For a film that fits so snugly into the tried-and-true formula of star-crossed lovers, Dear John is full of pleasant surprises.

The setup is a familiar one: In February of 2001, 21-year-old Special Forces officer John Tyree (Channing Tatum) meets college student Savannah Curtis (Amanda Seyfried) while he’s on leave and she’s on spring break. After a two-week courtship, they have sworn their eternal love and promise to get back together in one year after his tour is up and she graduates with a special education teaching degree. In the meantime, they exchange letters — since he’s being transferred all around the globe, snail mail turns out to be the most intimate, reliable form of communication they have (besides, an old-fashioned love story is no place for texts and e-mails).

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By fashioning Naomi Klein’s nonfiction book The Shock Doctrine into a feature-length documentary, multi-faceted British director Michael Winterbottom streamlines her arguments, and offers a rather compelling explanation of how the confluence of economic theory and secret CIA studies laid the foundation for the Bush administration’s Iraq War battle plan.

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One of the ways to make a tried-and-true movie formula feel fresh is to cast good actors, and that’s exactly what makes The Tooth Fairy better than you might expect.

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I’m not sure how to sum up this decade, other than to say that looking back at my list of the ten best films from the first ten years of the 21st century I’m amazed at how many astounding films just missed the cut.

10. Munich
Four years after the Twin Towers fell, Steven Spielberg went into the past and used the fallout from a 1972 terrorist act to fashion the best cinematic response to the dominant news event of the 2000s, offering up nothing less than an inquiry about how to live a moral life in the face of an immoral act.

9. Lost in Translation
Everytime I revisit Sofia Coppola’s aching romantic drama, I’m left with a different feeling. When I first saw it, I thought Bill Murray’s beaten down actor would trudge back to his tiresome marriage, and that Scarlett Johanson’s searching twentysomething would have her head on straight and find real happiness. But repeated viewings have left me wondering if she might end up far worse off than he does - forever questing for something she’ll never find. Any movie that can still move me, and yet leave itself so open-ended, deserves to be remembered.

8. Gangs of New York
I’m a Scorsese junkie, and while The Departed won him a well-deserved and long-overdue Oscar, it’s the ambitious, flawed, and entirely unique Gangs of New York that I keep returning to time and again. Full of little details, but dominated by Daniel Day-Lewis’ larger than life maniac Bill the Butcher, the film just overflows with history, cinematic showmanship, and a sense of place.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. Michael Hoffman’s The Last Station shows how another great writer, Leo Tolstoy, lived that quote.

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At one point in Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart, 57-year-old alcoholic, down-on-his-luck country singer/songwriter Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) explains that the great songs sound like you’ve already heard them. There’s much truth in that statement, and it’s an apt description of the movie’s charm as well.

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Although it’s adapted from a successful Broadway musical, Rob Marshall’s big-screen version of Nine never makes the case that the movie needed to be made.

This musical version of Fellini’s classic 8 1/2 stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Guido Contini, a famous Italian filmmaker who must begin shooting his ninth movie in just about a week. The catch is that he has no script, and no idea what kind of story he wants to tell. An international celebrity, Guido’s day-to-day life involves confronting fanatical fans, pestering paparazzi, and lovely ladies willing to throw themselves at him — and all the hedonism just adds to his lack of creativity. In order to find some inspiration, Guido thinks back on all the women who have mattered to him. As he becomes lost in daydreams about the prostitute who took his innocence (Fergie), and remembering his deceased mother (Sophia Loren), he shuttles between having sex with his mistress (Penélope Cruz) and trying to be a decent husband to his wife (Marion Cotillard). As the pressures mounts, Guido begins to face the painful truth about himself — and in so doing may find a reason to keep working.

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Handsomely mounted historical dramas about the great kings and queens in world history are about as durable and long-lasting a genre as filmmaking has ever known. And people who like that kind of thing will find The Young Victoria to be the kind of thing they like.

The teenage Victoria (Emily Blunt) ascends to England’s throne after the death of her uncle, King William (Jim Broadbent). Because she is unmarried, her choice for a groom has international implications. She’s inundated with a steady stream of advice from her mother (Miranda Richardson), her closest political aide (Paul Bettany), and from many other self-serving members of court. The young queen wants to think for herself, however, and even though she has no desire to marry, takes a shine to Prince Albert (Rupert Friend) and allows him to begin courting her from afar. Although her people celebrate her grandly at the beginning of her reign, Victoria begins to lose the goodwill of her subjects due to an amateur understanding of politics, and soon comes to believe that Albert may be the only person she can fully trust.

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