Top 20 Movies of the Decade (2000-2009)

After waiting a year (almost) for the movies of 2000-2009 to fully sink in, we’re finally prepared to unleash our best of the decade list. Hold on to your butts.

20. Memento – The infamous “backwards movie” that really launched Christopher Nolan’s career (The Dark Knight, The Prestige, Inception). Nolan packs enough action into his movies to satisfy most everyone, but at the root of his best movies are unique story/narrative concepts that are fully developed and realized via complex plots. Hard to believe that some thought of him as a “gimmick” movie maker when Memento first came out.

19.  Cloverfield – A documentary style horror movie, effectively crossing Godzilla with The Blair Witch Project. Maybe not completely beloved by critics, but beloved by me. Cloverfield‘s faithfulness to its point of view gives the unfolding horrors a sense of realism that heightens their impact.

18. Nine Lives – Nine loosely connected, interwoven vignettes, written and directed by Rodrigo Garcia, son of famed Latin American author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

17. Dogville – Lars Von Trier’s controversial 2003 movie starring Nicole Kidman and set on a stage with no props, backdrops, or scenery. Very dark.

16. Adaptation – Charlie Kaufman and his fictional twin, Donald, attempt to adapt Susan Orlean’s  The Orchid Thief.

15. The King of Kong – This documentary tells the story of the all-time Donkey Kong arcade game record, which is surprisingly dramatic. There’s sabotage, conspiracy, and an antagonist so villainous, you wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t real. Plus a lot of hilarious nerds.

14. O Brother, Where Art Thou? – The Coen Brothers teamed up with George Clooney to make a Depression-era retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey.

13. The Man Who Wasn’t There – Billy Bob Thornton stars in this barber shop Noir. My favorite Coen Brothers movie of the decade, even if it’s not the most critically acclaimed.

12. Brick – This is what happens when you view a high school drama through a Noir lens.

11. The Descent – A horror movie that rises to the challenge of having an actual story with real characters, while remaining truly scary. (Side note: In seventh grade, I made it to the southwest semifinal spelling bee for my state, and I got out on my first word. Descent. Ever since, the word has terrified me.)

10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind – Charlie Kaufman’s “what if we could pay to erase our bad memories?” movie, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet.

9. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – Peter Jackson’s fantasy trilogy is probably the best execution ever in this genre.

8. Let the Right One In – Swedish vampire movie that on the surface sounds similar to the plot of something like Twilight, but in reality works as a totally unique, quirky horror movie.

7. Inglourious Basterds – Most critics prefer the Kill Bill movies, but despite many openly sophomoric elements, Basterds struck me as Tarantino’s most mature movie, and it’s my favorite of his from this decade, and maybe my favorite over all.

6. A Tale of Two Sisters – This Korean horror movie combines a “what the hell is going on” plot with a variety of creepy visuals.  It has stuck with me for about 7 years.  (It also was remade into the horrible American horror movie “The Uninvited“.)

5. Shotgun Stories – A blood feud erupts between two families in a rural Arkansas town, and it’s not long before both sides go too far.

4. Amelie – A French story about an eccentric girl and her first secret adventures after a childhood of isolation.

3. The Station Agent – A lonesome dwarf inherits an old train station building in rural New Jersey and befriends some of the locals.

2. The Best of Youth – Originally made for Italian TV, this 6 hour mini-series/movie tells the story of 2 brothers, covering from their high school years up through adulthood.

1. Grizzly Man – The life and death of Timothy Treadwell – the guy who voluntarily lived among the bears in the wild of Alaska for months at a time – filmed by Treadwell himself and pieced together into a documentary by Werner Herzog after Treadwell’s death.  I watched this over 5 years ago and still think about it a lot. It didn’t win the Oscar, in fact it wasn’t even nominated, but it’s number 1 in our book.

The Acolytes: Underground Horror from Down Under

Part serial killer thriller, part good teens gone bad, Australian indie “Acolytes” is the kind of horror movie they should be making more of. I’m pretty hard to please when it comes to this genre, and I was pleasantly surprised by this one.

Mark (Seb Gregory) wanders into the woods one day and spies a man burying something. He and his friends James (Josh Payne) and Chasely (Hannah Morgan Lawrence) decide to unearth the buried treasure, but instead of money, they discover the body of a young woman.

Here’s where the movie takes a turn for the “Kids do the darndest things when they find a body”, and I start wondering if I ever really want to procreate. Instead of reporting the body to the police, Mark and James cook up a scheme to find the murderer and blackmail him into killing an evil scumbag kiddie rapist (Michael Dorman) who has recently been released from prison. Schemes like this in thrillers never play out as planned, so things go from bad to worse pretty quickly for Mark, James, and Hannah.

TV Casualties Rating: out of 5

Run Time: 91 minutes

Directed by: Jon Hewitt

Written by: Shayne Armstrong, Shane Krause

Starring: Sebastian Gregory, Joshua Payne, Hannah Mangan Lawrence

Theatrical Release: 05/15/08

DVD Release: 07/28/09

Production Budget: $4 million

Domestic Gross: N/A

Metacritic Score: N/A

Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 83%

With a small budget of only four million dollars, “Acolytes” has a great visual style and excellent performances by the cast, especially considering their age. Unlike most teen horror flicks, the characters in “Acolytes” are handled as real people instead of hash marks on a killer’s bed post.

You’ve probably seen movies that have one twist too many. The theatrical release of this movie has four or five too many- so many twists piled on top of one another is overkill and takes away from the overall impact. The ending is a bit of a cliché for a thriller, which is the biggest let down of all. (The DVD features two alternate endings.)

Overall, “Acolytes” is a movie I would certainly recommend to fans of the horror/thriller genre. It’s dark and disturbing and has just the right kind of jump-out-of-your-seat tension. The DVD became available in the U.S. today.