25 Films I Really Liked from the Aughts
This list is a pointless one, because I am entirely limited in what I have seen this decade. I generally even approach year-end Top 10 lists with trepidation because I know how narrow my viewing range is. I’m not a critic by trade, I’m not sponsored by any critics group – I’m just someone who loves movies but never gets nearly close enough to seeing all of them. So this list, save for maybe my Top 5 or 10, is in no way meant to imply that these are the best films of the decade. These were my favorites, out of the ones that I had the pleasure of seeing. And I offer this list a) because it is traditional and so many other organizations, blogs, publications, and individuals are doing them and b) because if nothing else, it’s an excuse to give 25 movie recommendations and hopefully get someone out there to see a movie on this list that they may not have seen otherwise.
Though one of my most noticeable gaps in viewing occurred in documentaries this decade, I can safely say that No End In Sight is one of the most important documentaries that came out this decade. The Aughts were defined by 9/11 and the subsequent war in Iraq; No End In Sight sets out to explain how misguided and wrong the war was and how mishandled the ordeal was from the get-go, but manages to do so in an even-handed and methodical way. It’s incredibly effective in making its point, and that’s what the best documentaries are able to do.
District 9 was so critically-lauded this year and was a runaway box office success, but Cloverfield had the same tricks up its sleeve and executed them much better eighteen months prior. Clever and effective marketing? Check. Shaky handheld camera to add verisimilitude to an outlandish premise? Check. Exhilarating execution of this technique? Ah – there’s where the films start to diverge. Cloverfield expertly used its handheld point-of-view and smoothly integrated special effects to create a seamless movie-going experience. All of the gimmicky elements worked, and the effect was pure, giddy movie magic.
Such a quiet film that could have easily devolved into something incredibly boring, Before Sunset was the sequel that no one asked for that became a great film on its own terms while simultaneously making the case that yes, this sequel was necessary. Before Sunrise has much of the same pleasures as Before Sunset in that both films feature well-written dialogue between two characters and not much else. But Sunset excels in communicating how the two central characters changed in the wake of their exchanges from Sunrise. And the film’s closing scene perfectly encapsulates the bittersweet melancholy that permeates the whole film.
Another film on this list that could have easily collapsed under its own shtick. Shortbus emerged as John Cameron Mitchell’s follow-up to his outlandish musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch with the simple task of using real on-screen sex to tell a story. Michael Winterbottom tried to do something similar with 9 Songs; in that film, the results came off as pornography, whereas Shortbus uses sex as a way of exploring its central themes. The film is ultimately an exploration of how we interact with each other and how we close ourselves off from others. Ultimately, though, when all is said and done, the film is joyful, bursting with life and exuberance. And really, shouldn’t a film full of sex ultimately do that?
Tina Fey’s Reign of Awesome through the Aughts kicked it into high gear with her screenwriting debut Mean Girls. Is the film perfect? Not by a long shot. It sort of falls into cliché as it tries to wrap things up, but regardless, the film is an enduring creature. Fey’s screenplay is so smart, so witty, and so funny that any inconsistencies in the storytelling itself are easily tossed aside. Throw in ideal casting for roles big and small, and the film is one of the most iconic and re-watchable films of the decade, and that alone earns it a spot on this list.
Fair warning: Pixar will be a frequent offender on this list. Saying that Finding Nemo is the worst of the three films that will ultimately appear on this list does a disservice to the film, because the film is so so very good. Watching it again, it becomes clear what masters of screenplay structure Pixar’s writers are, and then Pixar brings the expertly-crafted story to life with gorgeous animation. Though Monsters, Inc. hinted at their talents, Nemo catapulted Pixar into another realm of what could be accomplished with animation. The images in Nemo are saturated in gorgeous color, perfectly capturing the underwater locales and giving viewers a taste of what Pixar would provide in the years to come with subsequent efforts.
Director Martin Scorsese finally secured the Best Director Oscar with The Departed, an almost uncomfortably taut crime thriller. It’s an immensely well-crafted exercise in character-building and in atmosphere-building. Scorsese masterfully conducts scenes and moves his camera in just the right way to capture the complex interactions between characters and to effectively stage and shoot action sequences that build, climax, and release exactly when they need to. It’s a perfect match of director and material, and as a result, the film is ultimately a lot of fun to watch.
It takes balls to have a debut film this ambitious, but more importantly, it takes talent to actually deliver on those ambitions. Writer/director Richard Kelly could have easily delivered a final film that crumbled under its lofty and heady blend of sci-fi, family drama, dark comedy, and character study, but the finished film is a perfectly-orchestrated blend of its disparate elements. This is a film with a talking rabbit, wormholes that emerge from people, an airplane jet engine that crashes onto a house, time travel, and Drew Barrymore as an English teacher, and you buy all of it – who’d’ve thought that’d be possible? It all works, and the result is a film unlike any you’ve seen before, executed perfectly.
We’ll never know how well Kill Bill would have worked if it were cut down for time and released as one film, as Quentin Tarantino originally intended. What we’re left with are two vastly different “volumes.” Volume One works perfectly as an homage to a chunk of film history that I am vastly underprepared to discuss. The beauty of One, though, is that the film never alienates its audience that might not be versed in the various tropes and genres that Tarantino plays with. Volume Two was weaker precisely because all of this homage was at the expense of the audience. Volume One instead gets the balance just right: even if we don’t always understand as much as Tarantino does, we’re still left with scenes that work on their own merits and are goofy fun to behold. It’s all style and very little substance, and that’s the way it should be.
Ratatouille may be one of the more esoteric films in Pixar’s canon, but it works as well as it does because, at its core, it’s very nearly another dumb animated film. Rats can’t cook! Oh my God! Fill in the cast of rats with big-name celebrity voices and you’d be left with something DreamWorks might put out. What makes Ratatouille so special is writer/director Brad Bird’s ambition to make the story a more broadly-reaching commentary on the role of art in society and to the individual. It has profound things to say about individualism, about the culinary arts, and technically, about the art of animation itself. Seriously: not only does Ratatouille have some of the most painterly animation, used to capture everything from the streets of Paris to the gleaming copper pots in the kitchen, but it has some of the best character design we’ll likely see in animation for years to come.
It’s so easy to dismiss this film because of the pop culture significance (and some might say notoriety) it gained and has maintained since its release. The film’s lasting effect on the cultural dialogue on gay marriage and its place in the queer cinema canon will always be of importance, though, as will the strength of the performances that director Ang Lee elicited from his cast. Very few films this decade were able to tell a simple story and tell it well, but Brokeback Mountain accomplished this about as well as any other film from the Aughts. This is one of the decade’s films that I have no doubt will continue to be part of the cinema discussion indefinitely.
I always struggle with where to place this film on various lists because I don’t have a very firm grasp on it. The reason? It’s devastating to watch, so I’ve seen it only twice. Lars Von Trier’s stab at a musical of course turned into taking a female protagonist and slinging as much shit at her as possible. It’s Von Trier’s formula, and he follows it here. The other crucial element of his formula is a great performance from whatever actress plays that female protagonist. Björk has notoriously declined to act again after the emotional turmoil of making this movie, and every ounce of that shows in the finished film. The music numbers (all written by Björk and Von Trier) burst with joy, but they mask the undeniable tragedy that Björk’s Selma undergoes in the film. As Selma turns to music one last time towards the end of the film, singing “My Favorite Things” softly to herself, it will absolutely rip your heart out and the film will proceed to stomp all over it until the camera finally lifts up through the roof at the end of the film, turning away from the sadness in the world that Von Trier created.
This is still a fresh one in my mind, clearly, but I don’t see why newer films can’t be featured on this list. Otherwise, we’d end up with a list of films from 2000-2005 and that defeats the purpose of a list of films from the Aughts. Away We Go deeply resonated with me, and I’ll grant some of my love for the film on the good fortune that the film deals with themes that affected me for personal reasons. Objectively, though, this is a film with a superb debut script from novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Veda, and the direction throughout is so spot-on that the overly twee or quirky setups instead take on an emotional weight that reverberates so effectively, long after Burt and Verona finally figure out where they’re meant to raise their child. It’s the film equivalent of a great short story collection: each vignette is absolutely lovely on its own, but they all work together to form a great film.
Many call Waiting for Guffman their favorite Christopher Guest film, but my vote goes to 2000’s Best in Show. The film is an oddly perfect fit with Guest’s brand of improvised humor. Its exploration of several dogs and their eccentric owners at the Westminster Dog Show is at once broadly drawn and expertly honed. Yes, the characters that Guest’s regular troupe of performers play are all caricatures to some extent, but they are all played so well and the actors given such perfectly-chosen scenes in which to explore their characters that they turn into deeply human people. Watching Parker Posey’s Meg frantically search her hotel room for her dog’s Busy Bee toy, for example, we laugh at the conviction that Meg has for the importance of the toy, but we also understand her devotion. All of the characters in Best in Show are allowed similar moments of broad humor that in turn end up showing their deep humanity.
Another one to file in the “personal favorite” category, Stranger than Fiction is a lovely, lovely film that explores its central gimmick to great effect and ultimately turns into a surprisingly poignant examination of mortality. Will Ferrell plays against type in a downplayed turn as a lonely shut-in who begins to hear an omniscient narrator in his everyday life. The cast is rounded out with an eclectic mix of actors who run the gamut from Emma Thompson to Queen Latifah and all work together wonderfully to compliment the slightly askew tone of the film. Add in a great visual flair to the whole thing from director Marc Forster, and the finished product is fantastic.
One of the most criminally overlooked performances of the Aughts came from Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky. Her central performance as the eternally optimistic Poppy is so carefully nuanced and lived-in, that the film around her is elevated immensely. The supporting performances pulse with a vivacity that comes from the authenticity that Hawkins brings to the table, and the meandering story that in a lesser film would have been deadly instead becomes a joy to watch here. Sometimes there’s nothing quite as thrilling as watching the ordinary become extraordinary right before your very eyes.
The Hours may reek a tad much of Oscar bait at times, what with the prestigious literary source material and top-notch talent in front of and behind the camera and late-December release date. The film quickly overcomes this with its incredibly poignant take on death and its effect on those around us. The adaptation, too, from David Hare, is one of the very best I’ve seen, taking the complex source material and adapting it into something completely suitable for film. There’s so much great thematic work that the film accomplishes, as well as so many great performances that director Stephen Daldry elicits from his cast that it becomes that much easier to overlook the stereotypically awards-grabby trappings that the film also tends to fall into.
Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights will not be for everyone. It’s slow-going, its visuals are overly-stylized, the acting is a tad uneven, and the film doesn’t tell much of a story beyond the central arc of Norah Jones’s Elizabeth travelling the country to find herself after a horrific break-up. But what passion Wong Kar-Wai is able to capture in the finished project. Ice cream melting over blueberry pie has never before been so erotic.
With Pixar dominating the general conversation this decade about animated films, something like Coraline has fallen through the cracks a bit. It is, and I don’t say this lightly, akin to this generation’s The Wizard of Oz. Upon my initial view of the film, I felt such awe at the craftsmanship on display and felt like I was watching something truly unique and wondrous. The visuals in this film are such a testament to flesh-and-blood artistry, with nearly all of the finished film made from hand-done stop-motion animation or practical effects. The result is a wonder to behold, and on top of that, we’re also left with a children’s film that is at once joyous and terrifying, a wonderfully complex film in all aspects of its creation.
It’s easy to over-praise this film, I fear, as so many people love it, but there’s a reason: it’s a great film. It takes a simple theme and explores it in an entirely new and fascinating way that helps us understand it in a new light. So easy to write down on paper and set out to do in theory, but so difficult to execute in practice. With Eternal Sunshine, writer Charlie Kauffman doesn’t quite match the perfection of his Being John Malkovich, but he comes damn close. Michel Gondry’s direction perfectly matches the quirk of the script, finding a effortless visual palette to communicate the film’s complex ideas about love and love lost. It’s incredibly re-watchable, and it’s a film that rewards multiple viewings with new complexities every time.
Steven Spielberg’s much-maligned masterpiece is an absolute marvel of science fiction, a film filled to the brim with big ideas and big themes. The film could have easily collapsed under its own ambition, but Spielberg is up to the challenge set for him by original writer/director Stanley Kubrick. Kubrick’s long-gestating project was handed off to Spielberg, who took Kubrick’s initial vision, churned it through his own tendencies toward sentimentality, and the film that emerged takes both filmmaker’s visions and melds them into a uniquely dense future world where technology has advanced so far that even the computer-driven humanoids of the future just want to be loved. It’s a bold film with startling ideas about what makes us human and what love actually is.
Probably the most overlooked film of the Aughts, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang starts with a genius screenplay that is delightfully self-referential without ever being cutesy – a difficult hat trick to pull off. The film is at heart a noir, but that’s ultimately a disservice to the film as a whole, for Black is able to combine several genres into one: noir, yes, but also slapstick comedy, pulp fiction crime thriller, and buddy comedy all at once. Perfectly cast, leads Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, and Michelle Monaghan are all at the top of their games, selling Black’s quick-fire dialogue with panache. They made stylized dialogue look good long before Juno came along. Stripped of any and all gloss that the film has, though, this is a complex detective story told well. It’s a marvel of a movie; Black accomplishes so much so effortlessly that it’s easy to take it all for granted.
Pixar’s crowning achievement of the decade, and what will no doubt enter the pantheon of the best animated films of all time, WALL•E is nothing short of a masterpiece. The film accomplishes so much under the restrictions of “G-rated” and “a film for children” that, much like other films on this list, you sit back and marvel that the film doesn’t collapse under its own good intentions. From the film’s paying homage to silent film comedy styles of the past to the timely moral implications of its storyline, centering on a lone robot left to clean up Earth’s trash as humans are safely stowed away on a vessel in deep space, the film gets everything right.
It’s not for everyone; I will volunteer that qualification from the start. But David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is the only film from Lynch where he earns the right to be as out-there and whacked-out as he is. Many critics loved his follow-up INLAND EMPIRE (the all-caps are Lynch’s preference, to which I give a huge sigh), but Mulholland Drive, for me, is so much better at proving that there’s a method behind Lynch’s madness. The film is so dense with deeper meaning that the film demands a second, third, fourth viewing, something I can’t help but respect. Most importantly, though, is that it rewards its viewer every single time.
Children of Men was overlooked when it was released in 2006, one of those films that got lost in the shuffle of awards contenders and flashier of-the-moment films, but it deserves to be remembered for several reasons. Primarily, director Alfonso Cuarón employs bravura filmmaking techniques (most notably his use of extended long takes) to immerse the audience in the near-future dystopia of 2027 England, where the world has collapsed in the wake of widespread infertility. There are a handful of set pieces that have stayed with me long after my first viewing of the film, and it’s without a doubt something that I will return to year after year. The genius of Children of Men is that it captures the bleakness of its fictional world, the hope that new life ultimately brings to it, and the gray area in between, showing us in the present what it really means to appreciate what we have before it’s gone.
The Full List:
- Children of Men
- Mulholland Drive
- WALL•E
- Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
- A.I.: Artificial Intelligence
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Coraline
- My Blueberry Nights
- The Hours
- Happy-Go-Lucky
- Stranger than Fiction
- Best in Show
- Away We Go
- Dancer in the Dark
- Brokeback Mountain
- Ratatouille
- Kill Bill: Volume One
- Donnie Darko
- The Departed
- Finding Nemo
- Mean Girls
- Shortbus
- Before Sunset
- Cloverfield
- No End In Sight
© 2004-2009 Ben Waldorf. Posted January 01, 2010.
Love your list and I mostly agree with your choices. I wouldve like to have see No Country for Old Men on your list as I believe that it is one of the best films of the decade in terms of it’s acting, filmmaking techniques, and in regards to it’s symbolism of contemporary American captialism. What I truly loves is that you placed children of men as #1 because I too feel like it is a forgotten/overlooked gem of a film. Kudos sir.
— William Jan 2, 11:16 AM #