The 6 Most Universally Loved Movies Released Since 2000, Ranked
Luc Haasbroek is a writer and videographer from Durban, South Africa. He has been writing professionally about pop culture for eight years. Luc's areas of interest are broad: he's just as passionate about psychology and history as he is about movies and TV. He's especially drawn to the places where these topics overlap.
Luc is also an avid producer of video essays and looks forward to expanding his writing career. When not writing, he can be found hiking, playing Dungeons & Dragons, hanging out with his cats, and doing deep dives on whatever topic happens to have captured his interest that week.
Sign in to your Collider account
As the monoculture recedes, replaced by algorithmic niches and personally tailored subgenres, it's becoming harder and harder for movies to be universally loved. Still, a fair few films released this century do boast enough critical acclaim and commercial success to qualify. "Universally loved" will always involve some exaggeration (no movie is literally adored by everybody), but the titles on this list come pretty darn close.
They span animation, crime, fantasy, superhero cinema, and heartfelt comedy-drama, but all combine tremendous filmmaking craft with unusually broad appeal. They're modern classics, gems that resonated with the public and reviewers alike.
6 'The Intouchables' (2011)
"Sometimes you have to reach into someone else's world to find out what's missing in your own." One of the most feel-good movies of the last quarter-century. This French comedy-drama follows Philippe (François Cluzet), a wealthy quadriplegic man who hires Driss (Omar Sy), a young man from a vastly different social background, as his live-in caregiver. Driss initially has little interest in the position and even less experience providing care. Somehow, the mismatch develops into an enormously affecting friendship.
The chemistry between the leads is the movie's greatest strength, helping the characters feel like real people. As a whole, the film refreshingly avoids pity or pathos. Most movies in this subgenre tend toward melodrama and contrived silver linings. The Intouchables manages to be uplifting and accessible without ever becoming maudlin. Not for nothing, it went on to gross $426m worldwide against a budget of just $10.8m.
5 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse' (2023)
"Nah, I'mma do my own thing." It's hard to hate a movie with this much heart and visual bravura. In this animated banger, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) discovers the Spider-Society, an organization led by Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac) that attempts to preserve the stability of the multiverse. Their philosophy creates a fundamental conflict: certain tragedies are supposedly necessary parts of every Spider-Person's story, and Miles has absolutely no intention of accepting that someone he loves must die simply because the narrative says so.
From here, we get a propulsive superhero plot anchored by touching, well-realized relationships, particularly the bond between Miles and his parents and Gwen's (Hailee Steinfeld) painful relationship with her father. The animation matches the emotion perfectly, serving up a stream of astonishingly expressive imagery. Different universes operate according to distinct visual languages, and color itself can change according to a character's inner state. Gwen's watercolor-inspired world is especially beautiful.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which MCU Character Is Your Best Friend? Steve Rogers · Tony Stark · Peter Parker · Shuri
Pick where you meet, what they text you at two in the morning, what they hand you on your birthday and what the two of you keep arguing about. Four very different people are waiting on the other side: the one who never leaves, the one who is exhausting and worth it, the one who replies in four seconds flat, and the one who will roast you and then fix your life.
🛡️Steve Rogers(Captain America)
🛠️Tony Stark(Iron Man)
🕸️Peter Parker(Spider-Man)
🐆Shuri(Black Panther)
01
Where do the two of you meet? Nobody in this universe makes a friend somewhere normal.
02
Your phone lights up at two in the morning. What does it say? You find out what kind of friend somebody is by what they send at that hour.
03
It is your birthday. What do they hand you? The present is never really about the present.
04
What does a good Saturday with them actually look like? Superheroes have days off, and this is how they spend them.
05
You have your worst day in years. What do they do about it? This is the part of a friendship nobody puts in the trailer.
06
Every real friendship has one fight it keeps having. What is yours? The thing you argue about is usually the thing you like most about them.
07
The alarm goes off and you are both in the field. What is your job? You get one role on the team, and it says a lot about who you want next to you.
08
Ten years on, what do you want this friendship to be? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides who picks up the phone.
The Line Is Ringing Your Best Friend Is…
Four people, four completely different ideas of what it means to have somebody in your corner. Here is who picked up, what they would ask of you, and what you would get back.
Steve Rogers
You want the friend who does not leave. Steve is the one who turns up at the door without being asked, who remembers what you said you were worried about, and who has never once made you audition for his attention.
- His entire character is built on a single sentence, which is that he will not abandon somebody just because it has become expensive to keep them.
- He is far funnier than people give him credit for, and the joke is almost always at his own expense rather than yours.
- The friendship comes with a cost, since being close to Steve means being dragged into fights that were never yours and being glad about it later.
- You would get a friend who tells you the hard thing to your face and then defends you to everybody else in the room.
Tony Stark
You want the friend who is genuinely exhausting and completely worth it. Tony will forget your birthday, then build you something at four in the morning that you did not know you needed, and hand it over as though it were nothing.
- He is bad at saying the warm thing out loud, so he says it in hardware instead, which is why everybody around him ends up with upgraded everything.
- Being his friend means putting up with the disappearing, the deflecting and the jokes that arrive about ninety seconds too early.
- What you get in return is somebody who will spend an unreasonable amount of money and effort on a problem the moment it becomes yours.
- He is the loudest person in the room and the one most likely to be quietly panicking about all of you.
Peter Parker
You want the friend who replies in four seconds and apologises for it. Peter is earnest in a way that is almost unfashionable, and he will take on far more than he can carry rather than admit that he is struggling.
- He is the only one on this list who needs looking after as much as he looks after you, and that balance is exactly what makes it a real friendship.
- Nobody in the MCU is better at the small stuff, from remembering the thing you were nervous about to showing up with food you did not ask for.
- Spider-Man: Brand New Day arrived in July 2026 and put him back where he works best, which is broke, local and carrying the weight on his own.
- You would get a friend who is sincerely, embarrassingly happy for you when something goes right, with no edge to it at all.
Shuri
You want the friend who insults your shoes, fixes your phone and then quietly rearranges your entire life for the better. Shuri does not do soft reassurance, and that is the reason you would believe her when she says you are fine.
- She is the smartest person in almost any room she walks into and treats that as a reason to tease you rather than a reason to lecture you.
- The teasing is the affection. When Shuri stops making fun of you, something has gone seriously wrong and you should probably ask her about it.
- Her story is the one on this list that goes somewhere genuinely dark, which is what turned her from a scene stealer into the emotional centre of the films.
- You would get a friend who never pities you, never softens the truth, and never once lets you take yourself too seriously.
4 'The Departed' (2006)
"When you're facing a loaded gun, what's the difference?" This movie killed at the box office and took home the Best Picture Oscar. With The Departed, Martin Scorsese relocated Infernal Affairs to South Boston. There, cop Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) infiltrates the organization of crime boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), while Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) secretly works for Costello from inside the police force. Once both sides realize they have a mole, Billy and Colin effectively begin hunting each other without knowing whom they're looking for.
In a sense, The Departed takes a classic, twist-heavy, action-focused B-movie plot and elevates it with world-class writing, performances, and directing. Marty keeps the elaborate plot moving with remarkable energy. Phones become weapons, apparently casual conversations carry hidden threats, and almost every meeting risks exposing somebody. The movie is frequently hilarious as well, particularly whenever Mark Wahlberg's magnificently abrasive Dignam enters a room.
3 'Spirited Away' (2001)
"Once you've met someone, you never really forget them." Plenty of Miyazaki movies are widely cherished, perhaps none more so than Spirited Away. The story kicks into gear when ten-year-old Chihiro's (Rumi Hiiragi) parents wander into an apparently abandoned amusement park, gorge themselves on unattended food, and transform into pigs. Chihiro soon discovers that she's entered a spirit world centered around an enormous bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba (Mari Natsuki), and saving her parents will require considerably more courage than the frightened girl initially seems to possess.
The animation here is gorgeous and hand-drawn, crafted with care, full of images that somehow feel simultaneously bizarre and completely natural. There are soot sprites carrying coal, enormous bathing spirits, disembodied heads, talking frogs, a mysterious dragon boy named Haku, and the unforgettable No-Face, who becomes increasingly monstrous once the bathhouse begins feeding his appetites. It all adds up to a kind of modern fable.
2 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' (2003)
"My friends, you bow to no one." Return of the King is the most ambitious of the LoTR movies, and it brought the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion. In it, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) must finally embrace his responsibility as Isildur's heir, Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and the forces of Gondor prepare for Sauron's armies, and Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Sam (Sean Astin) continue their increasingly desperate journey toward Mount Doom.
The Battle of the Pelennor Fields remains astonishing more than 20 years later, with cavalry charges, siege weapons, Oliphaunts, Nazgûl, and enormous armies colliding across the screen. Yet the film's greatest moments simply involve two exhausted Hobbits climbing a mountain. It's here where the themes hit home: loyalty, the heavy burden of trauma, the corrupting effects of power, enduring strength and hope, and the capacity of even the meekest to make a difference.
1 'The Dark Knight' (2008)
"Why so serious?" The Dark Knight is the third-highest-rated movie on IMDb, with a score of 9.1 based on 3.2 million ratings. It's not hard to see why. Here, Christopher Nolan takes the Batman mythology and constructs an expansive crime thriller around it, following Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), Lieutenant James Gordon (Gary Oldman), and district attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) as their campaign against Gotham's criminal underworld is violently disrupted by the Joker (Heath Ledger).
The film fires on all cylinders, delivering superhero thrills alongside practically grounded action sequences, epic IMAX photography, smart writing, psychological showdowns, and one of the greatest villain performances of all time. Indeed, Ledger is The Dark Knight's center of gravity. He makes the Joker funny, frightening, unpredictable, and disturbingly intelligent, abandoning the usual villainous backstories and motives for pure, unbridled chaos. In the process, he set a new high bar that arguably no one has yet topped.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.