Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade – Part 11, with reactions from Peter Jackson, David Fincher, Guillermo del Toro and more…

In this penultimate stage of the countdown we're eavesdropping with the Stasi, intellectualising with Michael Haneke, mining for dollars with Daniel Day Lewis and drifting into adulthood with Hayao Miyazaki...

Click here to reveal Time Out London's number one film of the decade...

5. The Lives of Others (2006, Ger)
Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Best. Director. Name. Ever.
It’s a truism that repressive regimes destroy lives – until you meet Stasi agent Hauptmann (the late Ulrich Mühe), a Stasi agent who sits in a cold, empty flat in headphones, listening in on the inhabitants below. As the warmth of those other lives – of handsome, successful playwright Georg and his beautiful actress girlfriend, their books, friends and music – begins to thaw Hauptmann, so the harshness of the regime gradually toughens and compromises the golden couple; director-writer von Donnersmarck deserves his Oscar for flawlessly conveying the trio from ignorance to the very opposite of bliss. NC
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4. There Will Be Blood (2007, US)
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
No blood for oil
In a decade of grievous Academy blunders (‘Chicago’? ‘A Beautiful Mind’? ‘Crash’?), one in particular may come to be viewed by film historians as more outrageous than any other: the decision to reward the Coen Brothers’ perfectly serviceable but largely underwhelming thriller ‘No Country for Old Men’ over PT Anderson’s towering, eye-scorching birth-of-a-nation parable, ‘There Will Be Blood’. It’s a misjudgement we’re happy to rectify here: ‘There Will Be Blood’ is nothing less than a ‘Chinatown’ for our times, a study of venality and avarice unmatched in modern fiction, and a blistering attack on American corporate, political and religious malfeasance right when the country needed it most.

Expanding on the narrative unconventionality of his previous film ‘Punch-Drunk Love’ but largely eschewing the visual experimentation which alienated that film’s audiences, Anderson constructed ‘There Will Be Blood’ in the manner of a Biblical allegory: detail is scant and characters more iconic than realistic; events are huge, their consequences grand and terrible. The casting of Daniel Day-Lewis in the central role was a masterstroke – in other hands, Daniel Plainview might have been just a bully – but let’s not forget Paul Dano’s career-making turn as charlatan preacher Eli Sunday, simultaneously subservient and superior, grasping and dominant. This could well be the film that comes to define the dark days of the early 21st century: America’s history predicting its present, and inevitably its future. TH
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3. Spirited Away (2001, Japan)
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
We're definitely not in Kansas any more
There are certain unenlightened souls who just don’t 'get’ Hayao Miyazaki’s transfixing, Carroll-esque ode to the curiosities of childhood. Indeed, one esteemed pollster glibly refers to the film as ‘Mutant Slugs on a Nightmare Pagoda’. Still, that it managed to coolly clamber mere millimetres from the apex of this list stands as testament to its uncanny, all-enveloping stylistic richness and a mode of storytelling that feels abstract yet wholly emotionally viable to modern, Western audiences. Unsurprisingly for Miyazaki, ‘Spirited Away’ takes place inside an unusual supernatural kingdom – a kingdom of magic and monsters, ghosts and gods – that’s hidden in a discreet woodland furrow in the Japanese countryside. It tells of a young girl separated from both her parents and her identity and forced to suffer an occasionally deadly test of resilience and determination, dealing in ornate metaphors to depict her attempts to breach the walls of adulthood and return to reality. In many ways, the film represents a kind of beautiful cohesion of themes and interests that have speckled Miyazaki’s astonishing body of work, from the belief that inquisitiveness is the key to self-empowerment, to questions about how local history and tradition are faring in the hands of – as Ozu would coin them – ‘the younger generation’. This is feature animation at its most heady and cinematic, a film more whimsical, aesthetically distinctive and – eventually – dramatically overpowering than the lion's share of ‘real’ filmmaking this decade. Oh, to have seen the faces on the Pixar set when they first sat down to watch this… DJ
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2. Hidden (2005)
Directed by Michael Haneke
No, I think Ron Howard will do a really good job...

While 1997’s ‘Funny Games’ introduced Michael Haneke’s name to a wider group of international film-goers than his first three films had achieved, it was this 2005 film which proved to be the Austrian director's biggest commercial and critical hit to date. It also showed that Haneke could have more mainstream appeal without diluting the rigour and originality of his earlier ideas. Like ‘Code Unknown’ (2000), ‘Hidden’ takes modern Paris as its canvas: Daniel Auteuil is a television personality of the liberal, intellectual variety – imagine a French Melvyn Bragg – while Juliette Binoche is his wife, and together they live with their young son in an upscale Parisian home. Upset begins to intrude their bourgeois, comfortable lives when mysterious video tapes start to arrive in the post – tapes which suggest that the family is secretly being filmed. Haneke develops this thriller narrative to untap a long-sealed reservoir of guilt lurking in Auteuil’s character concerning a race-related incident in his childhood. The video recordings – their provenance, their aim, their meaning – open up several fronts of meaning relating to ideas of perspective, surveillance and reality and simultaneously offer the film's audience an opaque mystery with which to grapple. That the mystery ultimately proves elusive is not frustrating, as some detractors have suggested, but a trigger for an understanding of this local, contemporary story that has more historical and universal significance than the film’s surface might initially suggest. DC
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Click here to reveal Time Out London's number one film of the decade...