The New York Times’s 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century
The New York Times’s 25 Best Movies of the 21st Century
Looking to catch up on some new classics? Among the highlights of these picks from critics Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott are a feminist blockbuster, a Romanian tragedy and a coming-of-age cartoon from Japan.
MOVIE
I’m Not There
A free-form series of vignettes and character sketches, inspired by the music and life of Bob Dylan.
Watch... for a boldly experimental journey through the mythology of a legend. Bob Dylan evolved his music, approach, and appearance throughout his career, so director Todd Haynes (“Carol,” “Far From Heaven”) took perhaps the only sensible approach to his life: casting six different actors of varying age, race and sex to encapsulate the man’s contradictory personas and enact the conflicts in his music. “I’m Not There” doesn’t always make logical or narrative sense (a close familiarity with Dylan’s work helps), but it has an emotional resonance and lyricism too often absent from musical biopics — it’s less interested in dates and places than in the feel of the music and the emotions it evokes.
MOVIE
The 40-Year-Old Virgin
A good-hearted nerd outs himself as a virgin to his co-workers, who set about helping him conquer his inexperience.
Watch... for an uproariously funny and atypically sweet sex comedy. Steve Carell not only stars, but also wrote the script with Judd Apatow (in his feature directorial debut), and their sensibilities and maturity help the material transcend its inherent smuttiness. The film’s heart lies in the charmingly tentative relationship between Carell’s character and the single mom played by Catherine Keener, creating a perfect balance between gentle romance and bawdy humor. And that humor is provided in spades by the nudging, often improvised byplay between our hero and his work buddies (a crackerjack comic ensemble of Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen and Romany Malco). Bonus: keep an eye out for early appearances by the likes of Elizabeth Banks, Jonah Hill, Mindy Kaling, Kat Dennings and Kevin Hart.
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Million Dollar Baby
A grizzled, aging boxing trainer agrees to work with a stubborn female fighter, forging an unexpectedly intense emotional bond.
Watch... for an intimate and moving melodrama. Clint Eastwood directs and stars in this modest boxing story, and it’s a smooth fit for his classical style: It has the feel, texture and tone of a 1940s boxing movie, but with the modern twist of having the crusty old-timer take a “girl fighter” under his wing. It’s mostly a film about the relationships between its key characters. It’s about the comfortable, lived-in, longtime friendship between Frankie (Eastwood) and Scrap (Morgan Freeman); the subtle respect Scrap pays to Maggie (Hilary Swank) and her tenacity; the evolution of Frankie’s irritation toward Maggie into grudging respect and, eventually, love and sacrifice. This is a quiet movie, often barely registering above a whisper. But it speaks volumes about the human condition.
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A Touch of Sin
Four fictionalized stories of corruption and injustice paint a portrait of a China in political, social and economic flux.
Watch... for a gorgeous cultural critique from one of the globe’s most rapidly changing regions. Director Jia Zhangke uses the tales of a fed-up miner, a beaten-down migrant worker, an underage factory operator and the receptionist at a peculiarly themed brothel to expose a population caught between colossal forces: traditionalism and modernism, nationalism and globalism, morality and pragmatism. But rather than offer a textbookish survey of timely issues, Jia renders his film as an empathetic parable by taking the time to respectfully observe the struggles of these characters as hopeful, frustrated, determined, defeated human beings.
MOVIE
Silent Light
In a Mennonite enclave in rural Mexico, a farmer wrestles with the spiritual and familial consequences of an affair.
Watch... for a beautiful meditation on religious austerity and the possibility of divine grace. Previously known for the provocative sex-and-death art films “Japón” and “Battle in Heaven,” the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas took a great leap forward with this mesmerizing drama about the extreme isolation and severity of the faith-based life. Drawing heavily from Carl Dreyer’s transcendentalist classic “Ordet,” Reygadas emphasizes a family’s suffering and sin before suggesting that they may indeed have a special place in God’s kingdom. What sets “Silent Light” apart is the picturesque splendor of the countryside, starting with an opening shot of the sunrise that makes an everyday occurrence look like a miracle.
MOVIE
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
In this Romanian black comedy, a cranky old drunk gets shunted from hospital to hospital over the course of one long night.
Watch... for a critique of Romania’s broken medical bureaucracy that’s equal parts riotous and bleak. The complaints of the local misanthrope Mr. Lazarescu fall on deaf ears until one duty-minded nurse takes a personal interest in his case. As they’re rejected by one uncaring doctor after the next, the Kafka-caliber ineffectiveness of the state infrastructure comes into sharper focus. Director Cristi Puiu keeps this trudge of indignity moving along with a generous dose of bitter gallows humor, treating the total indifference of the medical community with deadpan control and a keen bite.
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White Material
In an unspecified African country, a white coffee-grower rides out an encroaching civil war in order to stay through the harvest.
Watch... for a visually striking vantage on war and privilege in postcolonial Africa. Director Claire Denis has returned to her childhood roots in Africa several times in her career, most notably with “Chocolat” (not to be confused with the film starring Juliette Binoche) and “Beau Travail,” but “White Material” taps into more contemporary hostilities. As the coffee-grower, Isabelle Huppert suggests a woman penned in by her own stubbornness and denial, and much of the film exists in the uneasy limbo before violent action. Through her elliptical style, Denis offers a vivid impression of her heroine’s world in pieces, with gorgeous landscape shots interspersed with images of child soldiers and of a woman slowly coming undone.
MOVIE
The Gleaners and I
The French documentarian Agnès Varda looks at her country’s rich tradition of “gleaners,” and the modern scavengers who continue that tradition.
Watch... for an engaging, enlightening physical and philosophical journey. Director Agnès Varda become fascinated by the history and culture of gleaners, those people who traditionally gathered the leftovers of the harvest, and she set about crossing her country to connect those figures to their modern counterparts: trash diggers looking for scraps, island people finding oysters at high tide, artists who salvage material for their works and more. And she, herself, is a gleaner of the images and effects she captures with her camera, crafting more of a playful personal essay than a documentary.
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MOVIE
Three Times
An anthology of three Taiwanese love stories, told in three different periods (1911, 1966 and 2005), featuring the same two actors.
Watch... for a sampler of a master director’s work, each part with its own distinct texture. The three segments play out at about 45 minutes apiece, which gives them the quality of a novella — long enough to make a strong impression and short enough to offer a distilled vision that doesn’t overstay its welcome. Hou’s career-long interest in period rituals and mores, established in historical dramas like “The Puppetmaster” and “Flowers of Shanghai,” suffuses all of them, but his approach is varied and relatively accessible. The best of the three, the 1966 segment “A Time for Love,” recalls Wong Kar-wai (“In the Mood for Love”) in its bittersweet pool-hall romance, which plays out under dreamy ballads like The Platters’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
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There Will Be Blood
A misanthropic early 20th-century California oil tycoon deals with rivals and opponents while building one small town into the seat of his empire.
Watch... to see a modern American epic with a towering central performance. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for helping writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson create one of the most memorable characters in modern movies: a ruthless entrepreneur whose mannered way of speaking barely masks his contempt for the people who stand in his way every day. Anderson constructs scenes that illustrate the taming of the American west by crooked businessmen and spiritual gurus (one of whom is well played by Dano). The movie’s a downer, but Anderson’s filmmaking is thrilling.
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Inside Out
When 11-year-old Riley grows moody after her family moves, the five emotions operating her brain (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear) desperately try to keep her as innocent and happy as she was as a young child.
Watch... if you want a bittersweet, powerful union of Joy and Sadness. “Inside Out” ranks high among Pixar’s best films, but while children will enjoy the colorful “emotions” bouncing around Riley’s consciousness at face value (the script is funny and wildly inspired), the film’s effect on adults —parents especially — is most profound. Through this inventive conceit, co-writer/director Pete Docter (“Up,” “Monsters, Inc.”) details the volatile yet resilient mind of a child as it evolves and deepens, and leaves childhood simplicity behind. “Inside Out” is about the necessary heartbreak of growing up and becoming more complex beings, and the important roles emotions other than Joy will play in a person’s life.
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Boyhood
Filmed over the course of 12 years, Richard Linklater’s experimental drama follows Mason Jr. from age 6 to age 18, as he develops and matures under a single mother and an unreliable father.
Watch... if you want to have the profoundly bittersweet experience of watching a child grow up before your eyes. Presenting each year of Mason’s life in episodic nuggets, Linklater catches the drama of a boy with a complicated and ever-changing home life. “Boyhood” stands as a testament to how heavily time itself affects our perspective on life and storytelling. For the characters and the audience, it’s a long and fulfilling journey that’s over before you know it.
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Summer Hours
When the beloved matriarch of a family passes away, her grown children are left to decide how to divvy up the estate, which includes some precious heirlooms, but the process reveals some deep divisions between them.
Watch... for an exquisitely observed drama about what holds a family together. The film gets into questions common to many families when a loved one dies: How do you divide the assets? What gets preserved and thrown away? And how does the loss of the deceased alter the family dynamic? Between the opening scene and the closing scene, both set on the matriarch’s estate, the siblings undergo a subtle and painful evolution in their relationship that leaves them and the next generation in a much different place.
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The Hurt Locker
As head of an elite team of specialists tasked with defusing improvised explosive devices in Iraq, Staff Sgt. William James leads his squad mates into perilous situations, perhaps recklessly.
Watch... for a nerve-jangling action-thriller. Writer Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow, who’d later collaborate on “Zero Dark Thirty,” have made a war movie with high drama and expertly choreographed suspense sequences, but Boal’s experience as a journalist adds credibility. “The Hurt Locker” won the Oscar for best picture because it’s as gripping as any action movie, but tethered to the real traumas of war, both in the field and at home, where the stresses of warfare are difficult to shake. The film honors these soldiers’ bravery while understanding its long-term consequences.
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Inside Llewyn Davis
A down-on-his-luck musician tries to find success without sacrificing his integrity in the heyday of the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene.
Watch... if you’re in the mood for a playful, sad character study filled with lovely folk music. In the character of Llewyn Davis, Joel and Ethan Coen (with great support from Isaac) have created a character of fascinating complexity. He sees the rest of the world as full of sell-outs, but he’s also not above using them. There’s also clearly great hurt inside this man, but it only ever seems to come through when he sings. It’s the unhappy journey of a talented performer who may never make it to the big time.
MOVIE
Timbuktu
A cattle herder’s family finds its quiet, withdrawn way of life threatened by the jihadists who move into their village.
Watch... if you’re up for a thoughtful but unnerving examination of life shadowed by fundamentalists. Abderrahmane Sissako tells his story from the inside out, with his modest farmer protagonists doing their best to ignore and avoid the barbaric jihadists who have taken over their community, and the quiet, contemplative scenes between the husband and wife at its center have the overheard poetry of documentary. But if its early scenes amble, the film eventually snaps into focus with blindsiding force, portraying the horror and dread of Shariah law, with brutal scenes of both physical and psychological violence that are troubling and unforgettable.
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Munich
After a Palestinian terror organization kills the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics, a group of Israeli agents are enlisted to secretly hunt down and kill those responsible.
Watch... if you want a thoughtful thriller about terror and revenge. This is one of director Steven Spielberg’s most politically complex films. As we watch this small group of Israeli agents methodically kill those they believe are responsible for the Munich attack, the moral landscape they inhabit becomes more and more complicated — until we can no longer separate the good guys from the bad. Spielberg stages individual suspense setpieces quite effectively, but as the film proceeds, each one becomes messier and more troublesome.
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Mad Max: Fury Road
In George Miller’s reboot of his own series, post-apocalyptic loner Max reluctantly helps a big-rig-driving warrior flee a grotesque tyrant’s grasp, along with his five wives. Many high-revving chase scenes ensue.
Watch... for two hours of unrelenting and virtuosic action set pieces. Miller’s hyperkinetic visual style has been a feature of the “Mad Max” series from the start, but advancements in technology and a generous increase in budget allows him to take his deranged, dystopian future into vastly more expansive terrain. “Mad Max: Fury Road” is as much about Charlize Theron’s steely Imperator Furiosa as its title character, foregrounding a potent allegorical fantasy about women wresting power and freedom in a world controlled by men. Mostly, though, the film streaks full-throttle through desert and fire, intent on becoming a new standard-bearer for the action genre.
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Moonlight
A shy boy in a poor Miami neighborhood struggles with a drug-addicted mother and his own sexuality in this story told in three parts, at three different ages of his life.
Watch... for a gorgeous, moving character study that will stay with you. Writer-director Barry Jenkins tracks his quiet protagonist from grade school through young adulthood, using the triptych structure to subtly but powerfully show how the slights, disappointments and messages this sensitive boy encounters cause him to bury and harden his true self. These moments play out in scenes so delicate, painful and truthful that they’re sometimes hard to watch, but when the protagonist finally finds his peace, you genuinely share the joy of what he’s attained.
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Wendy and Lucy
En route to find work in Alaska, Wendy stalls out in Oregon with her canine companion and not a penny to her name.
Watch... for a heartbreaking and beautifully acted portrait of life on the economic precipice. Channeling the simplicity and social awareness of Italian neorealist films like Vittorio De Sica’s “Bicycle Thieves” and “Umberto D.,” director Kelly Reichardt sees Wendy’s life as a narrowing set of choices, each more desperate than the last. Without the money to pay for car repairs, she gets caught shoplifting dog food from a grocery store, which separates her from her dog Lucy and deepens her financial predicament. The end is a crushing inevitability, but in a subtle and self-effacing turn, Reichardt and Michelle Williams reveal the hazards of being a young woman living hand-to-mouth, without a social safety net to catch her fall.
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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
After their relationship painfully ends, Clementine and Joel undergo a futuristic procedure to erase each other from their memories, with unexpected consequences.
Watch... for a conceptually audacious and sneakily moving mind-bender. Working with director Michel Gondry (the music-video visual wizard who made trippy videos for Björk, Radiohead and the White Stripes), “Being John Malkovich” writer Charlie Kaufman scampers through a maze of human consciousness as a regretful Joel frantically tries to hold onto memories that are slipping away from him. Through all its seriocomic gimmickry, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” makes the sophisticated argument that memories of past relationships, even agonizing ones, are precious and shape who we are. Driven by Jim Carrey’s uncharacteristically restrained lead performance, Kaufman and Gondry’s bittersweet love story (which won an Oscar for best original screenplay) values the sum of romantic experience.
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