
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.

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.

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.

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.

Sean Penn spent ten years persuading the family to let him film this: a graduate burns his savings and walks into the Alaskan interior, and the film neither mocks him nor canonizes him.

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg began writing it at thirteen and it shows: one night, a catastrophic fake ID, and a friendship neither boy can say anything about directly.

Diablo Cody won an Oscar for dialogue that no teenager has ever spoken, and it works anyway: a sixteen-year-old handles a pregnancy with more composure than every adult around her.

Herzog went to Antarctica announcing he would not film penguins, then made the saddest scene about one anyway: he is really there to interview the people who chose the place.

Marion Cotillard ages from a young street singer to the end of Piaf's life and is unrecognizable throughout: the first Best Actress win for a performance given entirely in French.

Alex Gibney's father was a naval interrogator and told him to make it: an Afghan taxi driver died in American custody at Bagram, and the film follows the policy up the chain.