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100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

From ‘Moonlight’ to ‘Parasite,’ super-long documentaries to superhero epics — our picks for the greatest movies of the past 25 years

Photo illustration of the best movies of the 21st century

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY MATTHEW COOLEY.

We’re now a quarter of century into the 21st century, and to say that the movies are in a different place now than they were 25 years ago would be putting it mildly. Technological innovations, industry fluctuations, the coining of the phrase “cinematic universe” — as both an art form and mass entertainment, the medium has changed in both minute and monumental ways. Even the way we view movies has evolved and devolved several times over. Film has been declared dead a half dozen times. It’s then been dubbed “never better!” a half dozen times more. Stars have come and gone, intellectual properties have risen and fallen, and the competition for attention spans and eyeballs has never been tougher. Take a time machine back to the year 2000, and watch as people blankly stare back at you before asking, “So wait, what’s a TikTok?!”

What has not gone away, however, is the power that a great film can have over viewers still willing to submit to the possibility of transformation when the lights go down (in a theater or your living room, though, y’know — aim for the former). The following 100 movies represent what a handful of Rolling Stone contributors who still believe in the movies, still obsess over them, still find thrills and chills and salvation in them, have dubbed the best of this relatively still-young century. It’s a living document, to be sure; we’ll undoubtedly go back and add to this list as the years go by. But every single entry here has reminded us of the way that the movies can reflect our humanity back at us, spark our imaginations, inspire us to laugh or cry or gasp or take action, and why we fell in love with the moving pictures in the first place. From comedies to tragedies, biopics to superhero epics, stop-motion foxes to milkshake-drinking tycoons — our picks for the high points of this moviegoing century to date.

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‘In the Mood for Love’ (2000)

Like vanished years remembered through a dusty window pane (to paraphrase the film’s eloquent parting words), Wong Kar-Wai’s cinematic tone poem uses 1962 British Hong Kong as the long-ago setting for his masterpiece of romantic ennui — a series of restless moments suffused with an electric atmosphere of longing. Forlorn reporter Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) rents several rooms right next to subletter Mrs. Chan (Maggie Chung), a conscientious secretary at an import-export company. The happenstance neighbors move into their respective homes on the same day, with chipper apartment-building buttinskis hovering nearby while distracted movers accidentally intertwine the respective belongings. Chow and Chan’s workaholic spouses — both traveling abroad, popping in and out after hours, their faces never shown — are too busy to be around. And too-similar gifts (a natty tie, a posh purse) become clues that the ever-absent betrotheds are actually having an affair with each other.As time goes by, their confiding and consoling inevitably draw them together, climaxing in assignations at a nearby hotel’s Room 2046. And the camera, ever demure, never shows anything other than arrested ardor.WKW repeats quotidian rhythms like a mantra: Our characters walk the same narrow corridors, linger on same empty streets, perform the same perfunctory errands. Even Chan’s two dozen figure-fitting cheongsam dresses feel like a stunning meditation on sacred stasis. And it’s all gorgeously photographed (props to master cinematographer Christopher Doyle), scored to a looped soundtrack of Shigeru Umebayashi’s string-plucking waltz “Yumenji’s Theme” (recycled from a Seijin Suzuki drama) and Nat King Cole’s Spanish-language versions of American songbook standards. The aching repetition is the point, with the way broken-hearted lovers replaying their fleeting ecstasies before packing them away, whispering them into sacred monuments and capping the secrets to preserve forever. Think of it as holy loneliness: rapturous, intoxicating, and bittersweetly sublime. —S.G.

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‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s origin story of American avarice towers like a derrick over our new millennium, its shadow as imposing as the silhouette mad oil baron Daniel Plainview casts upon his own era. Right from a primeval opening stretch in the bowels of New Mexico, it’s clear that the writer-director means to connect one turn of the century to another, building a long pipeline across cinema history. The wordless determination of a man carving his destiny from the rock evokes the majesty of early movies, as do the expressive close-ups of Plainview’s furious face — which is to say, of the magnificently mustached and stony countenance of a different driven Daniel (Day-Lewis). There are also echoes of Kubrick, Malick and Giant, which happened to be shot on the same unforgiving Texas plains; even the vindictive ramble through an old manor that ends the movie brings to mind Charles Foster Kane. That you can mention Plainview in the same breath as that composite Great Man is a testament to how close Anderson came, in his own wild entrepreneurial ambition, to achieving the fabled ideal of the Great American Movie.Yes, Blood has the scale of an Old or New Hollywood epic, precious to a present not exactly gushing with grand visions. But it also has a jagged modern soul, bursting free in the form of Johnny Greenwood’s atonally clicking score or whenever Day-Lewis is spewing contempt in pressurized, shockingly funny, Oscar-winning geysers of invective. (The milkshake jokes got old fast, but the climactic verbal vengeance that inspired them sure didn’t.) Though loosely pulled from the pages of Upton Sinclair, this staggering character study of greed incarnate is miles removed from tasteful literary reverence, and Anderson never lets his aspirations to make something weighty and classical blot out his idiosyncratic imagination — the very same that dreamt up a plague of frogs in his final epic from the previous century. Maybe the movie truly endures because its portrait of way back then has twisted, with disturbing inevitability, into a prophecy of right now. What could be more relevant to the 21st century than a drama about a vampiric capitalist, coming as a creator and leaving as a destroyer? —A.A.D.