The Quality Movies Of 2001

Clockwise from top left: Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, A.I., Ali, Audition, Mulholland Drive, Amores Perros, Moulin Rogue, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Monsters Inc.

Have the Oscars ever gotten it more wrong than they did in March of 2002, whilst Tom Hanks surpassed Best Picture to the treacly, forgettable biopic A Beautiful Mind? Okay, simply they've—the Academy has been making boneheaded requires just shy of a century. But it’s nevertheless hard to think about many Oscar-night moments as deflating as Ron Howard’s victory over no longer just four worthier opponents but each superior movie his wasn’t competing in opposition to. Because 2001 became extra than a super 12 months for movies. It become an all-timer, perhaps even filthier with masterpieces than the fabled 1999.

2001 gave us powerhouse studio movies—a competition of hobbits, monsters, unhappy robots, and all-famous person heists, all classing up the multiplex. Musicals were given thrillingly, eccentrically modern. Horror experienced a miniature renaissance. Major works arrived from Mexico, Japan, France, Hong Kong, and such a lot of different points on the arena-cinema map. The triumphs got here in all shapes and sizes, genres and languages. One even got here from (gasp) TV.

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We considered going to 50 this year. That’s how deep the pool of superlative films released two many years in the past runs. What, no Donnie Darko? No Black Hawk Down? No Zoolander? Consider them honorable mentions; each might have made a better Best Picture, too. As ordinary, we caught to movies launched in America in the course of the calendar yr in question, which is why you gained’t discover Spirited Away or Y Tu Mamá También on the list (look for them subsequent year, when we cite our favorites of 2002), and additionally why you will find Memento and In The Mood For Love there, no matter earlier festival debuts.

Keep studying for The A.V. Club’s listing of the 25 high-quality movies of 2001, as selected via a dozen of our regular individuals. Don’t agree with our picks? Hey, that’s ok, it became a treasure trove of riches in 2001—there were so many appropriate movies that you may make a very strong list of those that didn’t make the cut. Happy with how we voted? Beautiful minds think alike.

The audience is the enemy in the profoundly scathing provocations of Michael Haneke. But at the least once, Austria’s highest quality Funny Gamesman channeled his penchant to antagonize into something extra confounding than merciless—a pointedly cryptic puzzle-field of intertwined Parisian lives. Beginning with a public war of words that has an increasing number of devastating outcomes for the strangers worried, Code Unknown unfolds as a mysterious jumble of vignettes, provided out of order, elliptically sequenced. It’s an not going cousin to the we-are-all-connected ensemble pieces of the filmmaker represented two spaces down in this very listing, besides that Haneke is much less interested in what unites us than what divides us—screw ups of communique, disparities in privilege. The fragmentary nature of the movie gives its personal praise for connoisseurs of misunderstanding, a bounty of tantalizing obfuscation and cognitive dissonance. What’s more, it speaks to a bigger subject matter no much less relevant in our deceptively “connected” present: society itself getting lost in translation. [A.A. Dowd]

Formally inventive and narratively subversive, Cure proves that even a style as worn-out because the serial-killer film may be expanded by way of a filmmaker of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s self belief. The Pulse director eschews whodunit conference by means of introducing severa murderers, all with one issue in not unusual: They’ve crossed paths with Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara), an eerily calm amnesiac with robust powers of concept. Though detective Takabe (Kōji Yakusho) and his psychiatrist partner (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) capture up with Mamiya quickly, what follows is a pores and skin-crawling portrait of mental decay that borrows from David Fincher’s Seven and anticipates his later Zodiac. Kurosawa’s best gambit is by no means cuing visitors to search for any particular locus of chance inside his body. Instead, he fills each shot with indistinct anxiety and dread, after which just holds on it. Everything stays slightly “off” even if nothing strange occurs. Until it does, of route. [Vikram Murthi]

Reinvigorating Mexican cinema at the begin of the millennium, this grisly triptych of blood on the pavement, human (and canine) suffering, and primal goals released the career of Alejandro González Iñárritu. Traversing the socioeconomic strata of Mexico City, screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s tricky plot tragically connects the parallel plights of a Spanish model improving from a automobile crash, a homeless hitman lacking his daughter, and a reckless romantic played by way of a younger Gael García Bernal, in his first film role. Flaunting a memorable soundtrack that reflects the evolution of rock track in the us of a on the time, Amores Perros stays the Oscar-winning director’s most visceral work to this point—a real gut punch of a debut. [Carlos Aguilar]

Baz Luhrmann’s Hollywood-thru-France-through-Australia revival of the movie musical arrived simply in time for the 21st century—and but maybe nonetheless more than one decades too early, judging from some of the contemporaneous reactions. Those court cases, approximately the freneticism of a musical where the director cuts too speedy to look the dancing and—prepare the fainting sofa—now and again mixes and suits bits of various anachronistic pop songs, now experience key to the movie’s legacy, reflecting Luhrmann’s willingness to simply grapple with the tune-video revolution and push the movie musical form forward. He’s making use of the same modernism that enthralls penniless writer Christian (Ewan McGregor) and gifted/doomed courtesan Satine (Nicole Kidman) in 1900 Paris. The film’s love story is old-fashioned melodrama, however Luhrmann’s telling transcends cornball declarations (on occasion cribbed from Paul McCartney, Dolly Parton, and Elton John, amongst others), shooting the moment where pop schmaltz spins out into lovestruck delirium. Luhrmann’s decision to rent actors in preference to singers pays off brilliantly with shining-big name work from McGregor and Kidman—and an unforgettable rendition of “Like A Virgin” achieved with the aid of Jim Broadbent. [Jesse Hassenger]

Speaking of Nicole Kidman, she’s resplendent by means of candlelight, choking again gasps of terror, on this classically eerie outlier from an generation while mainstream horror become otherwise operating in the metatextual shadow of Scream. Making his English-language debut, author-director Alejandro Amenábar scored an unexpected hit by using sticking a game film celebrity and a couple of pale kids right into a foggy haunted house in post-WWII Europe. There’s an evergreen elegance to Amenábar’s craftsmanship that suggests The Others might have been launched in any era and still related with audiences. Credit Kidman’s timeless display presence, too; rarely has it served this sort of nicely-engineered tale, springing an convenient (and trendy) lure of fright. [Jason Shawhan]

Few phrases are as balk-worth as “rock musical,” however John Cameron Mitchell’s version of his enduring stage musical has the swagger to pull that dubious genre off. The filmmaker reprises the starring function of a punk-rock singer whose attempt to emigrate from East Germany results in a botched gender-reassignment operation, heartache, and an American concert tour shadowing the former lover who stole their songs. Light years in advance of its time in its remedy of gender and the power of drag, Hedwig is an agonizing love tale, lent profound weight by means of the autumn of The Berlin Wall. It’s also delightful, way to bawdy cabaret-fashion humor and Stephen Trask’s original songs, that are every bit as audacious as the title individual. [Leila Latif]