The 50 best movies of the 21st century (according to everyone who actually watched them)

There are films that reward patience, and then there is "Mulholland Drive," which rewards something closer to surrender. Lynch's Hollywood nightmare has topped more decade-end critical polls than any other film released since 2000, including Sight and Sound's 2012 and 2022 surveys, and the reason isn't that critics agree on what it means. They don't. The reason is that it does something only a handful of films in cinema history have managed: it creates an emotional logic that operates independently of narrative logic, meaning the film produces genuine feeling (dread, longing, horror, grief) without requiring you to decode its plot.

The basic shape of the story involves an amnesiac woman named Rita, a wide-eyed aspiring actress named Betty, and a Hollywood that eats both of them. Beyond that shape, interpretation fractures in a dozen directions, all of them defensible, none of them complete. What is not up for debate is the quality of Naomi Watts' performance in the film's first half, one of the most committed and technically precise pieces of screen acting in the century, or the way Angelo Badalamenti's score uses silence as aggressively as it uses sound. This is the most haunting film of the past 25 years. It earns that distinction on repeated viewings, not just the first.

Paul Thomas Anderson's film about an oil prospector and a preacher in early 20th-century California is the most ambitious American film of this century and possibly the angriest. Daniel Plainview, played by Daniel Day-Lewis in a performance so complete it bends the film around itself, is not a character study in any conventional sense. He is a thesis. Anderson uses him to argue that the founding mythology of American capitalism, the self-made man who builds something from nothing, was always a story told by predators about themselves. The film's famous final scene, which viewers either accept as necessary or reject as operatic excess, is the argument's logical conclusion, a man who has consumed everything around him sitting alone in the wreckage of his appetites.

Jonny Greenwood's score was famously disqualified from Oscar consideration in 2007 for using pre-existing compositions; it remains one of the most disorienting and effective film scores of the century, treating the Western landscape as hostile rather than romantic. Day-Lewis won the Academy Award anyway. What the awards conversation missed is how completely Anderson controls the film's rhythm, stretching scenes past conventional comfort to make you feel the scale of Plainview's obsessions. Two hours and 38 minutes that feel nothing like two hours and 38 minutes.

Charlie Kaufman's screenplay is the best piece of original screenwriting of the century: a science-fiction romance about a procedure that erases specific memories, structured so that you experience the erasure from inside the memory being deleted. The technical audacity of that structure is impressive. What makes the film extraordinary is that the structure serves an argument rather than a trick. Joel, played by Jim Carrey in the best dramatic performance of his career, decides midway through the erasure process that he doesn't want to forget Clementine after all, and the film becomes a chase through his own disintegrating memories, trying to hold on to what the procedure is designed to remove.

Gondry's direction is the perfect complement to Kaufman's script: practical visual effects built from in-camera illusions, giving the memory sequences a handmade quality that makes the emotional stakes feel tactile rather than digital. Kate Winslet's Clementine is one of the most fully realized female characters in American cinema of this era, written as a real person rather than a function of Joel's desire. The film's final scene, two people deciding to try again knowing exactly how it will go, is the most honest piece of writing about love and its costs that I've encountered in any medium.

Terrence Malick's Palme d'Or winner is the most polarizing film in this top 10, which itself tells you something. Critics who argue for it describe an attempt to place human experience against cosmic time, using a 1950s Texas childhood as the human anchor and a 20-minute sequence of the formation of the universe as the cosmic one. Critics who argue against it describe the same film and call it pretentious. The divide is real, and both camps have seen the film accurately. What I can say is that the cosmic sequence, photographed by Douglas Trumbull using techniques from "2001: A Space Odyssey," remains the most visually overwhelming thing I've encountered in a cinema in this century, and that Brad Pitt's performance as the father, simultaneously brutal and lost, is career-best work.

Malick's narration-as-prayer approach, characters addressing God directly in voiceover, is either exactly the right formal choice for the material or a distancing affectation depending on your tolerance for it. The film works best if you accept that its structure is built around feeling rather than argument, and that the two questions it poses (why is there suffering, and how do you live inside it) don't have answers that fit into narrative form. It's not for everyone. For the people it's for, it's irreplaceable.

The highest-grossing film in Japanese history until 2023 is also the most complete work of the century's most complete filmmaker. Chihiro, a sulky 10-year-old dragged into a spirit world after her parents are turned into pigs, is the least heroic protagonist imaginable: she complains, she panics, she has no special powers. The film's argument is that competence is built through work, not inherited, and it dramatizes that argument with such patience and specificity that it functions simultaneously as a children's film and as an analysis of labor, identity, and the moral weight of names.

Miyazaki's worldbuilding in "Spirited Away" is the densest of his career: every corner of the bathhouse has its own logic, its own economy, its own social hierarchy. The film's visual imagination, the Radish Spirit, the soot sprites, the faceless No-Face eating his way through the bathhouse, is not decorative. Each creature is a question about what kind of being a person becomes under specific economic and social pressures. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003 and remains the clearest argument for why the Academy's animated category needs to be judged on the same terms as the best picture field.

George Miller spent 30 years trying to make this film, and the delay produced something that no director working in continuous output could have made. "Fury Road" is built from practical effects, modified vehicles, and stuntwork filmed in Namibia over 120 days, and it moves at a speed that digitally composited action cinema simply cannot replicate, because the physics are real. Miller's editing, the fastest in mainstream cinema without losing spatial clarity, was called "pure cinema" by critics who had spent careers watching filmmakers cut action into illegibility. The film has a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score and six Academy Awards. It's a war film, a feminist film, and the best action film of the century.

Charlize Theron's Furiosa is the film's actual protagonist; Max is a witness and occasional ally. The decision to center the film on Furiosa's mission (freeing enslaved wives from a warlord) while letting Max narrate it in retrospective voiceover is a structural move that took critics a viewing or two to fully process, because the film's marketing positioned it as Max's story. It isn't. It's Furiosa's, and the distinction matters because it's why the film has thematic weight beyond its extraordinary formal achievement.

The Coen brothers' adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel is the most faithful literary adaptation of the century, which is a strange claim given that it faithfully reproduces McCarthy's most deliberate formal choice: the refusal to give the audience what it expects from a thriller. Llewelyn Moss finds a briefcase of money at a drug deal gone wrong. Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in an Oscar-winning performance that redefines screen menace, pursues him. Sheriff Bell, played by Tommy Lee Jones, investigates both. The film withholds conventional thriller resolution at every point where convention would deliver it, and the final scene, Bell's dream speech, is an act of storytelling courage that polarized audiences in 2007 and looks more right every year since.

Roger Deakins' cinematography of the West Texas and New Mexico landscape is the standard against which Western landscape photography in this century is measured. The film's treatment of violence, almost entirely off-screen or immediate without aftermath, is a formal argument that horror is more honest when it isn't aestheticized. The cattle gun is the most terrifying object in 21st-century cinema. Chigurh's coin flips are its most philosophically charged scenes. The whole film is this precise, this controlled, and this serious about what it's doing.

Barry Jenkins' triptych of a man named Chiron across three phases of his life (childhood, adolescence, adulthood) is the most formally accomplished American film of its decade. Each chapter was shot with a different visual register: the handheld intimacy of the childhood section, the more composed adolescent section, the wide and searching adult section. Jenkins uses color, specifically the film's blue palette, as an emotional grammar across all three chapters, and the result is a film that communicates character state through cinematography as effectively as through dialogue.

Mahershala Ali's performance in the first chapter, as a drug dealer named Juan who becomes an unexpected father figure to young Chiron, won the Academy Award for Supporting Actor and is the most precisely observed single performance in the film. But what "Moonlight" does that no single performance can accomplish is make the audience feel the accumulation of a life lived in suppression: the compound effect of hiding identity, absorbing violence, and reconstructing selfhood under pressure. The final scene's silence earns everything that came before it. The film won Best Picture at the 89th Academy Awards after one of the more memorable announcement errors in the ceremony's history.

Spike Jonze's film about a man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence operating system predicted, with unsettling accuracy, the texture of life in the mid-2020s: the isolation dressed as connectivity, the way digital intimacy substitutes for physical presence without fully replacing it, the particular loneliness of a person surrounded by screens. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix in a performance of almost unbearable openness, is not a cautionary tale about technology. He's a portrait of a person who finds it easier to be emotionally available to a voice without a body than to the people in his immediate life, and the film takes that preference seriously rather than condemning it.

Scarlett Johansson's voice performance as Samantha is the best performance of her career, given entirely without the physical tools that most performances rely on. The production design, realized almost entirely in Los Angeles locations dressed to suggest Shanghai and future LA simultaneously, is among the most coherent world-building in American cinema of the decade. Jonze's original screenplay won the Academy Award. The film's final image, two people sitting on a rooftop in silence after everything has changed, is the right ending for every question the film asks.

Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner is the most austere film in this top 10, and possibly the most demanding. Set in Communist Romania in 1987, it follows a university student named Otilia as she helps her roommate obtain an illegal abortion. Mungiu films the entire story in long, unbroken takes, often keeping the camera at a fixed distance that refuses to let the audience look away from what the characters are experiencing. There are no musical cues. There is no score at all. The film's most disturbing scene holds on a face at a dinner table for what feels like an impossible duration, doing nothing but registering the absence of emotion that a person develops when they've processed something too large to process.

The film has been described as a document of life under totalitarianism, as a film about female solidarity, as a horror film made from realistic materials, and as all three simultaneously, all of which are accurate. What distinguishes it from other politically charged films of the decade is that Mungiu never editorializes. The circumstances of the characters' situation produce all the horror the film requires without any directorial underlining. Anamaria Marinca's performance as Otilia is the most sustained piece of screen acting in the top 10: she carries the film's entire moral weight without the release of a conventional dramatic peak.

Del Toro's fairy tale set against post-Civil War Spain refuses to let you decide whether Ofelia's fantasy world is real or a child's coping mechanism, and the refusal is the point. The film's two registers, the brutal realism of fascist Spain and the baroque fantasy of the Labyrinth, share a logic: both are worlds where power is arbitrary and cruelty is institutional. Doug Jones as the Faun and the Pale Man are two of the most imaginative creature designs in cinema history. The final scene's meaning depends on which reading you accept, and the film allows both without cheating either. This is del Toro's masterwork.

The most prescient film of the century. Cuaron's adaptation of P.D. James' novel about a world where humans have lost the ability to reproduce looks like documentary footage of 2026 in ways that no one predicted in 2006. Emmanuel Lubezki's cinematography, including the eight-minute continuous take through an active battle sequence, changed what was considered physically possible in action filmmaking. Clive Owen's performance is the rare understated center of an overwhelming film. The scene of a newborn carried through a firefight, both sides stopping to stare, is the most powerful image of hope in 21st-century cinema.

Pixar's film about the emotional architecture of an 11-year-old girl navigating a family move is the most sophisticated depiction of psychology in mainstream American cinema, full stop. The conceit, personified emotions operating a control panel in Riley's head, could have been gimmick. Docter uses it as a delivery mechanism for something genuinely difficult: the argument that sadness is not a failure to be happy, that Joy's compulsive optimism is its own pathology, and that grief is the price of attachment rather than a malfunction. The abstract thought and imagination land sequences are the most inventive film animation of the decade. Bing Bong's farewell is the most devastating thing Pixar has ever produced.

Joshua Oppenheimer's documentary asks the men who led Indonesia's 1965-66 death squads, now elderly and celebrated by their government, to reenact their killings in the film genres they loved: westerns, gangster pictures, musicals. What follows is the most disturbing documentary ever made, not because of historical footage but because of what happens when the perpetrators perform their own crimes for an audience. The film documents, in real time, the moment several of its subjects appear to understand what they did. Whether that moment is genuine or performance is the question the film refuses to answer, and the refusal is its moral seriousness.

Edward Yang's final film follows a Taipei family through three hours of accumulated observation, building an argument about how lives proceed in parallel without ever quite touching. The film has almost no conventional plot: a man revisits a past relationship, his daughter navigates her first, his son (eight-year-old Yang-Yang) takes photographs of the backs of people's heads because they can't see what's behind them. Yang-Yang's project is the film's thesis. We can only see what's in front of us, which means we require other people to see us completely, and most of the time we don't have them. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and called it "a film of a lifetime." He was right.

Ang Lee's wuxia epic is the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in North America, and its box office is the least interesting thing about it. The film uses the genre's conventions, wire-work fight choreography, martial arts codes, hidden weapons, the pursuit of a stolen sword, as the container for a story about desire and its suppression across three women at different stages of life. Jen's rebellion, Zhang Ziyi's ferocious performance, is the emotional center. The bamboo forest fight remains the most beautiful action sequence in the century.

Jonathan Glazer's film about an alien wearing a human female body (Scarlett Johansson) who lures men into a black void is the most formally radical film on this list. Most of the encounters between Johansson and the men she approaches were filmed with hidden cameras, the men unaware they were being filmed. The alien's growing confusion about what being human means, and the film's refusal to explain the mythology or assign human motivations to non-human processes, makes "Under the Skin" one of cinema's most accurate portrayals of genuine otherness. Mica Levi's score is its own achievement: electronic noise as emotional state.

Celine Sciamma's film about a painter and her subject in 18th-century Brittany is the most controlled formal exercise in the top 25: no score for the first hour, natural light throughout, a screenplay structured around what is seen versus what is known to be seen. The romance between Marianne and Heloise develops through the logic of looking, and Sciamma makes the act of sustained observation feel charged and mutual in a way that romantic cinema rarely achieves. The scene where the string quartet from Vivaldi's "Summer" enters the film is the single most effective musical cue of the decade.

Aaron Sorkin's screenplay and David Fincher's direction combine to make a film that is simultaneously the most accurate portrait of how Silicon Valley culture operates and entirely a fiction about the specific people it depicts. The film doesn't care whether Mark Zuckerberg is accurately represented; it cares about using Zuckerberg as the carrier for an argument about what it costs to build something that changes the world and what kind of person tends to do that building. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' score won the Academy Award. Jesse Eisenberg's performance carries the film's entire moral ambiguity without once breaking the character's impenetrable surface. The opening scene is the best expository scene written for the screen in this century.

Jordan Peele's debut feature functions simultaneously as a horror film, a satire of liberal racism, and an extraordinarily precise piece of genre construction. The film's first half is more uncomfortable than its horror sequences because Peele captures, with unnerving accuracy, the specific texture of a Black man navigating white progressive spaces where the hostility is structural rather than overt. Chris Washington's sunken place is the most effective single horror image of the decade: a perfect visual metaphor for the experience of being present but unheard. The script's screenplay Oscar was well earned.

Linklater filmed Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, and Lorelei Linklater across 12 years, returning for a few days each year to capture a boy growing up in Texas. The film's formal achievement is inseparable from its emotional one: because you're watching real biological time pass in a child's face, the film produces a variety of mourning that no conventionally cast film can manufacture. Arquette's final scene, watching her son leave for college, is the truest depiction of parenthood that cinema has produced. The 165 minutes feel like a life observed rather than a story constructed.

Michael Haneke's black-and-white film about a series of violent incidents in a German village in 1913 and 1914 is deliberately withholding: no incident is resolved, no perpetrator is identified, no explanation for the collective cruelty is offered. Haneke's argument is that fascism doesn't require an identifiable origin point. It grows from the accumulated effects of authoritarian domestic discipline, repressed sexuality, and institutional hypocrisy on a generation of children, the generation that would become Nazis 20 years later. The Palme d'Or winner is the most rigorous exercise in formal restraint in this top 25.

Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northup's memoir refuses the conventions of the slavery narrative film: there is no redemptive white savior with meaningful agency, no emotional release built into the film's structure, and no softening of the economic logic that made the slave trade function. The film's most discussed scene, a hanging that lasts eight unbroken minutes while the plantation's daily life continues around it, is formally identical to Haneke's approach: holding duration past comfort to make the audience inhabit time rather than observe it. Lupita Nyong'o's performance won the Academy Award. Chiwetel Ejiofor's is as good and was less recognized.

Asghar Farhadi's film about a married couple in Tehran whose separation triggers a cascading legal and moral crisis is the most structurally elegant screenplay of the decade. Every character in "A Separation" behaves reasonably given their values and circumstances, and every character's reasonable behavior produces consequences for someone else that are unreasonable and unjust. Farhadi builds a film where there is no villain and no easy moral position, where the audience's sympathies shift with each new piece of information, and where the final scene's silence puts the question to a child that the entire film has been circling. The Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film was the most deserved of its decade.

Ari Aster's debut feature uses horror genre mechanics to make a film about grief, family systems, and the inheritance of trauma. The film's first half is a precision family drama about a woman (Toni Collette) processing her complicated relationship with a recently deceased mother. The second half is a horror film. Both halves are the same film. Collette's performance is the most visceral depiction of unmanageable grief in 21st-century cinema, delivered in a scene at a family dinner table that contains the most uncomfortable 90 seconds of controlled improvisation in recent memory. The film's final image is not there to shock. It is the logical conclusion of everything the film established in its first act.