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.
good kid, m.A.A.d city
Subtitled a short film, and the story runs in order across one day. The interludes are voicemails from his parents asking where the van is.
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Gollum changed what a digital character could be: Andy Serkis acted him fully and the industry rebuilt itself around motion capture, all inside a four-month night siege in the rain.
In Rainbows
They put it online and let people pay whatever they wanted, including nothing. Some of the songs had been played live for ten years.
Pan's Labyrinth
Del Toro put a child's fairy tale and Franco's Spain in the same film and refused to make either one safer: the creature with eyes in its hands follows people home.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Sciamma made a love story with almost no men in it and built the entire thing out of glances, firelight and the things two people decline to say.
Hurt
Rubin handed Cash a Nine Inch Nails song, and Reznor watched the video and said it was no longer his.
WALL-E
Pixar's bravest film: the first forty minutes have almost no dialogue at all, and a robot with two expressions carries more feeling than most live actors manage.
Get Ur Freak On
Timbaland set a tumbi melody over tabla and left Elliott acres of empty space to fill.
Boyhood
Nobody had tried this before: Linklater filmed the same cast a few days a year for twelve years, so you watch a real child turn into a real adult.
The Blueprint
It was recorded in about two weeks and released on the eleventh of September 2001. Kanye West sped the soul samples up to chipmunk pitch.
The College Dropout
Kanye recorded one of the songs with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, which is exactly what it sounds like.
A Separation
The first Iranian film to win the foreign language Oscar: Farhadi built a moral maze where every person is partly right, and you will change sides several times.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Reprise refused it, so the band bought the tapes back, streamed the record free, and then sold it to another label owned by the same company.
Moonlight
One life told in three chapters by three different actors, and shot in blues and purples so tender the film almost hums: nothing about it looks like anything else.
The Lives of Others
It made an entire country look at its own surveillance state: a Stasi officer listens in on a playwright's apartment, and the last line of the film lands like a blow.
12 Years a Slave
The first Best Picture from a Black director, and the least evasive film ever made about American slavery: McQueen holds shots long past comfort and refuses to look away.
The Road
Pushing a shopping cart south through a burned gray America, a man and his boy hide from people who eat other people. The talk between them is the tenderest thing McCarthy ever wrote.
Toxic
Minogue passed on it; Bloodshy and Avant hung a Bollywood string sample over surf guitar for Spears's only Grammy.
Back to Black
Producer Mark Ronson had a Brooklyn soul band play it live to tape like a sixties session. Winehouse wrote about the man she kept leaving.
The Departed
Scorsese remade a Hong Kong thriller and made it entirely his own: a cop inside the mob, a mobster inside the police, and a pitch that never once relaxes.
Channel Orange
Days before it came out, Ocean published an open letter about falling in love with a man, and then let the record speak.
Lost in Translation
Almost nothing happens and it stays with people for years: jet lag, neon, a Tokyo hotel bar, and two people awake at the wrong hours keeping each other company.
Memories of Murder
Bong made a serial killer film in which the police are the problem: it is based on a real case, and rural Korea itself ends up looking like the suspect.
Whiplash
Shot in nineteen days on three million dollars, and cut like a thriller: a drummer, a teacher who throws chairs, and the question of what greatness costs.
Before Sunset
Very little else works the way this does: eighty minutes of two people walking around Paris talking, in close to real time, and it is over far too soon.
Speakerboxxx / The Love Below
It is really two solo albums in one box, and the two of them barely appear on each other's halves.
99 Problems
Rick Rubin's first rap production in years, a Billy Squier drum break, and a second verse about a traffic stop.
Before Midnight
The third film is the one that hurts: Linklater and his two actors let nine more years pass, then take it somewhere the first two politely refused to go.
Work It
Timbaland's beat under a hook Elliott had reversed, a Run-DMC sample, and ten weeks parked at number two.
In Da Club
Dre's beat was offered to D12 and Rakim before 50 Cent wrote to it and held number one nine weeks.
Inglourious Basterds
Christoph Waltz plays four languages and makes every one of them frightening: Tarantino builds his scenes as long conversations where somebody at the table already knows too much.
Jesus Walks
A marching ARC Choir sample, Rhymefest's co-write, and a label convinced nobody would play a rap record about God.
Back to Black
Ronson cut it at Daptone with the Dap-Kings, sixties girl-group machinery rebuilt around a voice in ruins.
Up
The four-minute marriage montage is the most devastating thing Pixar has ever done, and it is wordless: after that, an old man flies his house away on balloons.
Finding Nemo
It became the highest grossing animated release to that point and pushed what animation could render: an ocean of light and current, and a frightened father crossing it.
Rehab
Cut live to tape at Daptone in Brooklyn with the Dap-Kings, and it took Record and Song of the Year.
Paper Planes
Gunshots and a cash register over a Clash loop, with Brixton kids singing a hook about immigrant stereotypes.
The Act of Killing
Oppenheimer asked the men who carried out Indonesia's mass killings to restage them as movie scenes, and they agreed gladly: no documentary has ever been braver or harder to sit through.
Oldboy
Korean cinema broke through in the West on the strength of this: fifteen years locked in a room without explanation, and a corridor fight staged in one take.