A couple of months ago, the BBC reached out to dozens of film critics and other writers who cover film—like me, as well as VF.com’s deputy editor, Katey Rich, and Vanity Fair’s digital director, Michael Hogan—and asked each of them to do the near impossible: rank the best movies of the 21st century so far. We could only pick 10 films each, which was not even enough to pick our favorite films from each year of the 2000s. It’s a tricky task, and one that, as all lists of subjectively assessed things tend to, makes one question the value of its premise.
But, ah well. It was still fun and a little maddening to put a list together. All told, 177 critics responded, and the BBC published the results last night, ranking 100 films based on all of our lists. This is the Top 10, based on consensus:
10. No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
9. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi, 2011)
8. Yi Yi: A One and a Two (Edward Yang, 2000)
7. The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
5. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014)
4. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
3. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
2. In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
1. Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
There were bound to be upsets and slights and snubs, but the master list is a fascinating survey of the last 16 years of filmmaking. (Not always in a good way: less than 10 percent of the films were directed by women, for example.) It’s been a great nearly two decades of cinema.
Maybe too great! Sifting through the individual critics’ lists, one could make a whole other best-of list from the scraps, those films chosen by one or a few critics, but not often enough to make the formal top 100. Here, for example, is a slightly more studio- and comedy-friendly list of 10 great films made since 2000, in no particular order:
Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003)
Traffic (Steven Soderbergh, 2000)
Best in Show (Christopher Guest, 2000)
Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)
Selma (Ava DuVernay, 2014)
Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010)
Bridesmaids (Paul Feig, 2011)
Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000)
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001)
Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007)
There are many more, almost infinitely more, permutations that would be perfectly suitable Top 10s. (Not a single Steven Soderbergh film made the formal top 100!) The point is, of course, that while there is certainly some critical consensus, the BBC’s list is not exactly definitive. But it does at least serve as a handy, thorough guide for people looking to catch up on movies they’ve missed in the new millennium. (I need to catch up on a bunch of Chinese and Korean films, for example.) To that end, the BBC’s done a good service. Anything that introduces people to Dogville or Caché or Certified Copy is doing something right.
