This is yet another half-serious, half-deathly subversive, half-bi-sexual exploration of the decade in which independent cinema took over the game.
1. There Will Be Blood - P.T. Anderson is one of our finest modern auteurs and this is the film that first wrote his name firmly into the canon of American Cinema. Before the bailouts, there was blood.
2. Synecdoche, New York - Like Samuel Beckett on the screen, it is still hard to comprehend exactly what this film was and what it means. Wrapped inside this movie are philosophy and ideas truly magnificent in scale.
3. Almost Famous - Out of the many beautiful things that the now far gone rock 'n' roll culture produced, Cameron Crowe's masterpiece has to be among the best of them. Everyone has their own Penny Lane and knows that one song they can sing with a bus full of feuding narcissists.
4. The 25th Hour - As brutal and moving a tale as Spike Lee has ever told, there is something about the narrative of the film, sparse and loaded with ambiguity that perfectly captures what i t means to live in New York after the towers fell.
5. Old Boy - The Virginia Tech gunman, Cho Seung Hi might be its most famous fan but the movie holds lasting value for the non-sociopathic too as a stylish, deeply considered parable of violence and revenge.
6. The Dark Knight - Christopher Nolan's reinvention of the Batman saga was bleaker than ever and the sheer craftsmanship in every sequence and the power of Heath Ledger's performance was evident to even the millions of idiots who would go on to quote it.
7. The Prestige - A Bale-Nolan-Jackman collaboration that was unfairly overlooked even though its narrative wizardry and mind-wrecking contortions were breath taking to watch.
8. Children of Men - As we inch closer and closer towards oblivion, this film feels ever more prescient. At the height of the Bush years, Alfonso Cuoran condensed all the malaise we felt into one superbly made classic.
9. Punch Drunk Love - Before Funny People, Adam Sandler pushed himself to the brink and created genuine love in P.T. Anderson's only small work.
10. Wall-E - The infantilization of the American public told through a kids story with a cockroach carrying loads of pathos — genius.
11. The Curious Case for Benjamin Button - Not since the heyday of Spielberg has popular art been done so well. Every minute of its length was justified by the bravura performances and remarkable style.
12. No Country for Old Men - At first glance it appears to be simply fatalism but eventually a tortured morality begins to appear which makes the blood all the more justified.
13. Into the Wild - It contains all the beauty of Romantic poetry with the grim punch of modernism as it evokes and then fractures.
14. Syriana - This is the war on terror, in all its messy, confusing and deadly vortex.
15. Half Nelson - The premise is as gimmicky as any, a crack addicted inner city white guy teaching black kids but the execution is infinitely memorable
16. The 40 Year Old Virgin - Changed the face of modern comedy one Kelly Clarkson scream at a time.
17. The Hurt Locker - This is Iraq.
18. Donnie Darko - Richard Kelly's masterpiece just had that certain something to give it permanent cult status.
19. Gomorrah - Neo-realism lives on, fittingly in the country that helped start. A bleak, mordant panorama which has the added benefit of being true to life.
20. Waltz With Bashir - Animation taken to rhapsodic new heights, the beauty and fatality inherent in war done to a near unbelievable degree of achievement.
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