2000s

Insomnia

A simple cop thriller elevated by a feeling. Pacino torments himself for us and it’s mostly wonderful.

The Passion of the Christ

A gutsy portrayal of a well-known story. But the passion has to come from you: the movie has little of its own.

Shaun of the Dead

With pure style, Wright re-arms the entire genre against us. Through comedy, we become the living dead.

Gender Horror in The Witch

A movie so scary it’s worthy of study. Eggers is a name to watch.

Zodiac

A movie made as meticulously as a case file. It will make you as obsessive as its director.

Lost in Translation

Coppola’s wry, magical opus. Maybe falling in love has never been like this, but you’ll believe that it should be.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

A movie where story and performance collide. As unsettling as we always knew Tilda Swinton could be.

The Matrix Reloaded

A ton of effort goes into figuring out what to do with a Kung fu movie. It can be beautiful, and it can also fall apart in your hands.

Be wary of superheroes that seem like they were invented as puns. You might end up with a passionate mess, with 85% Dutch angles, undeveloped characters, and a soundtrack like a prepubescent DJ’s iPod on shuffle. “Justice is blind,” proclaims Daredevil. So is Matt Murdock. So is Mark Steven Johnson.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

If Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was a tour of fantasy-land (who else thought their feelings seemed stuffed with baubles like gift-bags from a theme park?), The Chamber of Secrets is like accidentally wandering into the maintenance closet. Something is disenchanted by it, and I can think of no harsher criticism, to call something squinty that once was wide-eyed.

Superman Returns

Superman Returns feels like a lot of charming people were motivated to do the film twenty takes ago; now they’re kind of wistful and waiting for a break. The script has the right beats but the film is filled with sleepwalkers.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Cuarón colludes with us like one of Harry’s helpful army of British character actors whispering in our ear in a language we understand without knowing, or a clever dad with a dark and silly secret. This is the first Harry Potter film that feels like an open book. It’s the best teen film ever made.

Watchmen

Snyder’s baroque maleness shines through and so does his purity. He loves superheroes. You have to decide if that’s enough.

The Departed

Scorsese turns Goodfellas into a fever of talking, killing, and so much grinning. A mob movie for a new age.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

A film with tasty new charm, that you can only find if you don’t expect it to be the same charm you already ate.

Finding Nemo

Finding Nemo has a brilliant way of keeping this theme in the shallows of its action, always present but rarely addressed directly in the ecosystem of all its wonderful ocean stuff.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Here’s a tribute to the old “road to …” pictures. It might be the best of them, and no better than them.

Catch Me If You Can

Spielberg cons us into falling in love with thievery. An early DiCaprio treat.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Harry possesses none of the fairytale virtues: no great strength or speed or cunning. When they were handing out panaceas, the poor kid must have been grounded. His destiny follows him, as other people make it. (“She knows more about you than you do,” Ron says.” Harry’s reply is from someone losing to his identity crisis: “Who doesn’t?”).

The Incredibles

The film blasts an affectionate symphony of action spy movie set pieces, which Bird composes with such a self-believing style that he reminds me less of a director than of a virtuoso performer. And even they become a back-drop to what is essentially a mid-life crisis film, about a man who misses himself so much that he doesn’t even notice he has a family. Bird offers a genre fattened on mythic pretension a trimming alternative of joyous energy and dazzling characters.

Battle Royale

Fukasaku proves to be a master of the micro-story, the combinations of tiny joys and creeping terrors into one huge, fleeting, emotional whole. After decades of cultural regression, he evokes Japanese cinema’s desperate, horrific roar. It has a primal beauty, of the kind that will always be repressed, misunderstood.

Corpse Bride

A movie that actually should have been weirder: it’s the conventions of the plot that bog the movie down from being as beautiful as it looks.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

Adorable in a way movies aren’t anymore. McDormand shines.

Shark Tale

It takes zero seconds for Shark Tale to be the worst DreamWorks animated film I’ve ever seen. To find something worse you’d have to watch one of those Disney knock-offs that you pass over on Netflix with a cold shudder, or one of those YouTube-only CG student projects, or a film by Illumination. I’m going to scoop out its anchovy-sized heart and squeeze out the grease between my fingers before feeding it to my cat.

Cloverfield

Cloverfield manages to encourage us to hold on to those we love and enjoy any day that isn’t the last day of our life. It manages to do so on the run, which it owes to a snappy script and Miller’s motor-mouth, his comedic tension, his well-meaning worry.

The Happening

I’ve seen great filmmakers make bad movies. But I’ve never seen them willingly create the antimatter to their own style. With only the earnest request of his audience to question and unravel everything they believe about their brittle capitalistic existence, Shyamalan instead has made a film that makes me question and unravel everything I believe about Shyamalan.