Time Magazine has just created a list of the 10 Greatest Movies of the Millennium so far, made since 2000 (has it really been 12 years since the start of the millennium?). I guess it's quite a subjective thing but you can always appreciate a good piece of cinema whether the genre is your thing or not.

There are some in the list that I've seen and loved (namely The Artist, The Hurt Locker, Lord of the Rings and Moulin Rouge) and others that I've never heard of or didn't really enjoy (I know everyone rants about Synecdoche New York but to me it was just too weird and even a little boring but I do love his other movies Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)..

And then of course there's Wall-E, Time Magazine's number 1 movie of the millennium.. and probably mine too. Who would have thought you could be so touched and teary over a robot?

Check out the full list below and see if you agree:

10. The Artist

Director: Michel Hazanavicius
Year Released: 2011
Cast: Jean Dujardin, Bérenice Bejo, James Cromwell



A movie set in Hollywood’s silent era that is virtually wordless: a gimmick? No: sustained cinematic inspiration, deserving of every prize it received, including the Academy Award for Best Picture. This delightfully inventive comedy, about a swashbuckling star (supreme Gallic charmer Dujardin) and the peppy waif (Bejo) he befriends, echoes true-life Hollywood stories of the ’20s and ’30s — sort of, if Douglas Fairbanks had suffered John Gilbert’s career dip in early talkies while Ginger Rogers was on the rise. Another way to put it: the movie is Singin’ in the Rain, reveling in the same acumen and effervescence, but silent and in black-and-white. Hazanavicius, a master French pastiche chef, transported the two stars of his OSS 117 films to Hollywood, hired American actors (Cromwell, John Goodman, Penelope Ann Miller) in supporting roles, had the cast speak their dialogue (shown in intertitles) in English and somehow achieved the impossible balance of antique parody and earned emotion. In retrospect, the movie’s Oscar triumph may seem inevitable: an inside-Hollywood story with laughs, tears and an adorable terrier. Paying tribute in his acceptance speech to writer-director Billy Wilder, Hazanavicius acknowledged the font of inspiration that golden-age Hollywood provided to the rest of the world’s moviemakers. So this très French film was also the most classically American picture of its time.


9. Moulin Rouge

Director: Baz Luhrmann
Year Released: 2001
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Nicole Kidman, Richard Roxburgh




If a feeling is too intense to put into words, then put it into song. That’s an artistic mandate that applied for millennia to all forms of drama (Greek tragedy, Italian opera, Hollywood movies), though later audiences found it laughably peculiar. Leave it to Luhrmann, the unreconstructed Aussie romantic who infused Shakespeare with an urban urgency in Romeo + Juliet, to go both retro and now-tro in a musical that blends MGM and MTV. It’s a convulsive love story daubed in a giddily gaudy palette, with the never-prettier Nicole Kidman entrancing hunkily soulful Ewan McGregor in an orgasmic swirl of color, design and pop music. Wearing its soft heart on its fancily embroidered sleeve, Moulin Rouge! brought love stories back in fashion — though in the debased form of films from Nicholas Sparks novels — and cued the sporadic revival of musical movies and TV shows (Mamma Mia!, Hairspray, Glee). In the age of Media Cool, this recklessly amorous burst of kinetic excess offended cooler sensibilities even as it launched other viewers, including this one, into rapture. The movie asks, Moulin Rouge-ez avec moi ce soir? I say, Sure. All night long.


8. Devdas

Director: Sajay Leela Bhansali
Year Released: 2002
Cast: Shahrukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai, Madhuri Dixit




A year after Moulin Rouge! had its world premiere at Cannes, another visually intoxicating musical opened at the festival, introducing the sung-and-danced Bollywood dramas to the international culturati. Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s 1901 novel had inspired at least a half-dozen film versions before this one — in its time, the priciest movie in Indian history (at about $10.6 million). The plot, based on a 1917 novel, is good-old family-values propaganda, drenched in luscious masochism: rich boy Devdas (all-world charismatist Khan) leaves home, abandons his girlfriend (former Miss World Rai) and suffers magnificently while dallying with a prostitute (Dixit, a hot number who had danced flamenco on men’s libidos for a decade or so before appearing in this worldly-wise role). The piece is played with such commitment that the tritest plot twists seem worth believing — and dancing to, in nine nifty production numbers. But the fervid emotion is what makes the thing sing. Beyond that, Devdas is a visual ravishment, with sumptuous sets, fabulous frocks and beautiful people to fill them; it has a grandeur the old Hollywood moguls would have loved.


7. Synecdoche New York

Director: Charlie Kaufman
Year Released: 2008
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams




Independent movies of the Sundance stripe have become their own genre: small human dramas that can touch art-house hearts but don’t often expand the boundaries of cinema. Ambition is what most indie films lack, and what the directorial debut of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) has, ad infintum, ad gloriam. In this epic tragicomedy, Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a Schenectady, N.Y., theater director moves to Manhattan with the gigantic notion of putting on a realistic drama as big as all New York City. A self-styled truth-teller, Caden manages to exasperate or repel the fascinating women (including Catherine Keener, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Michelle Williams) who cross his downward path. The project drags on — it’s his life’s work, and it may take that long to finish — but Kaufman’s imagination never falters. Things keep getting bigger and weirder and denser and sadder and funnier, till all the pressure on Caden leads to a final implosion. A movie so human you may want to argue with it, spank it, take it home or give it some Xanax, Synecdoche is richly devious and daring: a truly, gargantuanly independent vision.


6. The Hurt Locker

Director: Kathryn Bigelow
Year Released: 2009
Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty




The attitude of war movies toward warriors often depends on when they were made. Hollywood battle films released during World War II usually treated soldiers as heroic grunts sacrificing themselves for the folks back home. A decade after VE Day, the view was darker, more cynical. The films of the Iraqi Occupation were different: the earlier ones (Redacted, In the Valley of Elah) painted GIs as sociopaths born or made, and every trek into alien territory threatened to produce a My Lai massacre, Baghdad-style. So the acutely nonpartisan Hurt Locker had a fresh, revisionist vision. To be sure, Sgt. William James (Renner) loves war. He connects more to his death-defying assignment than to his family; that’s why he keeps re-upping. But rather than gunning down civilians, he’s trying to keep them alive by defusing bombs found in streets and cars.

As seen by Bigelow, a smart director of gritty action films, James is a Hollywood hero out of the Howard Hawks playbook. Like the adventurers in Hawks’ ’30s films The Dawn Patrol and Only Angels Have Wings, James risks his life because, once a man volunteers for a job, he’s got to do it. That may be the mantra of the professional soldiers in the latest U.S. military excursions. And as the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan were blithely ignored by most Americans, so The Hurt Locker lured few pleasure seekers into theaters. It was left to the Motion Picture Academy to take the film off the DVD shelf and pin a slew of Oscars on its chest. Somebody has to remember heroes, and heroic movie endeavors.


5. The White Ribbon

Director: Michael Haneke
Year Released: 2009
Cast: Christian Friedel, Leonie Benesch, Ulrich Tukor




Haneke’s period political epic, which earned the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, tells the lacerating saga of collective brutality and guilt in a northern German village two decades before Hitler came to power. The town is troubled by seemingly random acts of violence on animals, property and a few local children. What’s happening? Who’s to blame? Perhaps everyone, as we discover by following the lives of five prominent families. A Mensa mashup of Our Town and Village of the Damned, the film is both draining and enthralling, sternly minimalist and beautifully filmed (in black-and-white). Working with the skill of an autopsy surgeon, Haneke depicts a town where the adults’ passions have soured into prejudices, yet children are so desperate to please their parents that they often burst into tears. The White Ribbon is as much as epic as any Tolkien or Rowling movie adaptation, but an epic tragedy: of the monstrous evil that corrupts and destroys ordinary folks. Most films don’t even consider the enormity of a society’s power to crush the best instincts of its people. This one says: Don’t look away. Look here.


4. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Director: Ang Lee
Year Released: 2000
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Michelle Yeoh, Zhang Ziyi




Born and raised in Taiwan, and schooled in the U.S., Ang Lee made his reputation with adult dramas-of-manners like The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility. But inside him was a child, a fan of martial-arts novels and movies, screaming to get out. The two Lees met and meld in this entrancing blend of Eastern physical grace and Western intensity of performance, of Hong Kong kung-fu directness and British attention to behavioral nuance. The director convened stars of three movie eras — pioneer kung-femme Cheng Pei-pei from the ’60s, Chow and Yeoh from Hong Kong’s glorious ’80s and bright new lights Zhang and Chang Chen — and set them to battling over a magical sword. When the actors aren’t flying across roofs and balancing on tree tops, in fight scenes choreographed by the great Yuen Wo-ping, they are navigating the murkier regions of personal responsibility and unspoken love. Crouching Tiger is a movie of gravity and buoyancy, of high art and higher spirits. It’s contemplative and it kicks ass.


3. Avatar

Director: James Cameron
Year Released: 2009
Cast: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver




The top-grossing film of all time — earning twice at the worldwide box office as any movie but Titanic —was also the first picture to justify the 3-D trend. For Cameron’s film does what fantasy is supposed to do: create a total environmental experience. Viewers don’t just visit the Pandora rainforest; like the movie’s paraplegic hero Jake, they find their legs and are quickly at home there. And then they fly, like Peter Pan’s lost boys, through a luscious landscape guided by a Pandoran princess. (Some saw Avatar as a free-form remake of Pocahontas, though its real source was A Princess of Mars, the same Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that Andrew Stanton officially remade as John Carter.) Conservatives may have decried the tree-hugger sentiments in a war movie where U.S. soldiers are the enemy; liberals may have wondered why the white American Jake should be the savior of the physically and ethically superior blue Pandorans. But for a sensational, seductive movie immersion, Avatar has it all over Cameron’s previous blockbuster. This one really is titanic.


2. The Lord of the Rings

Director: Peter Jackson
Year Released: 2001, 2002, 2003
Cast: Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Ian McKellen




No question that the Star Wars films, especially the cliffhanging climax of The Empire Strikes Back, made possible the two major organic movie epics of this millennium: the eight-film Harry Potter cycle and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Both based on touchstone fiction franchises written for kids, and both launching in late 2001, the two series required vision and daring not just from their creators but also from their sponsors. Warner Bros. (Potter) and New Line (Rings) committed to the full run of films, each episode costing well over $100 million, before knowing if anyone would go to them. Another challenge: these were long movies, some of them in excess of three hours. Live-action or animated films aimed at the young had taken into account the supposed limitation of children’s attention spans (and their bladders) and usually ran 90 minutes or less. But kids and their parents stayed glued to their seats as the great sagas spun out; the two series were among the most successful and beloved of all time. Addressing their stories with an anachronistic seriousness, and employing the full range of British acting royalty, they established an impressive standard of popular art — Jackson’s effort a bit higher and more cohesive (as The Lord of the Rings’ inclusion on the all-TIME 100 list indicates), but both among the most satisfying achievements of the new millennium.


1. Wall-E

Director: Andrew Stanton
Year Released: 2008
Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight



From Toy Story in 1995 to Toy Story 3 in 2010, John Lasseter’s Pixar animation house produced 11 features, all winners — and a few the very best films of their year. As director of Finding Nemo, the studio’s biggest hit, Stanton had free run of his imagination for WALL•E. Working from a story by Pete Docter (who also directed Monsters, Inc. and Up), Stanton devised a cartoon feature whose first half-hour dares to focus on a single lonely character who speaks rarely and then mostly in beeps. (It’s like The Artist, but stripped of intertitles and all but a few bars of music.) Stranded on Earth for centuries cleaning up the detritus of the vanished human race, robo-boy WALL•E might be old Carl, the solitary widower of Up, but soldiering on a poignant, irrepressible optimism. When this trash-can Adam meets his sleek EVE (a robot sent to scour Earth for possible vegetation), they inhabit a sci-fi cyborg romance for the ages.

As daring aurally as it is narratively, the movie boasts a soundscape — WALL•E’s and Eve’s metallic conversation, the other machines and weapons, the scooting of a cockroach — almost wholly created by Burtt, Pixar’s audio Audubon, who in his years with George Lucas had invented the sounds of the light sabers in Star Wars and the whipcrack in Raiders of the Lost Ark. (Burtt used his own voice, distorted by computer, for WALL•E and Pixar staffer Knight’s for EVE.) The movies of the past dozen years will be remembered for their technical wizardry and digital sheen. WALL•E has all that, plus a toy-meets-girl love story as pure as any in the cinema’s first 100 years.