Around the time I started this site, I did a “Top 100 of the 1990s” with the intention of doing a new decade every year. I had meant to do a new decade every year, but as with life, stuff came up. I got overwhelmed by my primary responsibilities on this site: reviewing new film and television releases. Hence, folks have some guidance when consuming new content.

Recently, I conducted a small poll on my personal Instagram (@fartgetis2) to ask what past decade I should do a “Top 100 Films” on. Overwhelmingly, the answer came back: “the 2000s”. Not the best decade for film, in my approximation; in fact, I was low-key hoping the poll results would be the 1970s or 1980s, but some beautiful gems came out of a post-9/11 mindset. Some of my choices are obvious and well-known, and others you may not have heard of. Please remember that art is subjective, and these choices are personal. 

Please don’t threaten to kill my family cause I like Sideways. 

I decided to release this article in ten parts, covering ten films each, to not overwhelm the viewer and make the movies stand out more. This was an arduous ranking process, especially for selections #73-#100, picking 28 films out of nearly 150 possible contenders.

Part 1: #100-#91

Part 2: #90-#81

Part 3: #80-#71

Part 4: #70-#61

So, let’s continue with #60-#51:

60. Traffic

2000 / dir. Steven Soderbergh / 147 minutes

cast: Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Michael Douglas, Luís Guzman, Dennis Quaid, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jacob Vargas, Erika Christensen, Amy Irving, Topher Grace, Clifton Collins, Jr., Miguel Ferrer, James Brolin, Albert Finney, Steven Bauer, Benjamin Bratt, Viola Davis, John Slattery, Salma Hayek

As an expose of the never-ending drug war in this country, Traffic doesn’t quite hold up as it did 24 years ago, but as a slick, fast-paced piece of narrative filmmaking with compelling three-dimensional characters, it holds up quite nicely. Soderbergh is like the MacGyver of filmmaking; he’s a resourceful technician who loves challenging himself, and Traffic is one of his best films. It follows four different strands related to the war on drugs – two American cops (Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán) trying to take down a cartel leader (Steven Bauer), the cartel leader’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones), who has no idea her husband is a drug kingpin until the family’s slimy lawyer (Dennis Quaid) informs her, and then trying to keep her husband out of prison by ANY MEANS NECESSARY, a Mexican cop (Benicio Del Toro – in an Oscar-winning role) who gets entangled in a corrupt general’s brutal war with a drug cartel that’s threatening his own operation, and the newly appointed United States drug Czar (Michael Douglas) who is trying to do his job without pissing off his political allies in Washington and get his drug-addled daughter (Erika Christensen) the help she needs. Only the Douglas-Daughter storyline sticks out as overly simple and after-school-special-y, but the rest of the three are compelling and complicated in the best way. (Streaming on Netflix)

59. A Serious Man

2009 / dir. The Coen Brothers / 106 minutes

cast: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolff, Jessica McManus, Alan Mandell, Adam Arkin, George Wyner, Amy Landecker, Fyvush Finkel, Simon Helberg, Michael Lerner

Second only to 2001’s The Man Who Wasn’t There as the Coen Brothers‘ least accessible film, A Serious Man is a funny and ironic little mediation on the meaning of faith if you can get past all the cringe. There’s a lot of fucking cringe; parts of this movie are straight-up painful to watch, but the central performance by maybe the most versatile and gifted character actor working today, Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me By Your Name, The Shape of Water, Hulu’s The Dropout, HBO’s Boardwalk Empire – several others), is phenomenal and the main reason why this film works so well.  Also Fred Melamed repeatedly bashing Stuhlbarg‘s head into a chalk board is money in the bank. (Streaming on Max)

58. Sexy Beast

2000 / dir. Jonathan Glazer / 88 minutes

cast: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox, Cavan Kendall, Julianne White, Álvaro Monje

Guy Ritchie (Snatch, Lock/Stock, The Gentlemen) and Matthew Vaughn (Kingsmen, Layer Cake, Argylle) are the two names I think of when it comes to modern British gangster pictures, but often those two tend to overcomplicate things with thick plots that get lost in thick accents. However, the plot for Sexy Beast is very straightforward based on a very straightforward script by Louis Mellis and David Scinto – an old retired gangster, Gal Dove (Ray Winstone), is driven out of retirement by a sociopathic mob enforcer, Don Logan (Oscar-nominated Ben Kingsley) for one last jewel heist. While most movies would be about the heist, this one devotes 90% of its runtime to the act of Don bullying Gal into doing the job, wearing on him little by little, sexually harassing his wife (Amanda Redman), pissing on his carpet, smashing rock glasses on his skull, etc. While the plot is straightforward, the way experimental director Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest, Under the Skin) handles the material is not – he adds surreal visual flourishes everywhere, including a giant rabbit monster ghost haunting the film’s lead as a metaphor for the criminal life in general. While the visuals are great, the real star of this movie is the acting. Winstone is great, but Kingsley is an absolute force – a terrifying but hilarious, larger-than-life villain that never seems less than 100% plausible because of the specificity of the choices Kingsley brings to the character. The movie is excellent, but Kingsley is genuinely unforgettable. (Streaming on Paramount+)

57. Vera Drake

2004 / dir. Mike Leigh / 125 minutes

cast: Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Daniel Mays, Alex Kelly, Sandra Voe, Eddie Marsan, Adrian Scarborough, Heather Craney, Sally Hawkins, Ruth Sheen, Lesley Sharp, Liz White, Peter Wight, Jim Broadbent, Simon Chandler, Lesley Manville

It’s not exactly the most uplifting or feel-goodiest of feel-good movies, but Mike Leigh‘s Vera Drake is a powerful and nuanced look into something still highly relevant today. In a performance that should have won her the Oscar over Hilary Swank‘s Million Dollar Baby, Imelda Staunton (Dolores Umbridge from Harry Potter) plays Vera Drake, a housekeeper who moonlights as an abortionist in 1950s England, when it was very fucking illegal. Everyone loves her, and most people around her view this service as a highly courageous and necessary act of kindness. However, the law sees it differently, and you can probably guess where this is going. Vera Drake is a crushingly sad movie that does not have a happy ending. However, it’s a very powerfully written and well-acted film that has a lot to say on the subject of abortion and how people are still divided on it. (Available for $4 rental on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and AppleTV+.)

56. Dogtooth

2009 / dir. Yorgos Lathinmos / 97 minutes

cast: Christos Stergioglou, Michelle Valley, Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, Anna Kalaitzidou

Many people I know didn’t care for Poor Things because it was “too weird.” I get that, but it always made me laugh when people told me that because Poor Things is so streamlined and not cynical compared to Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lathinmos‘ early work like Dogtooth, an excruciatingly funny and cringe-y satire about the dangers of sheltering your children. It’s about a family living in confinement in a compound somewhere in Greece – a controlling maniac father, a mother who sucks just as hard, and three children who look to be somewhere in their 20s. The dad teaches them that the outside world is dangerous, full of man-eating kittens and planes randomly falling from the sky, so they must never leave! He lies to them about the meaning of certain words to control them. He monitors what they watch, read, eat, etc. He also brings a female security guard at the local factory he works with to teach his children about sex by having sex with them. When the son refuses to perform cunnilingus on the security guard, it sets off a whole chain of events that leads to the family’s downfall and the scariest physical assault with VHS tapes I’ve ever seen. This is not a movie for most people. (Available for $4 rental on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and AppleTV+.)

55. Up

2009 / dir. Pete Docter / 96 minutes

voice cast: Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Christopher Plummer, Bob Peterson, Delroy Lindo, Jerome Ranfit, John Ratzenberger

The opening ten minutes are the best film Pixar has ever made. If the rest of Up retained the quality of that opening sequence, it would easily be included in my top 10. Unfortunately, it doesn’t, so it’s at #55. This isn’t to say any of the movie is bad; all of it is very good, but it just shoots itself in the foot with a beginning sequence so spectacular nothing could live up to it. Up is about a cranky older man, voiced by Ed Asner, who, after losing his partner and sinking into an existence of hating everyone, is given a second chance at life when his house becomes a hot air balloon. He travels the world with a fat boy scout and learns much about life. But in the back of your mind, you’re still like, “This isn’t as compelling as the wife stuff in the beginning.” (Streaming on Disney+)

54. Oasis

2002 / dir. Lee Chang-dong / 132 minutes

cast: Moon So-ri, Sol Kyung-gu, Ryoo Seung-wan, Ahn Nae-sang, Park Pal-young, Son Byong-ho

Let’s talk about Lee Chang-dong, a South Korean filmmaker who never gets the credit Bong Joon-ho (Parasite, Mother, Memories of Murder) or Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, Decision to Leave, The Handmaiden) gets, but is in my mind an even better director. That’s mainly because Lee isn’t quite the stylist that Park and Bong are; he makes very serious-minded and grounded dramas about realistic characters’ struggles, often women, that never resolve in clean ways. His deeply uncomfortable but deeply moving Oasis, known as the seminal film of the Korean New Wave, strikes a chord for never being sentimental but always being sensitive towards its characters. It follows the unlikely romance between a mentally disabled young man, Jong-du (a brilliant Sol Kyung-gu), freshly released from prison, and a young woman suffering from cerebral palsy, Gong-ju (an even more brilliant Moon Soo-ri), who is being completely neglected and used by her family. The young man is also the black sheep of his family, having gone away to prison for a hit-and-run accident that struck and killed none other than the father of Gong-ju, who doesn’t know this. Besides their relationship, this movie is about how society reacts to people with disabilities – both from a “try not to stare” standpoint and subtler, more condescending standpoints as well. There’s also a twist in this movie that will gut your soul. And it’s only Lee Chang-dong‘s fifth-best movie. (Remastered 4K Version Streaming Soon – look for it!)

53. A Mighty Wind

2003 / dir. Christopher Guest / 92 minutes

cast: Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, Christopher Guest, Jane Lynch, John Michael Higgins, Parker Posey, Fred Willard, Bob Balaban, Jennifer Coolidge, Christopher Moynihan, Jim Piddock, Don Lake, Ed Begley, Jr., Michael Hitchcock, Larry Miller, Deborah Theaker

Get it? The title is a fart joke! The best improvisers known to film are back for their third collaborative feature – A Mighty Wind. While not as side-splittingly hilarious as Waiting for Guffman or Best in Show, and ending on a probably transphobic joke (ugh, 2003, amirite?), this is a very well-performed and fairly emotional celebration of nerdy folk musicians with several banger original songs. It ultimately hinges on the reunion of former lovers/folk duo Mitch (Eugene Levy) and Mickey (Catherine O’Hara) during a giant folk reunion concert on PBS celebrating the life of a famous Folk music producer, and it doesn’t disappoint. It has several great supporting performances from Christopher Guest‘s fantastic company of improvisational comedic actors; my favorites are Fred Willard as a 70s TV sitcom star turned band manager, and Jane Lynch as a former adult film star turned folk musician. It’s a great comedy. (Available for $4 rental on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and AppleTV+.)

52. Mysterious Skin

2004 / dir. Gregg Araki / 107 minutes

cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brady Corbet, Michelle Trachtenberg, Elisabeth Shue, Bill Sage, Jeffrey Licon, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Chris Mulkey, Richard Riehle, Chase Ellison, Billy Drago, George Webster

Cult 90s filmmaker Gregg Araki is undoubtedly having a moment in the current indie film scene with the recent 4k releases of two of his best films – The Doom Generation and Nowhere. Deemed “too explicit” but really “too gay” for the time, these movies are currently experiencing a prosperous second life amongst film aficionados and assholes on Letterboxd. While Araki excelled at making goofy, live-action cartoons with a flippant attitude toward human depravity, his best film was much more earnest and sensitive in its approach to the subject. Hailed by Roger Ebert as the most touching movie ever made about child abuse, 2004’s Mysterious Skin, based on Scott Heim‘s acclaimed novel, follows two teenagers reeling from a traumatic childhood event in wildly different ways. Neil (a never-better Joseph Gordon-Levitt), now 18, has been working as a sex worker for gross older guys since he was 15. Brian (Brady Corbet) is convinced he was abducted by an alien when he was a kid and is, therefore, obsessed with UFOs. The two spend most of the film trying to find each other, but when they do, we’re treated to a wildly moving and never sentimental climax. (Available for $3 rental on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and AppleTV+.)

51. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

2005 / dir. Shane Black / 103 minutes

cast: Robert Downey, Jr., Val Kilmer, Michelle Monaghan, Corbin Bernsen, Dash Mihok, Larry Miller, Rockmond Dunbar, Shannyn Sossamon

I’m not going to pretend I don’t know writer/director Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Iron Man 3, The Predator) is problematic in his personal life (let’s discuss offline). Still, his 2005 detective comedy starring a recently rehabilitated Robert Downey Jr. in his best screen role to date and a wickedly funny Val Kilmer is among the most satisfying and clever comedies of the 2000s. RDJ plays a low-level thief who accidentally wanders into a movie audition while being chased by police after a botched robbery. Emotionally reeling from seeing his buddy thief get gunned down by police, he delivers a performance that gets him flown out to Hollywood for screen testing. He gets paired up with a former detective played by Kilmer for “detective lessons,” the two become a wildly entertaining odd couple. Kilmer acting as the cranky, practical one, with RDJ being the total dumb ass. Anyway, during this, an ACTUAL murder takes place involving the drug-addled daughter of a major movie producer (a perfectly sleazy Corbin Bernsen), which RDJ and Kilmer witness and subsequently get sucked into. Most movies like this would focus more on the central buddy relationship and let the actual mystery fall by the waist side. Still, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has a worthwhile and, sadly, very Hollywood mystery attached to it. This is a lean, well-crafted buddy comedy with almost no fat, featuring two excellent actors at the height of their game. (Available for $4 rental on Amazon Prime, Vudu, Google Play, YouTube, and AppleTV+.)