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

nothing more forbidding than slow cinema amirite.

I mean ... kinda? For me, at least. To be clear, I am not proud of this!

seems like barbie is destined to be on a list like this tho it must be too recent now or something.

I was also kind of surprised that Barbie didn't show up. I don't think it's a recency issue because four other Best Picture nominees of 2023 made the list. If I had to guess, it's that people enjoyed it as a phenomenon and think it was better than a movie about a toy had any right to be, but aren't sure how to think about it in a broader context. Like, it was lots of fun in the moment, but will it hold up as an all-time great? Is anyone even going back to it two years later?

Worth noting that the voters on the NYT list are directors, actors, producers, etc., not critics. As with S&S, it's more fun to look at individual ballots than the canon-making consensus. (Along those lines, Tracy Letts added his top 10 on Letterboxd.)

Great seeing Alfred's list (and table's too!). So many to finally get around to seeing. My self-consciousness when making my own list is that for every movie I've seen in this century, there are 10 that I was interested in seeing and it just didn't happen, in the same way that the ones I've seen also happened to coincide with free time, showtimes, and the impulse to go.

My top 20, approximately:

I Am Love
In Fabric
The Zone Of Interest
A Touch Of Sin
Audition
Moonlight
Rachel Getting Married
The Descent
A Serious Man
Margaret
Casino Royale
Force Majeure
The Lives Of Others
Caché
Code Unknown
Let The Right One In
My Winnipeg
Mulholland Drive
Enough Said
ugh No Country For Old Men ugh I do love it tho

I feel like I’d rate ten TV series over most of these tho (Twin Peaks 3, Mindhunter, The Wire, Paranoia Agent, and so on)

honestly the most insulting inclusion on the list is Whiplash, which might be one of the worst films i have ever seen

So you're saying it's ... not your tempo?

xps it's all good. someone call me when the nyt does a list of the best train videos, i'll be repping hard for the hide line in japan.

So you're saying it's ... not your tempo?

lol

Might be the worst films about music (or any artform) ever made, tbh

audition.. there's a forbidding watch haha! i like moonlight a lot but feel like it's a touch overrated at this point.

Audition is great! watched it my sophomore year of high school from a bootleg VHS my friend made

I wish Holofcener films got canonized more frequently, it’s really hard to make effective romantic comedies imo. Bong Joon Ho frustrates me idk why, I think I just hated Snowpiercer so much. Rachel Getting Married, In Fabric and I Am Love are my big three “I stan hard for these unappreciated masterpieces” movies.

Generally I really like the Gerwig/Baumbach thing but I feel like their best work is ahead of them. No love for Wes Anderson or Tarantino over here sorry

And yeah Audition is a perfect movie

yeah i honestly have hated everything after Rushmore. i “get” it, but i hate it.

i fast forwarded a certain scene in audition tbqh and that was at the peak of my tolerance for that kind of subject matter. i really liked the movie overall but nowadays i have like no stomach for body horror.

i'm totally in support of trashing wes anderson. just a dogshit filmmaker.

Would not go that far, but a lot of his movies leave me cold.

I've seen 85 of 100, aside from 2 or 3 most of the remaining unseen are no accident, I'm too old and life is too short.

Not gonna labor too hard over a top 20 but my unranked version would be close to this:

Barbie (2023)
Blue Ruin (2013)
City of God (2002)
Dogtooth (2009)
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Leviathan (2012)
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Margaret (2011)
Russian Ark (2002)
OJ: Made In America (2016)
Mulholland Dr (2001)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
Rewind & Play (2022)
Small Axe: Lover's Rock (2020)
Step Brothers (2008)
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)
Tar (2022)
The Fall (2006)
The Master & Margarita (2024)
The Souvenir (2019)

I love Rushmore! Everything since has had stuff I like about it, I’d def watch Budapest Hotel again, Moonrise Kingdom maybe too, but pretty much all Anderson’s instincts are bad instincts; in comparison, I really liked The Squid And The Whale and love Baumbach’s instincts and hope to watch a film by him that knocks me flat

Unranked and would probably revise if I rewatched them all:

The B Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography
Bao
Certain Women
Frances Ha
The Girlfriend Experience
Good Time
Hard Truths
Lady Bird
Last Days
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Meyerowitz Stories (New & Collected)
Miami Vice
Once
Perfect Days
The Place Beyond The Pines
Rivers and Tides
Sicario
The Social Network
Sideways
Tár

I did my part for Holofcener further in my list

Totally forgot that Laurel Canyon was this century. I hope it'd hold up.

When big names like, I dunno, Ebert, Kael, Denby, Sarris, Thompson, Kermode, make lists/compendiums, they've enough confidence and enough writing on record to have already adequately conveyed their aesthetic/historical predilections -- and so the lists come off as authentic and personal. They're comprehensible and thoughtful. With many of the S&S writers, including some of the lesser known ones, the listing tendency comes off as tactical, calculated "I want to be the kind of person that picks Serious Films, with one zany folly to show my range" or explicitly elitist/anti-elitist/liberal/formalist/whatever." It's so much more engaging when they indicate personal positionality and reflexivity to the movies, and when there's a hint of *pleasure* in the choices.

Hmmm. But wouldn't a list from one of the big names end up equally easy to second guess if we didn't have the context of their writing? And there's also, like, say I love two films pretty much equally but one is a well acknowledged masterpiece and the other's an obscurity, is the calculation of picking the latter truly a bad thing? I think the "personal positionality and reflexivity" you mention comes in more in the annotations than the list, but ofc mostly we read these w/o any annotation at all...

have only seen 24 1/2 of the 50 ( technical issues at cinema during 'a serious man' )
of those ' there will be blood' and ' once upon a time in hollywood' made me laugh the most, so one of those.

A quick 20, alphabetically. Three Z movies!

American Psycho
Cameraperson
Carol
Certain Women
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Homo Sapiens
In the Mood for Love
Mad Max: Fury Road
Marie Antoinette
Memoria
Mulholland Drive
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Rye Lane
The Souvenir
Still Life
Summer Hours
Tangerine
Zama
Zodiac
Zola

10 off the top of my head:

Ballerina (the South Korean one, not the Ana de Armas one)
Blackhat (director's cut)
BuyBust
John Wick
Marie Antoinette
Miami Vice (director's cut)
Michael Clayton
The Raid: Redemption
Universal Soldier: Dead Reckoning
The Villainess

Unranked top 10, based mostly on things mentioned in this thread (my memory for movies is terrible, and I don't keep obsessive lists like I do for music, so otherwise I wouldn't remember anything)

A Serious Man (Coens)
Death of Stalin (Iannucci)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry)
Gentlemen Broncos (Hess)
Grizzly Man (Herzog)
Monster (Kore-eda)
My Winnipeg (Maddin)
Parasite (Bong)
Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
The Trip (Winterbottom)

Here's a mostly unadventurous 25

A History of Violence
Berberian Sound Studio
Enter the Void
Freddy Got Fingered
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Good Time
Inglorious Basterds
Holy Motors
The Host
Jackass 3D
The Lives of Others
Mandy
No Country for Old Men
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Phantom Thread
Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
Roma
Russian Ark
Step Brothers
There Will Be Blood
The Tree of Life
Under the Skin
Wall-E
Wet Hot American Summer
Zodiac

Unranked 25 (now being frantically mentally revised in the light of good picks above)

ZODIAC
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
ZONE OF INTEREST
MULHOLLAND DRIVE
CHILDREN OF MEN
GOODBYE, DRAGON INN
THE MASTER
AFTERSUN
AFTER THE STORM
TWIN PEAKS: THE RETURN
UNDER THE SKIN
LEVIATHAN
ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND
RIPLEY
THE NEW WORLD
TROPICAL MALADY
BAIT
THE WITCH
THE RIDER
STILL WALKING
A SERIOUS MAN
LOVERS ROCK
MORVERN CALLAR
ELEPHANT

10 from the top of my head:

Stray Dogs
Hard To Be A God
Zama
Songs From The Second Floor
A Touch Of Sin
In The Mood For Love
Infernal Affairs
Burning
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Mulholland Drive

(excited to get to see a 25yr anniversary screening of Yi Yi in a few weeks)
(also NZ cinema hasn't had a great start to the century, sigh)

the ten i submitted were

mulholland drive
in the mood for love
inglourious basterds
royal tenenbaums
mad max fury road
children of men
fellowship of the ring
shaun of the dead
waking life
give me liberty (2019)

Zodiac
20th Century Women
No Country for Old Men
American Honey
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Adventureland
Andy Warhol: A Documentary
The Squid and the Whale
Wendy and Lucy
Spellbound
Lost in Translation
No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Carlos
O.J. Simpson: Made in America
Elephant
Best of Enemies
You Can Count on Me
School of Rock
The Heart of the Game
Mildred Pierce

#1, then the other nine from my ballot, then another 10 in no particular order. The usual disclaimer: my real #1 would be Mad Men if I could pretend it's like an American Berlin Alexanderplatz.

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

Hah, #2, 3 and 4 were in my top ten, though all three are enormous touchstones for cinephiles of the last 25 years. Another two cracked the top 50, albeit in the bottom ten ("Yi Yi" was my #1...#40? Outrageous!)

Also ten is way too few. I threw together a preliminary list and came up with 30 I'd want in a top ten. I kept whacking it down and didn't play with "strategy' - i.e. maybe vote for something that most people won't vote for? - and it just made "ten" seem arbitrary because great films are going to cover a lot of different territory and by the end I felt like there were gaping holes in my list of what was great about 21st century cinema.

Hollywood movies have been dogshit since at least 1960

oh

glad to know

Loving all this love for A Serious Man, I’m gonna rewatch it tonight, what a crazy good movie

shouts to josh safdie for voting snow on tha bluff and to gia coppola for voting bloody nose, empty pockets

xp A Serious Man is probably my favorite Coen brothers film of the past 25 years.

A top 20 for the moment. The first 5 are the top 5, the rest unranked

In the Mood for Love
Twin Peaks: The Return
Uncle Boonmee
Ash Is Purest White
Zama

Russian Ark
Burning
Silent Light
Mysteries of Lisbon
Toni Erdmann
The Act of Killing
35 Shots of Rum
The Wild Pear Tree
On the Beach at Night Alone
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
Petite Maman
Mulholland Drive
Stranger by the Lake
May December
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World

Ooh Shaun of the Dead would’ve been good for the list.

Toni Erdmann was a long film, but it was so interesting that I didn't notice. It has been described as a comedy, but it was very cringey. The nude party and the ending where she encountered her father dressed up as a monster in the park were a couple of the greatest scenes of all time.

I can see how Xavier Dolan, on the Cannes jury at that time, would object to it (apparently he did, and wouldn't allow it to be given an award)

tbc the running time has put me off in the past not bc I think it will be a slog, but bc it means it's not a movie I can start at 9 pm on a weeknight.

Gee, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, Dan S!

Never did get around to Fury Road, The Dark Knight, The Departed or the Tarantino things (and I don't know if I've even read the titles Bridesmaids and Moneyball before lol) so my opinion is worthless but...

Yi Yi, A Separation and A Serious Man might be the ones I'd be most keen to revisit if choosing tonight's viewing, at least.

Moneyball is is 21st century dad film canon

I thought Toni Erdmann was funny but I have to admit I’ve never understood the instant canonization of it

I love seeing Zama on a few lists, it just barely missed making mine. It floored me when I saw it, but feel like I need to see it a 2nd time and sit with it before I can give it all-time status

ZAMA was on my fake ballot, along with

mulholland dr
before sunset
to the wonder (had to write this in?)
carol
phantom thread
frances ha
in the mood for love
summer hours
eighth grade

Never did get around to Fury Road, The Dark Knight, The Departed or the Tarantino things (and I don't know if I've even read the titles Bridesmaids and Moneyball before lol) so my opinion is worthless but...

I saw those and I can't say I'm the biggest fan of any of those. Fury Road is amazing to look at so if you just want a great spectacle and you get a chance to see it on a big screen rather than at home, I'd do that. The others have their merits whether it's performances, dialogue, humor or the way they stage some action sequence or spectacle, but I had reservations about all of them, and the ones I revisited just got worse (even much worse) with each viewing.