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Best Films Of The Decade (2001-2010)

I think we can safely suggest that this decade has been incredible for films. Think about how far in these past ten years filmmaking has been pushed forward to reach the pinnacle of technical perfection. The further we get away from it, the more I think this will be known as the technical transformation of film. We've seen digital film burst forward due to the dawn of the internet and cheapness of materials to both amateur and professional filmmakers. From Danny Boyle & David Lynch's embracing of the DV format to the superb quality of the RED, mastered by the likes of David Fincher. The rise in 3D came in the latter half of the decade and the push towards photo realism in visual effects has become huge. Look for example at the rise in performance capture from Gollum to the Na'vi, from The Polar Express to Avatar, the leaps filmmakers have taken have been extraordinary. Also we should take a look at some of the influential characters from overseas. Mexican cinema was well and truly here by the middle of the decade with Alfonso Cuaron, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Gonzales Innaritu bringing over a new exciting cinema style to a western audience and seguing that sensibility into more mainstream work. We have the return of Eastern European austerity in the form of Michael Haneke, who has put arthouse audiences through the pain of watching films which are the true definition of uncomfortable viewing.


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1. There Will Be Blood (2007, Paul Thomas Anderson)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s majestic oil soaked epic is the most profound and complicated film of this decade, not in terms of plot but in terms of theme, character and message. There Will Be Blood plays out as an extended allegory for modern American capitalism as embodied in oil baron, Daniel Plainview (played by Daniel Day Lewis), as he slowly takes over a small Californian village into an oil city during the turn of the century. Then a spanner is thrown in the works as religious nut Eli Sunday poses a significant threat to the credibility and success of Plainview’s work, as if to symbolise the battle between Capitalism and Religion. Very much in the same way Guillermo del Toro worked his way up to Pan’s Labyrinth, There Will Be Blood is the film Paul Thomas Anderson has been working to, it is everything he has always aimed for.

Daniel Day Lewis is Plainview, he lives and breathes that character. It is truly a remarkable performance, from the opening of the film Day-Lewis dominates the screen and is rarely off it for the rest of the two and a half hours. And the way his powerful voice seductively commands the soundtrack, it is an oddly weird but slick mixture of Noah Cross from Chinatown and Agent Smith from The Matrix. The brilliance of Day Lewis’ performance is how he is able to make a thoroughly hideous man likeable. Plainview is a man made of pure evil and is interested with nothing except money. And yet, due to what we go through with Plainview, we side with him. We track his life and it is only by the end we begin to distance ourselves from his character. This also has a lot to do with Anderson’s direction as well and how he presents Plainview to us, in the framing most importantly.

When I said this is the film Anderson has been working to his whole career, I meant it. Sound and noise is very important in his movies and here it is possibly the most important factor. The score composed by Jonny Greenwood is powerful but also very unsettling and runs completely contrary to the images before our eyes. However, while scores are often used to reflect the emotion of the characters or the pace of a particular scene, in the case of Anderson he uses the music to set the mood and the tone throughout, which he has always tended to do. The offtone screeching strings which pierce the speakers are used to the highest degree to set off a sense of unease in the viewer from the beginning. However, this film is also very different from what Anderson has directed before, whilst in the past he has focused on ensemble pieces with many characters who have interweaving stories very much in the style of the films of Robert Altman or Martin Scorsese, There Will Be Blood is a focused character study on one man more in the style of Citizen Kane, and it works to startling effect.

The film also contains one of the best directed openings ever commited to film, the first 15 minutes which is dialogue free, manages to convey so much by doing so little. In that short space of time, Anderson perfectly sets up Plainview, the standing with his son and his ever growing business prowess and expansion. There Will Be Blood is a monumental achievement of filmmaking, it demands constant attention and benefits from repeat viewings. This is the kind of film to be indulged in by scholars and film lovers and it will be interpreted and studied for a very long time to come.

And there you have it. My top films of the decade. What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

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