The 10 Best American Directors of the 2000s

Image via Complex Original

Selected filmography: The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), Knocked Up (2007), Funny People (2009)

When you have names like Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, and Steve Carell attached to a film, you know you have a box office hit, if not the comedy of the summer, or, ideally, a comedy that defines a generation. There's a secret behind those comedy touchstones, and his name is Judd Apatow.

Everything the man attaches himself to is guaranteed to be billed as a comedy triumph, so much so that he's credited with creating a new formula for the genre. It's inspired Rogen's own work, namely This Is the End, and encourages other up-and-comers to seek out notes about this new science, including his protege Lena Dunham.

He offers us the big feelings we crave from the movies. At his best, he moves us to laughter and tears, as is the case with with Funny People, a film about a comedian with a terminal health condition. Apatow's movies are never too happy or too dramatic to the point where you're reminded that this is a film, this is all fantasy.

Many of his movies, including ones he produces, feel like teen comedies that just hit puberty. They're coming-of-age tales, but for adults. The 40-Year-Old Virgin remains the best example of this. In the film, a grown man is confronted with the same hardship a kid heading off to college might face: getting laid for the first time. Knocked Up explores a similar topic, with a man-boy forced to grow up after a one-night stand results in a pregnancy. There's a reason why these films have become the ones you stop to watch while channel surfing on a Saturday afternoon: You can relate to them.

This humanization is a testament to the actors that Apatow has brought into his crew. He's truly created a family out of his favorite people. He trusts his actors, and in turn they trust him, and in Rogen and Segel's case, they even emulate him. In one decade, Apatow helped launch the movie careers of Rogen, James Franco, and Steve Carell. On top of that, he helped recreate Paul Rudd, who was making the switch from supporting roles or the romantic interest in teen comedies, as a full-fledge comedy star.

His movies made them the personalities who are considered the faces of comedy today, as he tends to focus on the real actor behind the character rather than the character itself. Pineapple Express and This Is the End would never have been successful if we didn't know these actors as the heightened versions of themselves Apatow introduced us to.

And his impeccable eye for talent has never failed him; we'd be hardpressed to find someone he put on that didn't find greater success. He gave Aubrey Plaza a shot and let Jonah Hill shine in Funny People and, in the following decade, helped make Kristin Wiig the biggest name in comedy by producing Bridesmaids. Even his cameos shouldn't be dismissed; Jane Lynch, Leslie Mann, and Elizabeth Banks are unforgettable in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

Apatow is one of the only modern directors we'd put up against Howard Hawks and Woody Allen. His influence on comedy films today is too broad—he created them and everyone in them. —Tara Aquino

Selected filmography: Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006)

Sofia Coppola catches a lot of flak. No surprise, given that she's the daughter of a famous director. Yet despite the cries of nepotism, she's proven to be a resilient figure with a style all her own, one that escapes her father’s name and turns her own name into an adjective tossed around in film classes. That's so Sofia Coppola.

What does that mean? A lot, actually. It means the image looks like it’s shot through a sun shower. It means the story is told between the lines, in the silence around each character. It means that you can re-experience the film just by playing back the carefully curated soundtrack. It means that every shot and every prop has a purpose. But most of all, it doesn’t feel fake. She writes and directs what she knows: the stories of troubled young women lost in a culture of excess, celebrity obsession, and superficial charms. A culture that isn't kind to women. Coppola composes the now. 

In her Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, she examines the life of lonely young wife (Scarlett Johansson) whose photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) is so engrossed in his Hollywood work that she finds solace in a washed-up actor (Bill Murray) staying in the same Tokyo hotel as the couple. What could be a picture of upper-crust vanity becomes a universal story about a man and woman who’ve become so disenchanted with their lives that they cling to the one real thing they can find. In Tokyo, surrounded by signs they can’t read and small talk they can’t translate, they understand no one in the chaos but each other. Coppola is a master at finding the essence of an idea—in Lost in Translation’s case, it’s delivered by Bill Murray in one poignant line: “The more you know about who you are, and what you want, the less you let things upset you”—and building an entire movie around it.

In her infamous Marie Antoinette, best known for being booed at Cannes, she took a very liberal take on the controversial French monarch. But, considering the '90s' Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, any other approach from her would’ve felt forced. Rather than running with the tried-and-true version of a period piece, Coppola presented Marie Antoinette as Thirteen set in the 18th century. Never has a historical figure felt so familiar. Decorated with pastry-like accoutrement, the film is a portrait of a young girl (Kirsten Dunst) forced to grow up too soon, and in the public eye. Sound familiar? Essentially, Coppola presented her as the Lindsay Lohan of her generation, and that message couldn't be more clear. Adding together the miscommunication Marie has with her husband and royal contemporaries, the hidden pair of Chuck Taylors, the music from New Order, the Cure, and Gang of Four, and the Valley girl accent Marie uses when she actually gets the chance to speak for herself, Marie Antoinette is an impressive portrait of youth in all its unpolished edges and flaws.

Coppola's project has remained unwavering in the second decade of the aughts with Somewhere and The Bling Ring. She's unafraid to meditates on the fickle, delicate, bored, and shallow, turning them into tragedies worth paying attention to. —Tara Aquino

Selected filmography: Erin Brockovich (2000), Traffic (2000), Ocean's Eleven (2001), Full Frontal (2002), Solaris (2002), Ocean's Twelve (2004), Bubble (2005), The Good German (2006), Ocean's Thirteen (2007), Che (2008), The Girlfriend Experience (2009), The Informant! (2009)

That Steven Soderbergh released a dozen films between 2000 and 2009 speaks not just to his prolificacy as a filmmaker, but to his innate need to create. Not content to simply lead the charge of American indie directors that arrived on Hollywood’s doorstep in the late 1980s, Soderbergh sought to change the rules of the game. His directorial debut, 1989’s sex, lies, and videotape, was among the most successful of this low-budget new wave, grossing more than 30 times its meager $1.2 million budget, earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay and making the then-26-year-old the youngest director ever to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Whereas many of his contemporaries aimed to make a name for themselves at Sundance as a stepping stone to big-budget pictures, much of Soderbergh’s career until the aughts was spent working in relative indie obscurity, with films like King of the Hill, The Underneath, Gray’s Anatomy, and Schizopolis. By the end of the decade, after partnering with soon-to-be-business partner George Clooney on Out of Sight, Soderbergh seemed to stumble upon a formula for success: personal storytelling + A-list name = box office gold.

In 2000, Soderbergh would have a chance to test out this theory not once, but twice: first with the legal drama Erin Brockovich, for which Julia Roberts won her first (and so far only) Oscar, then with the epic war-on-drugs tale Traffic, which won four of its five Oscar nominations (including Best Director for Soderbergh).

This new millennium success led to Soderbergh being entrusted with $85 million to breathe new life into a Rat Pack classic, Ocean’s Eleven. Though some observers initially worried that Soderbergh had finally sold out—that his decade toiling away on sub-$1 million budgets had finally forced him to cash in his creativity—the director did something surprising: He created a piece of entertainment, pure and simple. There were no deeper meanings or messages; just a group of friends having fun with Warner Brothers’ checkbook and raking in more than $450 million in box office receipts, making it the fifth highest-grossing film of the year.

Ocean’s Eleven’s popularity spawned two sequels in relatively short order, Ocean’s Twelve in 2004 and Ocean’s Thirteen in 2007, and allowed Soderbergh to adopt the “one for them, one for me” philosophy to which indie trailblazer John Cassavetes had always subscribed (meaning for that every studio film he actually got paid to make, he’d make a no-budget picture to satisfy his own creative interests). This would, of course, explain Soderbergh’s spate of experimental films throughout the decade, including 2002’s imrpovisational Full Frontal, 2006’s Bubble, and 2009’s The Girlfriend Experience. Having proven himself as a bankable name, Soderbergh now wanted to show how little money mattered. He wanted to push beyond the comfy confines of Hollywood as it existed and discover innovative ways to find (and entertain) an audience.

An early adopter of digital technology, Soderbergh continued to challenge the conventions of Hollywood throughout the decade, becoming one of the first name directors to allow a day-and-date release strategy for Bubble, a move that National Association of Theater Owners president John Fithian called "the biggest threat to the viability of the cinema industry today.”

It didn’t hurt Soderbergh that he had the world’s biggest movie star in his corner: George Clooney. The duo co-founded Section Eight Productions in 2000, which had a hand in not just their own directorial efforts but Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia, Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven, Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, and Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton. Soderbergh and Clooney’s collaborations during this period included a remake of Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic Solaris and the post-WWII drama The Good German.

In 2008, the cinematic revolutionary took on—appropriately enough—the life story of Che Guevara in two parts, The Argentine and Guerrilla, a pet project of star Benicio del Toro’s which Soderbergh admits he approached with a “pretty significant sense of dread.” (It didn’t help that he opted to shoot the films in Spanish, which diluted the pool of potential investors.) The Girlfriend Experience, featuring a day in the life of real-life porn star Sasha Grey playing a high-priced Manhattan hooker, followed. Soderbergh ended the decade on a high note—and with a laugh—with the price-fixing comedy The Informant! 

How does one director jump from Vegas con men to Marxist revolutionaries? For Soderbergh, it’s all part of being an artist and, as he told an enthralled crowd during a speech on “The State of Cinema” at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival: “Art is simply inevitable. It was on the wall of a cave in France 30,000 years ago, and it’s because we are a species that’s driven by narrative. Art is storytelling, and we need to tell stories to pass along ideas and information, and to try and make sense out of all this chaos.” —Jennifer Wood

Selected filmography: Finding Nemo (2003), WALL-E (2008)

Writer/director Andrew Stanton took the Pixar formula and ran with it in 2003’s Finding Nemo before completely redefining it with 2008’s WALL-E, transporting us from the depths of the ocean to far above the clouds. Stanton’s exuberantly funny and exciting adventures explored new heights for animation whiling maintaining the strengths of classic cinema—his movies pay homage to Hitchcock and Kubrick among others.

Consider an image from Finding Nemo, where the young titular, fish-napped clownfish looks out into the skyline of Sydney, seeing his own reflection amidst the outdoors. He’s looking for freedom but a quick pan reveals Nemo trapped within a dentist’s fish tank. That’s just one example of how Stanton retains the visual storytelling of cinema’s past, while working within a groundbreaking new medium: CGI animation. Thus, Finding Nemo is littered with inventive visuals of light breaking through waves, ocean currents as highways, synchronized fish providing road maps and jellyfish as the prettiest sign of doom. But Nemo was just a primer to Stanton’s most daring achievements in WALL-E.

What other director can boast that he captivated audiences with a nearly wordless 30-minute opening featuring a robotic trash compactor and a fetching iPod-like drone? For that feat, Stanton drew from Chaplin, presenting mechanical characters, WALL-E and EVE, who communicated with their physicality—ironic since they are entirely digital creations. That such performances made us swoon is just testament to Stanton’s visual prowess, concocting romantic sights amidst heaps of garbage. The dreamy spacewalk sequence, where Wall-E and EVE dance amidst the stars, was just too easy for Stanton by comparison.

The director’s strength is in the minute details he loads into every stunning, painstakingly textured and tactile frame: the angles of light, rust, dust, haze, shadows and shimmers. His images are constantly revealing, where mountains and skyscrapers turn out to be trash heaps and a distant dust mite turns out to be our protagonist. Our attention is directed to such details with an imaginary camera, which pans, zooms and moves as if it were a physical presence, monitoring WALL-E and EVE’s romance from an unhinged distant perspective that might remind you of Antonioni. All this in a Pixar movie!

Kids may not have been persuaded by WALL-E’s darker tones and lyricism but that doesn’t take away from Stanton’s achievement. He made an adult-oriented film in what is sold as a kid’s medium, finding the art in animation and involving us so deeply that we forgot we were watching cartoons. —Rad Simonpillai

Selected filmography: Requiem for a Dream (2000), The Fountain (2006), The Wrestler (2008)

Darren Aronofsky doesn't want you to feel good. For the now-44-year-old Brooklyn native, to suffer is to live. He just so happens to present his stories of longing, self-destruction, and emotional turmoil in visually compelling ways that make the misery eye-opening. He leaves you shook, but also enlightened.

Before 2000, Aronofsky—a scholarly filmmaker with degrees from Harvard University and the AFI Conservatory—made waves within the independent film community with Pi, a taut black-and-white character study replete with mental instability, conspiracy theorists, and math. The film ends with its protagonist, Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), ending his brainy nightmare by drilling into his skull with a power tool. As the drill hissed, and Max's flesh spiraled open, Aronofsky's sensibilities became clear—he wanted to dig around in your brain.

Aronofsky's first film of the 2000s, Requiem for a Dream, is the ultimate in cinematic stimulation. It's also an impressive exercise in duality—just as its poignant and endlessly watchable, it's also incredibly depressing. Experiencing Requiem for a Dream turns you into It's a Wonderful Life's George Bailey, only that, instead of helplessly having to watch your family endure without you, you're helplessly watching sympathetic people slowly kill themselves. Based on Hubert Selby's 1978 novel of the same, the film looks at various forms of drug addiction, and how a person's dependency on the deadliest of narcotics can systematically destroy his or her life.

The performances—namely that of Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn, playing a lonely widow whose desire to lose weight sends her into an amphetamine tailspin—are bold and startling. The story, which continues Aronofsky's penchant for unhappy endings established with Pi, starts off sad, devolves into profound trauma, and erupts into a spellbinding, pulverizing climax in which every main character implodes simultaneously.

Once the final credits roll, and composer Clint Mansell's now-iconic score—a charged-up string symphony that sounds like angels weeping—gets firmly lodged inside your thoughts, Requiem for a Dream has established permanent residence in your mind. The image of Tyrone (Marlon Wayans) curled up in the fetal position, on a South Carolina jail's uncomfortable bed, superimposed with the shot of a preteen Tyron curled up in his now-dead mother's arms, won't stop replaying. Those kinetic, marvelously edited montages of Harry (Jared Leto), Marion (Jennifer Connelly), and Tyrone shooting themselves up with heroin have forever turned you off to drug injections, due to Aronofsky's use of repetition to convey degeneration.

You're reminded of Requiem's innovative montages whenever subsequent filmmakers use Aronofsky's techniques for their own purposes, like pre-travel packing rituals in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air or nearly every sequential transition in an Edgar Wright movie (see: Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz).

Aronofsky's next film, The Fountain brought the previously independent artist into the major studio system—specifically, into the Warner Bros. Pictures business. When it arrived in theaters, The Fountain mostly confused audiences and critics who weren't just displeased. it's easy to understand how that happened. Written by Aronofsky himself, the film's script is too ambitious for its own good, frankly. The layered ideas trip up the proceedings—or at least that's how it appears on the first viewing.

Naysayers will tell you that The Fountain is a muddled mishmash of science, religion, and fantasy, in which Hugh Jackman plays three similar characters in different times (the 15th century, the present, and the future) without any of his locales resonating much beyond WTF bewilderment. Those with keener eyes, however, will appreciate The Fountain for what it truly is: a heartbreaking representation of the mental lengths a person will go to make sense of losing a loved one. In the present-day storyline, Jackman's character can't handle the grief he's feeling as he watches his wife (played by Aronofsky's ex-partner Rachel Weisz) succumb to cancer. It's science fiction for the soul, a David Mitchell-esque interpretation of what comes before PTSD. Aronofsky's most polarizing film is also his most tender depiction of misery.

Having experimented vastly with visual wonderment in The Fountain, Aronofsky switched things up drastically for his follow-up, The Wrestler. Devoid of the director's usual devices (e.g., heavy montage), The Wrestler is a sparse, character-driven gut-punch—or, better yet, an emotional ram-jam. Pulling a Quentin Tarantino, Aronofsky resurrected a once-great Hollywood career by casting troubled, one-time-Brando-successor Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a "broken down piece of meat" whose bullheaded dedication to his career as a pro wrestler has left him all alone and battered. The daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) he can't help but disappoint hates him. The stripper (Marisa Tomei) with whom he so desperately wants to connect, bless her warm heart, just isn't having it. Even the little neighborhood kid with whom Randy likes hanging out doesn't seem him as anything more than the old wrestler with the 8-bit video game system. Randy is a walking, talking, pile-driving Nintendo—out-of-date and in need of some blowing into his system (read: steroids and cocaine) in order to function.

Aronofsky, cinema's greatest purveyor of broken dreams during the aughts, delivered bleakness with Requiem for a Dream and The Fountain, all with the help of crafty editing, exaggerated visuals, and powerful performances from his actors. The Wrestler, though, contains a simple moment that embodies Aronofsky's modus operandi: The man formerly known as the wrestling superstar The Ram seated inside a grungy, anonymous VFW hall in suburban New Jersey, waiting for fans to show up and ask for autographs or buy cheap-o merchandise, surrounded by other lost men who refuse to accept that the good life's passed them by.

In Aronofsky's world, misery loves company. —Matt Barone

Selected filmography: Old Joy (2006), Wendy and Lucy (2008)

When I say that Kelly Reichardt is the leader of American indie cinema, I mean real, low-budget, independent cinema; not the multi-million-dollar David O. Russell or Wes Anderson “indie” cinema that's financed by major micro-studios. Reichardt’s films are so indie, they can barely afford plots. 2006’s Old Joy follows two guys who embark on a one-night camping trip, get a little lost, have a few beers, reach their destination and then return home. 2008’s Wendy and Lucy follows a young woman whose journey to a new job in Alaska is interrupted when she must search for her lost dog.

Not much happens in either of these films, both of which are set in Oregon, yet their minimalist design and soulful observation of humans and nature have so much to say about America and the people who live on its margins. Both Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy are about individuals who set out for a new life while trying to cling on to something from the past.

In Old Joy, Mark (Daniel London) is expecting a child, yet he’s unsure of exactly how he’s going to grow into the role of a father. When Mark sets out on a road trip with his estranged, hippy socialist friend Kurt (Will Oldham), it’s an active attempt to cling on to his old lifestyle before he fully commits to a life of compromise. What the two men realize on the course of their journey—besides the fact that they have no idea where they are headed—is that the gulf between them is wider than they had assumed.

Kurt is the dramatic center of Old Joy, since it is he who hopes to tag along with Mark as he progresses through life. Yet the road trip leaves him stranded, living on society’s fringe, broke with very little hope. He’s not far off from where he began, only he now he realizes that he has nowhere to go.

Kurt’s fate is not unlike that of Michelle Williams’ titular protagonist in Reichardt’s superior follow-up Wendy and Lucy. On the way to find work in Alaska while escaping a vaguely sketched life of poverty, Wendy’s beat-up car breaks down in Oregon—just the first beating her meager budget will take. Her dog Lucy gets lost after an unfortunate turn of events, and Wendy ends up stuck, searching for her companion while her destination keeps getting further and further away. The timely 2008 film, released just as the Great Recession was getting underway, sharply observes how impossible it is for the poor to get out of being poor. Like Kurt, Wendy is stuck in transition, constantly moving with no fixed address, but never getting closer to stability.

Poverty is immobility in both of Reichardt’s film, which allow the characters and the setting to speak to America’s own political and economic crises. The Oregon background Reichardt favors in her beautiful compositions is almost always outdoors, where nature is interrupted by industry, and roads and train tracks flow through vast stretches of open space like sites of passage that take you to the middle of nowhere.

Reichardt is a filmmaker who gets stronger with age, and her work in this decade only set the stage for better things to come (see Meek’s Cutoff). While she has been tellingly compared to the neorealists and the Dardennes, her films set themselves apart from European arthouse. Her images carry a conversation with American mythology, with such Western signifiers as the open road, the wilderness, and (on occasion) the gun remaining prevalent to the stories she tells.

Reichardt’s paving a new path for American indie cinema, one, slow and meticulous film at a time. —Rad Simonpillai

Selected filmography: Finder Forrester (2000), Gerry (2002), Elephant (2003), Last Days (2005), Paranoid Park (2007), Milk (2008)

Gus Van Sant entered the 2000s like a beloved president in the midst of a PR nightmare. On the one hand, he had just three years prior directed Good Will Hunting, a box office smash, the Oscar-winning, feel-good hit of 1997. But he followed up that film with a shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and it was so universally reviled, Van Sant needed to recoup his clout. Enter: Finding Forrester.

Finding Forrester, a tepid New York-version of Good Will Hunting’s marginalized-genius story, performed strongly enough at the box office to make up for the mistake that was Psycho. This success allowed Van Sant to pursue a bold kind of filmmaking that continued to explore the themes of alienation present in his work from the beginning of his career, but this time with more formally audacious techniques. He threw out dialogue-heavy storytelling and conventional continuity editing for long tracking shots and editing that shattered chronology like a cheap mirror.

While in New York, Van Sant revisited Béla Tarr’s seven-hour-long Sátántangó and Chantel Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman at Anthology Film Archives as preparation before going into the desert to shoot 2002’s Gerry. The first film of his Death Trilogy follows two hikers, both named Gerry (Casey Affleck and Matt Damon), who become lost. Or, should I say, rock marooned?

In addition to flexing a new cinematic grammar, Gerry creates its own vocabulary. The word "gerry" also functions as slang for fucking up and around. Rock marooned is the state of being lost, inexplicably and incomprehensibly trapped atop a tall rock formation. The film is full of bizarre language that distances the viewer from the characters in the same way that they are distinct from nature and each other. Hypnotic, oblique, and funny (if you can get on its level), Gerry was the first step down a path Van Sant would walk for the next five years. Less patient viewers should note that it’s also the most difficult of his movies from this period.

Elephant and Last Days, which dramatize a school shooting similar to Columbine and the death of a rock star like Kurt Cobain, respectively, complete the loose trilogy. Both films engage with the thorniest of subject matter, and come away successful by maintaining a respectful distance from their subjects. The best scene in Last Days enacts this literally: The camera very slowly tracks away from the window of the decrepit mansion in the Pacific Northwest where Blake (Michael Pitt), the film’s Cobain figure, has holed up. Through the window you can just make out Blake as he moves around the room, playing various instruments. He picks up a guitar. A cymbal flashes like a winking cat's eye. Blake puts together a song as the camera moves further and further away. We can’t be there when he makes his art. We can’t access that space. We can't know him.

Neither Elephant nor Last Days try to explain away their tragedies. They don’t psychoanalyze. They don’t speculate. They don’t offer answers. They’re dreamy encounters with terrible things and if they’re about anything it’s the impossibility of understanding in the face of those things.

Van Sant concluded the decade with two powerful statements: Paranoid Park and Milk. Paranoid Park, about a young skater in Portland who accidentally kills a security guard, is of a piece with the Death Trilogy because of its fractured chronology and dialogue-less moments of cinematic ecstasy. Van Sant transforms something as mundane as a breakup between a high-school couple by removing the diegetic sound—that is, the sound actually happening in the scene—and replacing it with bright strings from Italian composer Nino Rota. It becomes sublime.

Paranoid Park stands out as one of the strongest (and most accessible films) from Van Sant’s 2000s output by marrying the more avant-garde style of the Death Trilogy to a strong narrative. Tellingly, Paranoid Park is an adaptation of a YA novel.

Milk, released in October 2008, was Van Sant’s return to conventional moviemaking (albeit on the level of someone of his talents and interests—this wasn’t Michael Bay’s Milk). A biopic about Harvey Milk, the gay rights activist and first publicly out person to be elected to public office in California, the film hit theaters just weeks before the vote on Proposition 8 in California. The amendment sought to ban same-sex marriage in the state. Milk is a beautiful, warm movie released at a time when the country needed Hollywood to say something meaningful. Sean Penn’s performance as the slain politician is charming and heartfelt, as are the supporting performances from James Franco and Diego Luna. Still, the amendment passed.

Thankfully, we can now talk about the amendment in the past tense. A district court’s ruling overturned Proposition 8, and the Supreme Court ruling on July 2013 did not to do anything to change that.

And regardless of what Van Sant does in the coming years, nothing will tarnish his five-picture hot streak during the aughts. —Ross Scarano

Selected filmography: Punch-Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007)

With 2002’s weird romance Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson ascended beyond the ecstatic Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman imitations of his early career to become the most unpredictable writer/director working in American movies. There Will Be Blood, his 2007 epic about oil and religion, only confirmed his talents.

Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood are about the possibility of change for men who don’t want to be the way they are. In Punch-Drunk Love, that man is Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan, a socially awkward entrepreneur prone to sudden outbursts of violence who doesn’t want to be alone. He’s not so different from Sandler’s usual characters, except the world isn’t a cartoonish stage for his tantrums. This allows for embarrassment, in the viewer and in Barry.

On a date with the equally alone Lena Leonard (Emily Watson), Barry destroys a bathroom and the desperation in his voice as he quietly pleads with the maître d’ to keep from getting kicked out gnaws at the viewer’s guts in unfamiliar ways; nothing in Sandler’s career has prepared you for this. Anderson creates a feeling of total assault by manipulating the sound design, in this scene and across the film. When Barry savages the bathrooms stalls, the sounds are distorted, muffled, like you’re being held underwater by his rage and shame. Just moments later, after the pathetic and heartbreaking pleading, Jon Brion’s carnival score bubbles up to create a fantastical environment further embellished by the clothing of Barry and Lena—she’s always in red, and he’s always in blue, like some kind of fairy tale costuming. And when they appear together, flashes of white illuminate the scenery. It’s a nod to Jean-Luc Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman. But only a nod. By the 2000s, Anderson was confident enough that he no longer imitated wholly the early masters.

Punch-Drunk Love is the great 21st century romantic comedy. It agitates and unnerves with peculiar sound mixing, an unmistakable mise en scene, and facts about the strangeness of modern life—the complex frequent flyer miles scheme involving pudding that figures prominently in the story is true—even as it allows you to believe in the transformative power of love.

There Will Be Blood speaks to contemporary politics—the Christian right and the quest for oil—by exploring the grand myths of America. The extreme formal decisions of Punch-Drunk Love are pushed even further here. In the first 15 minutes not a word is spoken as the camera tracks Daniel Plainview’s rise from silver prospector to oil man. (One thing that unites many of the directors discussed here is a willingness to tell stories without dialogue, a movement toward pure cinema.) Fully inhabited by Daniel Day-Lewis, Plainview is the rhetoric of bootstrap determination personified. He literally drags himself up a mineshaft, his leg broken, and then pulls his broken body across the desert to the place where he will receive payment for his silver.

Plainview doesn’t want to be a misanthropic monster. He wants to be a father to his adopted son, H.W. He longs to connect with some kind of family. But his fatalistic belief in his own narrative, his own mythology—on more than one occasion he talks about what’s in him, as if he were a plot of land to be drained—destroys him.

It’s a classic American story filtered through the lens of Paul Thomas Anderson, who uses a bracing score from Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood and bizarre moments of pitch-black comedy to create a singular experience. Nested allusions to everything from Stanley Kubrick to the Bible make There Will Be Blood a slippery text that gets stranger with each viewing. Each rhyming image, like the oil on H.W.’s shoe when they first arrive in Little Boston and the blood staining Daniel’s in the final scene, each unnervingly symmetrical shot, deepens the mystery.

As Anderson’s most recent film, The Master, has been his strangest (and best) yet, we can only anticipate more greatness from a filmmaker operating at the peak of his powers. —Ross Scarano

Selected filmography: Kill Bill Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009)

It's not that (fictional) crime stopped paying—for Quentin Tarantino, crime just wasn't enough anymore. As the new millennium rolled around, the critically acclaimed, aggressively unconventional filmmaker took a break from writing and directing movies about gangsters, thieves, and other varieties of law-breaking deviants.

A lifelong enthusiast of all things genre, the one-time video store clerk approached the aughts with the giddiness of a teenage boy sneaking into a sticky Times Square movie theatre during the 1970s to watch crackly film prints play exploitation films with titles like Black Mama, White Mama, Black Belly of the Tarantula, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and Ms. 45.

No influences were left un-mined. No filters were applied. With the confidence expected from the man who'd already changed the game with movies like Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), Tarantino let his highly decorated freak flag fly with four risky, gory, immensely entertaining exercises in excess: Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009). The results were unlike anything made by any other filmmakers in the 2000s—well, save for the litany of Tarantino copycats who, whether they realize it or not, have only made us appreciate the real deal even more.

The genre fanboys and girls weren't the only ones excited. Throughout the 2000s, just like he did in the decade prior, Tarantino blurred the usually bolded line between highbrow critical accolades and lowbrow violence, profanity, and over-the-top stylizations. Except that, when Tarantino characters slice people's heads off or play Home Run Derby with Nazis' heads using wooden baseball bats, there's an artfulness to the carnage, as well as constant hat-tips to the filmmakers who've come before him. What other Academy Award-winning director can get away with randomly inserting composer Ennio Morricone's "Paranoia Prima"—originally made for Italian horror icon Dario Argento's 1971 murder flick The Cat o' Nine Tails—into one of his motion pictures?

Whereas lesser genre directors revel in the sadism, he makes the sadism sizzle. His musical choices are often in stark contrast to what's happening on screen—in Death Proof (released as part of the ambitious and sadly misunderstood Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez-overseen, nostalgic double feature Grindhouse), when the homicidal Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) murders four innocent, fun-loving women by driving over their car with his, the girls are rocking out to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich's bubbly foot-stomper "Hold Tight!" What you're seeing on screen is horrific, but the vibe is just so damn vibrant. Head-nods alternate with cringes, which then alternate with wide-eyed awe at Tarantino's directorial prowess.

Death Proof often catches flack for being Tarantino's weakest film—a claim that, while true, has kept too many from seeing its many inspired moments of technical excellence, like the climax, a long, incredibly staged chase with real cars smashing into real cars on real highways. Yet, despite Death Proof's widespread downgrading, the aforementioned car crash sequence stands as one of the filmmaker's crowning achievements.

In Tarantino's universe, the more heightened the mayhem, the bigger the thrills. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is his wildest and most unruly film to date. Amongst other insanity, there's a hard-R-rated anime section; an extended scene of choreographed kung-fu presented in black-and-white triggered by The Bride (Uma Thurman) yanking a foe's eyeball out of its socket; and the repeated, consistently electrifying use of the siren horns from Quincy Jones' Ironside theme music whenever The Bride sees one her must-kill targets. As a whole, the first Kill Bill feels like all of Tarantino's favorite '70s-era genre movies stuffed into a blender that overflows, spills its contents all over the screen, and somehow leaves those it reaches with a rich, intoxicating aftertaste.

But with Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Tarantino flipped the script, showing off his creative diversity by scaling back the first movie's nihilism in favor of quiet moments about death and retribution. It's hard not to think of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 without replaying The Bride's trailer-home smackdown with Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), but that outburst of violence pales in comparison to the scene where The Bride is buried alive inside a casket, way beneath the ground, under many feet of heavy dirt. Turning the screen pitch-black, Tarantino conveys her desperation through stillness. For sheer superficial kicks, The Bride's one-versus-many fight against the Crazy 88 at the end of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is tough to beat, yet there's a reason why many critics have hailed Vol. 2's living burial scene as the Kill Bill saga's high point. Even when he dials his recklessness back, Tarantino is a master of breathtaking tension.

Which he's just as apt to do with words, of course, not just visual and sonic assaults. After all, we are talking about the film community's reigning king of dialogue. Inglourious Basterds—a box office juggernaut that earned $321 million—has its memorable moments of brutality: Donnie "The Bear Jew" Donowitz's (Eli Roth) head-bashing introduction, the cathartic image of Jew-in-hiding Shosanna (Melanie Laurent)'s face blown up on the fire-ravaged movie theater's big screen as the Basterds fire bullets into the bodies of high-ranking Nazi leaders, namely Adolf Hitler (played by Martin Wuttke). But those scenes are more badass than truly heart-pounding. Tarantino saves the film's best nail-biters for scenes where there's hardly, if any, action.

All that SS Colonel Hans Landa (Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz, giving one of the decade's best performances) needs to do to makes viewers' knuckles white is compliment a French dairy farmer about his "delicious milk," or compare Jews to rats, or, in a later scene, recommend his favorite kind of strudel to a frightened Shosanna during a casual brunch. For undercover Basterd Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) and his British associate Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), their participation in one of Tarantino's greatest scenes of sustained, dialogue driven intensity derives from a silly game where they have to guess the famous names on cards stuck to other players' foreheads.

The final shot of Inglourious Basterds finds Basterds leader Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) carving a swastika into Hans Landa's forehead, commenting to his colleague Smithson Utivich (B.J. Novak), "I think this just might be my masterpiece." It doesn't take a genius to see this as Tarantino's indirect way of declaring Inglourious Basterds his masterpiece, an opinion that we're not about to argue with. It's his most fully realized film, because it's totally fueled by the power of movies.

As the story goes, Tarantino initially planned to make Inglourious Basterds before Kill Bill: Vol. 1, but pushed his WWII epic to the side in order to fine-tune its far-reaching screenplay. That he ultimately ended the aughts by finally releasing Basterds, his then-11-years-in-the-making passion project, is fitting. He spent the first seven years of the 2000s elevating genre filmmaking to new heights, before ending the decade with a true masterwork. —Matt Barone

Selected filmography: O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), The Man Who Wasn't There (2001), Intolerable Cruelty (2003), The Ladykillers (2004), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), A Serious Man (2009)

If one were only to consider the first half of the decade, Joel and Ethan Coen’s placement at the top of this list would seem suspect. Though the new millennium began in a promising fashion with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which scored more than $75 million at the box office (their biggest take at the time) and coincided with a renewed interest in American folk music, the Minnesota natives’ subsequent desire to experiment with the moviemaking medium led to some of their most unfortunately mediocre output.

In 2001, The Man Who Wasn’t There—about a soft-spoken barber (Billy Bob Thornton) who suspects his wife (Frances McDormand) is having an affair with her boss (James Gandolfini) and aims to do something about it—hinted at a return to form for the noir-loving filmmakers, but instead ended up as proof that even the Coens weren’t immune to creating a film that had more style than substance. (The film did rightfully earn one Oscar nomination, for Roger Deakins’ cinematography; the legendary DP, who has been working with the duo since 1991’s Barton Fink, has helped to create their signature and very recognizable visual style.)

In 2003, they tried a throwback to the screwball comedies of Preston Sturges with Intolerable Cruelty, which pits a merciless divorce attorney (George Clooney) against a professional gold-digger (Catherine Zeta-Jones) with less than entertaining results. Film Threat claimed the film was “destined to rank among the Coens' least memorable achievements,” noting that “the pair would be wise to put aside this obsession with screwball comedy’s heyday and take a cue or two from their own golden age.”

In 2004 they produced—or rather, reproduced—a fairly faithful remake of Alexander Mackendrick’s The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks as the leader of a team of burglars operating under the nose of their church-going landlady. Given the brothers’ flair for originality, the film—and its fidelity to its 1955 incarnation—seemed an odd pairing.

It would be another three years before moviegoers would get their next taste of the Coens, but it would be well worth the wait. In 2007, the filmmakers fell back on the same sort of darkly humorous crime capers that made them household names in the first place with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. This utterly perfect film, which traces the unfortunate circumstances that bring together a sociopathic murderer (Javier Bardem), an unwitting hunter (Josh Brolin) and a small-town lawman (Tommy Lee Jones), didn’t just negate the filmmakers’ earlier missteps, it overwrote them completely.

Flawlessly executed, No Country for Old Men won four of its eight Oscar nominations, including one for Javier Bardem as Best Supporting Actor and matching statues for Joel and Ethan for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Director (it’s worth noting that the Directors Guild of America only officially granted the brothers co-director status in 2003; before that, Joel was given sole directing credit with Ethan as the producer). Universally lauded, the film served as a potent reminder that no one investigates crime like the Coens. But whereas their earlier efforts could take fun, Fellini-esque detours toward the surreal side, No Country for Old Men remains their most restrained effort, with only a paper-thin line separating suspense from humor. (Bardem’s coin toss scene is a mesmerizing example of this.)

Though Burn After Reading was largely dismissed as an inconsequential blip on the brothers’ filmography, the $163 million it earned at the box office (about $430,000 more than No Country for Old Men) made it clear that that they hadn’t lost their kooky (not to mention mean-spirited) edge. And that audiences were hungry for more than just remakes, sequels, and by-the-numbers adaptations.

That the Coens closed out the decade with the semi-autobiographical A Serious Man, about a Jewish mathematics professor (Michael Stuhlbarg) who can only sit by and watch as his own life crumbles around him, seems befitting. If the 1980s were about establishing themselves within the industry and the 1990s were where they found their voice, the 2000s were about experimentation and easing into a place of comfort—establishing a genre unto themselves where seemingly straightforward stories are made cinematic by the personal quirks and idiosyncrasies of the characters that inhabit them, resulting in what can only be described as “A Coen Brothers Film.” —Jennifer Wood