Best movie of each year 2000-2025, according to Inkhaven
Earlier this month, Jenn posted:
I’m at a 40 person writing retreat currently, and the venue has these huge whiteboard walls that were so invitingly blank. So I thought a fun thing I can do is write up a list of my favourite songs of each year of the 21st century so far, and then invite all of the residents to replace my picks with theirs, over the course of two days.
Since then, others have repurposed this white board infrastructure, asking their fellow Inkhaven residents to create “best lists” other things, like blog posts and video games and historical empires. And now I have done the same thing with movies.
For each year from 2000-2025, I offer my own entry, followed by the residents’ replacement:
2000
Snatch: Guy Ritchie at his best: criminals of every sort, kinetic direction, Brad Pitt doing an unintelligible Irish accent. Frantic, fun, fast.
Replacement: none
2001
Ocean’s Eleven: The perfect heist movie. Nobody does it like Soderbergh. Absurd levels of charisma on screen at any given moment.
Replaced by: Legally Blonde: “iconic movie with a sweet protagonist and one billion quotable quips. Comfort movie par excellence!”
2002
Spider-Man: They let Sam Raimi make a $100 million movie, and it rules! Jim Norton is in this movie for 2 seconds, and it rules! This movie is about New York and New Yorkers, and a guy who shoots webs. Great villain performance by Willem Dafriend Dafoe
Replaced by: Adaptation: “Nic Cage x2 + orchids”
2003
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: It’s now illegal to make movies that look this good. The performances, the score, and the script all conspire to create some of the most moving moments in cinema history.
No replacement
2004
The Incredibles: A movie about family and parenthood. What could be better? Incredible character design, absurdly tight script and characterization
Replaced by: Primer: “a 77-minute engineering mistake that became one of the best time travel movies ever made”
2005
Batman Begins: It’s kind of incredible that they let Nolan play with this IP. Liam Neeson makes a great Batman character. Bale brings a level of humanity to the Bruce Wayne role we haven’t seen since.
Replaced by: The Producers: “Step 1: we find the worst script ever written, Step 2: we hire the worst director in town, Step 3: we lose $10 million on a $1 production, Step 4: PROFIT!”
2006
The Prestige: More interesting as a character study than as a genre film, and yet it is also an incredible genre film. Has a great “plot” but it’s not dependent on strong plot twists.
Replaced by: The Departed (Justified by handwriting that I cannot read, sorry)
2007
Zodiac: A film about obsession, and who better to star than RDJ and Jake Gyllanhal? This is also a movie about the California highway system
Replaced by: Sunshine: “A solid horror movie disguised as a science fiction movie. The setting is at once claustrophobic but terrifyingly open. It’s got a great soundtrack that only adds to the creeping unease. And to me, the ending is a fist pump for humanity. (ignore the bad science)”
2008
The Dark Knight: The perfect movie, if you are a teenage boy (I happen to be born during the 90’s). Health Ledger’s Joker is iconic. The world of this movie makes no sense, but it’s aesthetically everything it needs to be.
Replaced by: Burn after reading: “Retired CIA gets into hijinks when his memoir is forgotten in a gym and employees try to extort him.”
2009
Inglorious Basterds: Tarantino’s got a thing for genre mashups and historical revenge fantasies and this one is alternately tense/terrifying and incredibly fun to watch.
Replaced by: OSS 117 Rio ne pépond plus (Lost in Rio): “Pure French comedy. Hilarious. Parody of James Bond. Esoteric to non-French. Extremely French protagonist. Heavy use of “second degré”.” Set in Brasil.”
2010
The Social Network: This is a movie about divorce that improbably centers on a relationship between two heterosexual men. Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross soundtrack. Armie Hammer is a tour de force, and there’s two of him. Andrew Garfield plays the perfect jealous partner, and his Prada is at the cleaners. Perfect movie.
Replaced by: Inception. “An extremely straightforward film about movie-making. The emotional core contains a perspective I’ve often felt and rarely seen, and the tense pacing and action pay for the runtime”
2011
Moneyball: A perfect movie! A wonderful work of fiction with delightful fictional characters. Like all Sorkin films, it’s about a dad and his daughter.
Replaced by: none
2012
The Place Beyond the Pines: “Ryan Gosling’s character just like me fr” is very far from being true in my case, but the filmmaking draws me into the world so thoroughly that I feel what it’s like to be that guy. Incredibly immersive.
Replaced by: Cloud Atlas. “An impossible adaptation that turned out to be not so impossible. Shifting the novel’s structure was a good idea—it led to many spectacular moments”
2013
Blue Ruin: A revenge movie that portrays revenge as a horrible, ugly, bloody thing. (The antonym to many lesser “revenge movies” that portray revenge as a cathartic power fantasy.)
Replaced by: Frozen: “If you’re confused about this, consult your local six-year-old.”
2014
Nightcrawler: A film about the dirty business of “making the news.” Jake Gyllenhaal is an incredible sociopath. Incredibly propulsive plot, never stops moving and never lets you rest.
Replaced by: Interstellar. “The blankfaces have taken over, and it’s up to the retired Progress Studies believer to save the day. ‘It’s not possible,’ says the robot. ‘It’s necessary,’ says the human race.”
2015
The Martian: An ode to joy, optimism, and the wonderful things human minds can do. It’s more of an engineering movie than a science movie, which is good because we don’t get enough of those!
Replacement: none
2016
Arrival: I cannot articulate what makes this movie great. It just is.
Amanda From Bethlehem keeps this and adds, quoting Honest Trailers: “It’s the second movie of 2016 that featured Amy Adams trying to relate to an alien that no one else likes. (The first was Batman v Superman.)”
A second resident adds: “Supposedly, people at Google came up with attention after watching it.”
2017
Baby Driver: I have seen this movie like 5 times, which is a normal thing to do when the experience of watching it is quite analogous to listening to your favorite album.
Replaced by: The LEGO Batman Movie: “Will Arnett is great as Batman; the movie captures the inherent silliness of superheroes while having a great heart.”
2018
Eighth Grade: Early adolescence is utterly terrifying, full of mortifying experiences. You just want to hide in your room where no one else can see your awkwardness and acne. And yet while fearing human contact more than anything, you also desire human connection more than anything.
Replaced by: The Wolf House: Nobody heard of this Chilean stop-motion animated historical allusion embedded in a fairy tale embedded in an in-universe propaganda film because sometimes you must seek out greatness. The visuals are both skin-crawling & unparalleled-literally-never-seen-anything-like-this-before stunning. Watch for the thematic language drifting between Spanish and German
2019
Uncut Gems: A 2-hour anxiety attack. There’s nothing quite so gripping. So intense, so specific, relentless.
No replacement, even though Marriage Story was sitting right there.
2020
Palm Springs: Not a great movie, but a good one, and sometimes that’s better than being great, especially when you need to stay home and want something comfy. Charismatic actors with great chemistry, what else do you need?
No replacement; just elaboration from Amanda From Bethlehem: “This movie came out direct to Hulu due to the pandemic, when theaters were closed. It was a fun, modern take on a Groundhog Day-style time loop, centered around a wedding in Palm Springs.”
2021
Dune, Part 1: They passed a law few decades ago forbidding the creation of new movie stars, but Timothee Chalamet managed to slip through the cracks. The cinematography is experimental and majestic, it’s just great to look at!
Replaced by: RRR. “Every event that happens in this larger-than-life anticolonialist musical action epic is awesome. A guy fights a tiger & then apologizes to it. A guy rescues his BFF from jail and has him ride on his shoulders while shooting two guns at once. There’s friendship & blood & mythology & a dance-off. It may be Hindu nationalist propaganda but it does f**k continuously & hard.”
2022
Tár: Every scene is gripping, Cate Blanchett’s performance is captivating. A great character study.
Replacement: none, because Everything Everywhere All At Once is apparently too on-the-nose for Jenn to add it as an ethnically Chinese millennial whose parents moved to North America the 90’s. But as she notes, her mother doesn’t “get it,” which sort of indicates a failure on the part of the movie to actually speak to the first generation experience, don’t you think?
2023:
Blackberry: A fun disaster movie. An elegy to a bygone era. It’s made all the better because you know how the story ends.
Replacement: none, even though Oppenheimer was right there.
2024:
Challengers: A perfect movie. Looks amazing in ways that baffle me, like literally “how did they do that?” And every performance is great. The camera is obsessed with the characters’ bodies, every pore, every sinew and muscle.
Replaced by: I Saw the TV Glow. Gorgeous film. I’m not really a cinematography knower but many of the shots took my breath away. The best movie about 90s TV show fandom culture. Perfectly captures the experience of disassociation.
2025
Bugonia: A disgusting, sickening film. Who else but Yorgos Lanthimos could do this? Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone have incredible on-screen chemistry. The soundtrack is emotional terrorism. Enter this twisted world at your own peril.
Replacement by: none, because of the delinquency of the resident Sinners-enjoyer Eneasz Brodski was not around to transcribe the thoughts which he already shared on his own blog
If you want more of my movie opinions, you can follow me on Letterboxd.
This is my penultimate post for Inkhaven, a 30-day blogging fellowship where I and 40 other residents post daily for the month of November.
Couple of random thoughts about these movies (with spoilers):
Inception - skip the debate about whether Cobb is dreaming at the end and consider the more interesting theory that his wife was right and he was dreaming the whole time. Lots of details subtly suggest this, if you're willing to accept that Mal's totem doesn't necessarily work for him (and he only even successfully checks with it once out of the at-least-three times he tries).
Palm Springs - rare example of movie characters correctly exploiting the premise (albeit somewhat out of necessity) - one of the protagonists uses the time loop to learn quantum physics. If you're ever in a time loop, learn as many useful skills as you can before growing as a person or whatever!
I appreciate Uncut Gems but what about Parasite and Avengers Endgame?
Parasite deserved its crown, I think… It cut class, violence, and irony with surgical grace.
1917 was cinema as choreography.
Tarantino wrote a love letter to ghosts.
The Irishman was a farewell whispered by giants.
Joker stared straight into the fracture.
But Endgame did something else entirely.
It turned a generation into witnesses.
It proved that storytelling, when sustained with care, becomes shared memory.
So I wouldn’t argue rankings but say this:
Prestige films win awards.
Mythic films win time.
And time always has the final vote.