Odd list of the Month

Odd List of the Month: A Decade in Film

Instead of doing a list of the best 10 or 50 or 100 films of the decade I've decided to simply list the best ten films of each year. This of course has many limitations since the only way I've gone about remembering what played when is by going onto Metacritic and looking at the past critics top 10 lists and also looking at a couple decade lists (one 50, one 100). But whatever, so it'll be imperfect, so it goes. Also I'm not going to rank them, that just seems troubling and I'd just change my mind as soon as I did so. Maybe I'll try to avoid ranking things except for lumping them into a ten or twenty or whatever from now on. Anyway, for now I'll put them in alphabetical order. So here they are, working from the bottom up.

2000
Almost Famous
Amores Perros
Billy Elliot
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
High Fidelity
In the Mood for Love
O Brother Where Art Thou?
Requiem for a Dream
Traffic

2001
Amelie
Donnie Darko
Hedwig and the Angry Inch
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Memento
Moulin Rouge!
Mulholland Drive
Sexy Beast
Shaolin Soccer
The Royal Tenenbaums

2002
Adaptation
Brotherhood of the Wolf
Gangs of New York
Lord of the Rings: Two Towers
Monsoon Wedding
Punchdrunk Love
Spirited Away
Talk to Her
Y Tu Mama Tambien
25th Hour

2003
All the Real Girls
Big Fish
City of God
Dirty Pretty Things
Kill Bill Volume One
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
Lost in Translation
Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
The Barbarian Invasions
28 Days Later

2004
Before Sunset
Dig!
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
House of Flying Daggers
Kill Bill Volume Two
Primer
Shaun of the Dead
Super Size Me
The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
The Five Obstructions

2005
Batman Begins
Cache
Howl's Moving Castle
Kontroll
Kung Fu Hustle
Millions
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Oldboy
Wedding Crashers
2046

2006
An Inconvenient Truth
Brick
Children of Men
Half Nelson
Letters from Iwo Jima
The Departed
The Fountain
The Lives of Others
The Science of Sleep
Volver

2007
Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Eastern Promises
I'm Not There
Juno
King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
No Country for Old Men
Sunshine
Sweeney Todd
The Host
There Will Be Blood

2008
A Christmas Tale
In Bruges
Let the Right One In
Reprise
Synecdoche, New York
The Class
The Dark Knight
The Fall
The Wrestler
Wall-E

2009
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Drag Me To Hell
Facing Ali
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Inglorious Basterds
Sugar
The Brothers Bloom
The Cove
The Hurt Locker
Up

That took more work to compile than one would think. Also here is a short list of films that almost made the cut:

Iron Monkey, Spellbound, District B13, Good Night and Good Luck, Hot Fuzz, V for Vendetta, Nightwatch, Persepolis, 28 Weeks Later, Mongol, Man on Wire, Redbelt, (500) Days of Summer, An Education, Sherlock Holmes

Also, here is a list of films that still need to be seen and thus could upset the tenuous balance I have just established:

In the Loop, A Serious Man, Bright Star, Antichrist, The White Ribbon, A Prophet, Girlfriend Experience, Broken Embraces, 35 Shots of Rum, Summer Hours, A Single Man, Thirst, Tyson, Precious, Imaginaruum of Dr. Parnassus, Funny People, World's Greatest Dad, Two Lovers, Treeless Mountain, Pollock, Quills, Small Time Crooks, The Contender, Before Night Falls, Beau Travail, Yi Yi: A One and a Two, In the Bedroom, Eureka, Gosford Park, The Believer, Far From Heaven, Rabbit Proof Fence, Russian Ark, 21 Grams, Irreversible, Man Without a Past, The Son, Bad Education, Code 46, Dogville, Goodbye Dragon Inn, Goodbye Lenin, Last Life in the Universe, Maria Full of Grace, Tokyo Grandfathers, Touching the Void, Time of the Wolf, The Edukators, Memories of a Murder, Murderball, Mysterious Skin, The New World, The Three Burials of Melquaides Estrada, L'Enfant, Syndromes of a Century, Notes on a Scandal, Who Killed the Electric Car, Why We Fight, 4 months 3 Weeks and 2 Days, La Vie en Rose, Lust Caution, Control, Into Great Silence, Away from Her, The Orphanage, The Flight of the Red Balloon, Che, Happy-Go-Lucky, RocknRolla, Wendy and Lucy, Waltz with Bashir, Paranoid Park, Still Life, Silent Light, My Winnipeg, I've Loved You So Long, Ballast, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, This is England, Black Book, The Limits of Control, Red Cliff