New Year's Day Special - Films of the Decade

This top 5 is based as much on the cinematic experience of watching the film as it is on its filmmaking merits. I know if i've seen an excellent film when I leave the cinema. I walk out and I feel different than when I came in. I feel that my worldview has been altered in an intangible way, and I resist leaving the universe the film created. 


Cinema has the ability to immerse the audience into an intense, revelatory experience of someone's worldview. For a couple of hours the viewer surrenders to an other's way of looking at the world. Having the ability to craft that kind of experience is my ultimate aim in filmmaking. It can happen with the most mainstream of films, with people returning to the cinema just to be in the atmosphere created by the film. Titanic was a huge success partly because of teenage girls going 4 or 5 times. 


When I was researching my top 5 I realised how many films I haven't seen, and not only that, how many films I have on DVD that I still haven't watched. Some notable potential list breakers: The Hurt Locker, Oldboy, Lives of Others and the Assasination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford which should be on the list purely on the merits of its title. 


See and Write Films top 5 films of the decade.


1 - Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008)
2 - Happy - Go - Lucky (Mike Leigh, 2008)
3 - The Departed (Martin Scorcese, 2006)
4 - Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001)
5 - Batman Begins / The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2006, 2008)


Here are some I desperately wanted to be on the list: Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, Matt Stone 2004), Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003) American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini, 2003) City of God (Fernando Meirelles, Katia Lund, 2002)  History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005). 


And the best scene of the decade has to be the silent film in Talk to Her ( Pedro Almodovar, 2002), in which a shrunken man declares his love for a woman by climbing into her vagina, never to return.