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The 100 best movies of the 21st Century - voted by more than 500 influential directors, actors and other notable names in Hollywood and around the world
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- Title
- The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
- Published
- Jun 23 2025
- Word count
- 265 words
I'll fix their list so it has correct dates and links to IMDB. Some were off by a year but Memories of a Murder was off by two. Let me know if you spot any errors. for example, their year and Frances Ha brings up the documentary short instead of the film.
So far the only ones I haven't seen are Black Panther, Fish Tank, The Gleaners & I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse), Melancholia, Volver, Carol, Toni Erdmann, The Favourite, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu), A Prophet (Un prophète), Bridesmaids -- I don't give a shit about Black Panther, but I'll eventually do the others. I should watch Carol, but I loved the book so much, I kind of don't want to.
The complete list
If anybody wants a list of IMDB IDs to import wherever, let me know.
Anchorman > Superbad? The fellowship lower than top 50? Seems like the list was generated by retirement age Hollywood notables
I don't mean to be a
webwet blanket, but I always find it very strange to object when fundamentally subjective things are judged differently by other people. I think that the list so far seems pretty spot on with what I would expect it to be from hollywood notables, and some of the voters are interesting. Some of them are indeed old, but lots of them aren't that old; Barry Jenkins and Chiwetel Ejiofor are both my age, Tony Hale is only about 10 years older, and Charles Melton is 10 years younger.I find it more interesting that Superbad or Anchorman appear at all on anybody's list. Their methodology is interesting - asking 500 people for a top 10 and then compiling it into a top 100 is almost an exercise in futility (trust me I know). So the fact that either of these movies got on enough lists to show up in the top 100 is pretty cool, in my opinion.
With respect to Fellowship of the Ring, I would also expect to see Return of the King later on the list, but we'll see; having two or more of a trilogy in a top 100 is pretty amazing, but maybe I"m just assuming RotK will show up.
Edit for posterity: when I made this comment, only the first 40 in the list were released.
if everybody is okay with a google form, we can have Tildes vote for something like this and I'll compile it... but I'm absolutely not reentering the great 'which form' debate of 2018 (maybe 2019) :)
We did something somewhat similar a while ago, though it was all time, and favorite instead of best. I think the sorted data is in one of these links.
https://tildes.net/~movies/1i5l/what_are_your_ten_favourite_movies_of_all_time
https://tildes.net/~movies/1i6w/tildes_favourite_movies
Edit: I didn't say this to dissuade you from doing something similar, but to give an idea of starting point. I just encouraged people to write it out as a comment, and it wasn't particularly onerous to compile it. It started getting tedious when I started trying to do further analysis, like breakdown by genre or decade, but then I got through that by just not doing it.
yeah, I was thinking we'd pretty much just take these films from the NYT list and reorder them. I don't think we have enough people to creating a meaningful ranking for all movies :)
If I were to do it for all films, it would be 100% by form using IMDB IDs, though. Way easier than years and titles or even just titles.
I went through my own watchlist to pull 'best...' categories and I came out with 1300 films.
I do all of this in Google Sheets with a script to pull in IMDB, TMDB, etc data. If its a really big pull, I have a python script that pulls from a text file of IMDB IDs. The sheet will search by title, though... and I guess the other script could too, but the titles need to be perfect. For this thread, I was scraping with
then I ran the year and title with my script, had another formula to generate the markdown, etc etc. The whole process is under a minute for the full list.
Anyway, long story short -- if you want to do another one of these in the future, hit me up. It'll be a breeze.
some quick stats on this list
Average by Genre
I wasn't there, but a Google form sounds great. 👍
ok cool. I'll post it with a bunch of populated movies and another few boxes for imdb IDs -- should work out well.
Lots of good entries in the list here, some I need to watch to be honest.
I'd like to hear from someone who's a huge fan of Get Out, I just didn't get it. I'll spoiler my thoughts and I'd love to hear another point of view.
Spoilers for Get Out
I found it was a reasonably generic horror movie to be honest. The main character fell for the bait and then ignored all the horror movie signs of "turn back!".
There's some decent tension and creepy moments, but not "top 5 movies of the century".
It might be a personal thing but I always think the ending where the main character suddenly becomes a hero and overcomes adversity after adversity in a horror movie really takes me out the movie. He's just one man and he successfully escapes (and kills) like a dozen people who've obviously been doing this for years. You could argue anything is possible in a world where people are hypotinised with spoons and people can get downloaded into each other's brains but it's about the tone really. I think it took away from the movie in the back half.
I dunno, it didn't feel that impactful to me compared to many similar films which have done similar but better (See No Evil springs to mind either the original or the remake, they both have merit, or Heratic).
I like it a lot, I've never particularly agreed with it being one of the best films of the century. But I think part of why it's so magnetic for people is it's blatant social commentary. There hadn't been a horror movie that was that explicit on what it was commenting on at least since like The Stepford Wives (which Peele took inspiration from). So it kind of changed the genre in that way.
Yes, it's 100% the social commentary for me. I don't know if either of you are American, but there is a very long and gross history of white people using Black labour and bodies for their own gains, going back to before the founding of the country. Get Out uses horror tropes to at first seem like it's a classic "Black boyfriend meets white girlfriend's family", but instead turns it into something far, far bigger. The film illustrates an escalation of American racism, where wealthy white people no longer just use Black bodies as a supplement to their external lives, but entirely subsume their bodies and inhabit them directly, with an even clearer rejection of the humanity and person inside. They also are basically "appropriating" the bodies themselves, so that these specific white people are unlikely to face racism in the same way, because they're the super-elite, donning attractive Black people like a costume. It's absolutely disgusting. The modern adaptation of slavery tropes (like the bidding war, the admiration of people's features in seemingly benign and pleasant conversations while knowing that they're just going to abduct and consume this person later) is beyond chilling. The rampage at the end isn't just about escaping the creepy house - it's also a cathartic and violent rejection of white supremacy generally and a specific kind of modern racism specifically - especially the kind that is on the surface very genteel and pleasant. I found it really powerful.
I did watch this film with an English dude and he completely didn't get it, even found it to be "nice" that the white people appreciated the Black folks so much...so I'm not sure how well the film translated to other cultures! (That dude was also not a great person.)
Sometimes the inability of people to understand trauma is the scariest thing. I’ve written before about my experience watching a play called A Strange Loop, which was basically a dark comedy about the trauma of being a fat gay black man. The scary part of the show was what the audience laughed at. They found the trauma funny. I can only wonder if they finally got it after seeing the main character letting a total asshole fuck him because he is so desperate for love and the finale, a musical number with his family members telling him he is going to hell, complete with a burning red cross.
That sounds like a really interesting play, although probably really difficult to experience! Not just for the content itself, but also the disconnect with the audience. I wonder if the writer was aware that the audience would lack compassion for the protagonist's pain, and leaned into it - I feel like the whiplash is a lot worse when you think what is supposed to be comedy is actually not really that funny at all. I will definitely have to check it out!
Right OK, yeah I see where you're coming from. Obviously I was/am aware of the social commentary around Get Out and you're right that I didn't find it as impactful.
I suppose what bothers me is if you took Get Out in isolation and showed it to a random group of people from random backgrounds all over the world and they had no idea what the film was before they watched it, would they be able to pull the same themes and social narrative from the plot?
I knew about the social commentary before I watched it and thinking back I felt like I watched the movie thinking it. But I'm not really sure I'd pull the same thoughts and feelings if I didn't?
I dunno, critics love it, I guess I feel like if it was a movie to make a statement that it should make it statement a little louder. But that's just my opinion!
That's all fair. I watch a fair amount of foreign films and roughly half the time I discover that I'm completely ignorant of some important cultural theme or motif or history and so I missed a huge portion of the meaning of the movie. Get Out is a very, very American film, but I think a lot of its themes are really relatable to other places - you just have to understand what that specific mechanic is, and how it translates. It may not be the best film for everyone, but it is an incredible commentary on racism. And since NYT is an American publication, I'm not surprised they interpreted it as being very important :)
I say this as a fan of Peele's movies. I liked it, but I never would have picked it for the top 20 of the 21st century.
Spoilers obviously
I need to watch it again to see if I feel the same way the second time, but to me:
Chris ignoring the signs is pretty explicitly the balancing act of the first half of the movie, based on the friend calling him and the GET OOOUUUUT scene; it's trying to get you to scream the title at him. Part of the horror is that he ignores it. If it didn't work for you that'd make sense you don't like it, but I also found it appropriately paid off in that scene where the facade all falls apart.
It's a bit improbable he makes it out, but it feels earned from him following his instinct. Metaphorically he's basically ignoring all of the horror he experienced in the first half to overcome a family whose power comes from faking his.
There are so many little mechanical details all over the script and the house that (I think) make the story feel well-constructed looking at it from a step back.
I don't think anyone has made anything as banally frightening in a horror movie as someone eating dry Froot Loops and drinking milk at the same time.
I also might need to rewatch, I feel like I maybe have missed some small details which have been cleverer written in!
This is really nicely put together! I love the intro scroll and that I can click which ones I've seen and get a little graphic at the bottom, and super cool to see notable people who voted for the particular film. I've seen 13 so far - guess I've got some catching up to do! Thank you for the link!
I really like how the page is put together. It's really smart and feels pretty usable. From the perspective of selling NYT, it's also really smart; I almost impulse purchased a subscription so I could see the ballots of specific people. Stephen King got me, I want to see his list.
I'm excited to see what's going to come up in the top 60.
Of the 40 on the list, I've seen 29 and have 6 on my watch list.
Now that the list is done I can say I've seen 80 films. Seems like most of the ones I'm missing are the foreign entries.
This list is not at all what I expected, but it also highlighted that despite how many movies I've seen, I've clearly not watched quite a few standouts. I loved seeing Mulholland Drive so high on the list, but even though I agree it should be in the top 20 it feels a bit high to me.
After reading through it though, I think my biggest take away was that there is no way I could personally even make a list like this. There are just too many standout movies in 25 years for me to rank them without getting stuck into analysis paralysis.
For as many movies as I do watch, a list like this just shows how much is out there and I’m glad I watch movies (and TV) as a hobby and know that I will never ever run out of things to watch.
Despite watching a movie or two almost every week, I’ve only seen 20 movies out of this entire list, for example, and the rest of the list seems like a great variety of movies for me to start pulling from.
There were some definite surprises in this list and it ended up giving quite a bit of variety. I would have never expected Borat to be here, for example.
I've seen 86 on the list.
They missed some truly influential movies from the early 2000's.
Batman Begins: Batman Begins effectively kicked off the gritty realistic superheros we have today, and started a series of reboots focused on reinventing the origin stories of famous characters. It discarded prior film continuity, which was an incredibly bold move at the time, but now is common place.
Iron Man: It kicked off the entire MCU.
Pirates of the Caribbean: It reinvigorated Disney's live action movies.
I mean, sure, but influential is different from best.
These are the best movies of the 21st century, there is simply a recency bias and fatigue given their heavy influence, so folks forget how incredible these movies were. At the end of the 21st century, these will be the movies everyone remembers.
Mulholland Drive at #2 is not something I can really get behind. I’ve seen it. I like it. But ranking a film meant to be outrageously incomprehensible that high reeks of pretentiousness.
I should probably rewatch it though. I never did after reading interpretations online after my first watch through.
It's a list made by polling filmmakers. Also their methodology of combining everyone's top 10 into a list of 100 is whack. So it's not surprising to me at all to find it in the top 5-10.
Listening to
filmmakersartists in general talk about Mulholland Drive is what I imagine it was like for my friends listening to me after I took seven hits of acid the first time I ever even tried it, and tried explaining to them that I understood the entire universe and everything in it while I stared directly into a strobe light from a foot away for two hours.If this were a list made from average people's opinions, and not filmmakers, I wouldn't even expect the movie to be on the list at all.
It's a fine list. There's plenty I don't agree with (naturally, since that's the charm of these lists) but my disagreements mostly come from the order rather than what's been included or excluded. That being said, there's only two films my personal list share with this, but realistically speaking, that's not a surprise.
My list
In no particular order, except for the first three:Some of the films that didn't make the cut, but could've just as easily so if I were compiling this at some other time:
I see a painfully distinct lack of Satoshi Kon. Even if they eschewed Paprika in favor of Inception, you'd still expect to see Millennium Actress.
If Ratatouille can make the list, I refuse to believe The Tale of the Princess Kaguya can't. It's right there with Spirited Away as the best Ghibli release, if not out on its own.
Not one of the Kapadia docs? I'd go for Diego Maradona myself, but no Senna or Amy?
Mad Max: Fury Road at #11?
If Black Panther was the only movie that could make it onto this list, I definitely didn't deserve all the crap I got IRL for not caring about edition after edition of Marvel Cinematic Universe pablum.
There are so many on that list that I dislike, or even despise and a couple of dozen that are mediocre at best. I really feel out of sync with modern movie makers.
In my opinion, there is at least one fine film that should be on the list and isn't, and that is Shoplifters.
I have seen about 3/4 of them and most of the rest is on my watchlist as I have heard good things about them. It is pretty fine and varied list in my opinion, and generally not anything I think doesn't deserve to be on such list.
It is the wrong Haneke film, too many Nolan, and I miss Kaurismaki, Hansen-Løve and perhaps a Danish film like Another Round and Godland. But as a source of good movies from the the last 25 years, there are few misses here.
Yeah 4 Nolan’s is kind of wild, I would have only put The Dark Knight and Oppenheimer in my list.