Best of the Decade, Take Four
Posted by Richard Brody

You don’t know your list until you’ve seen it published; maybe the reason for putting mine out yesterday with the “unfriendly” number (as they say in elementary-school math) of twenty-six films is that it awaited four friends to round it out, and there are four films that I find I miss from it as I’d miss friends. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, then casualness, and sometimes it’s works that are among the most affecting that get shoved aside in the dialectics and the polemics.

The first, in a foreshadowing, will rank high among my movie experiences of 2009: James Gray’s “Two Lovers,” which I discussed in a video clip a few weeks ago and which remains as potent as when I saw it at the beginning of the year. Another ranked high in my list for last year: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” by David Fincher, who there put digital technology to turn F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender fantasy into grand-scale melodrama. Jared Hess’s “Napoleon Dynamite,” from 2004, was a remarkable début; its sweetness and loopy humor—as well as its peculiar cultural isolation—suggested an exceptional sensibility, which “Nacho Libre” and “Gentlemen Broncos” have expressed even more profoundly and extravagantly, but Napoleon’s dance is still a moment of exquisitely mixed emotions. Then there’s another documentary, which may be the movie I’ve talked about the most this decade, because of the vast political scope its subject embraces: “Terror’s Advocate,” Barbet Schroeder’s biographical view of the French attorney Jacques Vergčs, a story that involves far-left and far-right, freedom fighters and tyrants, liberal republics and their enemies and, in the process, makes surprising connections and traces the evolution, or, perhaps, the devolution of ideas and ideals.