It’s telling that though the conversation surrounding the Academy Awards for 2009 was between The Hurt Locker and Avatar, my favorite movie of the year is a movie that was about as far removed from that conversation as possible. Still Walking, a quiet Japanese drama, has made a bigger impact on me than either the shock of The Hurt Locker or the spectacle of Avatar. It goes to show that we think we know what impact a year in the movies have left, but sometimes it takes a decade of reflection to sift the gold from the dust.
Anyway, here are my favorite movies from ten years ago.
Notable absences:
Precious: I find it inert and mostly boring.
The Blind Side: I find it inert and mostly boring.
District 9: I find it inert and mostly boring.
Summer Hours: Still haven’t seen it…
The Messenger: It was probably the first movie out of the full list, though I think it’s pretty incredible, especially its performances.
In the Loop: Probably just after The Messenger. I think it suffers a bit in comparison to Veep in hindsight, because Veep has been such a colossal comedic achievement, and In the Loop feels a little small as a result.
Top Ten
10. Where the Wild Things Are: Another great kids’ movie will appear later on this list, but this one is equally as timeless. Severely underrated upon its release, Spike Jonze’s adaptation of the classic picture book is, of course, different from the book, which was only natural since large chunks Maurice Sendak’s masterpiece are wordless. I appreciated how Jonze framed young Max’s journey to the land of the Wild Things as an escape from the hard things in a kid’s life: being picked on, not getting along with his sister, his mother dating. And all the Wild Things are essentially just children in monster’s bodies, which lends some realism to the surreal experiences Max has with them.
9. Up in the Air: The only late-2000s Jason Reitman movie to survive critical hindsight is Thank You for Smoking, though I maintain that Juno and Up in the Air are just as insightful and effective. Up in the Air, particularly, works as a comedy, as an examination of mid-life crises, and as a portrayal of a country steeped in corporation culture. George Clooney, in one of his best roles, plays the man companies hire to fire people during big layoffs, and Anna Kendrick, in her breakout role, plays his new partner. Vera Farmiga is also particularly good as Clooney’s love interest, though she gets to do a bit more than that and is every bit his equal in her scenes.
8. A Serious Man: I didn’t know what the hell I was watching when I saw this movie at the time. I understood the clear Job parallels in this story about a Jewish man (Michael Stuhlbarg) who can’t catch a break. But this may be the Coen brothers’ least accessible movie, beginning with a weird non sequitur about a dybbuk and continuing through a plot that has no discernible, conventional direction. Even though I was baffled, I loved the journey it took me on, and it still stands tall in my mind as one of the boldest and most personal movies the Coens have made.
7. The Hurt Locker: I remember a few of my friends being weirded out that I actually wanted Avatar to win Best Picture over The Hurt Locker. They’re both deserving, though my reasoning at the time was that the Academy had been embracing smaller movies for almost all of the 2000s and it was past due rewarding a big blockbuster. This was the first year the Oscars expanded the Best Picture slate to ten films, in an effort to let more populist fare like Avatar into the race to get ahead of falling ratings (sound familiar?), and they still gave it to the movie that had grossed the least. This is fine though, because the tension wire that is The Hurt Locker has only grown in my estimation over the last decade, both for its impeccable execution as a thriller and its clearly prescient assessment of the American military’s place in the world and at home.
6. Revanche: The plot of Revanche (German for “revenge”) plays like a soap opera: A bank robber’s girlfriend is shot during their getaway by a police officer, whose wife unwittingly begins an affair with the bank robber while he seeks revenge on the police officer. But director Götz Spielmann and his camera linger on the characters and allow them time around their lines to think and breathe. The movie takes these characters seriously, and the performances are so measured and precise that we do too. Revanche was nominated for the Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars, but it had to compete with Waltz with Bashir, The Class, and the ultimate winner, Departures.
5. Coraline: Coraline has grown on me over the years. I don’t think I had proper context for a spooky kids’ movie that involved a little girl being threatened with having her eyes replaced with buttons. Some of the best children’s movies are scary, and they teach kids through the security of a concrete narrative arc to face their fears. There aren’t too many freaky images in Coraline, but the concept itself, of a child who wills herself into an alternate world to escape boredom and becomes trapped, is terrifying. Ten years later, I think Coraline stands with the best of the best children’s movies, with artistry to spare in its stop-action filming and with themes that last past childhood.
4. Big Fan: This was a movie that surprised me over and over again by the unexpected turns its plot took while still maintaining complete control over its tone. A lot of the credit goes to Patton Oswalt for a performance that could have teetered all the way into caricature but instead stays grounded in something a little more twisted. He plays a man living with his mother in Staten Island whose life revolves around the New York Giants. The movie takes troll culture to its logical conclusion and is remarkably prescient about today’s crisis of masculinity. And it’s a comedy!
3. Avatar: A few months ago they released the tentative titles for the four (!) upcoming Avatar sequels: The Way of Water, The Seed Bearer, The Tulkun Rider, and The Quest for Eywa. These were met with a lot of derision, which I understand on one hand, and on the other hand…the original Avatar kind of blew my face off. It certainly had its detractors, and director James Cameron is not a particularly likable person. But let’s not pretend that it wasn’t a historically huge hit with relative critical acclaim, which is a good descriptor for almost every movie Cameron has made. Avatar is a go-to for my wife and me when we need a fun, familiar, non-challenging movie to watch. Add to that the sheer effect the movie had on the big screen, and it more than deserves a high spot on this list.
2. (500) Days of Summer: When I saw this movie in theaters, I thought it was one of the coolest movies I had ever seen. The main character, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), had an outlook on love and romance that I totally related to, and I thought the way the movie played with time was totally like the rom-com version of Pulp Fiction. I’m a little less bullish on both these days; Tom’s idea of love is naive, like mine, and the movie’s structure is now one of the least interesting things about it. Instead, ten years later, I’m all about the movie‘s idea of love, which I thought was supportive of Tom’s, but actually inverts it and makes Zooey Deschanel’s Summer a way more interesting person than I thought in 2009. And I think the movie’s stylistic strength is in the pure joy of its vignettes rather than its story structure. Anyway, this movie still rocks, and it’s deeper than I remembered.
1. Still Walking: There are some movies that I love that I’m not sure how to recommend to my friends. They are generally smart, culturally savvy movie-goers, but any knowledge of the history of the movies has no bearing on their everyday lives. Would someone who has never seen a Kurosawa film or any of the movies from the French New Wave have an appreciation for some of these movies I love? Is my enjoyment of some movies built on top of the vast variety of films I’ve viewed over the years or can it be shared with someone who has never read a word about auteur theory?
Still Walking is a great example of this dilemma for me. I watch Still Walking and I see a beautiful drama that explores how families handle the years after a trauma occurs and how families bear with their failings. I see a movie that is lit more beautifully than most studio tentpoles and staged more thoughtfully than most American Oscar contenders. I see a movie that has deeply shaped how I look at relationships and the way they change over time.
I worry that if I recommend Still Walking to my friends, they wouldn’t see that movie. Maybe they would just see a slow movie in which nothing much happens, which is definitely not wrong. Maybe all they would see is a movie about a culture completely foreign to them, and who could blame them? Even the most empathetic person has trouble assimilating into environments they aren’t used to; this goes for movies too.
But Still Walking is one of my favorite movies released this century. Director Hirokazu Kore-eda (also the more recent After the Storm and Shoplifters) made a movie that bore into my soul and won’t leave. So I’m recommending it to all my friends with the hope that it will do the same to you. Maybe you don’t care that Kore-eda’s pace and focus are influenced by iconic Japanese director Ozu or that Kore-eda is the premiere chronicler of the tensions between Japanese generations. But you’re a person and you have a family, so there’s something in this movie for you too.
Another Fifteen (alphabetical)
35 Shots of Rum: The best French film in a great year for foreign films, about a father and daughter living together in Paris.
Departures: The best Japanese film not named Still Walking in a great year for foreign films, about a struggling cellist who takes a job with a mortician.
An Education: The best movie starring Carey Mulligan, about her character coming of age.
Everlasting Moments: The best Swedish film in a great year for foreign films, about the life of a woman who discovers a love for photography.
Every Little Step: The best documentary of the year, about hopeful actors auditioning for A Chorus Line.
Fantastic Mr. Fox: The best stop-motion animated film about a fox, about a fox.
Fast & Furious: The best action movie of the year, about cars.
The House of the Devil: The best horror movie of the year, about Satan’s experience in personal realty.
Inglourious Basterds: The best film based on a true story, about Hitler getting burned alive in a movie theater. Sorry, should’ve warned you about spoilers.
Julia: The best road-trip movie of the year, about Tilda Swinton drunk off her ass.
A Single Man: The best-looking movie of the year, about Colin Firth dealing with Tom Ford prioritizing style over substance.
Star Trek: The best science-fiction blockbuster of the year, because Avatar was about real science, I hope.
Sugar: The best baseball movie of the year, about a Dominican prospect in the minor leagues.
Two Lovers: The best movie based on a Dostoyevsky short story, about Joaquin Phoenix discovering that Gwyneth Paltrow may not be totally honest about her Goop products.
Up: The best non-stop-motion animated movie of the year, about balloons.
Future Top Tens
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
Inception
127 Hours
Tangled
Winter’s Bone
Exit Through the Gift Shop
The Secret in Their Eyes
The Kids Are All Right
The King’s Speech
Rango
Take Shelter
Kinyarwanda
The Tree of Life
The Artist
A Separation
Warrior
Battle Royale
Drive
Super 8
Zero Dark Thirty
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
The Dark Knight Rises
Silver Linings Playbook
Amour
Chronicle
Django Unchained
Moonrise Kingdom
Holy Motors
Life of Pi
12 Years a Slave
Before Midnight
Her
Inside Llewyn Davis
Gravity
Captain Phillips
The World’s End
Short Term 12
American Hustle
The Past
Selma
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
Whiplash
Inherent Vice
Two Days, One Night
Boyhood
Guardians of the Galaxy
Ida
Snowpiercer
Blue Ruin
Coulda Been a Contender 
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