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Short answer: begin with Parasite (2019), Bong Joon Ho’s darkly funny South Korean thriller. It is the strongest current consensus pick: it ranked first in The New York Times’ 2025 poll of more than 500 prominent film figures and first in Rotten Tomatoes’ current 100-film guide. It also won Best Picture, Directing, Original Screenplay, and International Feature Film at the 92nd Academy Awards in 2020.
That does not make Parasite objectively better than every other film. “Best” is a judgment, not a laboratory result. This 100-film guide combines lasting critical esteem, formal invention, cultural influence, emotional and intellectual force, rewatchability, historical importance, and breadth across countries, genres, languages, and filmmaking traditions.
The scope is operational: films released from January 1, 2000 onward, matching the boundary used by The New York Times’ 2025 list. Festival premieres and commercial release years can differ, so a few titles may be dated differently by different databases.
How this list was built
This is a curated ranking informed by several kinds of evidence rather than a claim of objective measurement.
#1 Best Overall
- Industry and critic consensus: The New York Times’ 2025 poll asked more than 500 influential directors, actors, and other notable figures to identify the century’s best films. The BBC Culture poll from 2016 surveyed 177 critics from around the world and placed Mulholland Drive first.
- Critical-plus-audience reception: Rotten Tomatoes’ current guide uses Certified Fresh status and combines Tomatometer and Popcornmeter results with review volume, audience votes, release year, and editorial thresholds. It is useful evidence of broad approval, but it is not interchangeable with a critic poll.
- Institutional and historical significance: Awards, preservation, repertory circulation, international reach, and specialist home-video catalogs help identify films that have continued to matter.
The first 25 entries follow the order of The New York Times’ 2025 top 25, giving the list a transparent contemporary backbone. Entries 26–100 broaden the map with major documentaries, animation, genre cinema, international films, popular blockbusters, and influential works by women and filmmakers from historically underrepresented traditions.
Documentary viewers can jump directly to number 26 and numbers 41–55. Documentary cinema is not treated as a token side category here. It is judged by the same standards as fiction: form, insight, originality, consequence, and the ability to make the world newly visible.
For collectors, Criterion’s dedicated “Best Movies of the 21st Century” collection is another useful reference point. The research snapshot behind this guide identified 24 films from The New York Times list in that catalog. Criterion’s selection is evidence of physical-media and cinephile interest, not an independent ranking, and catalog status can change.
1–10: The current consensus core
1. Parasite (2019)
Director: Bong Joon Ho. Production: South Korea. Mode: social thriller, black comedy.
Premise: A struggling family gradually enters the household and professional lives of a wealthy family. Why it matters: Bong turns class resentment into an exquisitely controlled machine of suspense, comedy, architecture, and tragedy. Its cross-system consensus is unusually strong without making its ranking indisputable. Start here: It is the ideal introduction to Bong’s blend of genre mechanics and social criticism; follow it with Memories of Murder.
2. Mulholland Drive (2001)
Director: David Lynch. Production: United States and France. Mode: surreal mystery, psychological drama.
Premise: An aspiring actor and an amnesiac woman investigate a Hollywood mystery. Why it matters: Lynch makes identity, desire, performance, and cinematic illusion feel like unstable dream material. It topped the BBC Culture critics’ poll in 2016 and remains one of the century’s defining works of formal experimentation. Start here: Watch without trying to solve every image; then explore Blue Velvet if you want the earlier key to Lynch’s nightmares.
3. There Will Be Blood (2007)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Production: United States. Mode: historical drama.
Premise: An ambitious oil prospector builds an empire while clashing with a young preacher. Why it matters: It is an epic study of American extraction, religious power, loneliness, and self-invention, driven by Daniel Day-Lewis’s volcanic performance and an unsettling score. Start here: This is Anderson’s most imposing entry point; follow it with the more intimate The Master or Phantom Thread.
4. In the Mood for Love (2000)
Director: Wong Kar-wai. Production: Hong Kong and France. Mode: romantic drama.
Premise: Two neighbors suspect their spouses are having an affair and form a cautious emotional bond. Why it matters: Repetition, withheld dialogue, narrow corridors, music, and sumptuous color turn restraint into overwhelming romantic expression. Start here: Let the film’s pauses and ellipses work on you; Chungking Express is the more playful next step into Wong’s cinema.
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Director: Barry Jenkins. Production: United States. Mode: coming-of-age drama.
Premise: A Black boy and young man navigates poverty, masculinity, sexuality, and the need for tenderness across three stages of life. Why it matters: Jenkins gives emotional and visual unity to a life usually fragmented by stereotype, showing how identity is shaped by both violence and care. Start here: Its three-part structure is the clearest introduction to Jenkins; follow it with If Beale Street Could Talk.
6. No Country for Old Men (2007)
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen. Production: United States. Mode: crime thriller, neo-western.
Premise: A hunter finds drug money and becomes the target of a nearly unstoppable killer. Why it matters: The Coens strip the thriller down to fate, chance, violence, and moral exhaustion, using silence as aggressively as dialogue. Start here: It is the Coens’ starkest dramatic film; newcomers can then try the warmer tonal puzzle of Fargo.
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Director: Michel Gondry. Production: United States. Mode: science-fiction romance.
Premise: After a breakup, a couple undergoes a procedure to erase one another from memory. Why it matters: Its handmade visual effects and nonlinear structure make the fragility of love physically legible without reducing the characters to a gimmick. Start here: Begin with this accessible collaboration between Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman; then explore The Science of Sleep.
8. Get Out (2017)
Director: Jordan Peele. Production: United States. Mode: horror satire.
Premise: A Black photographer’s weekend visit to his white girlfriend’s family reveals a horrifying system beneath their polite liberalism. Why it matters: Peele made racial anxiety, social performance, and bodily danger work simultaneously as sharp satire and precise genre entertainment. Start here: It is Peele’s most concentrated film; follow it with the more mythic Us.
9. Spirited Away (2001)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki. Production: Japan. Mode: animated fantasy.
Premise: A young girl enters a spirit world and must work to rescue her transformed parents. Why it matters: Miyazaki combines ecological anxiety, labor, childhood fear, and moral ambiguity in a world of astonishing movement and detail. Start here: It is the most welcoming gateway to Studio Ghibli; follow it with Princess Mononoke for a darker ecological epic.
10. The Social Network (2010)
Director: David Fincher. Production: United States. Mode: historical drama.
Premise: The creation of Facebook becomes a story of lawsuits, friendship, ambition, and betrayal. Why it matters: Fincher, Aaron Sorkin, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross created a cool, fast, unnervingly prophetic portrait of status in the digital age. Start here: It is the most immediate introduction to Fincher’s controlled modernism; continue with Zodiac.
11–25: Films that define the early 21st-century canon
11. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Director: George Miller. Production: Australia and United States. Mode: action, science fiction.
Premise: A fugitive convoy crosses a desert wasteland while escaping a tyrant’s army. Why it matters: Its practical stunts, visual continuity, feminist charge, and near-verbal storytelling expanded what a blockbuster action film could communicate through motion alone. Start here: Watch it as a complete visual grammar lesson; the original Mad Max films show where Miller’s ideas began.
12. The Zone of Interest (2023)
Director: Jonathan Glazer. Production: United Kingdom, Poland, and United States. Mode: historical drama.
Premise: A family lives beside Auschwitz while treating the machinery of extermination as background noise. Why it matters: Glazer relocates historical horror into sound, domestic routine, and off-screen space, forcing viewers to confront the banality and proximity of atrocity. Start here: Its formal severity is deliberate; Under the Skin is the next stop for Glazer’s alienated perspective.
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Director: Alfonso Cuarón. Production: United Kingdom and United States. Mode: dystopian science fiction.
Premise: In an infertile near-future, a cynical former activist must protect a pregnant refugee. Why it matters: Its long takes turn political collapse, migration, and sudden hope into immediate physical experience. Start here: It is Cuarón’s most urgent film; follow it with the formally different but equally immersive Gravity.
14. Inglourious Basterds (2009)
Director: Quentin Tarantino. Production: United States and Germany. Mode: alternate-history war film.
Premise: Two revenge plots converge in a Nazi-occupied Europe that exists partly inside cinema’s imagination. Why it matters: Tarantino makes language, performance, and moviegoing itself into weapons, while questioning whether historical revenge can be ethically or artistically satisfying. Start here: Its dialogue-heavy opening is the key to its rhythm; then try Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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15. City of God (2002)
Directors: Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. Production: Brazil. Mode: crime drama.
Premise: Two boys take radically different paths through violence and ambition in a Rio de Janeiro favela. Why it matters: Its kinetic editing, vivid ensemble, and shifting points of view make structural poverty impossible to reduce to a single villain. Start here: It is an immediate introduction to Brazilian contemporary cinema; follow it with Walter Salles’s Central Station.
16. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Director: Ang Lee. Production: Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, and United States. Mode: wuxia, romantic adventure.
Premise: A stolen sword brings together warriors, lovers, and a young woman resisting the life chosen for her. Why it matters: Ang Lee combines gravity-defying action with a melancholy meditation on duty, desire, and freedom, bringing wuxia to a worldwide audience without flattening its traditions. Start here: It is the most accessible gateway to wuxia; then explore King Hu’s earlier classics.
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17. Brokeback Mountain (2005)
Director: Ang Lee. Production: United States and Canada. Mode: romantic drama.
Premise: Two ranch hands sustain a decades-long relationship under the pressure of social and familial expectations. Why it matters: Lee’s restrained landscape drama made queer longing central to mainstream prestige cinema without sacrificing ambiguity or sorrow. Start here: Pair it with In the Mood for Love to see how Lee and Wong Kar-wai use restraint differently.
18. Y tu mamá también (2001)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón. Production: Mexico. Mode: road movie, coming-of-age drama.
Premise: Two teenagers and an older woman take a sexually charged journey through Mexico. Why it matters: The film’s exuberant surface gradually opens into a portrait of class division, political history, friendship, and mortality. Start here: It is Cuarón’s most direct Latin American film; follow it with Roma.
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Director: David Fincher. Production: United States. Mode: investigative procedural.
Premise: Journalists and investigators spend years pursuing the identity of the Zodiac killer. Why it matters: Fincher transforms an unsolved case into an obsessive study of evidence, institutional limits, and the cost of needing an answer. Start here: Its patient procedural structure rewards attention; Memories of Murder makes a powerful companion.
20. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Director: Martin Scorsese. Production: United States. Mode: black comedy, biographical crime film.
Premise: A stockbroker builds a spectacularly corrupt financial empire and turns his own excess into a sales pitch. Why it matters: Scorsese’s speed and comic energy expose how systems reward predation while also implicating the audience’s appetite for spectacle. Start here: It is Scorsese’s most openly excessive late film; follow it with the more reflective The Irishman.
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Director: Wes Anderson. Production: United States. Mode: family comedy-drama.
Premise: A failed patriarch returns to his estranged family by pretending to be terminally ill. Why it matters: Anderson’s precise compositions and storybook deadpan conceal a surprisingly serious interest in regret, depression, and the possibility of repair. Start here: It is the best introduction to Anderson’s early ensemble style; continue with Rushmore if you want its predecessor.
22. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Director: Wes Anderson. Production: United States and Germany. Mode: comedy, adventure.
Premise: A concierge and his lobby boy become entangled in a stolen painting, an inheritance dispute, and a changing Europe. Why it matters: Its nested aspect ratios, miniatures, color schemes, and comic timing turn nostalgia into an elegy for a civilization that was never as innocent as memory suggests. Start here: It is Anderson’s most visually comprehensive film; then try Fantastic Mr. Fox.
23. Boyhood (2014)
Director: Richard Linklater. Production: United States. Mode: coming-of-age drama.
Premise: A boy grows from childhood to college while the same performers age over twelve years of production. Why it matters: The formal experiment is inseparable from the film’s quiet attention to time, parenthood, class, and ordinary change. Start here: Its naturalistic rhythm is Linklater at his most expansive; follow it with the Before trilogy.
24. Her (2013)
Director: Spike Jonze. Production: United States. Mode: science-fiction romance.
Premise: A lonely writer falls in love with an artificial intelligence operating system. Why it matters: Its warm futurism makes technology a vessel for questions about intimacy, projection, and emotional change rather than a simple villain. Start here: This is Jonze’s clearest feature introduction; follow it with the emotionally rougher Being John Malkovich.
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25. Phantom Thread (2017)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Production: United States and United Kingdom. Mode: psychological romance, period drama.
Rank #2
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Premise: A celebrated dressmaker’s rigid private world is disrupted by a young woman who refuses to remain a passive muse. Why it matters: Anderson makes control, dependency, appetite, and love into an elegant battle of wills, with clothing functioning as character and architecture. Start here: It is a refined introduction to Anderson’s later work; then revisit There Will Be Blood.
26–40: International cinema, social drama, and formal invention
26. The Act of Killing (2012)
Director: Joshua Oppenheimer. Production: Denmark, Norway, and United Kingdom, filmed in Indonesia. Mode: documentary, performance-based historical inquiry.
Premise: Former perpetrators of Indonesia’s mass killings reenact their crimes in the styles of the movies they admire. Why it matters: By giving perpetrators control of the performance, Oppenheimer exposes how fantasy, impunity, and national myth protect violence. It is one of the century’s most formally radical documentaries. Start here: Watch it before its companion film, The Look of Silence, which shifts attention toward survivors.
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Director: Terrence Malick. Production: United States. Mode: lyrical family drama.
Premise: A Texas family’s grief and memory expand into a meditation on creation, nature, and grace. Why it matters: Malick replaces conventional plot progression with memory, sensation, and cosmic scale, asking how private pain fits inside an indifferent universe. Start here: Accept its associative structure; Days of Heaven reveals the earlier roots of Malick’s visual language.
28. Aftersun (2022)
Director: Charlotte Wells. Production: United Kingdom and United States. Mode: memory drama.
Premise: A woman reconstructs a holiday spent with her father when she was a child. Why it matters: Wells uses fragments, home-video textures, and what remains unsaid to show how children remember adults they could not yet understand. Start here: It is Wells’s feature debut and a precise example of how small details can carry an entire emotional history.
29. A Separation (2011)
Director: Asghar Farhadi. Production: Iran. Mode: family and legal drama.
Premise: A marital separation becomes entangled with an elderly parent’s care and a disputed accusation. Why it matters: Farhadi builds suspense from competing truths, social class, religious duty, and the impossibility of clean moral judgment. Start here: It is the most direct entry to Farhadi’s ethical storytelling; follow it with The Salesman.
30. The Worst Person in the World (2021)
Director: Joachim Trier. Production: Norway, France, Sweden, and Denmark. Mode: romantic comedy-drama.
Premise: A young woman moves through relationships, work, family pressure, and changing ideas of adulthood. Why it matters: Its chaptered structure captures the freedom and anxiety of contemporary self-invention without turning indecision into a moral failure. Start here: It is Trier’s most accessible film; then watch Oslo, August 31st for a darker companion.
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31. The Handmaiden (2016)
Director: Park Chan-wook. Production: South Korea. Mode: erotic thriller, period drama.
Premise: A Korean pickpocket is recruited to defraud a Japanese heiress, but the scheme keeps changing shape. Why it matters: Park turns perspective, literary adaptation, sexuality, and colonial power into an elaborate act of cinematic misdirection. Start here: Its three-part structure is the best guide to Park’s precision; follow it with Decision to Leave.
32. Memories of Murder (2003)
Director: Bong Joon Ho. Production: South Korea. Mode: crime drama, procedural.
Premise: Detectives investigate a series of murders in a rural region while confronting their own incompetence and institutional limits. Why it matters: Bong moves from absurd comedy to dread and back again, making the failure to solve a crime a portrait of a society changing faster than its institutions. Start here: It is the ideal follow-up to Parasite.
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33. Before Sunset (2004)
Director: Richard Linklater. Production: United States and France. Mode: romantic drama.
Premise: Two people who met nine years earlier walk through Paris and reconsider the lives they chose. Why it matters: Real-time conversation becomes action: every hesitation and unfinished sentence carries the weight of years. Start here: It works best after Before Sunrise, but its emotional stakes remain clear on its own.
34. The Florida Project (2017)
Director: Sean Baker. Production: United States. Mode: social drama.
Premise: A child spends a colorful summer around a budget motel near Disney World while her mother struggles to survive. Why it matters: Baker’s bright images and child-centered perspective reveal poverty without stripping its characters of humor, mischief, or agency. Start here: It is Baker’s most immediately inviting film; follow it with Tangerine.
35. Michael Clayton (2007)
Director: Tony Gilroy. Production: United States. Mode: legal thriller.
Premise: A corporate law fixer confronts a crisis involving a colleague, a dangerous client, and his own compromised ethics. Why it matters: It makes professional language, institutional power, and moral exhaustion suspenseful while refusing the easy comfort of a clean hero. Start here: It is a compact introduction to intelligent American procedural drama.
36. Fish Tank (2009)
Director: Andrea Arnold. Production: United Kingdom. Mode: social realism, coming-of-age drama.
Premise: A volatile teenage dancer in an English housing estate encounters a charismatic new man in her mother’s life. Why it matters: Arnold’s handheld intimacy gives adolescent anger, desire, and economic limitation equal cinematic weight. Start here: It is the clearest introduction to Arnold’s raw, empathetic realism; follow it with American Honey.
37. Past Lives (2023)
Director: Celine Song. Production: United States and South Korea. Mode: romantic drama.
Premise: Two childhood friends separated by migration reconnect as adults while confronting the lives they did and did not choose. Why it matters: Song makes translation, geography, marriage, and counterfactual longing part of the film’s structure rather than background detail. Start here: It is Song’s feature debut and a remarkably assured first step.
38. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen. Production: United States and France. Mode: musical comedy-drama.
Premise: A talented but self-sabotaging folk singer drifts through Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Why it matters: The Coens make artistic failure funny, sad, and strangely beautiful, with songs that function as both performance and autobiography. Start here: It is a good bridge between their comedies and dramas; A Serious Man makes a similarly bleak companion.
39. Melancholia (2011)
Director: Lars von Trier. Production: Denmark, Sweden, France, and Germany. Mode: apocalyptic psychological drama.
Premise: Two sisters respond differently as a rogue planet approaches Earth. Why it matters: Von Trier turns depression and impending extinction into a stately visual universe, linking private incapacity to cosmic scale. Start here: Its two-part structure establishes the emotional logic; follow it with Breaking the Waves.
40. Frances Ha (2012)
Director: Noah Baumbach. Production: United States. Mode: comedy-drama.
Premise: A dancer moves through apartments, friendships, and professional disappointment while trying to become herself. Why it matters: Its black-and-white New York energy turns financial precarity and changing friendship into a modern comedy of movement. Start here: It is Baumbach’s most buoyant entry point; follow it with The Squid and the Whale.
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41. The Gleaners and I (2000)
Director: Agnès Varda. Production: France. Mode: documentary essay.
Premise: Varda travels through France meeting people who gather discarded food, objects, and images. Why it matters: The film connects poverty, waste, art, aging, and the filmmaker’s own act of looking with extraordinary curiosity and playfulness. Start here: It is one of the finest introductions to Varda’s personal documentary voice; follow it with Faces Places.
42. Grizzly Man (2005)
Director: Werner Herzog. Production: United States. Mode: documentary portrait.
Premise: Herzog examines the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell through Treadwell’s own footage and the testimonies of others. Why it matters: The film is simultaneously an environmental portrait, a study of obsession, and a debate about whether nature can be made emotionally legible without being sentimentalized. Start here: Watch it as a conversation between Treadwell’s images and Herzog’s skeptical narration.
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Director: Joshua Oppenheimer. Production: Denmark, Indonesia, Finland, Norway, and United Kingdom. Mode: documentary, survivor-centered historical inquiry.
Premise: An optometrist confronts men involved in the killing of his brother during Indonesia’s 1965–66 anti-communist violence. Why it matters: Its quiet encounters make denial, inherited trauma, and the risks of truth-telling painfully immediate. Start here: See The Act of Killing first if possible, then notice how the change in viewpoint transforms the ethics of the material.
44. Stories We Tell (2012)
Director: Sarah Polley. Production: Canada. Mode: documentary hybrid, family memoir.
Premise: Polley investigates a family secret through interviews, archival material, and carefully staged recreations. Why it matters: It demonstrates that documentary truth is shaped not only by evidence but by memory, performance, editing, and who gets to tell the story. Start here: It is Polley’s defining documentary; approach it without reading a plot summary that gives away its central revelation.
45. Citizenfour (2014)
Director: Laura Poitras. Production: United States and Germany. Mode: political documentary, real-time reportage.
Premise: Edward Snowden meets journalists in a Hong Kong hotel as he begins revealing the scale of government surveillance. Why it matters: Poitras captures history as it unfolds while retaining the tension and uncertainty of a thriller. The film also asks what responsible witnessing looks like when information itself is dangerous. Start here: It is the central film in Poitras’s surveillance trilogy; My Country, My Country provides a different route into her work.
46. O.J.: Made in America (2016)
Director: Ezra Edelman. Production: United States. Mode: long-form documentary, sports and social history.
Premise: This seven-part documentary film follows O. J. Simpson’s rise, criminal trial, acquittal, and later conviction against the history of race, celebrity, policing, and Los Angeles. Why it matters: Its length allows private biography and public institutions to illuminate each other rather than collapsing a complex history into a courtroom spectacle. Start here: Reserve time for the full work; its cumulative structure is part of its argument.
47. 13th (2016)
Director: Ava DuVernay. Production: United States. Mode: political documentary.
Premise: Scholars, activists, and politicians trace the relationship between the Thirteenth Amendment, criminalization, and mass incarceration in the United States. Why it matters: DuVernay gives a broad historical argument a clear visual and editorial shape, connecting law, labor, race, and political messaging. Start here: It is a strong first step into DuVernay’s nonfiction work; pair it with her scripted film Selma.
48. Collective (2019)
Director: Alexander Nanau. Production: Romania and Luxembourg. Mode: investigative documentary.
Premise: Journalists investigate corruption in Romania’s health system after a nightclub fire kills and injures young people. Why it matters: The film finds procedural suspense in reporting, showing how a single investigation can expose a network of institutional lies and fragile civic accountability. Start here: It is an accessible entry to investigative documentary because the reporting process supplies its structure.
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Director: Jonas Poher Rasmussen. Production: Denmark, France, Sweden, and Norway. Mode: animated documentary.
Premise: An Afghan refugee recounts his childhood escape and the secrets he has carried into adult life. Why it matters: Animation protects privacy while giving memory, fear, and displacement a fluid visual form that conventional interview footage could not provide. Start here: It is an excellent entry point to documentary animation; follow it with Waltz with Bashir.
50. Waltz with Bashir (2008)
Director: Ari Folman. Production: Israel, Germany, France, and United States. Mode: animated documentary, antiwar film.
Premise: A former Israeli soldier searches for memories of the 1982 Lebanon War. Why it matters: Its shifting animation styles make repression and testimony visible while questioning the reliability of personal and national memory. Start here: Watch it beside Flee to see two very different uses of animation for lived testimony.
51. Summer of Soul (2021)
Director: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Production: United States. Mode: music documentary, archival film.
Rank #3
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Premise: Performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival are placed alongside the social and political context that made the event significant. Why it matters: It is both a jubilant concert film and an act of cultural recovery, restoring an essential Black musical gathering to mainstream memory. Start here: It works as a first music documentary because its performances and historical argument reinforce each other.
52. Honeyland (2019)
Directors: Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov. Production: North Macedonia. Mode: observational documentary.
Premise: A beekeeper in a remote North Macedonian village tries to preserve a fragile balance with her environment and neighbors. Why it matters: The film’s intimate scale turns ecological stewardship, family obligation, and economic pressure into a quietly devastating human drama. Start here: Its patient observation is a useful introduction to contemporary environmental documentary.
53. Fire of Love (2022)
Director: Sara Dosa. Production: Canada and United States. Mode: archival documentary, romance.
Premise: French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft pursue eruptions together, leaving behind extraordinary footage. Why it matters: Dosa turns scientific archives into a love story while preserving the danger and grandeur of the natural forces the couple studied. Start here: It is an inviting gateway to archival documentary and science film.
54. All That Breathes (2022)
Director: Shaunak Sen. Production: India, United Kingdom, and United States. Mode: environmental documentary.
Premise: Two brothers in Delhi care for injured black kites amid polluted air, economic hardship, and an urban ecosystem under strain. Why it matters: Sen connects animal care to class, labor, religion, and the right to breathe, finding lyrical scale in ordinary acts of rescue. Start here: It is a strong companion to Honeyland and a thoughtful entry to ecological cinema.
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Director: Jehane Noujaim. Production: Egypt and United States. Mode: documentary, political reportage.
Premise: Activists in Cairo’s Tahrir Square navigate the hopes, conflicts, and reversals of the Egyptian Revolution. Why it matters: Noujaim captures political idealism as a living, contested process rather than a finished historical event. Start here: Its direct access and personal stakes make it a compelling introduction to movement-centered documentary.
56–75: Animation, science fiction, fantasy, and popular cinema
56. WALL·E (2008)
Director: Andrew Stanton. Production: United States. Mode: animated science fiction.
Premise: A solitary waste-collecting robot discovers a purpose that reaches far beyond Earth’s abandoned surface. Why it matters: Its largely wordless opening proves that mainstream animation can communicate loneliness, ecological warning, and romance through gesture and composition. Start here: It is one of Pixar’s strongest introductions for viewers who think animation is only for children.
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Director: Brad Bird. Production: United States. Mode: animated comedy.
Premise: A rat with an exceptional palate secretly helps a young kitchen worker become a chef in Paris. Why it matters: Its sensory animation and generous argument about craft make artistic excellence feel democratic without pretending that institutions are fair. Start here: It is a particularly accessible entry to Pixar’s mature storytelling.
58. The Dark Knight (2008)
Director: Christopher Nolan. Production: United States and United Kingdom. Mode: superhero crime thriller.
Premise: Batman faces a criminal whose attacks turn the city’s institutions and moral assumptions against themselves. Why it matters: Nolan uses comic-book mythology to examine surveillance, emergency power, public fear, and the cost of making oneself a symbol. Start here: Watch Batman Begins first for the full character arc, then return to this darker expansion.
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59. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Director: Peter Jackson. Production: New Zealand and United States. Mode: fantasy adventure.
Premise: A hobbit inherits a dangerous ring and joins a fellowship charged with carrying it to destruction. Why it matters: Jackson made large-scale literary fantasy emotionally coherent, geographically tangible, and central to modern blockbuster filmmaking. Start here: Begin with the theatrical trilogy in order; the first film establishes the world and the fellowship’s emotional stakes.
60. Interstellar (2014)
Director: Christopher Nolan. Production: United States and United Kingdom. Mode: science fiction epic.
Premise: An astronaut leaves a failing Earth to search for a future for humanity while separated from his children. Why it matters: Its scientific speculation is inseparable from a melodrama about time, parenthood, and sacrifice, presented with unusually ambitious large-format imagery. Start here: It is Nolan’s most openly emotional science-fiction film; follow it with Inception for a more puzzle-driven experience.
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61. Gravity (2013)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón. Production: United States and United Kingdom. Mode: science-fiction survival thriller.
Premise: Two astronauts struggle to survive after a disaster leaves them stranded in orbit. Why it matters: Cuarón turns weightlessness, silence, and fragile bodies into a direct sensory experience while giving survival an existential dimension. Start here: It is a concise introduction to Cuarón’s command of movement and space.
62. Black Panther (2018)
Director: Ryan Coogler. Production: United States. Mode: superhero adventure, Afrofuturist spectacle.
Premise: A newly crowned king must defend Wakanda while confronting an outsider shaped by the violence of the wider world. Why it matters: Coogler made Black identity, diaspora, technology, and political responsibility central to a global franchise film, with a villain whose challenge cannot be dismissed as simple evil. Start here: It can stand alone, though Captain America: Civil War introduces the hero.
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Directors: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Production: United States. Mode: science-fiction action comedy.
Premise: A laundromat owner confronts alternate versions of her life while trying to save her family and reality itself. Why it matters: Its maximalist editing and genre collisions ultimately resolve into a surprisingly direct argument for compassion across generational and cultural difference. Start here: Embrace its tonal volatility; it is intentionally too many movies before becoming one.
64. The Incredibles (2004)
Director: Brad Bird. Production: United States. Mode: animated superhero adventure.
Premise: A family of superheroes must work together after years of hiding their abilities. Why it matters: Bird uses superhero action to explore domestic frustration, labor, identity, and the dangers of confusing exceptionalism with virtue. Start here: It is a foundational modern animated superhero film and works without requiring any earlier viewing.
65. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
Director: Wes Anderson. Production: United States and United Kingdom. Mode: stop-motion animation, comedy.
Premise: A clever fox’s return to theft endangers his family and the animals living beneath the farms he raids. Why it matters: Stop-motion texture makes Anderson’s themes of vanity, family, and self-acceptance tactile and comic. Start here: It is the easiest way into Anderson’s animation and a natural follow-up to The Grand Budapest Hotel.
66. The Wind Rises (2013)
Director: Hayao Miyazaki. Production: Japan. Mode: animated historical drama.
Premise: An aircraft designer pursues beauty and technical achievement while Japan moves toward war. Why it matters: Miyazaki treats invention as both an artistic dream and a morally compromised contribution to history. Start here: View it after Spirited Away if you want to see Ghibli move from fantasy toward adult historical reflection.
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67. Coraline (2009)
Director: Henry Selick. Production: United States. Mode: stop-motion dark fantasy.
Premise: A bored girl enters a seductive parallel home whose apparent perfection hides a predatory force. Why it matters: Selick respects children’s capacity for fear, giving the film visual invention and genuine menace without losing its emotional clarity. Start here: It is a compact gateway to stop-motion horror and fantasy.
68. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman. Production: United States. Mode: animated superhero adventure.
Premise: A teenager becomes Spider-Man and meets heroes from several dimensions. Why it matters: Its comic-book textures, varied animation techniques, and multigenerational casting make visual style part of the story’s argument about inheritance and identity. Start here: No prior Spider-Man knowledge is required; the film teaches its own mythology.
69. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Directors: Anthony and Joe Russo. Production: United States. Mode: superhero ensemble, franchise film.
Premise: The surviving Avengers attempt to reverse a catastrophe while confronting the cost of restoring what was lost. Why it matters: Its formal importance is partly industrial: it demonstrated how serialized superhero storytelling could become a global communal event and emotional culmination. Start here: It is best after the preceding Marvel films, especially Infinity War, rather than as a standalone introduction.
70. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Director: Guillermo del Toro. Production: Mexico and Spain. Mode: dark fantasy, historical drama.
Premise: A girl in post-Civil War Spain escapes into a mythic labyrinth while living under a brutal military regime. Why it matters: Del Toro makes fantasy a language for political terror, obedience, imagination, and resistance. Start here: It is the clearest entry to del Toro’s mature fairy-tale cinema; follow it with The Devil’s Backbone.
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Director: Jonathan Glazer. Production: United Kingdom, United States, and Switzerland. Mode: science-fiction art film.
Premise: An apparently human woman drives through Scotland, drawing men into encounters whose purpose gradually becomes clear. Why it matters: Glazer reverses the usual alien perspective, using hidden cameras, sound, and bodily unease to examine desire, vulnerability, and the act of looking. Start here: Expect abstraction rather than exposition; The Zone of Interest shows the same director’s control of off-screen space in a historical mode.
72. Arrival (2016)
Director: Denis Villeneuve. Production: United States and Canada. Mode: science-fiction drama.
Premise: A linguist tries to communicate with extraterrestrial visitors while nations debate how to respond. Why it matters: Its science-fiction premise becomes an elegant meditation on language, time, grief, and whether understanding can interrupt fear. Start here: It is Villeneuve’s most accessible introduction; then move to the harsher scale of Blade Runner 2049.
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Director: Yorgos Lanthimos. Production: Ireland, United Kingdom, Greece, and France. Mode: absurdist dystopian comedy.
Premise: Single adults must find a partner within a fixed period or be transformed into animals. Why it matters: Lanthimos uses deadpan rules and deliberately unnatural behavior to expose the coercion hidden inside romantic and social norms. Start here: Its premise is the cleanest introduction to Lanthimos’s absurdism; follow it with The Favourite.
74. The Master (2012)
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson. Production: United States. Mode: psychological drama.
Premise: A volatile veteran becomes attached to a charismatic leader building a new spiritual movement. Why it matters: The film refuses to reduce belief to fraud or faith, instead examining damaged people’s need for structure, submission, and recognition. Start here: Watch it after There Will Be Blood to see Anderson turn from industrial power to psychological power.
75. The Favourite (2018)
Director: Yorgos Lanthimos. Production: Ireland, United Kingdom, and United States. Mode: historical black comedy.
Premise: Two women compete for influence over the ailing Queen Anne in early-18th-century England. Why it matters: Wide-angle lenses, acid dialogue, and shifting alliances make gender, class, desire, and political power into a vicious game. Start here: It is Lanthimos’s most accessible film for viewers who prefer historical comedy to dystopia.
76–100: International landmarks and essential expanders
76. Roma (2018)
Director: Alfonso Cuarón. Production: Mexico and United States. Mode: autobiographical historical drama.
Premise: A domestic worker cares for a family in 1970s Mexico City as private and political upheaval converge. Why it matters: Cuarón’s black-and-white compositions hold intimate labor, class hierarchy, family memory, and state violence in the same frame. Start here: It is Cuarón’s most personal film; watch it after Y tu mamá también for a revealing contrast.
77. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Director: Céline Sciamma. Production: France. Mode: historical romantic drama.
Premise: A painter is commissioned to make a portrait of a young woman who refuses to sit for it. Why it matters: Sciamma makes looking, being looked at, artistic collaboration, and forbidden desire the film’s active subjects. Start here: It is the defining introduction to Sciamma’s mature work; follow it with Petite Maman.
78. Drive My Car (2021)
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Production: Japan. Mode: literary drama.
Premise: A theater director accepts a driver after his wife’s death and slowly confronts grief, guilt, and performance. Why it matters: Hamaguchi uses rehearsals, translation, and long conversations to show how art can create a safe distance from truths people cannot yet speak directly. Start here: Its three-hour scale is purposeful; begin when you can give the film sustained attention.
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79. Burning (2018)
Director: Lee Chang-dong. Production: South Korea. Mode: psychological mystery.
Premise: A young delivery worker becomes obsessed with a woman from his past and the wealthy man she now knows. Why it matters: Lee turns class resentment and uncertain desire into a mystery that refuses to settle into a single explanation. Start here: Its slow accumulation is essential; Poetry offers a quieter route into Lee’s moral imagination.
80. A Prophet (2009)
Director: Jacques Audiard. Production: France and Italy. Mode: prison crime drama.
Premise: A young inmate rises through a prison’s competing power structures while learning how to survive and rule. Why it matters: Audiard makes institutional violence, language, ethnicity, and self-education part of a tense modern gangster education. Start here: It is Audiard’s most forceful crime film; follow it with the more intimate Rust and Bone.
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Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Production: Germany. Mode: political thriller, historical drama.
Premise: An East German officer assigned to surveil artists begins to change through the lives he observes. Why it matters: The film makes surveillance intimate, showing how bureaucratic power can invade rooms while also leaving small openings for conscience. Start here: It is a direct entry to post-Cold War European political drama.
82. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)
Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Production: Thailand, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Spain. Mode: mystical drama.
Premise: A dying man spends his final days with family members, including visitors from other states of existence. Why it matters: Apichatpong treats memory, reincarnation, landscape, and political violence as overlapping realities rather than separate genres. Start here: Let the film’s dream logic remain open; it is not designed as a puzzle with one solution.
83. Holy Motors (2012)
Director: Leos Carax. Production: France and Germany. Mode: surreal fantasy, episodic drama.
Premise: A mysterious performer travels through Paris taking on a series of radically different identities. Why it matters: Carax turns acting, motion capture, cinema, and urban life into a joyous and melancholy argument about why performance persists. Start here: Expect a collection of transformations rather than conventional narrative; Les Amants du Pont-Neuf shows Carax’s romantic side.
84. Toni Erdmann (2016)
Director: Maren Ade. Production: Germany, Austria, and Romania. Mode: family comedy-drama.
Premise: A mischievous father repeatedly interrupts his corporate daughter’s highly controlled professional life. Why it matters: Ade uses embarrassment and absurdity to examine work culture, emotional avoidance, class performance, and a parent’s desperate attempt to reach an adult child. Start here: Its long, uncomfortable comic scenes are the point; give them time to turn.
85. The Return (2003)
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev. Production: Russia. Mode: family drama.
Premise: Two brothers are taken on a mysterious trip by a father who has suddenly returned to their lives. Why it matters: Stark landscapes and withheld explanations turn paternal authority, masculine initiation, and childhood fear into an elemental modern parable. Start here: It is Zvyagintsev’s austere debut and a useful entry to his recurring interest in family and power.
86. The Rider (2017)
Director: Chloé Zhao. Production: United States. Mode: hybrid social drama.
Premise: A young rodeo rider must reconsider his identity after a brain injury threatens the only life he knows. Why it matters: Zhao blends fiction and lived experience to make masculinity, disability, labor, and belonging feel specific rather than symbolic. Start here: It is the best introduction to Zhao’s intimate American landscapes; follow it with Nomadland.
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87. Nomadland (2020)
Director: Chloé Zhao. Production: United States. Mode: hybrid road drama.
Premise: A woman travels through the American West after economic collapse, living in a van and taking seasonal work. Why it matters: Zhao’s mixture of professional and nonprofessional performers makes precarious work and chosen mobility visible without turning either into a simple lifestyle fantasy. Start here: Watch it after The Rider to see Zhao expand her method while retaining its human scale.
88. The Farewell (2019)
Director: Lulu Wang. Production: United States and China. Mode: family comedy-drama.
Premise: A Chinese American woman returns to China for a family wedding organized around a shared secret. Why it matters: Wang makes migration, language, filial duty, and competing ideas of truth emotionally accessible without declaring one culture’s response universally correct. Start here: It is Wang’s feature debut and a warm gateway to diasporic family cinema.
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Director: Martin McDonagh. Production: Ireland, United Kingdom, and United States. Mode: tragicomedy.
Premise: A man’s closest friend abruptly ends their relationship on a remote Irish island. Why it matters: The absurd dispute opens onto loneliness, masculinity, artistic ambition, and the violence people inflict when meaning disappears. Start here: It is McDonagh’s most contemplative film; follow it with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.
90. First Reformed (2017)
Director: Paul Schrader. Production: United States. Mode: psychological and religious drama.
Premise: A troubled pastor confronts ecological despair, institutional compromise, and a young couple in crisis. Why it matters: Schrader’s austere framing and spiritual vocabulary turn climate anxiety into a crisis of faith, action, and despair. Start here: It is the clearest modern expression of Schrader’s “man in a room” tradition; then explore Taxi Driver, which he wrote.
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91. The Lighthouse (2019)
Directors: Robert Eggers. Production: Canada and United States. Mode: psychological horror.
Premise: Two lighthouse keepers descend into hostility and delirium during an isolated posting. Why it matters: Eggers uses a nearly square frame, period language, folklore, and elemental sound to make masculinity and isolation feel physically claustrophobic. Start here: It is best approached as mythic horror rather than a conventional mystery; The Witch is the quieter starting point.
92. Uncut Gems (2019)
Directors: Josh and Benny Safdie. Production: United States. Mode: crime thriller, anxiety comedy.
Premise: A New York jeweler and compulsive gambler keeps making increasingly dangerous bets. Why it matters: The Safdies convert debt, noise, celebrity, and aspiration into an almost unbearable rhythm while making the protagonist’s self-destruction inseparable from his charisma. Start here: It is their most concentrated pressure-cooker; follow it with Good Time.
93. Lady Bird (2017)
Director: Greta Gerwig. Production: United States. Mode: coming-of-age comedy-drama.
Premise: A high-school senior tests her identity, friendships, ambitions, and relationship with her mother before leaving Sacramento. Why it matters: Gerwig makes adolescence feel both singular and ordinary, balancing comedy with a precise understanding of class and parental love. Start here: It is Gerwig’s feature directing debut; follow it with Little Women.
94. The Hurt Locker (2008)
Director: Kathryn Bigelow. Production: United States. Mode: war thriller.
Premise: An explosive-ordnance team in Iraq works under the pressure of improvised bombs, rotation, and addictive danger. Why it matters: Bigelow’s tactile direction conveys combat as a psychological dependency while avoiding a simple heroic or antiwar formula. Start here: It is a defining modern war film; pair it with her more explicitly political Zero Dark Thirty.
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Director: Hou Hsiao-hsien. Production: Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong. Mode: wuxia, historical art film.
Premise: A trained assassin must choose between an assignment and the man she was once meant to marry. Why it matters: Hou transforms martial-arts action into a study of distance, court politics, landscape, and emotional displacement, favoring atmosphere over exposition. Start here: Its deliberate pace is part of its design; A City of Sadness offers a historical route into Hou’s cinema.
96. The Host (2006)
Director: Bong Joon Ho. Production: South Korea. Mode: monster film, family satire.
Premise: A dysfunctional family searches for a daughter taken by a creature emerging from Seoul’s Han River. Why it matters: Bong mixes creature effects, grief, slapstick, environmental negligence, and political distrust without allowing any one genre to settle the film’s meaning. Start here: It is the most playful companion to Parasite and Memories of Murder.
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97. The Great Beauty (2013)
Director: Paolo Sorrentino. Production: Italy and France. Mode: satirical drama.
Premise: A celebrated Roman writer drifts through parties and memories after the death of a first love. Why it matters: Sorrentino’s extravagant camera movement and decadent spectacle gradually become an inquiry into aging, artistic emptiness, and the possibility of beauty after disappointment. Start here: Its excess is intentional; watch it as a visual and spiritual counterpart to La Dolce Vita.
98. The Souvenir (2019)
Director: Joanna Hogg. Production: United Kingdom. Mode: autobiographical drama.
Premise: A young film student becomes involved with an older, troubled man while trying to make her first serious movie. Why it matters: Hogg explores artistic formation, emotional manipulation, class, and memory through a film that is both an experience and a reflection on how experiences become art. Start here: Begin here, then continue with The Souvenir Part II for the full arc.
99. The White Ribbon (2009)
Director: Michael Haneke. Production: Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. Mode: historical mystery, social drama.
Premise: Strange acts of violence unsettle a northern German village shortly before the First World War. Why it matters: Haneke examines how authoritarian discipline, humiliation, and moral certainty can become social habits passed between generations. Start here: Its austere black-and-white style prepares viewers for Haneke’s larger interest in spectatorship and complicity; follow it with Amour.
100. Timbuktu (2014)
Director: Abderrahmane Sissako. Production: Mauritania and France. Mode: historical drama.
Premise: Residents of a Malian town endure the arrival of extremist rule and its restrictions on everyday life. Why it matters: Sissako combines sorrow, absurdity, beauty, and quiet resistance to show how political violence reaches music, sport, family, and ordinary dignity. Start here: It is a powerful introduction to Sissako’s humane, visually composed cinema.
Where to go after the 100
A list like this is a map, not a finish line. If you want more documentaries, continue with films such as Stories We Tell, Citizenfour, Collective, Flee, and All That Breathes as starting points into personal, political, animated, investigative, and ecological nonfiction. If you want a broader international route, move from Parasite to In the Mood for Love, City of God, A Separation, Drive My Car, and Timbuktu.
Streaming availability is too volatile and territory-specific to make a permanent claim here. Check a current local search service, digital rental or purchase listing, repertory cinema, festival program, or physical-media catalog before planning a viewing. Awards are useful evidence of institutional recognition, but they are not a substitute for artistic judgment.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Parasite objectively the best movie of the 21st century?
No. It is the strongest current cross-system consensus pick in this guide: it leads The New York Times’ 2025 industry poll and Rotten Tomatoes’ current guide, and it has major historical significance through its Academy Awards record. Rankings still reflect the voters, methods, and moment that produced them.
What counts as a 21st-century movie here?
The list uses January 1, 2000 as its starting boundary. Release years can vary when a film premieres at a festival in one year and receives a commercial release in another, so databases may occasionally show a different date.
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Why are documentaries included in a list of the best movies?
Documentaries use editing, framing, sound, performance, archival material, and narrative structure just as fiction films do. This list evaluates them by the same broad standards—formal achievement, insight, influence, emotional force, and lasting significance—rather than treating nonfiction as a separate or lesser category.
Where can I watch these films?
Availability changes by title, country, service, and date. Check current local rental and purchase listings, repertory screenings, festivals, or physical-media catalogs. Avoid relying on an old streaming list, especially for international and documentary titles.
The Bottom Line
If you watch only one, choose Parasite. If you want to understand the century’s range, pair it with Mulholland Drive, Moonlight, Spirited Away, The Act of Killing, WALL·E, and In the Mood for Love. The canon remains provisional: the New York Times poll is newer than the BBC’s 2016 snapshot, and films released tomorrow can still change the conversation. Use these 100 movies as a route through 21st-century cinema, not as a final verdict.
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