100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Visual artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen made an impact right out of the gate with this visceral interpretation of Irish political activist Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender, in his breakout role) starving himself to death in the final few months of his life. Rather than retelling the story of “the Troubles” through the lens of a biopic, the movie focuses on the notorious penitentiary where many IRA prisoners were held, via impressionistic snippets — the bruised knuckles of a guard, the smearing on human waste on cell walls — and sets the stage for Sands’ use of his own body and well-being as a means of protest. You’d think that a long centerpiece, in which Fassbender’s inmate debates morality with a priest, would be a break from the almost relentless intensity of life under lockdown for these men, yet the way McQueen captures their conversation via a single, unbroken 23-minute take turns the simple act of talking into something as kinetic and unsettling as the constant violence. Both the director and the actor would go to do equally fervent works centered around sex addiction (Shame) and institutionalized slavery (12 Years a Slave). This inaugural collaboration, however, proved they were perfect creative partners from the start. —D.F.

San Diego, 1975: meet Ron Burgundy, the city’s favorite TV news guy. He’s a gentleman of taste, fond of turtlenecks, jazz flute, his dog Baxter, and expressions like “Great Odin’s raven!” Anchorman is his story, from the comedy dream team of SNL cowbell advocate Will Ferrell and first-time director Adam McKay. Ferrell turned Burgundy into a zeitgeist-capturing American archetype: the absurdly pompous male blowhard whose vanity is about to go down in flames. Talk about influential: without Anchorman, we wouldn’t have modern idioms like “stay classy,” “boy, that escalated quickly,” “milk was a bad choice,” or “I’m kind of a big deal.” It kicked off a string of epochal Ferrell/McKay comedies like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys, chronicling the ritual self-humiliations of American masculinity. But it’s the comic aroma of this movie that still stings the nostrils like a whiff of Sex Panther cologne. —R.S.

There’s a potential that adding Ramell Ross’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel, which just came out last year, to a list like this could be a case of recency bias. But this radical take on a prizewinning literary work is, without a doubt, one of the most stunning cinematic achievements of this century to date. Using a distinct, shifting POV to tell the story of two Black boys (played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) sent to an abusive institution in Jim Crow Florida, Ross forces his audience to reorient their way of seeing as he focuses on small gestures and tiny details — a spiderweb catching the midafternoon sun, a policeman’s club poking a teen’s ribs — via an immersive first-person perspective. What unfolds is a work that takes you inside the characters’ experiences and shatters you as it builds to its tragic conclusion. Adding to its brilliance is Ross’s use of documentary footage, and you have something that truly feels like a lost artifact of American life. —E.Z.

At a meeting during Pixar’s early days, the studio’s core team brainstormed ideas, in the process coming up with a unlikely robot hero who had been left behind on Earth. (“I just thought that was the saddest character I had ever heard of,” director Andrew Stanton later recalled, “and I just loved that.”) Thus set in motion one of the company’s most ambitious films: An almost-silent first act — in which the lovable, dependable droid encounters the all-business probe robot EVE — gives way to a journey into outer space, where we’ll learn what happened to humanity after generations of relying on technology. Pro-environment and anti-consumerism, WALL-E is, first and foremost, a poignant love story about two mismatched misfits. Can anyone hear “It Only Takes a Moment” now without getting misty-eyed? —T.G.

Like several recent superb biopics, Ava DuVernay’s exploration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. isn’t some unwieldy cradle-to-grave portrait — rather, it’s laser-focused on a small but crucial segment of his life, an epochal moment that didn’t just define the man but also the country he sought to change.  King (David Oyelowo) is committed to ensuring the passage of the Voting Rights Act, even when many in America — including sometimes-ally President Lyndon Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) — stand in furious opposition. History tends to simplify this civil rights leader’s legacy, painting him as a humble, peaceful protestor. But Selma corrects that narrative, giving us a brilliant tactician and determined warrior whose steely resolve in the face of virulent racism borders on the miraculous. DuVernay and her deft ensemble — including Carmen Ejogo, André Holland, Colman Domingo and Tessa Thompson — crafted a stirring drama rippling with urgency that’s now flecked with sorrow. King lived to see the Voting Rights Act made into law. He would be long gone when the Supreme Court blithely dismantled it in 2021. —T.G.

Call it a Man Who Fell to Earth for millennials. Jonathan Glazer’s cryptic tale of an extraterrestrial femme fatale (Scarlett Johansson, in what is still a career-best performance) who lures unsuspecting dudes to their death — and then accidentally discovers she has more in common with this species than she thought is — in the truest sense of the word, awesome. Lots of movies have tried to channel that old Seventies sci-fi feeling, and Glazer’s visually sumptuous, genuinely unnerving movie is one of the few that feels as if it actually came from that fertile era of space oddities. But this isn’t the equivalent of one of those 21st century bands that go to great pains to sound like a classic rock group. There’s a sense of exploration in its elliptical storytelling that feels light years ahead of most modern aliens-among-us tales, as well as a handful of images (all those lads slowly sinking into the tarpit muck of her feeding room, the climactic scene that justifies the film’s title) that we still haven’t been able to shake. Under the Skin doesn’t just put a stylish, intellectual spin on the idea of visitors from another solar system. It’s a film that forces you to re-examine your own ideas of what it is to be human. —D.F.

How do you follow up a grand, sweeping, Great-American-Movie statement like There Will Be Blood? (Don’t worry, that film is on this list as well.) If you’re Paul Thomas Anderson, you make something equally as cryptic, complicated and ambitious in its look at the morally dubious men who made this nation what it is today. Joaquin Phoenix is a sailor who, suffering from post-WWII PTSD, is left adrift in terms of re-assimilating into “polite” society. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a would-be spiritual guru and grifter named Lancaster Dodd, who’s in the process of creating a movement that blends philosophy, science fiction, seafaring jargon and that ol’ time religion. (Any resemblance to IRL belief systems is, of course, totally coincidental.) It’s the weirdly paternal bond between these two profoundly flawed men that fascinates Anderson, and the intimate way he charts the contours of their relationship against a backdrop of the mid-20th century’s tectonic social shifts makes this both a character study and a skewed history lesson. Regardless of how the film serves you, it’s damned near unshakable. —D.F.

A portrait of a celebrity’s salacious fall from grace, a peek into the cloistered world of classical music, a meditation on social media’s power in an era of public moral scrutiny — each of these loglines could accurately describe writer-director Todd Fields’ third feature, a strong contender for the century’s defining biopic if not for the fact that Lydia Tár isn’t a real person. And yet, none of those descriptions give justice to the calculated, clinical precision of Cate Blanchett’s prodigious performance as a peerless conductor whose tenacious appetite and ambition exceeds her own grasp. “Time is the thing,” Tár boasts at the movie’s beginning, and Fields forces us to watch the way a world-renowned maestro crumbles when she can’t control the tempo.  —J.K.S

All Bruce Wayne wants is to hang up the cape and let District Attorney Harvey Dent clean up Gotham City. But how do you retire when someone with no regard for either side of the law just wants to watch the world burn? From the moment it opens with a heist scene that feels like the greatest Heat tribute ever, Christopher Nolan’s second Batman movie permanently raises the bar for superhero movies; it’s not an exaggeration to say that virtually every movie about comics-inspired crusaders, caped or otherwise, has either been an attempt to imitate it or fashioned as a counterpoint to it. Everything from Christian Bale’s somber take on the iconic character to those stellar set pieces (the race to save one out of two hostages, the high-flying abduction of an international criminal, the hospital explosion) works toward Nolan’s attempt to turn a pulp blockbuster into a why-so-serious epic about modern morality. But along with its seriousness of purpose, The Dark Knight is usually remembered first and foremost for Heath Ledger’s sociopath in greasepaint — his unhinged take on the Joker liberated the screen supervillain from campy 1960s Pop Art clown and kooky 1980s criminal kingpin, and rebranded him as a genuine 21st century agent of chaos. —D.F.

What do you get when you combine Harmony Korine, Selena Gomez, James Franco, Vanessa Hudgens, Ashley Benson, and Gucci Mane? Possibly the weirdest moment in any of these careers. Spring Breakers is a controversial shoot-‘em-up crime flick that’s also a beach party, like Scarface meets How to Stuff a Wild Bikini — a hallucinatory satire of the American dream in an orgy of pastel nihilism. Four college women go on spring break to St. Petersburg, Florida, for some fun in the sun, involving cheap drinks, hard drugs, and sex in the pool. But they get sucked into a criminal underworld with Franco as a gangsta drug kingpin. Best scene: the party girls gather around the piano at his mansion, order him to “play something inspiring,” then dance with shotguns in the sunset, while he serenades them with the Britney Spears ballad “Everytime.” —R.S.

Fans of The Walking Dead were familiar with Steven Yeun, whose heroic Glenn was one of that show’s signature characters. The rest of the world caught up with the actor thanks to his remarkable work in Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong’s slippery thriller, in which he plays someone who might be a monster. When Yoo Ah-in’s sensitive Lee falls for enigmatic beauty Shin (Jeon Jong-seo), he finds himself unexpectedly drawn into a romantic triangle with Ben (Yeun), a cocky, jet-setting playboy Shin meets on vacation. Based on Haruki Murakami’s short story, Burning provided Yeun with the platform to play a seductive, potentially dangerous man with an unsettling penchant for arson — and, perhaps, murder. —T.G.

The battle between faith and despair has always been central to Paul Schrader’s films as both a screenwriter and director, but rarely has that struggle been as front-and-center as it is here. A pastor (Ethan Hawke) tends to his meager congregation in an historically important but struggling church in upstate New York. The man of the cloth is struggling, too, with his beliefs and his place in the universe, an ordeal that only intensifies after he counsels an environmentalist (Philip Ettinger) who sees no hope for the Earth, at the request of the gent’s pregnant wife, tellingly named Mary (Amanda Seyfried). Schrader borrows freely from Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman in this parable about existential angst and the fine line between activism and extremism, but the result is a film no one else could make: the story of a man attempting to stare into the abyss without going blind. —K.P.

Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 book — detailing how the author, a free black man, was abducted, sold into bondage and survived to tell the tale — isn’t simply the memoir of a slave. It’s a visceral, violent, unshakably disturbing chronicle of the institution of slavery itself, and how it systematically destroyed men, women, families, generations, and the moral foundation of a nation. A visual artist before he began making feature films, the British director has a knack for finding odd, fleeting moments of beauty in Northup’s story, all of which make his unflinching scenes of historical horrors that much more nightmarish. To see Chiwetel Ejiofor’s hero look from the horizon to the camera, gazing at viewers with a pleading stare, is to feel decades of a cursed past collapse on you in an instant. —D.F.

Pedro Almodóvar reunited with his longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas for what is arguably his most personal work — let’s just say it’s not the movie’s resident filmmaker Salvador has a personal style and haircut that distinctly resembles Almodóvar’s. A director creepign into his autumn years, Salvador is in physical agony and perpetually haunted by the image of his mother (Penélope Cruz); the specter of his own death looms larger and larger. Such reminders of his mortality prompts a self-reflective journey that winds its way through meticulously designed Madrid spaces and courses through the highly autobiographical plot. Ultimately, Pain and Glory is a work of intimacy that can only be accomplished when artists know each other as long and affectionately as these two. —E.Z.

There’s an accepted playbook for stories of loss and grief — one which writer-director Kenneth Lonergan chucks out the window with this film starring Casey Affleck as Lee, an alienated loner working as a custodian in suburban Boston who’s compelled to return to his hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea after the sudden death of a family member. That death leaves Lee in charge of his teenaged nephew (Lucas Hedges), a responsibility he’s as unprepared to take on as he’s unwilling to confront an unspeakable tragedy in his past and his part in a failed marriage (there’s a reason that Michelle Williams’ portrayal of Lee’s ex-wife nabbed her an Oscar nomination despite the fact she’s only in a few scenes). It’s both a humorous and painfully honest depiction of the difficulty in attempting to take baby steps back into a world that seems to offer only pain. —K.P.

Reynolds Woodcock, the perfectly named high priest of haute couture played by Daniel Day-Lewis, sews secret messages into the fabric of his coveted clothing. Paul Thomas Anderson does something similar in this rapturous 1950s romance between London’s most revered, severe dressmaker and the woman (a radiantly defiant Vicky Krieps) who becomes his lover, his muse, his equal in domestic sparring. So elegantly refined is Anderson’s craftsmanship  — and so classically structured his storytelling, with its echoes of Hitchcock, Merchant, and Ivory — that it’s easy to miss the kinkiness woven into the film’s exquisite design, which springs out like an errant fiber in the hilariously perverse climax. Look closely, and you might even see something personal in this vision of what it’s like to live and love a demanding artist, sartorial or otherwise. –A.A.D.

We confess: this one’s a bit of cheat, given that Peter Jackson’s adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic sprawls out over three films, each released a year apart. Yet to try and choose one chapter of the trilogy over the others somehow feels instinctually wrong — this gamechanging work, which helped catalyze how genre fiction (and genre fandom) would be critically and commercially received by the mainstream for the proceeding decades, has always felt like the whole was more significant over the sum of its distinct parts. Hence, it’s best to look at this extended chronicle of how four hobbits, dozens of elves, countless orcs, two wizards, a handful of human warriors, a dark lord and some poor sap named Gollum sought to possess one ring to rule them all — say it with us: “and in the darkness, bind them” — as a single, once-in-a-lifetime achievement. From the introduction of the Shire that the hobbits call home to the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the fight with a giant spider named Shelob to the final, fatal grasp of “my precioussss,” The Lord of the Rings reset the bar for ambitious screen world-building and serial blockbuster storytelling. Deeds may not be less valiant because they are unpraised, yet Jackson’s work here still deserves every accolade in the book. —D.F.

Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) couldn’t be more of an average guy. He runs the local diner, loves his wife (Maria Bello) and kids, and is a pillar in his small-town community. After Tom foils a robbery, however, a dodgy-looking stranger (Ed Harris) shows up at his work. He claims to know Stall. And suddenly this everyman doesn’t seem so ordinary any more. David Cronenberg has spent so many years giving us nightmare-fodder visions of exploding heads, body-horror scenarios and Brundleflies that it’s easy to forget he is, first and foremost, a first-rate storyteller capable of delivering a crime thriller that hugs the curves. And while his adaptation of John Wagner and Vince Locke’s graphic novel doesn’t skimp on the gore when it comes to, say, the aftermath of someone’s nose bone being punched into their brain, this deceptively pulpy tale is less about the “new flesh” and all about the psychological effects of repressing your old shadow self. —D.F.

There are movies that put you into dream-like states, and there are movies that make you feel as if you’ve stepped into someone else’s dream already in progress. You can slot Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s award-winning parable about shuffling off this mortal coil into the second category — it’s hard to think of another modern film that replicates the free-form logic of a REM cycle with such poetry and fidelity. A young man, his aunt, and his terminally ill uncle head to a country house. Once they arrive, the barriers between the physical and spiritual worlds seem to dissolve: A ghost shows up to dinner. A long-lost son returns home, now with glowing red eyes and covered in fur. A princess falls in love with a magical catfish. (Before you ask: Yes, the relationship is consummated.) Meanwhile, the title character prepares for whatever awaits him on the other side. Pulling from a lot of regional folklore and paced like an ASMR video, this mediation on death and dying remains a sui generis reverie. It’s unlike anything you’ve likely seen in the past, the present or, should you be blessed with the gift of precognition, the future. —D.F.

Nightmares come sporting a pageboy haircut and a deadly air gun, in this dread-dripped adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s existential Carter-era crime novel that won four Academy Awards (including Best Picture). After stumbling on a corpse-strewn desert drug-deal-gone-wrong and a briefcase holding $2 million in cash, Vietnam vet Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) goes on the lam with the loot. He’s not expecting that the crooks would hire professional psychopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) to recover the dirty money. And grizzled local cop Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is one step behind it all, commenting dryly on the violent proceedings as the characters slowly seal their own fates. Protean auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen, consummate chroniclers of schemes that go sideways, expertly craft their unsettlingly amoral neo-western with laconic efficiency, delivering a blood-soaked reckoning in the empty plains of West Texas. —S.G.

Or: The Gangster as Tragic Zero. With the possible exception of Raoul Walsh, no other filmmaker has left a bigger mark on the mobster film than Scorsese, for better or for worse — and with this adaptation of Charles Brandt’s I Hear You Paint Houses, the director delivers what’s essentially a valedictory statement on the genre. Robert De Niro is Frank Sheehan, the Mob muscle turned Teamster official who was Jimmy Hoffa’s ace in the hole and, according to his memoir, the labor leader’s killer. Joe Pesci is the capo calling the shots. Al Pacino is Hoffa, who loves the working man almost as much as he loves ice cream and power. Rather than simply delivers a greatest-hits (in more ways than one) reel, however, Scorsese gives us the anti-Goodfellas — a long, sustained adrenaline rush that then asks you to spend serious time contemplating the aftermath of a life characterized by moral compromises and Mob rules. Late-act masterpieces don’t come moodier — or more impressive — than this. —D.F.

Attention and love are the same, a wise someone tells teen tornado Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson (Saoirse Ronan). By that metric, Greta Gerwig loves every tumultuous moment of her elapsed adolescence — the Sacramento upbringing she fictionalizes and atomizes into a hilarious, ecstatic montage of waning youth. Too many coming-of-age stories flatten the heightened emotions of growing up into easy lessons and big events. Not this one. It recognizes that every event is big on the cusp of adulthood, even when you’re so eager for life to begin that you can’t see the splendor of the life you’re rapidly leaving behind. Gerwig, like her heroine, has since graduated too, moving out of a vividly ordinary California into a vibrantly fantastic Barbie dreamworld. But her indie breakthrough still shines brightly in the rear-view mirror, a brilliant flash of immortalized teenage desire. –A.A.D.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s big-screen version of Haruki Murakami’s short story is a masterfully subtle and deeply profound meditation on mourning refracted through the experiences of a recently widowed Tokyo theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) mounting a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. Due to his glaucoma, the theater’s insurance company requires that he be driven around in his own vintage red Saab. Still devastated by his wife’s sudden death and haunted by her infidelity, he also deliberately casts her ex-lover in the play. A quiet melodrama of epic scope, Drive My Car paints a mesmerizing portrait of helplessness and despair, where a communal performance transforms unbearable pain into a life-affirming ode to endurance. —S.G.

It’s the year 2027, and Great Britain has been transformed into a war-ravaged dystopia — one where war, pollution, starvation, and pandemics have decimated the birth rate. When a cynical ex-activist (Clive Owen) is asked to do a favor for his ex-wife (Julianne Moore), he accepts in the name of some quick cash. Except the gig turns out to be transporting a pregnant young woman to safety, and thus ensuring the future of the human race. While this it takes its name, and little else from the 1992 P.D James novel, Alfonso Cuarón’s singular take on the source material is a cinematically-jarring exploration of where hope, power, and desolation find themselves at the so-called end of the world. At the time it was released, the movie felt like a worst-case-scenario fantasy. Now, two years away from the story’s time period, its premise feels even more prophetic — and politically urgent. —C.T.J.

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy paired up for a classic Nineties romance in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, in which an American boy meets a French girl on a train, they slip off for a night to explore Vienna, then kiss adieu in the morning. But its completely unexpected and heart-wrenching follow-up hits even deeper than the original, with the same couple meets up again nine years later as wounded and wary adults, having each spent too much time wondering how things might have turned out differently. Delpy’s Celine shows up at a Paris bookstore, where Hawke’s Jesse is signing the novel he wrote about her. They spend a day wandering the city, confessing their fears and regrets, in a real-time moment of painfully poignant intimacy. Linklater collaborated closely with Delpy and Hawke on the screenplay — she also wrote songs for the soundtrack. It’s a totally one-of-a-kind tour de force, and the three reunited for one more excellent chapter in the trilogy, 2013’s Before Midnight. —R.S.

Is it the best Wes Anderson movie? The most Wes Anderson movie? Or miraculously, somehow both? The writer-director’s ornate comedy of manners travels through time to tell the story of a swank European hotel, an exacting concierge named Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), his bellhop Zero (Tony Revolori), and the cast of 1930s sophisticates, eccentrics and felons who cross their path. Naturally, it’s as much a visually gorgeous confection as the cakes baked by Saoirse Ronan’s Agathe, down to the astounding production design by Adam Stockhausen and Alexandre Desplat’s twinkling score. But while Anderson’s tribute to vintage farces is indeed ridiculously funny — in no small part thanks to Fiennes’ impeccably timed line deliveries — it’s also a deeply sad work about encroaching fascism. Gustave is product of a bygone era, able to charm his way through a society that values the appearance of elegance and a sense of class. Once the brownshirts show up, none of that matters at all. —E.Z.

History has transformed Spike Lee’s adaptation of David Benioff’s novel — about a drug dealer named Monty (Edward Norton) who’s wiling away his last hours of freedom before reporting to prison — into a document of a city still reeling from the September 11th attacks. Already an elegiac, if jaundiced, love letter to New York at heart, Lee’s film doubles as a walking tour of a wounded, defiant place that, like Monty, has been forced to reckon with what truly matters by the shadow of finality. What might have merely been an excellent drama about one character’s plight instead immortalizes the feeling of a city, and a nation, mourning the past as it stared down an uncertain future. —K.P.

She’s a 89-year-old pioneer of the French New Wave and an elder stateswoman of world cinema. He’s a 34-year-old enfant terrible of the photography world that loves street art and perpetual sunglasses-wearing. No one could have predicted that Agnes Varda and the gentleman known simply as JR would turn out to be a legendary screen duo, or that a doc on the two of them traveling through the French countryside would be one of the most beautiful, life-affirming 90 minutes you could ever spend in the dark. The joy of riding shotgun with the two of them as they take snapshots of farmers, factory workers, wives, daughters, octogenarians and kids — then blow those photos up to poster- and/or building-size — while eavesdropping on conversations about life, art, movies, mortality and the necessity of being seen can not be overstated. All that, and a cameo (sort of) by “dirty rat” Jean-Luc Godard and Varda singing Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell.” —D.F.

Comedian-turned-filmmaker Jordan Peele’s debut didn’t just signal a career transformation — his tale of a Black photographer (Daniel Kaluuya), whose weekend with his white girlfriend’s family becomes a waking nightmare, reimagined how modern psychological thrillers could juggle social commentary, humor, and revenge at the same time. It was a sea-change in the collective understanding of microaggressions and their harm, with Kaluuya and fellow cast members Bradley Whitford, Alison Williams, Lakeith Stanfield, Betty Gabriel, and Catherine Keener each turning their moments on screen into individual lasting cultural touchstones on everything from white liberalism to the power of the TSA. (People still use — and understand — the sunken place!) Get Out’s presence predating the 2020 Black Lives Matter reckoning in America gives Peele’s film an almost prophetic quality, widening the lane for the inclusion of some of the scariest and prevalent nightmares of all: real life. —C.T.J

Alfonso Cuarón’s masterpiece doesn’t feel like a movie so much as a time machine — one that takes you back to the 1970s Mexico City of the director’s youth, where the streets are crowded with life and domestic workers like Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) double as a nurturing force. The longer we ride shotgun with this formative figure (based on the woman who looked after Cuarón when he was a kid) as she goes about her daily chores and takes care of a fracturing family, the more we’re reminded that cinema is a medium whose specialty is not spectacle but empathy. Not that Roma lacks big moments or ambitious set pieces — riots, earthquakes, mass martial-arts demonstrations and even death occur. But the glory in what the filmmaker accomplishes here is that he immerses you in what feels like one long, intimate memory. It’s a personal film for him; what makes it work is how personal it ends up feeling to you by the end of it. —DF

Revisiting the mass murder committed in the wake of an attempted 1965 coup of the Indonesian government, this chilling, infuriating film blurs the line between documentary and nightmare. Director Joshua Oppenheimer, working with Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian collaborator, talks to some of the men responsible for killing over 500,000 alleged communists and other perceived threats (that number, by the way, is according to the most conservative estimates). Unpunished and vocally unrepentant, the perpetrators are even willing to reenact their crimes in sequences that imitate the Hollywood movies they adore. It’s a chilling depiction of what happens when the bad guys win and start reshaping history in their own image — and of how truth has a way of coming to the surface anyway. —K.P.

Years before the public’s true crime addiction hit critical mass, the maestro of mindhunters himself, David Fincher, threw his magnifying glass over the most vexing American cold case of them all. Forgoing the lurid sensationalism of his earlier Seven, the director instead turns the real-life rampage and indefinitely sprawling manhunt for the Zodiac Killer into a perversely detailed procedural. For all the attention paid to the sleuths, amateur and otherwise, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., and Mark Ruffalo, the true star of the film is the investigation itself — a series of doggedly chased leads that end up leading only to dead ends, the dry matters of protocol and jurisdiction, the paranoid yarn-board conjecture. With its spooky evocation of a dawning tabloid era, Zodiac is like the ultimate 1970s thriller realized only through the clinical chill of hindsight. It ends up indicting the very sickness it passes on, and which the whole world has contracted: a sweaty itch for the mystery you never have to stop solving. —A.A.D.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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