The best movies of 2001
Where do Memento, Lord Of The Rings, and Mulholland Drive fall on our retrospective countdown?
Film Lists Jim Broadbent
Have the Oscars ever gotten it more wrong than they did in March of 2002, when Tom Hanks handed Best Picture to the treacly, forgettable biopic A Beautiful Mind? Okay, surely they have—the Academy has been making boneheaded calls for just shy of a century. But it’s still difficult to think of many Oscar-night moments as deflating as Ron Howard’s victory over not just four worthier opponents but every superior film his wasn’t competing against. Because 2001 was more than a great year for movies. It was an all-timer, perhaps even filthier with masterpieces than the fabled 1999.
2001 gave us powerhouse studio movies—a pageant of hobbits, monsters, sad robots, and all-star heists, all classing up the multiplex. Musicals got thrillingly, eccentrically modern. Horror experienced a miniature renaissance. Major works arrived from Mexico, Japan, France, Hong Kong, and so many other points on the world-cinema map. The triumphs came in all shapes and sizes, genres and languages. One even came from (gasp) TV.
We considered going to 50 this year. That’s how deep the pool of superlative films released two decades ago runs. What, no Donnie Darko? No Black Hawk Down? No Zoolander? Consider them honorable mentions; each would have made a better Best Picture, too. As usual, we stuck to movies released in America during the calendar year in question, which is why you won’t find Spirited Away or Y Tu Mamá También on the list (look for them next year, when we cite our favorites of 2002), and also why you will find Memento and In The Mood For Love there, despite earlier festival debuts.
Keep reading for The A.V. Club’s list of the 25 best movies of 2001, as chosen by a dozen of our regular contributors. Don’t agree with our picks? Hey, that’s okay, it was a treasure trove of riches in 2001—there were so many good movies that you could make a very solid list of the ones that didn’t make the cut. Happy with how we voted? Beautiful minds think alike.
218 Comments
Fat Girl is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.I’m not going to hedge it with “one of”. It is, without any doubt, the worst movie I’ve ever seen. A hateful piece of shit with no redeeming qualities.
Somebody get this man a copy of Ecks Vs. Sever, stat!
I have seen Ecks vs. Sever. It’s a terrible movie. It is better than Fat Girl.
That’s Ballistic: Ecks Vs. Sever. If you’re going to name-drop the worst-named movie of all time, at least get its cringingly awful name correct.
That’s like complaining I called it shit instead of dog shit.
I apologize for coming off as being genuinely critical; I was just trying to facetiously bring up that title (which, yes, I do think is the worst I’ve yet encountered), and I had the Randall-Mike “cretin” exchange from Monsters Inc. in my head thanks to this very list.
All good. I just love dunking on that movie.
No it’s not.
Man, you must have really pissed someone off to get re-greyed, my dude.Have a star and enjoy this thread.
Appreciate you confirming you’re the real recognitions. I was worried I might have uplifted an imposter.
They said “I’ve ever seen”, not worst movie ever. You don’t know what they’ve seen. Maybe they’ve been spared a lot of bad movies.
I mean it’s not a movie with no redeeming qualities. I know taste is subjective, and I’ll admit it’s far from a perfect movie but if you can’t at least take something away from it you’re being too dismissive.
I can “take something away” from it. What I take away is that it has an intense loathing of teenagers, men, women, sexuality, humanity and anyone who doesn’t fit the classical definition of beauty. It has nothing to say beyond the people are all loathsome assholes, and the completely out of nowhere ending is profoundly stupid. There is undoubtedly a “bUt ThE gReAtEr MeAnInG” crowd for it because it’s some arthouse nonsense from a director people have heard of, an attempt to justify the completely inept previous 90 minutes, but it’s an empty piece of hated.Yeah, I came away with something, that something is “fuck this movie, fuck everyone involved in this movie.” I have seen a lot of trash in my time, but this is worse than all of it.
I didn’t get that at all. The movie has a deep empathy for Anais, while allowing her to be a flawed kid who doesn’t necessarily respond to a bad situation in an ideal way.
It doesn’t have sympathy at all, and even if you think it does you get to the ending where she’s raped by the guy who kills her family and then it’s implied she likes it. Fuuuuuuuck that. Of course, you can read in the sympathy because you’re desperate to find a greater meaning to this cinematic dumpster fire but it’s not there. The movie hates every character, and never does anything but reinforce that everyone deserves their terrible treatment.
You don’t think the scene where Anais is imagining making out with an imaginary boyfriend in the pool shows sympathy for her? Or when she’s miserably watching her sister get it on with a dude in her bedroom? The movie very clearly demonstrates what a lonely existence she leads. The ending is harder to defend and certainly can ruin what came before for some, but I also think it’s meant to be more complicated than you’re implying.
I don’t think it implied she liked it at all. Instead it is a commentary on the ways that women rationalize the sexual violence done to them at an early age to better meet the myths they construct for themselves or are constructed for them. It is literally analogous to the sister being coerced into deeply uncomfortable anal sex she clearly does not enjoy, but then proceeds with a “relationship” to have the rest of the experience have meaning.
As I was saying: “you’re desperate to find a greater meaning to this cinematic dumpster fire but it’s not there”
Well… maybe there are deeper meanings and redeeming qualities but, based on your description, I ain’t watching this film, no way no how!
Highlander II: The Quickening.
It’s worth mentioning about AI is that it was Kubrick’s wish to go with the robot looking alien (Yes apparently they’re robots not aliens.) schmaltzy ending and Spielburg respected his wishes even though he thought it was a bad idea.
Yeah, but it was still Spielberg’s mediocre execution that made a lot of the parts of the ending that most people dislike (making it unclear that they’re supposed to be evolved robots, not aliens; writing in a bunch of annoying technobabble about why his mother can only reappear for one day; making the soundtrack so treacly that it’s really unclear for viewers whether they’re supposed to read the scene as Spielbergian kitch)
Another interesting bit of trivia is that the ending depicts the final snuffing out of the human race and is not schmaltzy!
BTW I went back and read your 2015 (!!) piece on this. Old comments sections are like time traveling. Anyway, you’re spot-on about the “correct” ending. Leaving David at the bottom of the ocean would have been just a mean-spirited conclusion. The last act is certainly sweet in its own way, but come one – humanity is extinct, he gets just a single day with his mother (the ending of which is emotionally devastating), and goes out as the last link to us as a species. Yes it’s less bleak than spending eternity repeating a phrase to a statue, but hardly all sunshine and rainbows.
Thank you! And yeah, the thing I was sort of dancing around saying (and probably pretty much actually saying) in that piece was, hmm, if EVERY YUTZ ON THE INTERNET feels like he “came up with” the solution of ending the movie under the ocean, then it’s almost certainly not an interesting ending.
I think the reaction from the 99% of people who don’t feel the need to be super-edgy would have been a GIANT What the Fuck?? THAT’S the conclusion of David’s story??! The movie would have been savaged.
I don’t get how people find the ending of A.I. to be schmaltzy. It’s so horrifying, and is intended as such by Spielberg.
No shit – it’s heartwrenching. You have a robot programmed to love, and does love his mother, getting to spend one more day with her after…how long? Thousands of years?
And here’s the other fucked-up thing: Is that even really his mother? Or is she an artificial creation that is capable of loving David in a way the Monica we see in the first half of the film isn’t?
I don’t think it matters if she’s biological, mechanical, or just virtual, since it’s definitely just a recreation populated with details from David’s memory. “She” definitely gives him the unconditional love he’s craved since they first activated him. It’s a last meal treat for him before he’s unplugged.
It was horrifying that he didn’t realize the correct ending was to end it with the Blue Fairy, rather than have the boybot get his happy ending.
Whether people like AI or not, I never understood why so many people failed to understand the ending. Humans were gone and all that remained were the robots and evolved AI’s. I’s keep seeing comments about the “aliens” and I wondered what movie they watched.
Yeah, it’s kind of inexplicable how people managed to miss that extremely obvious element. On the other hand, I begrudgingly suppose that might indicate that it could have been better communicated by the film. I don’t know. It seemed immediate to me – oh yeah, these are the millenia-later descendants of the robot tech shown for the entirety of the movie prior to this! – but maybe I should be more charitable about that.
Seems an easy mistake – at least I made it. A common movie alien is smooth, translucent, emitting light, having no apparently skeleton. Also, they should have had a continuously recorded history and no need to excavate or explore solely for that knowledge. Were they aliens they would be doing those things. What is sure is that the David robot would have had all the capacitors fail long before that ice would have accumulated and the bios battery would have leaked, corroding all the traces around it. All that he’d have done is glitched and asked for the system disk to be inserted.
Why would they have had a continuously recorded history? That’s like saying humans should have full knowledge of everything that was happening 10,000 years ago.
Nothing disappears on the internet.
The internet has only been around for about 50 years and the Web only for a little over 30. You do know that internetreside on servers. Servers that eventually break down. You are taking several leaps to believe that (1) all information is and will be on the internet, and (2) that everything that is available on the internet today will be available 100 years from now, let alone 1000’s of years from now.
Self-aware artificial intelligence doesn’t exist yet. Let me know when that happens and we can discuss what they will be recording.
Whether its humans or AI, the idea that future sentient beings would have access to all knowledge because of the internet is silly.
Humans lose information because civilizations collapse. But that’s fine for the continuation of the human race because to make more humans all you need to do is fuck, and even illiterate peoples can do that. Robots need to be made in complicated factories. So if robotic civilization ever collapsed that would be the end of robots. So if they still exist thousands of years in the future, their society never collapsed. So there would be no reason to wonder about their past.
Civilization collapse is not the sole explanation for information loss. You seem to be under the false impression that all information would be recorded in the first place.And libraries can catch fire and hardware can become obsolete.
Digital storage? Some sort of cloud-like repository?
I’ll cop that I thought they were aliens the first time through as well. IIRC (been quite a while) the beginning of the act shows the frozen-over world with excavations in the ice, which led me to believe aliens had discovered earth and were performing archeology on the remnants of the human race.
I had no idea that it had been misunderstood. Aliens??
C’mon now.
Because robots don’t work that way? They don’t evolve, and even if they did, why would glowing blue things have a selective advantage?
The ending is only schmaltzy if you don’t think about it, like, at all. The end is brilliant in that it inverts the whole movie that came before, giving an AI a fake mom pet to fulfill his wish of getting human love, after all of humanity has been wiped out. That it’s presented as a fairy tale ending is a pretty great bit of counterpoint.
“One year before Spider-Man kicked off the superhero craze that’s dominated multiplexes these past two decades”ummmm… NO.X-Men, 2000.
Um, I think you mean Blade, 1998.Anyway, Spiderman netted over 800 million to X-Men’s ~300 million. While X-Men surely deserves some credit, the first Spiderman movie is definitely the actual catalyst.
You mean the “R” rated film that came out after the catastrophe that was Spawn?Undoubtedly, Spiderman is more popular. X-Men started the modern superhero market in film, though. If that had failed? Things would probably look quite a bit different now.
It’s not that Spiderman is more popular, it’s that it was explosively profitable. Adjusted for inflation, X-Men made less money than three of the four Batman movies that preceded it. That’s pretty good, but we’re not talking about any of those movies kicking off a superhero craze. I think it’s a good movie on par with Spiderman, but it absolutely did not have same effect on the market. The Nolan trilogy and the MCU both could exist without X-Men, but not without Spiderman.
The skinny, geeky teen protagonist that has an ass-kicking secret identity and a knock-out partner is ABSOLUTELY a reason why Spider-Man works financially, so popularity is an outgrowth of that.
It’s why they keep RE-making the films, to the point of annoyance, almost.I welcome a more adult version of Disney as easily as I settle into their X-Men introductions.We’ll see what happens.
delete
If anyone had seen Mystery Men, I would have argued that it set off the superhero craze.
lol, thanks for that.
‘Mystery Men’ had the power to be invisible, but only when people weren’t looking at it.So, all the time.
I don’t mean to sound like the proverbial old man, but lord, there used to be a lot more better movies in a given year than nowadays…
I actually disagree, there have been a lot of absolutely fantastic movies over the last few years. However, I will agree that they are often shut out of actual theatres and only really show up on streaming services. If only the multiplex would use those extra screens to play something daring.
I would raise 2016, 2017, and 2019 as some recent years that disprove this!
Hey, mind if I hang out on your lawn for a while?
I expect it’s well-manicured.
Sounds like you need to watch more movies, or at least check out more beyond blockbuster stuff if you’re not already. There’s tons of great stuff, too much great stuff.
Sometimes you feel like a boob, sometimes you don’t,
Mulholland Drive’s got boobs, LoR don’t.
Would it have killed Jackson to give the Balrog a sweet rack?
You know Bombadil had some not nymphs hanging around, but no…
As a teenage boy, I REALLY appreciated Mulholland Drive.
No. The editing of Moulin Rouge was not good, anticipating the over-editing of future blockbusters like Transformers. But the latter one made me faint, too, so I never saw the whole thing.
There’s also a tendency for the film’s fans to be like, “Ugh, those stodgy critics who complain about the frenetic pace and mix-and-match cover songs just don’t appreciate a film that’s fun and poppy!” But to me the problem was always that Moulin Rouge mangles that pop sensibility in service of a story that’s extremely dreary and self-important.I recently saw a theatrical production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It that intermixes the Bard’s words with a grab bag of Beatles covers. And it works like gangbusters—because it’s a lighthearted sex comedy about young people having fun and lusting after one another, and the songs complement that perfectly. Moulin Rouge, on the other hand, tries to be this heavy-ass story about a doomed love affair crushed under the weight of a corrupt oligarchy—which has less than nothing to do with the pop music it thoughtlessly incorporates.
I loved it, I think the pop music is just to remind us that love is timeless, it’s a cheesy message but simple message!
Yeah, pop music has never had anything to do with doomed love affairs!
Not what I said. The issue with this particular doomed love affair is that it’s bound up in a dreary faux-deep story about an evil duke, as if pop music were about standing up to the Man in some portentous political way instead of just by being young and heedless.
But… the story isn’t dreary, in so much as it’s told with colorful and ebulliently staged musical numbers, the evil duke is a cartoon mustache-twirler, and defines its own message as “the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love, and be loved in return.” It’s advertising its own simplicity, so it seems weird to ding it for attempting to marry pop songs to a “faux-deep” story. The story is consciously told in archetypes!
Also, the idea that being young and heedless has nothing to do with standing up to whatever authority (or trying to and failing, or trying to and succeeding in some ways but still ultimately failing!) is deeply bizarre. The movie makes an explicit and tongue-in-cheek connection to the “summer of love” of the late 1960s.
I guess I see it as kinda the opposite: a movie that’s centrally about the colorful ebullience of the Moulin Rouge, only it’s weighed down by this bleak narrative about Nicole Kidman being menaced by an upper-class rapist and then dying of tuberculosis. A movie about old-timey party people could just be about . . . parties and irresponsibility and heartbreak, not tragic melodrama. It’s like a version of Almost Famous where Penny Lane dies of that drug overdose at the end.
Also, the idea that being young and heedless has nothing to do with
standing up to whatever authority (or trying to and failing, or trying
to and succeeding in some ways but still ultimately failing!) is deeply
bizarre.
I don’t think we disagree on this point. I specifically faulted the film for having its characters stand up to the Man “in some portentous political way” instead of “by being young and heedless”—as in, the latter is the way the pop crowd actually tries to buck authority.
The characters are absolutely young and heedless! They are self-described bohemians, not political revolutionaries! There’s really very little political portent to it at all! (Or rather, any of that is underneath it, not really in the text/characterizations. McGregor’s character is a “penniless writer” who believes in “truth, beauty, and love”… that’s portentous??)
Do I think it’s inappropriately weighty for a character analogized to a pop songwriter to be characterized in all seriousness as being devoted to “truth, beauty, and love”? I one hundred percent do!
To return to my earlier analogy, it’s like a version of Almost Famous where Jason Lee’s character proclaims “Rock and roll can change the world,” but we’re supposed to take that opinion seriously instead of him later realizing “I sound like a dick!”
I think it’s the “in all seriousness” where we depart, here. I think the movie is sincere, but not serious, in the sense that it treats McGregor’s character as a sweet and earnest romantic hero, not a revolutionary with big ideas. As far as belief systems go, truth, beauty, and love are not exactly lofty concepts, are they? They’re extremely broad ideals.
Hell, in Almost Famous, yeah, Lee admits he sounds like a dick. But is the movie’s point of view that rock and roll is pompous bullshit? Or does it end with Billy Crudup describing what he loves about music with “to begin with, everything”??Neither of these movies are cynical about pop music, and neither of them are pompous about its seriousness. It’s pure love.
Everything you don’t like about it is because it’s basically an opera updated to a modern musical style, and it really should be critiqued with that in mind. I think that the film shows that all the things audiences historically found so compelling about opera still resonate with them as long as the music is made accessible.
And then Baz actually directed the opera with the Bohemians at the Met….I really enjoyed his production of La Boheme, with the L’Amour sign front and center. And the Act 3 set change was so magnificient a bunch of us applauded the stage crew.
Obviously, I am into the aesthetic, but then again, I loved Strictly Ballroom a decade earlier. It is okay if it is not your taste, but if it is it is fantastic.
pop music is often connected to standing up for yourself and for who you love, it’s appropriate for a romance musical 🙂
I never saw Bazza’s version of ‘The Great Gatsby’, partially because the advertising made it clear that he’d filled a movie based on a book explicitly about what was wrong with the Jazz Age with a bunch of hip-hop, rap and R&B songs.(I have no problems with those genres themselves, but, again. Great Gatsby. Jazz Age.)
The editing to me felt truly bizarre. Like I was watching a David Lynch movie. It was completely incomprehensible and assaultive. Looking at it through a scary arthouse lens, I appreciated it.
The only thing that really stays with me after all these years is the “Can -Can” number with Kidman swinging around on a trapeze, and the constant super close-up shots that looked like they were using fisheye lenses. I appreciate what Luhrman was going for but ultimately don’t feel the need to see it again. Mcgregor’s good.
I switched over to Moulin Rouge a few times when it was on and the editing is like a fricking flea…never on one shot for more than a 3/4 beat, no full reactions, no sense of the geometry or connections.
It’s kind of amazing how much of a moving goalpost ‘the worst movie to ever win Best Picture’ is, depending on whatever ax a given writer has to grind at any given time. At various points, I’ve heard the ‘honor’ given to both Crash and Shakespeare in Love, which, if accurate in either case, would have made A Beautiful Mind not even the worst movie to win Best Picture within that particular 7 year time period.
SIL beat out Saving Private Ryan for best picture, and that is frankly unforgivable
Yeah but Shakespeare in Love was an actually good movie, which puts it ahead of Crash and A Beautiful Mind. If anything winning Best Picture was the worst thing that could have happened to SiL’s long-term reputation, had it been merely nominated & Gwyneth Paltrow won Best Actress it’d probably be remembered very fondly today (I sure as hell enjoyed it in theaters when I saw it a couple months before the Oscars).
Yes, it was a fun movie, and Paltrow was at the peak of her cuteness (and wasn’t a con-artist selling newage garbage yet)
I don’t know. The first 20 minutes are amazing, the rest a lot less interesting to me. Definitely changed how war movies were made, though. You can either go hyper real or make it quirky. Led directly to Band of Brothers, which I have seen ten times.
I think that’s most people’s beef. It’s a fun, clever movie but best of the year? C’mon.There’s also the fact that it laid the template for the Weinstein Awards Hype Machine to lobby for awards, which many people rightly hated.
I’m not sure SPR aged that well — there’s a good argument to be raised that all that WWII nostalgia and the myth of a “good war” ultimately encouraged the largely bipartisan support for the Iraq War — after all, WWII supposedly showed that overthrowing dictators and setting up a democratic government could work and was a noble thing. Except that while Germany and Japan turned out way better than Iraq, it’s really questionable if that was really generalizable and if nobility rather than simply trying to set up regimes favorable to the US was the real goal.
Anyone making claims about “worst Best Picture” needs to sit through The Broadway Melody (1929), The Great Ziegfeld, and Around the World in 80 Days.
Or The Greatest Show on Earth.
That was the Academy admitting that they screwed up by not giving an Oscar to DeMille for The Ten Commandments. Just like the Best Actress Oscar to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins was really for her performance in The Sound Of Music.
I actually found The Broadway Melody kind of charming, if very slight – and the big dance number is surprisingly bad.Now Cimarron, now there’s some garbage.
The thirties is full of bad Oscar winners. “Cavalcade” is the worst. And I have seen all the best picture winners.
Forrest Gump isn’t mentioned enough in these conversations.
The Greatest Show on Earth is still my top one. Possibly because I have avoided seeing Crash.
Crash is just very stupid in the way it goes about its combination of everything’s connected and everyone’s racist. Don Cheadle making fun of his Hispanic girlfriend with barbs about Mexicans parking their cars on lawns, when she’s not Mexican and he knows it, is a particular gem.
I’m still bitter that ‘Shakespeare in Love’ beat out the far superior ‘Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter’.
I just don’t get describing A Beautiful Mind as “treacly and forgettable”. For me it was a horror movie and a tragedy, watching such a brilliant mathematician (and author of one of my favorite mathematical insights) in such a struggle. It was also ambiguous and open-ended, in a good way — what has his recovery really meant for him and his abilities?It’s a movie that has stuck with me for 20 years. If you want a turd from 2001, it’s Gosford Park. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I saw Gosford Park in the cinema and was bored out of my mind. And I like period dramas and murder mysteries.
Screw the haters. A Beautiful Mind deserved its accolades. It’s thrilling and well-acted. Great soundtrack as well.Gosford Park… is, well “turd” is a bit harsh, but my philosophy on stuffy, British, prestige films like this are that they’re incapable of being bad in a standard sense, only just boring.
Like often happens with online discussions of best movies, it always seems like there’s huge recency bias. Even serious critics, who are usually better about including older stuff on the good lists, seem a little gunshy around the older winners, who have acquired a little prestige just by virtue of age. If someone’s making a list of “worst” best picture winners, 10-30% will come from the first fifty years, and 70-90% from the last forty.
Some good films here, but I reckon Amélie is way too low and AI is way too high. I love Ghost World, though, I haven’t seen that in a long time.
I’d knock two off of this list and replace with Spirited Away and Legally Blonde, both fantastic movies that made cultural splashes that are still felt today!
There’s a note at the beginning of the article about why Spirited Away is not included.
ah, good catch! I still stand by Legally Blonde being one of the better classic comedies out there, and deserves a spot!
I only watched ‘Legally Blonde’ a few years ago, because I mistakenly believed it would be a very stupid movie. It’s actually a whole lot of fun as well as being smarter than the advertising would make you expect.
Yeah, legally blonde is a great movie as well as niche classic for a wire large niche. Despite being same age as the characters when it’s came out, I am currently in law school and that movie has made a lasting impression on a generation of women. Just look at the number of Redditors named “ellewoods1996″ etc on r/LawSchool.
We did consider renting a chihuahua for my roommate to carry across the stage at her law school graduation in 2003 because of Legally Blonde. She already had all the pink shoes …
Swap that out for Black Hawk Down, then. Just a pure war flick, all killer no filler.
I was puzzled at first to see Cure in a list of “best movies of 2001″, even accounting for 2001 being the U.S. release year, since Cure first released in fuckin’ 1997! It took four damn years to get stateside? Didn’t realize that. Awesome movie though.
Noel’s last line on Royal Tenenbaums – “It’s an effective aesthetic, but it’ll never feel as surprising and new as it did with this beautifully melancholy vision.” – captures my experience seeing it as a teenager. A friend who had a parent in SAG brought over a screener and 10 or so of us watched it, not really knowing anything about it (let alone having seen his earlier movies) – I think about two-thirds of us disliked it, but I was basically hooked from the first second. I still think it’s my favorite of his, but that might just be because of that experience.
I’m like your two-thirds: I found it so unpleasant I never finished watching it.
You should give it another shot. I just love that movie and I think its perfect in everyway. Endlessly rewatchable.
I’m still not a Wes Anderson fan.
I watched RT with my parents (I saw it first and recommended it). We all got teary at the same time. I love that movie so much.
I originally thought ‘Tenenbaums’ was too twee for me. Then I watched ‘Rushmore’, loved it, and went back and could appreciate ‘Tenenbaums’ for what it was. Now I’m a huge Wes Anderson fan (though I haven’t gotten around to ‘Bottle Rocket’ yet.)
You must. Those three movies really make up a particular period for WA that ended with Tenenbaums
Bottle Rocket may as well be by a different director. It’s like Anderson was using the experience to learn How to Make a Movie. It’s nowhere near the heightened reality of his other films. Hanging with young Owen and Luke Wilson is fun.
I always think of Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and RT as a kind of loose trilogy. The characters are all different, yet somehow holding a lot of the same quirks. I stumbled across Bottle Rocket when (I think) A&E aired it six months before Rushmore came out. The Darjeeling Limited was the last film WA did that I watched and enjoyed (I know most WA fans don’t care for it, but holds up well for me). I’ll still watch everything he puts out, but it seems he’s more of a style over substance director/writer anymore…which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, just not my thing.
I think Tenenbaums succeeds and holds up because Gene Hackman and Anjelica Huston pushed Wes Anderson so hard on deepening their characters.Also it’s funny to watch the movie and see so many things Anderson probably wouldn’t do nowadays, like using a handheld camera during the Ben Stiller fire drill sequence.
I remember seeing it in the theater and liking it, but only barely — like it it was a few (Wes Anderson – I now know) quirks away from being a little bit too much for me. But my best friend had the soundtrack playing in her room on Thanksgiving when we were hiding from the adults and I ended up buying a copy for myself. I fell so madly in love with the soundtrack that the next time I saw the film I instantly loved every frame. Ice been all through his catalogue at this point but Tenenbaums will forever be my most favorite.
No Corky Romano??
Boy, do I have the reminiscence for you!!https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/death-of-snl-vehicles/
Just rewatching a few of these trailers makes me wonder when, if ever, studios have known how to make them good. Not to shit on the late Don LaFontaine too much, but why did anyone think using some random voice over the trailer to poorly sum up the movie was a good idea? Also, were all these playing at 1.25-1.5x speed or something? There’s no pause to let a line land. Even Fellowship of the Ring, which seems to be flirting with a more modern trailer style, is hurtling through everything. The “You have my sword” bit is 8 seconds long in the movie, which allows a little swelling of emotion, but it’s shaved to bits in the trailer and lands in less than half that.
I don’t think modern movie trailers are perfect or anything, but most of them actually seem to try to follow a sort of makeshift act structure to give the idea of a 2 minute movie, instead of simply cramming as much of the movie as they can into as little time as possible, introducing us to “a world, where nothing is as it seems”, and calling it a wrap.
I read somewhere a while ago that the trailers are generally not made by the actual production company, they just provide the footage that can be used to a company who makes trailers and also that trailers tend to follow trends (deep bass BWAAAA sound, slowed and stripped versions of old songs, etc.) There seems to be a fine line between showing too much and showing too little but I think more modern trailers are still worlds better than anything that came out in the 90’s.
Bonus life tip: if someone in the trailer gets hit in the balls the movie is not going to be worth watching.
I had a friend who worked for one of those companies, so I can tell you that you are correct. He said that so many trailers are the same (using the same sound effects and musical cues) because it’s the same people making them and, for the most part, they don’t care that much. So, that’s why every trailer goes “BWAAAA.”
I’m enthralled with the idea that there’s only a handful of people in the world who can make a movie trailer. “Yeah this is Derek and he’s overseen the production of 200 over the last 3 years. He also has a patent on slowing down a pop song for use in advertising.”
I remember when every film trailer began with, “In a world…” I think even ‘The Usual Suspects’ did that, and that was very much set in, you know, our world. We don’t need to be told what kind of world it is, trailer!
My favorite era of trailers is the ones from the 50s that had Les Tremayne as the voiceover. The films were typically staid soap operas but the copy and Les’ reading seemed designed to make you think, against all logic, that you were going to see an onscreen orgy straight out of Caligula
I’d love to know what the original BWAAA trailer was. I’m guessing something like Independence Day.
It’s been ages since I saw a genuine trailer narrated by a deep voiced man who isn’t a character in the film, yet the Honest Trailers series still makes this joke work because it was so ubiquitous for so long.
The Force Awakens trailer was a small masterpiece.Yes, I know.
The teaser trailer is possibly one of the top 5 of all time. Regardless of how you feel about the movie, it hits every note perfectly and gives away nothing while building a ridiculous amount of expectation. The official trailers are also very good, but they do suffer a bit from that “giving too much away” tendency.
I think the 2 minute trailer can be the perfect ad, the 3 minute ones tend to give away too many spoilers.Although the 5-6 minute first scene IMAX trailers are good at giving a tone without ruining later surprises.
Agreed. Personal favorite:
Well, I think a strong case can be made for trailers, on the whole, improving as time goes by, but it’s also true that the best trailer of all time was made in 1974:
It’s hard to argue that but I will say that the A Serious Man trailer is a masterpiece of the form.
True, that trailer is definitely top 5 material.
The ‘Ghost World’ trailer up there was so weird. It’s just clips from the film, mostly delivered in deadpan, until a voiceover guy who sounds like he’s had too many coffees comes in at the end to tell you what it is.
I swear I don’t remember them being this bad
I’m not usually one to argue with listicles, that most subjective of pop culture criticism, but I would place Fellowship easily within the top 10 on this list.It remains one of the few truly good fantasy movies ever made (and I love fantasy). It’s a technical triumph that offers still astonishing spectacle while also retaining a sense of heart and character that other blockbusters still can’t manage. It’s really just a great movie. The top five selected here are all worthy of acknowledgment as the best cinema from this year, but I think the best wizard’s duel ever put to film should earn this at least 7th.
What ‘LotR’ has going for it, I think, is absolute sincerity. There’s no winking at the camera, no suggesting that it’s silly that you’re watching elves shoot goblins with arrows. Just pure commitment to the epic nature of the story.
I think Fellowship is the best part of the books, and I actually give Jackson more credit for the later films because I think he had less to work with.
A.I. is a masterpiece from arguably one of modern cinema’s best directors, so I would have put it higher than #8. Especially since #7 may be my least liked Coen brothers movie (I’ve seen it twice and the movie wasn’t there). #6: I recently saw it for the first time, and knowing, vaguely, how it would go, the well-done rom-com feel of the beginning confused me. I also expected it to live up to its reputation but it was relatively tamer than I thought in that regard. “Heh” on the write-up.
I’ll be That Guy: Fellowship of the Ring should be #1. Ghost World, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Amores Perros, Mulholland Dr. and a lot of other movies on this list are five star classics (I’ll also be That Guy and say that In the Mood for Love bored me senseless), but 20 years and probably 200 viewings later I can still throw on Fellowship on a cold December night and watch it with fresh eyes every single time. Sometimes the popular answer is the right one.
I like Mulholland Drive more than most, but yeah, it doesn’t deserve the to spot.
Nah, that’s the right location for it.
Mulholland Drive is one of my favorite films…probably most fave. Plus with the callout to the Winkie’s Diner scene, I love it’s #1 spot.
I think Fellowship is the best adaption of the three LotR movies and I still love it so much.
I don’t know why, but seeing Fellowship of the Ring ranked behind Ocean’s 11 (a movie I quite enjoyed, incidentally) was where I completely lost it.
This is my issue, mostly.
Most of the movies on this list deserve to be on the list. But Ocean’s 11 ahead of Lord of the Rings and Amelie and Amores Perros? Seriously?
You have my upvote.
Agree re LotR. I have the extended edition on Bluray and watch it every year or so. (It’s the only Bluray I own and I can’t imagine buying another one. My Bluray player is effectively a dedicated LotR machine.) Of the other films, The Royal Tennenbaums and — yes — In the Mood for Love are the ones I revisit. I could watch Ghost World again. I don’t have any particular desire to revisit Mulholland Dr.
Maybe I’m blinded by nostalgia but I really like to think I have ok taste, and I agree, though it is hard to parse out one part of the trilogy for accolades compared to the whole. I watch a *lot* of fantasy and sci-fi TV shows and movies and most of them are honestly garbage. It’s a miracle Jackson & Co were able to pull it off.
Nah, Mulholland Drive is Lynch’s masterpiece and absolutely the best and most deserving film of the bunch. Fellowship is really good but it isn’t even the best LOTR movie.
Not hardly. Other than some decent soft-core lesbian porn in the middle, that film was completely forgettable.
Weird, you’d think I’d remember a scene like that in Fellowship.
I love A Beautiful Mind! One of the best movies of all time!
Waking Life erasure. But thank fucking Christ Shrek is not on this list.
Just my opinion, but I feel like anyone old enough to have been alive in 2001 is now too old to still be into Waking Life.
I voted for it on my ballot but I have to admit, that probably had a little to do with (a.) not rewatching it for this project (in fact, it was probably the only movie on my ballot that I hadn’t seen in the past five years) (b.) not having time to catch up on a couple more beloved favorites that I missed at the time and (c.) not thinking this was a really spectacular year (outside of my top five, which are five of my favorite movies ever and easily my favorite group of five at the top of any movie list of my lifetime).
Yeah I remember loving it seeing it in theaters in college. Just revisited it for the first time in decades and, oh man, does not hold up for me. I mean when rotoscoping is now used for insurance company commercials, there’s nothing special about it anymore. Music is still really good, though.
Yep. That and Black Hawk Down should be on this list.
It will never stop amusing me that Steve Buscemi’s character is basically a Mary Sue of director Terry Zwigoff. He basically wrote himself into Clowes’ story, and gave himself an affair with a teenager in the process.I still don’t understand the ending of Fat Girl. It’s one of those endings where you can’t tell if you missed the point or if the writer couldn’t think of anything good and just threw some random shit in there.The ending of AI is good actually and it definitely made more of an impression on me than The Man Who Wasn’t There, which I always felt was lesser Coen. Though it has been a while since I watched it.Royal Tenenbaums was the last movie in which Anderson’s characters felt more like real people than whimsical wind-up dolls.
Buscemi’s character in Ghost World is a social malcontent who forges a bond with a like-minded teenage girl who sleeps with him in a moment of desperation and immediately/obviously regrets it deeply. The character ends the movie in therapy, living with his mother, very likely lonelier than ever. If Zwigoff was trying to pull a Mary Sue, he doesn’t understand the concept. (I mean, I would bet that he probably isn’t aware of the concept, but moreover, the idea of a Mary Sue isn’t especially applicable to lacerating self-portraits.)
Self-insert then, whatever.
I’m not a fan of the term “Mary Sue”, but as commonly accepted it is typically taken to be an idealized, overpowered, or lauded character acting as authorial wish-fulfillment. A character shown as self-loathing, inept, and struggling would not seem to fit that description.I’m not even sure if calling Seymour an “authorial insert” would be accurate, since he appears in Clowes original graphic novel. Zwigoff did clearly identify strongly with the character.
The horrifying thought would be if, that all taken into account, Seymour still is an actual Mary Sue for Zwigoff.“Man, I wish my life were that good! Oh, hey, it’s lunch time, better open a fresh vodka bottle.”
Lol
“Gosh, it sure would be nice to know people who I could talk to about how much they suck.”
Well, considering that Zwigoff spent aroud three years almost broke trying to make “Crumb” and suffering from back pain so severe he slept with a gun under the pillow hoping to get the nerve to off himself I would say it’s entirely possible.
Self- insert is better. Even then characters like Rey are clearly not an author avatar, so people need to lay off of her. Sam Tarly is definitely GRRM’s insert, and he isn’t overpowered in any way besides with the power of book-reading!
Superb Audition capsule.
I’m glad to see some love for Monsters Inc. here; while not as deep or as daring as Pixar’s best, it’s just about perfect entertainment. Sulley’s face when he learns what puce is will never not make me laugh. And the chemistry between Billy Crystal and John Goodman is exhibit A in why actors sometimes really ought to be recording their lines together.It’s really annoying that Disney+ lacks the mid-credits scenes, though. C’mon, Disney, put “Put That Thing Back Where It Came From, Or So Help Me!: The Musical” back where it came from, or so help me!
Yeah it’s wonderful. The world is brilliantly realized, the monster designs are so creative, it looks beautiful, and it has the best voice acting of any Pixar movie. Plus, Boo is an absolutely adorable but non-cloying character who actually gets her own personality. And it’s by leaps and bounds the funniest Pixar movie – I wonder if that’s part of why it’s not often mentioned, since comedy is more disrespected and Monsters, Inc., while it works like gangbusters emotionally too, has the most pure comedy of any Pixar film. I think Monsters U is actually pretty solid too. The stakes are incredibly low, which in itself is a daring choice. And the message that, hey, there are multiple paths, dreams don’t always work out and that’s ok, and hard work at something you want is more important than being a college grad, is pretty unusual!
In the Bedroom tops my 2001 list. It’s such a good depiction of grief and the performances are incredible. Tom Wilkinson in particular just blew me away.
Yep, surprised that didn’t make it. Monster’s Ball should also be in the conversation.
I’ve never gotten around to Monster’s Ball, I guess because I haven’t found myself in such a fine mood that I needed to deliberately torpedo my good cheer.
It is a genuinely tough drama, but ultimately it’s a hopeful and life-affirming story in the end.Ironic that it’s probably more famous for its truly torrid sex scene than how heavily it comes down on the viewer’s emotions.
holy hell that was a good year
All you motherfuckers are gonna pay. You are the ones who are the ball-lickers. We’re gonna fuck your mothers while you watch and cry like little bitches. Once we get to Hollywood and find those AV Club fucks who left us outta their 2001 list, we’re gonna make ‘em eat our shit, then shit out our shit, then eat their shit which is made up of our shit that we made ‘em eat. Then all you motherfucks are next. Love, Jay and Silent Bob.
A Beautiful MindMulholland DriveAmelieThe Royal TenanbaumsThe OthersThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the RingHarry Potter and the Philosopher’s StoneThe Devil’s BackboneDonnie DarkoLegally BlondeShaolin SoccerSpirited AwayMillennium ActressAtlantis: The Lost EmpireMonsters, Inc.
Good work, that was very much the correct top pick.
20 years on, I can still remember my excitement waiting for ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ to come out. I was counting down the days until December 26th. I can’t imagine what I’d have felt if it had disappointed me, but luckily it had quite the opposite effect.
That whole undertaking had such the potential to be an abject disaster. I honestly still can’t believe anyone gave Jackson that kind of budget and authority at that point in his career.
I think that might be the best no-spoiler review of Audition I’ve ever seen. As hard as it is to go into a movie these days knowing nothing about it, this is indeed the best way to see Audition.
I wonder how many people understood what Mulholland Drive was about on their first viewing. I know I didn’t.If there’s one movie on this list I hope more people watch it’s Cure. Excellent movie.
I sure didn’t. In fact, it actively made me mad, because I can’t stand movies like that. I thought about it, and thought about it, and it wasn’t until after the it had been on my mind for days (close to a week, I think) that I realized that I had actually watched something remarkable that was having an effect on me
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge(2001)Tillsammans [aka Together] (2000)The Isle (2000)Thirteen Conversations About One Thing(2001)In the Bedroom (2001)Storytelling (2001)In the Mood for Love (2000)Fat Girl (2001)Chopper (2000)The Princess and the Warrior (2000)Werckmeister Harmonies (2000) was one of those rare instances I caught at CIFF (likewise Imamura’s Warm Water…) otherwise Tarr’s Werckmeister would absolutely make the list (as well). so there
This list has been weighed, and it has been measured, and it has been found wanting “A Knight’s Tale”.
Great list, made only slightly sad by the low ranking of Lord of the Rings, which I feel should be at least ten places higher than it is.
Has to be said, the otherwise admirable effort to conceal the spoilers in the write-up for Audition is kind of scuttled by the YouTube thumbnail on the attached trailer, which immediately clues the viewer in to the fact that SPOILER(ISH) things end up taking a rather nasty turn.
Yeah, it does kind of wreck the joke, doesn’t it?
Was worth a shot.Also a good example of why people complaining about spoilers in reviews is kind of silly. Hard to discuss what’s good and bad about a movie without some details.
I would assume for most readers, the purpose of a review is to determine whether to watch the movie being reviewed; in order to make that judgment, some spoilers are probably necessary. But if a review talks about, e.g., that great climactic moment where Darth Vader claims to be Luke’s father, I’d say that’s going too far.
Oh for sure. “I see dead people” is a great example of a trailer spoiling a key twist that isn’t revealed until halfway through the movie. It’s a fine line with reviews, but the “DON’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT THE MOVIE!!” crowd needs to just not read if they’re going to get that worked up.
American Pie 2 should be on this list, it is better than Mulholland Drive.
It’s funnier than the first one, which I rarely find comedy sequels to be. They were smart to realize nobody actually cares about any of the guys besides the heart of the thing being Jason Biggs and Allison Hannigan
Apparently I’m one of the few who found the romantically-marketed Amélie to be a creepy story about a weirdo stalker.
Why is “rock musical” cringe-worthy?!?
MULLHOLLAND DRIVE might just be my favourite Lynch film, as it has a cracking soundtrack and gets weird without becoming incoherent. And yeah, the alley scene made pretty much everyone in the cinema jump when I first saw it!
He might have won, too, were it not for the fact that he was competing against Denzel Washington in Training Day.
Please. He wouldn’t even have beat Russel Crowe’s John Nash. Hell, I’d place him behind Sean Penn going “full retard” in I Am Sam, too (Tropic Thunder brutalized this movie, but all things being fair, Penn was still unrecognizably good). ALI didn’t work for me. One of my problems was I didn’t see Muhammad Ali, I could only see Will Smith- doing a bad imitation, quite frankly. (For comparison, Eli Goree does a much better job in One Night in Miami). But even casting aside, a biopic about The Greatest should have been more interesting than it was, and should have had more personality than it did. Michael Mann may not have been the right director for this story.
Meanwhile I’m always finding new dimensions to Training Day every time I watch it. Some may have felt Denzel got a sympathy Oscar here, but I believe Alonzo’s mind games make it a pretty amazing performance and it was well-deserved.
Looking back at LoTR, the themes must’ve fucking hit like a truck in 2001.
“The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.”
i think there’s a sense of sincerity and goodness contrasted against the perpetual feeling that we are doomed by the state of the world that always resonates with me about LoTR. it’s a fundamentally lower-case c conservative work, but it’s conservative in the way most people are: nostalgic, suspicious of change, a little sad about being left behind. It suggests that we can still do some pretty great things in this world despite all those feelings – but that that greatness comes from humility and mercy, and that in the process, we absolutely can be hurt and scarred and never heal or be the same as we once were.
Two of the films on this list (Audition and Mulholland Drive) have arguably the greatest and most unique jump scares I’ve ever seen, with the bag moving and the diner scene respectively. The Mulholland one especially is absolutely amazing cause it’s so SLOW. The thing just kinda sidles onto frame and it’s fucking terrifying. I don’t know how you have a jump scare that’s so slow, and just a small part of the brilliance of that movie.
I’d say of this list – Ocean’s Eleven is perfect entertainment (I can’t count how many times I watched this on TV), Memento is a perfect modern noir, and Mulhollhand Drive is imperfectly perfect art. What’s remarkable about Memento is how the gimmick and the “twist” are so effective emotionally. A lot of the Nolans work seems more concerned with making a cool puzzle, but Memento really embraces ambiguity and makes sure that, even though the end takes place at the start of the story, it is very much the emotional ending of the movie. That ending really stayed with me for years and is absolutely devastating when I think about it and what it’s saying about humanity.
In The Mood For Love remains one of the most perfect films ever made.
Such a good year….what happened with 2002?!
2002 has excellent work from Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, Steven Spielberg (TWICE!), Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Steven Soderbergh, M. Night Shyalaman, and Alexander Payne! Good year!
True, true. I’m just thinking of the XXX, Die Another Day and Attack of the Clones of the world. Or maybe I was thinking 2003, which had LOTR and not much else
I still haven’t seen Amelie, Gosford Park, or Devil’s Backbone, so they could make my list in the future. But my current top 25: https://boxd.it/bHEMqRoyal Tennenbaums
The Others
13 Conversations about One Thing
Ocean’s 11
Pulse
Monster’s Inc
Mulholland Drive
Training Day
AI: Artificial Intelligence
Fellowship of the Ring
Metropolis
From Hell
Vanilla Sky
Cure
L.I.E.
Ghost World
The Mexican
The Believer
Manic
Frailty
Millennium Actress
Black Hawk Down
Donnie Darko
The Fast and the Furious
AuditionHonorable Mentions: Waking Life, Tomb Raider, Spy Game, Rush Hour 2, Man Who Wasn’t There
best [US-released] of 2001 ( still pending approval )Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001)Tillsammans [aka Together] (2000)The Isle (2000)Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001)In the Bedroom (2001)Storytelling (2001)In the Mood for Love (2000)Fat Girl (2001)Chopper (2000)The Princess and the Warrior (2000)runner-up: Sexy Beast (2000)
Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001)?
Lukas Moodysson’s Tillsammans [aka Together] (2000) – US release 2001
Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle (2000)?Released USA 2001
Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (2001)
In the Bedroom (2001) are my selects so controversial the need remain “pending approval”
Todd Solondz MPAA’s Storytelling (2001) are my selects so obvious they need remain “pending approval”?
Chopper (2000) [ ? ]The Princess and the Warrior (2000) [ ? ]runner-up: Sexy Beast (2000) [ ? ]…are these [my] Dec 2nd selects so overlooked they need remain “pending approval”? U triflin Discussion mods