Top 25 Films of the Aughts #15-11
And so marks the last five-per-post installment of Hollywoodprophets.com’s “Top 25 Films” series. You know the drill by now.
Our series is far from over. The next slieu of entries in the “Top 25″ will contain our 10 final reviews and before February, you will all know our complete list for the best films of the aughts. Excited? Let’s get a move on then, shall we?
15. Michael Clayton (2007)
The corporate crime thriller, Michael Clayton, is probably one of the best legal thrillers of all time. It is not only entertaining, but a truly scathing indictment of corporations and their attitudes toward the common man.
Tony Gilroy turns in one of the very most impressive directorial debuts of all time. Having written the Bourne series, he’s no newbie or anything in Hollywood, but an impressive outing nonetheless.
George Clooney is his always cool and controlled self and he does it just as well as he always does, in other words, very well.His best actor nomination was probably not as deserved as the films co-star though.
Tom Wilkinson didn’t beat Javier Bardem in the Best Supporting Actor category, (Wilkinson was my personal favorite supporting actor for the year, but Bardem’s performance in No Country was incredible as well) but he turns in the best performance of his career. Just as well though, Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, thus completing a serious coup by the global acting community at the awards show.
Acting in concert, the cast of Michael Clayton make for one of the greatest character dramas of the decade, certainly worthy of a spot on our list. – By Adam Gold
14. The White Ribbon (2009)
Along with French director Patrice LeConte and Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, German director Michael Haneke is the only other significant living filmmaker who has never made a bad movie. Indeed, these three filmmakers have never shot an ill-conceived frame.
In particular, Haneke’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, The Piano Teacher and Funny Games are each genuine masterpieces—to which we can now add his thoughtful, though equally grueling historical consideration of the events in a small German village just before World War I. These events range from the tragically ordinary, to the decidedly dastardly; what they actually portend are much more foreboding things.
The White Ribbon won the prestigious Palme D’or at the 2009 Cannes film festival and is in fact the best film of 2009 period—and one of the best of the past decade, certainly. — By Tim Cogshell
13. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Fine artist turned filmmaker Julian Schnabel’s adaptation of French Elle Editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir is in a word—extraordinary. The memoir was written through an arcane system worked out by Bauby and his caregivers after a devastating stroke left the 43-year-old renaissance man paralyzed but for the ability to blink one eye. Schnabel (with the help of screenwriter Ronald Hardwood) engages all of his artistic sensibilities to render a film that is a painterly abstraction of the world as Bauby experiences it while trapped within his body—only his mind free to roam.
Memories, regrets and hope and finally resignation rendered cinematic in a manner too piercing for words except—extraordinary. — By Tim Cogshell
12. The Proposition (2006)
I can’t think of any other way to say it that won’t sound like a Chris Rock monologue, so here goes: you know the world is crazy when the best western movie is Australian…
Here was another movie I never heard about until it was released on DVD. It sounded promising enough (a man with a notorious outlaw brother is hired by a sheriff to bring him in in order to clear his name), so I checked it out. I was very surprised at how well-crafted of a film it truly is, and how the minimalist effect of sparse narrative and character treatment works in telling the story.
Rape, murder, theft, desecration… it’s all an everyday occurrence of the Outback frontier depicted in The Proposition, a rural no-man’s-land much like the seedy boomtowns of America’s Wild West. Appropriately, the violence in the movie comes just as swift and brutally.
The acting is incredible on all fronts (Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, and Danny Huston, in particular give great performances). John Hillcoat doesn’t hold back anything from Nick Cave’s unflinchingly nihilist script. Any fans of the Western genre will be sure to enjoy this little gem if they give it the chance. — By Eric Shenefelt
11. The Aviator (2004)
In The Aviator, Leonardo DiCaprio channels the legendary magnate Howard Hughes to stunning acuity, revealing the portrait of a man whose ambitions could never be fulfilled and his fears never tamed.
The story does not force its way into Hughes’ head more than it has to, which is a perfect move. We all have our own weaknesses but not to the paranoid extremes Hughes reaches. Perhaps what is so enthralling to us is just how such an instable figure could become so larger-than-life.
Martin Scorsese puts us through the ringer for better or for worse with this one, hemming in the abstracts like Hughes’ fear of germs and his OCD, while conspicuously raising an enemy for us to hate. This role is given to Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), who is plotting the downfall of Hughes’ empire through any means necessary, including public humiliation. Every element in this film is cohesive and part of a larger whole, including the soundtrack, acting, and pacing.
Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, the most for any Scorsese film since Raging Bull, The Aviator ultimately won just 5. He lost both Best Picture and Best Director appropriately enough to another legendary filmmaker, Clint Eastwood. So in the interest of Academy politics, Scorsese finally won for The Departed in 2006. A bad film? By all means no. But The Aviator remains Scorsese’s 21st-century opus. — By Riley Briggs
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