News broke yesterday that Eric Rohmer had died. I’ve written a short appreciation for the NOW website, but honestly? John would have knocked something out in half the time with twice the impact — even if he didn’t like “My Night at Maud’s” as much as I do.

I miss John. There are days when I feel like I’m owning this gig, but there are other days when I realize just how unqualified I am to be stepping into those shoes. Yesterday was one of those other days.

Yeah, I know. It’s winter and everyone’s a little depressed. C’est la vie, right?

Sure, if you’re living.

James Cameron’s “Avatar” pulled in another $48.5 million over the weekend, bringing its domestic take to $429 million and its global gross to more than $1.3 billion — all in less than a month. So it’s not only the second-biggest hit in movie history, but it’s made that boggling amount of money even faster than the current chart-topper did. I suspect James Cameron will be having his critics lined up and shot by March.

Also, and of considerably more importance, Dan Jardine has posted a lovely and occasionally painful essay about Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” on The House Next Door — and in so doing, he reminds me that I left “Before Sunset” off my list of the next-best films of the last decade.

There was a rationale for that, originally; I’d omitted it because its impact is so dependent on the viewer having seen the previous film. But then I realize I should have disqualified “Saraband” for the same reason, and didn’t think twice about including that film.

But now, I think leaving “Before Sunset” off — and coming to regret it — is somehow appropriate. Going back back to correct a past mistake would demonstrate I didn’t understand the movie in the slightest, wouldn’t it?

Let’s give it nine years, and see what happens.

My latest MSN movie gallery uses the arrival of “Youth in Revolt” to explore other adaptations of cult novels. And yes, pretty much everything you’d expect to see in there is in there.

Sadly, as the definitive film version of “A Confederacy of Dunces” — directed by Steven Soderbergh, and starring Patton Oswalt as Ignatius P. Reilly — only exists in my head, I couldn’t include it.

Someday, though. Someday.

The first releases of 2010 trickle out today — sure, two of them premiered at TIFF last year, but you know what they say: If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!

You know what I say? “If you haven’t seen ‘Youth in Revolt’, consider yourself lucky!”

That’s me, I say stuff.

“Daybreakers“: It’s 2019, and a plague has turned most people into vampires — which means the few remaining humans are both priceless food sources, and desperate freedom fighters. Michael and Peter Spierig, the splat-happy directors of “Undead”, return in a more cerebral mode … well, for the first ten minutes, anyway. Then it just gets so gloriously messy.

“Leap Year“: Amy Adams and Matthew Goode do the lovey-hatey dance as mismatched strangers traveling across Ireland because tradition holds that women can propose marriage to their menfolk on February 29th. (Fun fact: Since it’s established that Britain has switched to the Euro, it’s obviously set in 2012, and therefore a massive tidal wave is waiting just out of frame to smash them into oblivion.) My review should be online any minute now. UPDATE: There it is!

“Youth in Revolt“: In which Miguel Arteta demonstrates that comedy is truly not his thing, from the opening Claymation sequence to the excruciating insistence that every moment of screeching, flailing comedy is Totally Wacky!!1! Points for Steve Buscemi’s refusal to buy into the foolishness, and for Michael Cera’s obvious delight in playing his character’s alter ego, the chain-smoking blue-eyed French sociopath Francois Dillinger. But that’s maybe eight minutes out of the whole sorry mess that don’t completely suck.

It’s a new year and a new issue of NOW, but inside the movie section, you’d think it was last September all over again, what with my TIFF interviews with Sam Neill and the Spierig Brothers from “Daybreakers” and Michael Cera of “Youth in Revolt”.

In other news, well, there is no other news. It’s really freaking cold out, and I’ve got deadlines to meet. You know how it is.

Sorry for the late post today; there still isn’t much news to report, other than that thing where “Avatar” continues to make lots and lots of money. Good for James Cameron, I guess, but not so great for the megaplexes of 2012, which will be stuffed full of mo-cap fantasy cash-ins that won’t be half as well-designed or entertaining. And seventy percent of them will have Robert Zemeckis as an executive producer.

I direct your attention instead to Dave Kehr’s fine video column in yesterday’s New York Times, on the challenge facing studios looking to move their older titles to Blu-ray. It’s a piece I’ve been waiting for someone like Dave to write; my MSN column doesn’t exactly offer me the same platform, you know?

Not complaining, mind you. Just stating a fact …

And now, the thrilling conclusion of that epic list of runners-up for my Top Ten Films of the Decade. (If you’re just joining us, you really should check out parts one, two, three and four.)

“Stranger Than Fiction”: This is the movie that keeps me from dismissing Marc Forster as a useless hack. Yes, I know: Zach Helm should be buying Charlie Kaufman lunch for the rest of his life, and any goodwill created by this screenplay was immediately undone by his writing and directing of “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium”. But even so, this is the only one of the Kaufman riffs that attains its own life-force — and the ending isn’t as much of a compromise as you’d think. (Apology to pedants: Alphabetically speaking, this should have gone in yesterday’s post, before “Summer Hours”, but I screwed up the original file.)

“Superman Returns”: Bryan Singer’s thoughtful, mournful Superman movie plays best as a thought experiment: What if someone made an utterly faithful sequel to the version of “Superman II” that Richard Donner was never able to complete? This is that film, and aside from the flawed casting of Kate Bosworth as Lois Lane, it’s pretty much perfect. A quarter-century too late, but perfect all the same.

“Sympathy for Lady Vengeance”: Sure, “Oldboy” is great fun, but for the final chapter in his vengeance trilogy, Park Chan-wook ascends from pulp fiction to grand drama with a tale of buried suffering and hard-won redemption. Also featuring the funniest axe joke of the decade.

“Synecdoche, New York”: Michel Gondry’s hopeful romanticism made “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” a transcendent experience; in his directorial debut, Charlie Kaufman removes that fragile shred of optimism entirely, plunging Philip Seymour Hoffman’s neurotic theatre director straight into misery, decay and the abyss. And somehow, it’s nearly as transcendent.

“Time of the Wolf”: In a decade of apocalyptic visions, Michael Haneke’s unshowy study of a family struggling to make its way across a dying European landscape burrowed deeper into my own anxieties than any other. (Well, except for the ones with zombies.) There’s none of Cormac McCarthy’s stark poetry here, just horrible pragmatism and despair. I can identify with that.

“Touching the Void”: Kevin MacDonald’s gripping documentary uses dramatic re-enactments to bring Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’ disastrous mountain-climbing trip to impossible life — and somehow doesn’t short-circuit the story’s breathless tension despite both having men narrating their experience to the camera, obviously alive and well. That’s some kind of art.

“24 Hour Party People” and “Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story”: In which the alchemical combination of Michael Winterbottom and Steve Coogan is demonstrated through the endlessly refracting, self-rerential lens of cultural commentary. One might think the centuries between Laurence Sterne’s watershed novel and Tony Wilson’s musical empire would pose more of an obstacle. One would be wrong.

“Unbreakable”: Wherein M. Night Shyamalan’s formal constructions and immense self-regard come together almost perfectly to form a Bergmanesque examination of comic-book heroes and villains. Bruce Willis gives one of his finest performances as a man who’s spent his entire life convincing himself he isn’t anything special; Samuel L. Jackson is over the top, but of course he would have to be.

“Waking Life”: Richard Linklater’s digitally rotoscoped fantasy is a lot of things — a trippy companion piece to “Slacker”, an alternate-reality sequel to “Before Sunrise”, a meditation on spirituality and a sideways confrontation with mortality — but it’s never any one of those things for very long, which is what makes it so engrossing and so repeatable. I dearly love “Before Sunset”, but this was his artistic accomplishment for the decade.

“We Own the Night”: James Gray’s third feature takes a very basic story — two brothers on opposite sides of the law — and explodes it from the inside out, subverting the cliches of the genre and pulling fantastic performances from Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall and Eva Mendes. Why everyone ignored it for Sidney Lumet’s creaky, faux-tragic “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” continues to vex me.

“Y Tu Mama Tambien”: The Mexican revolution declared itself fully underway with Alfonso Cuaron’s festival smash, which turned a simple coming-of-age story into great cinema and introduced us to the powerhouse chemistry of Gael Garcia Bernal, Diego Luna and Maribel Verdu. And yeah, Bernal and Luna have long since squandered their promise, but it doesn’t matter. Their work here will be remembered long after “Rudo y Cursi” is consigned to the dustbin of cable.

… and to my considerable shock, that’s the entire list. Hope you’ve enjoyed following along, and now it’s time to turn back to the work I’ve been putting off all week. If you think I missed anything essential, don’t hesitate to comment below.

And I still think “Mulholland Dr.” is pants.

Holy crap, this is long. (Check out parts one, two and three, if you haven’t already.) And there’s still so much ground to cover that we’ll be pushing on into tomorrow. But if you’re still with me, let’s continue!

“Punch-Drunk Love” and “There Will Be Blood”: P.T. Anderson’s bravura character studies — one about the madness of love, the other about the madness of capitalism — were the very last to be cut from my ultimate list, mostly because I couldn’t figure out which one to drop and which one to keep. And leaving them up in a tie for 11th place just seemed cruel. So it goes, and so they went.

“Pulse” and “Toyko Sonata”: Kiyoshi Kurosawa started his decade with a chilling prophecy of J-horror’s future (and, in its own odd way, a harbinger of Joss Whedon’s “Dollhouse”) and ended it with a lovely story of a family struggling against the current of Japan’s economic collapse that’s no less affecting or perceptive for being totally conventional in its storytelling.

“The Royal Tenenbaums” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox”: More bookends, this time from Wes Anderson: First, an absurdist family study that feels like fine American literature, and then an actual literary adaptation — in stop-motion, with talking animals — that somehow feels less absurd than the live-action undertaking. I want a bandit hat.

“Saraband”: Ingmar Bergman’s final work, a muted coda to “Scenes from a Marriage”, finds Johann and Marianne still inextricably tangled up in one another’s lives — and as passionate in their mutual love and loathing as ever. A work of crushing intimacy, from a filmmaker who knew how to do nothing else.

“The Savages”: Abandoned by Fox Searchlight when “Juno” looked like the better Oscar contender, Tamara Jenkins’ devastating study of adult siblings who fall back into their childhood dynamic as they care for their dying father features fearless performances from Laura Linney, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Bosco — and hits emotional notes that slice into me like razors. It’ll be a while before I can watch this again. But I will.

“Sexy Beast”: In a decade crammed with vainglorious, swaggering thugs, Jonathan Glazer’s ultra-stylized thriller — brilliantly scripted by Louis Mellis and David Scinto — is about so much more than a retired hood dragged back for one last job: It’s about intimidation and persuasion, and knowledge, and how the most terrifying monsters are the ones that know us as well as we know them.

“Sideways”: I don’t usually get much from Alexander Payne’s movies; I find pissy misanthropy awfully exhausting. But here, he tempers his loathing with genuine compassion — or maybe it’s just the vast reservoir of pain visible behind Paul Giamatti’s eyes as he staggers through his Bacchanalian purgatory, accompanied by immature buddy Thomas Haden Church. Whatever it is, it works; this little movie about middle-aged drunks chasing girls around California wine country acquires tremendous power by its final frames.

“The Squid and the Whale”: Noah Baumbach’s unblinking look at his parents’ divorce is as harrowing a film as American cinema produced in the last ten years, with Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney as monstrously self-absorbed pseudo-intellectuals who think nothing of using their children as messengers for their bile. I hope making this film helped him in some way, because it fucked me up good and proper.

“Spider”: It took me a couple of viewings to really appreciate David Cronenberg’s quietest film, which features Ralph Fiennes in a performance so intentionally mannered he’s nearly unwatchable. But once I understood its rhythms and surrendered to its claustrophobic sound design, it had me on the edge of my seat. I’m not sure I’ll ever watch it again, but it’s always there on the shelf, waiting.

“Standard Operating Procedure”: Errol Morris looks at the atrocities committed by American soliders at Abu Gharib, and reveals a particularly horrible truth about human psychology: If we can blame someone else for our actions, well, we’re capable of almost anything. In a just and decent world, this would have been hailed as a war-crimes indictment for the Bush Administration … but we don’t live in a just and decent world.

“Summer Hours”: Another look at family dynamics; this one’s from Olivier Assayas, as adult siblings Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche and Jeremie Renier try to figure out what to do with their mother’s estate. Commissioned by the Musee d’Orsay, this is anything but a museum piece; it’s a film about the meaning we assign to objects, and how that makes us behave.

… hey, look at that, the end is in sight. Come back tomorrow for the big finish.