The 10 Greatest Films of the 2000s

The 2000s were a strange and magnificent decade for cinema.

Hollywood was discovering how enormous franchise filmmaking could become. Digital technology was changing the way movies were shot and distributed. Animation was pushing beyond the idea that it belonged primarily to children. Independent filmmakers were experimenting with increasingly intimate forms of storytelling, while some of the world's greatest auteurs produced films that now rank among the most acclaimed works in the entire history of cinema.

And then there were movies that seemed almost impossible to categorize.

Mulholland Drive behaved like a dream you could never fully explain.

In the Mood for Love turned unconsummated romance into visual poetry.

There Will Be Blood made American capitalism feel biblical.

Spirited Away created an animated fantasy world capable of standing beside the greatest live-action cinema.

The Dark Knight demonstrated that a superhero film could function simultaneously as blockbuster entertainment, crime thriller and moral tragedy.

Meanwhile, films such as The Gleaners and I, The Piano Teacher and Before Sunset proved that some of the decade's most enduring filmmaking could emerge from something much smaller: a digital camera, two people walking through Paris, or a woman examining the lives of people society overlooks.

There can never be a completely objective list of the "greatest" films.

But these ten movies make a remarkably strong case for the cinema of the 2000s at its richest, strangest and most emotionally powerful.

1. In the Mood for Love (2000)

There are love stories about people who find each other.

In the Mood for Love is about two people who almost do.

In 1962 Hong Kong, journalist Chow Mo-wan, played by Tony Leung, and secretary Su Li-zhen, played by Maggie Cheung, move into neighboring apartments with their respective spouses.

Gradually they discover that their spouses are having an affair with each other.

The obvious cinematic response would be retaliation.

Perhaps Chow and Su begin their own affair.

Perhaps passion overwhelms restraint.

Wong Kar-wai does something much more painful.

They fall in love while desperately trying not to become the people who betrayed them.

The result is one of cinema's great studies of longing.

Doors frame the characters.

Hallways compress them.

Walls divide them.

Slow motion turns ordinary walks to buy noodles into memories before they have even finished happening.

Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bin's cinematography, William Chang's production design and Maggie Cheung's constantly changing cheongsams create a world that seems simultaneously physical and remembered.

The film rarely gives the audience what it expects.

Important events happen off-screen.

Conversations may be rehearsals rather than reality.

Time jumps.

Moments repeat.

What matters is not simply what happened between Chow and Su but how the memory of what almost happened continues to haunt them.

Its reputation has only grown.

In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll—one of world cinema's most influential surveys—In the Mood for Love ranked fifth among the greatest films ever made, the highest-ranked film from the 21st century on that list.

That placement feels less surprising with every passing year.

Plenty of films depict desire.

Few have understood so completely that sometimes desire becomes most powerful precisely because it remains unfulfilled.

2. Mulholland Drive (2001)

Trying to explain Mulholland Drive can almost diminish it.

A woman survives a car crash on Mulholland Drive and loses her memory.

She encounters Betty, an impossibly optimistic aspiring actress newly arrived in Hollywood.

Together they attempt to discover the mysterious woman's identity.

Then something happens.

Reality seems to break.

Names change.

Relationships change.

Characters appear to become different versions of themselves.

A blue box opens.

And what initially resembled a noir mystery transforms into something closer to grief, jealousy, fantasy and psychological collapse.

David Lynch does not ask us to solve Mulholland Drive like a conventional puzzle.

He asks us to experience its uncertainty.

Hollywood is simultaneously dream factory and nightmare machine.

Betty represents the fantasy: talent, possibility, romance and reinvention.

Diane represents something much darker: disappointment, humiliation and what happens when the dream turns against the dreamer.

Then there is Club Silencio.

"No hay banda."

There is no band.

The music continues anyway.

That sequence almost functions as the key to Lynch's entire film.

Cinema itself is an illusion.

We know it is an illusion.

And yet our emotional reaction remains real.

That paradox is Mulholland Drive.

Its critical standing has climbed dramatically since its release. In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, critics ranked it No. 8 among the greatest films of all time, while directors placed it joint 22nd.

A movie once considered baffling has become one of the central films of contemporary cinema.

Perhaps that is because its refusal to provide a definitive answer is not a flaw.

It is the reason people keep returning to it.

3. There Will Be Blood (2007)

"I have a competition in me."

Daniel Plainview barely needs to say anything else.

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is ostensibly about an oilman building an empire in early-20th-century California.

It becomes something much larger.

Capitalism.

Religion.

Power.

Fatherhood.

Loneliness.

American mythology.

And the destructive consequences of a man who understands every human relationship as a contest he must win.

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Plainview with terrifying control.

His voice sounds strangely theatrical.

His posture is calculated.

His friendliness always feels like negotiation.

He can sit calmly in a room while making the audience feel that violence is already taking place.

Opposite him stands Eli Sunday, Paul Dano's young preacher.

One man sells oil.

The other sells salvation.

Both understand performance.

Both want control.

And both gradually expose the hypocrisy in the other.

Anderson shoots their conflict almost like an Old Testament struggle.

The oil derrick explosion is one of the defining sequences of 2000s cinema: fire against a black sky while Jonny Greenwood's score transforms industrial catastrophe into something almost apocalyptic.

The film received eight Academy Award nominations and won two: Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.

Its reputation has continued to rise as well. The 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll placed it joint 122nd among the greatest films ever made.

But awards and rankings do not explain the film's endurance.

The deeper reason may be that Daniel Plainview never really becomes outdated.

He represents an appetite that cannot be satisfied.

Money is not enough.

Success is not enough.

Winning is not enough.

He must see everyone else lose.

4. Spirited Away (2001)

Spirited Away begins with something ordinary.

A family is moving to a new home.

Ten-year-old Chihiro is unhappy about it.

Then her parents take the wrong road.

They enter an abandoned-looking place.

They find food.

They begin eating.

And suddenly Chihiro's parents have become pigs.

Within minutes, Hayao Miyazaki has carried the audience into one of the most extraordinary fantasy worlds in cinema.

Yet what makes Spirited Away great is not simply imagination.

It is how coherent the imagination feels.

The bathhouse has rules.

The spirits have jobs.

Workers complain.

Food is prepared.

Boilers operate.

Contracts matter.

Greed has consequences.

Even the supernatural world contains bureaucracy.

Chihiro's growth is equally unusual.

She does not become powerful because she discovers she is secretly chosen or exceptionally gifted.

She becomes capable.

She learns to work.

She remembers people's names.

She treats strange creatures with compassion.

She becomes braver because circumstances require her to act despite being afraid.

Then there is No-Face, one of Miyazaki's most memorable creations.

Initially lonely and almost harmless, No-Face becomes monstrous after absorbing the greed surrounding the bathhouse.

But Miyazaki refuses to reduce him to a villain.

Remove him from the environment that feeds his worst impulses and he changes again.

That generosity toward characters is one of the director's defining qualities.

Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 2003 Oscars.

In the 2022 Sight and Sound poll, critics placed it joint 75th among the greatest films ever made.

Calling it one of the greatest animated films seems almost unnecessarily restrictive now.

It is simply one of the great films.

5. The Piano Teacher (2001)

Some films are difficult because they are complicated.

The Piano Teacher is difficult because it refuses to protect the viewer from its protagonist.

Erika Kohut, played by Isabelle Huppert, is a respected piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory.

She is intelligent.

Disciplined.

Formidable.

And profoundly damaged.

She lives with her controlling mother in a relationship defined by dependence, resentment and emotional violence.

Her private sexual life involves voyeurism, humiliation, self-harm and fantasies that become increasingly disturbing when a younger student, Walter, becomes attracted to her.

A more conventional film might explain Erika.

Michael Haneke observes her.

That difference matters.

He does not provide a comforting psychological diagnosis that allows the audience to put her behavior into a neat category.

Nor does Huppert ask us to like Erika.

She gives one of the most fearless performances of the decade because she refuses to soften the character.

Her face can appear almost completely controlled while tiny changes reveal humiliation, cruelty, desire and panic.

The relationship between Erika and Walter gradually becomes a struggle over who controls the terms of desire.

Fantasy seems manageable while it remains fantasy.

Reality is another matter.

The film's reputation was immediate.

At the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, The Piano Teacher won the Grand Prix, while Isabelle Huppert won Best Actress and Benoît Magimel won Best Actor—an extraordinary three major awards for the same film.

It remains one of the harshest masterpieces of the decade.

Not because it wants to shock.

Because Haneke understands how terrifying people become when desire, shame and control can no longer be separated.

6. Before Sunset (2004)

Two people walk through Paris and talk for around 80 minutes.

That is almost the entire movie.

And somehow Before Sunset contains an entire adult lifetime.

Nine years earlier, Jesse and Céline met on a train in Before Sunrise.

They spent one night walking through Vienna.

They promised to meet again six months later.

Now Jesse is a writer.

Céline works in environmental advocacy.

He is married.

He has a child.

They meet again in Paris after Jesse gives a reading from a novel clearly inspired by their night together.

His plane leaves that evening.

The clock begins.

Richard Linklater structures the film in near-real time, which creates extraordinary tension without traditional suspense.

Will Jesse miss his flight?

Will they admit what happened after Vienna?

Did they really forget one another?

Are they still in love?

Perhaps the film's greatest achievement is how the conversation changes.

At first Jesse and Céline perform adulthood.

They are successful.

Sophisticated.

Funny.

Fine.

Then tiny cracks appear.

An old disappointment surfaces.

A question becomes an accusation.

The past nine years suddenly enter the conversation.

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke helped write the screenplay alongside Linklater, and the dialogue has the specificity of people who have carried imaginary conversations with one another for years.

The film earned an Academy Award nomination for Adapted Screenplay for Linklater, Delpy and Hawke, with story credit also going to Kim Krizan.

But its greatness is concentrated in something awards cannot measure.

The final minutes.

Céline dances to Nina Simone.

Jesse watches.

She tells him he is going to miss his plane.

He smiles.

"I know."

Cut.

Few films have ended with greater confidence.

7. Lost in Translation (2003)

Bob Harris and Charlotte are both lonely.

That does not mean they are lonely in the same way.

Bob, played by Bill Murray, is an aging movie star in Tokyo to shoot a whisky commercial.

Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a young college graduate accompanying her photographer husband.

Bob wonders what happened to his life.

Charlotte has not yet figured out what hers is supposed to become.

They meet in a hotel bar.

Nothing enormous happens.

And that is precisely the point.

Sofia Coppola builds the film from transitional spaces.

Hotel corridors.

Elevators.

Taxi rides.

Bars.

Bedrooms.

Neon streets glimpsed through glass.

Tokyo becomes not simply a location but an emotional condition: overwhelming, beautiful and isolating.

Bob and Charlotte develop an intimacy that does not fit comfortably into conventional definitions.

Are they friends?

Potential lovers?

Surrogate family?

Two strangers temporarily rescuing each other from loneliness?

The film understands that some relationships matter precisely because they cannot last.

Bill Murray's performance is particularly remarkable because so much of it seems to happen between jokes.

He can make Bob funny and exhausted in the same facial expression.

Johansson, only a teenager during production, creates the opposite energy: Charlotte seems simultaneously young and already frightened by how quickly adulthood is arriving.

Coppola won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film received four Oscar nominations overall, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Murray.

The ending became famous because we cannot hear what Bob whispers to Charlotte.

Some viewers have spent years trying to decipher it.

But the words do not really matter.

The moment belongs to them.

We were never supposed to possess it.

8. The Dark Knight (2008)

Before 2008, superhero movies could certainly be serious.

But The Dark Knight changed expectations about how far the genre could go.

Christopher Nolan took Batman and placed him inside something resembling a Michael Mann crime epic.

Banks are robbed.

Organized crime negotiates.

Politicians compromise.

Police departments contain corruption.

Surveillance becomes a moral issue.

And then the Joker enters the system.

Heath Ledger's Joker is not frightening because he has the most elaborate plan.

He is frightening because he understands that institutions depend on people believing certain rules will continue to matter.

He wants to test that belief.

Batman believes criminals ultimately want something rational.

Money.

Power.

Survival.

The Joker burns money.

That destabilizes Batman's entire understanding of the conflict.

The film therefore becomes more than hero versus villain.

It asks what happens when someone exploits the ethical restrictions that distinguish a hero from the enemy he is fighting.

Can Batman torture someone for information?

Can he conduct mass surveillance?

Can society survive if its heroes become symbols built partly on lies?

Does refusing to kill remain meaningful when that refusal allows further deaths?

These questions are wrapped inside enormous set pieces: the bank robbery, the Hong Kong extraction, the truck chase, the hospital explosion.

That is what made the film unusual.

Nolan did not choose between blockbuster spectacle and moral drama.

He made the spectacle carry the moral drama.

Ledger posthumously won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, and The Dark Knight received eight Oscar nominations and won two, also taking Best Sound Editing.

Its influence on blockbuster filmmaking was enormous.

Not every later attempt to make superhero movies "dark" understood why The Dark Knight worked.

Darkness was never the achievement by itself.

Consequences were.

9. The Gleaners and I (2000)

The smallest-looking film on this list may contain the biggest idea about filmmaking itself.

Agnès Varda begins with gleaners: people who collect food and objects left behind by others.

Historically, gleaners gathered crops remaining in fields after harvest.

In contemporary France, Varda finds modern equivalents.

People collect discarded potatoes.

Food from markets.

Abandoned appliances.

Objects other people consider useless.

Then she realizes something.

She is a gleaner too.

Her camera collects images.

Moments.

Faces.

Thoughts.

Accidents.

Things the larger machinery of cinema might normally discard.

Varda was working with a lightweight digital camera, and the technology transformed her filmmaking.

She could shoot her own aging hand.

Capture passing trucks between her fingers.

Film inside her home.

Allow digressions.

The documentary gradually becomes an essay about poverty, waste, ageing, art, consumption and the act of looking.

There is no conventional plot pulling everything together.

Varda herself does.

Her curiosity becomes the structure.

That approach proved enormously influential as inexpensive digital cameras expanded possibilities for autobiographical documentary and essay filmmaking.

The film's critical reputation is exceptional.

In Sight and Sound's 2014 poll of the greatest documentaries ever made, critics ranked The Gleaners and I eighth.

By the 2022 all-time poll, it had reached joint 67th among all films, not merely documentaries.

That rise feels appropriate for a film about discovering value in things others overlook.

Varda made a masterpiece about gleaning.

Cinema eventually gleaned the film itself and recognized what had been sitting there all along.

10. Amélie (2001)

There may be no Paris in cinema quite like the Paris of Amélie.

It is not realistic.

That is the point.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet transforms Montmartre into a storybook of deep greens, glowing reds, eccentric strangers, tiny pleasures and secret interventions.

Audrey Tautou plays Amélie Poulain, a shy waitress who discovers a hidden box of childhood possessions inside her apartment.

She returns it anonymously to its former owner.

Seeing his emotional response gives her an idea.

She will improve other people's lives.

From there, Amélie becomes a secret engineer of happiness.

She reunites people.

Creates coincidences.

Punishes cruelty.

Manipulates circumstances.

And avoids dealing with her own loneliness.

The movie's whimsical tone can make it seem lightweight on first viewing.

But underneath the elaborate visual design is a surprisingly recognizable emotional problem.

Helping other people is safe for Amélie.

Being vulnerable herself is terrifying.

She can construct an elaborate trail of clues for Nino.

She struggles to simply tell him how she feels.

That tension gives the film its heart.

The visual style is impossible to separate from its emotional effect.

Bruno Delbonnel's cinematography pushes Paris toward fantasy.

Yann Tiersen's accordion-heavy score became almost inseparable from the film.

Jeunet uses rapid montage, narration, visual effects and tiny character details to build a cinematic universe where private eccentricities matter.

Amélie became an enormous international success, receiving five Academy Award nominations and later being named European Film of the Year.

Twenty-five years later, the BFI described it as the biggest French film of its era and highlighted the uniqueness of its almost fantastical portrait of Paris.

There are more severe films on this list.

More formally radical films.

More philosophically difficult films.

But cinema also needs joy.

Few movies of the 2000s created it with such confidence.

What Makes These 10 Films So Important?

Put these movies beside one another and something becomes obvious.

They barely resemble each other.

Spirited Away is hand-drawn animation.

The Gleaners and I is a digital documentary.

The Dark Knight is a $100-million-plus superhero blockbuster.

The Piano Teacher is psychologically brutal European art cinema.

Before Sunset is essentially one prolonged conversation.

There Will Be Blood is an American historical epic.

Mulholland Drive operates through dream logic.

This variety is precisely what makes the decade so remarkable.

The 2000s were not dominated by one cinematic language.

Instead, filmmakers explored entirely different definitions of what movies could do.

The Decade Was Caught Between Two Cinematic Eras

The 2000s also arrived at a technological turning point.

Traditional film production remained dominant at the beginning of the decade.

Digital cinematography, digital editing and inexpensive consumer cameras were becoming increasingly powerful.

By the end of the decade, cinema was moving rapidly toward the digital ecosystem that defines modern filmmaking.

Agnès Varda's The Gleaners and I demonstrates one side of that transformation.

Its compact digital camera gave Varda a new form of freedom.

At the opposite end of the industrial scale, movies such as The Dark Knight demonstrated the continued power of large-format film photography and practical spectacle.

The decade did not replace one cinema with another.

For a while, multiple forms existed together.

That transitional quality helped produce extraordinary experimentation.

These Films Also Redefined Genre

Several selections took familiar genres and quietly rebuilt them.

The Dark Knight transformed superhero cinema into an urban crime tragedy.

Spirited Away rejected the assumption that animation needed to simplify emotions for children.

Before Sunset removed almost everything normally associated with romantic drama except conversation and time.

Mulholland Drive began as mystery and dissolved into psychological nightmare.

There Will Be Blood used the historical epic to examine capitalism and misanthropy.

The filmmakers were not trying simply to execute genre perfectly.

They were asking what else those genres could contain.

The Performances Were Extraordinary Too

The decade produced several performances that now feel inseparable from cinema history.

Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview.

Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut.

Heath Ledger as the Joker.

Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung as Chow and Su.

Naomi Watts as Betty and Diane.

Bill Murray's exhausted Bob Harris.

Audrey Tautou's quietly mischievous Amélie.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy somehow making conversation feel more suspenseful than action.

Many of these performances are powerful because they resist easy explanation.

Daniel Plainview is charismatic and repulsive.

Erika is victim and perpetrator.

The Joker is hilarious until the joke becomes terrifying.

Chow and Su communicate most powerfully through what they refuse to say.

Great acting frequently depends not on expressing emotion but controlling how much escapes.

The 2000s were full of actors who understood that.

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Which Film Is Really the Greatest of the 2000s?

If critical consensus is the standard, two films have separated themselves from much of the decade.

In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Drive.

In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll, they ranked fifth and eighth respectively among all films ever made.

That is extraordinary.

Not fifth and eighth among films of the 2000s.

Among films from the entire history of cinema.

But choosing between them reveals exactly why ranking art eventually becomes impossible.

Mulholland Drive is more mysterious.

In the Mood for Love is more emotionally restrained.

There Will Be Blood may contain the decade's most overwhelming lead performance.

Spirited Away may be its greatest feat of pure imaginative world-building.

Before Sunset may understand adult relationships better than any of them.

The Gleaners and I may ultimately prove more influential on personal documentary filmmaking.

There is no mathematical solution.

Greatness is not a statistic.

Films That Could Easily Have Made the List

Any list of only ten films from the 2000s is going to leave masterpieces outside.

A completely different but equally defensible list could include:

• Yi Yi (2000)
• Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
• City of God (2002)
• Talk to Her (2002)
• Oldboy (2003)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• Caché (2005)
• Brokeback Mountain (2005)
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
• The Lives of Others (2006)
• No Country for Old Men (2007)
• Zodiac (2007)
• WALL-E (2008)
• A Serious Man (2009)
• The White Ribbon (2009)

That is not a weakness in the original ten.

It is evidence of how deep the decade was.

Even the BFI's own retrospective of 2000s cinema extends well beyond the obvious canonical choices, reflecting how difficult it is to compress an entire decade of global filmmaking into a single list.

Why These Movies Have Aged So Well

The most interesting thing about a great-film list is not what critics thought when the movies were released.

It is what remains decades later.

Some movies dominate awards seasons and disappear.

Others initially seem strange, difficult or modest and become increasingly important.

Mulholland Drive has become more canonical.

The Gleaners and I has risen dramatically in critical estimation.

In the Mood for Love now stands inside the top ten of one of cinema's most prestigious international polls.

Spirited Away continues reaching new generations who were not alive when it premiered.

The Dark Knight remains the reference point whenever audiences debate the artistic possibilities of superhero films.

Before Sunset becomes more devastating as its viewers age.

That last point is particularly revealing.

Great cinema does not remain identical.

The film stays the same.

The viewer changes.

Watch Spirited Away at 10 and it is an adventure.

Watch it later and you may see a story about labor, identity, environmental destruction and childhood disappearing.

Watch Before Sunset at 20 and Jesse and Céline may seem romantic.

Watch it at 40 and their conversation about compromise, regret and time can feel completely different.

That ability to survive the changing viewer is one of the strongest tests of greatness.

The 2000s Produced Movies That Refused to Disappear

More than two decades after many of these films premiered, they remain extraordinarily alive.

Film students study them.

Directors cite them.

Critics continually reassess them.

New restorations return them to cinemas.

Scenes circulate online without losing their power.

And people who discover them for the first time continue having the strange experience of realizing that a movie made before they were old enough to watch it somehow understands something about their own lives.

That is ultimately why these ten films belong together.

Not because they won the most awards.

Not because every critic agrees.

Not because one ranking can permanently settle what the greatest films of the 2000s were.

They belong together because each demonstrates a different possibility of cinema.

A dream.

A memory.

A conversation.

A nightmare.

A fairy tale.

A documentary diary.

A superhero tragedy.

A story of capitalism.

A study of desire.

A small act of kindness in a fantasy version of Paris.

The 2000s gave us all of them.

And the distance between The Gleaners and I and The Dark Knight, between Amélie and The Piano Teacher, between Spirited Away and There Will Be Blood, is not evidence that the decade lacked a defining cinematic identity.

Perhaps that range was its identity.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the 10 greatest films of the 2000s?

A strong list includes In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Drive, There Will Be Blood, Spirited Away, The Piano Teacher, Before Sunset, Lost in Translation, The Dark Knight, The Gleaners and I and Amélie.

What is considered the greatest film of the 2000s?

There is no objective answer, but In the Mood for Love and Mulholland Drive have especially strong claims based on long-term critical consensus. In the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll they ranked fifth and eighth, respectively, among the greatest films of all time.

Is Mulholland Drive considered one of the greatest films ever made?

Yes. The 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll ranked David Lynch's Mulholland Drive eighth among all films in cinema history.

Why is In the Mood for Love considered a masterpiece?

Wong Kar-wai combines restrained performances, fragmented storytelling, expressive cinematography, music and production design to create a film about desire, memory and missed possibilities. Its reputation has grown to the point that critics ranked it fifth in Sight and Sound's 2022 all-time poll.

Did Spirited Away win an Oscar?

Yes. Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 75th Academy Awards.

Is Spirited Away one of the greatest films ever made?

It is widely regarded as one of animation's landmarks. The 2022 Sight and Sound poll placed it joint 75th among the greatest films of all time.

How many Oscars did There Will Be Blood win?

There Will Be Blood received eight Academy Award nominations and won two: Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit.

Why is Daniel Day-Lewis so famous for There Will Be Blood?

His performance as Daniel Plainview combines physical transformation, unusual vocal characterization and controlled menace. It earned him the Academy Award for Best Actor and became one of the most celebrated performances of the 2000s.

Did The Dark Knight win an Oscar?

Yes. The Dark Knight won two Academy Awards from eight nominations: Best Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger and Best Sound Editing.

Why was The Dark Knight important for superhero movies?

It demonstrated that a superhero blockbuster could function simultaneously as crime film, action spectacle and morally complex drama. Its enormous cultural impact influenced the darker and more serious tone adopted by many subsequent comic-book films.

What awards did The Piano Teacher win at Cannes?

Michael Haneke's The Piano Teacher won the Grand Prix at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Isabelle Huppert won Best Actress and Benoît Magimel won Best Actor for the same film.

Did Lost in Translation win an Oscar?

Yes. Sofia Coppola won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. The film received four nominations overall, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Bill Murray.

Was Before Sunset nominated for an Oscar?

Yes. Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke were nominated for Adapted Screenplay, with the story credited to Linklater and Kim Krizan.

Why is The Gleaners and I considered important?

Agnès Varda used lightweight digital filmmaking to combine documentary, autobiography, social observation and essay cinema. Critics ranked it eighth in Sight and Sound's 2014 documentary poll and joint 67th in the publication's 2022 all-time film poll.

How successful was Amélie?

Amélie became a major international arthouse success, received five Academy Award nominations and was named European Film of the Year.

What other 2000s movies deserve consideration?

Frequently acclaimed alternatives include Yi Yi, City of God, Oldboy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Caché, Brokeback Mountain, Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, Zodiac, WALL-E and The White Ribbon.

Why were the 2000s such an important decade for cinema?

The decade combined traditional film production with rapidly expanding digital technology while global cinema, animation, documentary, independent filmmaking and large-scale franchise cinema all evolved simultaneously. The result was an unusually diverse period in which radically different forms of filmmaking could flourish at the same time.