Cinema after 1999: five films and a generational war

The debate over whether cinema died in 1999

The year 2000 kicked off with Gladiator and the conversation has never stopped since: is this century a wasteland or a quiet golden age? An open debate asks for five titles from after 2000, and the result is a map of tastes, grudges and the occasional cinephile heresy. The first answer set the tone: The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, No Country for Old Men, John Wick and Blade Runner 2049. From there, everyone championed their own personal pantheon.

Some simply refuse to accept any of it. "The answers so far only confirm that cinema died in 1999," declares one voice in the debate, who spares the Lord of the Rings trilogy while calling it a chore to rewatch compared to Indiana Jones or Back to the Future. Unapologetic boomer nostalgia is a force to be reckoned with.

From Mulholland Drive to The Lighthouse: the recurring canon

If the tally reveals anything, it is that a handful of titles come up again and again, almost like dogma. Mulholland Drive tops many lists, closely trinc by No Country for Old Men, The Wolf of Wall Street, Children of Men, The Lives of Others and Gran Torino. The Lighthouse sneaks into the favourites for its visual craft, and The Northman even gets called "the most perfect film".

Tastes split quickly. One camp defends the ambitious blockbuster —The Dark Knight, Mad Max: Fury Road, Inception, Interstellar— while another takes refuge in auteur cinema with familiar names: Villeneuve, Refn, Wes Anderson, Kore-eda. Nocturnal Animals leaves more than one person "absolutely knocked out", and Her is singled out as an unwitting prophecy of language models. The full list of titles mentioned, with their defenders and detractors, is a document that will not fit in these lines.

The Pearl Harbor heresy and The Departed remake

No film takes as much abuse as Pearl Harbor. "It's an absolute piece of shit so big that fifteen minutes in you're already wishing the Japanese would hurry up and arrive," writes someone. The defence is not long in coming: whoever criticises it, the argument goes, despises the film for its romantic plot, just as happens with Titanic, and behind that contempt lurks a snob detector. The spat is straight out of the manual.

The Departed does not escape either. Some point out it is a remake and call it bad without nuance, adding that Scorsese has not recovered since he left the horse. Blade Runner 2049 takes the dart of "sequels were never any good" and of trash, along with a theory about Deckard that would spark a war of its own. Even Oppenheimer gets its share: it is criticised that the first two hours work and then the film drifts into a boring trial without showing the dropping of the bombs.

The 21st century as a prophecy factory

Beyond the ranking, the debate drifts into unexpected territory. People ask which films have predicted the future: Her and language models, Idiocracy and its generic portrait of idiocracy, or the Spanish film Hablar, which seems set during the 2020 elbichito outbreak despite being from 2015. The conversation jumps from science fiction to post-war Czechoslovak cinema without missing a beat.

There is also room for less-travelled Spanish cinema: Smoking Room and its portrait of the workplace, antiestéticaturing Eduard Fernández's first major role, or Cell 211. And for documentary film, low-budget cinema and the films that exist only in the memory of those who watched them on Swiss TV in the early nineties.

The exact point where the analysis gets stuck is the usual one: there is no way to agree on what "better" means. For some, cinema died with the century; for others, this is a century with more memorable titles than any golden decade. The lists keep coming.