2000s
Showing 1,216 works across all media from the 2000s
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.
In the Mood for Love
Longing has never been filmed better than this: Wong Kar-wai gets more out of a stairwell and one repeated waltz than most directors manage with an entire script.
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.
Kid A
Singer Thom Yorke pulled the lyrics out of a hat because he could not write, and the band released it with no singles and no interviews.
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.
Stan
The 45 King looped Dido under four letters, and Eminem's fan character ended up in the Oxford dictionary.
Ms. Jackson
Andre 3000 apologizing to Erykah Badu's mother, who liked it enough to buy a Ms. Jackson license plate.
Bad Romance
Written on a tour bus in Norway and premiered at Alexander McQueen's last show, all nonsense syllables and appetite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Stankonia
B.O.B. runs at a hundred and fifty-five beats a minute, which is drum and bass speed, with a gospel choir on top.
Yi Yi
Nothing else captures an ordinary family like this: Yang holds three generations of a Taipei household in one frame, and the small boy photographing people's backs explains the whole method.
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.
The Marshall Mathers LP
It sold nearly two million copies in a week. Elton John agreed to perform with him at the Grammys while the protests were loudest.
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.
One More Time
Romanthony's vocal pushed through auto-tune over a slowed Eddie Johns disco sample, filtered until the chorus explodes.
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.
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.
B.O.B.
Bombs Over Baghdad at 155 beats per minute, drum and bass colliding with a gospel choir and a guitar solo.
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.
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.
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.
Memento
Nolan told it backwards and the trick is not a trick: the reverse order strands you exactly where its amnesiac protagonist lives, knowing only the last five minutes.
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.
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.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
It won four Academy Awards and remains the highest grossing foreign language film ever released in America: wire work so graceful that gravity stops being a consideration.
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.
Brokeback Mountain
It changed what a mainstream American film could be about: Lee filmed twenty years of two men unable to say what they are, almost entirely in silence.
Gasolina
A dembow riddim from Luny Tunes, an uncredited hook from Glory, and a place in the National Recording Registry.
Cache (Hidden)
The most quietly frightening film anyone has made about guilt: videotapes of a family's own front door start arriving, and Haneke cares far more about what nobody says.
Last Nite
Built on the bones of Tom Petty's American Girl, which Petty confirmed without complaint, and recorded in Gordon Raphael's basement.
Stronger
West cleared the Daft Punk sample through their manager, had Timbaland reprogram the kick drums, and hit number one.
Gold Digger
Foxx sang the Ray Charles hook fresh from his Oscar for playing him, and it held number one ten weeks.
Elephant
Recorded in eight days on equipment made before 1963, with no computers. The bassline everyone knows is a guitar pushed down an octave.
Gilead
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
Austerlitz
A stranger in an Antwerp waiting room talks about architecture, and over years of meetings tells how he was sent out of Prague on a train in 1939. The grief is never named.
Crazy (Gnarls Barkley)
Cee-Lo cut the vocal in one take over a 1968 spaghetti western sample. Nine weeks at UK number one.
Feel Good Inc.
Maseo's cackle, Danger Mouse at the desk, and a song Albarn dreamed up driving past California windmills toward Coachella.
International Player's Anthem (I Choose You)
A Willie Hutch loop left alone at the top, and Andre 3000's verse reportedly returned with the drums stripped off.
A Prophet
The best prison film of this century, and it works like a business education: an illiterate nineteen-year-old walks into a French jail and starts learning very fast.
Mr. Brightside
Flowers wrote it after a bad night at a Vegas bar; Britain has kept it charting past 500 weeks.
Postwar
Judt carries Europe from the rubble of 1945 to 2005, east and west in one story, showing a continent that rebuilt itself by forgetting the war and then defined itself by remembering it.
Drop It Like It's Hot
The Neptunes built it from tongue clicks and almost nothing else, and it gave Snoop his first number one.
Everything In Its Right Place
Radiohead opened Kid A with no guitars at all, just a Prophet-5 and Yorke's voice diced in Pro Tools.
Harder Better Faster Stronger
Edwin Birdsong's Cola Bottle Baby, found in a record bin, vocoded into a mantra Kanye West later borrowed wholesale.
Since U Been Gone
Pink passed on it and Duff couldn't hit the notes, so Clarkson asked for heavier guitars and won a Grammy.
Poker Face
RedOne produced it at Record Plant, Gaga's mum-mum-mum-mah hook nodding to Boney M, and 2009's best-selling single worldwide.
Gladiator
It dragged the Roman epic back after thirty-five years of dormancy: Russell Crowe's fury is the whole engine, and the arena sequences still deliver everything they promise.
Ether
Ron Browz's beat, handed over before he knew its target, and a release date set on Jay-Z's birthday.
Can't Get You Out of My Head
Dennis and Davis wrote it in three and a half hours, and Minogue committed after twenty seconds of the demo.
Take Me Out
Two songs welded together, the tempo dropping a minute in, and a sniper film lending Kapranos his double-edged title.
Heartless
Auto-Tune, a TR-808, No I.D. co-producing, and Kid Cudi writing the hook: rap learned to sing from this.
The Pianist
Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto as a child and waited sixty years to film any of it: a pianist left alone in the ruins of Warsaw, and no heroism anywhere.
Wake Up
A wordless chorus half of indie rock then copied, and Bowie sang it onstage with the band in 2005.
Clint Eastwood
Albarn built it on a melodica and an Omnichord's first preset; Del cut his verses in half an hour.
In The End
Shinoda's piano figure under Bennington's chorus took nu metal to number two, and the RIAA finally certified it diamond.
The Black Album
Every track has a different producer, which he did on purpose. He announced his retirement, held a farewell concert, and came back three years later.
Yellow
Ken Nelson pointed at the stars outside Rockfield, and Martin sang the melody in his worst Neil Young impression.
Love Story
Swift wrote it in twenty minutes on her bedroom floor, gave Romeo and Juliet a happy ending, banjo included.
Ratatouille
Almost nothing else takes both cooking and criticism this seriously: a rat with a palate steers a hapless human around a Paris kitchen, and the food looks extraordinary.
The Hurt Locker
Bigelow made war feel like an addiction rather than a duty: a bomb disposal sergeant works without much fear, and every defusal is stretched until the room turns physical.
Float On
Brock wrote it in the final days of tracking, fed up with darkness, and built indie rock's warmest chorus.
All Falls Down
Denied the Lauryn Hill sample, West had Syleena Johnson sing the part, and got his first solo top ten.
The Real Slim Shady
Iovine wanted another "My Name Is," so Eminem wrote this hours before the album was due. It hit number four.
Y Tu Mama Tambien
A road trip with a narrator who keeps interrupting to tell you things the characters will never know: Cuaron slips a portrait of Mexico under a teenage sex comedy.
Maps
Zinner's looped riff, twenty minutes of writing from Karen O, and a video where the tears are real.
Izzo (H.O.V.A.)
A Jackson 5 chop, an arena chant, and Jay-Z's first solo top ten, courtesy of a young Kanye West.
Almost Famous
Cameron Crowe was writing for Rolling Stone at fifteen and on the road with the Allman Brothers at sixteen: the film gets every detail right, including the boredom.
Ignition (Remix)
A remix that swallowed its own original: number two in America five weeks, four at Britain's top.
A Serious Man
The Coens' most personal film and their least forgiving: a Minnesota physics professor's life comes apart for no reason at all, and nobody in it will explain anything.
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
The Romanian New Wave announced itself with this: an illegal abortion arranged across one day in 1987, filmed in long static takes that give you nowhere to look.
Empire State of Mind
Two songwriters homesick in London started it; Keys and a Moments piano loop made Jay-Z's first lead-artist number one.
The Prestige
Nolan built a film about magicians the way a magician builds a trick, and tells you so in the first minute: two rivals destroy each other over one illusion.
Jesus, Etc.
Reprise rejected the album, Wilco streamed it free, and a sister Warner label put out these swooning strings instead.
Clocks
A piano riff Martin nearly saved for the next album, rescued by their manager, then Record of the Year.
We Belong Together
Fourteen weeks at number one, two soul interpolations underneath, and Carey singing softly rather than belting.
American IV: The Man Comes Around
Trent Reznor said that after hearing Cash sing Hurt, the song no longer felt like his. Cash died the following year.
Viva La Vida
Eno producing, Davide Rossi's looping strings, a deposed king narrating, and Coldplay's first number one in Britain and America.
Cry Me A River
Storch's clavinet, Timbaland's beat, and a breakup Timberlake spent years declining to explain; the Grammy arrived anyway.
Casino Royale
It stripped Bond back to a man who bleeds: the parkour chase in the opening twenty minutes told audiences immediately that the gadgets and the winking were gone.
Fallin'
Two chords, one piano, and Keys writing and producing her own debut single straight to Song of the Year.
The Way You Move
Eight weeks stuck at number two behind Hey Ya!, then Big Boi's live Atlanta horns finally took the top.
Man on Wire
Petit walked a wire between the Twin Towers in 1974 and Marsh tells it as a heist: the planning, the break-in, and forty-five minutes in the air.
SexyBack
Timberlake sang it in a distorted low register borrowed from Prince, and it held number one for seven weeks.
Day 'n' Nite
Cut in Dot da Genius's home studio in East New York, using a Geto Boys favorite as its blueprint.
Dirt Off Your Shoulder
Timbaland's beat is all snap and space, and in 2008 a presidential candidate borrowed the shoulder-brush on a Raleigh stage.
Discovery
Daft Punk set out to make the music they had loved at ten years old, and had the whole album animated as a film.
Touching the Void
You will not believe it is true and it is: two climbers in the Andes, one broken leg, and a decision that neither man has ever fully stopped explaining.
Amelie
The most exported French film of its generation: Jeunet saturated Paris into green and gold and sent a shy waitress out to quietly rearrange other people's lives.
Graduation
It came out the same day as a 50 Cent album, and the two turned it into a public sales contest. Kanye won by a distance.
Million Dollar Baby
Eastwood spends an hour making you love a boxing underdog story and then does something else entirely: nothing in American film is tougher than where it ends up.
Illinois
Stevens announced he would make one of these for all fifty states, then made two and stopped. One song is about John Wayne Gacy.
Skinny Love
Vernon cut it alone in his father's Wisconsin hunting cabin over a winter, and the falsetto still sounds snowbound.
I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
O'Rourke mixed this one song as an audition, won the whole album, and Wilco made it the opening track.
Late Registration
Kanye brought in Jon Brion, a film composer who had never worked on a rap record, and put a string section behind everything.
Traffic
Soderbergh color-codes three separate drug-war stories so you always know which one you are in, then declines to let any of them resolve into a tidy lesson.
Can't Tell Me Nothing
DJ Toomp built the beat and bassline, West layered the strings, and Zach Galifianakis lip-synced it on a tractor.
My Girls
An arpeggio out of Chicago house, a sample from the Cassini Saturn probe, Lennox wanting only a home.
Beautiful Day
Eno programmed the drum machine, Lanois played the Telecaster, and the Edge won the argument for his old delay-drenched sound.
Sideways
It measurably dented cheap merlot sales and sent pinot noir soaring: two middle-aged men drive through wine country, one about to be married and one unable to move on.
Letters from Iwo Jima
Eastwood made two films about the same battle, and the Japanese one is the better: shot almost entirely in Japanese, with a general nobody in America had heard of.
Minority Report
Spielberg hired futurists to design 2054 and most of what they invented has since arrived: gesture screens, targeted advertising, and a police force that arrests you beforehand.
Irreplaceable
Ne-Yo pitched it as country, written with Shania Twain in mind; Beyoncé turned it into ten weeks at number one.
Do You Realize?
Coyne wrote it during Drozd's recovery, a plain statement about mortality that Oklahoma voted its official state rock song.
Kill Bill
Tarantino built it out of every film he ever loved: kung fu, spaghetti westerns, anime and samurai pictures, and the House of Blue Leaves fight tops all of them.
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
No film has put an audience inside a wooden warship this completely: Weir's frigate is a working machine of rope and rank, chasing a faster enemy across the bottom of the world.
You Belong With Me
Banjo, fiddle and mandolin under a scene Swift wrote after overhearing a touring musician's phone call with his girlfriend.
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Homer's Odyssey rerouted through Depression-era Mississippi: the soundtrack of gospel and bluegrass sold eight million copies and sent a mass audience back to music first recorded in the 1920s.