The Best Movies of the Decade

I've been thinking long and hard about it, and rewriting a list. Perhaps that is too much thought, but a person, a writer, can only be true to what he thinks. This is the best I got - these are the movies that most excited, moved, surprised me the last ten years. I no longer care about being representational or talking about movies I thought were "significant." Some of these movies are on others' lists, some are not, but the sensation was the same - watching each of these movies, something struck me that I loved, something I hadn't seen before or couldn't remember when I'd seen. There are maybe 100 others this decade that were outstanding, but these ten (or, I guess technically, 14) are the ones I remember the overwhelming experience of the whole thing.

The Top Ten Movies of the 2000s:

1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004)

Let me describe what watching Eternal Sunshine did for me in 2004. I stood up in the theater, near the end, as Jim Carrey nearly allowed Kate Winslett to walk away forever. I yelled "What are you doing?! Go after her!" I never felt a love story like this that looked at the inevitability of the failure of human interactions over time, but fell on their side anyway. It reminded me of the end of Annie Hall and of nothing, I had never seen anything like it. It could only be made in our time, and yet, it is timeless.

2. I'm Not There (2007)

The height of esoteric moviemaking, yet for those initiated, it's completely unequaled. Do you learn about Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes' fake-named, expressionistic, occasionally dream-speak creation of what Dylan's denunciation of identity is? No, I suppose - I knew enough going in and filled in the story with the "truth" I knew. But yes, in that I learned about identity, the quest for who we are and how we see ourselves. Some scenes are beautiful, some are puzzling, some are unmistakably sad and lonely. In some, "Dylan" (or, whoever he's being called at the moment) rejects all we thought we knew of him. Yet do we not feel the same pull sometimes? To see meaning in our moments and yet feel the need to change into someone else entirely? To me, leaving I'm Not There as though I was in a different world, I felt as though I no longer understood who we were, and that I was closer to understanding.

3. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001-2003)

You sit in The Return of the King and you think "I cannot remember seeing a story like this." That is if you can stop watching, if you're no longer drawn to the screen. For that, I cannot just single out Return of the King. The friendship of Fellowship of the Rings and battle of The Two Towers are essential too. I never read a word of JRR Tolkein, but the movies speak to me of what is important about him. This is what happens when every weapon in a filmmaker's arsenal is employed correctly.

4. What Time Is It There? (2001) and Yi Yi (2000)

I love movies about watching others, and I combine these two because they're a brand of Taiwanese movies that simply observe. In Tsai Ming-Laing's What Time Is It There? they observe the sensation of loss, of disconnection, of feeling without understanding of the movements and ease of everyone else, of wondering what others' experiences could possibly mean, because ours, well, we're not sure about those. Edward Yang's Yi Yi is, perhaps, more "story" oriented, but it too is about observing how others interact, and make sense of the world. More humanist and less speculative, Yi Yi is about the way we can love everyone, even if they do not love each other, or if they act in ways we cannot condone.

5. Amelie (2001)

I looked at my friend Melinda while watching Amelie in Boulder at a theater that no longer exists. I have not spoken to her now in several years. It was at the end of the first sequence, which introduces us to characters by going through their purses, telling us the things they like to do, pointing the camera to the sky and telling us the shapes they see in the clouds. I couldn't remember smiling like that, perhaps ever, and maybe I still don't. She felt the same, and the feeling, the beautiful, floating feeling came with you out of the theater. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movie is a love song to movies, and to happiness itself.

6. Mulholland Drive (2001)

I was willing to give up on Mulholland Drive, too, but then I read a piece about an interpretation of the movie, and then another. Pieces started to gain clarity to me. My father told me of his interpretation, so I would watch it again. I would marvel at the pieces I could no longer fit into what was now my own interpretation of the movie. There are scenes I love that I perhaps think I know what they "mean," but it's the spell I love. A man at a diner who speaks of a dream, then the dream exists. The old couple in the cab whose disturbing smile never ceases. Naomi Watts talking in lonely honesty while no one listens at a later dinner. David Lynch truly made his masterpiece with Mulholland Drive, and truthfully, it's the movie we'll all remember him for.

7. Kill Bill, vol. 1 and 2 (2003-2004)

I think my favorie scene in all of the Kill Bill movies is the opening scene in Kill Bill 2, the black and white western moment when Bill, playing a flute, speaks to his bride with a wide smile. He knows what he's there for, and to an extent, so does she. As her fiance comes outside, she whispers for him to call her another name, and he does. Or is my favorite scene the brilliant unbroken shot in Kill Bill 1 that Tarantino repeated in Inglourious Basterds when the camera goes up the stairs, down, into the kitchen, around, to the bathroom, and back up? Or is it when Beatrix's hand, bruised from Pai Mei's tutelage, eats her rice, and learns to form itself again? Or is it when Lucy Liu kicks off her shoes into the snow before her battle with Bea? I never want to have to decide, I only want to see them all again.

8. All The Real Girls (2002)

Some scenes in David Gordon Green's All The Real Girls last only a few seconds, yet you know the hours of which they encompass. A woman tells her friends at a party about a guy she's started dating. Those two stand outside of a door and speak, obliquely, about the night they just had. A man fights with his mother, who is in clown makeup, about his breakup and his sadness. All The Real Girls is, like Eternal Sunshine, about love, but it's also about who we are, and what we give to others in our life, how they change us. It creates its own context by being precise to the moments that may have had beginnings and endings, but shows that the moments that occurred in the middle - the smiling, the honesty - were what mattered.

9. 25th Hour (2002)

I have seen 25th Hour three times, and each time I remember, at the movie's end, just how powerful it is. Monty (Ed Norton) is driving to prison by his father (Brian Cox), who speaks to him of a long, glorious alternate world in which he doesn't drive Monty to prison, but instead helps him escape, somewhere far away. He speaks of the life he has, of reuniting with his love Naturelle (Rosario Dawson). It is so achingly beautiful that we think, this must be what happens. Yet we know, with the deliberateness of the previous day that we've seen that nothing that beautiful could possibly happen. 25th Hour also speaks of New York after September 11th, and many, writing about it at the end of the decade, focus on this. That is part of it, but it is the part that emphasizes Monty, not necessarily Monty that emphasizes New York. 25th Hour is one of Spike Lee's greatest movies because of the humanity of his gaze.

10. Donnie Darko (2001)

Almost a synechdoche for all things cloyingly "indie" and hipster in the decade, Donnie Darko, pre-director's cut, has some of the most riveting, funny, enrapturing loopy storytelling you can remember. The director's cut, perhaps, shows Richard Kelly's true stoner philosopher spirit, but Darko hides that just enough to keep the metaphysical tantalizing and emphasize a story of truth and sacrifice underneath. A true post-Tarantino modern classic, Donnie Darko doesn't need to make sense to work, it simply needs to leave you rapt and puzzled at once.

And if I had to pick ten more, they might be...
Junebug, Brokeback Mountain, Michael Clayton, Pan's Labyrinth, The Bourne Supremacy, Talk to Her, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Requiem for a Dream, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, The New World

Best of 2009 - The "Real" List

Every year, I like to take a minute to think back and discuss the most important works that I read or heard or saw over the past year, regardless of when they came out or what the rules that govern lists are. Each year, you encounter things that strike you, move you, that weren’t in your life a year earlier. What a year it was for me. I lost my father and started law school. I became busy, and had moments of doubt and darkness. In a way, none of these works reflects that darkness, though maybe I could have included Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell,” which I spoke about at my father’s funeral, or Joni Mitchell’s “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsay,” which inspired me to write about the darkness that lurks in us all. Maybe that would be the most honest way to write.

Instead, I had to speak to what is truest to myself, and this year, the things that brought me joy were what meant the most to me. The songs of Yeah Yeah Yeahs that were aggressive and dancy, punky and sweet, dark and light. The books that spoke of artists experimenting at the fringes. The tears and honesty of extended world of Yi Yi, Prince on stage, and a remembrance of all the great music of this decade. This is what I felt this year, this is what I saw myself in.

1. “Zero,” “Heads Will Roll,” “Softshock,” “Skeletons” Yeah Yeah Yeahs
I had had Yeah Yeah Yeahs on my iPod and even loved a song or two of theirs, but I didn’t really hear Yeah Yeah Yeahs until I saw them at Sasquatch over Memorial Day. There, all the rumored charisma of Karen O on stage, I realized, had been massively understated. On stage she’s a god, she’s totally transfixing, bringing ferocity and context to the primitivity of each song. She’s this generation’s Prince or Bowie.

Still, it’s as though this only set the stage for the ascension of all of the great Yeah Yeah Yeahs music to join my iPod. By the time my iPod crashed in October, there were 10 songs of theirs in my Top 30 most played, and in the top 4 were these, the first four tracks on this year’s It’s Blitz, the songs that absolutely defined my year. From the energy of “Zero,” the dance defiance of “Heads Will Roll” and the soft lycra-led dance ebullience of “Softshock,” you see a side of YYYs you never would have predicted but seemed to be there all along – the part that embraced the dancing, synth-raised pop lover in all of us. “Zero” is a song that must be blasted, and was, I think, the song of the summer. “Heads Will Roll,” which opened that Sasquatch performance, capitalizes on all of Karen O’s aggression only to command you to “dance til you’re dead.” “Softshock” could have been made by Pat Benatar, but only if she had been this awesome.

And “Skeletons?” Well, “Skeletons” got me through the rest of the year, its synth simplicity that is like the sun setting and feeling alone, Karen O’s voice trembling in polygraph tremors on that “e” of the minimal line “Skeleton: me.” You’re moved with the drum sticks and synthesizers, bowled over by the intimacy. The disappointment of It’s Blitz is that YYYs didn’t have the conviction to make an entire album of the synth-heavy 80’s sound. The triumph is that these songs entered and completely dominated my world, shocking me into realizing they hadn’t been part of who I was all along.

2. Goodbye 20th Century by David Browne, and We Got The Neutron Bomb by Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen
I released myself from the need to read books that fit into certain categories this year – I’m not sure if I read any novels to completion or finished a memoir. I think I finished Go Tell It On The Mountain, which was great, and read some short stories and essays. But really what I did was allow myself to admit the books that I treat like candy – stuff that informs me of the works I can’t get enough of. Sonic Youth has always been a band like that for me – noisy, wildly different, daring, and esoteric enough to feel like by being such a big fan of theirs, I was in on the world’s greatest, most powerful secret. David Browne, a former music critic for Entertainment Weekly, wrote Goodbye 20th Century, and I wonder if he understands what a gift he gave me. These songs and albums that I’ve appreciated now for ten years since I was introduced to them became so much fuller in the wake of stories about their creation – Thurston Moore and Lydia Lunch scaring bus passengers as they essentially devised “Death Valley ‘69” on a bus ride home! The pop and yell Lee Ranaldo yells out during “In The Kingdom #19” was from Thurston lighting a firecracker! Ranaldo reminiscing that he loved the title of Washing Machine because it felt, to him, “like cleansing ourselves of Dirty” (Dirty being their astonishing 1992 album that showed the Youth in peak, marketable grunge form – and clearly could not last). This was an astonishing portrait of a band at their vital peak.

Couple that with the wacky, rollickingly entertaining oral history We Got The Neutron Bomb, and you have a great one-two punch of fringe music writing. Neutron Bomb tells the story of the LA punk movement of the 70s and 80s as one long overlapping interview, gathering bits and pieces from books, tv specials, interviews, and compilations from the voices who experienced the time. It plays like VH1’s old Legends show, that told a story entirely through the voices of people recalling them. I remember the moment each of the interviewees spoke of David Bowie walking through LA wearing a dress. Just that movement started young fans like Pat Smear and Darby Crash, who then, not being able to play a note, took the stage plunging a microphone into a jar of peanut butter, and then, somewhere down the line, became The Germs, who I’m told are still touring. In Goodbye 20th Century, Lee Ranaldo, bored during an early, terrifying performance of “The Burning Spear” strapped a drill to a microphone while they were playing. That drill is still in the final take. That’s the artist spirit I love, and could revel in forever.

3. Rewatching my favorite movies: The Sweet Hereafter, Mean Streets, Nashville, Playtime, Full Metal Jacket
The rest of the world’s been onto this for years, and it sounds stupid, but something struck me rewatching each of these old movies – the first time, however long ago it was, was never enough. With Full Metal Jacket, I realized it had been since I was in high school ten years ago since I’d seen the whole thing, and yet I thought of it as a favorite of mine. Seeing it now is to reveal all of its meticulously composed, brilliant layers. With The Sweet Hereafter, watching it in full for the first time since, I think, 2002, I saw a more delicately composed, mystically invasive story than I’d seen previously. And with Nashville (hmm, maybe I saw it in 2001?), it’s like I was shown a different world, Robert Altman’s overlapping dialogue making me think that though he’s telling you 2 dozen stories at once, he’s just as interested in the ones even further on the fringe - the security guard talking in the corner, the person working at a sales counter waiting for a superstar to roll through.

It’s like I fell in love with movies again. With songs, you hear them over and over again, get acquainted with each sigh, each turning of a phrase. A great movie is (duh) just as precisely filled with glorious moments, but I was afraid I’d dilute the impact of the full product by seeing it over and over again, and wound up with a shelf full of movies I never watched. That and they’re so much longer than songs. Yet watching each of these movies again this year made their impact more full because I was freed of the confines of expectations with the story, and I could marvel at the journey to get there. Could this be the beginning of me turning into someone who sees certain movies over and over again? I guess I wouldn’t mind so much.

4. “A Woman A Man Walked By/The Crow Knows Where All The Children Go” and “April” PJ Harvey
For the most part the world has moved on from PJ Harvey by 2009, and perhaps that’s the way of how we talk about music. She released a collaboration with John Parrish this year, A Woman A Man Walked By and toured with him singing songs from that album and their previous collaboration, 1996’s Dance Hall At Louse Point. Dance Hall is a favorite of mine, wilder and looser and more demon-full than even Harvey’s harshest work. A Woman… is not as solid and has, I think, about a half album full of the first material of Harvey’s I’d ever truly call inessential.

Yet two songs were Harvey at her mercurial best. “April,” which is like a late night torch song, sung in an old-woman-y rasp with a weird 20s funeral organ cranking behind her. Yet as the song reaches towards a solemn, wrenching climax, it shows Harvey still as a master of composition, creation, of concept spread into four minute songs. Likewise, the title track gets Harvey’s feisty, inscrutable wildness just right. Talk-singing over a blazing power-chording acoustic guitar, she sings of a “woman/man” with “chicken liver balls,” and cries out, “I want his fucking ass! I want your fucking ass!” It’s the defiant, fearless, goofy, aggressive Harvey I’ve loved for as long as I remember, coming through in all her glory.

5. “Anti-Orgasm” and “Sacred Trickster” Sonic Youth
Reading an interview with Lee Ranaldo recently, he stated he thought The Eternal was the best Youth album of this decade, citing its creation as a more jam-based indie record (it was their first with an indie label in 20 years). I wish I could agree overall, much of it is not especially interesting. However, the Kim Gordon led songs are the best for her in over a decade, and the first two of the record are flat out astonishing. “Sacred Trickster” jangles with atonal guitars and propulsive surprise. Singing “What’s it like to be a girl in a band? I don’t quite understand!” Gordon sounds playful, surprised, rejuvenated and completely essential again. And “Anti-Orgasm” really is the jam-fueled indie song Ranaldo mistakes the whole album for – loud, ferocious, drums and guitar and voice exploding with snarky SY anger and mischievousness.

6. The Rolling Stone Best of the 00s Albums List Issue
I’ve spent so much time thinking about what the 00’s were as a decade and compiling a Best of the Decade list for albums and movies. Yet it always struck me that we were foisting a personality that never quite fit onto this decade. Seeing the list Rolling Stone published this month really drove home what the decade was – which is to say, full of the great voices of decades past comingling with this decade’s. Radiohead’s 4 albums appeared on it, so did two from U2 and two from Bruce Springsteen and two from Bob Dylan. So did Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine and PJ Harvey’s Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea. I felt like I didn’t have to pretend that everyone from the 90s made music this decade, and this list, with Radiohead’s Kid A claiming its top spot, didn’t exactly match mine. It did register smart, witty opinion on the ten years that preceded us. Other lists seem full of albums I’ve never heard of. What is a list if it’s that persnickety? Read this list and remember why you loved the music that truly existed in these last ten years.

7. Star Trek
I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. My brothers and I would watch episodes, play with fake phasers, and discuss our favorite side characters over dinner. J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek – dare I say it, the best movie of the year – was the episode we always deserved, full of guts, effects, characters, drama, fascination, excitement, justice, and nobility. Abrams knew his reboot would have to be solid and exciting to restart the franchise in a time where everything (even Melrose Place!) seems to be rebooting. He did that and so much more.

8. Yi Yi (2000)
Somewhere deep in the nether regions of my Netflix cue was Yi Yi, a movie I only remembered because in 2000 it kept beating Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for Best Foreign Film honors in smaller film awards. Watching it, I hadn’t expected it to be the type of movie I’ve fallen so in love with lately – observational, taking in one interesting character’s experience after another, silently, as they go through more and more human scenarios. Yi Yi loves everyone in its world, deeply, even if they don’t love each other. Roger Ebert wrote this year or last about how when he cries in movies, it has to do with the kindness people show each other. I completely agree, and in Yi Yi, a wife who cries to her husband, a grandmother who strokes her granddaughter's hair, or a son speaking to his dead grandmother about how he loved her, these were the things that brought out wells of emotion I love experiencing for fictional characters. Because their experiences aren’t fictional at all.

9. Purple Rain (1984)
This September I saw a midnight showing of Purple Rain, and though it was just a normal showing of a movie and not quite a Rocky Horror event, audience members cheered at the musical numbers, and one superfan even knew the dance moves to all the Morris Day and the Time songs. What Purple Rain is, truly, is a fairly dumb story used to serve as context for extraordinary musical performances. That made Purple Rain the great evocation of Prince’s performance artist magnetism. How about in “Baby I’m A Star” when Prince catwalks up a small set of stairs to find a glowing guitar and shreds it shooting off priapic beams of light into the audience? Or when he humps the stage in “Darling Nikki”? Or stands with will-he-go-on solemnity before introduces “Purple Rain,” ya know, for that “real feeling” effect? Prince was a great showman at his prime here, and junky 80s story and bad acting or no, you can’t take your eyes off him when he performs.

10. “Poker Face” and “Bad Romance” Lady Gaga
The year when all rules were out the window for pop hits. Watching Lady Gaga now, I’m convinced she’s at the forefront of a major pop movement, in which she can wear a corset, or date Kermit The Frog, or reference Hitchcock in a song, winning with her mystery over giant pop audiences and art-indie hipsters at once. This may be the next revolution (evolution?) of music – everything that comes before is suddenly accessible. And how did Gaga accomplish it? Through fun, pop hooks that explode and burn you without you ever minding. “Poker Face” is one of the great singles of modern times, I do not overstate this, and it bookended the year with “Bad Romance,” which indulged Gaga’s art-destruction outrage which must have been the most giant chorus ever created. Viva the future!

The Best Film Performances of the Decade

The Onion’s AV Club came out with a list today of the 20 Best Film Performances of the Decade (see it at http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-best-film-performances-of-the-00s,35851/). It’s a fine list, although, I admit to have no fondness for their number 1, Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, and am shocked to not see my top 2 choices on their list. Still, the tenor of acting this decade has been so high, and so many movies were created simply to show off their star performance. With that in mind, I offer an alternative list, with only a few performances coinciding with theirs. Some of these won Oscars, some were nominated, and some, well, only I seemed to love them. I’m ok with that, as those performances absolutely go toe-to-toe with the more famous ones. At the top is the performance that perhaps sums up the capabilities of this decade’s movie ambitions – and the costs.


1. Heath Ledger The Dark Knight (2008)
In our lifetimes I wonder if we’ll ever witness a performance this overwhelming, something that’s partly due to Ledger’s death. People, at the time of Ledger’s Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, argued that the Academy wouldn’t even recognize this type of movie had he not died before completing the film. I can’t possibly believe that (seriously, he would’ve won anyway), but in a way, it’s beside the point – Ledger did die, and that does color our perception of the performance, the full, demonic, invasive transformation of his Joker. You hear him sucking the wounds from his cheeks as though he’s feeding on the monstrosity of its presence. He seethes with anomie that takes over the stringiness of his hair, the sloppiness of his makeup, the rage of who he is. It goes beyond making a memorable “villain” and instead is like a generational embrace of nihilism and destruction – a force powerful enough to take the man playing the role. The Dark Knight concludes that humanity is a far more powerful adversary than the nihilism Ledger’s Joker, and you almost don’t even buy it. Here, he epitomizes evil like the great, dark monsters of cinema – from Bela Lugosi’s Dracula to Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrance to Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. May I say with seriousness, this performance is better.

2. Charlize Theron Monster (2003)
Didn’t every actor and actress try and physically morph into a character of slumming ugliness in the hopes of getting an Oscar? Certainly many tried and even succeeded this decade. For Theron, that involved 30 pounds, a layer of fake leathery skin, and a vicious streak that inhabited serial killer Aileen Wuornos. Did she do it for the award? Maybe, maybe not, but either way, nobody went as far for a performance as Theron did (at least, until #1). It’s not simply the physical transformation into near unrecognizability, although, Theron’s voice, eyes, and physicality complete the makeup work. It’s the riveting magnetism of the performance that gives the character sympathy, meaning, humanity. Argue if you want that the movie wasn’t that great – it wasn’t, but really all that does is emphasize the grand transformation at its center, a full showcase of a personality so powerful it can’t even fit into a scripted film.

3. Naomi Watts Mulholland Dr. (2001)
This is something you never see anymore – a daring part starring a no name actress that is both fearless and commanding, a part that turns its indie starlet into a true Hollywood star. Watts has to be varied in Mulholland Drive, just by the nature of her dual character – David Lynch didn’t make an easy task for her. Yet what gives the movie power is the way in which its labyrinthine final act of the movie is so rife with sympathy and ugliness. This is a woman that captivated us with her pure, sweet, gorgeous star innocence (her name was Betty, for crying out loud!). The unique, Lynchian moment in which a soap audition turns into a scene of carnal desire shows Watts in her full, indescribable range – pure, all right, but pure, adrenalized emotion.

4. Catalina Sandina Moreno Maria Full of Grace (2004)
Indie movies were perhaps more proscripted this decade, and even more beholden to having conclusive, positive endings. Maria Full of Grace is like that, but also more unvarnished and wise. Casting Moreno, who was unknown prior (and, really, afterwards), was key in the film’s wounding, humane power. She glows and wants, fears and does not know what she’s gotten herself into. In fact, she typifies what has become a trend that’s a powerful antidote to the all-star slumming of non-indie pictures – the unknowns that, through the truth of their embodiments of their characters, show us life on screen (see also Gabourey Sidibe in this year’s Precious).

5. Jamie Foxx Ray (2004)
So many actors found movie vehicles for their perfect impersonations of famous people, it became a little boring. Ray is a lumpy, occasionally formulaic biopic, but there’s no missing what Jamie Foxx accomplishes as Ray Charles (and if you did miss the movie, he brought it to you everywhere else, including Kanye West’s #1 hit “Gold Digger”). You can argue where Ray works is in showing you the demons that made Charles impossible to deal with and a desperate drug addict were the same that made him great. What that really means is that the precision of Foxx’s work makes you believe in the overwhelming size of his drives and abilities. Foxx is scaldingly, charismatically spot on here.

6. Ellen Burstyn Requiem For A Dream (2000)
In one unforgettable story from Director of Photography Matthew Libatique on Requiem For a Dream, Libatique discussed filming Ellen Burstyn’s famous monologue about what it means to get old. The camera drifted a bit, and director Darren Aronofsky confronted him on it. Libatique’s lens had become too fogged up to see – he was crying too hard. That was the take Aronofsky used. Burstyn’s work was beyond fearless – ugly and terrifying in spurts, her portrait of a deluded drug addict makes the movie’s upsetting, kick-in-the-pants story its true heart.

7. Phillip Seymour Hoffman Capote (2005)
Hoffman seemed everywhere in film this decade, but his work as Truman Capote is the most unforgettable. Hoffman invaded the persona – the voice, the invective, the gestures, the demons, the physical fanciness as well as the control and manipulation of his words. In Capote, Capote’s gifts are also his downfall – his obsession and vanity get tangled with his sympathy, his morality, his talents. As a portrait of the twisted depths that drive artistry, Capote works because Hoffman so specifically inhabits all that drives Capote.

8. Meryl Streep Doubt (2008)
She got four Oscar nominations in the 90’s and 6 in the 80’s, but I’ll take each of her three (and, I can say with reasonably certainty that this year will make four) Oscar nominated performances this decade as a mark of the true power of Streep’s abilities. Adaptation, The Devil Wears Prada, and this year’s Julie and Julia show a Streep so comfortably ferocious and relatable, she was an entirely new imposing figure. Doubt is the finest of her work here, as a terrifyingly serious, focused nun convinced of a horrible wrongdoing. She was matched up with Phillip Seymour Hoffman in an intense mental showdown, but he can’t stand a chance – Streep’s singular certainty and last minute collapse is the height of masterful, invasive acting.

9. Christian Bale The New World (2005)
Call it my personal favorite. Terrence Mallick’s occasionally-painfully-slow, methodically gorgeous take on the Pocahontas story seemed to many like an art school joke. I’m convinced it was more, a deeply beautiful meditation on civilization’s reining in of the wild spirit. Bale’s eyes are unforgettable – as John Rolfe, the man who loved Pocahontas and brought her to civilized celebrity, he takes over the movie from Colin Farrell only to take it to a more deeply felt, more genuine place. He later became so severe an action hero, it’s easy to forget that so much of Bale’s range comes from his warmth, his certainty about humanity. Here, you saw the gentle version of that same instinct.

10. Daniel Day Lewis Gangs of New York (2002)
His performance in There Will Be Blood may be more iconic, but I’m convinced Paul Thomas Anderson wouldn’t have even known Daniel Day Lewis’s bloody, terrifying abilities before Gangs of New York. Scorcese missed the ball on this movie – I don’t even think he knew what he was making – but Lewis’s maniacal ruthlessness is such a potent force on screen, it enlivens and justifies the mess around him.

11. Zhang Ziyi Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
She played on the persona so many times afterwards (even making it into Rush Hour 2!), Ziyi nearly killed all the goodwill she built from Crouching Tiger. Her performance, however, is the movie, despite its set-piece, high-wire flying fight scenes. The truth is the core of the movie is her impetuousness, her youthful insatiability, and her desire for freedom. Ziyi is magnetizing and unnerving at once, a warrior and a little girl fighting for recognition.

12. Billy Bob Thornton The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
Thornton’s best and last great performance came from nothing but staring with deep, wounded eyes. The Coen Brother’s existential noir brimmed with beautiful black and white cinematography, but it was matched by Thornton’s haunted vacuousness, a performance of seeming passivity that helps keep a movie about an absence of personality from ever seeming empty.

13. Eddie Murphy Dreamgirls (2006)
When performing on SNL in the 80’s, you knew Murphy could inhabit James Brown, but perhaps you missed the pain and viciousness of his eyes. In Dreamgirls, Murphy, more than his starlet costars, inhabits fame’s dark side, and coming from work as recognizable as his James Brown impersonation, you feel like you know the source of his infamous staged energy.

14. Cate Blanchet I’m Not There (2007)
If you need proof of Blanchet’s versatility, may you find it in 2007 when her performance as Bob Dylan in I’m Not There earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the same time as Elizabeth: The Golden Age earned her a nomination for Best actress – for playing Queen Elizabeth. Squint and you’ll have trouble telling her apart from the real Dylan, all scrawny limbs and severe cheekbones. Even when you can tell the stunt impersonation for the glorious sleight of hand it is, her work as a driven artist frayed by his own idealism is mesmerizing in its own right.

15. Cameron Diaz Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her (2000)
Rodrigo Garcia’s Things You Can Tell… (2000) and Nine Lives (2005) each tell short, intricately delineated stories of women interconnected by their lives and feelings, and each overflows with miraculous performances. Things… sticks with me, though, above all else due to Diaz’s sweet, astonishingly beautiful performance as a lonely blind woman in a dead-end love affair. Say what you will about Diaz as a star, Diaz is an actress of true feeling and range. Here, her character may not even know how beautiful she is, and has nothing to hide her own isolation and disappointment behind. She delivers an astonishingly lovely speech at the end of the film asking "What is the life of a woman anyway?" It answers its own question.

16. Judi Dench Notes From a Scandal (2006)
Dench had long been accepted as a perennial, majestic, presence of acting royalty. Yet her work in Notes From a Scandal turned her severity both inward and outward at once. As a teacher who discovers an affair between another teacher (Cate Blanchet) and student, Dench is harsh and furious, but also lonely, isolated, and turned on by the power it provides. The movie is luridly soapy, but Dench’s work also makes it deeply felt.

17. Jack Nicholson About Schmidt (2002)
For Nicholson, the notion of being this free of vanity seemed highly impossible. Indeed, as Schmidt, Nicholson is frumpy, sad, angry, lonely, and imperfectly blanketed in the world’s worst combover. Alexander Payne’s dramedies climaxed with Oscar recognition in 2004’s Sideways, but Schmidt was closer to who he was – a deep, unclear pool of conflicting emotions embodied in Nicholson’s entire physical presence.

18. Mickey Rourke The Wrestler (2008)
So many dramas this decade reveled in the hard, unvarnished truth of their characters. Darren Aronofsky knew where these performances came from (see #6), and in Mickey Rourke, he found an actor willing to plum the depths of his “used up piece of meat” living long past his expiration date. One look at the famous scene on an abandoned boardwalk in which Rourke tells Evan Rachel Wood that he only wants her not to hate him, and you, with full sympathy, believe.

19. Daniel Craig Casino Royale (2006)
Action movies became so serious this decade, and it was a bit of the trifecta of Matt Damon, Christian Bale, and Daniel Craig that helped complete the shift. Craig, for my money, came in by radically reshaping Jamed Bond into a short-fused paragon of seriousness. Many balked that Craig was an enemy to the fun of Bond (particularly in 2008’s awful Quantum of Solace), but he’s beyond magnetic on screen.

20. Nicole Kidman The Others (2001)
New Nicole Kidman performances have fallen into a sort of disfavor, but 2001 seemed to be the height of her career – an Oscar nomination for Moulin Rouge was inevitable, and all the while, critics and audiences alike lamented that Kidman couldn’t be nominated also for The Others. The Others was a horror film in the vein of The Sixth Sense, in that its ending was all shock, but it builds on the rich, smoky textures of Kidman’s performance as a mother equally unable to keep ghosts from her children as she is unable to keep the world from getting to them first.

Honorable Mentions: Maggie Gyllenhaal Sherrybaby, Vera Formiga Down to the Bone, Christoph Waltz Inglourious Basterds, Molly Shannon Year of the Dog, Terance Howard Hustle & Flow, Johnny Depp Pirates of the Carribean, Tim Robbins Mystic River