Critics and Filmmakers Name the Best Movies of the 21st Century

You know we love a list here at ScreenCrush, and The New York Times published a whopper of a good one this week. They polled more than 500 directors, actors, and critics and compiled the results to create a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century.

When all was said and done their choice for the top film of the last 26 years was … Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, the critically acclaimed Oscar Best Picture winner from 2019 about a poor Korean family that slowly worms its way into the lives of a wealthy family — with tragic results for almost all the characters.

It’s a choice that’s hard to argue with, but of course this is the internet, so I am sure everyone will argue with it. In the meantime, are the top picks from their best films of the century list.

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Head to the link above or below to see the full ranking, but if you’re wondering: Genre films actually did okay here. There are comedies (Bridesmaids), superhero movies (The Dark Knight), sci-fi (Arrival), gangsters (The Departed), and sports films (Moneyball). It’s a pretty solid survey of the range of movies released this century.

A few of my personal favorites didn’t make the cut — I created my own ballot that you can see here. To my surprise, seven of my ten picks were on the NYT’s master list. (The ones that got left out were Catch Me If You Can, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Take Shelter.) But seven out of ten is pretty good. And up and down the list there are a lot of great films. If you picked one of the 100 titles at random to watch at home on a movie night, you really couldn’t go wrong anywhere.

You can read The New York Times’ entire list, see how individual filmmakers voted, create your own top ten ballot, and vote for your favorite movies in a variety of genres ranging form Tom Hanks movies to R-rated comedies, at their website.