Home › Best noir of the 2000s.
The 2000s were a quieter decade for noir than the 1990s — no single film changed the genre the way Pulp Fiction had in 1994. But the films that did appear were often extraordinary. The Coen Brothers made two of their best films. David Cronenberg made his most accessible work. David Fincher moved from genre exercise to genuine seriousness. And from South Korea, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook were making films that Western audiences were only beginning to discover.
Anton Chigurh is the genre distilled into a single character. A cattle gun as a murder weapon. A coin as moral philosophy. The Coens made their most formally severe film and one of the greatest American films of the 21st century.
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Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, a driver for a Russian crime family in London who may be an undercover operative. Cronenberg made his most conventionally plotted film and still found room for the bathhouse scene — Mortensen naked, wielding a knife against two attackers — which is one of the most viscerally intense scenes in contemporary cinema.
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A cop inside the mob and a mob guy inside the police. Scorsese's adaptation of Infernal Affairs won him his first Oscar. Jack Nicholson unhinged. Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio as mirrors. Everyone dies in the last fifteen minutes.
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Tom Hanks as a mob enforcer who goes on the run with his son after his employer's son murders his family. Conrad Hall's final film as cinematographer — he won the Oscar. Sam Mendes made one of the most visually beautiful crime films ever made, a film about fathers and sons and the way violence passes between generations.
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David Fincher's procedural epic about the Zodiac Killer. The most unsettling ending of any crime film made in the last twenty years — not because anything dramatic happens, but because nothing is resolved and the obsession continues regardless.
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Guy Pearce as a man with no short-term memory investigating his wife's murder. Nolan tells the story in reverse, putting the audience in the same epistemological position as the protagonist: unable to trust our own understanding of events.
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Sam Rockwell as Chuck Barris, who claims in his memoir that he was a CIA assassin while producing The Dating Game and The Gong Show. George Clooney's directorial debut is one of the most underrated films of the decade — formally inventive, genuinely funny, and surprisingly moving.
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No Country for Old Men (2007), Eastern Promises (2007), The Departed (2006), and Road to Perdition (2002) are the essential 2000s crime films.
The Dark Knight (2008) has strong noir elements — a corrupt city, moral ambiguity, an antagonist who represents chaos — but it is primarily a superhero film. Heath Ledger's Joker is one of the great screen villains.