Now-Where Was I? The 20 Greatest Films of the '00's

In last week's New York Times, there was an article about what to name the decade that is about to come to a close (you know, like the "Me decade" 70's or the "go-go 80's"). Were we to practice a similar form of reductivist thinking on film in the past ten years, it might be accurate if a bit facile to call it something like the Decade of Disappointment. In America, this was felt in a particularly keen way; after a while, it seemed like all we were getting were CGI blockbusters or regressive comedies with either Will Ferrell or Seth Rogen. The 90's had ended with a rush of great films like Fight Club, Magnolia, Rushmore, The Matrix, Pi, Three Kings and others that heralded a generation of homegrown auteurs ready to take the place of the Scorsese/De Palma/Coppola generation. And this decade, those same directors have given us the occasional great film (There Will Be Blood, The Fantastic Mr. Fox), some passable moments (The Wrestler, Zodiac) and a whole pileful of disappointing garbage (Speed Racer? Benjamin Button? Darjeeling Limited? I Heart Huckabees?) Even QT, the greatest hope of the 90's, has wandered, becoming an uneven-yet-frequently-brilliant "problem director." And with the passing of the indie studios through closure (Picturehouse, Warners Independent) or co-opting (Miramax, New Line), the American indie movement that began with sex, lies and videotape and reached its apogee with Pulp Fiction is now as dead as Bill after Pai Mei's five point palm exploding heart technique.

And let's not forget that the decade brought the biggest technological paradigm shift in the history of cinema; anytime we use the word "film", it must now be with a sense of ironic nostalgia. Digital may signal the end of the very act of sitting in a dark room filled with strangers and experiencing the thrill of, in Pauline Kael's phrase, losing it at the movies. Digital may even signify that the new auteurs are huddled away writing software rather than out there shooting footage. These are debatable changes; having everything on demand is certainly desirable, and if digital fulfills its potential, then there will be no more physical restraint for film in terms of form or content. The only limits will be the imagination of the artist. One thing beyond debate, however, is that as of this point, the fact that the means of production are now universally accessible has not led to a creative revolution bubbling up from below. YouTube has given us plenty of cats in dryers, but nary a noteworthy new director. As is the case with music, we're left wondering whether the bad old days when the studios had absolute control as gatekeepers were really so bad.

So where does this all leave us? Is American film in eclipse, destined to be overtaken by such unlikely emerging rivals as Mexico, Romania and South Korea? And as the film school generation fades, will anyone take their place? Hard to say, but almost in spite of ourselves, we managed to produce some memorable work in the "aughts", as per the list below. Perhaps, in the end, we can refer to the '00's as the "Ellipsis Decade," a statement suspended midway, trailing off into silence, or perhaps resuming with something more powerful than that which preceded it...

20. Slumdog Millionaire (Danny Boyle, 2008). Living proof that once or twice a decade, Oscar actually gets it right. For the past 15 years, Boyle has always been the most slippery of auteurs; how could the director of Trainspotting made such varied and underappreciated genre pieces as Sunshine and Millions? Watching Slumdog, one had the sense that it was make or break for the director, and from the most unlikely roots, this triumph emerged. Yes, it is the greatest hits of Bollywood filtered through Western eyes, but it didn't feel like cultural appropriation or orientalist slumming. If the individual elements of the film were less than original, the combination of them surely felt so. Jai Ho!

19. A Mighty Wind (Christopher Guest, 2003). No one could make the argument that it's as funny as Best in Show or even Guffman, not to mention Tap. But Guest and his band of brilliant improvisers tap into something much bigger here in their imagining of a star-studded tribute to a recently deceased and beloved folk impresario. What we see is the slow, romantic death of the idealism of the 60's, embodied especially in Eugene Levy's burned out genius Mitch. When Mitch and his former partner and love, Mickey (Catherine O'Hara) kiss at the end of their song, all they and their generation had and lost are brought to bear. When Nigel rejoined the boys on stage at the end of Tap, we cheered. Our response here is something much more complex, sad and sweet. And yet somehow, the film never stops being funny. And so much more: pitch-perfect songs that are parodies yet somehow capture the essence of the various folk sub-movements of the 60's; Ed Begley as the world's most Jewish Scandinavian; the best song ever written about catheters; and the greatest catchphrase that never caught on: Wha' happened?

18. Rachel Getting Married (Jonathan Demme, 2008). To a boy from the outer boroughs moving to the East Village in the late 80's, Jonathan Demme's films of the period represented my fantasy of my new home: odd, edgy, bubbly, funky and awesomely, spectacularly multicultural, the same vibe one felt in his Stop Making Sense, still the best concert film ever made. Like Jeff Daniels in Something Wild and Michelle Pfeiffer in Married to the Mob, I entered an alternate downtown universe that was a little dangerous, more than a bit enticing and stirringly romantic. But times changed; the neighborhood gentrified, and so did Demme, as he became a glorified studio craftsman with Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. Beloved was a neglected masterpiece, but Demme hit a new creative low with his early 60's classic remakes phase. All by way of setting up what a blissful return to form we got in Rachel, even if the bubbling melting pot has been relocated to suburban Connecticut. Starting with the moment when we all realized that Anne Hathaway was an actress, the film serves up many similarly unexpected treats, not the least of which was the return of Debra Winger. Two moments stand out: Hathaway's justly celebrated wedding dinner toast, and Ethan's plate. Wait for it.

17. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai, 2000). I hate to sound cranky, but what happened to our one-time domination of all things genre? How has it come to a point where the best noir and the best horror films of the decade came from South Korea? Is it true that all we're capable of making is Transformers vs. Iron Man 12: The Quickening? We used to own film romance; now we're reduced to sentimental tripe like The Notebook or the recent spate of vampires in love. You want old school romance? Check out Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in this aching, beautiful and strange romance set in 1962 Hong Kong. Filled with all of Wong's usual brilliant visuals, what truly makes this work is the attention to detail and the restraint of the two leads. They slowly and inexorably fall for each other, even as they realize that their respective cheating spouses are cheating with each other. Will they choose the same path and give in to their attraction? Or will they resist, since giving in would make them as bad as those who have hurt them so badly? Not that it's giving too much away, but In the Mood for Love reminds us that all the great romances, from Romeo and Juliet to Casablanca, end with love unrequited. And that's the most romantic thing of all.

16. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2005). Not surprisingly, this is not the only film of the so-called Mexican New Wave to end up on this list. In bringing us into a dystopian future where the human race is no longer able to reproduce, Cuaron avoids all the expected paths and presents us with the most unsettling and despairing vision of where we are headed this side of 12 Monkeys. Featuring yet another of Clive Owen's beautiful leading man/character actor roles, powerful support from Julianne Moore and Michael Caine and a most unlikely and reluctant heroine (Claire-Hope Ashitey's Kee), Children is believable precisely because it offers us no explanation of what happened or why. Instead, we are dropped in medias res into our bleakest nightmare, with only the slightest glimmer of hope at the end. The nearly-wordless scene where the main characters walk down the steps of a besieged building holding the miraculous newborn baby is one of the most powerful of the decade.

15. I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007). The Oscars and American moviegoers were in love with movie biopics this decade, as Jamie Foxx and Reese Witherspoon will attest. (Dewey Cox, anyone?). In this deeply flawed but endlessly interesting piece, Haynes, who's never made a bad movie, explodes the idea of the biopic, picks up the shards and creates a funhouse mirror that functions instead as a biography of the idea of Bob Dylan. It does not always work, particularly in the grating section with Richard Gere as Zimmy in his Pat Garrett Americana phase. On first viewing, in fact, I found it more than a bit uneven and bordering precariously on the pretentious. But it stayed and stayed with me, and just would not let go. Further spins suggest that the innovative, frustrating form Haynes employs is the only possible way to approach this particular content. In the end, the subject is truly "not there", which, I'd guess, is the only way Dylan would have it.

14. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004). OK, OK, I take back everything I said about the death of the American romantic film. Sunset is unusual in many ways. It is the rare sequel that is as good as, if not better than, the original. For an American film, it takes an unusually grown-up and, dare I say, complex approach to love and to the bittersweet pain of truly entering adulthood. It is the rare film from one of the Austin crew that wasn't made for eight year olds (this means you, Robert Rodriguez, and your jars of testicles). And it marks the one piece of truly solid work in the second decade of Richard Linklater's erratic but never dull career, although there were certainly many good things about his other work of the decade. In Sunset, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy reunite as the couple who passed a gloriously romantic 24 hours together in Vienna in 1995's Before Sunrise. That film ended with a promise to meet again in six months' time. As Sunset opens, we find out that he never showed, and they both moved on with their lives (sort of). Most of the film's 85 minutes is simply the two leads meandering through the streets of Paris, wandering in and out of the notion that the magic of that one youthful night so long ago can never return with the same intensity. Linklater's inevitably brilliant dialogue and his trust in his audience create a unique moment in American film.

13. Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005) I have yet to see Haneke's Palme d'Or winning White Ribbon, and I must admit that I've often found his films to be gratuitous, if witty, exercises in anti-bourgeois sadism. As I've noted elsewhere in these pages, the subject of Cache, just below its glossy Hitchcock-like, videotape-paranoid surface, is nothing less than the legacy of the Western subjugation of the Muslim world. A crucial plot point hinges on a historical reference to an infamous incident from the late 1950's, when a wave of Muslim protesters decrying the French presence in Algeria were set upon by the Surete; hundreds were killed and injured. As our upper middle class Parisian protagonists go about their evening routine, images and sounds of the Iraqi conflict come from the TV in the background. Cache never lets us forget that the scars of oppression never simply disappear when the oppression itself ends. When one of the characters, overwhelmed by the accumulated pain, commits suicide, it is one of the most effectively shocking and brutal moments in the history of film. All of this comes together in my favorite closing shot of the decade, which actually runs under the closing credits. It's a moment that suggests both the idea that we pass our sins on to our children in an endless cycle of violence and retaliation, as well as the possibility that our children may be the ones who will finally end the cycle.

12. A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2009). In many ways, this is the film that all the Coens' work over the last quarter century has been leading up to. For all of the complex shaggy dog plots, the brilliantly arch film-school camerawork and editing, the impeccably selected soundtracks and the unforgettable dialogue, there has always been a shiny, brittle and facile superficiality to their work. With the possible exception of Fargo, there never have been any real people in their films. Brilliant caricatures, yes, from H.I. and Ed all the way through Anton Chigurh. And just as the formula was starting to show some strain, with the unwatchable Burn After Reading, the Coens reach back into their suburban 60's Jewish childhoods to bring forth this darkly comic take on the Book of Job. In some ways, this is not a surprise; there has always been a small undercurrent of dark Jewish humor in their work, from John Turturro's Bernie in Miller's Crossing to Michael Lerner's studio head in Barton Fink, and most memorably in the"shomer shabbos" lunacy of Walter Sobchack in Lebowski. In A Serious Man, the Coens' fanatical attention to detail is put to use in the creation of a real world, riddled with extremely imperfect people wrestling with eternal issues of truth and guilt. In Lebowski, one small mistake leads to someone peeing on Dude's rug; in this film, one small mistake leads to what might very well be the end of the world. One can almost sum up the Coens' view of the universe with Larry Gopnik's line: no one can figure it out, but you're still responsible for it on the midterm.

11. Monsters, Inc. (Pixar Studios, 2001) No sensible fan of mainstream film could come up with a list such as this without including at least one film from Pixar. As the locus of real creativity has shifted from film to TV (can any film of the decade match the sustained excellence of shows like Lost, Mad Men, Sopranos, etc.?), the only sure bet in American film for the last 15 years has been on the geniuses at Pixar. In just about everything they've done, they have been able to make children's films that appeal to everyone, something that hasn't been seen consistently since the Chuck Jones heyday of Warner's cartoons. So the only question was, which to choose for the list? I would certainly argue that the first 45 minutes of Wall-E and the first half hour of Up are as beautiful as anything that has ever been put on film, and I'm not just talking animated film here. I tend to love the Pixar films where they create an entire universe out of whole cloth. So, with Wall-E as a close second, I'm going to go with Monsters, which drops us into a complete fantasy world that we believe in immediately. Hilarious, touching and completely pop-culture-reference free (take that, ogre), this is probably the most original film of the decade. And I still call my daughter "Boo" sometimes, even though she's 14 now...

10. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofsky, 2000) It might be easy to argue that with the gorgeous mess that was The Fountain and the lovely but conventional Wrestler (which might be directly descended from that Wally Beery wrestling picture that Barton Fink could never quite finish), that Aronofsky, like many other late 90's auteur hopefuls like Fincher, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson and maybe even Tarantino, has not lived up to his early promise. These are arguments for another page; even if he had only directed Pi and this darkest of masterpieces, he would still be a major figure in American film. The old cliche is that a film has three parts: get your characters stuck up a tree, throw stuff at them, and then get them down. Unlike just about every other storyteller in the addiction subgenre, Aronofsky resolutely refuses us that third step, as his characters descend into an indescribable hell. Jared Leto and Jennifer Connolly are strong and believable, Marlon Wayans is a revelation, and who the hell was it who beat Ellen Burstyn for that Supporting Actress Oscar? Not to mention the Kronos Quartet's endlessly-appropriated music and Matthew Libatique's emergence as perhaps the best cinematographer of his generation. But the star here, from start to finish, is Aronofsky, and if he's wandered a bit since, repeated viewings of Requiem (if you can tolerate repeated viewings) leave no doubt about his potential to be the greatest American filmmaker of his generation.

9. Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-'04) Say what you want about his failure to live up to his early promise. Better yet, try to stay awake through the first half of Death Proof. The man is still the stickiest writer of his generation, and in many ways, these two films, taken as one, are his masterpiece. The House of Blue Leaves, of course, and the Superman monologue, the anime origins of O-Ren, the return of Sonny Chiba, Darryl Hannah and David Carradine, and my favorite: Beatrix digs herself out of her own grave as he recalls her cruel tutelage at the hands of Pai Mei. But perhaps what really puts this one over the top is the moment near the end when she breaks into Bill's hacienda ready to kill, only to find her cute daughter BB very much alive and well. Aside from Pam Grier and Robert Forster's performances in Jackie Brown, this may be the closest QT gets to real. And amazingly, Uma makes the moment real, convincing and even touching. In the end, it comes down to this; my wife, who cannot remember movie lines or song lyrics at all, was reciting whole scenes from the film after having seen it only once several years before. Like I said--sticky.

8. The 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2003). The decade's most wonderful surprise as Spike, more than a decade removed from the films that made him the most celebrated African-American film director in history, began his understated reign as poet laureate of post-9/11 New York cinema. The ostensible topic of the the film is the last night of freedom for Monte (Edward Norton) before he begins a stretch in prison for a drug bust, and his quest to discover who it was who tipped off the cops. But the tragedy of the towers seeps through every pore of the film, most explicitly in the view of Ground Zero from the window of the apartment owned by Monte's best friend Frank (Barry Pepper), and in the palpable sorrow hanging over the bar owned by Monte's ex-firefighter dad (Brian Cox). All the performances shine, especially Pepper, Rosario Dawson as the girlfriend under suspicion, Cox, Anna Paquin and especially Norton's self-loathing Monte, a kid who was handed unbelievable opportunity only to piss it away. Two moments stand out in particular: Spike reprising the famous cursing litany from Do the Right Thing to very different effect here; and the beautiful, unexpected ending, which I think of every time I pass the George Washington Bridge...

7. Oldboy (Chan-Wook Park, 2004) Easily the best noir of the decade. In a genre that these days seems stale, too self-referential or both, Oldboy was a jolt to the system, a live octupus straight no chaser. From one of the most original setups in the history of the genre to the shocking and brutal ending, this is the rare film that refuses to let you be complacent and comfortable. That Park can pull this off while maintaining a sense of humor is even more remarkable. It doesn't feel like your granddaddy's noir, but when you get past all of the claw hammer violence and cephalopod appetizers, what remains is vintage: the story of a basically decent man who casually made a terrible mistake years ago, and is now forced to pay an inconceivably horrific price for his transgression. Not the least of the film's pleasures is that it finally opened Western eyes to a long-thriving South Korean film industry, and we're only now just beginning to realize that they do our genre films better than we do (see The Host, for example).

6. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2003). OK, so maybe this one is a bit of a tip-off to my age. I can tell you the date and the theater where I watched Lynch miraculously revive American film with Blue Velvet. And I know who killed Laura Palmer. I am a bit sentimental when it comes to film's favorite eagle scout, although not enough to get me through all of Inland Empire awake. But it seems, looking back, that with the exception of Blue Velvet, Mulholland is the best balance Lynch has ever achieved between his hilarious, deadpan solipsism and why-should-the-audience-care auteurism. All of the major Lynch themes are there, as are the visual motifs; these come together in the Club Silencio scene, one of the best he's ever shot. (And there's a Roy Orbison song again, this time en espanol). Even after all this time, no director has Lynch's ability to imbue the quotidian with such sinister beauty and mystery. The twist is that this time, Lynch's heroine makes her escape from Lumberton/Twin Peaks to the dream factory itself; in Lynch's hands, however, the dream can turn into nightmare in a flash behind the dumpster at Winkie's. Some still argue that there is no there there when it comes to Lynch. Well, perhaps no hay banda...and yet there is definitely music.

5. Almost Famous (Cameron Crowe, 2001) For the man who would be Billy Wilder, this was not the best of decades; Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown were unmitigated failures. And when you think that Crowe was not living up to his early promise, you look at films like Singles, Jerry ("Show me the exit!") Maguire and even, yes, Say Anything, and wonder what the fuss was ever about in the first place. It's interesting, though, that the one time Crowe violated his master's dictum to never be explicitly autobiographical, he created a masterpiece. From the opening sequence, featuring the best fondling of album covers as though they were holy objects ever put on film, everything feels right and real. Billy Crudup, Jason Lee and especially Kate Hudson give the best performances of their careers, while old reliables like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Frances Mc Dormand add to their respective galleries of brilliant character performances. Among the many highlights: the phone call between Crudup and Mc Dormand is priceless, as is the crashing airplane confessional of Sweetwater's drummer. Crudup's "I am a golden god" scene is followed by what for me is the single most beautiful scene in any film this decade, as the band and their entourage, frustrated, angry and annoyed with each other, sing along to "Tiny Dancer." In that moment, you can see them brush away all of the desire for fame, fortune and women and remember why they're there in the first place: the music. And when William says he has to get home, Hudson's Penny replies, "You are home." Yes we are, and for the only time in his career, Crowe hits a perfect note.

4. Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006). The Man with No Name has made a fine living for all these years by quietly being a lot smarter and more gifted than anyone was willing to give him credit for. And so slowly, without anyone noticing until it happened, Eastwood has evolved from mannequin punchline to one of the greatest of all American filmmakers. Yet even his staunchest supporters were unprepared for the amazing burst of creativity that we've seen from him as he approaches 80; he has become the Philip Roth of American film. Not since John Huston's great run of late films have we seen anything like it. And as his more celebrated contemporaries like Scorsese, De Palma and Coppola have faded into inconsistency at best and mediocrity at worst, one might even argue that Eastwood was the greatest Hollywood filmmaker of the decade. But for all his brilliant films of the last few years, and a second Best Director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby, his greatest achievement may be Iwo Jima, his startling, understated and ultimately devastating take on that legendary battle from the Japanese point of view. Its companion film, Flags of Our Fathers, was underrated, and featured not only some unforgettable scenes (recreating the battle in Soldier Field as part of a war bonds drive, for example) but an unusually thoughtful meditation on the arbitrary nature of heroism. Iwo Jima, though, is the superior film. Boiled down, it is a study of how one must behave when faced with an absolutely hopeless cause, in a battle from which you will surely never return. In its own way, it is as powerful a statement as All Quiet on the Western Front, which also gave a face and a soul to a seemingly inscrutable enemy. No one else would have even attempted such an ambitious project; that Eastwood, at age 75, was able to bring home both films with such skill and grace is one of the great accomplishments in the history of American film.

3. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). If American film of the new century's first decade had a presiding spirit, I would argue that it resides in the work of the Spike Jonze-Michel Gondry-Charlie Kaufman nexus. Some of their films were more successful than others, but I would argue that even lesser works like Adaptation, The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, Synecdoche and Wild Things will grow in reputation and will be viewed for years to come. While each of these filmmakers has their own style and obsessions, there are common visual and thematic motifs that run through their work. These include gloriously complex, house-of-mirrors plots, a classic and pure sense of surrealism, and, especially in Gondry's work, a childlike sensibility that is touching and naive but never cloying. In short, these films are the locus of whatever is left of imagination in American cinema. And while all of them have their charms, there was only one where it all seemed to come together: Eternal Sunshine. To begin with, the movie features Jim Carrey's one great performance, the only time where he's not an annoying man-child or a sentimental sap. Kate Winslet's Clementine is one of the great characters in recent American cinema, and I believed every minute of their strange and beautiful relationship. Add in pitch perfect character turns by such stalwarts as Tom Wilkinson, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo...hell, even Frodo isn't too bad. Then there's Kaufman's script, which for once tempers his dazzling intelligence, self-reflexiveness and multiple realities with people we actually care about instead of with cardboard cutouts. As with most of Kaufman's work, the film deals with people whose childlike sensibilities make it difficult for them to handle the real world and so, in a very retro-futurist DIY kind of way, they create or recreate their own realities. One of the many miracles of the film is that we don't even question for a second the plausibility of the idea of the good folks at Lacuna selectively removing memories. And perhaps the most romantic thing is Joel's realization that the pain of his memories is nothing compared to the pain of forgetting.

2. Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro, 2006) When my wife and I go to movies, we usually talk for hours afterwards about what we've just seen. When we walked out of this film, we were completely silent for a half an hour. At that point, the only thing I could say was, "That's why they invented movies in the first place." My daughter, tough city girl that she is, cried for a week after seeing it. What Del Toro achieves here is nothing less than the greatest example of magic realism in the history of cinema, perhaps along with Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, which was clearly an influence. No film in my memory has ever created such a stark and intense contrast between brutal reality and (literally) escapist fantasy. The brilliance that Del Toro hinted at in Cronos and Devil's Backbone is fully realized here, although credit must be given to his collaborators. All of the actors, in both the real and the fantasy sequences, disappear completely into their roles; the set design is bleak, beautiful and original; and the music, especially that lullaby, will haunt forever. Much has been made of this film being a grown-up fairy tale, but I don't think that does it justice. Del Toro and his cast and crew are miraculously able to tap into the unconscious in a way that only the greatest stories can.

1. Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000). This has been at the top of the list for nearly the entire decade, and nothing has been able to shake it from its perch. Along with Oldboy, it is the best neo-noir of the decade, but it is so much more than that. It is a gimmick film that miraculously, unlike all other gimmick films (this means you, M. Night) gets richer and richer with repeated viewings. And it is easily the greatest example in the decade of how form reflects content. In a film like Inarritu's 21 Grams, the unusual time structure ends up feeling trivial and arbitrary, and adds nothing to our appreciation of the characters or the story. And at first, Memento's story seems confusing for confusion's sake. But then the moment comes when it hits you that Nolan has found a way for us to get inside Leonard's head and actually experience the confusion that stems from his anterograde amnesia. And it goes even deeper. The memory thing, which seems like the cheapest of plot gimmicks lifted from a second-rate 40's B noir, becomes the basis for the greatest cinematic philosophical excursion into the nature of memory itself since Rashomon. Either intentionally or not, Nolan tapped into something very profound about our culture; it's no surprise that we've seen so many variations on the idea since, from the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore 50 First Dates to Dory in Pixar's Finding Nemo. And what does it say about us that #1 and #3 on this list feature either self-induced memory loss or deliberately misremembering something too painful to bear by repeating a lie often enough that, via conditioning, it becomes the truth? As for the film itself, what a blessing to have three great character actors in the leads, interesting and colorful players in the bit parts and a director whose fascination with these ideas of identity and self have played out so beautifully here, in Prestige and in the Batman films. If this was a decade that featured much that we'd all choose to forget if we could, Memento has to be its iconic film.