Adrien Brody is phenomenal in an intense, character-driven epic.
It seems odd to be ranking or considering movie lists having to do with “the 21st century”, but indeed a lot has changed over the past 16 years. The highest grossing film of the year 2000 was The Grinch, a live-action family movie, followed by Cast Away, a largely dialogue-less drama fronted by Tom Hanks. The superhero genre was just starting to become a thing, and visual effects hadn’t yet advanced to the point that every major blockbuster involved wholly CG-created environments. The rare drama can crack the end-of-year box office Top 10 nowadays, …
Cinematography is a vital aspect of great filmmaking. Without a strong director of photography with a point of view, a film can be somewhat lacking even if every other aspect of the movie is firing on all cylinders. Film is a visual medium after all, and great cinematography has the power to transport audiences to a new world, to put audiences in the shoes of a character, or to even relay a theme using visual metaphor. One of the greatest cinematographers who has ever lived is Roger Deakins, whose naturalistic eye has brought unforgettable imagery to films ranging from The …
Has any studio more fully dominated one decade like Disney did in the 2010s? Not only did the Mouse House start mining its animated classics for live-action remakes that regularly cross $1 billion at the box office, but Walt Disney Animation Studios enjoyed a tremendous resurgence both critically and commercially, and Disney’s acquisitions of Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm expanded their marketplace domination even further. But even before the 2010s, Disney was churning out terrific films—largely thanks to the acquisition of Pixar. In truth, the films of the 21st century so far has largely been dominated by Disney …
Thanks in part to Marvel Studios’ blockbuster reign at the box office, along with hits like Gravity and the recent run of Star Wars films, science fiction has seen a resurgence on the small screen -- especially in the last 10 years. No longer relegated to campy or niche programming, the genre’s output has become as popular and must-see as crime procedurals or medical dramas -- albeit with richer storytelling possibilities. From live-action hits like Stranger Things and The Mandalorian, to envelope-pushing animated fare like Rick & Morty, sci-fi has become royalty in the age of Peak …
Since the turn of the millennia, no genre has dominated popular culture quite like superhero stories. From comic books to video games to TV shows to theme park attractions, superheroes have been everywhere. In particular, they have overrun the multiplex, from small indie movies to the warring titans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the DC Extended Universe, plus whatever the X-Men were up to while still at Fox. Every movie was an event, and every event more hotly anticipated than the last. So it’s with this in mind that we rank the top 45 superhero movies since …
Making a good comedy film is hard. You not only have to make them laugh, you have to make them care enough about the characters they’re watching to stick with it for 90-120 minutes. Veer too far into the jokes and you’re left with paper-thin characters. Forget the jokes, and you’ve got yourself a melodrama. But comedy is always evolving, and throughout the 21st century thus far we’ve seen numerous different phases for the genre. No doubt Judd Apatow had a tremendous impact on not only what kinds of comedies audiences respond to, but …
From 2000 to the present, animated films have become ubiquitous, increasingly experimental in their narrative construction and visual language, and critically acclaimed. The 21st century has done a lot of kindness for the animated medium, offering its particular pleasures to audiences of all ages. Computer generated imagery definitely became the technique du jour, but many of our pioneers continued to mess with the form's tired-and-true methods of hand-drawn or stop-motion animation, resulting in an influx of interesting animated auteurs. To celebrate these modern masterpieces of crat and imagination, we've got the 45 best animated …
The golden age of slasher films is widely considered to have taken place from the mid-70s to the mid-80s, but just because the introductory days of Leatherface, Michael Myers and more are well behind us doesn’t mean that the beloved horror sub-genre is slowing down. We’re seeing a considerable amount of new releases lovingly embrace their iconic predecessors and a slew of other films carving wildly creative new paths of their own. Traditionally, a slasher movie involves a masked killer picking off a group of unsuspecting victims. You will certainly find a lot of that …
On Parks and Recreation, Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) tries to explain to April (Aubrey Plaza) that he has so many soundtracks because, “I kind of look at it like it’s your favorite directors making a mix tape just for you.” While that’s a cute and naïve way of looking at it (although in the case of Cameron Crowe movies, probably true), for the most part, soundtracks serve to support the film. They’re part of the storytelling apparatus. Sometimes the choices can be super obvious (there’s a moratorium on using “Sympathy for the Devil” until 2067), …
There's nothing like a great monster movie to get your heart racing, a perfect blend of adrenaline-fueled thrills and stomach-churning scares that often feels like the cinematic equivalent of a death-defying rollercoaster ride. At the same time, monster movies have long been the proud home of allegorical storytelling; gorgeously designed stand-ins for the real-life fears that plague and control us, and in the film's below you'll see an especially interesting assemblage of both modern panic and technology-age terrors, born specifically out the era in which they were created, and more universal, …
It’s impossible to say when, exactly, mankind first dreamed of traveling into outer space, but ever since we got the idea in our heads we never let it go. We’ve been telling stories about alien worlds for longer than anyone has been alive, and we’ve been making movies about flying to the moon since practically the dawn of cinema. As visual effects expanded and space travel itself became a reality, movies have become more and more obsessed with sci-fi stories about star treks, star wars, and just about anything star-related. In the 21st Century those …
François Truffaut once argued that it was impossible to make an anti-war movie, because once you put warfare on camera, it can’t help but look dramatic. But filmmakers have been trying to make anti-war movies for decades, while other filmmakers have been hard at work making pro-war movies to support their nation’s troops. It’s a complex genre, in which some of the best films can be unironically positive about a war, while others are also entirely critical of that exact same war. Some war movies are action-packed and rousing, others a violent …
It’s been said on more than one occasion that the western movie genre, which was for decades a regular staple and major box office draw, is dead. But if that’s true then nobody told the actual westerns, because although we may not get as many of them as we used to, they’re still being produced every single year. What is a western? It’s not just deserts and horses and cowboy hats. The western movie genre takes place on the far edge of society, along the frontier, where law and order is often tenuous and tales are …
It's a good time to be a fan of spy cinema. No matter what flavor of espionage action you like, from pensive dramas to scorching political fables, twisted romances, or classic shaken-not-stirred sex appeal, there's been a great spy movie molded in that fashion since the turn of the 21st Century. Heck, for time there, we had James Bond, Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne all in peak form, turning out top-notch spy franchises left and right. Bourne and Bond may have taken a tumble in their most recent films (though somehow these Mission: Impossible movies …
Some genres are easier to define than others. Werewolf movies are movies with werewolves in them. Family movies are intended for all audiences. But “thrillers” can be tougher to nail down. After all, a lot of movies want to thrill you. That doesn’t mean they all have life-or-death situations, serial killers, and kidnappings in them. But those are the types of intense, suspenseful situations we come to expect from films with the “thriller” label. They are typical stories of seemingly normal people, suddenly thrust by circumstance or their own sins into perilous situations. Will they survive? Will …
The classic '90s Disney princesses vs. the new 21st century ones: it's an everlasting debate. But who is truly the best of them all?
The 21st Century has been a particularly good era for television so far. As you well know by now, we're living in the thick of a Second Golden Age for TV, and we have been for a while. And as you've probably heard if you follow any TV critics on Twitter, we're also in the midst of "Peak TV." So not only is TV really good right now, there's a lot of it out there. If there's a downside to that, it's that there's literally too much television for any one person to …
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