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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.

18

‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ (2013)

As Llewyn Davis, a disgruntled songwriter trying to make his name in the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk scene, Oscar Isaac possessed both the musical chops and the slow-burn comic timing necessary to transform his everyman character into the patron saint of all never-weres — an avatar of the dedicated, sometimes self-sabotaging artists who time forgot. Writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen had previously essayed cockeyed character studies about embattled individuals — Barton Fink, A Serious Man — but never with this much compassion or a bewildered sense of awe for the many long-suffering nobodies who never got their big break. You’ll forever think differently about the mysteries of luck and chance… not to mention the guy who quietly bumps Davis off the stage and out of the picture, some fly-by-night troubadour named Bob Dylan. —TG

17

‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ (2004)

Would you scrub an ex-lover from your thoughts? Mild-mannered Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) — glum, shy, rooted in a lifetime of minor humiliations — is devastated after splitting with wild child Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), a restless motor-mouth with rainbow of rotating hair dyes. Luckily, there’s a radical cure for heartache: selective memory eradication (and a slight case of permanent brain damage), courtesy of the eraser guys at gonzo medical outfit Lacuna Inc. Then a regretful Joel changes his mind and decides to resist the treatment and cling to the withering past. Music video director Michel Gondry applies his virtuoso surrealism to this giddy tale of human sadness, enlisting Hollywood’s favorite absurdist romantic Charlie Kaufman to pen his wise, Oscar-winning screenplay about the futility of a world-forgetting peace of mind. —S.G.

16

‘Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood’ (2019)

In which Quentin Tarantino gives us his version of a memory movie and rewinds to the lazy, hazy glory days of Los Angeles, 1969 — a world of nonstop AM radio and primetime TV chatter, kitschy pop hits, workaday actors, ragged stuntmen, hippies, starlets, and the damaged goods known as the Manson family hovering on the periphery. Many films get dubbed “a love letter to the movies,” but Tarantino’s meticulously designed valentine more than earns the right to be called a love letter to the movie industry; there’s a genuine affection for the folks who worked hard to craft pulpy fictions back in the day and battled the changing tides of the business called show. The irony that he’s using three of the top A-listers working today (Brad Pitt! Leonardo DiCaprio! Margot Robbie!) to pay homage to the forgotten players and reduced-to-tabloid-headlines talents of yesteryear isn’t lost on you. But this isn’t a tongue-in-cheek take on vintage Tinseltown, and Tarantino’s insistence on revising a historical tragedy via a happily-ever-after wish upon a star comes from the heart as much as the hip. He’s promised that he’s done with cinema after his next project. While we wouldn’t want to deprive ourselves of one last Tarantino joint, it’s tough to imagine a better swan song than this. —D.F.

15

‘Spirited Away’ (2001)

Most stories about growing up follow a familiar arc: adversity, loss, discovery. But even in its more recognizable moments, Hayao Miyazaki’s breathtaking animated adventure resists simple classification. At its most foundational level, Spirited Away chronicles the terrifying supernatural journey of 12-year-old Chihiro, who loses her parents and is forced to work at a bathhouse that exists in the spirit realm — a paranormal palace full of witches, frogs, and cloaked figures. As this young woman navigates a world that seems ready to swallow her whole, she develops and deploys an inner confidence and generosity at life’s most precarious moments. It would be enough if this cinematic achievement only contained the Japanese anime master’s usual layered tableaus, painterly light, and spellbinding vistas. But the movie’s intense understanding of adolescent awe, profound terror, and sudden transformation spin this special, surrealist work of art into a dream you never want to escape. —J.K.S.

14

‘Carol’ (2015)

Todd Haynes turned an underappreciated Patricia Highsmith novel — one published under a pseudonym that doesn’t feature the pulpy, crime-thriller undertones usually associated with her work — into a deceptively epic queer cinematic love story. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), a shy shopgirl who encounters the impossibly glamorous Carol Aird (Cate Blanchett) at the department store where she works. A lost glove leads to a lunch of martinis and poached eggs over creamed spinach in a darkened bar, where the two women’s attraction to one another becomes obvious. Working from a lyrical screenplay by Phyllis Nagy, Haynes recreates the 1950s in a way that is consummately cinematic, evoking his idol Douglas Sirk, aenhanced by Carter Burwell’s aching score, and two impeccable lead performances. The ending is expectedly bittersweet, given the time period in which these two lovers live, but the echoes of their romance reverberate in the viewer’s brain long after the credits roll. —E.Z.

13

‘The Social Network’ (2010)

Following Mark Zuckerberg’s transformation from dorm-room creep to one of the most powerful (and richest) people on the planet, this Aaron Sorkin-scripted, David Fincher-directed film tells the origin story of Facebook and, consequently, that of much of 21st-century life. The Social Network plays to the strengths of both collaborators: Sorkin supplies punchy, info-packed dialogue that makes dense, technical concepts not only understandable but exciting, while Fincher supplies the precisely calibrated tension that proves well-suited for the story of a service whose creation is defined by alienation and division. As the man behind it all, Jesse Eisenberg plays Zuckerberg as a tetchy outsider with a gift for coding and a habit of discarding those who help and inspire him once they’ve stopped being useful. The film’s unforgettable final image of the wunderkind alone at his keyboard, desperately hoping to make a human connection, has only gotten more resonant as the years have gone by. What once seemed like Zuckerberg’s fate now looks like all of ours. —K.P.

12

‘A Separation’ (2011)

Long before Marriage Story let a thousand memes bloom, there was Asghar Farhadi’s take-no-prisoners tale of a union rent asunder by anger, custody issues, blinkered self-involvement, double standards and a need for relocation. The fact that this fight is taking place in Iran, of course, also means there is a different set of cultural rules in play. The couple, played by Peyman Moadi and Sarina Farhadi, keep finding themselves running up against their respective bitterness and a mutual frustration with bureaucratic red tape; an incident involving a carekeeper (Sareh Bayat) hired to care for the husband’s elderly father only complicates things further. A major touchstone of modern Iranian cinema and a stunning example of how to mine drama from the simplest of conversational scenes, Farhadi’s breakthrough movie reminds us that there are no good guys and bad guys in these types of stories. There are only people — loving, flawed, best-intentioned and perpetually screwed up people. —DF

11

‘OJ: Made in America’ (2016)

Orenthal James Simpson was a charismatic Black athlete who bridged this country’s racial divide — he embodied the American dream, proving to be an inspiration to kids who wanted to believe they too could overcome their circumstance. Director Ezra Edelman chronicles what happened after the happy ending, delivering an exhaustive, despairing snapshot of not just a man but also a nation. Just as thoughtful in its examination of Simpson’s sports career as his murder trial, this Oscar-winning documentary connects the dots between race, class, politics and stardom, illustrating how each of them impacted O.J. — and, also, how he came to symbolize the conflicting impulses within the country itself. Americans love a triumph-over-the-odds saga because we like telling ourselves fantasies. Made in America disabuses us of such fanciful notions, arguing that his sobering downfall couldn’t have happened in any other nation on Earth. —T.G.

10

‘Boyhood’ (2014)

Richard Linklater has always been fascinated by the passage of time — that was clear in early works like Slacker (1990) and Dazed and Confused (1993), not to mention his Before trilogy. But it wasn’t until this long-game experiment that the director harnessed its full narrative and thematic potential, capturing the same boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane), his parents (Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke), and sister (Lorelei Linklater) over a 12-year span. (The backstory as to how the Texas-based filmmaker pulled this feat off is in and of itself incredibly fascinating.) In just under three hours, the movie takes the everyday fragments and monumental moments of Mason’s growth, from curious six-year-old to cynical college freshman, and seamlessly reinvents the coming-of-age story into a moving and profound portrait of family and masculinity. It’s rare that such an ambitious movie can look and feel so ordinary. But Boyhood embraces that seismic tension, its indelible power and pleasures baked into the fleeting nature of life itself. —J.K.S.

9

‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)

David Lynch originally planned Mulholland Drive as a network TV drama in 1999. But after ABC rejected his pilot, Lynch expanded it into his 2001 masterwork — his most audacious, haunting, pained, emotionally devastating, imaginatively lavish creation. It’s a surreal night-town tour of Los Angeles, focused on two mystery women: Betty (Naomi Watts), a small-town ingenue fresh off the plane and filled with dreams of movie stardom; and a damaged amnesiac (Laura Harring) who names herself after Rita Hayworth. They fall in love (“Have you ever done this before?” “I don’t know—have you?”), fall asleep, and slip into a trance-like narrative on the border between nightmares and reality. The end result plays like a kaleidoscope of warped Hollywood dreams, complete with the legendary MGM-musical hoofer Ann Miller as a salty landlady, Sixties pin-up boy Chad Everett as a sleazy actor, or country stud Billy Ray Cyrus punching out Justin Theroux. Audiences were stunned, partly because few viewers had seen Watts act before — so nobody was prepared for how violently she transforms throughout the movie. (Lord, that audition scene.) But of all the classics that Lynch left behind, this is the one that most captured the dark power of his genius. Silencio. No hay banda. —R.S.

8

‘Yi-Yi: A One and a Two’ (2000)

There was no way for Edward Yang to know that his seventh feature would be his last; a mere few weeks after he won Best Director for it at the Cannes Film Festival, the late, great Tawainese filmmaker was diagnosed with the cancer he’d battle for the rest of his life. All the same, it’s difficult to imagine a richer, wiser swan song than the story of the Jians, a middle-class Taipei family experiencing a gauntlet of emotions over the course of one eventful year and three exquisitely observed hours. Though the film begins at a wedding and finishes at a funeral, Yang’s mosaic never takes the shape of a rude awakening from bliss to despair. Instead, it zigzags from one to the other, on to the mundane and then back again — a symphony of new friendships, first dates, secret affairs, money troubles, swimming lessons, karaoke, fast food meals, and one tender romantic reunion so perfectly performed and written it could easily occupy its own film. To sink into the movie’s insights is to be grateful that Yang shared them before he went, and bitter that he didn’t have time to share more. But that’s life, isn’t it? —A.A.D.

7

‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ (2015)

His name is Max, and his world is fire and blood. When it came time to revisit Mad Max decades after 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome, Australian filmmaker George Miller decided he’d try to do the film the old-fashioned way, with lots of practical stunts. The director wanted nothing less than to outdo himself. He succeeded. To watch Tom Hardy’s world-weary Max, Charlize Theron’s one-armed protector Imperator Furiosa, her fugitive female wards, a gaggle of biker-gang cosplayers, and those manic War Boy soldiers duke it out on the open plains at 120 mph is witness action-moviemaking at its finest, and its most fearless. There isn’t a single moment when you don’t feel like this ongoing clash of metal and bone isn’t happening before you without real stakes — not just narratively, but in terms of everyone’s safety. (“It was literally like going to war,” stunt coordinator Guy Norris said.) We’re still not sure how they pulled off some of these stunts, and how they didn’t leave dozens of brave men and women in traction afterward. It’s a turbocharged version of an action movie that makes every chase scene, explosion, and death-defying bit of business somehow feel organically crafted with both tremendous care and total abandon. Accept no substitutes. —D.F.

6

‘4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days’ (2007)

Cristian Mungiu’s harrowing drama about a young woman (Anamaria Marinca) helping her roommate (Laura Vasiliu) procure an illegal abortion during the Ceaușescu era wasn’t the first of the Romanian New Wave works to make an international splash or hit these shores. But it’s arguably the key film of the Eastern European nation’s filmmaking renaissance in the mid-2000s, and the one that best represents why this particular new wave remains the most vital world-cinema movement of the 21st century to date. Those long takes and talk-heavy scenes all carry a sense of menace, making you feel like these women are constantly one wrong word, one false move away from having their lives taken from them; even a seemingly innocuous dinner-party sequence feels freighted with danger. (Watch how the camera constantly stays on Marinca’s face, as she worries about the state of her friend while idle chitchat fills the soundtrack.) And the scene in which Vlad Ivanov’s medical “professional” essentially blackmails our protagonists hammers home the way that social repression can breed opportunism in the worst possible ways. It remains a sobering reminder that in a totalitarian regime, all politics are personal — and everything personal is instantly politicized. —D.F.

5

‘Y Tu Mamá También’ (2001)

Before Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón won two Best Director Oscars and conquered Hollywood, he gifted the world with this raunchy rom-com, in which teenage buddies Tenoch (Diego Luna) and Julio (Gael García Bernal) sweet-talk an alluring older married woman, Luisa (Maribel Verdú), into accompanying them on a road trip to a remote, gorgeous beach. The utopian destination doesn’t exist, but they’re cocky (or dumb) enough to think they can pull off this impromptu getaway and score with a flirty, quietly melancholy beauty. Beyond the steamy threesomes and wicked jacking-off jokes, Cuarón’s humane coming-of-age drama captures a snapshot of Mexican society at a time of economic inequality and widespread political protests. The film’s hormone-crazy dudes may be too focused on their dicks to notice the wider world around them, but Y Tu Mamá También is acutely aware, offering a poignant examination of mortality, freedom and male friendship. It’s still one of the horniest movies of this young century, which doesn’t stop it from also being deeply felt celebration of the fragility and seduction of life itself. —T.G.

4

‘Parasite’ (2019)

Bong Joon Ho’s hilarious, terrifying, and violent satire broke through in a way few South Korean films have for American audiences, ultimately taking home Best Picture at the Academy Awards. After having made two sci-fi features with English-speaking stars in Snowpiercer (2013) and Okja (2017), Bong returned to his native Korea for this story of two families both united and divided by class. On one hand there are the Kims, who live in a perpetually flooded basement apartment. On the other there are the Parks, who quite literally live in a glass house. Slowly but surely, each member of the Kim family starts working for the Parks, lying about their qualifications and their relationships to each other. And from there the saga gets wilder and weirder, with a rainy night providing one of the most memorable twists in recent history. There’s a foreboding quality that hangs over the entire film, yet one that’s matched with pure comedy — the “Jessica, only child, Illinois, Chicago” jingle is a perfect example. Those laughs suck you in before the blood starts flowing, the anger at the root of this story coming to the forefront. There are no heroes or villains here. Instead, the haves and have-nots are all painfully human, which makes the tragedy of the story all that much greater — and makes Parasite the perfect film for it’s era, reflecting a generation’s concerns in a gloriously brutal fashion. —E.Z.

3

‘Moonlight’ (2016)

Barry Jenkins’ second film seemed to come of out nowhere — an adaptation of playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney’s little-known work “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue,” courtesy of a modest indie distributor with little industry juice (what’s an A24?) and a director who’d run into obstacles trying to follow up his impressive 2008 debut Medicine for Melancholy. “Gamechanging” doesn’t begin to describe the impact it had once audiences saw what the then-37-year-old filmmaker had come up with. Charting a sensitive young Florida kid’s rocky road to manhood via three time periods and three different actors (Alex R. Hibbert, Ashton Sanders, and Trevante Rhodes, all of whom are fabulous), Jenkins refracts the agonies and ecstasies of African-American life through a very subjective prism. Yet the story he’s gifted us with goes beyond any attempt to categorize it. Moonlight is simply a profound, tender, sympathetic look at a human being finally, painfully coming into his own. Every character, from the neighborhood drug dealer (Mahershala Ali) to the addict mother (Naomie Harris) to the high school tough guy, contains multitudes. Every shot looks ravishing. It’s the sort of once-in-a-lifetime project that hits at just the right time and finds the audience it deserves. This is what the movies look like when the medium’s full arsenal of expression is being tapped by someone with vision. —D.F.

2

‘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.

1

‘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.