The 50 Exceptional Films Of The 2000s

If comparing music from Gillian Welch and Outkast in our 50 Best Albums of the Decade is like apples and oranges, ranking movies like Amélie, The Dark Knight and Mulholland Drive is extra like apples, ice cream and foie gras. But in spite of the wild range amongst our 50 Best Movies from 2000-2009, each is an exquisitely made, fairly gratifying piece of cinema that we agree with will bear well after the last decade has ended. There are masters like Martin Scorcese and Lars Von Trier, and relative learners like Fernando Meirelles and Anna Boden. There are documentaries, comedies and dramas, as well as lively films and even a remarkable-hero flick. Mirroring a decade of globalism, the filmmakers are from america, New Zealand, Taiwan, Germany, Ireland, France, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Romania, Thailand, Brazil, and almost each part of the U.K. Let those be our hints to your Netflix queue—or inside the case of #21, a theater near you. Personally, after reading the loving descriptions in those pages, I’ve already were given movies I missed the primary time around—like Syndromes and a Century and Beau Travail—at the way.—Josh Jackson, Paste editor-in-leader 50. The Squid and the Whale (2005)

Writer/Director: Noah Baumbach

Starring: Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, Jesse Eisenberg, Owen Kline

Studio: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Borrowing subject matters from his preceding movies—youngsters of failed marriages; characters whose bookish smarts appear to work against them; a floating sense of fatalism—The Squid and the Whale creeps ever towards Noah Baumbach’s personal tempestuous past. His parents’ faltering union isn’t only a element used to add depth to a certain individual. It’s the entire tale—a suitable, candid portrait of the messy automobile crash of divorce, from all angles. “It’s difficult to even put myself inside the attitude of those films anymore,” he advised Paste in 2005. “With Squid, those are reinventions of people which can be near me, and that is the movie I perceive with the maximum. It is a herbal extension of what I have meant and what I experience. I relied on myself more on this one.”—Keenan Mayo 49. High Fidelity (2000)

Director: Stephen Frears

Writer: Nick Hornby (novel)

Stars: John Cusack, Jack Black, Lisa Bonet, Todd Louiso

Studio: Touchstone Pictures

Funny, insightful and insanely quotable, High Fidelity performs like an ultra-hip Woody Allen movie. Writer Nick Hornby tapped into the psyche of the 20 th century male, with John Cusack gambling an everyman who retraces his past female friend history only to locate he allow an appropriate lady slip thru his arms.—Jeremy Medina forty eight. Flight of the Red Balloon (Le voyage du ballon rouge) (2008)

Writer/Director: Hou Hsiao-Hsien

Stars: Juliette Binoche, Hippolyte Giradot

Studio: IFC Films

It’s tempting to position the today's film by way of Hou Hsiao-hsien into a neat little container. Although it’s no longer a film for kids, it’s an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s endearing kids’s short “The Red Balloon,” and at instances it appears as buoyant and aimless as a helium-stuffed toy. Hou is running in France as opposed to his typical Taiwan, and with Academy Award-winning actress Juliette Binoche instead of his solid of regulars. This makes the entire mission experience like a detour for an artist great recognised for complex, austere movies approximately Taiwan’s pulsing gift and tumultuous history. Lamorisse’s short is about a loner of a boy who has the pleasant of all viable buddies, an amazingly reactive balloon, but Hou’s movie is a sensible study the inside of this myth, on the contemporary-day stresses on close-knit households. He slips at the back of Lamorisse’s facade just like the Taiwanese novice filmmaker who takes a activity as Binoche’s nanny, an echo of Hou inside his personal tale; the nanny even tells us how computer graphics make the balloon move. Since Flight falls on the simple-but-elegant end of Hou’s spectrum, the mysterious and lyrical finale inside the Musée D’Orsay comes as a marvel; this balloon is anchored through a few heft.—Robert Davis 47. Grizzly Man (2005)

Writer/Director: Werner Herzog

Stars: Timothy Treadwell, Werner Herzog

Studio: Lions Gate Films

This pro?le of nature lover Timothy Treadwell, who unwisely tried to live among wild bears in Alaska till he changed into devoured, cuts a Herzogian swath throughout the hillside: A guy tries to ?nd harmony with nature but as an alternative ?nds, as Herzog places it, “chaos, hostility and murder.” Looming over the ?lm isn't always most effective the horror of Treadwell’s death however also an audio recording of the tragedy, taped inadvertently by the video digital camera in Treadwell’s tent. Herzog tastefully omits it from the ?lm, but he makes the viewer aware of its existence. “The question of the tape which recorded Timothy Treadwell’s dying and Amie Huguenard’s demise is some thing that I needed to cope with,” Herzog told Paste in 2007. “So I listened to it, and that’s the simplest time I seem in the ?lm. You best see me from behind, being attentive to it with earphones. The thrilling issue is that Jewel Palovak who turned into working with Treadwell and dwelling with Treadwell for two decades tries to read my face, and it’s very, very excessive and transferring for her. The second I heard the tape it become right away clean: Only over my lifeless body is that this tape going to grow to be within the movie. I’m no longer into doing a snuff ?lm, and I must admire the respect and privateness of two individuals’ deaths.”—Robert Davis forty six. Iraq in Fragments (2006)

Director: James Longley

Studio: HBO Documentary Films

Applying the overall spectrum of cinematic method to a nonfiction movie, Longley made one of the most hanging movies this year, an immersive view of lifestyles in Iraq; a document of evaluations and faces from across the usa, all captured at near range.—Robert Davis forty five. Whale Rider (2002)

Director: Niki Caro

Writers: Witi Ihimaera (novele), Niki Caro (screenplay)

Stars: Keisha Castle-Huges, Rawiri Paratene

Studio: Newmarket Films

Whale Rider tells the tale of a young girl, Paikea, who lives in New Zealand with a stern grandfather who, reputedly, wishes to get cutting-edge. Every scene tells us this and offers us an possibility to tsk-tsk his staunch rejection of his granddaughter who he believes, in spite of her lineage, can’t inherit the leadership of this Maori village because of her gender. She’ll need to persuade her grandfather she will be able to lead simply as well as the boys can, and she or he’ll need to do it earlier than the give up of the movie. But simply while you suppose you have got the movie pegged, its sincerity manages to break via the skinny characterizations and age-vintage plot. Young actress Keisha Castle-Hughes offers Paikea a richly expressive voice, and the turning point is an astonishingly heartfelt speech she promises at a faculty application for parents. Castle-Hughes’ grace and beauty at the screen might be the principle cause Whale Rider became a marvel art-residence hit.—Robert Davis 44. Hotel Rwanda (2004)

Director: Terry George

Writers: Keir Pearson, Terry George

Stars: Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix

Studio: Lions Gate

While Hotel Rwanda attempts to report the u . s .’s genocide in 1994, it does so by way of focusing on the character of Rusesabagina (played with the aid of Don Cheadle), who gave shelter to hundreds of fleeing Tutsis. Calling in dozens of favors together with his massive community of contacts, he became able to preserve the Hutu extremists (the Interahamwe armed forces) at bay, until the Tutsi rebels drove the Hutu from energy. Cheadle portrays Rusesabagina as an efficient supervisor who cares deeply about his own family and the people in he looks after It’s a gripping movie that bears witness to each a historic tragedy and one man’s bravery. “I by no means thought I become doing some thing distinctive,” Rusesabagina modestly informed Paste simply after the film’s launch. “I idea I was simply acting as a normal resort supervisor.”—J. Robert Parks forty three. In America (2004)