The greatest movies of the 21st century so far

This David Lynch masterpiece is a film split in half: a glamorous romance that suddenly morphs into bitter rejection, a Hollywood mystery that plunges into doom. Can there be another movie that speaks as resonantly– if unwittingly – to the awful moment that marked the ‘00s? Viewers grappled over the meaning of the ‘blue box’, finding little purchase. But in the troubled autumn of this psychodrama's 2001 NYC release, we might have understood it all too well. Mulholland Drive is the monster behind the diner; it's the self-delusional dream turned into nightmare. The triumph belongs to Lynch, who could have rested on the laurels of his three landmarks, Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Creatively, though, he saved this project (originally a misunderstood TV pilot) from dismissal, retooling it and extending his story into complexity. Along the way, a star was born: the extraordinary Naomi Watts, whose fearless double performance wrecked all who submitted to its spell. –Joshua Rothkopf

A man strikes a pickaxe against a stone wall. Later, after this same enterprising individual has found black gold, taken over a small town, gained the world and lost his soul (assuming he had such a thing to begin with), we watch him do the exact same gesture – only this time he's grasping a bowling pin, and that isn't rock he's bashing. Paul Thomas Anderson's revision of Upton Sinclair's Oil! jettisons the source material's muckraking in favor of something far more ambitious: mapping the moment that our nation's bootstrap mentality curdled into a cutthroat corporate culture. Credit goes to Oscar-winner Daniel Day-Lewis, who transforms the movie's inscrutable gargoyle, Daniel Plainview, into the very embodiment of American rot; he even makes a ridiculous non sequitur (‘I drink your milk shake!’) sound terrifying. But this is Anderson's film, and his black-hearted epic proves that the New Hollywood acolyte deserves a seat in the pantheon. As an oblique critique of Bush II's self-made power brokers and winner-take-all capitalism, There Will Be Blood cuts to the bone. As the work of a visionary artist, it's truly sui generis. –David Fear

The consummate unconsummated love story of the new millennium, Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece fetishizes early-'60s fashion more thoroughly than several seasons of Mad Men (how many cheongsam dresses can one person own?) and turns Nat King Cole's Spanish balladry into the official soundtrack of lonely hearts. Yet it isn't the nostalgia factor, pop-culture appropriation or even Wong's color-drunk visuals, courtesy of cinematographer Christopher Doyle, that makes the movie such a metaphysical aphrodisiac. His tale of two neighbors – the stately Mrs. Chan (Maggie Cheung) and would-be pulp writer Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) – who obsess over their spouses' affair in lieu of their own attraction works its spell by perpetually keeping passion at bay. Glances are exchanged, bodies brush against each other in hallways, hands are tentatively held... and then their buildup simply fades away before our very eyes. Thanks to Wong and his leads, both of whom give career-best performances, such small gestures turn unfulfilled longing into hothouse eroticism. The director himself would spend the rest of the decade burning out, and not even a sequel – the sci-fi-inflected 2046 – could help him find his mojo again. This peerless ode to snuffed desire, however, still makes our hearts pitter-patter. –David Fear

Hard to watch and impossible to fully comprehend, Joshua Oppenheimer’s radical documentary tracks down some of the men who took part in the Indonesian mass killings of the mid-1960s and asks them to recreate and relive their crimes for the camera. Flattered by the attention, these mass-murderers willingly take part, only for some to find themselves perplexed and even traumatised by the experience. Stark, incisive and unafraid to confront the absolute worst of human nature, The Act of Killing is, for better and worse, unforgettable. –Tom Huddleston

Monsters are everywhere in Guillermo del Toro's dark fairy tale, set in post-Civil War Spain. Dreamy 11-year-old Ofelia retreats into an imaginary world of feral fauns and fairies rather than face the Fascist in her mother's bed. But her fantasy world proves as brutal as the real one; the uses of enchantment have never seemed so bleakly powerful. –Maitland McDonagh

It's easy to be impressed by vivacious animation, but Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki's timeless fantasia—about a ten-year-old girl who moves to a town inhabited by beasts and specters—also entrances with Shakespearean wit, brothers-Grimm--like folklore and more emotional complexity than most year-end prestige pictures. –Aaron Hillis

In 2020, director Bong Joon Ho made history when Parasite became the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. A dazzling social-satire-meets-home-invasion-thriller about a poor Seoul family infiltrating the lives of a super-rich household probes at questions of inequality, class, manners and the lengths people will go to in order to grasp hold of what they believe ought to be theirs. Nevertheless, such a thematic melting pot and the film’s genre smash never jars, but is instead a dazzling work, surprising and fully gripping from beginning to end, full of big bangs and small wonders. 

Sarah Polley’s melancholic investigation of her family’s history begins as a cosy personal journey, then eases into a much scarier proposition: let’s be more curious about our parents’ pasts. Blending first-person interviews and grainy Super 8 re-enactments with panache, Polley’s one-of-a-kind identity pursuit ends up resembling a memory piece – one that honours her mother’s unapologetically spirited misbehaving. –Tomris Laffly

Pedro Almodvar's brilliantly eccentric girlfriend-in-a-coma melodrama combines a female matador, silent-film dream sequences and an exquisite depth of insight into the male psyche (rare for this feminist auteur). In a decade of comparatively conventional efforts, it's easily the director's most challenging achievement. –Stephen Garrett

Frances McDormand steers this unexpected Best Picture winner about a van-dweller who drives across the US badlands in search for a life outside of the broken system of late capitalist America. Featuring a cast of real-life nomads, director Chloé Zhao’s lo-fi road trip movie expertly stitches together realism, moments of sheer transcendence and a lightly-worn radicalism in a way that feels nothing but unpatronising and empathetic. 

Ang Lee's epic tale of a love affair between two male ranchers with big sky in their eyes was glibly labeled ‘the gay cowboy movie’. But beneath its sweeping vistas and breathless melodrama, the film brilliantly calls the bluff of the Western, that most American of film traditions, in order to excavate the universal loneliness and longing at the core of this country's bluster. –Lisa Rosman

Buster Keaton and Ingmar Bergman haunt Roy Andersson's comic dystopia, a series of absurdist vignettes set in an out-of-time Scandinavian civilization and shot completely on soundstages. Stiflingly artificial and yet thrillingly alive, the movie's stone-faced look at the human condition lurches from bellyaching laughter to stomach-churning despair – perfect for a decade of global unease. –Stephen Garrett

As aching and graceful as it is, Moonlight will always be synonymous with the greatest snafu in Oscar history. But it should equally be remembered as the film that heralded the arrival of Barry Jenkins, an American auteur possessing an unmistakably original voice, yet one comparable to giants like Wong Kar-wai and Claire Denis. A milestone in mainstream LGBTQ+ cinema, Jenkins’s early-career masterwork gently redefines black masculinity with specificity and universality. –Tomris Laffly

If the opening of Up made you blub, you might not have been ready for the bit in Pixar’s stunningly brainy, deeply emotional animation where the tweenaged Riley Andersen runs away from home, her world collapsing around her. We’ve all been there: a time in our lives where our emotions just became too big for our ability to process them. But only Pixar has the daring to reimagine those fast-changing young psyches as a dazzling landscape filled with globe-like memories, trains of thought and an imaginary friend called Bing Bong. –Phil de Semlyen

If eighteenth-century England was half as much fun as director Yorgos Lanthimos’s regal romp makes it look, you’d say to hell with all the itchy skin complaints and rotten teeth and move there. The Favourite plays like The Crown on helium, with bawdiness and bitchiness vying for space with political manoeuvring that would have made Molière proud. Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz are a pitch-perfect duo as bitter rivals, but Olivia Colman steals the show as the sorta-object of their affections: a maverick, melancholy queen who never saw a crustacean she didn’t want to race. –Phil de Semlyen

Disaffected suburban teen Donnie gets dire warnings about the future from a guy in a tatty rabbit suit: Is he losing his mind or is he the sole fixed point in a world whose center will not hold? The more often you revisit it, the better Richard Kelly's sly debut looks, and a 2004 director's cut takes the WTF trippiness to a whole other level. –Maitland McDonagh

In Asghar Farhadi’s Oscar-winning magnum opus, the humane Iranian master explores his customary theme of social justice, mapping out an unflinching study of a marriage’s dissolution intertwined with a shrewd whodunnit. En route to a divorce (not always granted in Iran), we experience an enormous amount of cultural texture as the complex custody case winds its way through the courts. Few films resolve to a final shot this devastating. –Tomris Laffly

Action movies in the 2010s found their thrills in speed (Fast Five, the Mission: Impossible films), spectacle (Inception, the MCU) and raw-knuckled smackdowns (John Wick, Atomic Blonde). The decade’s standout actioner, Mad Max: Fury Road, just went ahead and put a bullet hole in all those boxes – and a few that we hadn’t seen before. Director George Miller, whose hyper-kinetic style makes this movie the big-screen equivalent of defibrillation (he’s a doctor, it’s okay), made a majestic, sand-blasted road movie that also came alive in its quiet moments – not that there were too many of those. –Phil de Semlyen

Burned by the six-year, studio-mandated delay meted out to his sophomore film Margaret, playwright-turned-filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan retreated from Hollywood for more than a decade. When he returned, it was in triumph. Brought on as a writer-for-hire to flesh out an original idea by actors Matt Damon and John Krasinski, Lonergan delivered a devastating (and ultimately Oscar-winning) treatise on grief. One of the best films ever made about the emotional aftermath of deep personal loss, Manchester By the Sea can be spare and relentless, but it’s also unexpectedly hilarious. It recognises, and even celebrates those darkly comic absurdities that come hand in hand with trauma. –Tom Huddleston

You may be tempted to write off the whole thing as another case of irritable male genius torturing his fragile muse. But a redemptive strain of female retaliation mushrooms in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sophisticated romance, resulting in a perverse comedy set within the elegance of a fictional mid-twentieth-century London fashion house. What begins as flirtation morphs into a delicious battle of the sexes, fought by Daniel Day-Lewis – here playing a behind-the-times couturier who dresses the rich – and newcomer Vicky Krieps’s headstrong waitress who refuses to keep it quiet at breakfast. Anderson’s Rebecca-meets-Ophüls fling is not only one of the decade’s most beautiful films, but also the most quotable. –Tomris Laffly

Wobbling into view looking like a festive biscuit tin, the gorgeously ornate ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ could only be the creation of Wes Anderson. Controlled by the perfectly camp concierge Monsieur Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), it is the setting of a graceful character comedy that speeds up as its story gains urgency. War is the unwelcome influence, but the shift in tone is beautifully managed in one of Anderson’s most sophisticated stories. This plays with genre, and it wins. Murder, romance, politics, conflict, crime: all combine in an orderly fashion to create a story that’s as gripping as it is funny. –Anna Smith

Fearless auteur Werner Herzog wouldn't be content with a mere character portrait of eccentric environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, who cohabitated with grizzly bears before being eaten by one. Deepening the possibilities of documentary, Herzog inserts himself into the chronicle, canonizes Treadwell's accidentally poetic nature films and disagrees with his subject's invasion of nature. –Aaron Hillis

Russia’s Andrey Zvyagintsev exposed deep civic corruption (and an even deeper national cynicism) with this ominous Job-like fable, a microcosm of an anarchic post-Soviet culture stomping on the common man and favouring thuggish special interests. Besieged Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov) may lose his house to a rapacious mayor who wants a dacha for himself. Marital estrangement, murder and iffy religious advice swirl into the mix, making Leviathan an especially cloudy shot of 190-proof vodka. How it got funded by the powers that be is a mystery. –Joshua Rothkopf

Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul turns the memories of his doctor parents into a narrative seed, planting it in both a jungle and a city hospital to see what will grow from each. Few recent films seem as driven by pure, organic intuition—and are as consistently sublime. –Kevin B. Lee

Japanese maestro Hirokazu Kore-eda’s best films explore the mechanics of family: how we relate to, and care for one another. Made in the wake of global recession and inspired by real-life stories of Japanese families stealing to eat, Shoplifters tracks the fortunes of one such criminal collective, unrelated by blood but bonded by necessity and experience. Packed with moral complexity and shifting sympathies, Kore-eda’s film deservedly snatched the Palme d’Or at Cannes. –Tom Huddleston

If the notion of ‘gritty reboots’ of cartoonish IP became a rampant cliché in the 2000s, don’t blame Christopher Nolan – blame everyone else for doing it badly. As much credit as the director got for ‘reinventing’ the superhero movie, the equation isn’t exactly nuclear fission: the second entry in his Batman trilogy is basically a bombastic Michael Mann-style crime thriller, piled high with jaw-dropping set pieces and lots of broody ruminations on the nature of heroism. Can we be real, though? The main reason you’re reading about the movie here is Heath Ledger’s lisping, lip-smacking Joker, a rare comic-book villain of true skin-crawling menace. If it were possible to retire characters like NBA jerseys, his purple coat would have been hanging in the rafters before Jared Leto or Joaquin Phoenix ever got to try it on. —Matthew Singer

Someone is terrorizing Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil by delivering videotapes on which they are the secretly filmed subjects—but who's the culprit? A squirmy, jigsaw-puzzle allegory about guilt and revenge, Michael Haneke's icy masterpiece points his camera and finger at the audience, forcing us to question our own unresolved bloodlusts. –Aaron Hillis

If you were to make a character study about the concept of ‘cancellation’, you probably wouldn’t elect to frame it around a coldly intellectual lesbian classical conductor. As portrayed by Cate Blanchett, though, Lydia Tár is quite a character to study: both an EGOT and egomaniac, whose icy veneer hardly cracks as allegations of impropriety threaten to shatter her career. It’s a spellbinding performance, despite never revealing much of Tár’s inner life – or perhaps precisely because it keeps so much hidden. Blanchett makes the film, no doubt, but mercurial director Todd Field buoys the tremendous acting with a Kubrickian visual style, lending a distinctly 21st century story a tint of the surreal. —Matthew Singer

With Roma, Alfonso Cuarón joined the masters. Exploring the writer-director’s Mexico City upbringing from a unique and empathetic sideways angle, this gorgeous monochrome memoir focuses not on little Alfonso and his privileged siblings but on the experiences of his indigenous housekeeper and nanny, played with understated grace by first-timer Yalitza Aparicio. Robbed of Best Picture by the undeserving Green Book, Cuarón took the consolation prize of being the first Best Director winner for a foreign language film. –Tom Huddleston

The rebirth of 3D in the late 2000s resulted in countless cinematic crimes and digital misfires – but Gravity made it all worthwhile. The pinnacle of special effects cinema to date, Alfonso Cuarón’s high-orbit road movie follows marooned astronauts Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as they struggle to reach safety in the wake of a catastrophic space shuttle accident. Viewed on the biggest available screen in pin-sharp 3D, it’s literally breathtaking. –Tom Huddleston

This game-changing horror movie came out of nowhere and drilled straight into the consciousness of anyone who saw it. The reinvention of sketch-comedy star Jordan Peele as a kind of John Carpenter for the 2010s was one of the best stories of the decade: so too, the arrival of Daniel Kaluuya as an actor of serious range. Packed with Easter eggs (you need servicable Swahili to decode one of them), the film’s scary takedown of liberal hypocrisy is constructed around the Londoner’s portrayal of unwitting boyfriend, Chris, as he discovers a cancer in the soul of affluent white suburbia. –Phil de Semlyen

Park Chan-wook's deliriously divisive fable is an escalating series of outrages, perpetrated against (and by) a hapless salaryman-turned-avenger whose quest is as romantic as it is perversely unforgettable. Park's beyond-the-pale sensibilities triggered the usual pop-culture alarms: Did Oldboy empower the Virginia Tech killer? How could Steven Spielberg and Will Smith have considered doing a U.S. remake (there would be a remake in 2013 directed by Spike Lee)? Now take a deep breath and step back: The movie that sparks such discomfiting thoughts is the movie you need to see. –Maitland McDonagh

This sui generis masterpiece is the kind of bonkers gem that has you wishing that French auteur Leos Carax made a whole lot more movies. It’s only his fifth feature in a career that exploded into life in the early ’80s, but, wow, what a comeback: his muse Denis Lavant brings all his loose-limbed, acrobatic genius to the lead, well, 11 roles. One of them is a leprechaun. Another is an elderly beggar. Flowers get eaten. Armpits are licked. Kylie shows up. See? Bonkers – but utterly brilliant with it. –Phil de Semlyen

Are there really new ways for cinema to approach the Holocaust? Jonathan Glazer answers affirmatively in a film that derives striking potency from its surface mundanity. It is, on its face, a nearly plotless observation of a family living in Poland in 1943. Mother tends the garden. Kids swim in a nearby creek. And father goes to work – as the commandant of Auschwitz, which abuts his beautiful home. A din of gunshots, screams and a whirring furnace forms the soundtrack of their lives. But it’s not just about callous Nazis living in tranquility on the periphery of mass suffering: it’s an indictment of all those who’d prefer to tune out the atrocities happening right in front of them – then and now. —Matthew Singer

Björk's screen debut and swan song (until 2022's The Northman) perfectly encapsulates director Lars von Trier's genius – and his faults. A multiple-camera experiment that obscures as much as it reveals, this often atonal musical about a innocent woman railroaded onto death row remains, in spite of (or maybe because of) its contradictions, deeply affecting. –Karina Longworth

If the decade taught us nothing else, it’s that Lesley Manville is a truly stellar actor. Her standout performance came in Mike Leigh’s Another Year, a kind of filmic ‘Eleanor Rigby’ with a London postcode. As singleton Mary, she’s tortured by the contentment of Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent’s happy marrieds and stuck in a damaging spin cycle of expensive mistakes and cheap wine. A judgement-free study of everyday life – and struggle – Leigh’s compassionate film blossoms around her into something truly affecting and universal. –Phil de Semlyen

So much more than a vampire movie, while also being an extremely kick-ass vampire movie, Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster is just the shot of adrenaline big-budget, non-franchise moviemaking needed after the superhero bubble burst. In the 1930s Mississippi Delta, an African-American juke joint is besieged by Irish step-dancing bloodsuckers promising salvation from a world that would have its patrons destroyed. Around the simple ‘survive the night’ narrative, Coogler stuffs big ideas about race, religion and vampirism of the cultural sort, without sacrificing an ounce of blood, hot sex or Michael B Jordan firing a Tommy gun. Awarded with a staggering 16 Oscar nominations, it’s proof original stories can still win at the box office – and that Coogler might be his generation’s Spielberg. —Matthew Singer

Nine years after their brief encounter, we return to Before Sunrise's Europass romantics—and how heartbreakingly fragile they seem. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy turn in career-high work in this golden-hour Richard Linklater drama, the ultimate argument for sequels done right. –Joshua Rothkopf

So deadpan you want to check its pulse, Roy Andersson’s straight-faced comic marvel feels more like a series of loosely connected tableaus than a narrative whole in the traditional sense. But then, there’s nothing traditional about the Swedish director’s way of synthesising the universal business of being human into an artform that’s somehow larky, profound and existential. Time Out’s review at the time compared him with Monty Python. This is his ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch. –Phil de Semlyen

For better or worse (Martin Scorsese would probably say worse), the 2010s were the decade of Marvel. The MCU entered our lexicon in a big way: 21 films released during the last ten years alone, amassing upward of $21 billion globally. Pop culture – its production, its marketing, its consumption – was changed forever, and even if the movies themselves weren’t always worthy of the footprint, at least Ryan Coogler’s was. Dense with creative production design and Hamlet-like intrigue, Black Panther was the superhero movie ennobled. Wakanda forever. –Joshua Rothkopf

Director Pawel Pawlikowski (also of Ida) made one of the most romantic films of the 2010s: a decades-spanning, David Lean-esque epic about the pains of unattainable love. Shot in sparkling black-and-white and embellished with music ranging from Polish folk songs to classic chanteuse ballads (the latter performed by breakout star Joanna Kulig), Pawlikowski’s post-WWII melodrama offers everything we crave from stories of passion: a handsome central couple, unruly surface emotions and beguilingly sexy undertones. –Tomris Laffly

Encapsulating both Wes Anderson's idiosyncratically mannered style and his unjustly underrated humanism, this Salingeresque storybook of familial genius and dysfunction stands as his most majestic film. Led by Gene Hackman's regally flawed patriarch and electrified by bountiful pop songs, it's a dreamy tapestry of misery, regret and joy. –Nick Schager

Set at an English country house, Robert Altman's last great film is both a scabrous class study and a whodunit that makes ‘Who am I?’ a central question. Working from Downton Abbey-creator Julian Fellowes's consummately witty screenplay, the director revisits his fascination with hierarchies of power and rewrites the rules of the game. –Troy Patterson

One cop. One towerblock. An army of bad guys. The plot of Wales-born, Indonesia-based writer-director Gareth Edwards’s ferocious action movie was so simple, it was surprising no one had thought of it before (though coincidentally, the makers of Dredd did think of it at roughly the same time). Punishingly choreographed by stars Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, The Raid introduced the Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat to gobsmacked audiences and spawned an intermittently marvellous but wildly overcomplicated sequel. –Tom Huddleston

Among the most assured debuts of the century so far, Jennifer Kent’s heartbreaking horror film – also a parable on motherhood – unearths the deeply feminine emotional and sexual frustrations intrinsic to maternity. A grief-soaked, contemporary Rosemary’s Baby told in gothic hues, Kent’s modern classic mines screams not via cheap jump-scares, but something several degrees more terrifying: a single parent (the soulful Essie Davis) on the verge of a nervous breakdown. –Tomris Laffly

Call it Our Town's evil twin: Lars von Trier's Brechtian takedown of hypocrisy, Amerikkkan-style, turns chalk outlines on a sparsely furnished stage into a full-fledged version of a typically quaint burg. It also allows the Danish enfant terrible to engage in his two favorite pastimes – bashing the USA's penchant for pious facades and dragging his hapless heroines through hell and back. For once, the stars perversely align, and Von Trier delivers what may be his funniest, most savage satire. A once-in-a-lifetime cast – Lauren Bacall, Ben Gazzara, Harriet Andersson, James Caan, Udo Kier – complement the material, but it's Nicole Kidman as the avenging angel who wins the MVP award. –David Fear

The masterpiece his entire career seemed to have been building towards, Todd Haynes’s sumptuous adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Price of Salt gathers all of his previous preoccupations – forbidden passion, social anxiety, repressed emotion, painstakingly detailed ’50s fashions – into one majestic package. Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara are effortlessly convincing as the secret lovers kept apart by convention, and the final scenes are heart-stopping. It’s perhaps no wonder that Haynes has seemed a little directionless ever since. –Tom Huddleston

A backward-glancing filmmaker but not a nostalgic one, Reading’s Peter Strickland emerged as one of the decade’s most unusual voices: a synth-loving retro stylist who infuses the grammar of ’60s and ’70s exploitation flicks with deep feeling. His third feature is the perfect entry point (gateway drug, to be honest). Clothed in the gauzy soft-focus eroticism of Jess Franco and Radley Metzger, it presents a heartbreaking conundrum: a loving couple on the verge of losing their spark. Sometimes, sadomasochistic bondage play isn’t enough. –Joshua Rothkopf

Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant comedy harkened back to La Dolce Vita and its debauched journalist hero’s metaphysical yearnings. Jep (the magnificently louche Toni Servillo), a sunglass-shaded observer, is abruptly shaken by his own lifelong superficiality; he hopes to stretch out before it’s too late. Like Jep, the movie chases an evolving sense of beauty amid Berlusconi’s hedonism, but the confidence and panache of the filmmaking is never in doubt. –Joshua Rothkopf

This brilliant film took 12 years to shoot – by design. That kind of gamble doesn’t necessarily equal a masterstroke, but given the humane outlook of director Richard Linklater, America’s most relaxed player of the long game, it did. Boyhood is about growing up and if you approach it on a granular level, scene by scene, the content is fairly conventional: school days, first love, bad decisions, families in flux. But something magical happens as we watch young Ellar Coltrane steadily become a Texas teen (not to mention Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke deepen into middle-aged resignation). Boyhood feels experimental but it’s as familiar as a home movie. –Joshua Rothkopf

Heartwarming raunch? The Farrelly brothers scored big in the 1990s with sweet-and-shallow larks but Judd Apatow spent the next decade making the formula downright deep. Virgin is his masterpiece: a hilarious rendering of bromantic insecurity surrounding one decent man's search for someone to fuck. Or even love. –Stephen Garrett

Passion blossoms on the Yorkshire moors in Francis Lee’s stunning debut feature. Josh O’Connor is the surly young farmer who initially resents the presence of hired hand Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), but who could resist that face? Never falling into stereotype, God’s Own Country manages to be both a nuanced portrait of a struggling farming community as well as a sensual romance: much more than just a Yorkshire Brokeback. –Anna Smith

Probably the best film named after a boring legal term (Double Indemnity aside), Ruben Östlund’s tragicomic Force Majeure charts the cracks that open in a well-to-do family when dad scarpers during an avalanche on a skiing holiday, leaving his wife and kids to fend for themselves. Sharper than the pointy bit of a ski poll, what follows feels like a defining satire on the fragility of the male ego. In a meta twist, the avalanche became an internet sensation. –Phil de Semlyen

A stunner of immersive storytelling, Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic thriller plays out almost in real time, propelled by hypnotic long takes. In a future world where infertility has made the masses hopeless and the ruling class has exploited fear to divide and conquer, a band of British fugitives rally around the first baby in 18 years, breaking police barricades to reassert the very best of humanity.—S. James Snyder

She wanders the post-Soviet slums, dreaming of America. But after a brutal parental abandonment, this teen falls deeply into a trap. Young Oksana Akinshina gives the performance of a lifetime, worthy of Mouchette; her director, Sweden's Lukas Moodysson, was, at this moment, the world's most compassionate filmmaker. –Joshua Rothkopf

With anti-Semitism on the rise worldwide, the subject of the Holocaust feels as vital as ever – as do movies about it, especially those that commit to a studious, unsentimental reproduction of the horror in all its banality. Hungary’s László Nemes made his feature debut with this shattering landmark drama, an immersive plunge into the day-to-day operations of Auschwitz, seen through the eyes of a Sonderkommando, Saul (Géza Röhrig), one of the Jewish prisoners conscripted into the disposal of the bodies. –Joshua Rothkopf

Has a director ever grown up so well in the limelight as David Fincher? And still, no one—not his critics nor his fans—expected the shockingly intelligent exploration of obsession that Zodiac appeared to be. On its surface, Fincher's subject was California's notorious late-'60s serial killer, a vague memory from the filmmaker's own Marin County youth. But the movie's real power came in its latter scenes, the police leads running dry, our heroes unable to drop their quest even as it ruins them. Zodiac presents a city haunted by a ghost: We float high above nighttime San Francisco as voices whisper. It was way too close for comfort. –Joshua Rothkopf

If you'd had your heart broken, would you erase part of your consciousness? For Joel (Jim Carrey), the question's a no-brainer: he's so devastated over being dumped by his darling Clementine (Kate Winslet) that he'll have his remembrances of her wiped clean. Until, of course, Joel decides that a mind full of memories really is a terrible thing to waste. In the past, both director Michel Gondry's kindergarten arts-and-crafts aesthetic and Charlie Kaufman's Mobius-striptease scripts have come off as insufferably twee and gimmicky. Here, the duo finally finds the right combination of high-concept and humanity, taking the what-if idea of a company that lobotomizes the lovelorn into territory that's funny, painful, poetic and unsettlingly weird. –David Fear

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson deliver a startlingly original look at loneliness and love with this stop-motion animation about a travelling businessman (David Thewlis) who tries to look up his ex. It’s a darkly funny character comedy with all the surrealism you’d expect from a Kaufman creation, but like his screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it’s relatable in all kinds of unexpected ways. It also rivals Team America for the most memorable puppet sex scene in cinema. –Anna Smith

If Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation was a fierce corrective to DW Griffith’s 1915 namesake, this Oscar winner dismantled the cosy myths of Gone with the Wind piece by piece, showing slavery as the traumatic, brutalising prison it was. The big houses in Brit director Steve McQueen’s Best Picture winner (and surprise commercial hit) are filled only with moral cowards (Benedict Cumberbatch’s William Ford) and drunken monsters (Michael Fassbender’s Edwin Epps). Thankfully, the soulful Chiwetel Ejiofor as free-born New Yorker Solomon Northup and Lupita Nyong’o (spectacular in her breakthrough role) make it as much a cry of defiance as a litany of miseries. –Phil de Semlyen

Sofia Coppola’s second feature is a movie where nothing and everything happens at once. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are two lost souls adrift in the neon glow of Tokyo – he’s a washed-up actor, she’s a twentysomething disillusioned with her newish marriage – who meet in the lounge of the hotel where they’re both more or less sequestered. They stay up talking, drinking and, most memorably, singing karaoke. Then they part, most likely forever. Yet the impact of their fleeting connection changes them irrevocably, even if it’s never explicitly said aloud. (That we’re privy to hearing, anyway.) ‘Quietly devastating’ might be an overused phrase, but here, it’s hard to escape. —Matthew Singer

Young Gabita needs an abortion in 1980s Romania, where such things are illegal, and her roommate helps her scrap together cash to pay a man with questionable credentials. When things go terribly wrong in a hotel room, these women find a means to grit their teeth and survive. Cristian Mungiu's pressure cooker of a drama, widely praised upon its release, is an unflinching journey into the waking nightmare of an oppressed people. –S. James Snyder

With its four-hour running time, Shinji Aoyama's sepia-toned road movie (indebted to the work of John Ford) lacked mass appeal—that's fair. But as an exploration of the post-traumatic effects of a violent bus hijacking, it was a powerful and eerily prescient metaphor for the fear culture that plagued the decade. –Andrew Grant

Steven Spielberg inherited Stanley Kubrick's project about a robot boy's quest to become human, furthering his own descent into dark, challenging entertainment. Met with exasperation upon its release, it's the rare superbudgeted spectacle that's ambitiously provocative, using jaw-dropping special effects to probe the nature and future of humankind. –Kevin B. Lee

Simple as a fable, Terrence Malick’s yearning meditation on compassion and morality derives much of its emotional force from the writer-director’s own experience, dealing as it does with a boy in 1950s Texas who loses a brother, just as Malick did around the same age. But this spare central narrative is imbued with celestial importance, not least in the breathtaking special effects sequence tracking the origins of the universe and the dawning of empathy. Dizzying, frustrating, heavenly. –Tom Huddleston

Shot and edited with Claire Denis’ customary expertise, but disappointing for both its (admittedly ambitious) script and its performances, this is rather too elliptical and enigmatic for its own good. It tells of two individuals consumed by cannibalistic bloodlust, but cared for by loved ones. Do the killers thirst for blood because they're victims of medical experiments, or are the experiments carried out to cure such impulses? Who knows or even, given Gallo and Dalle's hollow performances, cares? The murders are nasty, the play with genre tradition uneasy, and certain scenes laughably implausible.

A stylish filmmaker turned increasingly thoughtful, Jonathan Glazer re-emerged after a nine-year break from features with this stunner: a woman-who-fell-to-Earth sci-fi drama that poignantly anticipates the international migrant crisis. Somehow Glazer convinced Scarlett Johansson to wear a dark wig and shoot guerrilla-style on the streets of Glasgow. Her unnamed main character, an alien, lures men to a dark void, but this isn’t an artier version of Species. Rather, Glazer deepens the emotions into cosmic loneliness, with a critical assist from composer Mica Levi, one of the decade’s true finds. Despite Johansson’s Marvel omnipresence, she finds her way into a whole new register. –Joshua Rothkopf

A caravanning couple’s dream holiday turns sour in this deliciously dark comedy penned by its stars Alice Lowe and Steve Oram. As the tension mounts, so does the body count and the pair must decide whether to turn Bonnie and Clyde. Directed by Ben Wheatley, Sightseers combines alternative British character comedy with horror tropes and amusing sidekicks: if comedies were drinks, this would be a very bitter, black builders’ tea. –Anna Smith

Two bridesmaids (Kristen Wiig and Rose Byrne) must work together to help their mutual friend plan her wedding, but rivalry and therefore hilarity ensues. It could have been awful, it could have been ordinary, but in the hands of writers Wiig and Annie Mumolo, Bridesmaids is hands-down hilarious. Never underestimating its audience, it swerved to avoid clichés as if they were littered across this well-trodden path and paved the way for more big-budget female-centred comedies. The aeroplane scene remains magnificent. –Anna Smith

Feted by Cannes but ignored by audiences and the Oscars, Paul Thomas Anderson's cracked ode to the transformative power of love in a world that actively mocks sensitivity is perhaps his most original work. Starring Adam Sandler as a tantrum-prone man-boy whose unlikely bond with a luminous Emily Watson gives him strength, it may be the only romance to fully skirt clich. –Karina Longworth

For his seventh feature film, writer-director Christopher Nolan took an instantly engaging premise and twisted into a terrifically complex tale, still finding a happy medium between arthouse and blockbuster. The notion is simple: teams of foraging scientists invade someone’s dreams and extract valuable information from their minds. But it’s a precarious business, people’s heads, and when something goes wrong, it has a profound knock-on effect. Impressively, Nolan balances bravura action sequences with a proper emotional payload, deep philosophical ideas and an ambiguous ending that kept the internet theorising for months. –Anna Smith

Greta Gerwig burst on the scene as an undeniable directorial force with this witty semi-autobiographical triumph. A rich coming-of-age comedy that also engages with issues of faith, social class and teenage sex, Lady Bird boasts an ensemble made up of stage veterans and a new generation of talented actors, including emotive heartbreaker Saoirse Ronan and up-and-comers Timothée Chalamet, Lucas Hedges and Beanie Feldstein. Full of attentive visual flair that romances the suburban Sacramento – from drab classroom corners to the comfy nooks of girlhood homes – the film is a reflective celebration of formative female friendships and the guiding voices of mothers. –Tomris Laffly

‘You’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole.’ Does any speech from the past decade of cinema resonate more deeply than this one, delivered by college student Erica Albright (Rooney Mara) to her demanding date, Jesse Eisenberg’s socially challenged Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg? Powered by a relentless, clinical Aaron Sorkin script, directed with sinuous grace by David Fincher and loaded with smirking, smart-ass central performances, The Social Network is arguably the most important and prophetic film of our era. Isn’t that a depressing thought? –Tom Huddleston

Rarely has a title been more apt. With their Oscars-dominating second feature, directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert indeed try pretty much everything, mashing together sci-fi, martial arts action and an immigrant family drama with a multiversal twist allowing them to send everything from weaponised dildos to talking raccoons flying at the screen. It sounds like an insane mess, but it’s held together by a poignant (and ass-kicking) performance from Michelle Yeoh as a mother blitzing through space and time to both save and vanquish her vengeful daughter. Make no mistake: it’s still plenty insane, but its message about love, fate and family cuts through the chaos. —Matthew Singer

Talk about a killer third feature. Lynne Ramsay’s chilling adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel is gripping from start to finish, with a constant sense of intrigue. Tilda Swinton is perfectly cast as the mother of a child who raises alarm bells, but perhaps not loudly or clearly enough, and Ezra Miller is a revelation as the older Kevin. And the story – sadly – remains relevant today. –Anna Smith

What happened to the guy who opened for Bob Dylan? The Coens take that premise and develop it into a wintry folk fantasia, suffused with the glum frustrations of also-rans. Shivering in the blueish light of Bruno Delbonnel’s masterful cinematography, Oscar Isaac turns in one of the decade’s flintiest performances, dangerously close to unlikable. Fortunately for us (but not for Llewyn), the movie aches with gorgeous music, and is animated by the filmmakers’ total command – as well as the presence of a cat. –Joshua Rothkopf

Finding dark laughs in Stalin’s vicious inner circle, Armando Iannucci reminds us that with material this sharp, nothing is off-limits. With co-writer David Schneider, he reimagines the aftermath of Stalin’s death as a vaudevillian carnival of in-fighting and shameless manoeuvring, populating it with some of the greatest comic actors of their generation. It still hasn’t been released in Russia, although it has been illegally downloaded by 1.5 million people. Comrade Beria would have all their names on a list. –Phil de Semlyen

The first volley of the decade's much-lauded revolution in Romanian cinema chronicles a pudgy retiree's fatal one-night journey through Bucharest's overburdened hospitals. Tinged with post–Soviet Bloc sarcasm but subtler than an anticommunist screed, Cristi Puiu's riveting drama features a protagonist who is unconscious half the time—an astonishing feat of orchestration and focus. –Nicolas Rapold

Already one of the decade's most iconoclastic screenwriters, Charlie Kaufman upped the stakes with his directorial debut, a morose but playful psychological puzzle about the life of a tortured playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman) that literally reconstructs reality as it grapples with issues of love, death and creation. A perfect snapshot of a midlife crisis, circa this very moment. –Andrew Grant

An all-time great action movie from… Paul Thomas Anderson? Believe it. Adapting his second Thomas Pynchon novel, the director delivers a timely story of parents struggling to leave a better world for their children, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a burned-out ex-revolutionary who fails to protect his mixed-race daughter (revelatory newcomer Chase Infiniti) from the threat of white supremacy, manifested by Sean Penn as a human throbbing-forehead-vein named Sgt Lockjaw. Anderson has orchestrated thrilling setpieces before, but nothing like this – it’s a nonstop barrage of shootouts, car chases, street riots and rooftop escapes that’ll leave you panting, exhilarated and, rare for these days, hopeful for the future. —Matthew Singer

Was it a hoax? Turns out that was the least thorny question emerging from this cryptic documentary, as wry and complex as a Robert Altman film. At first, its ostensible subject is Banksy (also credited as the film’s director), the mysterious street artist who likes to deface public spaces after midnight. But prophetically, the film shifts its attention to a phoney on the rise: Thierry Guetta, an amateur videographer reborn as an art star. Thanks to Rhys Ifans’s droll narration, you’re never not laughing, even as the concept of fame unravels. –Joshua Rothkopf

Jasmila Žbanić’s film about 1995’s Srebrenica massacre in which more than 8000 Bosnian muslims were murdered General Ratko Mladić’s soldiers might sound harrowing, and indeed it is. But by telling that story through the perspective of Aida, a school teacher, mother and UN interpreter, Žbanić grounds this terrible moment of history by showing the very human cost of war from the most clear-eyed perspective imaginable. 

A milestone for American independent cinema, this deeply affecting cri de coeur against Iraq War I, from experimental writer-director John Gianvito (who'd follow up with 2007's Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind), interweaves three New Mexico–set tales. A woman with the surname Hussein is the victim of a horrible attack; a passionate high-school activist protests the war to his family's chagrin; and a shell-shocked soldier struggles to survive upon returning home from the battlefield. Gianvito clearly leans left, but his movie rises above any encumbering ideological slant, especially in an illuminating finale in which all the characters euphorically gather at a communal effigy burning. –Keith Uhlich

Wunderkind Damien Chazelle breathes new life into a dying breed: the original Hollywood musical. Loaded with jazzy tracks and vintage dance moves, Chazelle’s romantic romp – the winner of the Best Picture Oscar for about four seconds – is indebted to both Jacques Demy and MGM’s legendary Freed Unit, but has a signature all of its own, stopping traffic in the first glorious sequence. A tonic for 2016’s political unsightliness, the movie now feels ageless. –Tomris Laffly

Released on Valentine’s Day 2014, this is no ordinary romance. Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) is in love with his computer’s operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Her entrancing voice helps make Spike Jonze’s futuristic film seem almost credible; as does the timely concept that’s explored with the writer-director’s usual wit and panache. It’s The Man with Two Brains for the internet age, and yes, that is very much a compliment. –Anna Smith

Set for release in 2005 but shelved for six years when writer-director Kenneth Lonergan and studio Fox Searchlight couldn’t agree on a final cut, this slippery, intensely felt drama charts one self-absorbed teenager’s experience with tragedy. Anna Paquin is astonishing as Lisa Cohen, the child of New York privilege who witnesses a fatal bus crash and slowly goes to pieces. Part character study, part social satire and part mournful post-9/11 elegy, Margaret is a complex, unpredictable and exhausting masterpiece. –Tom Huddleston

Lovers Rock is just one slice in Steve McQueen’s five-film Small Axe anthology, which celebrates and explores Black London life from the 1960s to the ’80s. Unfolding over the course of one night, this ensemble piece tells of a pay-on-the-door reggae night at a house in Ladbroke Grove, and perfectly captures the beats of a night out: from queuing for the loo to the buzz of the dancefloor. Filled with period detail from the ‘80s, as well as an almost scratch-and-sniff level of immersion, McQueen doesn’t ignore the socio-political realities of the time. But rather than letting it dominate the narrative, the politics are implicit, issues of racism, class, power and money are smothered under the thundering noise of the soundsystem, the party offering the characters freedom for at least a night. 

Two shafts of light pierce the sky above Ground Zero, lending a weighty sense of fatalism to this portrait of a convicted criminal's final night of freedom. It's the first and best of the 9/11-related movies, teeming with a bruised urbanity supplied by Spike Lee, who quietly topped himself. –Joshua Rothkopf

An era-defining political thriller in the tradition of The Battle of Algiers, Kathryn Bigelow’s plunge into the hunt for Osama bin Laden features the most driven main character since Zodiac. She is Maya (Jessica Chastain, portraying a character largely modelled on a still-undercover CIA analyst), the self-professed ‘motherfucker’ who discovered the terrorist’s hideout. Surpassing even her Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker, Bigelow’s psychodrama is a career-best achievement, riven by mission doubts and ethical compromises. –Tomris Laffly

German filmmaker Fatih Akin's fatalistic tale of two beautiful losers who enter into a marriage of convenience is the best chronicle of a punk-rock romance since Sid met Nancy. It's also a wonderful ode to the modern Teutonic-Turkish diaspora experience, adding sociological depth to what's already a supernova melodrama. –David Fear

Is it hyperbolic to suggest that director RaMell Ross, with his debut narrative feature, established a whole new cinematic language? Possibly. At the same time, basic descriptors fail to convey its deep immersiveness, inventive formal choices and the radical empathy it engenders. Adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers enduring a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South, Ross shoots entirely in first-person perspective, arranging the film into a time-jumping kaleidoscope of images, experiences, memories and dreams. He doesn’t just put you in his protagonists’ shoes – he draws you into their hearts, minds and souls. The effect is profound. —Matthew Singer

David Lynch inverts the arc of his great Mulholland Drive: instead of following an actor swallowed whole by tragedy, he follows one who blazingly overcomes it. Shot on consumer-grade camcorders over several years and through several countries, this is one of Lynch's deepest delves into the subconscious. Holding it all together is the great Laura Dern, who turns on a dime from a naive little-girl-lost to a hardened former vamp – and ultimately, a beatific savior. –Keith Uhlich

It isn’t too soon to look at the two features of Ari Aster – the punishing Hereditary and this equally impressive sunlit nightmare – and see a young master at work. Horror is Aster’s chosen genre but already he’s subverting it, deepening the vulnerability of his main characters with family tragedies and tenderising his audiences for the bigger chomp to come. Midsommar speaks in a fluent language of betrayal and revenge, beautifully supplied by breakout star Florence Pugh without recourse to strident you-go-girl moments. –Joshua Rothkopf

Made during the dot-com boom and a shrewd comment on capitalist appetites, Mary Harron's comic-horror take on the Bret Easton Ellis novel styles a serial-killing banker as the embodiment of the Gordon Gekko '80s. Star Christian Bale goes over the top and takes flight like a winged demon, delivering one of the decade's most memorable performances. –Troy Patterson

Is this ’80s-set summer holiday saga the most tactile film of the decade? It’s not far off. It feels like you can almost reach out and touch the fabric of Timothée Chalamet’s polo collar, or even graze a hand along Armie Hammer’s thigh. That’s just one of the reasons Call Me by Your Name captured imaginations around the world. It’s also a vivid gay love story that’s intelligent, characterful and funny, just like André Aciman’s source novel. Bravo Luca Guadagnino. –Anna Smith

Set almost in entirely one location, Florian Zeller’s dementia drama manages to turn an expensive looking London flat into a disorientating space where you’re left wondering what is real and what isn’t. Anthony Hopkins’ Oscar-winning performance mixes mute despair with an almost aggressive joie de vivre as his character grapples with a state of permanent self-gaslighting, his dementia turning a cosy and familiar space hostile, while the editing sees scenes concertina into one another, characters and actors often overlapping. Collectively, it communicates perfectly what dementia must feel like: a world stripped of its signposts, a feeling of being uncoupled, a sense of the familiar slowly becoming frighteningly ‘other’.

Anybody can make a movie about how miserable holiday family get-togethers are; it takes a filmmaker like Arnaud Desplechin, to turn this premise into a sprawling, free-form meditation on morality, mortality and unresolved matters of the heart. The Vuillard clan's matriarch (vive Catherine Deneuve!) has been diagnosed with leukemia, which killed her firstborn ages ago. The resident black-sheep son (Mathieu Amalric) is an eligible donor, though not even his good bone marrow can cure the bad blood between them. That's only one of several stories in Desplechin's novelistic take on the ties that bind and gag. It's the graceful, organic way the director lets these characters interact that make this movie such a rich, rewarding gift. –David Fear

Using moments from his own childhood as inspiration, Lee Isaac Chung’s big-hearted story about a Korean-American family coping with culture shock in ‘80s Arkansas is overflowing with heartache and hope. It’s a film that picks at what it means to belong, take root and assimilate to your surroundings – with all the fear, opportunities and hostility that comes along with that. 

Noah Baumbach delivers his most mature work to date with this fiery masterpiece drawn from his own experiences: a divorce drama caressed by notes of humour and evenly split bravura performances by Adam Driver and a never-better Scarlett Johansson. A soul-crushing portrait of a marriage gone numb, the film improves upon the ambiguity of Kramer vs Kramer; here, cravings for independence bump up against shared responsibilities and the reality of thwarted ambitions. Baumbach’s frank observations about falling out of love might rip your heart out. But almost miraculously for a tale about two combatants, Marriage Story ends generously, amid the soft-pink magic hour of an LA suburb. –Tomris Laffly

Too often, we critics will celebrate a movie's foreignness, forgetting that even curious viewers need a passport. So let's go the opposite way with Yi Yi, a masterful Taiwanese family drama that was certain to place in this list. The movie, set in a present-day city, is about every extended family you know. The Jiangs, a middle-class clan of Taipei urbanites, are pivoting in transition: There's the long-foreseen death of their elder; a teenage love triangle preoccupying Sis; and a naughty younger brother who should study more. Director Edward Yang – lost to cancer in 2007 – struck a note of such universal clarity, his movie became instantly recognizable. To explore his legacy is to come home. –Joshua Rothkopf