2002: "Don't say 'pitch.'"

1. Adaptation

I remember the exact moment in Adaptation when it went from being a great movie to one of the my all time favorites: the low speed car chase between the Kaufmans and Susan Orlean. This was the moment I realized that, after two acts spent carefully creating rich, interesting characters and struggling with the difficulties of creating truthful art, writer Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze were going to intentionally set fire to the whole construction with an empty Hollywood-style action ending. It's a ballsy move, and it pays off handsomely: not only does it cut the Gordian knot of the how to deal with the tough subject matter, but it's also a point blank indictment of narrative cinema's inherent limitations. Combine that with Nicholas Cage's last known unironically good performance, and you've got the makings of a post-modern triumph that manages to express real emotion while also undermining the Robert McKee screenwriting model.

2. Punch-Drunk Love

After P.T. Anderson followed the sprawling porn industry melodrama Boogie Nights with the even more sprawling Magnolia, you might have wondered if his next movie was going to be a 16 hour miniseries about every citizen in greater Los Angeles. Instead, he radically rebooted, tapping noted man-baby Adam Sandler to take his psychotic infant schtick to a darker, sadder place. This is a romantic comedy that is less about the birth of a relationship than about the forces of alienation, shame, family resentment and fear that make romantic love necessary and beautiful. Best scene: Sandler trying to juggle his pushy sister, his would-be love, his befuddled employees and an extortion-minded phone sex operator, while John Brion's nerve-wracking score jangles in the background. Contrast that with the sweet, weird moment in bed with Sandler and Emily Watson, talking about how much they want to bash in each other's faces, and it makes you feel blessed and strong to have a love in your own life.

3. Bloody Sunday

This is the first of two Paul Greengrass-directed dramas about horrifying real life events to appear on my list, so let's get it over with: I have no truck with people who complain about Greengrass' handheld camera work. If it makes you nauseated, that's one thing, although if you get a tummy ache from watching a fucking movie, I wonder how the hell you can walk to the mailbox without hurling. Anyway, non-stomach-related complaints can all suck it: the Greengrass approach, more than anything, drains historical events (and, in his Bourne films, the spy genre) of their mythic qualities, cutting everything down to a human scale. The "Bloody Sunday" massacre in Derry, Northern Ireland proved to be the opening shots of the IRA insurgency that raged for thirty years, but Greengrass breaks the tragedy down to a series of mistakes and miscommunications, giving everyone involved, from activist MP Ivan Cooper to young Bogside Catholics to the British Paratroopers who carried out the shooting, their moments of quiet humanity.

4. About Schmidt

Warren Schmidt could be a character in Ghost World, maybe sitting alone in a diner booth behind Enid and Rebecca, eating soup and looking out the window at a dry cleaners. The marvel of this movie, Alexander Payne's best to date, is that it channels the same sort of bland, lifeless suburban hellscape as Ghost World, but does so through the eyes of a character who is largely oblivious to it. Jack Nicholson's best "old dude" performance powers the story of a man who knows, deep down, that life has somehow passed him by, but he doesn't quite know how, and more importantly, he can't figure out what to do about it now that he's in post-retirement, widower drift. It's a collection of awkward personal interactions and fumbles towards enlightenment, all topped by one of the best endings of the decade; Ndugu's painting is a disarming bit of pure grace, and the tears that come to Schmidt's eyes are heartbreaking. They're tears of joy for the beauty of the world, and tears of sorrow for all the beauty that he's missed.

5. Full Frontal

Of all of the low budget, digital experiments Steven Soderbergh directed in the 00s between Ocean's movies, Full Frontal is easily the best. Unlike pretty much every other inside-Hollywood movie, Full Frontal goes beyond easy satire of the superficiality and lack of creativity of the industry (although there is plenty of that) and actually engages with the psychological transference by which film directors and writers take the raw material of their own lives and neuroses and put them on the screen. It also features one of the funniest supporting turns of the decade, with Nicky Katt as a struggling actor/pilates instruct playing a yuppie version of Hitler in a play when he isn't complaining to the director that his co-stars don't get him. "You know what, fuck her. And here's why. Number One-anyone who's offended by drinking blood, obviously doesn't drink blood. Number Two-anyone who drinks as much blood as I do knows that it has no effect. Number Three-there is absolutely no scientific connection between drinking a shot of blood a day and being an extraordinary actor. And Number Four-it is impossible to prove Number Three." Big ups to Baron Von Hugecock.

Worst movie that also doubles as an endorsement of serial murder: Frailty

"Modern Classic" I just can't get behind: Time Out. It's on a bunch of best-of-the-decade lists, but this flavor of quiet desperation is a bit too quiet, and not desperate enough.

Oscar-winning, universally-beloved movie that actually kinda sucks: Chicago. Sure, it looks good, and some of the musical sequences are brilliant, but still...it's just a goddamn musical! Seriously!

Movie that makes me wish I had a time machine: Gangs of New York. Give me access to a time machine, and the first thing I'm doing is grabbing a DVD of There Will Be Blood (and a portable player, of course), going back to, say, 1995, finding Martin Scorsese and making him watch it. Afterwards I would say to the man: "Marty, you're going to get Daniel Day-Lewis to star in this Gangs movie you've been trying to get made for the past twenty years. THIS is what he's capable of. For the love of God, don't waste a bunch of screen time with some bullshit teenybopper love story and some pissant kid whining about his dead daddy. You made Goodfellas, ferchrissakes! You know how to build an entire film around an unsympathetic character! Look at There Will Be Blood! This punk kid Anderson stole half your shit to make Boogie Nights, then he took Day-Lewis and made the movie that you COULD have made if you didn't waste precious screentime on weak-ass shit!" Just imagine a cut of Gangs of New York that did away with DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz completely, and focused on Day-Lewis' Bill the Butcher. I think my brain melted from the very notion of such concentrated awesomeness.

Scariest scene of the decade: the Brazilian birthday party sequence from Signs. The only time I got goosebumps watching a movie.

Most perverse scene in a Steven Spielberg film: Peter Stormare as the creepy eyeball doctor in Minority Report. With that unhealthy yellow light, Stormare's sleazy demeanor and a disoriented, eyeball-less Tom Cruise, you'd never guess that it was directed by the maestro of childlike wonder.

Best sex scene: the three way in Y Tu Mama Tambien. Alfonso Curon creates such a vibrant atmosphere of in-the-moment pleasure that two dudes kissing doesn't feel "gay" some much as an expression of the complete loss of inhibition.

Line of the Year: "Just look at the greatest Jewish minds ever. Marx, Freud and Einstein. What have they given us? Communism, infantile sexuality and the atom bomb." --The Believer