, who should make far more films than he does.

The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003)
Has there ever been such a better cinephilic film ever made as this one? Set against the May 1968 riots in Paris, Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel, fall into the cinema as it reflects their times and their lives. This film is a love letter to the film makers of the Nouvelle Vague; Cahier Du Cinema and its editor Andre Bazin; along with the Cinematheque Francaise and its archivist Henri Langlois. This film is for the revolution that is cinema.

Goodbye Lenin (Wolfgang Becker, 2003)
German film has had a strong presence across the past decade to the point that one could even talk of a German New Wave of the early 21st century. In fact, there are three German films included on this list. Goodbye Lenin, is based around the bitter-sweet freedom brought on by the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the reunification of Germany, as the film’s protagonists try and keep the fact of the fall of the wall away from their already dying mother, with some wonderful comic turns. It is as if one order is dying while another moves forward. Heart stopingly fantastic.

Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001)
If there was ever an overaching theme for films of the past 10 years or so then the passing of an age may well be one of them. It’s in Jesse James, In To The Wild, Lost In Translation, The Lives Of Others, and Good Bye Lenin. And this sublime murder mystery is one that can be added to the list. And it’s so much more. Gosford Park represents the crumbling of the English class system between the wars. The 19th century is dying in this film – some of the aristocracy may not have noticed, yet those who work down stairs most certainly have. Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Charles Dance, and Kristin Scott Thomas, are just some of the names that appear in this large ensemble cast.

Into The Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)
Into The Wild is the only film of the decade that may be able to take on Pitt’s Jesse James and win. I don’t think I’ve seen a more American film in years than this. It is so American that it goes straight to the heart of the creation of the States: a combination of wilderness and God. Emile Hirsch as Chris McCandless, who calls himself Alexander Supertramp, goes off into the wilderness in search of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendental god, which cuts through the whole of nature. Sean Penn does a wonderful job in writing and directing this piece, which distils life in to a more open idea of humanity.

The Lives Of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
Freedom of thought has always been a right that we take for granted here in Britain. But then there have been countries and times where that right has been curtailed. The Lives Of Others is set in East Germany, a country that before 1989 was not heavily in to any kind of freedom of thought. Ulrich Muche plays a Stazi agent whose job it is to keep an eye on deviant thought, especially of a certain writer, who claims to be on the side of the party, but may be having other thoughts, that the party do not allow. This is a film about the watchers, doing the watching, and the effects that this system has on watched and watched alike. A dazzling film about things that we take for granted, and things we could easily lose.

Lost In Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, in the same film together could easily have been a disaster. But this wonderful study of the lost human heart comes at you like a metaphysical blast which pulls the characters form their own nothingness into their very own human sense of being. In the end it is not the space between people which counts but their own humanity which lies within. This is what both Murray and Johansson find when they meet in the bar of the hotel they are staying at. It is not the city of Tokyo or the Japanese that is strange but their own very lack of sense of who they are. They first have to have the courage to be before they can be anything else. They make each other whole.

The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums forms the foundation for most of the important comedy written in America over the past decade. Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Ben Stiller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Luke Wilson, pull Wes Anderson’s strange style off with skill and panache. After all Anderson’s America is strange place, full of strange people, odd events, and even odder conclusions. And if Anderson keeps creating work of this oddness and quality one can only assume that we have an American classic on our hands. Even if that classic is dressed in bright red track suits, and thick horned rimed glasses.

Russian Ark (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2002)
Russian Ark is one of the most labyrinthine Proustian films that have ever been made. It is a film where history falls in upon itself and weaves its magic in successive waves. For history is the material form which we are made, to the point that time in the end has no meaning, and, like the narrator of this grand gorgeous film, we become nothing. This is was shot in digital in a single shot, there are no cuts or editing here, and quite possibly one of the finest achievements of European cinema since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
Gael Garcia Bernal stars here in his international breakthrough role, along side Maribel Verdu, who would later go on to play the house keeper in Pan’s Labyrinth. This film is about growing up, and facing the facts of life and death, and that, maybe in the end, we all have to take our own individual paths. Events, in the end, are the things that shape us, and bring identity to our lives, even if we have no control over them. Thought these very acts we become human and grow. Sometimes this film could seen as a paean to lost freedoms that we all lose when we become older.

Sex & Lucia (Julio Medem, 2001)
The title of Sex & Lucia is self explanatory. But the shape of the narrative of this film is nothing of the sort. It is a circular film, and the circular appears all over the place. It repeats itself here, there, at different levels, as it moves through the glorious different levels of this bright, sun-drenched film. It keeps moving but will always find an end. Lucia will find her writer. After all, as he says, writers don’t tend to get women like her

Sophie Scholl (Marc Rothemund, 2005)
One of the best German films of the last 20 years, Sophie Scholl, played by Julia Jentsch (who reminds me, especially in her acting style of the young Juliette Binoche), is the tale of the last days of The White Rose Movement, told through Scholl’s eyes. The White Rose Movement was a non-violent resistance group in Munich, which tried to resist the thought tyranny of Nazi Germany. However, the members were arrested tried and sentenced to death in a show trial, and then executed on the same day. Sophie Scholl was executed along with her brother Hans, and another member of the group. The film reminds us how precious freedom of speech and democracy is to those who have it, and what some brave people will go through to gain it. It is because of this that Sophie Scholl is such a potent symbol of that right to freedom of speech, and what we might have to pay in our defence of that right. Sophie Scholl and The White Rose Movement must never be forgotten.

Under The Sand (Francois Ozon, 2000.)
This is the tale of Marie Drillon, played by the excellent Charlotte Rampling – it was this film that revitalized her career – who goes on holiday to the south of France for holiday, only to lose her husband when he goes swimming on a clear fine day. The film then recounts, in very hard realist terms the process, of her mourning the loss of her husband. Although not an easy film, it is by far incredibly humane film in the position it takes with regards to the central character. The way that Rampling projects the barrenness of the loss of a loved one has never been done better.

Vendredi Soir (Claire Denis, 2002)
Vendredi Soir is a beautiful, minimalist, impressionistic, film of one Friday evening and morning in Paris, as two people come together, have a brief flirtation and affair, and then part once more in the morning. It is a film of moments, of slow movements, of traffic stuck on a cold winter night on a Parisian Boulevard, of sun rises, and sun sets, of time trapped in the detail. This film has one of the best sound tracks, invoking the city at night, you’ll ever hear. Sensitive and supple it brings the spectator in and almost leads to a full emersion. A superb film, by a superb film maker.

La Vie En Rose (Olivier Dahan, 2007)
If there was ever one singer that came to define the French nation over the 20th century, then it’s Edith Piaf. This film is likely to become the best filmic portrait of the singer, showing her in different stages of her career and life – as a young girl and street singer trying to make ends meet, as a singer trying to establish herself as a recording artist, as a international star at the top of her game, and then as a dying women who passed away far to young and far to early. Marion Cotillard’s, Edith Piaf, is the most sublime piece of theatre you are likely to see on the screen in many a year.

• Do you agree or disagree with Nick? What are your top 20 films for the last decade? And what would you change? Comments below, please

(Image: from The Assassination Of Jesse James. Director of Photography for The Assassination Of Jesse James, Torquay’s Roger Deakins was Nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Cinematography, and he also received  a whole host of other nominations and awards for his work on the film.)