Maybe the most profound insight in David Fincher’s “The Social Network” comes when Mark Zuckerberg muses to his best and only friend, Eduardo Saverin, about fashion.
“When will it be finished?” Saverin asks Zuckerberg about their nascent website that will soon become Facebook.
“It won’t be finished,” Zuckerberg responds. “That’s the point. The way fashion’s never finished.”
Saverin: “You’re talking about fashion?” Zuckerberg: “I’m talking about the idea of it and I’m saying it’s never finished.”
Saverin: “OK, but they manage to make money selling pants.”
As both a hopeless cinephile and an incurable list-maker, I have long made peace with the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with myself about movies and compiling would-be “definitive” rankings thereof.
As 2024 draws to a close, the world finds itself one-quarter of its way through the 21st century—assuming, of course, the third millennium began in 2000, not 2001—leading my good self to reflect on my favorite films made in the last 25 years.
Like fashion and Facebook, this particular list will never be set in stone. As has proved true in my two-plus decades of taking movies seriously, one’s taste in cinema is an ongoing process with no objective standards and no final destination.
Nonetheless, the pants must be sold. And so here are—for the moment—my 25 favorite movies of the first 25 years of the 2000s:
1. No Country For Old Men
Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a heartless killer and the two men attempting to bring him to justice remains as spare and unforgiving and funny and frightening and perfect as it was on the Thanksgiving weekend when I first saw it in 2007.
2. The Social Network
The towering creative and stylistic achievement of director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, depicting the inception of the most important website ever created, for better and for worse.
3. Almost Famous
“What do you love about music?” “To begin with: Everything.”
4. Spirited Away
The strange, dreamy, bottomlessly inventive “Alice in Wonderland”-esque cartoon by the Japanese animator god Hayao Miyazaki, who earlier this year collected his second Academy Award, 21 years after winning his first (for this).
5. Sideways
The funniest and most realistic portrayal of alcoholism this side of “The Lost Weekend.”
6. Memento
Christopher Nolan’s audacious depiction of a man with short-term memory loss avenging the murder of his wife, presented in a manner that, by design, one can rewatch dozens of times without ever quite remembering how it ends—or, rather, begins.
7. Inside Llewyn Davis
The Coen Brothers’ anti-fairytale of a Dylan-esque musician who never quite achieves Dylan-level fame. Keep your eye on the cat.
8. The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson’s fantastical, absurd, bittersweet drama about a fastidious hotelier in a fictional country on the eve of a fictionalized World War II.
9. 25th Hour
Spike Lee’s dazzling and devastating adaptation of David Benioff’s novel has somehow managed to become the definitive movie about 9/11 without—strictly speaking—having anything to do with 9/11 at all.
10. Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola’s hilarious and heartbreaking tale of two lonely Americans hanging out in a hotel in Tokyo for a few days while reflecting on the meaning of life.
11. Inglourious Basterds
“We ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business. We’re in the killin’ Nazi business. And cousin, business is a-boomin’.”
12. Minority Report
Steven Spielberg’s virtuosic adaptation of the Philip K. Dick short story about an inescapable surveillance state has proved more prescient by the day.
13. There Will Be Blood
Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic about oil prospectors that begins with a man being bludgeoned to death by an errant oil derrick and ends with a man being bludgeoned to death by a bowling pin. In between, of course, is the titanic performance by Daniel Day-Lewis.
14. Hell or High Water
Before becoming a neo-Western TV impresario, Taylor Sheridan wrote the screenplay for this neo-Western film about two brothers who rob a bank in order to pay off their mother’s mortgage, which happens to be held by the same bank. Released in 2016, the movie reflects the Great Recession-era sense of economic dislocation that ultimately produced Donald Trump as effectively as any fictional motion picture to date.
15. Phantom Thread
Paul Thomas Anderson’s other masterpiece starring Daniel Day-Lewis—in this case, the portrait of a marriage between two passive-aggressive lunatics in the fashion houses of 1950s London. Beware the yellow mushrooms.
16. Django Unchained
Featuring the second Oscar-winning performance by Christoph Waltz in a Quentin Tarantino movie, this time as a non-practicing dentist hunting slavers in the Antebellum South.
17. City of God
Fernando Meirelles’s breathless saga of teenage street gangs in Rio de Janeiro was justifiably compared to “GoodFellas” upon its release. Two-plus decades later, its visceral power has not diminished one iota.
18. Chef
Jon Favreau’s delightful, heart-warming odyssey of a storied restaurateur taking his career into his hands (in both senses of the term) by crisscrossing the Southeast in a food truck with the help of his uncommonly resourceful preteen son.
19. Up in the Air
Jason Reitman’s incisive adaptation of the Walter Kirn novel about a businessman who lives his life entirely in airports, hotels and conference rooms as a collective act of defiance against the bourgeois notion that happiness can only be found through marriage, children and other species of concrete human connection. Because he’s played by George Clooney, his fundamental wrongness becomes obvious only in retrospect.
20. Knives Out
Rian Johnson’s delicious Agatha Christie-like confection about a murder at a gothic mansion investigated by an incandescently goofy Daniel Craig. Full disclosure: Several scenes were filmed roughly a mile from my house and—by happenstance—I once found myself on the grounds on the actual mansion while the movie was being shot.
21. The Holdovers
A reunion of Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti 19 years after “Sideways,” with the latter once again portraying a prickly, over-educated snob with a drinking problem but also an uncanny ability to arouse the affections of attractive, sweet, intelligent women.
22. Parasite
The most entertaining—and audacious—offering from the nascent global fountainhead of cinematic dynamism that is South Korea.
23. Before Sunset
Only in recent months have I come to agree with the apparent critical consensus that this middle installment of Richard Linklater’s trilogy—preceded by “Before Sunrise” and followed by “Before Midnight”—is, in fact, the crown jewel of Linklater’s grand experiment.
24. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Melissa McCarthy as a foul-mouthed New York writer who sells forged literary documents to credulous collectors in order to pay her rent and feed her cats. Based on a true story, because of course it is.
25. The Departed
That Martin Scorsese—Hollywood’s quintessential Italian from New York—won his only Academy Award for a film about Irishmen in Boston is but the latest evidence that God exists and has a wicked sense of humor.