Twenty-First-Century Countdowns
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On Monday, social media was suddenly bestrewn and bespattered with ballots. Each one displayed ten thumbnailed posters neatly stacked in two columns, each film identified by its title and the year of its release. The New York Times had begun rolling out the results of its “100 Best Movies of the 21st Century” poll of “more than 500 influential directors, actors, and other notable names in Hollywood and around the world.” Starting with #100 (Greg Mottola’s Superbad, 2007) through #81 (Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, 2010), the NYT is revealing a fresh round of twenty each day, but many movielovers aren’t waiting for Friday’s top twenty before drawing up lists of their own.
Nor are they—okay, we—waiting to speculate as to which movie might take the top spot. The wisdom of any crowd of voters is impossible to measure or predict, but there are a few indicators we can turn to. It’s only been three years since Sight and Sound conducted its most recent massive poll to create—as it famously does only once every ten years—its list of the “Greatest Films of All Time.” And only two films released in the twenty-first century made the top ten on that 2022 list: Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000, #5) and David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001, #8).
Mulholland edged out Mood to top the end-of-the-decade critics’ poll Film Comment conducted in 2010. Coming in at #3 was Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000), which topped the list of the fifty “Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far)” that came together when the Hollywood Reporter’s critics huddled in 2023: “As a brilliant snapshot of its time, Yi Yi ushered in the twenty-first century with pessimism and promise.”
According to They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?, all three films are still holding up mighty well. TSPDT maintains a list of this century’s most-acclaimed films, “an annually updated amalgamation of critics’ end-of-year, end-of-decade, all-time, and miscellaneous lists/ballots relating to films released from 2000 onwards.” The eighteenth edition appeared on February 1 of this year, and the top three titles, in order, are Mood, Mulholland, and Yi Yi.
Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001) comes in at #4, followed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007) at #5. Blood topped both the list of the century’s best that the NYT’s Manohla Dargis and A. O. Scott put together and discussed back in 2017 and the one that the Guardian’s critics drew up and annotated two years later.
When the BBC polled 177 critics in 2016, Mulholland topped it, followed by Mood, Blood, Spirited Away, and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), which is not only the first film mentioned here that was made after 2010 but also the only film made in the twenty-first century with a Metascore of 100 at Metacritic—out of a total of fourteen such perfect scores for any film made since the Lumière brothers set up a camera outside their factory.
What about the 2010s? Were the Aughts so much better for cinema than the teens or will it simply take us a while to appreciate the enduring greatness of, for example, the films that topped the “Best Films of the Decade” poll that Film Comment conducted in 2020? Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) was the favorite at the time, followed by Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann (2016) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010).
ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer was probably onto something last summer when he put his ear to the ground—i.e., checked Letterboxd—to see how fans were ranking the films of past quarter century. The list has its surprises—Wang Bing’s Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002) at #21, Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) at #20—but #1 isn’t one of them: Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite (2019), which—never mind the four Oscars—has racked up more than two million five-star ratings.
Even more fun than cheering or tsk-tsking the rankings in the current NYT poll is scanning the ballots cast by great filmmakers. Bong has listed just nine films, not ten, and intriguingly, two of them are directed by David Fincher: Zodiac (2007) and The Social Network (2010). The ballots are also in from—among many, many others—Pedro Almodóvar, Mel Brooks, Sofia Coppola, Robert Eggers, Barry Jenkins, Julianne Moore, Patton Oswalt, Benny and Josh Safdie, Celine Song, John Waters, and Edgar Wright.
Looking ahead, a new restoration of In the Mood for Love will open at Film at Lincoln Center and IFC Center on Friday along with what Wong Kar Wai has called a “dessert,” a nine-minute coda that hasn’t been screened since 2001. Just as exciting, Wong’s new thirty-episode series Blossoms Shanghai will see its North American premiere later this year on the Criterion Channel.
As much as we’re still missing David Lynch, John Bleasdale, reporting for Variety, hears from cinematographers Frederick Elmes (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet) and Peter Deming (Mulholland Dr., Twin Peaks: The Return) that one of Lynch’s unrealized projects, Unapologetic Genius, may appear as a book. And September 26 will see the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Regina Hall, and Alana Haim.
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