With only about a month to go before the first decade of the 21st century finishes, the “best films of the decade” lists are already beginning to filter in. So I thought I would get in on the game and offer up my Top Ten favorites (with a few honourable mentions) of the past ten years. Of course, this list will surely change even as the decade completes, as I will continue to see new films from the 2000s in the years ahead and re-evaluate and re-watch the ones I have. But hopefully this list can provide a few recommendations of some of the best films produced in recent years. I chose to limit myself to one film per director. With all that said, here is the list.

Honorable Mention:

THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS (Wes Anderson, 2001)

IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000)

THE SON (The Dardenne Brothers, 2002)

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND (Michel Gondry, 2004)

FAR FROM HEAVEN (Todd Haynes, 2002)

I would consider all of these films in my top category, all masterpieces and completely successful on their own terms. Any one could have made the Top Ten on a different day. Wes Anderson is a love/hate type of director, and although I’m not a hardcore fan, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS is his best work, containing a mixture of distance and artifice characteristic of his style with a real sense of loss and pathos. A sequence set to Nico’s “These Days” remains my favorite of the decade. Wong Kar-Wai’s best work is probably from the 1990s, but IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE is one of the most effective romantic dramas you will find. The Dardenne Brothers from Belgium continually make amazing movies, and THE SON is right up there with 1999′s ROSETTA (my 8th favorite of the 90s) in best representing their uniquely visceral brand of realism. The writer Charlie Kaufman is one of the most original voices currently in American cinema, and as much as I love BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (Spike Jonze, 1999), ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND is just as innovative and has a deeper emotional core. Finally, Todd Haynes’s homage to 1950s melodrama and the director Douglas Sirk is another example of a filmmaker using distancing techniques to activate the critical faculties of the audience without sacrificing identification with his characters and their suffering.

10. THE VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE BY HER BACHELORS (Hong Sang-soo, 2000)

My favorite Hong Sang-soo film keeps changing, with NIGHT AND DAY (2008) and WOMAN IS THE FUTURE OF MAN (2004) also strong contenders. And Hong may be the director of the decade, with seven great features and an equally good short film. But THE VIRGIN STRIPPED BARE is such a unique experiment in narrative that I would place it at the top for now. It is so unique that critics kept disagreeing not just on interpretations of the story, but what the story actually is. Many feel it is a twice-told tale of a love affair, first from the male and then from the female perspective. But closer inspection reveals that we are in many cases simply viewing the earlier scene from a later point in time and that the narration is not primarily subjective. The black and white cinematography and increasing use of long takes only adds to the abstract nature of the story, which nevertheless manages to be a very realistic take on Korean society, especially in terms of gender relations (see longer review here).

9. GOODBYE DRAGON INN (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2003)

Another director producing consistently great work, including his recent film FACE, is Tsai Ming-liang. GOODBYE DRAGON INN might be his greatest and is certainly among the most unusual experiences one is likely to have at the cinema, an 80 minute feature taking place during the screening of a old Hong Kong martial arts classic, King Hu’s DRAGON INN (1967). There is almost no dialogue and very few defined characters. Instead, it relies primarily on mood and the actual cinematic experience itself. The long silent sequence in which we as an audience are forced to stare at an empty movie theatre is a particular highlight (see longer review here).

8. MYSTERIOUS SKIN (Gregg Araki, 2005)

Most of the films on my list are heavy on style, but MYSTERIOUS SKIN’s power is primarily from its storytelling perspective and from its amazing lead performance by Joseph Gordon Levitt. The story of childhood sexual abuse is very easy to exploit and it is almost impossible not to fall into cliche. However, Araki is daring enough to take a different tactic, showing how a child can have sexual desire for an adult while also making it clear that this desire does not condone or justify the adult’s reaction. The ending here, both the final dialogue and the final shot (shown above), is immensely moving and completely unforgettable.

7. YI YI (Edward Yang, 2000)

The last film of Yang, the Taiwanese master who unfortunately passed away in 2007 at the age of 60. Along with Hou Hsiao-hsien, Yang really began the Taiwanese New Wave of the 1980s. I have yet to see the film many consider his masterpiece, A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY (1991), but YI YI would undoubtably be the crowning achievement of the career of even the best of directors. This family drama contains a certain amount of hope in the character of the young boy, a photographer that one can see as something of a director surrogate, but it is also a very dark tale of the dissatisfaction and repression at the heart of both the family unit and Taiwanese society as a whole. The images on display here are simply dazzling, with many layered and superimposed compositions providing a visual equivalent for the multi-layered and complex narrative that is unfolding.

6. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)

The 2007 Cannes film festival winner and the best of a very strong group of films coming out of Romanian this decade. Set during the dictatorship of the 1980s, the plot revolves around a woman who helps her friend obtain an illegal abortion. The film creates both a sense of realism through its long take style and, increasingly, a sense of subjectivity as well. The approach establishes the space and the relationships between the characters, and then as the drama enfolds allows the real time aspect of the long take to give the viewer the experience of these characters. The visceral impact that this film has (and thus its political importance) is intimately connected to the nature of its long take approach (see longer review here).

5. PAN’S LABYRINTH (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006)

One of the great movies about childhood, partially inspired by another masterpiece, Victor Erice’s THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (1973), but in my opinion much more emotionally engaging. Set during the Spanish Civil War, the story follows both the reality of the war and the fantasy world in which the young female protagonist escapes, showing how the two are atcually intimiately connected. This mixture creates a popular modern fairy tale that is not afraid to confront the truly horrifying fact of fascism and the difficulty of confronting it.

4. SECRET SUNSHINE (Lee Chang-dong, 2007)

If I didn’t limit myself to one film per director, Lee Chang-dong’s OASIS (2002) would also appear on this list. But my favorite of his films is SECRET SUNSHINE, which won the Best Actress prize for Jeon Do-yeon at the Cannes film festival. Overall, the film has received good but not great reviews, and has not yet been distributed in North America. For some reason, it affected me like few movies ever have. What I most admire here is that Lee takes the female-centered melodrama, in which we follow a suffering character, and turns it into a realistic, quotidian tale. The style is quite allusive, at times very ordinary and following shot/reverse shot conventions, while at other times showing very long takes from very unusual perspectives (see shot above for example). The ending is both very simple and endlessly thought-provoking, much like the film itself (see longer review here).

3. CRIMSON GOLD (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

If the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami dominated the international cinema of the 1990s, his protege Jafar Panahi has taken over as Iran’s greatest working director. Based on a Kiarostami screenplay, CRIMSON GOLD tells the story of a man on the margins of Iranian society and uses his story to speak, however indirectly, about the current political and social climate of the country. The opening and closing shots are justifiably celebrated, but the sequences in between are equally memorable, as is the central performance. More proof of the richness that Iranian cinema continues to give to the international film scene.

2. CODE UNKNOWN (Michael Haneke, 2000)

Another strong contender for director of the decade is Haneke, with CACHE (2005), his recent Cannes winner THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), and perhaps his most underrated work, 2000′s CODE UNKNOWN. This is Haneke’s first film in France following his career in Austria, and it is a remarkable study of the contemporary French society. It is similar in some ways to one of my least favorite films of the decade, Paul Haggis’s Oscar-winning CRASH (2005), and shows how a talented director can shape material that could be completely mishandled into a work that is both formally adventurous and politically uncompromising. Like most of Haneke, it is very bleak, but there is less overt moralizing than some of his other films, and Haneke seems more invested in his characters than usual. The best film of arguably the greatest European auteur since Robert Bresson.

1. THE WORLD (Jia Zhangke, 2005)

Jia Zhangke emerged this decade from the underground of Chinese filmmaking, working in digital video and outside of the government and its censorship. THE WORLD tells the story of a couple working in a giant amusement park that features mininatures of world landmarks, including the World Trade Center towers. The rather simple story is used by Jia to allow for a extreme long take visual style, at times featuring static compositions and at other times highlighting very mobile framings, which include a remarkable opening tracking shot through a backstage environment. What this style brings to the forefront is the whole issue of cinematic realism. It seems that Jia believes in this notion of cinematic reality, and the film’s scenes gain a dramatic force and weight that conventional editing would not provide. Despite the fact that he shoots on digital video, Jia relies on the ontology of the film image, and one can say he places his faith in reality (to quote Andre Bazin). But at the same time, there are moments when Jia employs animation to convey his characters’ imaginary worlds, giving the sense that there are realities film cannot capture. There are also a few scenes that self-consciously question the image, however subtly. Tao and her boyfriend, Taisheng, make a video in front of a bluescreen for a magic carpet ride. The camera tracks from their image in reality to their image on a video screen where their DVD is being captured. Within this simple shot, reality and image are both put into play (and into question). Similarly, and less obviously, there are shots twice in the film of people posing for pictures in front of the model for the Leaning Tower of Pisa, pretending to hold the tower up. However, these shots reveal the constructiveness of these pictures, and, consequently, of all film images in depth. This long take style that nevertheless questions its realism even as it relies of its ontology is especially appropriate to a film about the reality of characters and their situations within a fictionalized environment consisting of a literal simulation of the world. No other film this decade tells us more about contemporary life nor does it with as much directorial flair.

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