01 Still the high-water mark for a comic-book movie taken seriously.
50 Best Movies of the 2000s
By Vlad Zakh · May 10, 2026
The 2000s were the decade streaming and superhero franchises both quietly took root, and this list pulls the strongest films across every genre the site already covers from that ten-year stretch.
01 
02 A sprawling, brutal portrait of a Rio favela across two decades.
03 Are you not entertained, and two decades later the answer is still yes.
04 A remake that somehow out-tenses its own already-tense source material.
05 Told backwards, and somehow that's the only way this story works.
06 A breakup movie disguised as a memory-erasure sci-fi premise.
07 Brutal, but it earns every second of that reputation.
08 Tarantino's revenge epic told through pure genre-blending style.
09 The reboot that made grounded, serious superhero films the norm.
10 A politically charged action film that only got more relevant with time.
11 Daniel Day-Lewis turning oil-boom ambition into pure menace.
12 A repressed almost-affair between neighbors, told through glances more than dialogue.
13 A chase movie that refuses every genre convention it sets up.
14 A boxing movie that becomes something much heavier by the final act.
15 Reinvented Bond as colder and more physically believable.
16 A rags-to-riches structure told through game-show trivia.
17 Earns its ending through everything that comes before it.
18 A superhero family forced back into action, still Pixar's sharpest action film.
19 Redefined spy-thriller action with a grittier, more grounded style.
20 Bleak sci-fi action anchored by some of the most technically stunning long takes made.
21 An amnesiac and an aspiring actress unravel a Los Angeles mystery that refuses to resolve cleanly.
22 An uncomfortable, tender drama about two men caring for women in comas.
23 A zombie comedy with more genuine heart than most straight horror films.
24 A vampire story that's really about loneliness and childhood cruelty.
25 The pop-culture-reference comedy that launched a genre of imitators.
26 The film that quietly launched the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe.
27 The romance movie the entire decade measured itself against.
28 A full-throated, physical piece of stylized action filmmaking.
29 Denzel Washington in full righteous-revenge mode.
30 A dirty-cop thriller anchored by one of the great villain performances.
31 A fugitive hides in a small town staged entirely on a bare soundstage, chalk outlines standing in for walls.
32 A traveling circus and a stuffed whale trigger unrest in a small Hungarian town, shot in extended unbroken takes.
33 Two strangers, one hotel, and almost nothing happens on purpose.
34 An ensemble drama built entirely on collisions, literal and otherwise.
35 A quiet, devastating love story that still resonates two decades on.
36 A theme-park ride turned into an actual blockbuster classic.
37 The decade's last great comedy before the genre shifted entirely.
38 A breakup told out of chronological order, refusing to be the romance it looks like at first.
39 The teen comedy that closed out the decade's comedic run.
40 A shoestring premise that launched an entire subgenre almost single-handedly.
41 Reinvented the zombie genre with fast, rage-driven infected instead.
42 A quiet, old-fashioned ghost story that earns its final twist.
43 Ten overlapping London love stories converge in the weeks before Christmas.
44 A dense, faithful adaptation of a comic considered unfilmable for years.
45 Still considered one of the best entries in the entire X-Men franchise.
46 The superhero sequel that raised the bar for the entire genre.
47 The indie-comedy voice that defined a specific late-2000s tone.
48 A deadpan, apocalyptic vision of modern life told in static, painterly tableaux.
49 A theater director builds a replica of his own life inside an ever-expanding warehouse set.
50 Mockumentary comedy pushed further than almost anything before it.
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