Is David Lynch’s unsettling, hallucinatory meditation on Hollywood culture, Mulholland Drive (2001), really the best film of this century so far? According to 177 of the world’s foremost movie experts, yes. Yes it is.
Is David Lynch’s unsettling, hallucinatory meditation on Hollywood culture, Mulholland Drive (2001), really the best film of this century so far? According to 177 of the world’s foremost movie experts, yes. Yes it is.
BBC Culture surveyed film critics, academics, and curators from 36 countries across every continent (except Antarctica) to compile an international list of the top 100 films released since the year 2000.
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Atop the list is Lynch’s surreal noir, followed by Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (2000), Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007, pictured above), and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (2001). Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014) rounds out the top five.
Almost half the critics were American, and two-thirds were men. They included representatives from established publications including the New Yorker, Variety, the Toronto Star, and Le Monde, as well as some from online sites such as Indiewire and Uproxx. Each critic ranked his or her top 10, and BBC ranked the movies by number of votes.
The top 100 films are in 20 different languages, but more than half (57) are in English. The next most common language was French, with 13 films. The best year of cinema so far this century was 2012, with 10 films.
Six directors tied for the most films on the list, with three each: Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, the Coen brothers, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Michael Haneke, and Christopher Nolan. The Coen brothers are the only ones to have two films ranked in the top 20: Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) and No Country for Old Men (2007).
Virtually no live action comedies made the list (unless you count Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street) and only a handful of animated films made the cut, including Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and WALL-E.
Small and independent arthouse movies made a strong showing. Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) is the only superhero film to make the list, and the only other big-budget action films to appear in the rankings are Inception (also from Nolan) and George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road.
Even for movie buffs who have seen many of the films routinely listed on “best of” lists from the last century, this new list is likely to include some unfamiliar gems. Critics could only choose films made in the last 16 years, of course, so it’s unclear how many of these films will stand the test of time, and be remembered, say, fifty years from now.
Here are the top 100 films of the 21st century, according to the experts:
100. Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
Now, if I had a ballot (I did not, perhaps for good reason), this would be my top 10:
10. Whiplash (Damien Chazelle, 2014)
