July 2, 2025 6:07AM

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

By ROLLING STONE

Photo illustration of the best movies of the 21st century

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.

From Rolling Stone US

Kenneth Lonergan shot this drama about an Upper West Side teenager in 2005; after a torturous birthing process, it was finally released in 2011. But while the battles over the final cut have added mystique to Margaret, the work itself stands alone. Anna Paquin plays Lisa Cohen, who inadvertently causes the death of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) while flirting with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo). The everyday pain of being a teenager starts to meld with the genuine trauma that Lisa feels as she tries (and fails) to make amends to everyone involved. Lonergan’s sprawling, operatic screenplay is about privilege and New York City, but it also nails the unique yet universal strangeness of being an adolescent anywhere, anytime. —Esther Zuckerman

Proving that just about any setting can play host to a noir, Debra Granik’s adaptation of a Daniel Woodrell novel follows Ree (Jennifer Lawrence, in a star-making turn), a 17-year-old caring for her siblings and mentally ill mother. She’s soon forced to chart a dangerous path through the Ozarks’ backwoods in an attempt to keep her family from losing their home. In the process, Winter’s Bone explores a place with communities whose traditions stretch back through the centuries grappling with the 21st-century scourge of the meth trade. For Ree, that means dealing with the dangerous criminals seemingly responsible for her father’s disappearance and with Teardrop (John Hawkes), a menacing yet sympathetic uncle struggling with addiction. It’s both a gripping thriller and a depiction of how easily lives on the margin can fall apart and disappear. —Keith Phipps

Clocking in at a shade over four hours, Lav Diaz’s crime-and-punishment epic is considered one of his more concise films (some of his features run past the nine-hour mark). But what’s that saying about no great film ever feeling like it’s too long, and no bad film ever feeling like it’s too short? The Filipino writer-director’s Dostevsky-influenced drama is a perfect Exhibit A for the defense of that first sentiment, and this leisurely tale of a moneylender’s murder — along with the ripple effect of the deed, which lands an innocent man in prison — is never less than completely compelling. And while it doesn’t shy away from the uglier aspects of the human condition, Norte never feels like the work of a shock artist. It’s a grand statement from someone who truly believes that people endure, even during times of great hardship and injustice. You wish it would never end. —David Fear

In between starting his career as a cinematic agent provocateur (Tony Manero, Post Mortem) and refashioning himself as the go-to maker of biopics about complicated women (Jackie, Spencer, Maria), Chilean writer-director Pablo Larraín gave us this satirical jab at the 1988 ad campaign that helped sow the seeds of dictator Auguste Pinochet’s professional demise. Gael García Bernal is the hipster marketer who’s hired to sell the pro-democracy “No” vote to the masses during the country’s 1988 plebiscite. Rather than make it a depressing laundry list of the leader’s low points in governing, however, the young man proposes a far more colorful, literally and figuratively, plan of attack. History has already rendered its judgement on how effective his effort was, yet this breezy, based-on-a-true-story drama doesn’t just keep you guessing on whether he’ll pull it off or lose his soul in the process. It somehow manages to cast a sideways glance at how media and policy interact while still celebrating a political win, with the good, bad and ugly of it all captured in gloriously scuzzy, period-appropriate low-def video. —D.F.

It’s the Brazilian gang-war epic that took the whole world by surprise. City of God follows the rise of a murderous criminal empire in the mean streets of Cidade de Deus, the most notoriously violent favela in Rio de Janeiro, from the Sixties to the Eighties. Directors Fernando Meirelles and Katia Lund recruited a cast of hundreds, mostly first-time actors from the Brazilian slums and shantytowns, who knew the desperate poverty, corruption, and bloodshed up close. Leandro Firmino stars as the ruthless drug lord Little Dice, while samba singer Seu Jorge plays his nemesis Knockout Ned. (Jorge later appeared in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, singing David Bowie songs in Portugese.) City of God This twist on mobster sagas is visually stunning, complete with handheld cameras, fast edits, and digital time-warp, which reflect Meirelles’ background in advertising. But it’s also devastatingly bleak film — Pixote via Goodfellas — that still managed to became a Brazilian box-office blockbuster and an international sensation. —Rob Sheffield

There are delightful movies, and then there’s Maren Ade’s blissful, batshit-crazy tale of a stressed out white-collar worker (Sandra Hüller) and her free spirit father (Peter Simonischek), whose unexpected visit leaves them both feeling disconnected. Then a disruptive, wild man named Toni Erdmann barges into her life and her professional circle — a trickster who happens to bear a striking resemblance to her dad in a bad wig and false teeth. You will not see a better takedown of the banality of corporate living, experience a more profound tale of the ties that bind, or hear a better impromptu take on “The Greatest Love of All,” sung with all the passion that a human being not named Whitney can muster. And the movie’s last half hour, which revolves around a party being crashed by a furry, 10-foot-tall monster — no, seriously — is as close to comic perfection as you could ever hope for. —D.F.

Kathryn Bigelow’s stunning ride-along with an Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal in Iraq feels less like a typical “war movie” and more like a wartime procedural, eschewing pro or con Op-Ed viewpoints in favor focusing on the how-to details of defusing I.E.D.s in active combat zones. Just how authentic the film’s depiction of such missions has been debated, yet it remains a nerve-jangling watch, even if you know that the wild-card staff sergeant (Jeremy Renner, in his big pre-Hawkeye breakout role) will make it through a number of near-fatal vignettes. Adrenaline has always been Bigelow’s drug of choice, and The Hurt Locker will always be a landmark Best Picture win simply for the fact that it became the first movie directed by a female filmmaker to take home the big prize. But it’s her facility for consistently ratcheting the tension up while chronicling both grace and chaos under pressure that makes the film feel like a ticking you-know-what. —D.F.

A young woman (Rihane Khalil Alio) finds herself with child, and is cryptic about who the father may be. She wants an abortion — which, in her home country of Chad, is forbidden by law. Her mom (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), no stranger to unwanted pregnancies or the social-pariah status that comes with it, is determined to help her by any means necessary, even if that means being exiled from their community. Legendary filmmaker Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (A Screaming Man) turns this mother-daughter tale into a moral parable, a cri de coeur and a formalist wonder; the use of composition, color and mood he employs here is virtually peerless. That he also manages to celebrate the sacred bonds of sisterhood among the women moving in and out of this story without sacrificing a sense of outrage at the situation they’re up against only makes it that much more impressive. —D.F.

Football is life for the teenage ultras of Jafar Panahi’s sublime neorealist comedy: The girls even disguise themselves as boys to sneak into a soccer match, risking arrest in a modern Iran where women aren’t permitted to attend sporting events. Panahi took a risk, too, filming his young actresses around and inside a real Tehran stadium during a real World Cup qualifier — a choice that turns a fictional portrait of civil disobedience into a documentary of the same. Every one of the writer-director’s movies is an act of courageous defiance, especially in the wake of his arrest and the filmmaking ban he’s continued to ignore, one illegal polemic at a time. But there’s an uncommon effervescence to this one, which sees no contradiction in opposing backward laws (like the kind that keep fervent fans out of the stands, depriving a team of its 12th woman) and still deeply loving your country. By the jubilant finale, we’re all cheering from the supporters section. –A.A. Dowd

A French antiques dealer (Juliette Binoche) and a British writer (William Shimell) meet in Tuscany and spend the day together. Driving around the countryside discussing art and life, they’re eventually confused for an old married couple and begin acting the part — playfully at first, and then with a growing intensity that calls the actual nature of their relationship into question. Working outside Iran for the first time while staying firmly in his behind-the-wheel wheelhouse, the late Abbas Kiarostami fashions a heady conversation piece that deepens into something altogether more perplexing. But it’s not ambiguous for ambiguity’s sake; the “are they or aren’t they?” of this glorious two-hander opens up into a richer meditation on how truth and fiction are not always mutually exclusive. Can an imitation be every bit as meaningful as the real thing? Find your answer in Binoche’s rapturous performance, which renders the distinction meaningless. –A.A.D.

British filmmaker Peter Watkins has always had a knack for mixing history lessons with modern formalist storytelling (his 1966 BBC mockumentary The War Game presented such an intensely real portrait of nuclear armageddon that the network deemed it “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting; a 1974 biopic on Norwegian painter Edvard Munch resembled a cinéma vérité portrait, complete with characters staring into the camera). And his 2000 magnum opus takes that anachronistic ideology to the extreme by restaging the rise and fall of the Paris Commune, a socialist regime that briefly took power in France during the late 19th century before its member were brutally massacred. Except this time, the revolutionized will be televised, courtesy of TV reporters interviewing 1870s working-class citizens and state-sponsored media pundits issuing anti-communard propaganda. Running a shade under six hours, Watkins’ takedown of modern media’s role in how people process political movements displays an extraordinary commitment to a bit — and also reminds you that the past is more than just a prologue. It’s also a primer for unpacking the present, one faux-broadcast news report at a time. —D.F.

One of cinema’s great baroque stylists, Park Chan-wook shows a more restrained touch than usual in this story of a detective (Park Hae-il), a dead body, and the victim’s widow (Lust, Caution‘s Tang Wei), i.e. this murder case’s prime suspect. The South Korean filmmaker’s sly riff on Vertigo still has a number of jawdropping visual flourishes, but this time, he’s left the Grand Guignol set pieces on the cutting room floor and instead focuses on the way that obsession slowly, methodically chips away at his white-knight hero. It’s as much a love story as it a fatalistic neo-noir, even when director Park and screenwriter Seo-kyung Chung essentially reset the narrative at the halfway point. New city, new case, same old amour fou. That gamble somehow makes this tragedy twice as swoonworthy, and when Park is twisting the screws here, he’s being cruel to be kind for once. It makes all the difference. —D.F.

All Wes Anderson films are meticulously designed, but his scrupulous attention to detail was never more rewarding than in this stop-motion animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1970 novel. George Clooney voices the title character, a reformed thief who’s now a respectable husband, father and columnist — until he’s tempted back into his old life by a seemingly can’t-miss heist of three local farms. Fracturing families have long been at the core of Anderson’s emotionally delicate stories, but here he found a whole new level of bittersweet beauty, pairing Clooney with Meryl Streep as Mr. Fox’s frustrated wife and Rushmore star Jason Schwartzman as their awkward, adorable son. The handmade animation only underlined the characters’ fragility — their need for love and their fear of being abandoned — which was accentuated by the cast’s warm, vulnerable voice work. Among these wild animals, Anderson felt very much at home. —Tim Grierson

“He’s just a man,” wannabe desperado Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) says of the legendary outlaw he’s destined to fell, or so the film’s full, flamboyantly protracted title — The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — tells us. But from the moment Brad Pitt emerges phantom-like from a cloud of locomotive smoke (a silhouette of menace conjured by the great cinematographer Roger Deakins), it’s clear that this Jesse James is man and myth rolled into one. The magnificently moody oater named after both men stands on the same fault line, becoming an ambivalent eulogy for the fables of a fabled Old West, told through discursive episodes that plant you in a vividly lawless 19th-century America. It’s the dawn of a new celebrity age that writer-director Andrew Dominik pulls slowly into focus around Affleck’s tragic, craven Bob, a Tom Ripley figure claiming his 15 minutes of infamy with a pistol and a wince. –A.A.D.

Christopher Nolan’s sprawling biopic on the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds benefits from a depth-charge of a performance by Cillian Murphy, a meticulous sound design that prizes both dead silence and deafening booms, and a cast featuring every third actor with a SAG card. (The fact that it was also one half of the most unlikely cinematic coupling in the history of the movies didn’t hurt, either.) Yet so much of it works because of the characteristic rigor that Nolan, one of the last name-above-the-title auteurs standing, brings to the filmmaking; even when the competing timelines and set pieces start to mash up against each other, there’s a genuine thrill to watching the Inception director try to get inside the mind of this towering, often inscrutable 20th-century figurehead. —D.F.

A Steven Spielberg movie about Abraham Lincoln and the 13th Amendment? On paper it sounds like one dreary history lesson, the most miserable ordeal you could suffer in a theater without actually getting shot by John Wilkes Booth. But Lincoln turned out to be a genuine history-as-drama political thriller, with Daniel Day-Lewis driving it as a smolderingly tortured Abe, brooding like a log-cabin Heathcliff, in the final months of his life. As the Civil War ends, the President realizes his Emancipation Proclamation will be doomed without a Constitutional amendment to abolish the atrocity of slavery. So he does the dirty political hustling to ram it through Congress. Sally Field gives an Oscar-nominated performance as First Lady and goth queen Mary Todd Lincoln. But there’s also a killer ensemble of 19th-century villains, as dishy as a Veep episode, with James Spader, Lee Pace, David Strathairn, and the ultimate Seventies comeback kid, Jackie Earle Haley. —R.S.

Before he was Hollywood’s favorite Euro-weirdo filmmaker and Emma Stone’s bestie, Yorgos Lanthimos gave us this truly odd, remarkably uncomfortable cringe-comedy about three adults (played by Christian Passalis, Angeliki Papoulia and Mary Tsoni) who’ve lived an extremely sheltered life within the family home they’ve been forbidden to leave. Whether their parents are simply overly protective or have been conducting a borderline psychotic experiment in imprisonment and stunted growth is anyone’s guess; Lanthimos isn’t interested in providing easy cause-and-effect answers. But thanks to their isolation from the outside world, this trio has some… let’s say “unusual” ideas about airplanes, cats and socially acceptable behavior. And while the Greek director’s ascension up the ranks of Oscar-nominated, brand-name auteurs has been a gift from heaven, those who saw Lanthimos’ breakthrough film and became early adopters of his brand of elliptical, thought-provoking WTF-itude will tell you that this pure dose of Lanthimos’s sensibility is one truly potent trip. —D.F.

Ari Aster’s feature debut boasts the kind of nightmarish imagery and atmosphere that creeps into your brain and never escapes. When a family’s matriarch dies, she plants the devil’s seeds into her daughter Annie (Toni Collette), and then in her granddaughter, Charlie (Milly Shapiro), both of whom soon begin sharing odd behavior. The rest of the family — psychiatrist husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) and son Peter (Alex Wolff) — soon become overwhelmed by a malevolent presence that has slowly infected their family. Influenced by feelings around his own ancestry, Aster interrogates the way our inherited DNA shapes our future and fate — and the consequences of trying to escape it. Outside of its well-timed jumps and terrifying symbology, Hereditary suggests there may be nothing scarier than the realization that you can’t avoid your destiny. —Jake Kring-Schreifels

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In the eighteenth century marriage mart, a picture is worth more than a measly handful of words — which is why Marianne (Noémie Merlant), an artist, has been hired to paint a wedding portrait of a wealthy client’s daugter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel). What starts as an assignment turns into the beginnings of a passionate, life-changing romance for these two women, and it’s the way that French director Celinne Sciamma slamming their love story into its true historical context that distinguishes this from your typical tale of furtive liasons, heartbreak and tragedy. It’s a captivating image of how life-changing romance can be, even if only for a season. —CT Jones

We’re not sure whether Michael Haneke believes the children are our future — but we do know that his Palme d’Or-winning drama suggests that you can look to how certain past generations were treated in their formative years to make sense of historical tragedies. The year is 1913. The setting is a small village is Northern Germany, where a land-owning baron has an economic hold on the residents’ bodies and a strict Protestant pastor holds sway over their souls. A series of mysterious accidents plagues the town. Eventually, a schoolteacher (The Zone of Interest‘s Christian Friedel) begins to suspect the local children may be involved, and that they’ve learned their parents’ lessons of cruelty and domination all too well. Do the math, and you’ll realize they’ll grow up to be Germany’s leaders in the 1930s, which… you get the picture. The Austrian filmmaker has an abundance of 21st century masterpieces on love (Amour), hate (Cache) and everything in between in his back catalog, yet this austere, forbidding work continues to haunt in a way his other works don’t. Especially when you consider that those who forget the past are doomed to perpetually repeat it. —D.F.

At their best, Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries aren’t just hilarious — they evince an abiding fondness for their foolish, frequently vain characters. This was never better expressed than in his funny, unexpectedly touching look at the oddballs who frequent the Mayflower Kennel Club Dog Show. Yes, the canines are cute, but it’s their human owners who are the truly strange creatures, their self-worth wrapped up in their relationship to their four-legged friends. Guest and co-writer Eugene Levy created a sturdy narrative framework — everything leads up to the big competition — and then allowed their formidable cast to improvise brilliantly, including Parker Posey playing a shallow yuppie and Fred Willard as a spectacularly terrible color commentator. But the MVPs are Levy and Catherine O’Hara as a down-on-their-luck couple who don’t have much except for love — and the most endearing terrier you’ve ever met. — T.G.

Who knew martial arts fight sequences could be as heartbreaking as they are exhilarating? Ang Lee drew on the wuxia films and adventure tales of his youth to create a thrilling adventure tale that doubles as a tale of star-crossed love. Two such tales, actually: Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat star as, respectively, Yu Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, old friends who’ve never become lovers in spite of their feelings for one another. Their relationship contrasts with that of Jen (Zhang Ziyi), who was once whisked away by a chivalrous bandit named Lo (Chang Chen) and who has schemed to reunite with him. Over the course of the film Lee makes the dreamlike fight scenes (exquisitely choreographed by the legendary Yuen Wo-Ping) serve as expressions of anger, rebelliousness, repressed love, and other powerful emotions, simultaneously paying tribute to classic martial arts films and reworking them into poetic new forms. —K.P.

Whatdid Paul Thomas Anderson see in Adam Sandler that nobody else had when he cast him as a lonely Los Angeleno? The answer: A rage that was never far from the surface of the comedian’s manchild characters. The filmmaker teases Sandler’s sound and fury out via a love story in which San Fernando Valley businessman Barry Egan falls for Lena (Emily Watson), a friend of one of his many sisters. They’re two misfit people who clearly belong together, even if his habit of bottling his ire until it explodes threatens both their relationship and the bathrooms of local restaurants. Also, did we mention the Provo, Utah phone-sex operators and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s vengeful mattress king? The film served as a kind of coming out for Anderson, who shook off the influences of his first films to get looser, stranger, more heartfelt and way funnier than he’d ever dared be before. —K.P.

Jonathan Glazer‘s take on Martin Amis’s 2014 novel is a portrait of hell from the periphery. An S.S. officer (Christian Friedel) and his family live in the housing area surrounding Auschwitz; they throw pool parties and take afternoon tea with friends while chimneys belch black smoke in the distance. Glazer strips away the imagery we now associate with Holocaust dramas and puts his high-formalism style to perfect use, presenting an absolutely chilling look at how normalization works — at some point, you simply stop hearing the barking dogs, gunshots, and human suffering happening right outside your own backyard. This is what the banality around the banality of evil looks like. And Sandra Hüller, playing the officer’s raging wife, once again convinces you that she’s one of the most fearless international actors working today. —D.F.

French filmmaker Claire Denis (Beau Travail) uses Yasujiro Ozu’s masterpiece Late Spring as a jumping off point for her own tale of a father (the always great Alex Descas), his grown daughter (future auteur extraordinaire Mati Diop), and the pain of letting go and saying goodbye. A single dad working as a train driver in Paris, he’s raised his kid solo since she was little, and slowly watches as a mutual attraction develops between her and a young man (Grégoire Colin) from their neighborhood. He must eventually come to terms with his brood leaving the nest and down the ceremonial shots of rum that signals the end of one era and the beginning of the next. Like all of the director’s work, Denis’ tender tale of familial affection finds the divine in the details, and pays close attention to the way that silences say more than words. It also guarantees that you won’t leave dry-eyed, nor ever hear the Commodores’ “Night Shift” the same way again. —D.F.

Long master chroniclers of New York’s seedy underbelly and its shadier denizens, filmmakers/siblings Josh and Benny Safdie reached their apex by teaming up with Adam Sandler, who’s electrifying as Howard Ratner, a low-life jeweler and inveterate gambler on a losing streak trying to outrun the loan sharks who want their money. They somehow find room in this extraordinarily tense thriller for both pop star the Weeknd and Boston Celtics great Kevin Garnett, each playing ingeniously malicious versions of themselves. But Uncut Gems is turbo-charged by Sandler’s bravura performance, which encapsulates the fleeting euphoria and flop-sweat desperation of an addict chasing the rush of the seemingly perfect parlay. Howard drowns in front of our eyes, his fast-talking no match for the tidal wave about to crash on top of him. —T.G.

His name alone is enough to strike fear in both underworld bigwigs and his professional-killer peers. He’s a one-man killing machine that people refer to as a mythological boogieman. You do not want to make John Wick angry, in other words. Which is exactly what some Russian mobsters do. Bad move. Cue payback, mayhem and a pile of corpses. Ignore the modest title: Stuntmen-turned-codirectors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski quickly turn this revenge thriller into a three-ring action-movie circus, with Reeves demonstrating an ability to handle anything (bullets, elbows, kicks, an assortment of sharp objects) fired at him. It’s a gun fu nirvana that somehow gave birth to a surprisingly fertile franchise, complete with eccentric worldbuilding — a hospitality industry catering solely to assassins? — and a go-for-broke mentality that somehow suits its stoic star to a tee. —D.F.

The best Seventies thriller of 2007, Tony Gilroy’s character study is that cinematic rarity, a hyperintelligent, emotionally sophisticated drama featuring middle-aged men and women frayed by life and struggling with the fallout from morally questionable actions. George Clooney plays the titular fixer, a prestigious law firm’s bagman tasked with cleaning up the messy lives of super-stressed staffers. Their high-priority client is shady agricultural conglomerate U-North, the stakes are a $3 billion dollar class action suit against its cancerous products, and the potential saboteur is brilliant but broken prosecutor Tom Wilkinson. His off-his-meds, gone-rogue revelation: tell the truth. Tilda Swinton nabbed an Oscar as U-North’s dangerously brittle in-house counsel. But it’s co-star, co-producer and New Hollywood’s studio savant Sydney Pollack whose participation really anoints first-time writer-director (and future Andor show runner) as his generation’s cynical voice of outrage. —Stephen Garrett

Before he turn Downton Abbey into a global obsession, writer Julian Fellowes gave us another story revolving around the upstairs-downstairs power dynamics of England’s country estates. A group of British aristocrats and several 1930s Hollywood types gather at the home of Sir William and Lady McCordle for a shooting weekend. One of the assembled ends up dead. An Inspector Maigret-type shows up to investigate, but neither Fellowes nor director Robert Altman are interested in a drawing-room whodunnit; they’re much more concerned with the ways that sex, lies and class systems intersect within the lifestyles of the rich and famous. It’s the perfect type of ensemble movie for the Nashville filmmaker, who makes great use of a truly once-in-a-lifetime ensemble: Clive Owen, Helen Mirren, Kelly Macdonald, Michael Gambon, Kristen Scott Thomas, Emily Watson, Alan Bates, Ryan Phillippe, Richard E. Grant, Derek Jacobi, and Maggie Smith, doing a dry run for her Downton dowager here. You think you’ve settled for a murder mystery. What you get is far better: a pitch-black satire, laced with arsenic and tragedy. —D.F.

Bong Joon Ho serves up a highly sociopolitical spin on the kaiju subgenre, as a giant, mutated fish crawls out of the Han River and proceeds to wreak havoc in the city of Seoul. The creature is a product of toxic chemicals being purposefully dumped into the body of water; when the authorities try to mask how exactly an everyday tadpole turned into a two-ton apex predator, a viral outbreak is “invented” as a cover up. Meanwhile, a thirtysomething slacker (longtime Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho) and his family attempt to track down the beast, who’s abducted the man’s daughter (Ko Ah-sung) and deposited her in the sewers for later consumption. It’s a monster movie, a conspiracy thriller, a family drama, and a serrated-edge satire, all wrapped up in one scaly, scary skin. — D.F.

Neither Scarlett Johansson nor Bill Murray were exactly unknown quantities when this movie hit theaters. But Sofia Coppola’s stylish one-on-one comic drama brought out more emotional depths than either had revealed before. A bitter middle-aged man and a disillusioned bride meet in Tokyo, a city neither of them knows, yet form a surprisingly tender bond. Murray’s a washed-up actor doing a Japanese whiskey ad; Johansson’s a Yalie with no plans, no dreams, just an already-sinking marriage. But far from home, they force each other to confront the loneliness they’re both hiding — especially when they hit the karaoke room, where Murray pours all his mid-life despair into Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” And the film’s shoegaze soundtrack feels just like honey. (In 2003, new My Bloody Valentine music was a shocker in itself.) We may never know what he ultimately whispers in her ear. But Lost in Translation makes you glad to spend your life wondering. —R.S.

Timothy Treadwell — the conservationist who spent 13 summers living with grizzlies before one of them mauled him to death — remains the paragon of a “Werner Herzog character”: An iconoclastic misfit who blurred the line between hero and madman. Culled, in part, from 100 hours of Treadwell’s own video footage, Grizzly Man tracks the life and death of someone so infatuated with his bruin brethren that he emphatically states he’d “die for these animals.” Where the subject views his coexistence with grizzlies as evidence of cross-species harmony, the fascinated yet sympathetic filmmaker sees in the bears yet another example of the “overwhelming indifference of nature.” (Cue Herzog’s Burden of Dreams jungle speech.) It’s that duality, mixed with brutally raw footage no Hollywood director could dream of getting, that makes the film so remarkable. “I discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil,” the director notes. In other words: pure Herzogian catnip. —Jason Newman

As a portrait of the artist as a young, insecure film student, Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical romantic drama candidly illustrates why finding your voice often dovetails with figuring out that you’re too good for the toxic boyfriend you’re obsessed over. In London in the mid-1980s, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) is trying to turn her messy life into a movie, all the while navigating a going-nowhere relationship with emotionally aloof — and secret heroin addict — Anthony (Tom Burke). Hogg draws from the past not for nostalgia but to ponder how we become the people that we are — and how part of that evolution involves the immature, doomed love affairs we learn to outgrow. Swinton Byrne is perfection as a fragile woman finding her steel, the movie adding an additional layer of poignancy by casting the actress’ own mother (Hogg’s longtime friend Tilda Swinton) to play Julie’s loving, worried mom. — T.G.

Anyone who caresses their iPhone more than their loved ones will wince at the veracity of Spike Jonzes’s speculative sci-fi romance-gone-wrong, an inexorably tragic look at a singleton’s love affair with a computer operating system. Shy, emotionally wounded Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), still tender from an almost-finalized divorce, signs up for a brand new A.I.-driven interface to power his digital ecosystem: a super-intelligent intuitive entity that calls itself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson, fueling a thousand Sam Altman wet dreams). And her always-evolving aptitude includes irresistible empathy, which turns out to be a killer feature for its all-too-human user. One of the most enduringly prophetic films of the new millennium, Spike Jonzes’ geek-emo treatise on male loneliness is also a warning about artificial general intelligence. It may not destroy or enslave us, the film suggests, but it will utterly break our hearts. —S.G.

Originally, documentarians Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel wanted to make a film about the town of New Bedford, Massachusetts, America’s preeminent fishing port, which had inspired Moby-Dick. But then they left dry land behind, and the result was an immersive portrait of the fishing industry that felt otherworldly, with the directors strapping GoPros on the seafaring workers. The striking nautical images, intertwined with an experimental sound design that seems to be conjuring up the Rapture, gave the profession a primal, nearly biblical urgency. Birds dart across a doomy sky. Close-ups of caught fish capture their final shaky breaths. In the process, Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel invented a hypnotic, surreally intense new strain of documentary filmmaking, sucking the viewer into the vortex of their gripping milieu. —T.G.

Strange as it seems now, many people really did think Wes Anderson had already peaked after Rushmore blew up in 1999. But what his extraordinary follow-up movie presupposes is: maybe he didn’t? The Royal Tenenbaums proved the boy wonder was just getting started, with the sprawling tragicomic tale of a New York family full of colorful eccentrics. The late Gene Hackman takes his great autumnal bow as the crusty rogue who’s back to reconcile with the ex-wife and kids he left years ago. Anjelica Huston presides as the matriarch, with a trio of damaged siblings: burned-out tennis pro Luke Wilson, failed playwright Gwyneth Paltrow, grieving widower Ben Stiller. The director brings his trademark flourishes: the fetishistic set design, the soundtrack of Nico and Nick Drake deep cuts, Bill Murray. But it’s the emotional realness that makes the film unforgettable. Owen Wilson, who co-wrote it with Anderson, damn near steals the show as the mescaline-addled cowboy author (“Wiiiild-cat!”) who can’t help wishing he could be part of this messed-up family. —R.S.

Samuel L. Jackson’s best 21st century performance? Look no further than this moving documentary about James Baldwin, which focuses on both the late author’s unfinished book Remember This House and his lifelong lament about the racism he witnessed in America. The usually boisterous Jackson disappears inside his muted narration, quietly speaking Baldwin’s words with sorrow and gravitas, making each bitter recrimination and poignant reminiscence hit like a hammer. Director Raoul Peck fashioned a biographical portrait with uncommon subtlety, melding Jackson’s weary voiceover with choice archival interviews as Baldwin eloquently dissects a country riven by racial divides that are exacerbated by its movies and politics. At a moment in which the Black Lives Matter movement was exploding, I Am Not Your Negro proved as seminal a work of art, forcing white audiences to confront their complicity in ensuring that America remains a profoundly imperfect union. —T.G.

Before Anora turned indie maverick Sean Baker into “Oscar-winning director Sean Baker,” the scrappy filmmaker gave us this richly textured document of a transient, impoverished community on Orlando, Florida’s outskirts. Through the perspective of its fearless, wild-child leader — a six-year-old named Moonee, played with a mix of ferocious gumption and unbridled glee by Brooklyn Prince — the movie observes a humid slice of life on the fringes, bearing witness to the beauty and tragedy of its young protagonist’s extended, unsupervised stay at a roadside motel in the shadow of Disney World. Moonee can only dream of a theme-park life, hustling tourists with her mother (Bria Vinaite) and surviving on the good will of an almost-spiritual motel manager and unwitting caretaker (Willem Dafoe). It’s a compassionate, clear-eyed look at the collision of innocence and instability, where wonder and despair exist side by side. —J.K.S.

Judd Apatow had already made a name for himself with small-screen sketch comedy (he co-created The Ben Stiller Show), peerless cringe-comedy (The Larry Sander Show) and sensitive character-based comedy (R.I.P., Freaks and Geeks). For his big-screen directorial debut, he took a bit from all three and concocted what’s become a modern-comic template: the heavily improvised, ensemble-cast manchild farce. A post-Daily Show/pre-The Office Steve Carell is the title character, a geek-culture lifer who’s never had a real relationship; a crack team of supporting players including Romany Malco, Jane Lynch, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd offer horrible romantic advice and off-the-cuff riffs about everything from soft rock to skin-mag stashes. (Seen today, the Rudd/Rogen volley of absurd “you’re gay” playground taunts is somehow both a highlight and a low point.) The talent bench is deep here — blink and you’ll miss Kat Dennings, Mindy Kaling, Jonah Hill and Kevin Hart in small parts — while Apatow’s knack for connecting outrageous set pieces with a surprisingly overall sweetness would become his signature. But it starts here, and as everyone knows, you never forget your first time. —D.F.

Has any ending been more misunderstood than the final sequence of Steven Spielberg’s episodic, centuries-spanning story of an openhearted robot boy named David (Haley Joel Osment) who aspires to be human despite repeatedly being failed by humanity? Those who dismissed it as sentimental seemed to have missed that the director, who inherited the film from his friend Stanley Kubrick after the latter’s death, was doing nothing less than saying good riddance to humanity while turning out the lights on history. It remains a visually stunning film, set in a near-future in which David experiences the worst life on Earth has to offer: parental neglect, torture, exploitation, and loneliness. That ‘boy whop yearns to be a real boy never gives up hope is equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking. —K.P.

Lars von Trier has never set in foot in America due to a fear of flying. But in the 20-plus years since he released this Brecht-ian drama, Dogville has only grown in stature as the angriest, most spot-on critique of the so-called Home of the Brave. The action all takes place in the fictional small town of the title, which is visited by imperiled outsider Grace (Nicole Kidman). She’s looking for sanctuary from some dangerous mobsters. The locals treat her as one of their own, until they don’t. The Danish writer-director doesn’t simply strip the stage bare — leaving only white outlines on the ground for where buildings should be — he reduces America to a poisoned hellscape of small-minded reactionaries who destroy or exploit everything around them, secure in their unearned moral righteousness. Von Trier’s scorching condemnation took aim at the post-9/11 Bush era, but the movie now feels like a permanent warning to anyone, especially U.S. viewers, who still thinks of this country as the Land of the Free: abandon all hope, ye who enter here. —T.G.

When he first arrived in the Nineties, Quentin Tarantino used to vow, “I’m gonna do a guys-on-a-mission movie one day.” He lived up to his promise with this spectacularly over-the-top World War II romp. Brad Pitt leads a black-ops crew of U.S. commandos who specialize in taking scalps. As he declares, “We ain’t in the prisoner-takin’ business — we in the killin’-Nazis business! And cousin, business is a-boomin’!” Christoph Waltz won an Oscar as the terrifying S.S. officer Col. Hans Landa, tangling with Diane Kruger as an undercover movie star, Melanie Laurent as a Jewish avenger, and Michael Fassbender as a film critic turned spy. Tarantino made Inglorious Basterds extremely pulp (he swiped his title from a trashy 1970s Italian war flick) and extremely fiction, with plot twists that absolutely none of the 2009 audience saw coming. Plus one of his all-time coolest needle drops: David Bowie’s “Cat People,” the goth-rock anthem to cue the apocalypse. —R.S.

Before getting too deep into its runtime, Terrence Malick’s story of growing up in Waco, Texas in the middle years of the 20th century pauses to depict the beginning of existence and the origins of life on Earth. It seems at first a puzzling choice for a film that — before and after the flashback — focuses on the fraught relationship between Jack (played as a boy by Hugh McCracken and as an adult by Sean Penn) and his parents (Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain). Then, as the film progresses, it becomes clear what Malick’s up to: using the story of a single life — and one that overlaps heavily with the director’s own — as a microcosm for nothing less than the story of the universe itself. The result often resembles a coming-of-age tale told from the perspective of God, and it’s hard to imagine few other filmmakers attempting, much less turning something like this into such a gutting visual feast. —K.P.

Kill or be killed is the first life lesson for illiterate, friendless 19-year-old Algerian Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), arriving in prison for a six-year sentence and confronted with domineering Corsican mob boss César Luchini (Niels Arestrup). In exchange for assassinating an informant, Malik gets protection and petty privileges, not to mention a haunted sense of identity and a vengeful determination to play the long game. Jacques Audiard’s blistering underworld thriller is a Horatio Alger story for immigrant convicts — a gripping social commentary about a young man who learns how to read en route to economic fluency, polylinguism, religiosity, and hashish trafficking, straddling factions and triangulating power in his ultimate goal to become an underworld godhead. —S.G.

An emotional pas a deux set in rural Italy during the summer of 1983, Luca Guadagnino’s breathrough movie chronicles the romance between two American expats — Timothée Chalamet is the sullen teenage pianist, Armie Hammer is the older, brash grad student. The Italian filmmaker makes it an exquisitely anguished love story that unfolds in tiny moments, glance by glance, touch by touch, with every scene haunted by the oppression of the Eighties closet. James Ivory won an Academy Award for the screenplay, at 89 — the oldest Oscar winner ever. Sufjan Stevens contributes three songs, including “Visions of Gideon” in the heartbreaking final close-up of Chalamet’s face, while Michael Stuhlbarg and Amira Casar shine as his empathetic parents. But the Mighty Tim is so painfully vulnerable in his period-perfect Talking Heads shirt, casually callous to almost everyone in his life, yet helpless to avoid losing his heart. As his fan Bob Dylan might say, he’s got no secrets left to conceal. —R.S.

Playwright-turned-filmmaker Celine Song immediately established herself as a first-rate chronicler of the messy, complicated, and emotionally rich experience we call “romance” with this quietly brilliant debut, about a NYC writer named Nora (Greta Lee, finally liberated from scene-stealing supporting roles) who plays tour guide to a childhood friend/crush, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), who’s visiting from Seoul. She’s now happily married. He still pines for what might have been. Neither are sure what will happen when they’re finally reunited in person after years of on-again/off-again correspondence. There’s not a false note here, and the result is a work of art that takes what appears to be a simple story of unrequited love and gives it the depth, the feeling, and the emotional scope of something that feels so much larger than just a film. —D.F.

The supreme gaslighting movie of the 21st century, Chris Nolan’s thriller is pure, inspired mindfuckery, told backward to simulate the disorienting headspace of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce). He suffers from such chronic short-term memory loss that he writes himself messages everywhere — notably on his heavily tattooed body, becoming a human Post-It Note as he attempts to find the person who killed his wife. Deepening the mystery are a very chipper but sketchy Joe Pantoliano and jaded bartender Carrie Anne-Moss, aptly enough both alums from the previous year’s reality-bending hit The Matrix. Nolan’s early-career masterpiece established the temporally obsessed director as one of our post-fact era’s greatest Hollywood filmmakers, where the very essence of truth is always in flux and humanity’s greatest struggle is to find solace within life’s implacable instability. —S.G.

As with many great horror movies, Danny Boyle’s eviscerating zombie thriller grew out of real-world terrors. “Danny was particularly interested in issues that had to do with social rage – the increase of rage in our society, road rage and other things,” screenwriter Alex Garland explained. Out of that came 28 Days Later…, in which a handful of survivors (including Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris) try to stay a step ahead of unstoppable hordes of rampaging undead, who don’t just feast on the living but seem to be filled with an unquenchable anger, ferociously chasing after our heroes with the lunatic logic of a nightmare. Shot on MiniDV to emphasize the grubby, post-apocalyptic ugliness, the film is a marvel of handheld camerawork and jittery editing. But in the wake of 9/11’s jolting tragedy, this prescient horror film also spoke to unconscious anxieties about a world in which simmering tensions and seething paranoia felt like a terrible new normal. —T.G.

Ryan Coogler’s tale of T’Challa — part-time Avenger, full-time regent of the fictional African empire known as Wakanda — is more than just the crown jewel of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s an old-school epic that combines widescreen thrills with a glorious, gorgeous Afro-futurist aesthetic and genuine moral gravitas; it proved that you could successfully fuse a filmmaker’s sensibility into the MCU without compromising the corporate bottom line; and it gave us a Shakespearean tragedy in comic-book cosplay, complete with a conflicted hero (rest in power, Chadwick Boseman) and a multilayered villain via Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger. Most of all, it proved that superhero movies could be about something more than just entertainment — they could reflect, refract, and represent the real world around us while still transporting us to some other place entirely. They could be more than just a roller-coaster ride. They could, in fact, be something close to cinema. Wakanda forever. —D.F.

Loading a rifle, crossing a stream, setting up camp: everything takes a small eternity in Kelly Reichardt’s hypnotic Western odyssey about a caravan that strays disastrously off the Oregon Trail. John Wayne traditionalists might balk at how the writer-director slows this quintessentially homegrown genre to a grueling trot, to say nothing of how she hands the reins of steely moral clarity and conviction to her muse, Michelle Williams. But beneath the patiently observed labor, tensions simmer — between pigheaded men and headstrong women, between the interlopers and the indigenous of a windswept wilderness, between different social strata equalized by an unforgiving nature indifferent to matters of class. Contemporaneous reviews reached for an Iraq War metaphor; years of conflict later, any number of American quagmires glimmer in Meek’s folly. –A.A.D.

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