Tomb

2000: In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-wai)

Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love has both haunted and inspired me for the 10 years following its release. Seldom is a film so monumental in emotion, yet so minimal in its scope — In the Mood for Love’s 1960s Hong Kong backdrop literally drops away in the on-screen presence of aching lovers Tony Leung (rightful winner of the Best Actor award at the 2000 Cannes film festival) and Maggie Cheung. We barely even notice anyone else exists — for them, trapped in marriages with other people whom we, as the audience, never even fully see, it’s clear no one else does.

There’s no sordid lipstick traces to be found — this isn’t that kind of love story. Christopher Doyle’s awe-inspiring cinematography splashes the tiniest of details (dress collars, shaking hips, steaming bowls of noodles) across gorgeous widescreen, and Kar-wai unfolds the narrative like deconstructing delicate origami. It’s a cinematic experience both exhilarating and exhausting, and throughout the rest of the decade (including with the chilly, remote 2004 sequel 2046), even Kar-wai couldn’t surpass it.

MARK HAMILTON

2001: The Royal Tenenbaums (dir. Wes Anderson)

The Royal Tenenbaums was released at the end of 2001, but I spent 2002 ringing from the impact. It was deadpan farce played out in an anonymous New York where grime and cloudy skies contrasted with the colour palette of a palatial home filled with former geniuses. More importantly to me, there was something in a dysfunctional family of intelligentsia that, even if it didn’t speak directly to my own experiences in an eccentric, damaged family, hit near enough to the mark that I kept going back, wading through dull brown January slush. At the time, I was alone in a new city and feeling lost, regretting everything.

Near the end of the movie, Chas Tenenbaum, a tennis-prodigy-turned-paranoid-father, breaks down in front of his own father and chokes, “I’ve had a rough year, dad,” and I felt a movie kick me in the chest for the first time. It wasn’t a turning point, exactly, but things did get better, eventually. Hell of a year was 2002.

JEFF KUBIK

2002: Bowling for Columbine (dir. Michael Moore)

Few films inspire ideological debates like those of Michael Moore, and 2002's Bowling for Columbine is the most historically significant of the lot. It was the most financially successful documentary ever at the time, divided audiences along political lines and is still an object of passionate discourse today. This is Moore's masterpiece, entertaining and provoking audiences with rare skill. The first time I saw this in a theatre, nobody wanted to leave afterwards. They all just stayed in the lobby, excitedly discussing what they'd just seen.

Interestingly, the film's thesis changed in the middle of filming. Moore's comparison of Canada and the U.S.A. suggested that gun ownership wasn't the problem, and that cultural differences were to blame, sending his doc into unexpected and fascinating directions.

Until Bowling for Columbine, popular documentaries never won Academy awards. Not only did it win, but Moore used his acceptance speech as an opportunity to tell off the president of the United States!

JOHN TEBBUTT

2003: The Return of the King (dir. Peter Jackson)/Lost in Translation (dir. Sofia Coppola)

The year 2003 was polarized between the big-budget action spectacle of The Return of the King and the smaller, more intimate offering of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. On the one hand, the release of Peter Jackson's final faithful instalment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was the fulfilment of my own childhood fantasies. It was sweeping and grand in scope, an indulgent four-hour capstone, rich in historical detail and determinism, straightforward in its good versus evil allegorical treatment of the 20th century. Lost in Translation goes the other way, narrowing the human experience to the sum of a few Shinjuku Toyko blocks, exploring themes of alienation, disillusionment, selling out and still maintaining the hope to reach out for human contact.

SEAN MARCHETTO

2004: I Heart Huckabees (dir. David O. Russel)

Bill Murray’s post-Rushmore reinvention as a dry-witted middle-aged smart-ass has provided some of the funniest cinematic moments of the decade. However, what no one seems to mention is the similarly hilarious mid-2000s turn-around of Dustin Hoffman, best showcased by the flawed but endearing Will Ferrell vehicle Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and my favourite film of 2004, I Heart Huckabees.

Alongside pitch-perfect performances from Jason Schwartzman, Isabelle Huppert, Jude Law, Naomi Watts and — most surprising — Mark Wahlberg, director David O. Russel skillfully wrote and cast Hoffman and Lily Tomlin in the roles of a husband-and-wife “existential detective” duo. Assigned to spy on his clients’ day-to-day activities while also enacting oddball exercises, Hoffman’s Bernard Jaffe shares such mystifying insights as “There’s no such thing as nothing.” That year offered many other excellent films — The Sea Inside, The Life Aquatic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — but nothing keeps me coming back like Huckabees.

JESSE LOCKE

2005 – Good Night and Good Luck (dir. George Clooney)

George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck made me feel proud to be an almost-sort-of-journalist, even if I deliberately run at full speed away from the serious, real news the characters in the film cover. Telling the story of CBS personality and celebrated Second World War correspondent Edward R. Murrow’s defiant refusal to cotton to Senator Joe McCarthy’s bullying during the Red Scare, the film provided a subtle reminder about complacency to Americans during the middle years of George W. Bush’s much-maligned presidency.

Political message aside, the film is simply a delight. Hearkening back to a time when characters said things that carried some meaning, the dialogue is razor-sharp and laced with humanity. The film also cashed in on the appeal of well-groomed, Scotch-drinking, quick-witted men in classy suits years before Mad Men came along. Good Night and Good Luck feels like a forgotten classic from Hollywood’s golden age. That it happens to be relevant to post-millennial audiences is just an added bonus.

GARTH PAULSON

2006: Children of Men (dir. Alfonso Cuaron)

A first viewing of Children of Men is like riding a horrifying roller coaster. A smart, high-budget genre film that feels like a labour of love, Children tapped into some very real anxieties we were beginning to have about our impact on the planet, then wrapped them in superbly implemented direct cinema techniques. Cuaron has always planned the movements of his “wandering” camera with anal-retentive exactitude, but Children was the first time he was able to successfully maintain an illusion of improvisation throughout. Though the genre-movie-with-a-brain saw its apotheosis two years later with The Dark Knight, Cuaron's chilling adventure remains one of the decade's greatest achievements in sci-fi filmmaking.

KYLE FRANCIS

2007: Michael Clayton (dir. Tony Gilroy)

In a year where the Coen Brothers took home a deserved best picture Oscar for No Country For Old Men, it’s Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton that keeps me coming back. You’ve seen the story time and again — an underdog takes on a big, greedy corporation and its high-priced law firm when its negligence has put lives on the line — but never with such morally ambiguous characters. George Clooney, abandoning his bag of acting tricks almost entirely, plays the law firm’s “fixer,” who reluctantly gets caught in the middle when his colleague (a pitch-perfect Tom Wilkinson) blows the whistle on U-North agriculture products (whose shameless general council is played by Oscar winner Tilda Swinton). It’s a gripping enough story even without the delicately played subplot involving Clayton’s failing business and strained family relationships. Gilroy directs his own script and never forces a moment, never gives the audience more than they need and never takes anything for granted. This is brilliant and mature film that is as thought provoking as it is entertaining. The movie is so effortless that the closing credits roll over some of the best acting of the movie and of Clooney’s career. Like the rest of the film, that moment shows that nothing in a movie has to be overwrought for it to be meaningful.

JASON LEWIS

2008: Synecdoche, New York (dir. Charlie Kaufman)

Charlie Kaufman has done a lot of great work as a screenwriter, and for Synecdoche, New York, he takes the director’s chair as well. The plot centres on Caden Cotard, a stage director embarking on an impossibly large production. His play — a mirror image of his entire life, set in a fantasy-sized warehouse — quickly sprawls out of control. Each role requires multiple actors, as every time his play begins, another smaller play must naturally begin inside of it. Soon, there is no way to tell what is real and what is in the play, which is exactly Kaufman’s point. What’s the difference between who we are and who we think we are? What’s the difference between what we see in ourselves and what others see in us? These are just some of the questions Kaufman asks, but he doesn’t dare answer them. Questions are more interesting anyway.

NATHAN ATNIKOV

2009: Where the Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze)

For the last few years, I’ve made a point of avoiding movie trailers. It’s nothing against the format — second-for-second, trailers provide more entertainment than most feature-lengths you care to mention. When the preview for Spike Jonze’s take on Where the Wild Things Are started making the rounds, though, I couldn’t avoid it — heck, I started enthusiastically showing it to anyone who had two minutes to spare. The blend of Jonze’s imagery, Arcade Fire’s swelling soundtrack and the powerful force of nostalgia was nothing short of masterful. The finished movie was something different altogether —introverted and existentialist rather than life affirming and triumphant — but that trailer got me excited for the film in a way that no movie had in years.

PETER HEMMINGER