The Best Way To Make Everyone Mad
A look at IndieWire's 2000s list. And my own list.
You gotta hand it to IndieWire. Its website is a mess that makes most stories nearly unreadable, but its writers are pros when it comes to making the Internet mad.
Just last week, David Ehrlich, Kate Erbland, Eric Kohn, Siddhant Adlakha and many many more film critics dropped a monster of a list, ranking The 100 Best Movies of the 2000s. It’s an incredible recap of the decade, which feels like it was just yesterday, and although I personally wouldn’t have the same No. 1 as IndieWire, I respect the hell out of such a bold choice.
It’s a genuinely fun idea and a good way to keep movies in the limelight during the usual August lull.
This list has been reshuffled 100 different times since we first cobbled it together, and there are at least 100 films that it pained us to omit in the end; our sincerest apologies to “We Own the Night,” “Millennium Mambo,” “Munich,” “Master and Commander,” “The New World,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” and any number of great movies that might have made the cut had we done this two months ago, or two months from now. But we’re happy to cop to that fluctuation, because the 2000s have always been defined by change, and that’s the one thing about them that probably never will. —IndieWire
It’s always interesting to me how the responses to these rankings are “WHERE’S [INSERT MOVIE HERE]?” instead of being excited to learn about new movies to check out. There’s a lot here that I’ve never seen, including half of the Top Ten, and I’ll try to check them out sooner rather than later. It frankly feels lazy to immediately get mad at these types of lists instead of just saying, “That’s cool. Let me also make my own.” And so … “That’s cool. Let me also make my own.”
I apologize in advance if this list is a bit on the nose, but I am who I am. I tried not to repeat directors, which is why stuff like Punch-Drunk Love and Kill Bill missed out, but I think this is a pretty good 10. Also, I went alphabetically here, so please don’t yell at me.
Children of Men
I vividly remember watching this one night on HBO, back when I used to have cable (at my parents’ house) and I was shocked at how damn good this movie was. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is an action-thriller in which infertility endangers mankind. Clive Own is unreal as the protagonist and there’s a cavalcade of some of the best actors from Julianne Moore to Michael Caine to Chiwetel Ejiofor. Somehow makes you both optimistic and pessimistic about the future.
In Bruges
A fucked-up and twisted dark comedy, I will never stop recommending In Bruges. It’s Colin Farrell’s best performance and no one understands Martin McDonagh quite like Farrell. This movie makes me want to go to Bruges, but perhaps not for the same reason as the main characters. It also has an all-timer of a Tottenham joke.
Inglorious Basterds
Every time I watch Inglorious Basterds, there are a few weeks where it’s my favorite movie. It’s right up there for me as the Quentin Tarantino World War II epic is hilarious, ridiculously dark and features Michael Fassbender in one of the best extended scenes of the 21st century. I always appreciate Tarantino, and as he states at the end of the movie, this might be his masterpiece.
Lost in Translation
This is the only Top Ten that IndieWire and I have in common. I went through a full Sofia Coppola watch during Covid, and Lost in Translation and Somewhere are easily my two favorites. The premise is that a just-married Scarlett Johansson and down-on-his-luck Bill Murray somehow find one another while futzing around Tokyo. It’s good stuff.
Michael Clayton
This has the outline of your run-of-the-mill legal thriller, but it’s a lot more than that. George Clooney plays the titular fixer, who’s trying to reach out to one of his company's best litigators during an out-of-nowhere breakdown. It may have my favorite ending of any movie on this list, which is saying quite a lot. Shoutout to Tilda Swinton who got a much-deserved Oscar for her unraveling Karen Crowder.
No Country for Old Men
To be totally honest, I was going back and forth between this and O Brother, Where Art Thou? but ultimately I’ve seen this one recently, so I’m going with No Country for Old Men. A best picture winner that actually deserved it, this Coen Brothers movie features Javier Bardem as one of cinema’s greatest villains surrounded by every good actor you’ve ever heard of. It doesn’t get much tenser than the above gas station scene.
Ratatouille
I wanted to get one animated movie in here, so why not this Brad Bird Pixar classic about art and what we make of it? The movie revolves around Remy the rat, who wants to cook, as we all know. There are obviously high jinks, bizarre scenarios and not enough sanitary restrictions, but at its core, this is about someone who has a desire to create despite everything telling him to move on.
The Royal Tenenbaums
A friend and I saw this at the Museum of the Moving Image earlier this year and it still fucking hits. The AC wasn’t even working and no one cared. That’s how good The Royal Tenenbaums is. My second-favorite Wes Anderson movie, behind Grand Budapest Hotel, is remarkably funny and somehow as sweet as it gets. The cast is loaded as is the soundtrack.
There Will be Blood
I’m not breaking any news when I say that Daniel Day-Lewis is good at acting, and yet, Daniel Day-Lewis is good at acting. This is a tour de force that I was lucky enough to see in theaters a while back. Just a mesmerizing piece of shit at the center and a perfect cast of character actors helping him thrive.
Zodiac
Every time I watch a true crime show for an episode or listen to a murder podcast, I get annoyed because it’s not Zodiac. Although it has a purposefully cloudy ending, this gets the closest to the truth of it all: No one really knows what they’re doing and sometimes it just takes blind luck. This is David Fincher’s best movie, and it of course features Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. in some of the best performances of their respective careers.