Decade ten best: Two from the New Yorker

I've been poking around a lot on the New Yorker's web site recently: If you're a subscriber, you can read any issue of the magazine ever published, which is fun, and their writers and editors relax a bit and blog, occasionally posting things that are more interesting that what they publish.

David Denby and Richard Brody, two of their film critics, posted their decade ten best lists and the contrast is interesting, reflecting very different attitudes toward the medium.

Denby's list is, frankly, impeccable. From "The Lives of Others" to "The Incredibles" and "Wall-E" from "Crouching Tiger" to "Cache" and "The White Ribbon" from "Mystic River" to "Knocked Up", Denby shows why he gets the big bucks -- this is a man with good taste, who writes well, and who will not scare the children. A bit boring, of course, but there's not a movie on the list that anyone but an eccentric would complain about.

Brody, whom I don't know, contributes a list that could either be insightful or insane, with only three movies I've ever heard of (one of which was The Darjeeling Limited -- surely a unique accolade for that one -- and another of which was a Senegalese movie about genital mutilation). Lots of food for thought: Jia Zhangke is 'the best new non-American director of the last twenty years'; Ying Liang and Wang Bing are the two best new directors of the decade; Manoel de Olivera made a movie that nobody told me about; and French people still make movies in black and white starring enigmatic and beautiful women.

I'd put Denby's list in the time capsule, but I'm putting Brody's list on my Netflix queue -- if I can find them there.