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
Browse by time · year
2001
Showing 142 works across all media 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
Get Ur Freak On
2001
Timbaland set a tumbi melody over tabla and left Elliott acres of empty space to fill.
★ 8.5
The Blueprint
2001
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.
★ 8.4
Last Nite
2001 · From Is This It
Built on the bones of Tom Petty's American Girl, which Petty confirmed without complaint, and recorded in Gordon Raphael's basement.
★ 7.7
Austerlitz
2001 · 298 pages
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.
★ 7.6
Harder Better Faster StrongerDaft Punk
Harder Better Faster Stronger
2001 · From Discovery
Edwin Birdsong's Cola Bottle Baby, found in a record bin, vocoded into a mantra Kanye West later borrowed wholesale.
★ 7.6
EtherNas
Ether
2001 · From Stillmatic
Ron Browz's beat, handed over before he knew its target, and a release date set on Jay-Z's birthday.
★ 7.5
Can't Get You Out of My HeadKylie Minogue
Can't Get You Out of My Head
2001
Dennis and Davis wrote it in three and a half hours, and Minogue committed after twenty seconds of the demo.
★ 7.5
Clint Eastwood
2001
Albarn built it on a melodica and an Omnichord's first preset; Del cut his verses in half an hour.
★ 7.4
In The EndLinkin Park
In The End
2001
Shinoda's piano figure under Bennington's chorus took nu metal to number two, and the RIAA finally certified it diamond.
★ 7.4
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
Izzo (H.O.V.A.)Jay-Z
Izzo (H.O.V.A.)
2001 · From The Blueprint
A Jackson 5 chop, an arena chant, and Jay-Z's first solo top ten, courtesy of a young Kanye West.
★ 7.3
Fallin'
2001
Two chords, one piano, and Keys writing and producing her own debut single straight to Song of the Year.
★ 7.0
Discovery
2001
Daft Punk set out to make the music they had loved at ten years old, and had the whole album animated as a film.
★ 7.0
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
New Slang
2001 · From Oh, Inverted World
Sub Pop pressed it as a one-off single in 2001; three years later Garden State made it a generational password.
★ 6.8
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
Atonement
2001 · 351 pages
In 1935 a thirteen-year-old girl watches her sister and the charwoman's son by a fountain, misreads what she sees, and accuses him of a crime. McEwan follows the wreckage through Dunkirk.
★ 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
Family Affair (Mary J. Blige)
2001 · From No More Drama
Dre's instrumental sat titled Fragile for months before it was renamed Family Affair and took six weeks at number one.
★ 6.6
I'm feeling pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Curb Your Enthusiasm · 2001
Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)Jay-Z
Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)
2001 · From The Blueprint
A Bobby Bland soul record from 1974, rebuilt by Kanye West, and Jay-Z sounding untouchable and unloved at the top.
★ 6.3
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
Let Me Blow Ya Mind
Eve and Gwen Stefani
2001
Ninety beats a minute, Dr. Dre and Scott Storch on the track, Gwen Stefani's hook, Eve at number two.
★ 6.3
The Middle
2001
Capitol dropped the band, Trombino produced on credit, and the drum pattern came straight off Tom Petty's You Wreck Me.
★ 6.2
Hard to Explain
2001 · From Is This It
Four feet of air between hi-hat and snare mic, and a drum machine sketch reborn as live New York rock.
★ 6.2
Island in the Sun
2001 · From Weezer (The Green Album)
Not planned for the Green Album until Ocasek fought for it, then Spike Jonze filmed the band among wild animals.
★ 6.1
Whenever, Wherever
2001
Panpipes, a charango, and Gloria Estefan rewriting Shakira's Spanish lyric in English; it hit number one in twenty-two countries.
★ 6.0
Survivor
2001
A radio host's joke about the lineup changes, flipped into a Grammy winner Beyonce largely wrote on a flight.
★ 6.0
John Adams
2001 · 751 pages
McCullough gives the difficult, honest second president his full size: a marriage to Abigail conducted in letters across an ocean, and a friendship with Jefferson that broke and was repaired in old age.
★ 5.9
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
Amnesiac
2001
Recorded at the same sessions as Kid A and held back eight months. The band spent years insisting it was not a collection of leftovers.
★ 5.7
Sweetness
2001
Capitol passed on the Clarity demo, then a dropped band self-funded Bleed American and made those wordless hooks stick.
★ 5.7
Time (the Revelator)
2001
There are only two people on it, Welch and David Rawlings, recorded live in an old Nashville studio with a single pair of microphones.
★ 5.6
Lady Marmalade (Christina Aguilera)
2001
Four singers, one Rockwilder beat, and Missy Elliott turning a Labelle cover into 2001's best-selling single worldwide.
★ 5.6
Weapon of Choice
2001
Bootsy Collins doubled in both channels, a Sly Stone sample, and Christopher Walken dancing through a Los Angeles hotel lobby.
★ 5.5
Bel Canto
2001 · 318 pages
Guerrillas storm a vice president's mansion somewhere in South America and hold the room for months. Among the hostages is a soprano who sings each morning, and everyone begins falling in love.
★ 5.5
First Date
2001
DeLonge wrote it after the band's manager complained the album had no feel-good song; a SeaWorld date supplied the rest.
★ 5.3
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
To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.
Life of Pi (novel) · 2001
Ride Wit Me
2001
A DeBarge interpolation from 1982, Jay E producing, and Nelly making must be the money a national catchphrase.
★ 5.2
Rollout (My Business)
2001
Timbaland built the beat at Manhattan Center Studios, and Ludacris turned deflecting nosy questions into pure comic swagger.
★ 5.2
Move BitchLudacris
Move Bitch
2001
Mystikal barks the guest verse, Ludacris takes his first top ten, and 2003 antiwar marchers rewrote the chorus.
★ 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
Stay Together For The Kids
2001
DeLonge's parents divorced when he was eighteen; Finn produced, and the wrecking-ball video was reshot after September 11.
★ 5.0
Bleed American
2001
Capitol dropped them, so they paid for it themselves; that opening riff bought the whole gamble back.
★ 4.9
Short Skirt/Long Jacket
2001
DiFiore's trumpet lick, chords borrowed from Sweet Jane, and McCrea deadpanning a want ad for the ideal woman.
★ 4.9
Toxicity
2001
Serj Tankian and Daron Malakian sing over each other constantly, one shouting while the other croons, often within the same bar.
★ 4.8
White Blood Cells
2001
Recorded in Memphis in about three days. Michel Gondry animated the video for Fell in Love with a Girl entirely out of Lego bricks.
★ 4.8
Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)
2001
Monahan woke from a dream of his late mother, and Paul Buckmaster's strings carry the whole ache.
★ 4.8
Always on Time
2001
By Ja Rule's account he fished the beat out of Gotti's garbage; Ashanti's hook carried it to number one.
★ 4.6
The Luckiest
2001
Written for the comedy Loser, which cut the scene, and now the piano ballad people play at weddings.
★ 4.6
U Remind Me
2001
Cut at Tree Sound in Georgia with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis producing, it won Usher his first Grammy.
★ 4.4