One of the most significant demonstrations of pretension and pomposity is to assemble a Top 10 List of some kind and attempt to peddle it as gospel. An even greater display of self-importance is to amass a Top 10 List that cites the presumed “best” of an entire decade. So with that, I snootily submit to you my 10 Best Movies of the ’00s.

I tried to cover every stereotype and cliché that accompanies lists like these: There are a couple of blockbusters included, as well as a few indie films that no one’s ever heard of, and then a movie or two that would provoke a collective “WTF!?!?!” from the peanut gallery, and I’ve no doubt that almost anyone reading this would either disagree with some or all of my entries, the sequence of the entries, or any combination thereof.

And by bizarre coincidence, there are three consecutive movies on this list that center around drugs—go figure. But hey, these are the movies that struck the most resounding chord with me over the last 10 years, and besides, disagreement is what makes lists like this fun. So get ready to take aim.

10.  Avatar:  Sure, you can say that it’s saddled with dialog hokier than anything this side of the Star Wars franchise. And yes, you can bemoan the fact that its perfunctory “Trail of Tears” parallel is a weak stab at providing cultural legitimacy to a film in which special effects serve as the penultimate reason for its very existence. Yet, as a piece of visual eye candy, no cinematic offering from this decade, or any other decade for that matter, comes even remotely close. A virtual theme-park ride of a movie, I have never seen its equal. The fact that James Cameron had to invent technology in order to accommodate his extraordinary vision is reason alone for inclusion on this list.  Avatar represents the future of filmmaking, and to say that future is bright is tantamount to saying that Naavi are blue.

9.  The Departed:  At the time, a handful of critics labeled Martin Scorcesse’s 2006 exploration of the economics of loyalty as simply a “Goodfellas in Boston.”  Yet this tightly written and directed gem turned out to be the Oscar pie that had eluded Scorcesse his whole career, and was easily his best film of the decade. Yes, there was a conspicuous layer of cheese (no pun intended; if you’ve seen the movie, you know what I mean) uncharacteristically inserted into the finale, but that aside, the film is quite possibly Scorcesse’s second best film of all time.

8.  The Big Kahuna:  Technically, this film was completed in 1999, but didn’t see a nationwide release until the spring of 2000. And even then, it was only seen by about as many people who claimed a Bigfoot sighting. Still, this intimately shot meditation on spiritual ambiguity serves as a master class in writing and acting. At the center of the film is the subject of religion—in this case, the religion known as Christianity versus the religion known as Industrial Lubricants. Three sales reps are at a convention in Wichita for the purpose of obtaining high-profile contracts for the company they represent. I won’t delve into many details, but ultimately, the film examines the difference between preaching the scriptures and preaching the benefits of certain machine oils.  The suggestion is that the difference is subtle at best. Danny Devito delivers the finest, most delicately nuanced performance of his career as the spiritually confounded mediator between the younger sales rep—who feels his desire to spread the Word overrides any secular sales objective—and the older, “business first” veteran played by Kevin Spacey. By closing, the film simply asks, “What is important?” As human beings, our continuous attempts to answer this question are what simultaneously drive and hinder us.

7.  Requiem for a Dream:  Simply put, this was the decade’s best horror film without officially being classified as such. But this deeply moving mosaic from director Darren Aronofsky is indeed a horror film in every conventional sense. The movie’s dread isn’t supplied in the form of a hockey mask-wearing carnival freak or a soulless kewpie doll on a tricycle, but rather via the painfully exhibited ravages of drug addiction (and we’re not just talking the hard stuff here either). The film doesn’t preach, it doesn’t lecture, nor does it resort to superfluous histrionics to plant a message. It doesn’t need to. The characters’ actions and subsequent consequences speak for themselves.  What we see unfold before us in Aronofsky’s players is a deterioration of both body and spirit that is staggering, haunting, and extremely difficult to behold. To witness the unraveling of Ellen Burstyn’s diet pill-popping mother is like something out of a fever-induced nightmare. If our school systems wish to be truly preemptive in deterring children from drugs, then this should be required viewing.

6.  Traffic:  Steven Soderbergh’s referendum on the U.S.-declared “War on Drugs” corroborated what many people believe, but don’t want to come out and say during Christmas parties: The War on Drugs is a farce—an utter failure of a war, in which there are no winners, nor even losers, but merely a long list of casualties. Soderbergh’s film deftly observes that the world of illegal drug trafficking is a rigidly and perpetually well-oiled machine, of which the juxtaposed “war” against it functions as an integral component. From Benecio del Toro’s Oscar winning turn as a Mexican cop caught between both sides to Michael Douglas’ (never better here) reluctant White House Drug Czar who’s thanklessly tasked with managing a global war effort, but discovers how dramatically the rules can change once the war shows up at his front door, Traffic asserts itself as an indelible illumination of a war with no discernible landscape and no end in sight.

5.  A Scanner Darkly:  Based on Phillip K. Dick’s most personal novel, this film is also the most faithful screen adaptation of any of the writer’s canon heretofore. Set in that all-ubiquitous not-too-distant-future, Keanu Reeves plays an undercover cop in a world in which the mysterious and devastatingly addictive drug, “Substance D” is all the rage. Reeve’s cover—living in a bedraggled shanty with two “Substance D” users, and using the drug himself to avoid suspicion—is meant to provide him the opportunity to discover the identity of the illegal substance’s most prominent dealer. The problem, as it turns out, is that Reeves is actually unknowingly investigating himself. Once again, this is a film that adroitly explores the follies of the war on drugs, but also suggests that addiction and rehabilitation may not be mutually exclusive components. It also posits that the worst havoc drug addiction may wreak is the obliteration of one’s soul.

4.  There Will Be Blood:  A tale in which a man hates his fellow man, hates God, fights them both, and by film’s end, wins on both counts. Paul Thomas Anderson’s richly textured character study of an early 20th century oil tycoon, whose greed and detachment from humanity are all that sustain him, is a timeless expedition into the shadows of the human heart. From its haunting score and breathtaking cinematography to one of the most intriguing and complex protagonists ever to populate the silver screen, this is a film that will be studied for decades to come.

3.  The Wrestler:  The second Aronofsky entry on the list, this parable of broken redemption packed possibly the strongest emotional resonance with me. This was one of those movies in which the final scene remained seared into my brain long after the credits had rolled and Bruce Springsteen’s final note of his captivating melody had faded out on a heartbreaking piano key.  Using the all but forgotten world of professional wrestling as his vehicle, Aronofsky weaves a yarn of a fallen icon (Mickey Rourke) whose quest for reconciliation with his estranged daughter is eclipsed by his desire to maintain his identity as a wrestler, an identity that he finds being ripped away as a result of age and hard-living catching up to him. They say that what you do for your “day job” is your “real job,” regardless of extracurricular aspirations. So when you can no longer do that which has always defined you, then what are you? What remains? It’s this conundrum that Aronofsky gracefully explores, and in doing so, he managed to redeem and resurrect the extraordinary talent of Rourke.

2.  The Dark Knight:  The fundamental purpose of any movie, first and foremost, is to entertain.  Anything else it accomplishes is merely a fortuitous byproduct. No other movie this decade was more successful in amalgamating visual wonderment with cerebral intensity than Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus exploration of the iconic vigilante, Batman. Not only did he transcend the comic book genre by manifesting its relevance in the pantheon of popular filmmaking, he did so by casting a harsh floodlight on the times in which we live. In a decade in which terrorism permeated the headlines, Nolan’s film, among other things, asked the following: When those that would harm us jettison any tangible motive or universally acknowledged moral code in doing so, do we then remain obligated to adhere to such principles ourselves while combating them? Almost 10 years since 9/11, the answer to that question remains ambiguous and astringently debated.

1.  No Country for Old Men:  The best film of the decade was an exercise in the brothers Coen outdoing themselves. And that’s saying something. They took on novelist Cormac McCarthy’s insidiously bleak canvas of the contemporary American West, refracted it through their uniquely eccentric lenses, and the result was a remarkably faithful adaptation, as well as a clearly indistinguishable Coen film. If you’d been familiar with their catalog, but had no familiarity with McCarthy’s novel, you wouldn’t have thought twice that this was yet another of their remarkable originals. No Country is not only the decade’s best movie; it’s the decade’s defining movie. Until its release in 2007, there had been no clear front runner in terms of a cinematic venture that embodied the trepidation and uneasiness that had subverted our sense of complacency, cultivated during the 90s. No Country is simultaneously beautiful and repugnant, optimistic and pessimistic, exalting and excoriating. And to boot, it cemented Anton Chigurh’s (Javier Bardem) status as the most indelibly perfect villain since Hannibal Lecter.

Todd Guill has returned to Pop Life after a months-long hiatus during which he focused his energies on the creation of a diet Shepherd’s Pie dish. He was not successful.