Okay, I will succumb and give you my top ten list of favorite movies from the last decade.  How did I pick them?  For every film here, I sensed that the filmmaker was all too aware of what mainstream Hollywood expects and these films go their own way.  They offer restraint over showboating and artistry over paint-by-numbers moviemaking.  What we get with each film is a generous gift of humanity.


Heaven (2002)
Giovanni Ribisi plays an Italian police officer who falls in love with Cate Blanchett after she’s arrested for planting a bomb that killed innocent lives.  Ribisi is best known as the medic in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and for playing goofy weirdos (like Phoebe’s half-brother on Friends).  But here, Ribisi shines with a quiet strength anchored by youthful purity.  Blanchett’s role is not an easy one to play, but her integrity as an actress is what ultimately validates this unlikely love story.  Directed by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run).


Hero (2002)
Nobody brings people and natural spaces together like directors John Ford and Zhang Yimou.  Hero is a true cinematic masterwork.  The western and martial arts genres are easily dismissed as action spectacles, but both Ford and Zhang elevate the genres to mythical proportions.  The struggle for justice and the human spirit is staged in a theatre of rock formations, endless skies, and expansive domains.

Zhang’s sense of visual drama is even more operatic than Ford’s.  Zhang utilizes color, costume, and even draperies to drive emotional urgency.  John Ford gave his women complex inner lives, but Zhang goes farther in bringing women into the action and main thrust of the film.  His strong cast in Hero includes Maggie Cheung and Zhang ZiYi who are just as important as the male leads played by Tony Leung and Jet Li.  Maggie Cheung, in particular, gives an eloquent and commanding performance on par with any by Cate Blanchett.

What’s the story about?  The future first emperor of China is the target of legendary assassins.  From the first frame to the last, everything resonates with poetic reckoning.


Before Sunset (2004)
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy’s characters first met in 1995’s Before Sunrise where they fall in love in the course of talking and backpacking through Austria.  Without exchanging contact information, they fix a date and promise to meet up with each other later.  But of course, circumstances interfere and in Sunset, we find out that Delpy’s grandmother died and fatefully detained her.

It’s nine years since that missed date and Delpy and Hawke are reunited in Paris.  They talk about their respective significant others and where life has taken them and their idealism in the intervening years.  This is where I would put a disclaimer about how all this talking isn’t for everyone.  But why anyone would put up with the yammering on any reality dating show versus Hawke and Delpy’s well-drawn conversation-fest is beyond me.

Hawke and Delpy have natural chemistry as Jesse and Celine.  No other film roles, in fact, have ever made them sexier, more accomplished, and indelible.  When Delpy plays her guitar and sings him a waltz she’s composed, there is no doubt they share real magic.


Dear Frankie (2004)
Emily Mortimer plays a single mom with a son who’s deaf.  To explain his father’s absence, she sends the boy letters (pretending they’re from the dad) with foreign stamps explaining that a seaman’s life takes him away from home.  But she’s forced to find a man to pose as the father and Gerard Butler comes into her life.

Gerard Butler is wasted in movies like P.S. I Love You (2007) and The Ugly Truth (2009).  Check him out here and be rewarded for how truly warm and gentlemanly a screen presence he can be.  

Emily Mortimer is sympathetic as the single mom without being wimpy or shrill.  Her relationship with her son feels genuine and you really want to see something happen for her with Butler.


A Letter From an Unknown Woman (2004)
This is based on an original novella by Stefan Zweig.  It was previously adapted to film in 1948 starring Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan (also excellent).  This time, Jinglei Xu (director, writer, & leading lady) sets the story in Peking before the Second World War.  

A young girl falls in love with a writer who moves in across the way.  From a distance, she watches him entertain bohemian friends in his home full of precious books and Western-influenced furnishings.  The writer is unaware of her adoration or her despair when she has to move away.

Years later, the girl returns to the neighborhood to live across from the writer again.  She attends university and participates in protests against increasing Japanese aggression.  It’s while protesting that she happens to meet and connect with the writer.   They begin dating, but he doesn’t take her seriously.  Though promising to contact her after a business trip, he proceeds to forget about her altogether.

Years later, he meets her again without recognizing her.  She is no longer a student, but a single mom with a party girl lifestyle.  He involves himself with her, still oblivious to her identity.  All of this changes when he receives his fateful “letter from an unknown woman”.  In it, the girl connects the past for him in a heartbreakingly selfless way.

The story has potentially melodramatic trappings, but Jinglei Xu does a marvelous job of conveying the power of love without weeping foolishly over it.


A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Audrey Tautou plays a young woman in a tenacious search for her true love who was reportedly killed in World War I.  The film is based on a novel by Sebastien Japrisot (well worth reading, by the way) and works as both a love story and as a mystery with Tatou as an unconventional detective.  Tautou asked for and got the creative team behind her breakthrough 2001 film Amelie (most importantly, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet) to guide her through this complex drama that also boasts a gutsy performance by Marion Cotillard (La Vie En Rose).

I loved Amelie, but there is a dramatic weight to A Very Long Engagement that I find especially haunting.  Tautou goes through a greater range of emotion here.  The supporting character roles are also more poignant and indispensable to Tatou’s story than in Amelie.

The visual landscape was well-researched for historical accuracy.  A good portion of the film is devoted to brutal fighting conditions in the trenches and in No Man’s Land between opposing trenches.  The importance of seeing these images is comparable to the recreation of the Normandy invasion in Saving Private Ryan (1998).


Joyeux Noel (2005)
Another World War I film, but this is a French-German-Anglo-Romanian co-production based on real-life events.  The joint effort is refreshing and historically relevant.  The world has a shared history and we should embrace that whenever possible.

On Christmas Eve in 1914, patches of German and French forces held a temporary truce.  In this depiction, the Scottish are also involved.  The film makes each side a primary focus so that the men of each country suffer through the same hardships.  The soldiers are told to fight in a war started by rulers and politicians.  Every death is a personal one to the men, but only a vague casualty in the vast landscape of the war.

The absurdity of war is made clear when the opposing sides meet together in No Man’s Land for the Christmas Eve truce.  Sharing photographs of loved ones, bottles of wine, and Christmas carols, they become friends when only moments before, they were mortal enemies.  It’s a tremendous revelation of feeling.  If there was ever a way to negotiate peace, this is it.  


A Dirty Carnival (2006)
Ha Yu directs this Korean gangster film with plenty of action and also a surprisingly tender love story.  In-Seong Jo is the lead character and when we first see him, he’s furious at his younger brother for attempting small-time gangster shenanigans.  Jo, however, is a full-time gangster himself and moving quickly up the command chain in order to make money to support his crew and his family (his sick mother and two siblings).

A childhood friend, now filmmaker, meets up with the gangster hoping to get insight for a film he’s making.  A childhood crush also re-enters the gangster’s life, leading In-Seong Jo to juggle baseball bat melées with rival gangs and wholesome dates with the girl.

The gangster’s ascent up the ladder comes at a deadly cost, of course.  It’s mixed up with betrayal, murder, and a loss of self.  The filmmaker is clearly influenced by Martin Scorsese, but this gangster flick is fascinating in other details.  It’s nearly impossible to think of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesce as boys, but you can clearly see the boyish qualities of In-Seong Jo and the other young men.  They were all “clean” once, ordinary and hopeful.  What made their lives extraordinary also corrupted them beyond redemption.


Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
A movie about a family of losers who end up winning each other and the audience.  Alan Arkin is pitch perfect as the grandpa, but the ensemble acting is “flavory” (as my nephew would say) to the last drop.  Abigail Breslin’s journey to a kiddie pageant is a quirky and, yes, adorable odyssey.


Stranger Than Fiction (2006)/Last Chance Harvey (2008)
I’m cheating here, but I can’t think of one of these films without the other.  The chemistry Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson bring to their brief meeting in Stranger gets full attention in Harvey.  

In Stranger, Thompson plays an author with a serious bout of writer’s block.  Will Ferrell plays her creation who doesn’t realize he’s not real, but then becomes real and therefore places an unforeseen responsibility on Thompson regarding Ferrell’s mortality.  Thompson is completely believable as the writer with a brilliant, but morose wit.  And nobody can deliver deadpan disappointment like Hoffman.  When he reads Thompson’s finished manuscript and says “it’s okay”, you know he’s thinking she’s copped out, that she’s not exploiting the full potential of her work, and that he witnessed Great Literature falling out of reach.

In Harvey, Hoffman is a down-on-his-luck composer who attends his daughter’s wedding in London.  His professional life is on the verge of falling apart, and he’s simultaneously forced to face his non-relationship with his daughter, his failed marriage, and the fact that he’s been elegantly replaced as a father and a husband by James Brolin.

Hoffman happens to meet Emma Thompson who has a thankless job taking surveys amongst unsympathetic and rushed travelers at the airport.  The 40-something Thompson is single with next-to-zero dating prospects and a paranoid mother who has Thompson on speed dial.  What’s really lovely about Thompson and Hoffman meeting is that nothing in either of their lives promises that they will connect with someone in a meaningful way.  Neither of them possesses glamour or any success that would draw others to them.  But they do meet and making that effort to be kind to one another changes their romantic fates exponentially.

It’s rare to make a romantic comedy about older characters without making them seem hysterical and terminally menopausal.  I think Hoffman and Thompson prove that there’s plenty of reward in honest interaction.


Stunning Performances
Whenever I think of these actors in the respective films below, I’m still awestruck.  Simply breathtaking work.

•  Gong Li, Eros (2004)
•  Peter O’Toole, Venus (2006)
•  Marion Cotillard, La Vie En Rose (2007)
•  Kristin Scott Thomas, I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)


Note:  Of course, I’ve left something out that I’ll remember later and regret.  And admittedly, I haven’t seen everything.  I loved Pride & Prejudice and admired Memento, Atonement, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  I think Cinderella Man was underrated and I also enjoyed About a Boy, Lost in Translation, O Brother Where Art Thou, In the Mood for Love, Miss Potter, Road to Perdition, The Pianist, and The Widow of St. Pierre enormously.