The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century: Watch List Edition

Note to readers: It’s been four years since I started Ty Burr’s Watch List –four calm, peaceful years! – which means the annual membership renewal is coming up for many of you. As always, I cannot thank you enough for your patronage – you’ve made it possible for me to have an independent career and largely steer my own ship, a rare condition for a longtime movie critic sidling toward the end credits. (Not yet, Satan, not yet.) And I truly hope you continue to find this newsletter readable, amusing, provocative and, above all, useful in your search for movies that mean something, whether that’s an evening’s adrenaline or a life-altering challenge. I want the Watch List to do right by you, but if it’s not, please tell me what I’m doing wrong or could do better, either in the comments section below or by hitting reply to this email and letting me have it. And, again, thank you. I couldn’t do this if not for you.

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By the way, I do appear in the flesh from time to time; Coming up is the latest installment of “Ty Burr’s Movie Club” at the West Newton Cinema on Thursday July 10^th at 6:30 p.m. This month’s classic is Charles Laughton’s dreamlike Depression-era fairy tale, “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), with illuminated cinematography from Stanley Cortez, a very special appearance by Miss Lillian Gish and a performance of towering evil from Robert Mitchum as the homicidal con-man preacher of your nightmares – a figure more relevant than ever in these times of Christian evangelism gone off the rails. With Shelley Winters, a script by James Agee, and a journey by nighttime river that will imprint itself on your eyeballs, “Night of the Hunter” is this close to Hollywood outsider art – the work of a creative eccentric who directed this one movie and was never allowed to do it again. I’ll lead a discussion after the film.

To the business at hand:

Oh, look, they’re making movie lists again. The folks at the New York Times have recently named the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century To Date after polling 500 actors, directors, writers and other interested parties, and the paper has been hitting the social media hustings asking civilians to post their own Top Tens. I no longer subscribe to the Paper of Record – the Times’ 2024 hammering on Joe Biden’s senescence while ignoring Trump’s was one of many last straws – and I was feeling a touch of FOMO until I found their list published elsewhere (here and here).

I do think it’s fair to say that my 11-year tenure as a movie and video critic at Entertainment Weekly magazine in the 1990s qualifies me as a father, if not the father of the modern movie list. True, England’s Sight & Sound magazine got there first in 1952 and every decade since, but when EW published its “100 Greatest Movies on Video” in August 1990 – subsequently available in paperback in 1994 and as a hardcover 1999 “bookazine” (God, how I hate that word) – the authoritative, know-it-all film ranking as we have come to endure it was born. (The 1999 list, if you’re interested, is here.) The arrival of the World Wide Web in the early part of the decade only metastasized the format, as every Joe and Josephine Cineaste could and did post their Top Ten, Top 50, Top 1,000. All of them valid, since they're as much about one's personal values as cultural consensus (or what should be consensus).

I wrote a good chunk of that first EW list and ensuing editions (and managed to sneak in Jacques Rivette’s quixotic 1974 masterpiece “Celine and Julie Go Boating” in at the #100 slot in 1999), and I continued to make, write and contribute to countless movie lists at the magazine and then at the Boston Globe starting in 2002, spreading the virus to the greater New England area. One of my Globe duties in 2019 was compiling a list of the 50 Best Movies of the 2010s, an endeavor that has now been mooted by the arrival of the quarter-century. So, since everyone and their cousin has been responding to the Times’ ranking with their own list, I’ve compiled a rough and ready 100 of my own, with intermittent commentary, podcast links, pimages and trailers. It holds water without too much leakage, and obviously it reflects this critic’s tastes more than anything else. Use it as a grocery list for your own viewing pleasure or argue angrily (or not) with what’s here and, worse, what isn’t. (Your favorite movie, probably.) Then compile your own Top Ten or 100 and post it in the comments below. (Note: The year 2000 actually counts as the last year of the 20th century, not the first year of the 21st, but the hell with that.)

Ty's 100 Best Movies of 2000-2025

1.           Mulholland Drive (David Lynch)

2.           The Clock (Christian Marclay) – The only movie on this list you have to go to a museum to see (Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts shares its copy with Montreal’s Museum of Contemporary Art; it swings back to the MFA every few years), Christian Marclay’s masterwork is a unique beast in the history of cinema: A 24-hour collage of snippets from other movies, each of which features a clock, or a watch, or someone mentioning the time. Which sounds pretty deadly until you actually sit down and experience the thing – experience time itself passing before your eyes. Scenes from movies you remember, or have forgotten you remember, or don’t know at all, spin past like a fiendishly well-edited waking dream. There are moments of tranquility and crashing climaxes – you should see what happens at noon. It’s a history of the movies, of the 20th century, of your own media consumption. And among its other otherworldly virtues, “The Clock” actually is a clock: You can settle in on one of the museum’s viewing couches for 20 minutes, or two hours, or a whole day, and know exactly when to leave for your next appointment. Most movies invite us to kill time. “The Clock” brings it to life in astonishing ways. 

3.           Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller)

 4.           4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu) – It follows a Romanian woman, Gabriela (Laura Vasiliu), who’s trying to get an abortion in the waning days of Ceausescu regime, when abortion was a very punishable crime. She’s not the most likable of heroines, scared and selfish and small-minded, and after a while you realize the movie’s about her best friend, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who goes to endless lengths for Gabriela while wondering if anyone would ever do the same for her. It’s a movie about everyday sainthood, really. At what point does simple human kindness become something bigger, maybe even a last-ditch stand against everything that men and fate and the state can throw against you? (Listen to my podcast with Slate film critic Dana Stevens)

5.           Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson) – link is to my podcast with critic and cultural commentator Hunter Harris

6.           A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen)

7.           Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron)

8.           In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar Wai)

9.           Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

10.       Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer) Under the Skin (2013) – Jonathan Glazer’s dead-pan sci-fi drama, based on a novel by Michael Faber, follows an anonymous woman (Scarlett Johansson) driving a van around rural Scotland, picking up men and delivering them to... something... in a mouldering mansion. She’s a lure, but what happens when the bait starts sympathizing for the baited? Johansson had a hell of a decade, and this is one of its peaks; her performance as an alien intelligence is genuinely startling, as devoid of personality as her voice in “Her” is rich with it. A cold but seductive masterwork from a filmmaker working in fields once trod by Kubrick and Nicolas Roeg. The hardest movie on this list to synopsize and possibly the hardest to shake – a scene on a rocky beach, while not violent, remains one of the most terrifying sequences I’ve ever seen. (Listen to my podcast with Rolling Stone film critic David Fear)

11.       The Social Network (David Fincher)

12.       Get Out (Jordan Peele)

13.       Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan)

14.       Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro)

15.       Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)

16.       Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki)

17.       The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick) – link is to my podcast with actor-director Alex Winter

18.       There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson) – link is to my podcast with NYT critic Manohla Dargis

19.       The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer)

20.       Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy) – link is to my podcast with film composer Mason Daring

21.       The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck)

22.       A Prophet (Jacques Audiard)

23.       Paterson (Jim Jarmusch) – link is to my podcast with film critic Glenn Kenny

24.       I’m Not There (Todd Haynes)

25.       The 25th Hour (Spike Lee)

26.       The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci) From the creator of "Veep" and "In the Loop,” a caustic, brilliantly funny satire in which the jostlings for power in 1953 Moscow are played as furious Monty Python-esque farce. A work of brutal screwball comedy, with fine work from Steve Buscemi (as Nikita Krushchev), Jeffrey Tambor (Malenkov), Michael Palin (Molotov), and more. (Listen to my podcast with Slate film critic Sam Adams.)

27.       Amour (Michael Haneke)

28.       The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook) – The evil genius of South Korean cinema has adapted Sarah Waters' 2002 novel "Fingersmith" into an elegantly depraved and genuinely erotic Gothic revenge thriller. It may or may not be great art, but it's unquestionably great filmmaking. An astonishment, and a lot funnier than it may seem.

29.       Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

30.       Master and Commander (Peter Weir)

31.       Adaptation (Spike Jonze)

32.       Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)

33.       The Shape of Water (Guillermo del Toro)

34.       The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson) – The most anal-retentive director in the history of the medium is up to his old tricks but with a magnanimous confidence that at the time felt like a gift. Set in the fictional country of Zubrowka between the wars, it's the story of a world-class concierge named Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes, achingly fine), his adoring acolyte Zero (Tony Revolori), and the hive of intrigues, subplots, and character actors that buzz around them in all directions as the clouds of war gather. It's a lovely film, steeped in a vanished world. (You can substitute “Moonrise Kingdom” here, if you’d wish.)

35.       The New World (Terrence Malick)

36.       The Pianist (Roman Polanski)

37.       Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin)

38.       Small Axe: Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen) -- The most ecstatic party I went to in 2020, and not just because it’s the only party I went to that year. All five of the films in writer-director Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” anthology are excellent, but while the other four tackle socio-political dramas within England’s West Indian community, “Lovers Rock” is simply (and not so simply) the story of a rent party in Notting Hill in the 1980s, before the neighborhood got gentrified. We see the DJs set up and the women deck themselves out, feuds and flirtations unfold — and for two strangers (Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn and Micheal Ward), there might be something like love. But the vibe’s the thing, the air thick with patois, perfume, and sweet release, all cued to the greatest reggae soundtrack since “The Harder They Come.” And when a living room full of dancers takes Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” off the turntable and into its collective heart, it’s a moment of movie magic and a snapshot of what makes us human.

39.       Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross)

40.       The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer)

41.       Yi Yi (Edward Yang)

42.       Spotlight (Tom McCarthy) – link is to my Boston Globe review

43.       Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino) - The movie to see when you want to slow things down and feel the planet turning beneath your feet. Director Michelangelo Frammartino drops us down for a year or so in a tiny Italian village somewhere in Calabria, contemplating the lives and deaths of an ancient goatherd, a baby goat, a tree. There’s an amazing long shot from above the village that takes in a series of elemental dramas, comedies, calamities; for all I know it’s going on still. There’s another shot of an old man seated at a table that you realize with a jolt is moving, the snails covering its surface milling about at a speed almost too slow to register. That “almost” is the key – “Le Quattro Volte” says we’ll see everything if we look long enough. In an angry, noisy world, watching this movie is as restorative as a long, cool drink from a lake.

44.       The Florida Project (Sean Baker)

45.       Oslo, August 31st (Joachim Trier)

46.       Burning (Lee Chang-dong) – link is to my podcast with New Yorker film critic Justin Chang

47.       Memento (Christopher Nolan)

48.       Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

49.       WALL-E (Andrew Stanton)

50.       Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog)

51.       Zodiac (David Fincher)

52.       Atonement (Joe Wright)

53.       Before Sunset (Richard Linklater) – “Honey, you are going to miss that plane.”

54.       Her (Spike Jonze) – link is to my podcast with L.A. Times film critic Amy Nicholson

55.       Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee)

56.       Lincoln (Steven Spielberg)

57.       Manakamana (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez) – This documentary by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez is a trip – 11 trips, actually – up a Nepalese mountain by cable-car to a temple. The uninterrupted shots of religious pilgrims, tourists, rockers, old ladies, and goats become blank canvases for the audience's projections. Patience is required but the rewards are beyond the power of words to describe.

58.       Broken Flowers (Jim Jarmusch)

59.       No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen)

60.       12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen)

61.       Sideways (Alexander Payne) – When I was in high school, I knew two guys, best friends, who the girls nicknamed “Teddy and the Stud.” Teddy (as in Bear) was short, intellectual, sympathetic, every woman’s best friend. The Stud just slept with them all. That kind of male-bonding symbiosis is not uncommon and who knows? – maybe even useful for the propagation of the species, since a Teddy’s sensitivity reflects onto a Stud, and a Stud lends a Teddy his sex appeal. But I’ve often wondered how far into adulthood such friendships can go before collapsing into inevitable bile. With “Sideways,” Payne’s comic masterpiece of male self-deception, we have our answer: The friendship lasts until the road trip before the Stud’s wedding, after the Teddy has drunk a spit-bucket of Merlot in a fit of splenetic rage but before the Stud has had to run several miles back to his motel, naked, at four in the morning. I thus heartily recommend the movie to all men between the ages of 30 and 55, if they can take it. “Sideways” offers few consolations besides the bitter, humane laughter of the morning after.

62.       Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos)

63.       Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie)

64.       The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)

65.       Holy Motors (Leos Carax)

66.       Sinners (Ryan Coogler)

67.       Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi Gan) – A spellbinding Chinese art film that takes place half in dreamland, this may be the closest the movies have ever come to the look and feel of the way we actually dream. Writer-director Bi Gan turns a film noir storyline inside out, with an hour-long single-take 3D climax that has to be experienced to be believed.

68.       Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

69.       Atlantics (Mati Diop)

70.       Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar)

71.       Eephus (Carson Lund)

72.       Old Joy (Kelly Reichardt)

73.       The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson) – Better than the first and third films parts: tighter, smarter, funnier. All the gang is back – Elijah Wood's Frodo, Ian McKellan's Gandalf, Viggo Mortenson's Aragorn (swoon) – but the show is stolen by computer-animated Gollum (voiced by Andy Serkis), the bipolar flapdoodle who leads Frodo and Sam to Mt. Doom. Jackson has the gift of pop-Wagnerian grandeur: For the film's three hours, you're raised up into the kind of exalted storytelling that "Star Wars" and the Harry Potter movies only feebly promise.

74.       Hit Man (Richard Linklater)

75.       Everything Everywhere All At Once (The Daniels)

76.       Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan) – Link to my Boston Globe review, one of a handful of pieces I feel pretty good about.

77.       Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)

78.       Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine) – Director Korine ("Gummo") comes of age with this mesmerizing vision of teenage apocalypse. Former TV innocents Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Selena Gomez play college girls who rob a diner and head to St. Pete, where they hook up with a sleazy gangbanger (a surprisingly effective James Franco). The film's an outrageous provocation, shocking and exhilarating and tender in equal measure. Korine loves his pretty little animals the way a renegade zoologist loves the lemmings he studies as they mate and chew pieces off each other and eventually jump off straight off the cliff.

79.       Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

80.       The Incredibles (Brad Bird)

81.       This is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi)

82.       Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman)

83.       Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda)

84.       Past Lives (Celine Song)

85.       45 Years (Andrew Haigh)

86.       Y Tu Mama Tambien (Alfonso Cuarón)

87.       Man on Wire (James Marsh) -- Early on the morning of August 7, 1974, a French aerialist named Philippe Petit walked back and forth on a cable stretched between the towers of the recently completed World Trade Center in Manhattan. Using interviews, archival footage, and dramatic re-enactments to recreate the illegal stunt, James Marsh’s documentary is a spine-tingling memorial to recklessness as art, and it reclaims the Twin Towers as a stage for dreaming.

88.       Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan)

89.       A Separation (Asghar Farhadi)

90.       Carol (Todd Haynes)

91.       Oh Brother, Where Art Thou (Joel and Ethan Coen)

92.       Cameraperson (Kirsten Johnson)

93.       Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)

94.       The Immigrant (James Gray)

95.       The Rider (Chloé Zhao)

96.       True Grit (Joel and Ethan Coen) -- Temporarily forget the 1969 version starring John Wayne ever existed. (It’s a fun movie but hardly a great one.) Now find a copy of Charles Portis' dry, deep 1968 novel; you can get it at the library and it'll take you all of two days to read. The book's intense love of language – the way the frontier characters cling to the formalities of speech as shaky proof they're civilized – is what drew the Coens to the project, dovetailing as it does with the brothers' long-established love of doubletalk. The resulting film is a beauty and a pleasure: Stately toward its time and place yet respectfully wry about its people – Hailee Steinfeld as a self-possessed young Mattie Ross, Jeff Bridges as a Rooster Cogburn plonked down between the Dude and the Duke, Matt Damon as a bluffly naïve Texas Ranger. It also understands, as do the characters, that violence and death is never not close at hand, no matter how fine people talk. "True Grit" is a picaresque, but by this point in their career, the Coen's mastery of their craft (and Carter Burwell's fine hymn-based score) provide it with majesty and depth.

97.       Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)

98.       His Three Daughters (Azazel Jacobs)

99.       First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)

100.    Elle (Paul Verhoeven) – Isabelle Huppert stars, magnificently, as a rape victim who refuses to be victimized in what's possibly Verhoeven's most perverse and provocative movie to date – a survivor's tale made with sinew and black humor. Few directors have led audiences to more places of complicit discomfort and have insisted on the power dynamics and inherent emotional fascism of what the rest of the world calls love. Not for the faint of heart, but absolutely fascinating.

Feel free to post your own top picks for 2000 through 2025, leave a comment or add to someone else's.

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