21. Primer
Made for just $7,000 with a crew composed primarily of one man, Primer is the blueprint for how to do micro-budget sci-fi right. Without the budget to create it visually, films like this one depend entirely on their writing to create and sustain a world. And Primer is famous for assuming a high level of intelligence among its audience, plunging viewers into a jargon-heavy river of scientific dialogue almost from the first scene. The short version of what happens in this movie is that engineers Aaron (writer-director-editor Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) have reached a turning point in the experiments they’ve been conducting in Aaron’s garage, and the implications are reality-altering. That being said, the structure of this film is as challenging as its dialogue, and more than one viewing is required to pick up on all the subtle clues and heady implications of the story. It’s the kind of film that excites curious viewers who like a challenge—people a lot like the obsessively driven characters at its core, actually. [Katie Rife]
20. Saw
With a studio franchise that’s still kicking (to varying results) 20 years later, the enduring appeal of writer Leigh Whannell and director James Wan’s indie horror gem doesn’t require much defense. In any case, allow me sing the praises of the arguable trigger for the 2000s uptick in “torture porn” flicks (though compared to its sequels, it’s not completely drenched in gore). Starring Whannell himself alongside Cary Elwes, the duo play the first of serial killer Jigsaw’s sadistic “games,” involving, you guessed it, Chekhov’s saw! The incomparable Danny Glover also plays a detective investigating a grisly smattering of crime scenes where Jigsaw’s victims failed to play according to his rules. Beyond its phenomenal cast, Saw exemplifies the thrill of working within one’s constraints; its single location conceit makes it all the more claustrophobic and anxious. Though the reverse bear trap scene may have thrust the film’s sequels into a different creative direction, the dingy tiled prison that the two men inhabit is still an incredibly recognizable set. Perhaps the only film to ever commit this gimmick to screen better is Scary Movie 4, where Dr. Phil and Shaq must hilariously free throw and amputate for a shot at survival. [Natalia Keogan]
19. Infernal Affairs
A franchise-starting, era-defining blockbuster, Infernal Affairs was the culmination of decades of Hong Kong crime movies. Sleek, sharp, and impeccably crafted, it was a massive hit across Asia in 2002 and 2003 before finally opening in the U.S. in the fall of 2004. Co-helmed by an acclaimed cinematographer (Andrew Lau, who shot Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express) and a journeyman director (Alan Mak, still churning ‘em out), the film is a greatest hits of HK genre cinema both in its style—which combines John Woo’s macho melodrama with the dynamic grit of Ringo Lam—and its cast list. Tony Leung was fresh off of Zhang Yimou’s Hero when he signed on to play undercover cop Chan Wing Yan, while Andy Lau was Hong Kong’s biggest name both in movies and music when he took on the role of Lau Kin-ming, a gangster who worms his way into the upper echelons of the police force. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Infernal Affairs inspired Martin Scorsese’s The Departed. But the original has something Marty’s version does not: roots in Buddhist philosophy, which teaches that the worst kind of hell is one where the same suffering repeats itself over and over again. [Katie Rife]
18. Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle
Despite the film having been predominantly shot in Toronto, New Jerseyans are still more than entitled to claim Harold and Kumar as Garden State icons. In search of their munchie-induced slider craving, the duo travel between three different counties to scope out the rumored White Castle locations in New Brunswick, Cherry Hill, and Princeton, but end up ensnared in increasingly ridiculous predicaments motivated by their constant desire to get high. These are remarkably high-functioning stoners, though, able to navigate impromptu surgeries and runaway cheetahs with surprising finesse. Complete with a performance from Neil Patrick Harris that violently shook off the lingering image of Doogie Howser, M.D., an incredible Bush-era t-shirt, and cleverly subverted tropes for its Asian leads, the meld of high- and low-brow humor in Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle make it a perennial classic—and one of the rare ‘00s comedies whose overall humor hasn’t aged like milk. [Natalia Keogan]
17. Napoleon Dynamite
One of the first homespun indie films that many of us of a certain age fell in love with, the cultural imprint of Napoleon Dynamite goes far beyond the iconic Vote for Pedro t-shirt. The film still stands as a bastion of low-budget brilliance; it’s hard to imagine a truly original comedy project breaking through the same way that Napoleon Dynamite did. Famously, star Jon Heder was only paid $1,000 upfront for his work on the $40,000 film (a rate which he successfully negotiated higher when the film’s success skyrocketed), filming in director Jared Hess’s Idaho hometown with the generous support of locals who’d let the crew shoot and eat for free on their properties. Emblematic of the lo-fi spirit of the Sundance Film Festival’s 2004 lineup—which also included several entries on this list, among them Saw, The Five Obstructions, and Primer—Napoleon Dynamite’s eccentric brand of slice of life humor will forever be mimicked, but hardly ever perfected again. [Natalia Keogan]
16. The Village
The Village is where things started to go wrong for M. Night Shyamalan. His previous three films, The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, had all been unqualified successes. But while this 2004 thriller was technically profitable, it was also the film that made critics and audiences lose faith in Philadelphia’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock. It’s a weird one, no doubt, hinging on a revelation that’s somehow both earth-shattering and inconsequential at the same time. But the misty woods and glowing lanterns look incredible, thanks to cinematography by the great Roger Deakins. And the cast is great, featuring future movie stars Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard early in their careers. Most importantly, though, The Village was way ahead of the curve in terms of metaphor-forward period horror: Individual pieces may not add up, but the overall message about the mechanisms of fear and control that claim to “protect” people while systematically isolating them is as relevant in the era of online extremism as it was during the Iraq War. [Katie Rife]
15. Mean Girls
It shot Lindsay Lohan into superstardom and made Tina Fey the most in-demand comedy writer of the decade, but Mean Girls’ biggest pop-cultural impact has to be the memes. These, of course, are a result of the sharp and savage writing in Fey’s screenplay, which holds up against Anchorman in sheer quotability. Mean Girls sees high school girls for the savage and terrifying beasts they really are, observing them through the eyes of outsider Cady Heron (Lohan), the daughter of literal zoologists who compares the behavior of her classmates to that of animals on the plains of “Africa.” This is one of those movies that perfectly captures its moment, catching a new generation of stars on its way up—Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lizzy Caplan, and Lacey Chabert all co-star—and elevating established players Fey and Amy Poehler to A-list status. It’s both ironic and kind of nice that it’s become a movie that cool moms pass down to their daughters, to the point of ads declaring, “this isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls!” about the 2024 remake. [Katie Rife]
14. Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy
It’s been said that before memes, people would simply quote Anchorman at each other for years. Comedy has a unique way of infecting culture. More than other genres, lines of dialogue get memorized, cataloged, and archived for future usage, and no film this century has a filing cabinet bursting with as many memorable quotes as Anchorman. But it’s not the lines that made an impact: It’s their delivery. Ferrell’s mastery over unearned confidence and innate innocence made every line a gutbuster. Anchorman made question marks as funny as a “glass case of emotion.” These lines, buoyed by an oft-imitated improvisational looseness, made each joke stickier, more memorable, capturing the energy of a basement improv show performed by people who really know what they’re doing. Those people—Ferrell, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd, Dave Koechtner, and Christina Applegate—fit seamlessly into Adam McKay’s ambitious character comedy, the most successful since Austin Powers, and just as interested in the casual sexism of the past. Both an absurd exercise in bombastic silliness and an overt satire of male chauvinism, inspiring Barbie and Righteous Gemstones alike, Anchorman begat a decade of blockbuster comedies and now-classic must-see-TV sitcoms that all tried to capture the legendary Ron Burgundy musk, but like sex panther, 60% of the time it worked every time. We know that doesn’t make sense. [Matt Schimkowitz]
13. Sideways
Sideways hasn’t aged like fine wine, but soured over time to become even more acidic—and that’s a good thing for this tale of two pricks in crisis. Alexander Payne’s stinging buddy comedy, between a himbo groom-to-be (Thomas Haden Church) and his grumpy best man (Paul Giamatti), collides like an upper-class DUI into wine country, where local industry workers Virginia Madsen and Sandra Oh are the main casualties. The softer notes to the skirt-chasing, drunk-dialing, glass-sniffing, mansplaining tale have decayed over the years, leaving the comic barbs even sharper and the melancholy emotions even more raw. It’s a sad teen sex comedy, now hungover and middle-aged, barely hiding itself in a transparent costume of respectability. As Payne more clearly embraces sentimentality in his later career, it’s even easier to appreciate his lacerating bitterness here. And yet, you still care for everyone involved. That’s just how good the Oscar-winning script is, and the cast who deserved to win some Oscars of their own. Its endearingly hilarious performances coincide with a pervasive pessimism about passion, and how it can act as a substitute for personal growth—a self-effacing theme for a filmmaker obsessed with his fumbling, lovable screw-ups. [Jacob Oller]
12. The Incredibles
The only good thing about The Iron Giant being unappreciated in its time is that it led filmmaker Brad Bird to Pixar. The Incredibles, writer/director Bird’s first film for the animation studio, applies its political Rorschach test to a suburban, Watchmen-like retro-con of old-fashioned comic heroism. Its satire picked apart classic costuming while its midlife crisis narrative picked apart our expectations. Michael Giacchino’s jazzy brass, Bird’s winning super-family dynamics, and the silk-smooth action sequences may thoroughly distract you from assessing its bigger ideas, but even here it has a leg up on almost every other superhero movie. Either praised or derided for the libertarianism some spy lurking beneath the spandex, Bird’s larger filmography helps clarify his thematic focus on the stifling of those bursting to offer the world—and those around them—their gifts. It’s all the more impressive that this clever Fantastic Four riff is complex enough to hold up to this deeper inspection. Gray office life and a stable household aren’t the end of the world, but they aren’t enough if you don’t at least get to flash your bright red supersuit when it’s your time to shine. [Jacob Oller]
11. The Aviator
Howard Hughes is one of the great American enigmas, the celebrity tycoon turned paranoid recluse who sank millions into obsessively tinkered pet projects that, in many cases, resulted in public failure. Martin Scorsese’s biographical epic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Hughes, turns him into a figure of inner conflict, torn between the reckless pursuit of all-American greatness and the increasingly consuming symptoms of his mental illness—the elation of flight in the open sky and the claustrophobic isolation in which he will eventually ensconce himself, the silvery airplane and the dark room. It’s a sweeping, opulent, often very funny piece of filmmaking, packed with terrific supporting performances, cameos, film-history nods, and thrilling sequences (the disastrous test flight of Hughes’s XF-11 reconnaissance plane is a particular standout), but at its center is the broken psyche of a man tormented by his compulsions and solitude. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
10. The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Was this the first movie to be described as the most Wes Anderson movie to ever Wes Anderson, or something to that effect? Regardless, it wouldn’t be the last; the uneasy response to the hyperdetailed whimsy of the film’s production design juxtaposed with the sometimes poisonously unlikable characters (even/especially/mostly the one played by beloved institution Bill Murray!) would be echoed in plenty of Anderson’s future projects (though perhaps never again with such hostility). Rather than a point of no return, however, The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou represents Anderson confronting the beauty, insanity, and occasional horror of making art via Murray’s Zissou, a Jacques Cousteau type who films gorgeous underwater nature documentaries with a mix of arrogant conviction and utter haplessness. Anderson’s previous movies had plenty of comic bite, but it seems possible that co-writer Noah Baumbach sharpened the movie’s teeth even further, resulting in some of Anderson’s most blackly hilarious passages (including perhaps the funniest-ever exchange clarifying the details of being eaten by a shark), mirroring the unruliness of pushing one of his patented dollhouse-style sets out onto the ocean. One of Anderson’s sourest characters and most violent movies still somehow dovetail into a stunning emotional climax, which hinges on Zissou heartbreakingly asking a question that speaks to a universal fear of impermanence. Maybe the filmmaker’s indulgences are more recognizable than they look. [Jesse Hassenger]
9. Los Angeles Plays Itself
An endearing, curmudgeonly essay about a city, constructed out of that which built the city in the popular imagination while simultaneously stripping the city of its identity: movies. Los Angeles Plays Itself is Thom Andersen’s Hollywood historiography, documenting how Los Angeles has defined itself through erasure over decades of films. It masqueraded as Chicago during the heyday of bootlegger gangster pictures, offered enough geographic diversity to play New England or the Middle East, and resigned its modernist architecture to the ignoble fate of housing slick villains. More often though, Los Angeles is simply nowhere, a fake city for fake stories. It’s enough to think that the city’s ashamed of itself for existing in the first place. Andersen’s progressive-minded indignation is contagious as his convincingly assembled film unfolds. Like the best lectures, you get a sense of the professor alongside the material. Through Encke King’s dry narration, Andersen’s contempt for the police and concern for Los Angeles’ underclass bleeds through his well-researched rant. Then, the film will digress, blissfully, into a conversation about Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and public transit. It’s three hours of dense and witty film criticism, and I only wish there was more of it. [Jacob Oller]
8. Birth
An uneasy fairy tale told with Kubrickian frigidity, Birth offers a cruel curl of the monkey’s paw: A widow (Nicole Kidman) gets her husband back, reincarnated as a 10-year-old boy, at the celebration of her new engagement. Or so the boy claims. Romantic notions of love and the commitment of marriage are corrupted before our eyes as Kidman plays (in perhaps her best performance) a still-grieving woman increasingly adrift in a world that no longer makes sense to her. Cinematographer Harris Savides isolates her, shell-shocked, in a bleakly well-to-do New York, one that’s stamped out passion in favor of stiff flower arrangements and the good china. As strange as it sounds, it’s hard to blame her for clinging to her shameful hope, no matter how scandalous and unlikely it seems. Director Jonathan Glazer and Kidman commit to this oddity without veering into perversion or undermining its own metaphysical mystery (though its ending responds to our incredulities a bit too cleanly). As funny as it can be, Birth takes itself and its emotions seriously—so seriously in fact that a foaming-at-the-mouth Danny Huston almost obliterates a little kid—and it’s because of this that its unsettling what-if sticks in your heart. [Jacob Oller]
7. Shaun Of The Dead
Amid the early ‘00s zombie revival, Shaun Of The Dead perfected the zom-com, giving filmmaker Edgar Wright’s kinetic feats of parody a far bigger platform than his Channel 4 sitcom. But his TV roots inform how the film’s Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Undead gags develop its characters, economically building out our smarmy, sidelined hero with petulant punchlines and self-effacing physical comedy. When the Romero satire eventually collapses into genuine emotion (and gory dismemberment), it’s already proven that there’s plenty of rotted meat on its bones. Wright’s breakneck editing and dedication to background detail only reinforce the ever-approaching dread of his zombies, and only make it funnier that flatmates Simon Pegg and Nick Frost barely register that the apocalypse is happening around their dead-end lives. Wright’s Cornetto trilogy gave his career a foundation of heart-of-gold losers stumbling through lovingly crafted genre pastiches, but none of the trio balance irreverence and reverence as successfully as his shambling quest for a cold beer with good mates at a local pub. [Jacob Oller]
6. Collateral
By 2004, numerous auteurs had powered their expeditions into paranoia, ambition, and desire with Tom Cruise’s megawatt star power. Often deconstructing his celebrity, the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Paul Thomas Anderson had reduced “the last movie star” to a whimpering, self-pitying slurry of insecurity. But Michael Mann saw the menace in Cruise’s psychotic focus, and with Collateral, he gave Cruise full control. Collateral is a return to form for Mann, who, after two biographical dramas, delivered his most stripped-down thriller since Manhunter, exploring what it would be like if a normal guy met a Michael Mann character. Jaime Foxx plays Max, the unambitious cabbie forced to escort the hitman Vincent (Cruise) as he checks names off his hit list. Foxx shrinks behind his frameless specs as he searches for the can-do spirit of a Tom Cruise action hero. The contrast of Joe Schmoe versus Top Gun Terminator makes for a tense and pulpy L.A. noir, emphasis on the L.A. In one of Mann’s early digital experiments and his biggest hit, the director captures La La Land as an authentic cityscape where sprawl isolates and public transportation saves. Collateral still moves with the fluidity of Vincent drawing his pistol and it hits twice as hard. [Matt Schimkowitz]
5. Spider-Man 2
A quarter-century into the modern superhero movie era, Spider-Man 2 still feels like a breath of fresh air. Leaning into Peter Parker’s Silver Age personal problems, Alvin Sargent’s screenplay explores the dregs of masked avenging without denying its romance. There’s a lightness to Sam Raimi’s direction, which can segue from a gutting conversation about Aunt May’s dire financial outlook to Webhead and Doc Ock’s subway streetfight with ease. Tobey Maguire heightens Parker’s innocence and awkwardness just enough to make him as pitiable as he is endearing to Kirsten Dunst’s Mary Jane. Their romance is mirrored in Doc Ock’s doomed marriage and [Bruce Campbell voice] groovy resurrection, adding emotional weight and complexity to a villain so far ahead of the game that Marvel sold the ninth live-action Spider-Man movie on his return—to say nothing of J.K. Simmons’ J. Jonah Jameson, both of whom lose some luster in the MCU. Raimi balances this mix of action and romance with some patented Three Stooges gags and a newsroom repertoire in the style of Rosalind Russell, keeping the plot swinging along as Parker loses one job, fight, and girlfriend after another. Spider-Man 2 isn’t just the best superhero movie ever, nor simply one of 2004’s best films. It spins a web among the greatest blockbusters ever made. [Matt Schimkowitz]
4. Before Sunset
Eighty minutes of real-time romance, resparking, flickering in the wind, and finally catching entirely, nine years after it was first lit. Richard Linklater weighed Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy with nearly a decade of ambition in his sequel to the rambling-conversation-as-romance Before Sunrise. Before Sunset conjures a wearier, more mature magic, its wounded spell even more believable thanks to its experienced casters. Answering the question of whether its one-night standees would stay true to the first film’s ambiguous promise to meet again, the Parisian romance responds to that youthful fantasy with one of its own, dinged and bruised by reality. The characters have loved and lost, have suffered and succeeded. In their years apart, they’ve grown into people who have even more to offer one another, yet they’ve also erected practical barriers to prevent that dream from coming true. Hawke and Delpy steer this stunning two-hander through its familiar yet ineffable tonal shifts; they capture both an inability to reach out and touch those you love, and the feeling that the dominoes are falling towards the inevitable. Cinematographer Lee Daniel’s meticulous attention to light, Linklater’s long takes, and the actors’ embodiment of their characters’ development perfect the illusion: It doesn’t take long before we believe we’re watching two people fall in love all over again. [Jacob Oller]
3. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
The digital revolution had not yet truly arrived in 2004, but there was already a sense that something or other was coming to an end, a particular way of relating to movies. Perhaps, by extrapolation, it was also a way of relating to each other in the once-crowded spaces we might briefly co-inhabit. Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a minimalist requiem on this theme—a farewell to cinema as an artform that defined a century of urban culture. On the eve of its closing, an old Taipei movie palace hosts its final screening (of King Hu’s wuxia classic Dragon Inn) for a small handful of lost souls, among them an elderly actor, a lovesick ticket-taker with a limp, and a Japanese tourist who’s awkwardly trying to cruise the theater for sex. A landmark of what, over the course of the 2000s, would come to be controversially known as “slow cinema,” the film can be challenging to many tastes, but anyone who’s willing to tune into Tsai’s wavelength is in for a rewarding experience. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
2. Kill Bill: Volume 2
Under no circumstances should anyone hand anything to the Weinsteins, so let’s just call the company’s insistence that Quentin Tarantino’s 240-minute revenge epic be sliced in twain a case of others simply providing an excuse for the material to breathe as it should. No matter how Tarantino prefers it, the second “volume” of his devil-in-the-details saga feels distinct from its rock-and-roll predecessor, bringing forward that film’s cliffhanger revelation—the Bride’s unborn daughter survived the brutal attack from Bill and his henchpeople—and allowing it to infuse the bloody action (of which there is still plenty, albeit sparer this time around) with greater emotional urgency. If the first movie is perhaps Tarantino’s most remix-happy, sample-heavy work, the second makes yet another case that Tarantino’s encyclopedia of genre reference points still translates into its own rich text. That transformation happens well before the penultimate shot, but Uma Thurman sure drives it home there, capping her greatest performance: Lying on the bathroom floor as her rescued daughter watches cartoons in the next room, her Beatrix Kiddo cries in gratitude and relief, an ecstatic and deeply moving act of parenthood. The tenderness of Jackie Brown hadn’t been bled out after all. [Jesse Hassenger]
1. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind
Michel Gondry’s modern classic is, among others things, a sci-fi parable, a deconstructed relationship drama, and a bittersweet love story. Following a bad break-up, thirty-something Joel (Jim Carrey) discovers that his ex-girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet), has deleted him from her mind with the help of Lacuna, a mysterious company that offers “the focused erasure of troubling memories,” and decides to do the same. Much of the rest of the film is set inside Joel’s head, as he re-experiences his life with Clementine and watches it get wiped away—an ambitious premise realized through Gondry’s intimate direction and inventive use of special and visual effects. The script, co-written by Charlie Kaufman, cleverly refracts the relationship not only through multiple timeframes and layers of decaying memory, but also through a gaggle of Lacuna employees (played by Tom Wilkinson, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, and Elijah Wood) with issues of their own. Original, strange, and, in the end, deeply moving, Eternal Sunshine suggests that we are all destined to ironically repeat our foibles and failures, but that the yearning to connect is ultimately worth it. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
