7. “Fat Girl”
Provocateur Catherine Breillat certainly has a lot to say about female sexuality, but fans of her work would agree her most abrasive, confrontational film is this tale of two sisters, one a sexually active nymphette awash in thoughts of true romance, the other her far more cynical and more rotund sibling. As the older seductress pines for her much-older male paramour, the younger can only think in inflexible terms, knowing that the end of adolescence means the beginning of loneliness. “Fat Girl” traces the connection between the emotional disassociation of youth and the loveless call of passionless, selfish sex, creating a lacerating tale of the truth behind our darkest sexual thoughts. It’s as if Breillat is saying “come to my film for the cheap thrills, but I will scar you beyond belief.”
6. “Sexy Beast”
Before his directorial debut, Jonathan Glazer was only known for some ghostly music videos (Radiohead, Massive Attack, Blur) and staggeringly inventive commercials (Levi’s, Guinness, Nike), but that would all change with his gangster-trying-to-go-straight tale “Sexy Beast,” a picture that ironically (and perhaps wisely) would mostly let the visual flair take a backseat in favor of performance, sweltering mood and well, Ben Kingsley. While Ray Winstone is superb as Gal, the gone-lazy-and-fat ex-criminal trying to retire in his posh Spanish villa, it is Kingsley as the perennially apoplectic, raving lunatic former partner who is sent to fetch his colleague, a frightening force of nature (earning an Oscar nomination for his turn). The tense, tightly wound drama is also supremely buttressed by UNKLE‘s claustrophobically throbbing electro score and the appearance by Ian McShane as a chilling crime boss.
5. “Amélie”
Launching the international acting career of Audrey Tautou and vaulting cult director Jean-Pierre Jeunet into A-list status, “Amelie” was the rare foreign film sensation that both packed theaters and pleased critics. Premiering in North America at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 10, 2001 and released in theaters just a few months later, the film harkened back to a more blissfully uninformed time that seemed lost forever in the smoke and fire of the next fall morning. The whimsical, sweet tooth of a story about a charmingly naive and innocent girl who quietly tries to help those around her and stumbles into love was the perfect dose of escapism the world needed. The fact that it’s an enchanting film, with a wondrous sense of comic timing, lovely set decoration and seared with earnest, unaffected hope and optimism, is why it continues to endure.
4. “The Werckmeister Harmonies”
Comprised of only 39 shots, many of them in colossally-long 11 minute takes, Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr‘s enigmatic masterwork about a strange circus sideshow —which includes a giant whale and a mysterious and unnatural ideologue named “The Prince”— that produces social unrest, fear and ultimately panic in a decaying provincial town, is beautifully grim and unforgettable (and also a challenging film for those that can’t go the distance with the slow-burning pace and bombed-out atmosphere). A young man (Lars Rudolph) hopelessly tries to assuage the restless town’s tensions, but the moral consequences of the fait accompli self-implosion climaxes with one of the most heart-stirring sequences ever put on film (and corresponds sublimely with Mihály Vig‘s dolorous score). Tarr once joked that the 11-minute reel was Kodak’s implicit form of censorship —either way, you can blame his mesmerizing and hypnotically graceful films (and sustaining sequences) for all of Gus Van Sant‘s experimental work of the decade; the director named him as a key influence on “Gerry.”