Top 10 Lists

If you missed Part I of this list, you can check it out here. Moving right along, here are the Manifesto’s Top 10 Movies of 2010:

10. Fair Game. As befits a film based on books by Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, Doug Liman’s political thriller is overtly partisan, bristling with outrage from its authors and scorn for the Bush White House. Politics aside, however, Fair Game is a canny, invigorating piece of muckraking cinema. Tightly plotted, crisply edited (remember, Liman made the first and best Bourne picture), and laden with verisimilitude, the movie swiftly and efficiently paints a portrait of both a country in turmoil and a marriage in crisis. Naomi Watts is typically sharp as outed CIA operative Plame, but it’s Sean Penn who provides the film’s real force. Bringing his considerable talent to bear, Penn portrays Wilson as part righteous firebrand, part weary husband, a confident, decent man lashing out at the institutions who have failed him. Fair Game may inspire heated reactions (perhaps if anyone actually saw it), but it’s a reminder that hushed conversations and shadowy figures can form the backdrop for a movie as gripping as any blockbuster. Read More

Movie critics are supposed to publish year-end top 10 lists. It’s part of our job (and while I receive no income for holding this alleged “job”, I’m still labeling myself a critic and that’s that). Sure, you can grouse about how it’s morally objectionable to rank subjective works of art against one another or how 10 is an arbitrary figure (I particularly enjoyed New York Times critic Manohla Dargis seething that our habit of composing 10-item lists functions as tacit approval of the Ten Commandments), but readers have a ravenous appetite for easily digestible summaries of the year that was, and it’s our duty to oblige them.

Back in 2007, I defied this silent edict and published a list of the top fifteen movies of the year rather than my usual decathlon. My rationale was entirely laudatory – there were simply more stellar films than there was available space on a catalog of 10. And while I couldn’t quite label titles such as Charlie Wilson’s War or Juno as one 2007’s 10 best films, I couldn’t in good conscience exclude them from my commemoration of the year’s superlative features. I had no choice: I had to expand the list to 15. Read More

Before getting to the best films of 2009, a quick recap of my Oscar performance. (Yeah, from four months ago. I’ve been busy. Or lazy. Whatever.) Of the 21 categories I predicted, I hit correctly on 17 of them, or 81%. That’s my high-water mark since 2003 (when The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was such a juggernaut that it could have turned Grady Little into Nostradamus), so I’m reasonably pleased overall. I’m disappointed that I missed on Best Original Screenplay, where Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker held off Tarantino’s edgier script for Inglourious Basterds, and I’m shocked – shocked – that Precious defeated Up in the Air for Best Adapted Screenplay. But otherwise, it’s hard to complain about shooting over 80%. For what it’s worth, I’m completely confident that my success rate will dip dramatically in 2010.

O.K., on to everyone’s favorite feature, my Top 10 list for the year in film. Looking back on the year at the movies as a whole, I have to regard it with a sense of apathy that’s becoming alarmingly familiar. I saw 88 different movies in the theatre in 2009, and very few of them generated true enthusiasm from me. Don’t get me wrong, I liked a considerable number of the films that I watched. That’s normal for me – if I didn’t like most movies I watched, I wouldn’t watch so many. But I don’t want to like movies. I want to love them. And whether it’s a result of a shift in my personal ideology (could my taste as a critic actually be maturing? I doubt it) or a decline in the quality of both studio and art-house fare (a more disturbing theory), I’m having a hard time loving movies these days. The simple truth is that, while I’m frequently content with what I see, I’m far less likely to actively stump for the vast majority of it. And that’s a shame, because I want other people to see movies. They’re my primary passion in life, and if people stop seeing them, then during conversation I’ll be forced to resort to riffing about the majesty of Jon Lester’s cut fastball in order to keep myself entertained. Read More

(Quick note before I conclude my rundown of the decade’s best films: In addition to this list and my compendium of the Best Performances of the 2000s, I also considered compiling a list of the decade’s best individual scenes. I worked on this briefly before determining such a monumental task to be untenable. First of all, while these superlative-style lists tend to focus on recognizing excellence – hence the moniker “Best of” – even bad movies have good scenes (see: this scene in Crash), making such a catalog somewhat incongruous. More importantly, while I’m reasonably confident that I can remember all of the great movies I’ve seen over the past 10 years, I’m equally confident that in no way can I recall every great scene. I’ve just watched too many films, meaning I’d inevitably leave out a terrific set piece, and then I’d hate myself. So, no dice.

I can, however, with absolute certainty, declare what would have been my number one choice had I followed through and created such a list. It’s this one. Nothing else even comes close.)

Alright, in the words of Kurt Russell in Tombstone, let’s finish it. If you missed Part I, revealing slots 11-25, check it out here. And now, for the Manifesto’s 10 Best Films of the 2000s: Read More

Well, that was grueling.

Alright, in case you missed it, my Best Performances of the 2000s post articulated my attitude toward lists, namely that they’re inherently absurd but also compulsively readable. That list was also incredibly difficult to make, but compared to my next task, it was easier than playing Seeker while high on Felix Felicis. A top 10 list of the best movies of the entire decade? Now that’s intense. In terms of the most nerve-wracking, pressurized, “I feel like Ron Burgundy reading the news without a teleprompter” moments in my life, creating a list of the decade’s 10 best films fell somewhere between “Taking the LSAT” and “Shooting two free throws with my team down two and no time left on the clock”.

And I failed. Miserably.

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it. I can’t precisely quantify how many movies I’ve seen over the past 10 years, but I’m guessing the tally is around 800. Do you honestly think I can coherently assemble a compendium representing the best 1.25% of those films? It would be like being tasked with choosing the 10 best baseball players of all-time, or the 10 best Emma Watson moments in film history. You can’t possibly do it without omitting contenders that merit a mention. It would be a moral violation of all things just and true. Read More