During the annual year-end celebrations and sentimental retrospectives, 2009 affords us the occasion to review more than just the milestones of a single year.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, but I feel this is a more perfect opportunity to show my appreciation as a sign of the times. On a front that is both personal and professional, I transitioned from loving film to critically loving film and took my first established step towards becoming a working writer.

Secondly, this list documents not only a new decade’s worth of films but also a new millennium. Having survived the Y2K scare — which, in hindsight seems like a forgotten footnote — we found ourselves less than two years later staring at a changed landscape, a hole in the eternal skyline of New York and a real sign (post-9/11) of the times that continues to loom large on screen and off. Real fear and loathing was upon us.

I still vividly remember my first trip to New York, a city I was never all that fond of. (Truth be told, as an African-American Southerner, my adopted hometown of Philadelphia was always more in keeping with my sense and sensibilities). Yet I joined the Brown Sugar movie junketeers, almost exactly one year after 9/11, and thanks to several long walks around the immediate environs — my final stroll with the film’s engaging director Rick Famuyiwa stands out as a highlight filled with grown-folksy musings on music, love and, of course, the city.

I fell in love with NYC.

More importantly, though, I fell in love at first sight all over again with film because I realized that while it wouldn’t let us forget what life and that fractured skyline was like before, it would continue to offer visions of its future and, by extension, our own.

I also came to appreciate the powerful impact of war on our imagination and perspective.

The attacks of 9/11 led to global armed engagement and an immediate attempt by filmmakers to bring the physical and psychological devastation to the home front.

The more obvious efforts like In the Valley of Elah (2007), Rendition (2007) and Stop/Loss (2008) sought to capture the toll as it spread from soldiers and underground fighters to the civilians in harm’s way, but there were also touching examples like The 25th Hour (2002) that stared at the gaping wound left in all of our lives as we fumbled around in the blackest night before the dawn.

Yet more dark challenges would arise — likely the biggest threat and possible savior would arrive under the guise of technology and its impact on spreading media messages. To my mind, criticism, even and especially alternative debate, needs to be able to engage a cross-section of readers. It’s even more important in the Midwest, the flyover region, isolated from the two coasts, the locus of film and tastemakers.

Our voices and our opinions need to be expressed and heard. I have watched with curiosity and some measure of dread as local voices have been silenced and then come to see and appreciate the reality that it was not just here but everywhere, which made criticism even more vital and necessary.

It needed to reach readers in this format — the print format — because the shape and dimension and tenor of the discussion becomes more diffuse online. It becomes a quantitative assessment dominated by vitriolic voices matched to a sheer numbers game (the most views and loud responses) rather than civil, thoughtful qualitative engagement.

Maintaining and defending the printed word is an honor fraught with great responsibility that I try to impart on the journalism students I teach at the University of Cincinnati as we study the craft of review and criticism. It is dying, but that is what we say about everything.

The novel and Rock & Roll have soldiered on despite dire pronouncements from time to time. Film, some would argue, died after the 1970s, but the corpse remains animated.

As a critic and fan of the form, I hold the same sense of nostalgia as others who cocoon themselves in the dark with these outsized characters of light. I embrace too tightly my simulated memories, these implants of days and stories I could only wished to have lived.

From The Conversation and Taxi Driver and Last Tango in Paris to Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing and To Live and Die in LA to Sex, Lies and Videotape and Heat and Pulp Fiction to the flickering images of this past decade, the one that we struggle to define with a single pithy tag. Take the following films as a list of not necessarily the best that this invisible decade has offered but rather as the snapshots, the moving sign of the times.

United 93 (2006)

Memento (2001)

No Country for Old Men (2007)

There Will Be Blood (2007)

Solaris (2002)

Punch Drunk Love (2002)

The Constant Gardener (2005)

The Fountain (2006)

In America (2003)

Children of Men (2006)

One day, someone will say that the Internet is dead, having fallen to the latest iteration of communication and narrative. But filmmakers will always find a way to present challenging visions that break through the cultural noise and trigger a sense of shared experience. I hope that I will still be around to savor those stories. That is worth far more than a name, if you ask me. (tt stern-enzi)