100 Best films 2000-2020

A quietly devastating drama about a soft-spoken, bespectacled and devoted kindergarten teacher whose life is upended by a false accusation from one of his students. It offers a powerful, provocative study of mob mentality and the fabric of trust. You leave The Hunt unsettled in the best sense. Its images and implications are likely to stay in your head a long time.

This pitch-dark comedy, which was directed, con brio, by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, sizzles as the camera circles, stalks and swoops. Emmanuel Lubezki’s friction-free cinematography constitutes a virtuoso turn in its own right in a production that’s strewn with superb performances, some of them loud and bold, others subtle and restrained. The bravura gestures work gorgeously in Birdman, as does the humor, which playfully balances the film’s most mystical, contemplative ideas with a steady stream of inside jokes and well-calibrated shifts in tone and dynamics.

In a stunning performance, Teller resists the impulse to sugarcoat Andrew’s egocentricity. Simmons is equally impressive, lending Fletcher just enough humanity to render his monstrousness all the more shocking.Whiplash is true to its title. It throws you around with impunity, yet Chazelle exerts tight, exacting control over his increasingly feverish and often weirdly comic melodrama. Whiplash is cinematic adrenaline. In an era when so many films feel more refined by focus groups or marketing managers, it is a deeply personal and vibrantly alive drama

Nothing comes easily in Atonement, especially its ending, which, both happy and tragic, is as wrenching as it is genuinely satisfying. How fitting, somehow, that a novel so devoted to the precision and passionate love of language be captured in a film that is simply too exquisite for words.

It's a movie of such jaw-dropping violence, wild improbability and dazzling style it overpowers all resistance. Oldboy is a powerful film not because of what it depicts, but because of the depths of the human heart which it strips bare. Park's direction is flawless

It's surreal, erotic, creepy, frustrating, absorbing, transporting and torturous in the way only a Lynch film can be. The challenge is exhilarating. You can discover a lot about yourself by getting lost in Mulholland Drive. It grips you like a dream that won't let go.

The film is above all a consummate work of art, one that transcends the historically fraught context of its making, and its pleasures are unapologetically aesthetic. It reveals, excites, disturbs, provokes, but the window it opens is to human consciousness itself. There Will Be Blood is ferocious, and it will be championed and attacked with an equal ferocity. When the dust settles, it will be looked back on as some kind of obsessed classic.

Made with palpable energy, intensity and excitement, it compellingly creates a world gone mad that is uncomfortably close to the one we live in. Cuaron creates the most deeply imagined and fully realized world to be seen on screen this year, not to mention bravura sequences that bring to mind names like Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick.

Each episode of director Leos Carax's film perfectly masters the exact tone of a different genre. An electrifying, confounding, what-the-hell-just-happened exercise in unbounded imagination, unapologetic theatricality, bravura acting and head-over-heels cinema amour. Holy Motors, fueled by pure feeling, is a dream of a movie you want to get lost in. It's a thing of beauty.

A feast for the eyes and succor for the soul. Probably the most breathtakingly gorgeous film of the year or any year, dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema forever. Smolders with reserved passion.

Writer-director Kang Hyeong-Cheoi has a keen grasp of what motivates teenagers, which is mostly a desire to be an individual while also being exactly like everyone else. Poignant and filled moments of tenderness, humor and warmth

Departing from two decades' worth of domestic and personal dramas and returning to his roots as Japan's maestro of mayhem, Kinji Fukasaku has delivered a brutal punch to the collective solar plexus with one of his most outrageous and timely films. [Fukasaku's] genius is finding the overlap between teenage dreams and nightmares, between the intensity of first love and the terror of extinction.

This is the Paris -- and the mad, beautiful young Parisienne -- we look for in dreams. Joyous. This is a film that will put a goofy grin on your face from the opening frame, through to the credits, out into the lobby, the whole way home, and possibly even till you fall asleep.

A gripping, utterly unexpected noir, glinting with bits of poetry and a hard, deadpan humor. Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that's as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body. The astonishing payoff takes the film to another level entirely, unleashing a battery of existential questions that shed new light on everything that precedes it.

At its core, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind could have been just another love story. Refracted through Kaufman's wonderfully weird prism, it's something truly memorable. Works marvel after marvel in expressing the bewildering beauty and existential horror of being trapped inside one's own addled mind, and in allegorizing the self-preserving amnesia of a broken but hopeful heart.

The film is a bevy of contradictions - beauty and horror, young love and violence, innocence and guilt. The fact that it works at all is impressive. The fact that it's a mind-blowing sensory experience is inexplicable. A true original: love story, horror film and social drama. At once brilliant in its parts, and more than the sum of them.

The incredible first act boasts more horror, surprise and intrigue than most fully-formed features, this is a potent, almost unbearably visceral slice of confronting cinema. Impressively directed and beautifully shot, this is a superbly written thriller with strong performances and a terrific soundtrack.

The Chaser is an expert serial-killer film from South Korea and a poster child for what a well-made thriller looked like in the classic days. This is expert filmmaking at every level, continually adding engaging subtext that touches on family pressures, blind self-interest and warped justice. The Chaser delivers as a piece of cinema rather like Seven did - it doesn't let up for a moment.

Action and smarts don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. But director Nicolas Winding Refn deftly blends them in 'Drive,' a phenomenally entertaining movie that employs a haunting soundtrack, clever direction and entertaining characters. From its opening shots, Refn's movie is as cool and controlled as its protagonist... at once unhurriedly stylish and intensely gripping. You'd like to lean back and admire, but the action keeps pulling you to the edge of your seat.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's precise, uncanny performance as Capote doesn't imitate the author so much as channel him, as a man whose peculiarities mask great intelligence and deep wounds. Actor-turned-writer Dan Futterman's smart, subtle screenplay, which explores both Capote's determination to turn murder into literature and the deeply troubling questions he raised in the process. Small-scaled and limited, Capote is nevertheless an intelligent, detailed, and absorbing film ever made about a writer's working method and character--in this case, a mixed quiver of strength, guile, malice, and mendacity.

Very much a mood piece, the film's deft balance of humor and poignancy makes it both a pleasurable and melancholy experience. Lost in Translation revels in contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road.

Guillermo del Toro has crafted a masterpiece, a terrifying, visually wondrous fairy tale for adults that blends fantasy and gloomy drama into one of the most magical films to come along in years. Haunting and visually spectacular, this Spanish fable is not a story for children so much as an illustration of the blurred line between reality and daydreams that manifests with such resonance in childhood.

Nichols assembles a tense portrait of blue-collar life, while deepening his thematic interests and working on a bigger scale. Burrowing into the subconscious of a damaged man, he delivers a modern American epic with extraordinary restraint. Take Shelter, which, it should be said, boasts haunting but seamless visual effects, is a movie for this moment in time, this moment in our lives.

In terms of scale, The Tree Of Life recalls the mammoth ambition of Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but it's also more intimate and personal than Malick's previous films, rooted in vivid memories of growing up in '50s Texas. There is simply nothing like it out there: profound, idiosyncratic, complex, sincere and magical; a confirmation that cinema can aspire to art.

Director Hayao Miyazaki treats his audience as imaginative and intelligent human beings, rather than catering to kids with rote displays of silliness, stunts and scares. It's a visual masterpiece, it's breath-taking, it's timeless.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience. Wall-E is one for the ages, a masterpiece to be savored before or after the end of the world.

Unpredictable and rich with symbolism, this Argentinian murder mystery lives up to its Oscar with an engrossing plot, Juan Jose Campanella's assured direction, and mesmerizing performances from its cast.

A remarkably engrossing and thoughtful picture, beautifully rendered in an artful mode of realism stripped of pretense and sentimentality. It's a hard film to watch, especially if you know where it goes--I had to brace myself to see it a second time. But it's an important film, one of great feeling.

Beautifully poised, slow and sinister: a trance of expectant menace in which Fincher holds his audience until the movie's finale. No cheap tricks or cop-outs in this film. It's for true crime buffs who enjoy peeling and deciphering the layers.

At the risk of overhyping 80 minutes of intimate real-time, this is the soul of generosity, a beautifully vibrant and big-spirited film.

While the stories themselves are about the joys of losing control, their creator knows exactly what can be achieved with crafty pacing, masterly editing and a precisely controlled balance between the matter-of-fact and the shamelessly hysterical. A splendidly anarchic portrait of a world on the verge of a nervous breakdown.