Best Films of the ’00s
December 27th, 2009
25. Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2
It’s kind of cheating to pick two movies here, but since Tarantino originally conceived of Kill Bill as a single film I think it’s fair enough. He ought to be rewarded anyway, for giving us upwards of four hours of his demented tribute to kung-fu, slasher, and spaghetti western classics.
24. Yi Yi
From Salon:
“Edward Yang’s “Yi Yi: A One and a Two …” may be the greatest film ever, let alone the best of the decade. What does that mean? For starters, it means that Yang’s final film lies somewhere between formalist hard-assery and middlebrow accessibility, between slow-burning Ozu and — in the abruptly climaxing story lines of the last hour — understated soap opera. In telling the story of a Taiwanese family in crisis, Yang has three hours to zero in on what makes one family’s members tick while positioning them exactly in the center of late-20th-century global economics: micro- and macro-, both specifically Taiwanese in its business scenes and universal in its familial dynamics.”
23. Punch-Drunk Love
Between Boogie Nights, Punch-Drunk Love, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood (only two of which were eligible for this list), Paul Thomas Anderson easily looks like one of the best directors around. This is a remarkable film, with a rare performance from Adam Sandler, a pitch perfect score from Jon Brion, and beautiful interstitial art from the late Jeremy Blake.
From Salon:
“It is literally a moving painting, because of Jeremy Blake’s color-field interludes and also because of the way these interventions into the film space seem to haunt the non-painted imagery. But it is also in the same class as a Rothko or Newman or Kandinsky, in that it visualizes the invisible and the intangible, in a way that transcends narrative and forces us to engage with its space and its presence within our space. It is a moving painting — it’s a painting that moves the viewer.”
22. Half Nelson
Ryan Gosling gives a career-making performance as a crack-addicted history teacher who travels the same drug-worn streets as his students. It’s a movie that could easily have fallen into half a dozen bad clichés (Dangerous Minds, Stand and Deliver, etc) or gone mushy and sentimental, but Gosling’s understated grace and excellent direction from Ryan Fleck keep things engrossing and believable.
21. In the Bedroom
From Roger Ebert:
“At first, [In the Bedroom] seems to be about a summer romance. At the end, it’s about revenge–not just to atone for a wound, but to prove a point. The film involves love and violence, and even some thriller elements, but it is not about those things. It is about two people so trapped in opposition that one of them must break.”
The two people Ebert references, a couple portrayed by Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, are two of the most fully realized, wonderfully acted, and just plain real characters you’ll find in any movie of the decade.
20. Requiem for a Dream
You guys, don’t do drugs. Just Say No, ok?
From The New York Times:
“‘Requiem’ interweaves the stories of four drug addicts — Harry; his mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn); his girlfriend, Marion (Jennifer Connelly); and his buddy, Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) — in their pursuit of a reality-blurring high. Still, the picture holds close to the theme of the novel: the real drug we’re all hooked on is the American Dream, with its promises of big cash paydays and fame and eventually happiness, which can all no doubt be found around that same corner where prosperity is said to lurk.”
19. Zodiac
From the AV Club:
“David Fincher is notorious for his hyper-demanding, Kubrickian pursuit of perfection, where even the simplest shot can demand a hundred takes. With that in mind, rarely have filmmaker and subject been as compatible as in Fincher’s Zodiac, a mesmerizing procedural that follows the still-unsolved case of a Bay Area serial killer all the way down an obsessive-compulsive rabbit hole. What begins as a gorgeous evocation of a region under the grips of a cryptic serial killer—the opening, from the fireworks on July 4, 1969 to the haunting “Hurdy Gurdy Man” sequence that accompanies the first murder, is as good as it gets—becomes all the more fascinating once the case goes cold and only a miserable few can’t bring themselves to let it go.”
18. United 93
Paul Greengrass’ work in the ’00s will probably be remembered best for the frenetic action of the Bourne franchise, but his account of United Flight 93 on September 11 is certainly his finest film. Straightforward and matter-of-fact, his portrayal of both the hijackers and their victims creates high-tension drama without catering to overt patriotism or simplistic explanations. This is a powerful film, one that’s not often much fun to watch, but that everyone should see.
17. Adaptation
These days it takes a truly tremendous film for me to recommend anything with Nicolas Cage in it. Luckily, Adaptation is pretty great.
From Roger Ebert:
“What a bewilderingly brilliant and entertaining movie this is–a confounding story about orchid thieves and screenwriters, elegant New Yorkers and scruffy swamp rats, truth and fiction. “Adaptation” is a movie that leaves you breathless with curiosity, as it teases itself with the directions it might take. To watch the film is to be actively involved in the challenge of its creation.”
16. Let the Right One In
In the decade where Vampires made a late resurgence in the terrible Twilight franchise, it was Let The Right One In that really redefined the genre. More than that, it’s a bizarrely touching type of buddy flick, portraying the strange friendship that begins when a young vampire protects her friend from his bullying peers. Tomas Alfredson sets the film in his native Sweden, where the foreboding white-out of the winter makes the spurts of blood-red violence all the more startling. By far the best horror film of the ’00s.
15. Y Tu Mamá También
From Salon:
“‘Y Tu Mamá También’ is one of the most joyous movies I’ve ever seen, and one of the handful of great erotic films the movies have given us. Audiences in Mexico responded by making it the biggest hit in the country’s history. It deserves to be just as big a hit here. … Cuarón has said the movie is ‘about two teenage boys finding their identity as adults and … also about the search for identity of a country going through its teenage years and trying to find itself as an adult nation.’”
14. Waking Life
Before Charles Schwab ripped it off for their terrible ad campaign, the rotoscoping animation technique made its dazzling debut in Richard Linklater’s (Dazed & Confused, Slacker) Waking Life. Instead of bland, boring financial advice Linklater populates his film with a pseudo-philisophical investigation of dreams and dreaming. Though the characters are often trafficking in some pretty abstract ideas the dialogue never seems to drift too far from real, everyday conversation. And there’s always something interesting to look at, the animation shifting in and out of dream-like states as appropriate to the scene. This one is worth watching twice, at least.
13. Good Night and Good Luck
Remember when journalists were brave? When they dared to speak truth to power? Good Night, and Good Luck, likened by Roger Ebert to, “a morality play, from which we learn how journalists should behave,” dramatizes the political conflict between Joe McCarthy and newsman Edward R Murrow at the height of the 1950’s Red Scare. Directed by George Clooney, who also co-stars, and shot in black-and-white, the film is a smoky tribute to hard drinking and hard thinking journalists who put their careers and reputations on the line to report the truth. David Strathairn is particularly good as Murrow. His gallows humor and stalwart, stubborn determination shows a man with a rare kind of moral courage.
12. Children of Men
The best sci-fi movie of the decade, Children of Men presents a future world rocked by political strife and environmental disaster in which no one has been able to give birth for 18 years. It’s a dystopian nightmare, but one that connects all to easily with current events. Clive Owen is the centerpiece of the film; his performance as a cynical former radical who must help safely transport the only pregnant woman in the world provides the story’s core emotional arc. Children of Men is Alfonso Cuarón’s second film on the list, after Y Tu Mamá También.
11. Wall-E
Wall-E is one of the most amazing, startlingly beautiful, visual masterpieces of the ’00s. It’s also an incredible throw-back to the silent era, where verbal exposition was limited and filmmakers still knew how to show the audience their story without relentlessly telling it to them. It’s also a cautionary tale about our reliance on technology and the future fate of human evolution. It’s also a heartwarming love story, full of wit and wonder. It’s also a robot that cleans up trash.
10. 25th Hour
From the AV Club:
“In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, filmmakers were rushing to digitally blot out any evidence that the Twin Towers ever existed on the New York skyline. Not Spike Lee. New York is his town, and he alone was committed to documenting it truthfully and poignantly, as an event that touched everyone’s lives in that specific time and place and should not be papered over. That sense of profound loss dovetails beautifully with David Benioff’s story of a convicted New York drug dealer (Edward Norton) spending his final day of freedom before serving a seven-year sentence. Lee connects his regret over the life he’s led—compounded by the realization that the world will keep turning without him—with the vibrancy and resilience of the wounded city he at one point professes to hate, but loves with bone-deep transparency. “
9. Amores Perros
From Roger Ebert:
“Amores Perros … tells three interlinked stories that span the social classes in Mexico City, from rich TV people to the working class to the homeless, and it circles through those stories with a nod to Quentin Tarantino, whose “Pulp Fiction” had a magnetic influence on young filmmakers. … The title, loosely translated in English, is “Love’s a Bitch,” and all three of his stories involve dogs who become as important as the human characters.”
8. Donnie Darko
Favorite Line: “I’m beginning to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!”
Like many of the films on this list, Donnie Darko feels like five or six different movies all going at once - science fiction, teen comedy, satire, horror, drama, philosophical treatise. Then you have to also figure in the Director’s Cut, which adds scenes and voice-over narration, and emphasizes certain plot points differently than the original. It may not be easy to categorize, but something about Donnie Darko taps into the postmodern zeitgeist in a way that appeals to people, especially those of us who grew up in the ’80s.
7. Memento
Favorite Line: “I have to believe in a world outside my own mind. I have to believe that my actions still have meaning, even if I can’t remember them. I have to believe that when my eyes are closed, the world’s still there. Do I believe the world’s still there? Is it still out there?… Yeah. We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. I’m no different.”
Memento is probably best known for being one of the first mainstream films to truly experiment with non-linear storytelling as more than mere gimmick. The point of its tortured chronology is to put the viewer in the shoes of Guy Pearce, who after surviving the murder of his wife is left alone, looking for revenge while simultaneously struggling with the fact that his brain is unable to make new memories. It works thrillingly as a visceral, mind-fuck suspense story, but also connects on a deeper level as a meditation on the pointlessness of revenge and the idea that obsessing about the past can rob us of the future. Memento is also notable as the first great film from Christopher Nolan, who gave us three more in the ’00s - Batman Begins, The Dark Night, and The Prestige (Insomnia … not so much).
6. No Country For Old Men
Favorite Line: “I always figured when I got older, God would sorta come inta my life somehow. And he didn’t. I don’t blame him. If I was him I would have the same opinion of me that he does.”
‘No Country’ is the Coen Bros. best film of the ’00s, their best since ‘Fargo,’ and just maybe their flat-out best ever. Wait, no, that’s the Big Lebowski. But anyway - Cormac McCarthy’s novel is brutal, white-knuckle nihilism and the Coen’s lose none of that in translating it to film. I’ve heard some people complain about the ending but I loved it, especially because it holds true to the source.
From the AV Club:
“Rarely do the Coens seem overly interested in any reality but their own, but with No Country For Old Men, they tapped into the waking nightmare of our age of terror, and did so in a way that made impending doom feel viscerally exciting.”
5. Almost Famous
Favorite Line: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world… is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”
From Roger Ebert:
“Oh, what a lovely film. I was almost hugging myself while I watched it. “Almost Famous” is funny and touching in so many different ways. It’s the story of a 15-year-old kid, smart and terrifyingly earnest, who through luck and pluck gets assigned by Rolling Stone magazine to do a profile of a rising rock band. The magazine has no idea he’s 15. Clutching his pencil and his notebook like talismans, phoning a veteran critic for advice, he plunges into the experience that will make and shape him. It’s as if Huckleberry Finn came back to life in the 1970s, and instead of taking a raft down the Mississippi, got on the bus with the band.”
4. There Will be Blood
Favorite line: “I drink your milkshake!”
Everything about this movie is pitch perfect - the incredible cinematography, Daniel Day-Lewis’ over the top performance, the score by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood - even the extreme, unforgettable ending.
From the AV Club:
“True to form, Anderson’s bruisingly intense 2007 Upton Sinclair adaptation There Will Be Blood looks and feels nothing like any of his previous films. It’s a brawling, two-fisted indictment of conscienceless capitalism built around Daniel Day-Lewis’ volcanic performance as a ruthless oilman who gains the world and loses what little is left of his soul. Anderson has made a film at once epic and intimate, a character study of a man whose lust for money and power knows no bounds. As long as we remain addicted to oil, Anderson’s gut-punch of a film will retain extraordinary contemporary resonance. ”
3. The Royal Tenenbaums
Favorite line: “I’ve always been considered an asshole for about as long as I can remember. Uh, that’s just my style. But I’d really feel blue if I didn’t think you were going to forgive me.”
The best of Wes Anderson’s brilliant, uneven ouevre, The Royal Tenenbaums plays as an homage to Wells’ The Magnificient Ambersons or J.D. Salinger’s Glass Family stories. A family of precocious young geniuses find themselves struggling with adulthood, their misadventures serving as both a funny and touching portrait of modern family life.
2. City of God
Favorite Line: “A kid? I smoke, I snort. I’ve killed and robbed. I’m a man. “
From Roger Ebert’s review:
“‘City of God’ churns with furious energy as it plunges into the story of the slum gangs of Rio de Janeiro. Breathtaking and terrifying, urgently involved with its characters, it announces a new director of great gifts and passions: Fernando Meirelles. Remember the name. The film has been compared with Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and it deserves the comparison. Scorsese’s film began with a narrator who said that for as long as he could remember he wanted to be a gangster. The narrator of this film seems to have had no other choice.”
1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Favorite Line: “Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it’s on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you’ll miss.”
From Salon:
“I have been thinking about movies, and while it’s hard to pick a favorite or a best, or whatever, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” keeps coming up. It captured something so tragic and beautiful about relationships, something that can’t even be verbally articulated — but it was articulated — through all of the different elements of the film. The first time I saw it, I couldn’t get up. I was reduced to a puddle. It affected me in a way that got inside.”
I know that Eternal Sunshine is my favorite film, too, and not just of the ’00s. You can argue about the ambiguity of the ending - about whether or not implies fatalism or hope - but either way the film’s depiction of relationships and memories (and they way they define who we are) feels true in a way that most movies fail to capture. It’s one of the few films that actually kept me surprised and in awe throughout, and the only one that left me grinning from ear to ear when I first saw it.