
There Will Be Blood
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.

Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.

The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.

They put it online and let people pay whatever they wanted, including nothing. Some of the songs had been played live for ten years.

Producer Mark Ronson had a Brooklyn soul band play it live to tape like a sixties session. Winehouse wrote about the man she kept leaving.

West cleared the Daft Punk sample through their manager, had Timbaland reprogram the kick drums, and hit number one.

Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.

The Romanian New Wave announced itself with this: an illegal abortion arranged across one day in 1987, filmed in long static takes that give you nowhere to look.

It came out the same day as a 50 Cent album, and the two turned it into a public sales contest. Kanye won by a distance.

DJ Toomp built the beat and bassline, West layered the strings, and Zach Galifianakis lip-synced it on a tractor.

All My Friends is one piano figure repeated for seven and a half minutes while everything else is built up around it.

In 1500 disbelief in God was barely possible. By 2000 it is ordinary. Taylor explains the shift not as science clearing away superstition but as Christian reform building a self sealed against transcendence.

Handheld chases got shakier for a decade because of this film: Greengrass films spying as legwork rather than glamour, and the Waterloo Station chase is the most tightly constructed surveillance sequence ever filmed.

Schnabel put the camera inside a paralyzed man's one working eye and left it there: the memoir it comes from was dictated letter by letter, by blinking, and the film feels weightless anyway.

No chorus, just strings and a rising ache; Kleerup's living-room track became Robyn's first British number one.

Wright's parody is better constructed than most of the films it mocks: a London supercop is exiled to a picture-perfect village, and the final act is staged better than the real thing.

Guha carries India from independence in 1947 to the present and asks why it never broke apart, given partition, famine and insurgency. He calls it an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy.

StarGate looped Michael Jackson's chant from Wanna Be Startin' Somethin', and Rihanna took it to number one in ten countries.

Sent to the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace asks whether boiling an animal alive is defensible. The same scruple drives his reports on a porn awards show and Senator McCain's presidential campaign.