The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

24. 2002 - The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers

The Lord of the Rings The Two Towers Helm's Deep Aragorn
New Line Cinema

Honourable Mentions: Infernal Affairs, Spider-Man, 28 Days Later

The phrase "cultural reset" gets thrown around a lot, but it's tough to describe Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy as anything but. The New Zealand-born director marshalled a production that defined fantasy in the 21st century, taking the most seminal of genre texts from J. R. R. Tolkien and creating an awards and box office phenomenon befitting their reputation.

As with other franchise megahit Star Wars, there's a case for each of the three original LOTR films for being the best, and like with Star Wars again, you can't really go wrong with the second.

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is the perfect compromise between the more intimate Fellowship of the Ring and the epic Return of the King, as our protagonists branch off into three distinct groupings and try to survive, battle, and destroy the forces of Sauron and Saruman. Jackson weaves these three stories together in a coherent and thoroughly compelling manner, whether it's the introduction of Gollum as Frodo and Samwise travel to Mordor, or the return of Gandalf and the siege of Helm's Deep.

A perfect blockbuster through and through.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.