NOTE: For structural reasons and to ensure that this list is super-duper pretty at all times, we’ll be posting this same intro for all sections of The Decade List. If you’ve already read all of this, you can just head down to the continuation of our list!

Let’s just get it out of the way right off the ol’ bat: yes, we know it’s been a few months since we left the decade. Most folks undertook this heavy task pre-2010, but we decided that it would be a little bit better to let the new year settle in a bit before hitting you with something of this magnitude.

So here we are, geeks: we’ve officially arrived in FUTURE *cue retro ’50s sci-fi music* and still we have no freakin’ flying cars yet. What’s the deal with that? While it is pretty exciting to be inside of the year 2010 — a year that always seemed unreachable to us mere mortals — we are also exiting another entire decade that leaves us staring at one majorly epic task. That task? To search, dig, locate, retrieve, organize, polish, and present the very best films of the past ten years!

We must once again declare that this list is also simply opinion. You are are without doubt going to find movies here that you hate and do not think deserve to be included. You will surely think of movies that you think should not only be on here, but that should be at the very top of the list. There will even be some that I have not seen and thus, can not add. Even at this very moment, I sit, worrying and wondering if I’ve forgotten any that I would include; that’s just the way things fly when compiling something this massive.

With all of that said, we invite you in to relax and check out our Final Chapter of The Decade List: The 59 Best Films of the Past Ten Years!

Sin City
Directed by Robert Rodriguez, Frank Miller and Quentin Tarantino
Starring Bruce Willis, Clive Owen, Mickey Rourke, Jessica Alba
Release date: April 28, 2009

Every so often a movie comes along that startles and stirs conventionalism and ushers in a new brand of filmmaking; filmmaking which possess dualities ranging from oddly enchanting to vigorously ruthless. In 2005 Robert Rodriguez‘ film version of Frank Miller‘s graphic comic Sin City was that force of a movie that abandoned traditional comic book adaptations and elaborated upon the film noir genre, which has been around since the late 1930s, by initiating a unique update while still holding true to the meat and potatoes behind a genre that glorified gloomy alley ways, dampened cobblestone streets and gorgeously delicious femme fatales possessing diabolical schemes and knives prepared to be impaled into the backs of delusional men.

Now don’t think that if a director wakes up one morning deciding to reinvent and upgrade a genre that his illusions will turn into an artistic triumph. Evidence for such directors making boneheaded decisions by injecting hyper-serum and hypnotic imagery are Michael Davis’ Shoot “˜Em Up and, surprisingly, Frank Miller’s The Spirit. Not so much do these films qualify as cinema but they are better placed within the category of pointless parodies. These two such films were still able to break the conventionality that’s tied to the gangster picture as well as the action picture. But one ingredient they forgot to include in their dream projects, and that’s a heart dedicated to initiate and defend its change.

“It’s called a confidence game. Why? Because you give me your confidence? No. Because I give you mine.”
— Mike from House Of Games

“Well, maybe I don’t! I had ten good years with Cole, and I want them back! I gotta have a partner! I looked and I looked and believe me, brother, I kissed a lot of fucking frogs, and you’re my prince!”
— Myra Langtry from The Grifters

“It’s like seeing someone for the first time, and you look at each other for a few seconds, and there’s this kind of recognition like you both know something. Next moment the person’s gone, and it’s too late to do anything about it.”
— Jack Foley from Out Of Sight

Tony Gilroy‘s Duplicity is the ultimate cinematic cock tease. Duplicity has everything going for it right from the starting gate, but ultimately the film fizzles where it should sizzle. It is not a bad film, far from it, but after all is said and done, one wonders if they have just seen a comedy of manners written with enough reversals to give David Mamet a run for his money. Although “fuck” is never used enough to give it the traditional David Mamet touch, it is con game film. Tony Gilroy’s screenplay may be too smart for its good. Steven Spielberg had confessed that the film was too confusing for him to understand so he passed on directing it.