NYT Best Films of the 21st Century

ctrl+f toni erdmann

it's that or Mandy. anyway

Yi Yi or Children of Men.

In the absence of Werckmeister Harmonies and Big Man Japan it'll be Spirited Away

imago at 9:33 27 Jun 25

ctrl+f toni erdmann

it's #59! also the highest ranking film i haven't seen.

(it's on my watchlist, but whenever I've thought about watching it, the running time has been an impediment.)

mulholland drive or in the mood for love. can't argue with top 5 for either of them

Tempted to go with Her due to all the hate its been getting around here, but ended up clicking Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. About 10 others would easily be in contention.

only one of these i actively dislike is oldboy. sorry. i liked handmaiden and decision to leave tho

Yi Yi.

I like Guadagnino's ballot. I'm guessing Ghosts of Mars may have been a solitary vote.

Zodiac, which I thought would have been up near the top (painful to see it next to Wolf of Wall Street).

I'm pleasantly surprised it's as high as it is, given that it was somewhat overlooked/overshadowed at the time of its release (zero Oscar noms, e.g.)

True--released early in the calendar year, I think--I just thought it had gained so much traction in the last 15 years.

I feel bad for the half a dozen good to great films here.

I don't worry about placement on lists -- I like to see my picks no matter where they land.

Boring answer but Mulholland Drive

The Zone Of Interest or Moonlight. Perennially frustrated with the celebration of Call Me By Your Name over Guadagnino’s masterpiece I Am Love

Can someone copy/paste the full list?

Perennially frustrated with the celebration of Call Me By Your Name over Guadagnino’s masterpiece I Am Love

For a lot of younger viewers CMBYN was like Brokeback Mountain was a breakthrough film. I prefer Queer and even Challengers.

CMBYN is definitely better than Challengers, if only because Aciman’s novel is better.

None of my choices made the top 50, but given some of the utter trash on that list, I consider that a good thing ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(seriously tho, The Departed? Up? Royal fucking Tenenbaums? )

Full list:

1. Parasite
2. Mulholland Drive
3. There Will Be Blood
4. in the Mood for Love
5. Moonlight
6. No Country for Old Men
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
8. Get Out
9. Spirited Away
10. The Social Network
11. Mad Max: Fury Road
12. The Zone of Interest
13. Children of Men
14. Inglourious Basterds
15. City of God
16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
17. Brokeback Mountain
18. Y Tu Mama Tambien
19. Zodiac
20. The Wolf of Wall Street
21. The Royal Tenenbaums
22. The Grand Budapest Hotel
23. Boyhood
24. Her
25. Phantom Thread
26. Anatomy of a Fall
27. Adaptation
28. The Dark Knight
29. Arrival
30. Lost in Translation
31. The Departed
32. Bridesmaids
33. A Separation
34. Wall-E
35. A Prophet
36. A Serious Man
37. Call Me By Your Name
38. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
39. Lady Bird
40. Yi Yi
41. Amelie
42. The Master
43. Oldboy (2005)
44. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
45. Moneyball
46. Roma
47. Almost Famous
48. The Lives of Others
49. Before Sunset
50. Up
51. 12 Years a Slave
52. The Favourite
53. Borat
54. Pan’s Labyrinth
55. Inception
56. Punch-Drunk Love
57. Best in Show
58. Uncut Gems
59. Toni Erdmann
60. Whiplash
61. Kill Bill Vol. 1
62. Memento
63. Little Miss Sunshine
64. Gone Girl
65. Oppenheimer
66. Spotlight
67. Tar
68. The Hurt Locker
69. Under the Skin
70. Let the Right One In
71. Ocean’s Eleven
72. Carol
73. Ratatouille
74. The Florida Project
75. Amour
76. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
77. Everything Everywhere All at Once
78. Aftersun
79. The Tree of Life
80. Volver
81. Black Swan
82. The Act of Killing
83. Inside Llewyn Davis
84. Melancholia
85. Anchorman
86. Past Lives
87. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
88. The Gleaners & I
89. Interstellar
90. Frances Ha
91. Fish Tank
92. Gladiator
93. Michael Clayton
94. Minority Report
95. The Worst Person in the World
96. Black Panther
97. Gravity
98. Grizzly Man
99. Memories of Murder
100. Superbad

yeah like a full third of those films are total garbage.

I'd love to see posters' own top 20.

I wonder if Spielberg got vote-split. Minority Report at 94 is his only placement.

Amazed anyone even remembers Little Miss Sunshine

I'm amazed anyone laughed through it.

i would like to see which films everyone thinks is garbage

yeah little miss sunshine is one of the ones that i dislike. also interstellar, what a bore.

lots of films that were 'events' it seems

it's not that I think loads of these are bad films, it's that loads of them are just fine, good, whatever, but together they make for a really drab canon

...which was inevitable with an exercise like this, obv

For example, I would never put Bridesmaids or Anchorman anywhere near this list, but if I was trying to get something that represents those kinds of films I would have gone with the far better Barb and Starr Go to Vista Del Mar.

come sit by me

Negronis out, it’s Trish time!

Lives Of Others deserves more hatred, the kind of prestige middlebrow thing that thankfully doesn't hit cinemas too often anymore.

Full list:

1. Parasite
7. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
13. Children of Men
15. City of God
16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
19. Zodiac
21. The Royal Tenenbaums
22. The Grand Budapest Hotel
27. Adaptation
30. Lost in Translation
31. The Departed
32. Bridesmaids
47. Almost Famous
53. Borat
54. Pan’s Labyrinth
56. Punch-Drunk Love
60. Whiplash
61. Kill Bill Vol. 1
62. Memento
63. Little Miss Sunshine
64. Gone Girl
65. Oppenheimer
71. Ocean’s Eleven
73. Ratatouille
76. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
77. Everything Everywhere All at Once
87. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
92. Gladiator
93. Michael Clayton
94. Minority Report
100. Superbad

i either loathed, disliked, or fell asleep (ie was bored) during every one of these.

oh wait, i actually liked City of God, forgot to erase it. otherwise, that stands.

What would top your list, table?

So this is aligned more with the Oscars than with Sight & Sound (though it's interesting to me that a majority of the Best Picture winners since 2000 failed to make the cut at all).

I did an analysis of all the Best Picture nominees and their placement on the list. I won't post it all here, but there are a few interesting results. For instance, 46 of the 191 Best Picture nominees in 2000-24 made the list. But only 10 of the 25 Best Picture winners did. And none of the 43 Best Picture nominees from 2002, 2004, 2008, 2020, 2021, and 2024 made the list at all.

Weirdest to me might be that the only 2012 Best Picture nominee to make the cut is Michael Haneke's Amour, beating out Argo, Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, and Beasts of the Southern Wild. Not that these are all great movies (though I do love Lincoln), but I don't think anyone would've guessed back in 2012 that Amour would be the only one to make a list like this in 2025.

my ballot in no order:
Monster (2023)
Audition (2001)
Gasoline Rainbow (2023)
Close (2023)
Hagazussa (2017)
Marmaduke (2010)
Beau travail (2000)
Hale County This Morning This Evening (2018)
Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party (2015)
Who is Bozo Texino? (2005)

A few more i would add:
In the Mood for Love
Five Broken Cameras
Toni Erdmann
Uncle Boonmee
The Forgotten Space
American Honey
Yi Yi

Good to know! (And S. Cone is a friend, so good to see Henry Gamble there.)

Threw together a top20 featuring no selections from that list.

Arabian Nights, Vol.1: The Restless One
Blindspotting
Life Without Principle
The Souvenir
Moonrise Kingdom
The People's Joker
Once Upon A Time In Anatolia
Hundreds Of Beavers
The Squid & The Whale
RRR
Il Divo
Certain Women
Pictures Of Ghosts
The Big Sick
Eight Grade
Fallen Leaves
Rap World
Technoboss
Don't Let The Riverbeast Get You
Ha Ha Ha

Marmaduke (2010)

Respect.

Is Marmaduke what I think it is?

No, it's about a suburban family that moves to a new neighborhood with their large, yet lovable Great Dane, who has a tendency to wreak havoc in his own oblivious way.

Reading the Wikipedia summary, which ends with this: "Marmaduke then passes gas in the bed as he winks at the camera."

It is simply put an astonishing critique of capitalism and consumer culture disguised as a family film

I am being 100% sincere

Micro-praw-cessahz

annoying suggestion for the Departed stans (of which I count myself as one):

please watch the source material for a far superior film (click cc for engsubs)

https://archive.org/details/infernal-affairs-2002

I can out annoy you: Infernal Affairs II is even better (III a bit of a dud tho).

In the category of acting performance in an Irish gangster flick I'll take Gary Oldman in State of Grace (fake accent and all).

The Departed plays like that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where Larry David appears in a fake Scorsese movie, first time I saw it I couldnt believe it was intended to play straight. The accents are so crazy that even Matt Damon starts screwing up his own actual accent.

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Monday, June 30, 2025 9:42 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah, same, in fact i thought the whole movie was being self-referential in that regard. that first shot of marky mark in the bowtie got me lollin

Lol Oldman's accent in State of Grace is so ott that he doesnt even sound like a native English speaker half the time. It would have been less bizarre if he'd just used his regular British accent. Truly next level shit.

I know! He's great though: unhinged and threatening, like the Joe Pesci gangster in Goodfellas, but also more vulnerable and emotionally complex.

annoying suggestion for the Departed stans (of which I count myself as one):

please watch the source material for a far superior film (click cc for engsubs)

https://archive.org/details/infernal-affairs-2002

― imperial frfr (Steve Shasta), Monday, June 30, 2025 5:37 PM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I can out annoy you: Infernal Affairs II is even better (III a bit of a dud tho).

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Monday, June 30, 2025 6:01 PM (three hours ago)

Yeah, much tighter film, Tony Leung/Andy Lau are fantastic, and post-'97-handover Hong Kong is a much richer setting/backdrop for the meditations on identity (esp in the wake of the 2014/2019 protests).

Glad people have brought up An Elephant Sitting Still; realised the big omission from my list is Jiang Wen's Devils on the Doorstep - actually came out in 2000 but it's grouped in my head with 1999's Beau Travail.

Tony Leing was the hottest man on earth for a decade

Leung

honestly he is still really hot

I personally like both films equally (which means: a helluva lot), and am excited to investigate Infernal Affairs II

I think it may have been behind the scenes of the Irishman, but once I saw a clip of Scorsese directing a frankly sorta horrifyingly violent scene and he's cackling like a madman and I thought "oh"--point being: I think The Departed is quite hilariously and pointedly over the top in its nihilism. He atones in movies like Silence and Killers, but they're both part of him. I take him seriously as a moralist because he's honest about how fun sin is...

Wolf in particular being an expression of just how much he considers movie making at all as a kind of morally dubious enterprise...he's riding the fun right into hell.

There's that scene late in the Irishman, De Niro on the phone just crumbling to dust right before our eyes, and it feels like a bookend to that famous shot in Taxi Driver when the camera pans over in embarrassment as Travis is on the phone, also falling apart, except this time he just holds it without flinching. That's late style, no flourish just looking at it head on.

Even if I didn’t rate any of his recent films in my dumb list, I feel like I don’t deserve Scorsese, what a wonderful body of work

Max reax:
https://maxread.substack.com/p/the-29-best-movies-of-the-21st-century

― jaymc, Friday, June 27, 2025 4:33 PM (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Max talks about his list with ... Joseph Gordon-Levitt?!
https://journal.hitrecord.org/p/my-top-10-movies-of-the-21st-century

Put a list together from a few years' worth of ilx end of year poll ballots. Took out most of what has already been mentioned (if I haven't its bcz I couldn't be arsed to check) or put in something by a director I voted for but changed the film (Colossal Youth as the Pedro Costa film)

---
Dead Souls (Wang Bing, 2018)
Touch Me Not (Pintile, 2018)
The Heiresses (Marcelo Martinessi, 2017)
Visit or Memories and Confessions (De Oliveira, 1982/2016)
No Home Movie (Akerman, 2015)
Like Someone in Love (Kiarostami, 2012)
Amour Fou (Hausner, 2014)
Taxi Tehran (Panahi, 2015)
The Assassin (Hou Hsiao-Hsien, 2015)
Suntan (Papadimitropoulos, 2017)
The Death of Louis XIV (Serra, 2016)
Scarred Hearts (Radu Jude, 2016)
The Nothing Factory (Pedro Pinto, 2017)
Colossal Youth (Costa, 2006)
The State I am in (Petzold, 2000)
Bacarau (Medonca Filho, 2019)
Norte, the End of History (Diaz, 2013)
Long Day's Journey into Night (Gan, 2019)
Right Now, Wrong Then (Sang-Soo, 2016)
I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai, 2006)

We have a lot of overlap (good to see Long Day's Journey Into Night and at least something by Hong). You needed at least one example of schlock you dug, though!

I put together a list
https://letterboxd.com/adamt/list/best-films-since-2000/

Love that The Kid Detective made your list. One of my faves, for sure.

You needed at least one example of schlock you dug, though!

I know it's viewed as arthouse due to politics and Brazil not having much international cinema recognition outside of that circuit but Bacurau works great as a shlocky action movie.

If there’s one movie I would urge everyone to catch up with sooner than later it’s Nickel Boys.

My list, in case anyone cares, in no order

Hunt For The Wilderpeople
Spirited Away
Kill List
Mandy
The Holdovers
Knives Out
Happy Go Lucky
A Real Pain
The Substance
Children of Men

Here's mine (unordered), feat. not one but two Weerasethakul and not zero but one Matthew Barney

Songs From the Second Floor
Werckmeister Harmonies
Mulholland Drive
Spirited Away
Cremaster 3
Belleville Rendezvous
Tropical Malady
A History of Violence
Inland Empire
Big Man Japan
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
No Country for Old Men
Dogtooth
A Serious Man
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
The Act of Killing
Under the Skin
Burning
Shoplifters
Parasite

If there’s one movie I would urge everyone to catch up with sooner than later it’s Nickel Boys.

― Chris L, Wednesday, July 2, 2025 9:45 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

how does it compare to the book?

Haven’t read the book.

Loved the book, and been putting off the movie as a result.

same as crypto!

First Roy Andersson mention? I love him so much

Colson Whitehead is one of my favorite authors. The Nickel Boys film is more abstract and the story less explained and less charged and brutal than it was in the book, and that is probably a disappointment to many people, but it is more poetic and is equally great I think.

The cinematography is subtly astonishing. It alternates between the first-person perspectives of the both of the two boys, including the way the camera functions as their eyes, and shows how their perspectives have been shaped by what they have previously experienced in their lives

The book seems like it would be almost impossible to film, but RaMell Ross, who directed the great Hale County This Morning, This Evening, made it enchanting

I know that a lot of the love I have for this is in experiencing the way it was filmed, and that others may not feel that way at all

I've encountered some praise for the film, but a lot more griping about the way it was filmed, which is just giving me The Lady in the Lake flashbacks.

Soderbergh's recent Presence is kinda like that, where you're seeing what the ghost is seeing... it gets a little old

Okay, i didn’t know RaMell Ross directed, I will watch it now, HCTMTE was on my shortlist for best of the past 25 years. incredible film

I loved Nickel Boys the novel, thought the film a well-intentioned misfire.

I liked the film quite a bit and would not be surprised to see it on a list like this in a few years, given how rapturous some of the praise was.

Meanwhile, the readers' list:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/movies/readers-movies-21st-century.html

I've seen 86 of these, compared to 94 on the industry list. But less excited about filling in the gaps when the movies I haven't seen include two LOTR movies, two Dune movies, two Pixar movies, and two Marvel movies.

Best movie on the readers' list that didn't make the other list has to be The Handmaiden.

I didnt realize people loved Black Swan so much. I thought it was entertaining enough for a Friday night at the movies but havent thought about it since then

In full, 72 movies appeared on both lists. Here are the 28 that only appeared on the readers' list:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
La La Land
Dune: Part Two
Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Pride and Prejudice
Sinners
Django Unchained
Little Women
Hereditary
Blade Runner: 2049
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Handmaiden
The Prestige
Mean Girls
Perfect Days
Barbie
Dune: Part One
Top Gun: Maverick
Drive My Car
Knives Out
The Incredibles
Killers of the Flower Moon
Howl's Moving Castle
The Lighthouse
The Holdovers
Midsommar
Avengers: Endgame

My Top 10

Chopper
Another Year
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
A History of Violence
Children of Men
Ash is Purest White
Toni Erdmann
Cache
Im Not There
Team America World Police

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

The fact that Heath Ledger got awarded for The Dark Knight posthumously, instead of Brokeback Mountain while he was still alive, it makes my heart ache

Best movie on the readers' list that didn't make the other list has to be The Handmaiden.

Love that one, would maybe make my own list.

probably my favourite of Park Chan-Wook's

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Yi Yi is so beautiful. I watched it again the other night and cried a lot.

enjoyed this conversation about the list between critic Wesley Morris and film curator Eric Hynes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/podcasts/cannonball-movie-list.html

I've now seen everything except Amour. Haven't been ready for that one yet.