The Decade In Review
Best of the Decade: Corneliu Porumboiu
By Antoine Bourges | | CS82, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight, The Decade In Review
In Porumboiu’s films, I see a connection to the use of “factual” elements in my own work. I often work with non-actors and have used re-enactments of what may seem like insignificant administrative protocols in a few of my films. In one particular instance, while interviewing a caseworker for a film project in Toronto, I came upon a type of document I had not seen before: a court referral for a man who was charged for refusing to appear in court after being caught stealing.
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Best of the Decade: Jafar Panahi
By Hugh Gibson | | Canadiana, CS82, From Cinema Scope Magazine, Spotlight, The Decade In Review
What would Harry Lime say about today? It feels like the time of the Borgias, but without the Renaissance. Oppression, trauma, and war are omnipresent—and that’s just on my list of the decade’s top films, which includes reflections on the scars left by conflicts past (Christian Petzold’s Transit, 2018; Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises, 2013; Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War, 2017), portraits of traumatized soldiers (Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of Men and War, 2014; Valeska Grisebach’s Western, 2017; Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, 2012), and works that bear witness to atrocities (Wang Bing’s Dead Souls, 2019; Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, 2012,and The Look of Silence, 2014).
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Cinema Scope Top Ten Films of the Decade
By Cinema Scope | | CS42, The Decade In Review
1. Platform (Jia Zhangke, 2000) 2. In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2001) 3. La libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001) 4. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003) 5. 13 Lakes (James Benning, 2004) 6. Evolution of a Filipino Family (Lav Diaz, 2004) 7. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000) 8. Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, 2006) 9. Memories…
Read More The Decade in Review | Olivier Père
By Olivier Pere | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Russian Ark by Alexander Sokurov (2002) The last great master, in the Viscontian sense of European cinema. And one of the great digital artists, endowing digital with a Proustian impact. His films raise issues about preservation (of History, Art) and memory. I could equally well cite his magnificent film The Sun. Black Book by Paul…
Read More The Decade in Review | Cyril Neyrat
By Cyril Neyrat | | CS42, The Decade In Review
If the films were classified in order of preference, In Vanda’s Room would occupy first place. It’s by chance that Costa’s film tops a chronological ordering: of the ten cited, it is undoubtedly the only one whose importance can be immediately measured against the scale of cinema history. In Vanda’s Room launched a new epoch,…
Read More The Decade in Review | Charles Mudede
By Charles Mudede | | CS42, The Decade In Review
The best science-fiction film of the ‘00s is Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008)—the next great science-fiction film of that decade is Silent Light (2007). The interesting thing is that both are set in Mexico. But Silent Light is about aliens in an alien world, and Sleep Dealer is about humans in a post-human world. Rivera,…
Read More The Decade in Review | C.W. Winter
By C.W. Winter | | CS42, The Decade In Review
It’s not often that one would write about a film while it’s still in the middle of its first screening. But as it turns out, one of my favourite movies of this decade—a movie that’s also one of my favourites of the ‘90s, ‘80s, and ‘70s—offers no other choice. I’m speaking of Tony Conrad’s Yellow…
Read More The Decade in Review | Bérénice Reynaud
By Berenice Reynaud | | CS42, The Decade In Review
One of the most important filmic events of the decade was Wang Bing’s monumental West of the Tracks, which changed the way we look at documentary, social reality, and Chinese cinema. From December 1999 to the spring of 2001, Wang and his sound engineer Lin Xudong stayed at their own expense in the Ti Xie…
Read More The Decade in Review | Jennifer Reeves
By Jennifer Reeves | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Every contender for a “best-of” list should be seen more than once. First impressions aren’t always what they’re cracked up to be. And if you care about accuracy and fairness, films not commercially distributed should be given as much consideration as widely available ones. As I was unable to view all of my “contenders” multiple…
Read More The Decade in Review | Tony Rayns
By Tony Rayns | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Seven hundred words aren’t many to fillet the best from a decade, especially when you’d like to use some of them to discuss how archival DVD releases are helping to demolish the institution of film criticism. Maybe we can get to that topic in a future issue, but for now—best crack on. In September 2004…
Read More The Decade in Review | Quintín
By Quintin | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Hong Sang-soo’s most recent film, Like You Know It All (2009), begins with a filmmaker arriving at a film festival in Korea, where he’s supposed to serve on the jury. Hong’s basic plots are usually triggered by his memories, and so some people call him a Proustian director, while others prefer Rohmerian, due to his…
Read More The Decade in Review | Andréa Picard
By Andrea Picard | | CS42, The Decade In Review
A decade of remembering (or, Avant que j’oublie) Literally. Or the fear of forgetting. From Godard’s elegiac Éloge de l’amour (an anguished apologia for the ramshackle installation to come—another of the decade’s most memorable moments strewn amid the ruins of abandoned thought), perhaps the most poignant and prescient statement of the ‘00s (one plus one), not…
Read More The Decade in Review | Mark Peranson
By Mark Peranson | | CS42, The Decade In Review
When I think of Role Models (2008), the film I’ve seen more often than any other in the last decade—except maybe Colossal Youth—the word that comes to mind is wise. The best of recent American comedies, i.e., the most particular, have trouble off the continent because of their particularities—you might say a discrete sense of…
Read More The Decade in Review | Raya Martin
By Raya Martin | | CS42, The Decade In Review
Everything is told, but nothing was ever written. The decade closed like a baffling movie ending: film critics Alexis Tioseco and Nika Bohinc were shot dead during a robbery in the former’s home in Manila. In addition to being one of the few defenders of true independent cinema in the region, Tioseco was also the…
Read More The Decade in Review | Dennis Lim
By Dennis Lim | | The Decade In Review
David Lynch is not an overlooked filmmaker and Mulholland Drive is not a film in need of championing—quite the contrary, since it has already won the decade-end critics’ polls of several other publications. Still, this near-unanimous canonization is not just surprising but suggestive in ways that have largely gone unremarked. It’s worth taking a moment…
Read More The Decade in Review | Christoph Huber & Olaf Möller
By Christoph Huber | | The Decade In Review
Instead of yet another list of favorites, the Ferroni Brigade offers a dozen extraordinary films that have remained marginalized for different reasons; a little anthology of current film culture’s blind spots and an antidote for people who, like us, are lulled to sleep browsing the Times et al. polls. Notes from the Basement (2000). If…
Read More The Decade in Review | Steve Gravestock
By Steve Gravestock | | The Decade In Review
Looking back on the first ten years of this century, it’s hard not to consider it one of the most appalling periods in recent memory. Rung in by tragedy and followed by a disgraceful variation on frontier justice (fuelled by pampered frat boy machismo), the decade dragged obnoxiously on with one outrage following another each…
Read More The Decade in Review | John Gianvito
By John Gianvito | | The Decade In Review
The value of the game of lists—if there is one—is that it affords one an opportunity to share one’s enthusiasms, to extol, to an imagined other, certain values one holds dear. Each of the films on my list is, by its very existence, a victory against the Cinema of Alienation and Distraction; each, in highly…
Read More The Decade in Review | Emmanuel Burdeau
By Emmanuel Burdeau | | The Decade In Review
Cloverfield (2008) is the film one must have seen in order to take stock of where we are, today, in 2010, once again faced with the same questions. Realism, André Bazin, and “The Evolution of a Cinema of Exploration,” the special beauty of films destroyed, lost, regained, forever incomplete—Kon-Tiki and the others…the delicate balance between…
Read More The Decade in Review | Thom Andersen
By Thom Andersen | | The Decade In Review
Okay, I have a fascination with lists: best of, worst of, whatever. I would even claim they’re useful as a quick sketch of history, revealing which films are remembered, which are forgotten. In Film Comment’s best-of-decade poll, for example, I was pleased to see that so many films I admired were remembered by others, and…
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