Author’s Note: I apparently did this in July of 2009
but didn’t list my top ten favorites. It
simply had my favorite film and then a few honorable mentions that would have
been in the top five.
I started a series of lists that rank my top ten
favorite movies by decade. It began in
the 1920s and will be working toward the new millennium.
To compile this list, I took my ranked films from
IMDb, which I grade after every movie viewing, and sorted them from highest to
lowest. Then, looking at each movie in
each decade I came up with my favorite ten.
I have included some honorable mentions to show what
the top ten were up against. We will continue with the 1990s.
2000s
Honorable Mentions: Almost Famous (2000), Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Amelie (2001), The Royal Tenenbaums
(2001), X2 (2003), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Shaun
of the Dead (2004), King Kong (2005), Little
Miss Sunshine (2006), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Man on
Wire (2008), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Harry
Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
10. Star Trek (2009)
Similar to
another reboot of a well-established film franchise higher on this list, Star Trek reintroduced audiences to the
original crew of the starship Enterprise.
Director J.J. Abrams revitalized the series with an action-packed
time-travel story that allowed for the filmmakers to explore an alternate
timeline without being constrained by the continuity of the previous five
decades of Trekkie canon. Critics praised
the feature for being well balanced among humor, action, drama, and
spectacle. Star Trek had the largest American opening ever in the series’
history and went on to be the highest-grossing of all the Trek feature films. The movie received four Academy Award
nominations, winning in Best Makeup, and other nominations included a Grammy,
three Empire, five Teen Choice Award, four People’s Choice Award, and five
Broadcast Film Critics Association nominations.
9. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
(2004)
The third film of the Harry Potter series, it is the first of the
franchise that took a darker, more mature, tone and was truly stylized for both
children and adults. It is also the only
film of the series that could be a stand-alone picture, which is one of the reasons that makes it so appealing to me. Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is the story of a man named Sirius Black
who has escaped prison and looks to murder Harry. Despite enormous, and even record-breaking in
some areas, box office receipts and earning nearly $800 million worldwide, it is the lowest grossing of all the Harry
Potter films. The movie garnered two
Oscar nominations for Best Original Score and Visual Effects and found its way
on to a few “Best Of” lists, including Empire magazine, IGN, and Moviefone.
8. WALL-E (2008)
Pixar is heavily
represented on this decade’s list, but this is right in the middle of the Golden
Age of Pixar filmmaking. WALL-E is a futuristic story that
follows a robot designed to clean a waste-covered Earth that falls in love with
another robot and travels into space, altering the lives of mankind. Although a children’s computer-animated
movie, the story deals with deeper societal issues, including consumerism, complacency
in the technological age, environmental and waste management, and
nostalgia. WALL-E received near universal acclaim and was a box office
success. Accolades included nominations
and wins at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Hugo Awards, Saturn Awards, and
numerous Critics’ Award ceremonies. It
also was named the best film of the decade by TIME.
7. City of God (2002)
Most likely the
only Brazilian film I have ever seen, Cidade
de Deus, or City of God, follows
the rise of organized crime in Rio de Janeiro from the late 1960s to the early
1980s. Among the movies bountiful praise
from critics, it received abundant rankings on top ten lists for the year and
decade. The film received four Academy
Award nominations and was named the Best Foreign Language Film at the Chicago
Film Critics Association Awards, New York Film Critics Circle Awards, Las Vegas
Film Critics Society Awards, Satellite Awards, Southeastern Film Critics
Association Awards, and Toronto Film Critics Association Awards, along with
several other nominations in the same category at other award ceremonies. The movie also spawned a television series
and a film based on the TV series.
6. Gladiator (2000)
Not just an epic
guy movie that supplanted Spartacus
as greatest gladiatorial film, but Gladiator
was also an Academy Award winning best picture.
Ridley Scott directs Russell Crowe as former general, turned gladiator,
who seeks revenge on the emperor who has murdered his family while surviving
fights to the death in Rome’s Colosseum.
Due in part to its box office success, favorable reviews from critics,
and showering of awards, Gladiator
renewed interest in the historical epic genre.
While it wasn’t a universal success with critics, despite the Best
Picture Oscar, audience-goers loved it, making it one of the highest grossing
films of the year. The film was
nominated in 36 individual award ceremonies and of the 119 nominations it
received, it garnered 48 wins. Along
with the Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe, and other award nominations, Gladiator was included on the American
Film Institute’s 100 Heroes and Villains list, the Total Film list of 50 best heroes and villains, and Empire’s 100 Greatest Movie Characters.
5. Up (2009)
One of the things that
makes Pixar’s Up so incredible is the
first four minutes of the film is a gripping dramatic montage of cinema that
summons the deepest compassion in nearly every viewer as it traces the love
story of two characters. Yet, Pixar didn’t
stop there and the next 92 minutes follows that up with some of the most
heartfelt storytelling Hollywood has ever produced. The movie centers on an elderly man and young
Wilderness Explorer who are thrown together on a trip into South America after
the former ties thousands of balloons to his home. Up
was the first animated film to ever open the Cannes Film Festival and only the
second animated movie to receive a Best Picture nomination. It went on to become a huge financial success
and was lauded by critics. The movie was
named Best Animated Feature and won for Best Original Score at the Academy
Awards and Golden Globes. It also
received nine Annie Award nominations along with several other accolades.
4. Finding Nemo (2003)
Yet another
title from the prodigious filmmakers and designers at Pixar, Finding Nemo is not only an astonishing
work of storytelling, but the achievements in creating natural-looking water
through computer animation is beyond belief.
Like the title implies, Finding
Nemo follows an over-protective clown fish named Marlin, who is searching
for his abducted son and meets a friend with short-term memory problems along
the way that helps teach him that not everything in life can be safe. Another critical and financial smash for
Pixar, Finding Nemo was the second
highest grossing film of the year, won the Academy Award and Saturn Award for
Best Animated Feature, and is the best-selling DVD of all time. It received countless other awards and
nominations, among which included Best Animated Film at several critics’ award
ceremonies. AFI included the movie among
its 10 Top 10 Best Animated Films.
3. Casino Royale (2006)
No “Best Of”
list by decade would be complete for me without at least one James Bond movie in
consideration, except for the 70s (that’s on you Roger Moore). Casino
Royale, the first written and last filmed of Ian Fleming’s novels, is a
reboot of the series, becoming grittier and showing a more vulnerable
hero. Bond must win at a high-stakes poker
game in order to bankrupt criminal-financier Le Chiffre. Current 007 Daniel Craig took over the role
with this film, presenting an interpretation more in the mold of Sean Connery
and Timothy Dalton than Roger Moore and Pierce Brosnan. Critics were receptive to the new direction
of the series but some felt the more brutal tone was turning James Bond into
Jason Bourne. Financially it was the
biggest Bond film ever up to that point.
Casino Royale made it on
several critics’ top 10 lists and received eight BAFTA nominations, five Saturn
Award nominations, and several other awards for its screenplay, film editing,
visual effects, and production design.
2. The Dark Knight (2008)
Another
film series that rebooted the character to create a darker, more realistic
tone, Christopher Nolan’s Batman series is considered to be supreme among the
superhero genre. The Dark Knight is based on the comics The Killing Joke and The Long
Halloween and focuses on Batman and Harvey Dent’s pursuit of a new menace
in Gotham, the Joker. Heather Ledger was
posthumously awarded the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA
for his role as the Joker and the film was nominated for another seven Academy
Awards and eight BAFTAs. Several other
award ceremonies recognized the film and financially the picture made more than
a billion dollars worldwide. With the
tone being much more serious than previous comic book movies, real-world themes
and analysis were presented with the release of The Dark Knight, including vigilantism, escalation and the extreme
measures men will take to fight for justice.
1. The Incredibles (2004)
The fourth
and final entry of a Pixar film on this list, The Incredibles presents themes concerning a family of supers attempting
to cope with living a normal existence, such as what the Fantastic Four has attempted to achieve, but on a much more human
level. Like Finding Nemo before it having to generate an accurate
representative of animated water, The Incredibles
required animators to create new technology that would result in
realistic-looking human characters that would detail human anatomy, clothing,
and skin. Praised as one of the best of
the year, the film was the first all-animated feature to win the Hugo Award for
Best Dramatic Presentation. The movie
also received the Academy Award and Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. Winning another Oscar for Best Sound Editing,
The Incredibles was the first Pixar
feature to win multiple Academy Awards.
It was announced last month that a sequel is currently in the works.
Analysis
Including four computer-animated features on
this list portrays me as a simpleton that cannot handle more complex movies
than what is presented to a child, but that is simply not the case as Pixar’s
filmography includes titles with complicated themes and mature content. Plus, computer-generated effects were heavily
used throughout the 2000s, especially in the animated feature genre. This specific decade also saw an increased
interest in foreign language films and documentaries. Another attribute of the period was how 9/11
affected filmmaking and the use of social networking to promote movies.