21st century
Showing 1,776 works across all media from the 21st century
There Will Be Blood
Day-Lewis builds an American monster out of oil and resentment, and Jonny Greenwood's score scrapes at the nerves for two and a half hours without once letting up.
Spirited Away
The high point of hand-drawn animation: Miyazaki invented a spirit world so dense and so unexplained that it took the Animated Feature Oscar away from every American studio.
The Dark Knight
Adults started arguing about superhero films because of this one: Ledger's Joker is so unnerving that the Academy gave a posthumous Oscar to a man in clown makeup.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Eleven nominations and eleven wins, a clean sweep no film has bettered: Jackson closed a decade-long gamble with battles at an unattempted scale and an ending that earns its farewells.
Lose Yourself
Written between takes on a film set, delivered like a man with exactly one shot at everything.
Mulholland Drive
Lynch built a Hollywood that runs entirely on dream logic and trusted the audience to assemble it: the whole thing feels like a half-remembered dream, and people keep returning.
Seven Nation Army
A guitar pitched down to fake a bass, and the seven-note riff every stadium on earth now sings.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
No romance this century has come close: Kaufman's premise, that you could pay to have someone erased, turns out to be the most honest thing anyone has said about breakups.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Everyone said the book could not be filmed: Jackson shot three films at once in New Zealand and delivered a Middle-earth so furnished you stop noticing it was invented.
No Country for Old Men
The Coens made a chase film with almost no music in it at all: Javier Bardem's killer with a cattle gun became the most frightening figure of the decade.
Parasite
The first film not in English to win Best Picture: Bong turned class rage into something so entertaining that the whole world watched it and then argued about what it meant.
Crazy in Love
Rich Harrison looped a Chi-Lites horn fanfare; Jay-Z turned up at three in the morning and improvised his verse.
City of God
Nothing else moves quite like it: Meirelles cast the favela itself, cut two hours into what feels like twenty minutes, and took a Brazilian crime film to four Oscar nominations.
Bad Romance
Written on a tour bus in Norway and premiered at Alexander McQueen's last show, all nonsense syllables and appetite.
The Social Network
The film that got the internet age right before anyone else did: Sorkin's dialogue moves faster than you can follow, and the loneliness underneath it has only aged better.
Children of Men
It looked like science fiction in 2006 and looks like the news now: Cuaron's roaming takes put you inside a collapsing Britain, and the ambush in the car is astonishing.
Inception
Proof that a summer blockbuster can be genuinely difficult: Nolan stacked four levels of dream on top of each other and audiences argued about the last shot for years.
Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)
Beyonce found Bob Fosse's Mexican Breakfast on YouTube; three Grammys and a decade of wedding receptions followed.