19 items
Tim Burton's warmest film: a dying father who has always told his life as a series of tall tales — a giant, a witch who shows your death in her eye, a perfect hidden town called Spectre — and the grown son trying to sort truth from myth before it's too late. Ewan McGregor plays the young father in the fables, Albert Finney the old man telling them.
Tom Hanks, a desert island, and a volleyball named Wilson. Robert Zemeckis stranded America's most trusted movie star alone on screen for the better part of two hours — and made one of the biggest hits of 2000 out of silence, sunburn, and a volleyball with a face.
A sharp, seductive update of Laclos' 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses transplanted to Manhattan's prep-school elite, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe. Written and directed by Roger Kumble, it became a defining late-90s teen drama with genuine cultural impact.
Wisteria Lane looked perfect — the lawns, the casseroles, the cul-de-sac waves — and every bit of it was a cover story. Narrated by a neighbor who takes her own life in the show's first minutes, ABC's suburban satire-soap made Sunday night appointment television again and turned four housewives into the biggest stars on TV.
Michael Crichton's high-velocity emergency-room drama gave network television permission to be dense, technical, and chaotic. Gurneys crashing, doctors walking and talking through hallways, trauma in real time — it changed what television drama could do.
Tom Hanks' Forrest Gump stumbles through history itself, unintentionally shaping 1960s and 70s America with innocent determination. Robert Zemeckis' 1994 phenomenon grossed $678 million worldwide, won 6 Oscars including Best Picture and Best Actor, and made 'Life is like a box of chocolates' part of the language.
The mother-daughter show that talked faster than anything else on television. Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, a small Connecticut town full of lovable cranks, Luke's coffee, Friday-night dinners — Gilmore Girls premiered on The WB in 2000 as an underdog and became the comfort-watch a whole generation never stopped rewatching.
The cane-tapping misanthrope, the puzzle-box cases, the Vicodin addiction, the mantra that everybody lies, and the rule that it's never lupus — House was the prestige procedural where every disease was a mystery to solve. Hugh Laurie's imperious Dr. Gregory House became appointment television for the 2000s and the most-watched show in the world in 2008.
Denzel Washington as a working father who takes an emergency room hostage when his insurance won't cover his young son's life-saving heart transplant. A blunt, angry drama that critics panned and audiences turned into a hit — and that landed as a lightning rod in America's healthcare debate.
The ABC serial drama that turned network TV into a mystery box for six seasons. When Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on a mysterious island, survivors discovered that their new home held impossible secrets—a smoke monster, a hidden hatch, a shadowy group called "the Others"—and a mythology so complex that fans spent years theorizing about every detail.
Tim Blake Nelson's modern Othello, relocated to an elite Southern prep school where basketball replaces Venice's wars. Mekhi Phifer as the only Black student and star athlete, Josh Hartnett as the jealous rival, Julia Stiles as Desdemona. It was made to be released in 1999—but held from the world for two years after Columbine.
Robin Williams as the real Dr. Hunter "Patch" Adams — a medical student who prescribes laughter, wears a clown nose on the children's ward, and dreams of a free hospital. Audiences packed theaters and cried; critics savaged it; the real Patch Adams hated it. A defining late-90s Robin Williams memory either way.
The strange outsider parable about a hairless, pale savant with electromagnetic powers — lightning-struck before birth, raised in a cellar, thrust into a small town that doesn't understand him. It split critics but became exactly the kind of weird 90s rental-store fixture that stays lodged in memory.
Daniel Day-Lewis shouting "Because it is my name!" and Winona Ryder leading the girls in shrieking fits — for a generation, this was the movie the teacher wheeled in after you finished reading the play. Arthur Miller himself adapted his own 1953 classic — and earned an Oscar nomination for it, more than four decades after the play premiered.
Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, and the rain-soaked kiss that calcified into a generation's romantic ideal. Critics split; audiences swooned; the 2000s got its definitive sleepover weeper.
Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.
Tony Soprano walks into a psychiatrist's office with panic attacks—and changed television forever. HBO's landmark 1999 drama paired mob violence with suburban therapy, making prestige TV a thing.
Jim Carrey's first great dramatic turn: Truman Burbank is an ordinary insurance salesman who slowly realizes his entire hometown is a giant TV set and everyone he knows is an actor — his whole life broadcast 24/7 to the world. Directed by Peter Weir from an Andrew Niccol script, it turned a high-concept nightmare into a tender, unsettling fable that only looked more prophetic as reality TV took over.
In April 1990, a logging town in the Pacific Northwest became the mystery the whole country was trying to solve. An FBI agent, a damn fine cup of coffee, and one question — "Who killed Laura Palmer?" Twin Peaks proved network television could be genuinely strange, elegantly cinematic, and popular all at once — at least until the answer came, and the spell broke.