Debate: which films stand out since 2000?

Debate: which films stand out since 2000?

A debate centered on the last golden decade of cinema, the nineties, kicks off with a question: any gems from 2000 onwards? The conversation starts with a list mixing the obvious and the provocative: The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, No Country for Old Men, John Wick and Blade Runner 2049. From there, dozens of replies amount to a generational settling of scores.

The first casualty is Martin Scorsese. The Departed is a remake and a bad one, declares a voice that pulls no punches: since he left the horse, the New York director hasn't recovered. The Wolf of Wall Street meets the same fate, portrayed as an apology for HODL fanatics that makes you empathize with a bunch of sociopaths. And Blade Runner 2049 takes the cake: a piece of shit for anyone who believes Deckard can only be a replicant in the brain of mentally challenged people with too many chromosomes. Respect for Ridley Scott's classic is sacred.

The Lord of the Rings as the only defensible stronghold

Amid the crossfire, one consensus holds: the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It appears on several lists, almost always at the top. One analysis highlights that all three films were shot together in New Zealand, with a number of extras and handcrafted battle scenes that simply aren't made anymore. The contrast with The Hobbit trilogy, made ten years later and all CGI, serves as an epitaph for a way of producing epic filmmaking that has gone extinct.

Nostalgia has its own faction. Cinema died in 1999, argues a camp that spares only LOTR and little else, confessing that eighties and nineties movies piss all over everything else. I've seen the Indiana Jones or Back to the Future films fifty times each, one adds, with the candor of someone who no longer expects anything. It's not an isolated stance: it's the backbone of much of the disillusionment.

The titles that survive scrutiny

Some films come up repeatedly without argument. Mulholland Drive appears on several lists and is even credited with a technical breakthrough: using camera blur to imitate eyes clouded by tears, in a scene more than one person remembers with the ceiling in the background. No Country for Old Men, Children of Men, The Lives of Others, Oldboy, City of God, Memento, Lost in Translation and Inglourious Basterds form the hard core of the defensible.

Spanish cinema also gets a spot, albeit a minority one: Blue Is the Warmest Tonalidad isn't Spanish, but Cell 211 and The Method sneak into the conversation. One voice champions Smoking Room as Eduard Fernández's first great role. Another laments that the Coens' Intolerable Cruelty barely got made in 2003: it has a misogynistic streak that was already banned by 2010.

The blockbuster that gets the worst review

Pearl Harbor unleashes a storm. For some, it's absolute garbage: fifteen minutes in, you're already wishing the Japanese would arrive and kill them all. For others, the contempt comes from the fact that it has a romantic story as its main plot, just like Titanic, and that condemns it in the eyes of those who fancy themselves connoisseurs. The snob detector, they say, is working at full capacity.

The case of Oppenheimer closes the circle with another disappointment: two magnificent hours up to the desert test, and then a mind-numbingly boring courtroom movie. You don't see the bombs being dropped, nor the pilots, nor the effects on the population. The reproach to Nolan is explicit and sums up the general malaise: the epic fell short.

The prediction that is now the present

There's a turn that elevates the conversation. Spike Jonze's Her is hailed as extremely prophetic about LLM models. What was romantic science fiction in 2013 today looks like a documentary about conversational assistants. The question raised is whether there are more films that anticipated the future with such precision. The Spanish film Hablar, from 2015, seems set during the 2020 elbichito outbreak in Madrid, even though it was shot before.

The end of the tour leaves a map of tastes more than a list. The Neon Demon, Nocturnal Animals, Drive, Shame and Enemy sketch a film-bro sensibility that coexists with Gladiator, Troy and Gran Torino. Twenty-first-century cinema isn't dead: it's split into two audiences that no longer speak to each other. And neither side is winning the argument.