Top 20 Best Films/Indies of the Aughts

14. Almost Famous (2000): "Almost Famous has got it all, y’all. It’s a slightly tipsy, 2 a.m.-phone-call kind of movie that introduces the best musical moment in cinematic history, the “Tiny Dancer” bus scene that will buckle your knees, make the hair on your arms salute the gods, and then detonate inside you. Almost Famous harkens back to a time when music offered salvation instead of an insipid avenue to that faux-hipster vibe and, if you can’t find some sort of romantic symbiosis when Phillip Seymour Hoffmann announces that “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone when you’re uncool,” then you don’t belong together.
— Dustin Rowles9. Memento (2001): Memento is a testament to what happens when a brilliant premise is paired with an equally brilliant director (Christopher Nolan). Movies that muddle with timelines are always a complicated undertaking, but Memento does it without resorting to cheap gimmickry. The story, about an insurance investigator (Guy Pearce) trying to find the man who beat and killed his wife, is told in reverse, starting with him murdering a man. From there it staggers back and forth between black and white scenes and color ones, as it alternates between time lines. To confuse matters even more, Pearce’s character, Leonard Shelby, has anterograde amnesia as a result of the attack on his wife, causing him to forget everything that happened since the attack. Every day he wakes up with no memory of anything that’s happened between that fateful day, and that very moment.. As a result, he develops a wickedly clever and intensely creepy and almost fetishistic method of keeping track of events, including notes, photographs, and tattoos that now cover his body. Memento is simply stunning, with a strange, harsh universe that is unforgiving to everyone in it. Shelby is one of the most complex characters I’ve seen on film, and the handling of his amnesia and his methodical dedication to his quest for retribution is breathtaking. Pearce, in what is arguably his best role ever, is a torn, shattered and confused man who despite all the chaos that every morning brings, is so driven that he’s almost scary. —TK7. Brokeback Mountain (2005): Calling Brokeback Mountain “that gay cowboy movie” is about as reductive as calling The Godfather“that mafia movie.” It contains aspects of Westerns, gay coming-of-age films, and romantic melodramas, but to apply a facile label would be to underestimate its majestic sweep and its heartening and heartrending depth. It is, at its base, a film about the conflict between what a man is and what he needs. The movie’s source is the final story in Annie Proulx’s book Close Range: Wyoming Stories, a collection of narratives about difficult lives lived in difficult circumstances by people who mostly don’t expect better. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the 'gay cowboy' opposites who attract each other.

Brokeback Mountain has one of each: Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), starry-eyed and caught up in heroic myths, and Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) a pragmatist who just lives his life the only way he knows how. In outline, the film is simple: Boy gets boy; boy loses boy; boy gets and loses boy over and over again across a lifetime — but there’s a whole world of suffering and grief in all that getting and losing, a permanent sense of loss, of possibilities forever forestalled, happiness perpetually found and then denied, lessons learned too late. — Jeremy C. Fox3. The Dark Knight (2008): Nolan takes the story seriously, and that makes all the difference, transforming his films from good to great. They’re the best superhero movies ever made because they embrace the character on a gut level and not as some pop artifact. The Dark Knight is a harrowing, frightening, uncompromising, flat-out great superhero movie, wonderful in sad ways, hitting the perfect mix of characterization and humor, bouncing between phenomenal action set pieces and the brutally human moments that place the film in a recognizable world even as it soars into comic book fantasy. Put simply, Nolan just gets it. He’s a believer, and he’ll make one out of you, too.
— Daniel Carlson1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry’s (and Charlie Kaufman’s) 2004 gem, represents perfectly the beautiful disasters we create through relationships, romantic and otherwise, with its look at the oddly matched Joel (Jim Carrey in the best thing he’ll ever do) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), who each opt to have their memories of each other erased after their painful breakup. As each memory of Joel’s slips away, though, he and Clementine — in a Kaufmanesque manner — view with new eyes everything they in fact had as a couple, and they can’t help but be drawn to each other all over again. A secondary plot ends the same way, with a girl (Kirsten Dunst) again loving the man (Tom Wilkinson) she had erased from her mind. In a depressed state you could take these plots the wrong way, in that you’ll never get over your former love, but it’s best to view the positive truths they represent on what it means to love unconditionally". — Sarah Carlson Source: www.pajiba.com

9. Garden State (2004): "It might be overly precious and insanely hipstery, with the wallpaper shirts and crazy girls preaching the gospel of the Shins, but it was a love story told to me at the loneliest and most confusing point of my life to date. Zach Braff’s tale of a twenty-nothing who runs to California on a dream, never to have it fulfilled, only to slink home for his mother’s funeral and to the friends and father he abandoned, said something to me. We spend most of our life wasting it. Every love we encounter should shake us like a snowglobe, change us irrevocably, make us want to be a different, if not always better person, and scare the shit out of us. If you can’t look past the wearing of the trashbags and screaming into a hole to the reason WHY they are doing that, that’s your problem. If you’re satisfied with your lot in life, if you don’t think you can do any better than where you are right now, if you don’t have miles to go before you sleep, and don’t want to bother trying to rebuild bridges that might have burnt down, that’s cool. Me, I still want more.8. Secretary (2002): Secretary is everything opportunity afforded by independent film done exquisitely. It deals with uncomfortabe topics like bondage and domination and self-mutilation with love and irreverent humor. It’s never made fun of, but it’s never treated like a sacred cow. The entire film is unusual and daring, because it doesn’t make the forbidden unforgivable or sinful. Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader are delightful as the lawyer and the woman who understands him in this dark — and strangely endearing — comic study of love and power.
Emilie de Ravin, Nora Zehetner, Noah Segan, Rian Johnson, Meagan Good, Lukas Haas, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Matt O'Leary at "Brick" Sundance Premiere, 2005.

5. Brick (2005): Rian Johnson’s debut re-imagines a gritty crime noir in a high school setting. Redoing older stories for teens is nothing new; crafting a Shakespearean plot in Converse sneakers has become its own genre. But Brick astounds because Johnson keeps the gin-mill language and nicknames while using a cast of teens. It’s mindboggling that it works, and it may seem gimmicky, but he clings to the conceit and keeps it fresh by actually having a seriously splendid murder mystery to tack his talents to. It’s Dashiel Hammett at Dawson’s Creek, without seeming cheesy. Adapting clever slang for high school students can be tricky, and giving them a patois that smacks of prohibition is a risky choice, but Johnson pulls it off with panache. The young cast, particularly stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lukas Haas, make it work.4. Primer (2004): Shane Carruth gives us a true indie masterpiece — a science-fiction time-travel study with special effects all occurring in the subconscious of the viewer. It was shot for a pittance — something like $7,000, edited on the writer-director-star’s computer, and the forced sparsity gives the film a stylistic edge. By calling Primer a time-travel picture I’m giving away so much and completely oversimplifying. The entire film sneaks up on you and does what all great hard science pictures should do — it forces you to think. It’s a daunting study on greed and capitalism among friends, like Office Space going the way of Shallow Grave. Carruth is able to do so very much with so very little, which is what all independent film should be. It’s a perfect example of making art out of practically nothing. 1. Juno (2007): Call it hipstery (cause it is), rag on the leads for being one note (which they aren’t), bitch and moan because you can’t stand the soundtrack, but keep on missing the entire point entirely. It does everything every other movie on this list did well — only all in one movie. It’s an unusual love story, it takes uncomfortable topics and makes fun of them, it creates its own unique patois, it does so much with so little, it elevates underappreciated actors, and it’s funny while being sweet and touching and smart. Most of all, it made me feel good. If you want to hate on it because you don’t think it’s meaningful or interesting, that’s your problem. But it shows that a clever script and a talented director can take a little bit of studio money and destroy the competition.It’s changed the playing field. Juno will always be an important film, because it marks the point when the film festivals started to matter, when comedies were taken as seriously as the dramas, and when price tags stopped mattering". Source: www.pajiba.com