Mr. Carnelian's Entirely Subjective Guide to 21st Century Cinema

2015: Mad Max - Fury Road

Remakes and reboots are two-for-a-penny these days, but if you're going to do it, follow Fury Road's example and do it right (see also 2012's highly underrated Dredd). Although Tom Hardy's Max is supposedly the lead, Charlize Theron steals the spotlight, showing off her action chops as determined road-warrior Furiosa.

An extended postapocalyptic chase sequence par excellence, Fury Road sees our protagonists chased across the desert by a menagerie of crazed fanatics, including a red jumpsuited guitarist riding a monster truck composed primarily of speakers. Oh, and his guitar periodically shoots flame. All in all, it's a glorious and entirely bonkers punk-rock opera of a film, as relentlessly kinetic and brutal a spectacle as Cirque du Soleil on meth.

Attachment 76265Attachment 76266

Fun journey through the films of the 21st century so far!

Rather than go through a list of what I thought was the best film of each year, I'll just choose the ones that have stayed with me the most though there is some overlap:

2000: Almost Famous - Still a top 5 favorite film of all time for me. A movie every teenager and their parents should watch together.
2001: Y Tu Mama Tambien - One of Cuaron's best and not the only one of his on this list.
2002: City Of God - Haunting, sweeping, depressing and uplifting all at once.
2003: LOTR: ROTK - Remains the only film I ever snuck into and watched a 2nd time right after the first screening ended because I wasn't ready to leave Middle Earth yet. The Beacon lighting scene still gives me chills.
2004: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind - So wise, so inventive, so much to say about memory, loss and love.
2005: 40 Year Old Virgin - Finally cemented Steve Carell as the comedic genius we all kind of knew he was already. Between this and Anchorman.
2006: Children of Men - My favorite film of the last 20 years. Even more important today.
2007: There Will Be Blood - PTA and DDL's finest work.
2008: In Bruges - Some of the best dialogue Tarantino never wrote.
2009: Up - The four minute sequence "Married Life" is quite possibly Pixar's greatest achievement and I readily admit to weeping at the movies when it ended. I was not the only one.
2010: The Social Network - Also WAY ahead of it's time in showing the dark side to Facebook.
2011: A Separation - Tree of Life was visually the most dynamic thing I saw that year but A Separation is Farhadi's masterpiece.
2012: The Master - A tour de force of actors (Hoffman, Phoenix, Adams) though a lot of strong choices this year including DDL as Lincoln, Craig and Bardem in Skyfall and Leo in Django
2013: (Tie) Her and Wolf of Wall Street - Two entirely different movies and I can't break the tie because both offer such wildly different versions of the world, one melancholy but uplifting, the other a black comedy showing the beating bloody heart of capitalism.
2014: A Most Violent Year - Oscar Isaac channeling early Al Pacino and a never better Jessica Chastain. Yes please. Boyhood was remarkable as an achievement as well.
2015: Mad Max Fury Road: As Barney might say, "just hook it to my veins!". Special shoutout to The Lobster for being so wonderfully inventive and to The Big Short for making the depressing funny.

Will update the rest when we get there.

Take care all.

Fury Road is astonishing, those chase sequences are something else. I like how Tom Hardy slips back into his Bane voice by the end too :D

2015 - Inside Out. Pixar's best non-Toy Story film. Who would have thought I'd get so upset over an imaginary friend?

Yeah, I will agree that Fury Road was a great film and one of my biggest regrets of that years is that I didn't watch it in a theater because the film was just made to be seen on the big screen. I also don;t understand the whining about Max not being as prominent in the film, because he's only really the heart of the story in the first film and the later two Gibson films had him playing the wild card helping out the more quirky and personable side characters the film mostly revolved around. Fury Road was hardly any different in that way.

My choice for best film is either Mad Max: Fury Road or Tarantino's Hateful Eight, which was a fun western film with some great acting and that usual cartoonish violence Tarantino is known for. I also would give a shout out to Ant-Man, which despite its original director leaving the project and the film getting redone to fit more in line with the MCU was a surprisingly fun caper movie and introduced us to the only true "every man" of the MCU franchise.

I still don't get the praise Hateful Eight gets. It's Tarantino's worst film by a distance to me.

Big Short, Anomalisa and Slow West were my faourites of 2015.

I personally hated Black Swan though I seem to be in the minority. I haven't been convinced by any of Darren Aronofsky's films and I've seen quite a few. I'll probably get round to watching Requiem for a Dream at some point which is supposedly his best. After watching the car crash that was Mother! though I'm not in any rush.

Hey these lists are subjective though and I reckon I'll be the only one with Limitless as my 2011 best film :lol:

2009 - Avatar
2010 - Inception
2011 - Limitless
2012 - Silver Linings Playbook
2013 - Specific Rim
2014 - Interstellar
2015 - The Martian

Fury road is actually what inspired my novel lmao which inspired an entire series. Except i thought "Mad max.. but on ice, in snow and winter!"

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Bubba

I personally hated Black Swan though I seem to be in the minority. I haven't been convinced by any of Darren Aronofsky's films and I've seen quite a few. I'll probably get round to watching Requiem for a Dream at some point which is supposedly his best. After watching the car crash that was Mother! though I'm not in any rush.

Hey these lists are subjective though and I reckon I'll be the only one with Limitless as my 2011 best film :lol:

2009 - Avatar
2010 - Inception
2011 - Limitless
2012 - Silver Linings Playbook
2013 - Specific Rim
2014 - Interstellar
2015 - The Martian

---

Watch The Wrestler, it's very different to all those other films

2016: Your Name

A fantastical body-swap romance, Your Name is a coming-of-age story of love, loss and fate. Mitsuha and Taki are the two young people going all Freaky Friday, with both finding themselves waking up one morning in the other's body and then living out a day in their shoes, a situation that then repeats itself periodically over the coming months. However, unusually for a body-swap film, after some initial body humour the situation isn't played for laughs. Rather, the two are fascinated by the glimpse into each other's very different lives, and find themselves drawing closer together despite being hundreds of miles apart.

Your Name is very much a tale of two Japans. The busy metropolis of Tokyo and the soundtrack's frequent use of fast-paced J-pop contrast with sleepy, rural Itomori, where traditional music accompanies ancient ceremonies. Likewise, beneath the film's glossy modern sheen lies something more mysterious and ancient, as Mitsuha and Taki gradually discover the key to their situation is to be found in ancient folklore.

An unexpectedly haunting and beautiful film, and one of my very favourites. Highly recommended.

Attachment 76272Attachment 76273

2016 - Manchester by the Sea

I thought this film was going to be devastating, but I didn't know the half of it. What's most amazing is the film also managed to be quite funny in places, how they managed the balance is incredible. Casey Affleck deserved his Oscar and Michelle Williams should have won too.

2017: Blade Runner 2049

Blade Runner 2049 had high expectations to meet, following up one of the 20th century's most highly regarded cult classics. Fortunately, it lives up to the challenge, providing a tale of identity both grandiose and thought-provoking.

One of Blade Runner 2049's great achievements is that it still feels like Blade Runner, despite largely disregarding the first film's noir atmosphere in favour of leaning more heavily into cyber-punk and throwing in generous lashings of post-apocalypse. A lot of this is thanks to the film's aesthetic, which not only evokes the visual mood of the original, but also builds upon it, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways.

Attachment 76274Attachment 76275

Blade Runner 2049 is far, far better than any Blade Runner sequel has any right to be.

2017 - Dunkirk
Even with The Dark Knight under his belt, I wasn't entirely sold on Christopher Nolan until I saw this. I left the cinema, and I jumped when a drop of rain landed on me as I was still so shaken up from watching it.

Always thought Blade Runner 2049 was a dumb premise that was incredibly well directed with an aesthetic Ridley would be proud of.

2018: Annihilation

Turns out, I really like psychological thrillers with Natalie Portman as the lead (see also, Black Swan). After her husband inexplicably appears at their house months after being declared Missing in Action and then promptly drops into a coma, Portman's Lena is drawn into the project he was working for. This project is an attempt to understand/destroy "the Shimmer" a mysterious and ever-growing area centred around an asteroid crash site, in which the laws of nature no longer seem to apply.

Film buffs might be tempted to write off Annihilation as a gender-swapped version of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film Stalker, but whilst there are a lot of surface similarities, at the core of each film is something quite different. Both feature a group of troubled individuals journeying through a strange, altered landscape in a quest to reach the mystery at its centre. However, whilst Stalker plays around with the nature of desire and how desire shapes us, Annihilation deals much more directly with questions at the heart of our notions of identity. What does it mean to be "you"? Is a copy or an echo of you also you? If so, might that echo be able to become more than you? How far can you be transformed before you cease to be you?

Both the world around Lena and her group and the interior world of their minds become haunted by doubling and mirroring the further they venture, culminating in a bone-chilling encounter at the heart of the Shimmer. I absolutely love sci-fi, so I admit that I'm biased, but for my money Annihilation is not only one of the best sci-fi films of this century so far, but one of the best films of the century so far, full stop.

Attachment 76277Attachment 76276

2018 - Roma/Eighth Grade

Alfonso Cuaron's beautifully done 1970s drama is easily the best thing Netflix have put their name to thus far, and cements him as a genius director. And Eighth Grade is a hugely sympathetic look at being a teenager in the present day and at social anxiety.