Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Directed by Michel Gondry
2004
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.
★ 8.9
Browse by time · year
2004
Showing 137 works across all media from 2004
The College Dropout
2004
Kanye recorded one of the songs with his jaw wired shut after a car crash, which is exactly what it sounds like.
★ 8.4
Before Sunset
Directed by Richard Linklater
2004
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.
★ 8.0
99 ProblemsJay-Z
99 Problems
2004 · From The Black Album
Rick Rubin's first rap production in years, a Billy Squier drum break, and a second verse about a traffic stop.
★ 8.0
Jesus Walks
2004 · From The College Dropout
A marching ARC Choir sample, Rhymefest's co-write, and a label convinced nobody would play a rap record about God.
★ 7.9
Gasolina
2004
A dembow riddim from Luny Tunes, an uncredited hook from Glory, and a place in the National Recording Registry.
★ 7.7
Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
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.
★ 7.7
Mr. Brightside
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Flowers wrote it after a bad night at a Vegas bar; Britain has kept it charting past 500 weeks.
★ 7.6
Drop It Like It's Hot
2004 · From R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece
The Neptunes built it from tongue clicks and almost nothing else, and it gave Snoop his first number one.
★ 7.6
Since U Been Gone
2004
Pink passed on it and Duff couldn't hit the notes, so Clarkson asked for heavier guitars and won a Grammy.
★ 7.5
Take Me Out
2004 · From Franz Ferdinand
Two songs welded together, the tempo dropping a minute in, and a sniper film lending Kapranos his double-edged title.
★ 7.5
Float On
2004
Brock wrote it in the final days of tracking, fed up with darkness, and built indie rock's warmest chorus.
★ 7.3
All Falls Down
2004 · From The College Dropout
Denied the Lauryn Hill sample, West had Syleena Johnson sing the part, and got his first solo top ten.
★ 7.3
Maps
2004 · From Fever to Tell
Zinner's looped riff, twenty minutes of writing from Karen O, and a video where the tears are real.
★ 7.3
Dirt Off Your Shoulder
2004 · From The Black Album
Timbaland's beat is all snap and space, and in 2008 a presidential candidate borrowed the shoulder-brush on a Raleigh stage.
★ 7.0
Million Dollar Baby
Directed by Clint Eastwood
2004
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.
★ 6.9
The Notebook · 2004
Sideways
Directed by Alexander Payne
2004
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.
★ 6.9
Reptilia
2004 · From Room on Fire
Nigel Godrich's sessions got scrapped, Gordon Raphael came back, and the descending twin-guitar riff turned everything into a sprint.
★ 6.8
If I Ain't Got You
2004
Aaliyah's death in 2001 clarified what mattered, and Keys answered with piano, gospel restraint and a Grammy-winning vocal.
★ 6.8
Chronicles
Volume One
2004 · 293 pages
Dylan refuses the story everyone wants. He writes instead about borrowed couches in Greenwich Village in 1961 and a New Orleans studio in 1989, in prose as good as his songs.
★ 6.7
Shaun of the Dead
Directed by Edgar Wright
2004 · United Kingdom
A zombie comedy that works as an actual zombie film: Wright plants every joke twice, so the second half pays off setups you laughed at an hour earlier without noticing they were setups.
★ 6.7
Downfall
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
2004
Bruno Ganz plays Hitler as a man rather than a symbol, and Germany argued about the film for a year: the last twelve days in the bunker, filmed without comment or consolation.
★ 6.7
Howl's Moving Castle
Directed by Hayao Miyazaki
2004 · Japan
Miyazaki's most beautiful machine is a walking house held together by magic and bad temper: underneath the wonder is an angry anti-war film, made while he watched the invasion of Iraq.
★ 6.6
Boulevard of Broken Dreams
2004 · From American Idiot
Armstrong wrote the lyrics alone in an East Village apartment, and that loneliness won Record of the Year.
★ 6.6
All These Things That I've Done
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Gospel choir the Sweet Inspirations, a bassline Flowers traced to Bowie, and a refrain built for arenas.
★ 6.5
Somebody Told Me
2004 · From Hot Fuss
Flowers called it the story of trying to meet someone in a club; Keuning's hook does the flirting.
★ 6.3
Mean Girls
Directed by Mark Waters
2004
Tina Fey adapted a parenting book about teenage girls into the most quoted comedy of its decade: the anthropology is accurate, and the cruelty is presented as a system rather than a person.
★ 6.3
Friday Night Lights
Directed by Peter Berg
2004
High-school football is the surface; the subject is a town with nothing else: Odessa, Texas in 1988, filmed handheld and close, where a losing season is a civic emergency.
★ 5.9
Evil
2004 · From Antics
Charlie White's video put an animatronic puppet through a real emergency room, six puppeteers digitally erased; fans named it Norman.
★ 5.8
How to Save a Life
2004
Slade wrote it after mentoring a troubled teenager at a Denver camp, and Grey's Anatomy did the rest.
★ 5.8
Whiskey Lullaby
2004
Two verses, two voices, and Jerry Douglas's Dobro; Bill Anderson and Jon Randall wrote country's bleakest modern ballad.
★ 5.8
I Miss You
2004
Cello, upright bass and brushed drums, roughly seventy acoustic tracks, and Hoppus and DeLonge trading verses about missing someone.
★ 5.8
American Idiot
2004
Someone stole the master tapes for the album they had just finished, so Green Day started over and wrote a punk rock opera instead.
★ 5.7
Ocean Breathes Salty
2004
Recorded at Sweet Tea in Oxford, Mississippi, and it turns a hard look at mortality into something close to serene.
★ 5.6
Such Great Heights (Iron & Wine)Iron & Wine
Such Great Heights (Iron & Wine)
2004
Beam slowed Gibbard's synth-pop into hushed acoustic guitar for a Sub Pop B-side, then Garden State put it everywhere.
★ 5.5
1, 2 Step
Ciara and Missy Elliott
2004
Jazze Pha built the beat on an Akai MPC3000, and Missy Elliott cut her verse before ever meeting Ciara.
★ 5.5
Somewhere Only We Know
2004
Rice-Oxley hammered it out on piano after "Heroes", and Keane proved a rock band could skip guitars entirely.
★ 5.5
Alexander Hamilton
2004 · 818 pages
Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, Hamilton reached New York at seventeen, wrote most of the Federalist Papers, and built American finance. Chernow drives it all toward the duel.
★ 5.4
Naughty Girl
2004
Scott Storch built it on a Donna Summer interpolation, and Beyonce turns a club come-on into pure command.
★ 5.3
Anchorman
Directed by Adam McKay
2004
They shot so many alternate takes that the discarded material was assembled into a second feature: Will Ferrell and Adam McKay built a 1970s newsroom out of confident men saying stupid things.
★ 5.0
Hot Fuss
2004
Mr. Brightside was the first song Brandon Flowers and Dave Keuning ever wrote together, and they never managed to write a bigger one.
★ 5.0
Lean Back
Terror Squad and Fat Joe
2004
Scott Storch's beat, three weeks at number one, and a hook that instructs the room not to dance.
★ 5.0
Hotel Rwanda
Directed by Terry George
2004
Don Cheadle plays a hotel manager who used bribes and telephone calls to shelter over a thousand people: the 1994 Rwandan genocide, seen mostly through the absence of anyone coming to help.
★ 4.9
Unwritten
2004
Cut in Venice Beach with Danielle Brisebois, then adopted by The Hills and every graduation slideshow since.
★ 4.8
Van Lear Rose
2004
Lynn wrote every song herself, which she had not done for decades, and Jack White recorded it in an old house in East Nashville.
★ 4.8
The Motorcycle Diaries
Directed by Walter Salles
2004
Before he was a poster, Ernesto Guevara was a medical student on a broken motorcycle: Walter Salles shot the actual route through South America, and the politics arrive as things seen.
★ 4.8
How We Do
2004
50 Cent wrote the chorus, liked it enough to take a verse, and Dre's beat carried Compton nationwide.
★ 4.7
Live Like You Were Dying
2004
Wiseman and Nichols built it from a friend's cancer scare, and McGraw cut it the year his father died.
★ 4.7
Naked as We CameIron & Wine
Naked as We Came
2004
Beam swapped his home four-track for Brian Deck's Chicago studio, and sang two lovers weighing which of them dies first.
★ 4.6
Everybody's Changing
2004
Rice-Oxley wrote it after the guitarist quit, which is why a rock band's biggest hook is played on piano.
★ 4.5
Funeral
2004
Three of the band lost close relatives while they were making it, which is where the title came from. Everything is played as though shouted.
★ 4.4
Breathe (Fabolous)
2004
Just Blaze cut it from Supertramp's Crime of the Century, and Fabolous raps it like a man being chased.
★ 4.4
Daughters
2004
Mayer lobbied his label against releasing it, then won Song of the Year in 2005 and said so onstage.
★ 4.4
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb
2004
Bono wrote Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own about his father, and sang it at his funeral before the record was finished.
★ 4.4
Ray
Directed by Taylor Hackford
2004
Jamie Foxx wore prosthetics that sealed his eyes shut for up to fourteen hours a day: Ray Charles approved the performance himself, then died months before the film opened.
★ 4.4
Ocean Avenue
2004
Sean Mackin's violin cutting through the guitars, and an avenue that is really a boulevard in Atlantic Beach, Florida.
★ 4.1
Fahrenheit 9/11
Directed by Michael Moore
2004
Disney refused to release it and it held the documentary box office record for five years: Michael Moore won at Cannes with an argument aimed squarely at an election five months away.
★ 4.0
I can't see anything that I don't like about you. Right now I can't.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
The Sopranos · 2004
Dare You to Move
2004
A song Foreman wrote to talk himself into moving, cut twice, the 2003 version the band's biggest hit.
★ 3.8
Tipsy
2004
Trackboyz built the stomp, J-Kwon was seventeen, and twenty years on Shaboozey turned the hook into a number one.
★ 3.7
2004
What a loss to spend that much time with someone, only to find out that she's a stranger.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
Are we like those bored couples you feel sorry for in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
Soldier
Destiny's Child and T.I.
2004
Sean Garrett wrote the hook in a taxi, and T.I. and Lil Wayne are the album's only guest verses.
★ 3.7
Miracle
Directed by Gavin O'Connor
2004
They cast hockey players and taught them to act rather than the reverse: Kurt Russell plays Herb Brooks skating his young Olympic squad into the ground before Lake Placid in 1980.
★ 3.6
I'm sorry that people are so jealous of me. But I can't help it that I'm popular.
Mean Girls · 2004
The Notebook · 2004
Team America: World Police
Directed by Trey Parker
2004
The puppetry is entirely straight-faced and never winks: Trey Parker and Matt Stone spent a fortune on marionettes so they could aim a Jerry Bruckheimer parody at absolutely everyone.
★ 3.5
Napoleon Dynamite
Directed by Jared Hess
2004
It cost under half a million and grossed a hundred times that: an Idaho teenager, his brother's internet girlfriend, and a deadpan rhythm nobody has successfully copied.
★ 3.5
2004
Aha Shake Heartbreak
2004
Three brothers and a cousin, raised on a Pentecostal preaching circuit, playing scrappy Southern garage rock. Britain loved it years before America noticed.
★ 3.1
Boxin' is about respect. Gettin' it for yourself, and takin' it away from the other guy.
Million Dollar Baby · 2004
Overnight Celebrity
2004
Kanye looped a 1978 Lenny Williams record, Miri Ben-Ari sawed the violin, and Twista outran both to number six.
★ 2.8
These Words
2004
Writer's block became the subject; Bedingfield turned her failure to finish a love song into a UK number one.
★ 2.7
Accidentally in LoveCounting Crows
Accidentally in Love
2004
Duritz dislikes writing to order, then handed Shrek 2 an Oscar-nominated rush of helpless, hurtling infatuation.
★ 2.6
I Go Back
2004
Jack & Diane, Only the Good Die Young, Rock'n Me: the songs Chesney says drag him back.
★ 2.5
Franz Ferdinand
2004
The band said they wanted to make records girls could dance to, and rehearsed in a derelict Glasgow warehouse they had taken over.
★ 2.3
There's a jet stream of bullshit coming out of your mouth, my friend.
Curb Your Enthusiasm · 2004
People have to share things, Joel. That's what intimacy is.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
It will be different. If we could just give it another go-round.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004
Constantly talking isn't necessarily communicating.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind · 2004