Eight top of Spain’s top journalists pick top ten films of the decade.

The filmmaker, 85 years, called back Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman), a couple of scenes from a marriage, 32 years after their separation.

Eight top of Spain’s top journalists pick top ten films of the decade.

1. Saraband
Ingmar Bergman (2003)

Bergman masterfully moves his characters as if they were a regular quartet of instruments to spin their confessional dialogue, bawdy, full of blame, feelings of guilt, loneliness, emotional coldness and final disappointment. The filmmaker, 85 years, called back Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman), a couple of scenes from a marriage, 32 years after their separation. "As my life has been exceedingly dogmatic, my view of life has died down gradually" Bergman said at the end of his life (he died in 2007). The film is a closed chamber piece in itself, here, a merciless hardness. The music of Bach, the fourth movement of Suite No. 5 for cello, sets the tone of a film marked by silences and absences. The passage of time does not heal, or redeem one, but puts the viewer in front of their own mirror.

2. Gran Torino
Clint Eastwood (2008)

Much of Eastwood's career has been marked by his success as an actor. He was one of the faces of films of the seventies and eighties, the face of Dirty Harry, without going any further, one who never apologized or felt guilty. He did what he had to do, without a word or a gesture more ... Well, the best movie of Eastwood as director since then has not stopped talking about guilt, forgiveness and redemption. With two landmarks evident in his long career. First Unforgiven, then Grand Torino that, do not forget, was the make of car driven by Harry in Magnum. "A parody of himself, perhaps? In a sense, yes. The largest and surly character who stars in Gran Torino could be that inspector Harry Callahan, now retired. And also a metaphor for an America that, anxious about changes, does not forget what is right. The Stars and Stripes America capable of sacrifice for ideals such as justice, equality and happiness.

3. The Lives of Others
Von Donnersmarck (2006)

After a comprehensive, more nostalgic Good Bye Lenin! (Wolfgman Becker, 2003) the release of The Lives of Others, three years later, was a blow on European consciences. Directed by newcomer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, not a hundred treated with equal force supposedly handed the burden, shame, abuse and fear that the former GDR had been dominated by a insensitive and bureaucratic power. It took a contrite look at its protagonist, the actor Ulrich Mühe, sadly deceased, to identify you, in your eyes, the grim look of an era.


6. Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood (2004)

The classicism of Eastwood behind the camera, sometimes (as in this case), leads to misunderstandings and a daring narrative is hidden by its apparent lack of pretension. Million Dollar Baby, as happened years ago with The Bridges of Madison, is hidden under the willows of a twilight drama abounds in the parent-child relationship (as in Gran Torino or a perfect world) but it reveals a powerful love tragedy. Besides this generic subversion, the plot is held by the elegant way Eastwood films, which gives privacy to learning spaces and the pain of his characters. Four Oscars, including best picture and best director, endorse a film that is already a classic.

7. Mood for Love
Wong Kar Wai (2000)

The place, Hong Kong. The time, the early sixties. And the protagonists, the essential Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. But in reality the Mood for Love has no coordinates. Not needed. It inhabits a place we can call the realm of melodrama, where the gesture commands slow, quiet voices, the sound of the rain at night and cigarette smoke all around him with a faint elegance.

8. The Pianist
Roman Polanski (2002)

The Jewish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman playing a Chopin nocturne on a Polish radio when the Luftwaffe devastated the station. He was 27 and soon to be imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, where he played in gambling houses of black market dealers and Jewish collaborators. Thanks to one of them he managed to escape the death trains. Many years later his son found his memoirs and published them. A similar story to Polanski, the filmmaker presents a realistic view, thanks to the interpretation of Adrien Brody.

9. A Man Without a Past
Aki Kaurismäki (2002)

A masterpiece of Kaurismaki, with hints of Dreyer's film and the surreal humour of silent film, with cinema photography showing the hyper-realistic landscapes of poverty and the sordid world where love and friendship is the lever that activates the salvation of their protagonists. A man loses his memory and must begin life from scratch, despised by the institutions and hosted by beggars. It is the Christian metaphor of a life of despair to die to be reborn to another, a merry tale steeped in sadness, absurd theatre and lunatic characters.

10. Dogville
Lars von Trier (2003)

A woman (Nicole Kidman) arrives in a remote village to escape gangsters. The inhabitants live in humility and the fear of God, but are gradually showing their despotism to enslave the girl. Lars von Trier was inspired by Brecht to shoot the pettiness of people in the years of depression and how the power that people have corrupts individuals




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