5 items
A grumpy unicorn gets badgered into a Candy Mountain quest in this absurdist fever dream. They wanted his kidney. Time magazine marveled that something so nonsensical could earn a cultlike following — and for once, the magazine was right.
Elliot Page's whip-smart pregnant teenager, Diablo Cody's Oscar-winning screenplay, a hamburger phone, and a Moldy Peaches soundtrack: Juno was the indie monoculture moment of 2007. Made for about $7 million, it earned $232 million and four Oscar nominations — and for a solid year, everyone you knew talked a little more like Juno MacGuff.
Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.
Jack Black in stretchy pants: a monastery cook who moonlights as a luchador to buy the orphans better food. Jared Hess's Napoleon Dynamite follow-up gave the 2000s an entire dialect of quotes delivered in one gloriously unplaceable accent.
A deadpan indie comedy about an awkward teenager in small-town Idaho navigating high school, family chaos, and his own social ineptitude. Released in 2004, the low-budget film became a quotable phenomenon with unforgettable moments — "Gosh!", "Vote for Pedro", tetherball showdowns — and spawned endless merchandise and T-shirt catchphrases.