Best 2000s Movie Posters UK — The Dark Knight, Lord of the Rings, The Departed

Christopher Nolan · Peter Jackson · Martin Scorsese — the decade of the franchise blockbuster — from £3

The 2000s is the decade when Hollywood definitively committed to franchise filmmaking: Spider-Man (2002) proved superhero films could gross $400M; The Lord of the Rings established that fantasy epics could win Best Picture; Batman Begins (2005) demonstrated that superhero films could be taken seriously as cinema. The decade also produced some of the most critically acclaimed non-franchise films of the 21st century: The Departed (2006), No Country for Old Men (2007), There Will Be Blood (2007), Brokeback Mountain (2005). At 98types Camden, confirmed 2000s film products include The Dark Knight, The Departed, The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Minority Report, Love Actually and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. From £3, buy 3 get 1 free, same-day dispatch from Market Hall, Camden Lock Place, Chalk Farm Road, London NW1 8AL.

🎥 The Dark Knight (2008) — The Finest Superhero Film Ever Made

The Dark Knight (2008), directed by Christopher Nolan, received 94/100 on Metacritic and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning two (Heath Ledger posthumously for Best Supporting Actor, Best Sound Editing). It grossed $1.005 billion worldwide — the first superhero film to break $1 billion — and permanently established superhero cinema as a genre capable of serious artistic ambition. The film's central performance — Heath Ledger's Joker, delivered without the usual superhero film tonal safety net of humour and spectacle — is the finest villain performance in the superhero genre and one of the finest supporting performances in cinema history.

The Departed (2006) — Scorsese's Oscar Film

The Departed (2006) won four Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director — Scorsese's first Best Director win after five previous nominations. An adaptation of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs (2002), The Departed follows two simultaneous moles — DiCaprio's undercover officer and Damon's mob plant — as each attempts to identify the other before being exposed. Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello is the finest comic-grotesque villain in any Scorsese film, and the film's denouement — a sequence of rapid escalating violence that resolves every narrative thread in five minutes — is the finest ending in any crime film.

The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003) — 11 Academy Awards

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) won 11 Academy Awards — all 11 for which it was nominated — including Best Picture. Peter Jackson's conclusion to the Tolkien trilogy grossed $1.1 billion worldwide and demonstrated that fantasy cinema could be commercially, critically and artistically the equal of any other genre. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields, Aragorn's coronation, the Grey Havens — the film's final hour is the most sustained achievement of emotional intensity in any fantasy film.

Minority Report (2002) — Spielberg's 2000s Masterpiece

Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg from Philip K. Dick's 1956 short story, received 90% on Rotten Tomatoes and is the most prescient science fiction film of the decade: the PreCrime system that arrests people for murders they have not yet committed is a direct metaphor for post-9/11 surveillance state expansion. The film's visual design — the transparent interactive displays, the personalised advertisements, the magnetic levitation highways — has been more accurately predictive of 2020s technology than virtually any other science fiction film.