Best Movies of the 2000s

The decade Hollywood digitised, the decade Pixar matured, the decade Peter Jackson built Middle-earth and the Coen brothers got their Oscars.

The 2000s is the decade Hollywood went digital. By the decade's end, almost no major theatrical release was shot on film. The same decade gave us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the early Pixar peak (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL·E, Up), the second wave of Christopher Nolan (Memento, Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight), and the late-career re-emergence of the Coen brothers (No Country, Burn After Reading, A Serious Man).

Our ten picks for the decade.

The ten

  • The Dark Knight (2008) — Christopher Nolan and Heath Ledger remade what a superhero film could be.
  • There Will Be Blood (2007) — Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis. A foundational text of 21st-century American cinema.
  • No Country for Old Men (2007) — The Coens won Best Picture. The film argued, quietly, against most of what Hollywood thought a thriller should be.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) — Peter Jackson made an entire trilogy in fifteen months and the visual continuity holds.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) — Eleven Oscars on eleven nominations. The only fantasy film to win Best Picture.
  • Memento (2000) — Nolan's breakthrough. Reverse-chronology storytelling.
  • Spirited Away (2001) — Studio Ghibli's Oscar winner. The film that made Miyazaki an English-language household name.
  • Zodiac (2007) — David Fincher's procedural masterpiece. The film about the absence of resolution.
  • The Departed (2006) — Martin Scorsese finally won Best Director. Hong Kong's Infernal Affairs adapted for South Boston.
  • WALL·E (2008) — Pixar at its bravest. The opening forty minutes are almost wordless.

The decade's industry shifts

The DVD bubble — the decade's most lucrative revenue stream for studios — peaked around 2006 and began declining. The studios that had financed mid-budget adult dramas on DVD revenue began retreating from the form.

Digital projection went from rare to standard. By 2009, the studios were ready to release Avatar in 3D digital at sufficient scale that James Cameron's bet paid off. The 3D bubble that followed Avatar would deflate by mid-decade.

Pixar's run from 2003 (Finding Nemo) through 2010 (Toy Story 3) is arguably the most sustained artistic peak any single American studio has had since Warner Bros. in the 1930s.