The 100 best movies of the 21st century
Between streaming services and superhero blockbusters, the way we watch and think about movies has changed dramatically over the past 25 years. But through that period of upheaval, which films have truly stood the test of time?
To find out, we embarked on an ambitious new project, polling more than 500 filmmakers, stars and influential film fans to vote for the 10 best movies (however they chose to define that) released since Jan. 1, 2000. In collaboration with The Upshot, we compiled their responses to create a list of the 100 best movies of the 21st century.
Voters included Oscar-winning directors like Pedro Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola, Barry Jenkins and Guillermo del Toro as well as acclaimed actors like Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mikey Madison, John Turturro and Julianne Moore.
25. ‘Phantom Thread’
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017
Don’t you dare call Paul Thomas Anderson’s delectable 1950s fashion drama “chic.” Couturier Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis, would have your head. This film is sumptuous and subversive, recounting the love story between Reynolds and his unruly muse, Alma (Vicky Krieps). He is prickly and easily perturbed; she delights in getting under his skin. It may seem that Anderson is investigating power imbalances in relationships; instead it’s the tale of a man meeting his match. Eat up, you hungry boys.
24. ‘Her’
Spike Jonze, 2013
Eschewing the hard, gleaming surfaces of most speculative sci-fi for something more off-kilter, Spike Jonze’s digital romance follows a lonely introvert (Joaquin Phoenix) in near-future Los Angeles as he falls head-over-code for an adaptive operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Is it real machine love or just a grown man’s pathological avoidance of intimacy? “Her” refuses easy answers, though the many questions it raises, alas, feel a lot less theoretical today than they did in 2013.
23. ‘Boyhood’
Richard Linklater, 2014
An audacious concept — the movie was shot, in start-and-stop fashion, over more than a decade — meets a winningly low-key execution in Richard Linklater’s acute, unhurried portrait of a small-town Texas kid (Ellar Coltrane) navigating his parents’ divorce, first crushes and other travails and triumphs of adolescence. The result is a coming-of-age drama of uncommon loveliness, both piercing and sweet.
22. ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’
Wes Anderson, 2014
Wes Anderson’s candy-colored visions can be deceptive. The magnificent inn of the title is a glorious pink confection, but there are real stakes at play: Fascism is fast approaching, and refugees have good reason to fear the authorities at the borders of a fictional European country. This between-the-wars tale of a beloved concierge (a terrific Ralph Fiennes) who calls men and women alike “darling” and sleeps with all his friends is in the end deeply moving.
21. ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’
Wes Anderson, 2001
Before his name became a byword for a distinctive and much-imitated aesthetic, Wes Anderson was also just a really good storyteller. His exploration of one eccentric New York family contains no shortage of Wes-lian signatures: deadpan line deliveries, dreamy Pantone palettes, first-rate needle drops. But it’s also a deeply felt and often very funny portrait of an emotionally distant patriarch (Gene Hackman) and his messy, overachieving offspring, played with exquisite agony by Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow.
20. ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’
Martin Scorsese, 2013
More than a century after the days of “Gangs of New York,” Martin Scorsese finds more lower Manhattan bros behaving badly. Playing stock trader Jordan Belfort (whose memoir the movie is based on), Leonardo DiCaprio has rarely been funnier on screen. There’s inevitably a downfall, but if it seems as if Belfort gets off pretty easy — well, doesn’t that sound like Wall Street?
19. ‘Zodiac’
David Fincher, 2007
This drama functions as an examination of obsession. The titular serial killer is obsessive in the creation of a persona. The bureaucracy-hindered cops (Mark Ruffalo and Anthony Edwards) obsessively chase leads, while newspaper journalists, including Robert Downey Jr.’s boozy beat reporter, do the same. That you feel satisfied by the time the credits roll — even though the Zodiac’s identity remains a mystery — speaks to David Fincher’s obsessive attention to detail and technique.
18. ‘Y Tu Mamá También’
Alfonso Cuarón, 2002
Alfonso Cuarón’s bildungsroman has much on its mind — lust, class, male friendship, mortality, but mainly lust. Sex is all that high schoolers Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal) seem to live for — with their girlfriends, with each other’s girlfriends, with an alluring in-law who inspires a road trip to a beach. Cuarón shoots sex the way his characters feel it: hot, all-consuming, the weight of the world just off-camera. Like youth itself, we stumble out of the film blinking, disoriented, sifting through memories like sand strewn with gold.
17. ‘Brokeback Mountain’
Ang Lee, 2005
“The gay cowboy movie” did more than start water-cooler conversations and win several Oscars. Ang Lee’s austere western turned a clandestine romance between two Wyoming ranch hands (Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal) into one of cinema’s great tragic love stories, as aesthetically beautiful as it was emotionally shattering.
16. ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’
Ang Lee, 2000
When Ang Lee debuted this wuxia masterpiece starring Michelle Yeoh, Chow Yun-fat and Zhang Ziyi, the film appealed to Western and Eastern audiences alike, a rarity at the time, and demolished box-office records. This action drama marries acrobatic, aerodynamic martial arts with repressed love and forbidden futures. Seared in memory: the showdown between Yeoh’s swordswoman and the thief played by Zhang using a multitude of weapons, and the sword fight between Chow’s warrior and Zhang in a bamboo forest.
15. ‘City of God’
Fernando Meirelles, 2003
A teenager forces a younger teenager to kill an even younger child. The victim cowers inside a fenced patio that resembles a playpen. Nearby sobs another child; he’s been shot in the foot — to send a message, but also for fun. That a film can contain this scene and make you feel anything but sick is a testament to its narrative complexity, dazzling visual style and charismatic cast. It’s a harrowing yet poetic meditation on survival in Rio de Janeiro’s Cidade de Deus slum.
14. ‘Inglourious Basterds’
Quentin Tarantino, 2009
Quentin Tarantino’s World War II tale is epic but intimate: Life and death turn on a hand gesture, a dessert topping, a bad accent (not whatever Tennessee accent Brad Pitt is using — that one’s hilarious). Christoph Waltz stands out in a stacked ensemble cast and won the best supporting actor Oscar. But after a conflagration of revisionist history has burned this movie to the ground, Pitt gets the last word, and it’s hard not to hear it in Tarantino’s voice: “I think this just might be my masterpiece.”
13. ‘Children of Men’
Alfonso Cuarón, 2006
While the near future is bleak in Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi drama, almost every scene is a stunner. Women have become infertile, and hope for the human race is all but gone, but in a locked-down Britain hostile to refugees, a bureaucrat (Clive Owen) finds himself in a position to protect a newcomer (Clare-Hope Ashitey), the only pregnant woman in the world. The performances are lived-in, the narrative is prescient, and Emmanuel Lubezki’s camerawork dazzles.
12. ‘The Zone of Interest’
Jonathan Glazer, 2023
Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust narrative defies convention. Using the bones of Martin Amis’ novel of the same name, Glazer focuses on the day-to-day life of the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), who reside next door. They garden to the soundtrack of mass murder as the ash of human bodies falls from the sky. It’s a disorienting watch that shows just how easy it is to live with monstrosity, every so often jolting you out of your skin with Mica Levi’s unnerving score.
11. ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’
George Miller, 2015
The fourth installment in George Miller’s postapocalyptic series finds the world still thirsting for water and Max (Tom Hardy) riding shotgun with Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a one-armed, truck-driving revolutionary. Churning with bodies — human, machined, deathly pale, shinily chromed — Miller’s kinetic, lunatic hallucination leaves you slack-jawed because of both its outrageous visuals and depth of feeling. Come for the guy playing a flame-throwing guitar while tied to a moving semi, stay for the requiem for a world that looks eerily, devastatingly like our own.
10. ‘The Social Network’
David Fincher, 2010
Less a biography than an evisceration, David Fincher’s hypnotically unflattering, often funny origin story about Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and the creation of Facebook opens with a man and woman breaking up. By movie’s end, the man is the world’s loneliest billionaire, compulsively clicking refresh on his Facebook page. When “The Social Network” debuted, it seemed like a borderline cruel take on a classic American success story. Given how social media has radically reshaped the world, the film now seems almost quaint — and not nearly cruel enough.
9. ‘Spirited Away’
Hayao Miyazaki, 2002
Hayao Miyazaki’s hand-drawn fairy tale of adolescence is the “Alice in Wonderland” of our age. Unforgettable characters keep spilling out of an abandoned magical bathhouse — the boilerman and his soot sprites, the masked spirit No-Face, Haku the boy-dragon and, navigating it all, brave Chihiro, whose clueless parents have been turned into pigs by a witch. Beautifully uniting the master animator’s preoccupations — man’s corruption of nature, the loss of innocence, intimidating creatures who aren’t what they seem — “Spirited Away” is a spellbinding adventure with few peers in animation or elsewhere.
8. ‘Get Out’
Jordan Peele, 2017
When Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), the hero of Jordan Peele’s freakout, visits his white girlfriend’s parents, it’s obvious that something is off. Her mother is weirdly watchful, her father embarrassingly obsequious. Chris soon discovers that the family and their friends are modern-day slavers transplanting white brains into Black bodies. With mordant wit, great timing and superb control, Peele marshals genre conventions for a movie that’s at once an electrifying thriller about the horrors of white supremacy and an unsparing sendup of a post-racial America.
7. ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’
Michel Gondry, 2004
Sometimes a movie comes along that is so wildly inventive and wonderfully strange, you wonder if you dreamed it. Directed by Michel Gondry from a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, this dream ventures far beyond its rom-com center. Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey play a broken-up couple who opt to get memories of their relationship erased. The movie — equal parts playful and gutting — emphasizes how strongly such memories shape us.
6. ‘No Country for Old Men’
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2007
“What’s the most you ever lost on a coin toss?” menacing hit man Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) asks a gas station owner, who didn’t realize he was going to gamble with death that day. Chigurh verges on superhuman as he stalks through this neo-western thriller that the Coen brothers adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel about violence and fate. Long stretches have no music or dialogue — it’s just men working hard not to die. But as one character puts it, “You can’t stop what’s comin’.”
5. ‘Moonlight’
Barry Jenkins, 2016
The weight of this delicate drama doesn’t hit until the end, but when the finale arrives, it is staggering. Barry Jenkins expertly takes us through the life of one Black gay man, played at different ages by Alex Hibbert, Ashton Sanders and Trevante Rhodes. “Moonlight” is about everything it takes to make you who you are. It’s about the beauty and love that come your way, what you embrace and what you don’t. And ultimately it’s about feeling like an outcast, but patiently, quietly finding your way home.
4. ‘In the Mood for Love’
Wong Kar-wai, 2001
Soon after a journalist (Tony Leung) and a secretary (Maggie Cheung), both married to other people, move into the same crowded Hong Kong building in 1962, they brush past each other in mesmerizing slow motion. Sparks don’t fly; they smolder. They keep on burning in Wong Kar-wai’s rapturously beautiful, elegiac romance, in which he inscribes desire in every glance and unspoken word. Here, the sensuous curve of a woman’s back becomes an emblem of longing while the tendrils of smoke from a man’s cigarette express the ache of life’s impermanence.
3. ‘There Will Be Blood’
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007
Paul Thomas Anderson’s masterpiece about blood and oil, men and their gods, opens in the late 19th century with an American prospector, Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis), alone in a deep pit hacking at the earth. He continues gouging and pummeling (the earth, other people) to become an oil baron who ravages everything and everyone. Anderson’s filmmaking can make you gasp — the soaring camerawork speaks to the ambitions of protagonist and director alike — and so can the environmental and spiritual devastations that haunt this deeply American tragedy.
2. ‘Mulholland Drive’
David Lynch, 2001
David Lynch’s perverse fairy tale tracks the downward spiral of a bright-eyed young actress, Betty — a revelatory Naomi Watts in a career-defining performance — who stumbles into a dangerous, labyrinthine mystery shortly after arriving in Los Angeles. Filled with doubles, this is one of Lynch’s bleakest and most terrifying films, and among his most emotionally devastating. It’s also one of the great movies about Hollywood, a dark mirror world where dreams turn into nightmares, which means that it’s one of Lynch’s most autobiographical works, too.
1. ‘Parasite’
Bong Joon Ho, 2019
A tale of haves and have-nots, and a ferocious rebuke to the devastations of neoliberalism, Bong Joon Ho’s pleasurably kinked and unsettling shocker follows a destitute family as it insinuates itself into a wealthy household. Bong, a master of genre unbound by convention, fluidly shifts between broad comedy and blistering social satire throughout, then lights it all on fire with a paroxysm of tragic violence that’s as stunning as it is inevitable. When the movie opened in the United States, Bong was a favorite on the art-house circuit; by the time it closed, he had a fistful of Oscars, including best picture, and the world had a new superstar.
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THE REST: MOVIES 100-26
100. ‘Superbad’
Greg Mottola, 2007
99. ‘Memories of Murder’
Bong Joon Ho, 2005
98. ‘Grizzly Man’
Werner Herzog, 2005
97. ‘Gravity’
Alfonso Cuarón, 2013
96. ‘Black Panther’
Ryan Coogler, 2018
95. ‘The Worst Person in the World’
Joachim Trier, 2021
94. ‘Minority Report’
Steven Spielberg, 2002
93. ‘Michael Clayton’
Tony Gilroy, 2007
92. ‘Gladiator’
Ridley Scott, 2000
91. ‘Fish Tank’
Andrea Arnold, 2010
90. ‘Frances Ha’
Noah Baumbach, 2013
89. ‘Interstellar’
Christopher Nolan, 2014
88. ‘The Gleaners & I’
Agnès Varda, 2001
87. ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’
Peter Jackson, 2001
86. ‘Past Lives’
Celine Song, 2023
85. ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’
Adam McKay, 2004
84. ‘Melancholia’
Lars von Trier, 2011
83. ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2013
82. ‘The Act of Killing’
Joshua Oppenheimer and Anonymous, 2013
81. ‘Black Swan’
Darren Aronofsky, 2010
80. ‘Volver’
Pedro Almodóvar, 2006
79. ‘The Tree of Life’
Terrence Malick, 2011
78. ‘Aftersun’
Charlotte Wells, 2022
77. ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, 2022
76. ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2000
75. ‘Amour’
Michael Haneke, 2012
74. ‘The Florida Project’
Sean Baker, 2017
73. ‘Ratatouille’
Brad Bird, 2007
72. ‘Carol’
Todd Haynes, 2015
71. ‘Ocean’s Eleven’
Steven Soderbergh, 2001
70. ‘Let the Right One In’
Tomas Alfredson, 2008
69. ‘Under the Skin’
Jonathan Glazer, 2014
68. ‘The Hurt Locker’
Kathryn Bigelow, 2009
67. ‘Tár’
Todd Field, 2022
66. ‘Spotlight’
Tom McCarthy, 2015
65. ‘Oppenheimer’
Christopher Nolan, 2023
64. ‘Gone Girl’
David Fincher, 2014
63. ‘Little Miss Sunshine’
Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, 2006
62. ‘Memento’
Christopher Nolan, 2001
61. ‘Kill Bill: Vol. 1’
Quentin Tarantino, 2003
60. ‘Whiplash’
Damien Chazelle, 2014
59. ‘Toni Erdmann’
Maren Ade, 2016
58. ‘Uncut Gems’
Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie, 2019
57. ‘Best in Show’
Christopher Guest, 2000
56. ‘Punch-Drunk Love’
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002
55. ‘Inception’
Christopher Nolan, 2010
54. ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’
Guillermo del Toro, 2006
53. ‘Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan’
Larry Charles, 2006
52. ‘The Favourite’
Yorgos Lanthimos, 2018
51. ‘12 Years a Slave’
Steve McQueen, 2013
50. ‘Up’
Pete Docter, 2009
49. ‘Before Sunset’
Richard Linklater, 2004
48. ‘The Lives of Others’
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2007
47. ‘Almost Famous’
Cameron Crowe, 2000
46. ‘Roma’
Alfonso Cuarón, 2018
45. ‘Moneyball’
Bennett Miller, 2011
44. ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’
Quentin Tarantino, 2019
43. ‘Oldboy’
Park Chan-wook, 2005
42. ‘The Master’
Paul Thomas Anderson, 2012
41. ‘Amélie’
Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001
40. ‘Yi Yi’
Edward Yang, 2000
39. ‘Lady Bird’
Greta Gerwig, 2017
38. ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’
Céline Sciamma, 2019
37. ‘Call Me by Your Name’
Luca Guadagnino, 2017
36. ‘A Serious Man’
Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, 2009
35. ‘A Prophet’
Jacques Audiard, 2010
34. ‘Wall-E’
Andrew Stanton, 2008
33. ‘A Separation’
Asghar Farhadi, 2011
32. ‘Bridesmaids’
Paul Feig, 2011
31. ‘The Departed’
Martin Scorsese, 2006
30. ‘Lost in Translation’
Sofia Coppola, 2003
29. ‘Arrival’
Denis Villeneuve, 2016
28. ‘The Dark Knight’
Christopher Nolan, 2008
27. ‘Adaptation’
Spike Jonze, 2002
26. ‘Anatomy of a Fall’
Justine Triet, 2023
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.