This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more. Much like the decade that produced them, the movies of the 2000s were shaped in response to such profound and irrevocable change that it’s difficult to assign them a cohesive identity of their own; it can be tempting to think of them as a long suspension bridge between then and now rather than as a well-defined era unto itself.
When the sun rose on the start of the new millennium, the vast majority of films were shot and projected on film, superhero movies were still considered an outlandish gamble, middle-class malaise was American cinema’s preoccupying crisis, and James Cameron was the biggest director on the planet. By the time the smoke cleared 10 years later, digital had pushed celluloid to the brink of extinction, Marvel was beginning to exert an iron grip on the multiplex, the listless men of Tyler Durden’s generation had found their own forever war to fight, and James Cameron was the biggest director on the planet (some things never change). In that light, it hardly seems like a coincidence that so many of the decade’s most essential films are themselves dislocated in time and/or uncertain of their own reality.
Nor does it seem like a coincidence that it’s so difficult — and so rewarding — to try and determine which films those are. Fun as it was to look back at the ’80s last summer , and the ’90s the summer before that , relitigating settled history is a v.