January 21 - February 23

The reaction to Cinematheque Ontario’s Best of the Nineties poll in 2000 ranged widely, reflecting the fissures in film culture that would become more pronounced in the ensuing decade. The surprise choice of Victor Erice’s Dream of Light as the best film of the millennium-ending decade made top news in Spain, and was greeted with gratitude by the Globe and Mail’s Rick Groen in a four-star review. “Who would have thought watching paint dry would be the feel-good film of the nineties?” Groen asked—but the film was disparaged by others as characteristically esoteric. “Elitist,” that all-purpose put down, rendered meaningless by ideological overuse, was frequently deployed to criticize the poll, as if the film curators and historians who participated did so as a confederacy of mandarins intent on showing off their credentials, the coercive power of arcana. It seems unthinkable to some, if not purposely perverse, that one can actually love these films. But we persist.

One critic repeatedly asked the staff at Jackman Hall to inform me that the art film was dead. Not quite, as our new poll attests. Even with a considerably changed slate of participants—half of them are new to the task—that imperilled entity, the international art film, prevailed once again, though there were scattered votes for Pixar, The Lord of the Rings, Gran Torino, and Bad Santa. The twin triumphs of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Jia Zhang-ke (see our Directors of the Decade feature) illustrate not only the continued ascendancy of Asian cinema, but also a taste for the elliptical and allusive—the “challenging,” as a favourite euphemism goes. Even such critical hits as Zodiac and There Will Be Blood did not register the way they will surely do in similar polls of film critics. (At the time of writing, no such results have been published.)

Unlike the nineties, which, as Adriano Aprà observed at the time, was a decade lacking in trends and movements, the “aughts” saw many, both geographic (the Berlin School, and the “new” or revived cinemas of Austria, Romania, Mexico, Argentina, Korea, the Philippines) and thematic (New French Extremity, torture porn, bromance, mumblecore). Trilogies, long a staple of international art