Which movie is the best of the decade? The Onion’s A.V. Club has anointed Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Time Out New York liked Spotless Mind, too, ranking it third, but gave its No. 1 spot to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody didn’t put either of these movies on his heady list. He gives the brass ring to Jean-Luc Godard’s Eloge de l’amour (In Praise of Love). Long live the Nouvelle Vague!
So the question remains: Which movie is the best of the decade? Is there any consensus among the accumulating lists? To find out, we collected all of the rankings we could find and synthesized the results using a simple scoring system: Movies got 50 points for being the No. 1 pick on a list, 49 points for a No. 2 nod, and so on, down to one point for a No. 50 slot. (Brody, who only chose 26 movies, still received 50 points for his top pick.)
To see which movies of the aughts are earning the most end-of-decade love, select the “Points” category from the drop-down menu on the left. You can also sort the films by director or by total number of appearances on best-of lists. (Some directors had more than one movie in the running; mouse over the director’s name to see which of his or her movies made the cut.)
Use the drop-down menu on the right to view individual lists. We’ve collected six so far: Richard Brody, Time Out New York, the A.V. Club, the Times Online (London), the Telegraph (London), and Paste magazine. We’ll add new lists to the Aught-omatic as they appear, so check back here for the latest rankings. Eternal Sunshine has the most cumulative points for the moment, but There Will Be Blood’s Daniel Plainview is not a man who enjoys coming in second.
If you see a list that we should add to the mix, e-mail us at dvdextras@gmail.com.
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[Update, Saturday, Dec. 19, 2009, 1:30 p.m.: We’ve added Metacritic’s list of the “best-reviewed movies of the decade.” Thanks to reader Craig Danz of Seattle for the suggestion.]
[Update, Tuesday, Dec. 22, 2009, 7:58 p.m.: We’ve added indieWIRE’s Critic’s Survey.
