Spirited Away
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2001 · Japan
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.
★ 9.3
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2001
Showing 13 films from 2001
Mulholland Drive
Directed by David Lynch
2001
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.
★ 9.1
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Directed by Peter Jackson
2001
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.
★ 8.9
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
2001 · Mexico
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.
★ 7.3
Amelie
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
2001 · France
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.
★ 7.0
Monsters, Inc.
Directed by Pete Docter and Lee Unkrich
2001
Pixar built an entire energy economy out of children's nightmares: the joke is that the monsters are salaried professionals, and the film turns on one of them being frightened of a toddler.
★ 6.7
The Royal Tenenbaums
Directed by Wes Anderson
2001
The film where Wes Anderson's dollhouse precision finally serves real grief: Gene Hackman plays a father who lies his way back into a house full of ruined prodigies.
★ 6.6
Black Hawk Down
Directed by Ridley Scott
2001
Ridley Scott stripped out almost everything a war film normally has: no arcs, barely any backstory, just eighteen hours in Mogadishu in 1993 rendered as continuous, disorienting noise and dust.
★ 6.3
Ocean's Eleven
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
2001
The most relaxed heist film there is: Soderbergh assembles eleven movie stars, lets them amuse one another across two hours, and treats a Las Vegas vault as an excuse for the hangout.
★ 5.9
Donnie Darko
Directed by Richard Kelly
2001
It failed in theaters weeks after September 11 and became a cult object on DVD: Richard Kelly was twenty-six, and nobody has ever fully agreed on what happens in it.
★ 5.2
Training Day
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
2001
Denzel Washington took an Academy Award playing against everything audiences trusted him with: Antoine Fuqua shot in real Los Angeles neighborhoods, and a rookie narcotics officer gets one day to prove himself.
★ 5.1
A Beautiful Mind
Directed by Ron Howard
2001
Ron Howard took Best Picture for a mathematician's biography: Russell Crowe plays John Nash from Princeton prodigy to Cold War code work, and Jennifer Connelly matches him the whole way through.
★ 4.3
Zoolander
Directed by Ben Stiller
2001
The World Trade Center had to be digitally erased from the skyline two weeks before release: an idiot male model, and Ben Stiller commits to the stupidity absolutely and without apology.
★ 3.5