It's midnight somewhere. By Phil Nugent and Andrew Osborne "Cult movie" is a hard thing to pin down. For the purposes of this list — celebrating the tenth anniversary of Donnie Darko — we've put a premium on the intensity and selectiveness of a movie's appeal. We've also limited each director to one film.
The scene was not unlike 12 Angry Men (or, in this case, 3 Shlubby Men, 1 Exasperated Woman, And A Dude On Speaker Phone From Arkansas ): Armed with lists of their favorite movies of the decade, the five core A.V. Club film writers spent days sequestered in a stuffy, un-air-conditioned room—okay, it was actually just a few hours, and we were comfortable—in an effort to forge consensus on the Top 50 films of the ’00s. The result: A ranked list that is in no way arbitrary and will serve as the canonical standard for decades to come.