15 Best Films of the 21st Century!

Posted on December 16, 2009 - 4:02am by michael Now that we're about to enter the last year of the first decade of the new century, the Internet Movie Database has released a list of the 15 best films since the year 2000, based on user votes. I generally tend to find a conspicuous gap between the most popular films, and the best films, but it all comes down to how you define “best,” right? Are there any you think they left out?

15. Requiem For A Dream (2000), R, 102 mins.

In my original review of Requiem, I said "I watched it in the middle of the night, and when it was over I was almost afraid that the sun wasn’t going to come up in the morning." But don't let that deter you, this is easily one of the best drug movies ever made, and a tremendous achievement in cinematography and acting. Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and even at Marlon Wayans, all at their very best.

The story focuses on the lives of four different people as they struggle to contain their addictions while they each pursue their respective goals and dreams. It's a dirty, dreary tour through every aspect of the drug world that you could ever want to see, and plenty more that you probably wouldn't ever want to see. And eye-opening experience for addicts and non-addicts alike, Requiem For A Dream is a brilliant piece of cinematography and manages to overflow with drugs while not for a second glorifying them. Highly recommended!

14. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, (2004), R, 108 mins.

Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star in Charlie Kaufman's follow-up to brilliant films like Being John Malkovich and Adatation, a fascinating and strange trip through the ever-changing human mind. Carrey plays Joel Barish, a social outcast who has a run-in with a charming, blue-haired young woman named Clementine Kruczynski. They go on a couple of dates and are just beginning to like each other when strange things start to happen and they slowly realize that they have a history together that neither of them remembers.

Joel discovers that they had a relationship before, but Clementine underwent a medical procedure to have him erased from her memory, so he reacted by trying to have her erased from his. But in the middle of the procedure he remembers the passion they had together and tries to call it off, and ends up running with Clementine through his own mind, pursued by doctors who are erasing his memories from around him. I still think this is the best work that Jim Carrey has done so far. I's gonna take a lot to top this one!

13. Spirited Away (2001), PG, 125 mins.

It was a full two years after it was made that director iyao Miyazaki was honored with a Best Animated Feature Oscar for his brilliant film Spirited Away. The story is about a young girl named Chihiro who, while walking home with her parents, comes across a strange dirt road that they decide to take as a shortcut. The road leads them, as the tagline tells us, to a mysterious town. Restaurants are everywhere, filled with delicious foods of every kind, and even though her parents help themselves happily, Chihiro resists, sensing danger.

Soon, her parents have been transformed into pigs and Chihiro has to use the help of a young boy named Haku to find a job in a nearby building until she can figure out a way to break the spell on her parents and escape with them before they are killed and served as dinner to the supernatural creatures that frequent the place...

12.The Pianist (2002), R, 150 mins.

When When Roman Polanski's powerful World War II drama The Pianist was released in 2002, I remember wondering how people could keep making such an endless stream of films about the same war. But he focuses on a particular man and his family and allows the war to happen around them, taking us down a well-known road and still managing to provide an enormously moving experience in the telling of a true story, and the film garnered three Oscars for his and his production team's efforts.

Adrien Brody plays a brilliant pianist and Polish Jew named Szpilman who watches with his family the gradually increasing restrictions that the Nazis place on Jews in Warsaw, the capital city of Poland. Upon being forced into a German labor camp, Szpilman manages to escape and then goes into hiding in a destroyed building in the ruins of Warsaw from which, after barely escaping starvation with help from most unlikely of places, he witnesses two of the most decisive battles in Warsaw in all of World War II.

11. The Lives of Others (2006), R, 137 mins.

One of the three foreign language films on the list, German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's powerful dramatic thriller has earned itself, at the time of this writing, the 55th place on the IMDb's list of the 250 greatest films ever made.

It's about the horrifying, sometimes unintentionally funny system of observation in former East Germany. In the early 1980s, the successful dramatist Georg Dreyman and his longtime companion Christa-Maria Sieland, a popular actress, are big intellectual stars in the socialist state, although they secretly don't always think loyal to the party line. One day, the Minister of Culture becomes interested in Christa, so the secret service agent Wiesler is instructed to observe and sound out the couple, but their life fascinates him more and more...

10. The Departed (2006), R, 151 mins.

Martin Scorsese's gritty crime mystery is famously a take on Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs trilogy, about a cop undercover in a crime organization while a mole is undercover in the police force, each assigned to investigate each other. Scorsese's version takes place in South Boston, where the police are cracking down on Irish-American organized crime. Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a young undercover cop assigned to infiltrate the local mafia run by Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). Meanwhile, a criminal named Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is rising to a position of power in the police force.

Ultimately, as they each get closer and closer to their goals, both sides realize that there is a mole in their midst, and both Costigan and Sullivan have to discover the identity of each other first in order to save their own lives. True to Scorsese form, the movie is tense, fast-moving, and stomach-turningly violent. And it rarely gets better than this.

9. Amelie (2001), R, 122 mins.

Long before glimpsing superstardom alongside Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code,  the impossibly adorable Audrey Tautou starred in a little French film called The Fabulous Destiny of Amelie Poulain, better known simply as Amelie, the first film that made her well-known stateside. It's a wonderfully charming romantic comedy about a shy waitress setting herself to the task of distributing happiness to the world around her.

Amélie is looking for love, and perhaps for the meaning of life in general. We see her grow up in an original if slightly dysfunctional family. Now a waitress in central Paris, she interacts curiously with her neighbors and customers, as well as a mysterious Photomaton-image collector and one of his even more mysterious photo subjects. Little by little, Amélie realizes that the way to happiness (and yet more subtle humor) requires her to take her own initiative and reach out to others.

8. WALL-E (2008), G, 98 mins.

Last year's best animated feature has gone beyond the limits of 2008 to earn a spot on the list of the best movies made so far this century. It's worth keeping in mind that the character of WALL-E himself is a trash compactor, and as such he must be the most widely and deeply loved garbage can ever created in the history of mankind.

WALL-E lives on our earth but in the distant future, where the remnants of mankind have polluted the earth so badly that they have abondoned the earth's surface and have been living on an enormous spaceship for the last 700 years, where they live a cartoonish and hilarious exaggeration of the same sedentary lives that many of us live today. Still harboring some hope of returning one day, they have sent out a reconnaissance robot named Eve to determine whether or not Earth is once again inhabitable. The clunky WALL-E quickly falls in love with the smooth, sleek Eve, even when she consumes a living plant that he shows her and then deactivates, waiting to be recovered. Hardly a decipherable word is ever spoken between them, but it's one of the most charming screen romances I've seen in a movie in years. Bravo!

7. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), PG-13, 179-223 mins.

The second film in any trilogy or franchise is arguably the most important of all, at least in terms of the future and continuing success of the movies. The first sequel in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, then, was no small task for Peter Jackson to pull off, especially following the massive success of the original film. It's worth mentioning that Peter Jackson started his career making some of the most grotesque horror films that you'll still find on the video store shelves, and has risen to the director's chair of one of the best and most successful trilogies ever made. Nice going!

The movie continues the story of Frodo's and Sam's quest, which sounds almost entirely incomprehensible unless you're intimately familiar with what's happened before. After the fellowship has broken, Merry and Pippin, taken by orcs, make new allies in the Ents, while Legolas, Gimli and Aragorn make allies in the people of Rohan, and all of them must launch an assault on Isengard. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam force Gollum to guide them through Mordor, trusting him with their lives. Got all that?

6. Memento (2000), R, 113 mins.

Definitely one of my personal favorites on the entire list, Christopher Nolan's masterful mystery thriller Memento came out of nowhere in 2000 and blew audiences away. Told in reverse in ten minute sections, the movie intricately weaves paranoia and memory loss into one of the most fascinating thrillers I've ever seen, and it stars Guy Pearce in his best role to date.

It's is an absolutely brilliant film that engages the viewer and literally brings him or her into the mind of the main character and allows us to see through his eyes as his experiences are filtered through his damaged brain. Some time earlier, his wife was raped and murdered, and he was dealt a head injury which has left him without the ability to form short term memories. Hence, he can be having a conversation with someone on the phone, and a minute or two into it, forget who he's talking to, or why. This has happened to me once or twice, but it's certainly not the most convenient handicap when you are trying to track down your wife's killer!

5. Up (2009), PG, 96, mins.

I still maintain that Pixar's latest animated gift to the world is going to take home the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year, but 2009 has certainly been a banner year for the animated film genre, and the list of outstanding ones might be the longest of any year in the history of movies, and that's quite a pile for Up to be sitting on top of!

A family film made for children and focusing on the lives of two old men, Up is an enormous achievement in story-telling and a shining example of the possibilities available to the animated genre. It deals with such wide-ranging issues from life and death to how to deal with pesky, overly-eager Cub Scouts, and as if that weren't good enough, you get to spend most of the running time in a charming old house suspended from thousands of balloons. It is the perfect high-flying adventure, and you might even find yourself learning something about yourself along the way as well.

4. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), PG-13, 178-208 mins.

Ah, The Fellowship of the Ring. The only Lord of the Rings movie that I liked better than The Two Towers (except The Return of the King. That thing was awesome). At the height of the Harry Potter craze, Peter Jackson came along with his astonishingly ambitious fantasy adventure epic that captures millions of imaginations and instantly garnered dedicated fans all over the world. Much more mature but no less exciting than the Harry Potter films, The Lord of the Rings trilogy is possibly the best book-to-film series ever made.

The movie introduces the Hobbits and Elves that we would come to know and love, and begins their epic story. In ancient times, Elven-smiths created the Rings of Power, and then the Dark Lord Sauron created one ring to control all the Lesser Rings. But the Ring was stolen and thought to be lost for many years, until it came into the hands of a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins. Ultimately it comes down to Bilbo's nephew Frodo to jouney across Middle Earth and throw the Ring into Mt. Doom, the only place where it can be destroyed.

3. City of God (2002), R, 130 mins.

Ok, so let's take a quick break from the Lord of the Rings and take a trip to the slums of 1960s Brazil. Directors Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund show us the true story of the gangs that ruled the slums of Rio de Janeiro at a time when the city was run by a young mob boss known as Li'l Ze, and the children of the area watched and learned from the uncontrolled violence that ran rampant through the streets as Li'l Ze wipes out rival gangs and becomes more and more powerful.

In the middle of it all is Buscape, a young boy who wants no part of the violence, he only wants a normal life and dreams of one day becoming a photographer, but his only way out of this life of violence and crime is to document it through taking pictures. The City of God refers to a housing project in Brazil which was once known as one the most dangerous places in Brazil, and now it's been captured on film in one of the best movies of the new century. Enjoy!

2. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), PG-13, 201-251 mins.

...and, we're back! Peter Jackson has outdone himself in all aspects of film making, not just running time, and finally achieved that Best Picture Oscar that had eluded him for his first two efforts. I will say that, by the end of the movie, it becomes a little difficult to avoid the feeling that it's dragging on just a tiny bit long as we cross over into the fourth hour (or fifth, if you're watching the Director's Cut), but it should be noted that even at it's tremendous length it never gets boring, and there's remarkably little padding.

The story is as confusing as ever unless you're a long-time fan, but suffice it to say that there are epic battles, state of the art special effects, tons of bizarre and freaky creatures, and a healthy dose of suspicion and paranoia that creeps up between our heroes Sam, Frodo, and Gollum as they continue on their quest to Mt. Doom to destroy the all powerful Ring.

1. The Dark Knight (2008), PG-13, 152 mins.

Oh man, the Heath Ledger haters are gonna have a field day with this one. I think I heard more than enough talk about Heath Ledger winning the Best Actor Oscar last year only because he died, I don't think I need to hear that ridiculous argument rekindled by naming The Dark Knight the best movie that's been made so far this century, but I also have a hard time refuting it. Naming the #1 greatest movie is often an almost impossible task, especially when considering bigger adn bigger periods of time, and while the first decade of the 21st century has given us a tremendous number of brilliant films, many more of which also deserve a place on this list, The Dark Knight is one of the rare few that come from a well-known, and even cliched, genre, and yet still manages not only to surpass expectations, but to expand upon the world it comes from and open up bigger and better opportunities for the future of the series, and for comic book films in general.

It was directed by Christopher Nolan, who also directed #6 on this list, and features powerhouse performance from Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, Michael Caine, and of course the late Heath Ledger, to name only a few. It comes as the latest of a long line of not always good movies, but feels like the first installment in a whole new franchise. It's so much more than a Batman movie and so much more than a comic book movie, and easily earns its nickname, The Dark Masterpiece...