#11 — Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008) This is what a family looks like. This is what a family feels like. Though Rachel Getting Married takes place over the course of just a couple of days, the momentous weekend of … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Eleven
#12 — About Schmidt (Alexander Payne, 2002) One of the cinematic stands that I’ve taken with some regularity is that Jack Nicholson is the finest actor who made film his primary medium. This argument carries more weight with those who … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Twelve
#13 — Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000) It is perhaps a marker of the diminished expectations of any film that is dominated and driven by action sequences that Ang Lee’s involvement in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon initially seemed perplexing. Lee had made his mark with films that were about conversations rather than fisticuffs, films that were deeply invested in character. Even the battle sequences and other violent skirmishes in the film he’d made immediately prior, the flawed but underrated Civil War drama Ride with the Devil, were entirely secondary to small focused scenes that examined how the characters … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Thirteen
#14 — Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) It is a love story, like a thousand movies than came before, and a thousand that will follow. It adheres to that most familiar of trajectories: two people meet, gradually fall into in one another’s arms, and face impediments to being together. There are two potential paths to the closing credits, one ending in bliss, the other in tragedy. Despite the familiarity, Brokeback Mountain is uniquely special. It’s not just that this romance is between two men, cowboys drawn to each other while charged with looking over a herd of sheep together on … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Fourteen
#15 — American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003) The past decade was a good time for deconstructed narrative in film. Beginning with the mad flush of creativity of the cinematic year 1999, when the likes of Being … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Fifteen
#16 — Shattered Glass (Billy Ray, 2003) There’s a pleasing irony at the heart of Billy Ray’s Shattered Glass. In making a film based on real events, Ray has a certain amount of leeway to embellish and rearrange, shifting the … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Sixteen
#17 — Gosford Park (Robert Altman, 2001) Of course, there’s no shortage of admirable traits in Robert Altman’s finest films, but one of the clearest is the way they are rooted in the eras in which they were made. M*A*S*H … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Seventeen
#18 — You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000) I feel like I owe Laura Linney an apology. If you reattach ten years of torn-off calendar pages to the wall and find me back in the fall of 1999, … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Eighteen
#19 — Born Into Brothels (Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman, 2004) When evaluating documentaries, it’s easy to the conflate the worthiness of the subject with the quality of the filmmaking, which is why, for many years, Oscar pools could be … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Nineteen
#20 — Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005) Michael Haneke pulls no punches. The German-born and Austrian-raised director believe that films should have missions, usually to challenge and provoke. Watching his films gives the strong sense that he’d much rather leave an … Continue reading Top Fifty Films of the 00s — Number Twenty
Coffee for Two 