The Last 15 Years of Cinema, Ranked
1999 was probably one of the best years that cinema has ever had. It’s sequel, 2000, wasn’t far behind. In the span of those two years we were spoiled with the likes of:
Fight Club, Magnolia, American Beauty, American Psycho, The Matrix, Requiem for a Dream, Snatch, Gladiator, Cast Away, In the Mood for Love, The Sixth Sense, Eyes Wide Shut, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Being John Malkovich, Man on the Moon, Almost Famous, The Beach, The Iron Giant, O Brother Where Art Though?, The Green Mile, Traffic, and Toy Story 2
Even the bad movies were bad in a way that they were still enjoyable:
The Mummy, Star Wars Episode 1, Gone in 60 Seconds, Remember The Titans, Unbreakable, Any Given Sunday, Shanghai Noon, American Pie, Galaxy Quest, South Park: Bigger Longer Uncut, Mystery Men, and Wild Wild West.
To be a movie fan at that time would’ve been pretty great.
As I was only 10 at the time, the only two of those I really appreciated were Star Wars and the Mummy.
So, how has the world of cinema followed with that ever since?
I decided, with the help of stats, that I would take a look…
The Method
First and foremost, I should state for the record that when I talk about movies being good or bad, I’m talking about this from my own perspective. All of the rankings I use for this analysis are my own personal rankings. I did not use IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, or Metacritic. Fuck those guys…
The overall index I used to rank 2001–2015 for their cinematic quality is based on 4 factors:
- The average score of films that year
- The % of films considered to be a Masterpiece (90+ out of 100)
- The % of films that are within my top 10% of all time (84+ out of 100)
- The % of films considered to be Great (75+ out of 100)
I chose these categories because I wanted to focus more on the good movies that came out these years as opposed to bad ones, since it’s likely I decided not to watch a lot of bad movies in each year, and wanted to add emphasis on being REALLY good and opposed to just pretty good.
I watched somewhere between 77 and 168 films in each of these years, so I have a pretty good sample size in my opinion.
#15–2013 (The Year of Let-Downs)
Tier 10 Films — 12 Years a Slave, Gravity
2013 had some decent films in it, it wasn’t a complete waste of a year, but there were a lot of disappointments in it. Big directors put forth some very mediocre efforts when compared the rest of the their filmography. Scorsese had Wolf of Wall Street, the Coens had Inside Llewyn Davis, David O Russell had American Hustle, and Nicholas Winding Refn had Only God Forgives. These are still decent movies but they weren’t the masterpieces these guys usually deliver. Even in the blockbuster space: Man of Steel, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Hobbit 2 were all pretty disappointing.
#14–2005 (The Year of Talkies)
Tier 10 Films — Broken Flowers, Batman Begins, The Squid and the Whale, Noriko’s Dinner Table, Manderlay
This was a good year for cinema if you like a lot of talking in your movies. The action franchises of The Matrix, Star Wars Prequels, and LOTR were coming to close and the Superhero genre wouldn’t pick up again for another 3 years or so (Batman Begins is I would consider a revival point for the genre). In their place were movies like Broken Flowers, Manderlay, and Lady Vengeance which are exciting in their development of certain ideas, but not the heaviest year for action. This was also a year for beginnings as the Dark Knight trilogy, Rian Johnson, and Robert Downey Jr. all took big steps forward.
#13–2014 (The Year of Lets-Get-Weird)
Tier 10 Films —Birdman, Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Gone Girl
Perhaps Alejandro Jodorowsky spiked the drinking water this year, but everything got a little bit weird for 12 months. Jake Gyllenhaal was getting in touch with his inner psycho for Nightcrawler while Joaquin Phoenix was getting hippie weird with Inherent Vice. The superhero genre took a turn for the weird with Guardians of the Galaxy and even the documentary genre chipped in with Jodorowsky’s Dune.
#12–2015 (The Year of Lets-Get-Serious)
Tier 10 Films — The Revenant, Spotlight, Sicario, Youth
Coming off the 2014 oddities we got serious, real serious, in 2015. The Revenant and Spotlight headlined some serious tones and subject matters that also included mexican drug crime in Sicario, the brutal emotionlessness of robots in Ex Machina, and the holocaust in Son of Saul.
#11–2003 (The Year of Crossroads)
Tier 10 Films — City of God, LOTR: Return of the King, Big Fish, Lost in Translation, Kill Bill: Volume 1, Dogville, Coffee and Cigarettes
Part of what made 1999 and 2000 a really great time for movies was an influx in the neo-realist genre. 2003 was still continuing with this trend with great movies like City of God, 21 Grams, and Mystic River, but we were starting to see the industry movie in a slightly sillier direction as well. Kill Bill, Big Fish, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Oldboy took somewhat serious subject matter and through some cheesiness and silliness into the mix. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the Matrix trilogy which was completing it’s transition into absurdity at this point.
#10–2012 (The Year of Big Ideas)
Tier 10 Films — Moonrise Kingdom, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Looper
In 2012, directors aimed high. They took on big ideas and made films with lofty ambitions. Some of these worked while others did not, but their attempts can be appreciated. Life of Pi, Looper, and Cloud Atlas all took on ideas much bigger than anything simply contained within the actions of their characters. Christopher Nolan was taking on the apocalypse with The Dark Knight Rises, and perhaps the most ambitious idea was to actually end a franchise rather than turning it into an ‘expanded universe’. This was the year that The Avengers starting the taking the place of the Dark Knight trilogy, and complex ideas withered in favour of ‘let’s not take ourselves too seriously’.
#9–2001 (The Year of Loose Narratives)
Tier 10 Films — The Royal Tenenbaums, Amelie, LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring, Memento, Donnie Darko
With the success of 1999 and 2000, perhaps studio started trusting in directors and writers a bit more, because in 2001 they dropped the clear and concise narratives and decided to wander a bit more. Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive, Waking Life, Human Nature, and Spirited Away can all be looked at differently depending on who you ask. You weren’t spoon-fed in 2001, you had to go out and ask yourself and others what cinema was giving you.
#8–2011 (The Year of Good-but-not-Great)
Tier 10 Films — Drive, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, The Artist, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Samsara
You look at some of the best of 2011 and you perhaps ask yourself why this is as high up as it is. The reason is not for the top films but it’s all the small films underneath. At this time it starting becoming a lot easier to make high-quality cheap films. Writers moved from TV to Film and people started making their first films and they were good, not great but good. Shame, The Guard, Intouchables, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and Margin Call are all good example of this level playing field that didn’t wow but was impressive nonetheless.
#7–2002 (The Year of Great-but-not-Good)
Tier 10 Films — Gangs of New York, Adaptation., LOTR: The Two Towers, Punch-Drunk Love, Bourne Identity, Century of the Self, Irreversible, The Pianist, 28 Days Later, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Infernal Affairs, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance
If 2001 was a better year we could talk about 1999–2002 being a dynasty of cinema simply because of the masterpieces that were created in this year. Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Charlie Kaufman were all at the top of their game while Peter Jackson and Park Chan Wook were in the middle of some of the greatest trilogies of all time. Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of decent cinema underneath this, or this would be much higher on this list.
#6–2007 (The Year of Drama)
Tier 10 Films — There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, The Darjeeling Limited, The Trap, 300, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Into The Wild
If you like feelings like suspense, intrigue, and tension then 2007 was your year. The stories were simple, the characters were well-written, and the narratives were solid. Even the Coens stopped being so strange and told a good ole-fashioned western story. The Bourne trilogy was just wrapping up and the Dark Knight trilogy was about to hit top gear. The action trilogies of earlier in the decade were starting to be forgotten as drama settled in and the silliness of superheroes was still a few more years away.
#5–2009 (The Year of Sci-Fi)
Tier 10 Films — Moon, Watchmen, Bronson, District 9, Mr. Nobody, Life, An Education, A Prophet
The early 70s would’ve been proud. Before Star Wars turned the genre into lasers and action the sci-fi genre was all about simple thought-provoking stories, and for a year it returned to form. The four big sci-fi films mentioned above headline it but we see it in other films as well. The return of Star Trek was a bit more reserved than what it’s grown to since and the superhero genre had Defendor and I would even consider 9 as a representation of a good sci-fi superhero team-up as well.
#4–2010 (The Year of Cross-Polination)
Tier 10 Films — Inception, Shutter Island, Black Swan, The Social Network, Enter The Void, Senna, Cold Fish, Exit Through the Gift Shop, I Saw the Devil, Scott Pilgrim vs The World
2006 to 2009 was filled with solid, simple genre movies. Westerns were westerns, political thriller were political thrillers, and so on. The movies we got at that time were great examples of what the genres already were. 2010 started to break out of this by giving us great examples of mixing genres to great results. Edgar Wright mixed wacky visuals into romance and superheroes with Scott Pilgrim while Inception was mixing sci-fi into political thriller and heist movies. Cold Fish put a little bit of everything and The Social Network made us both love and hate Mark Zuckerberg. We’ve seen less and less of the simple genre films ever since because of how successful the styles and combinations were at this time. As a side trend, this was a fantastic year for documentaries as well, and the genre has been exploding ever since.
#3–2004 (The Year of Indies)
Tier 10 Films — The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Shaun of the Dead, The Aviator, I Heart Huckabees, The Power of Nightmares, Downfall, Bourne Supremacy, Hotel Rwanda, Primer
2004 was not only filled with quirky and fun indie movies, but it launched the careers of the quirky, fun artists that have given us much more ever since. Life Aquatic wasn’t Wes Anderson’s first film, but it was his biggest and put his work out there to a much bigger audience. Edgar Wright start the Cornetto trilogy, and his career, while even David O Russell took a break from his super serious filmography to get weird with Mark Wahlberg in I Heart Huckabees.
#2–2006 (The Year of You-Be-You)
Tier 10 Films — The Departed, The Prestige, Children of Men, The Science of Sleep, Thank You for Smoking, The Lives of Others, A Scanner Darkly, The Fountain
We didn’t see filmmakers break too many barriers in 2006, instead we saw them be themselves, deliver what they usually have, and do so at a very high quality. Scorsese gave us a violence-filled affair in Boston with The Departed. Christopher Nolan gave us a winding psychological plot with The Prestige. Richard Linklater gave us thought-provoking reflection with A Scanner Darkly. None of these are hardly surprising and could be used to describe other works within their filmographies, but you could also point to these ones as being at the top of those filmographies as well.
#1–2008 (The Year That Worked)
Tier 10 Films — The Dark Knight, Synecdoche New York, The Wrestler, Let The Right One In, RocknRolla, Love Exposure, Che, Tokyo!, Blindness, Burn After Reading, Man on Wire
Contrary to 2006, 2008 was a year where people branched out, took chances, and it worked. Heath Ledger was much maligned when he was first cast the Joker in the Dark Knight but ended up being the best super villain we’ve ever seen. Robert Downey Jr. was cast out of nowhere as Iron Man and has been the best thing about the MCU ever since. Jean-Claude Van Damme went serious in JCVD and it worked. Pixar had no dialogue for the first half of Wall-E and audiences loved it. Someone decided it was a good idea to have writer Charlie Kaufman direct his own movie and have full control. It was weird, but guess what it worked too. We weren’t yet in the cross-polination of 2010 when genres were being mixed around, we were still making good genre films, but we took big chances in key aspects of those films and they absolutely paid off in the best year of cinema in the 21st century so far.
