Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick the 50 Best Films of the 21st Century

Right, I would say that the majority of the films fail in a quality check as they failed to find an audience.

1. 'Time' (2020)(black)(political)
2. 'Pariah' (2011)(gay)(black)(political)
3. 'Grizzly Man' (2005)(political)
4. 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020)(female)(political)
5. 'I Am Not Your Negro' (2016)(black)(political)
6. 'The Social Network' (2010)(political)
7. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu' (2005)(political)
8. '35 Shots of Rum' (2008)(black)(political)
9. 'Wall-E' (2008)(political)
10. 'Moonlight' (2016)(gay)(black)(political)
11. '4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days' (2007) (female)(political)

So we got 2 abortion films 2 environmental ones, one about the prison industrial complex 3 films covering a spectrum of queer black culture. Which leaves us with facebook, healthcare, and housing.

Half of those films are not classics....good maybe in some peoples eyes. But frankly it's embarrassing to call some of those films top 50 of the last 22 years.

Ah yes the good old chestnut. It's okay to be dishonest because it serves some sort of greater good. Also your thesis that Asian filmmakers have been excluded until recently is at best hilarious at worst ignorant. Propaganda you agree with is still propaganda. In your brain Kurosawa is some hidden esoteric film maker...and Akira succeeded in spite of it's self and people haven't been pushing Ozu for the last fifty years.

Well it would be against the rules to insult other posters...even though I know you really want to. My knees always stay stationary...my eyes on the other hand they roll and roll and roll again.

I do enjoy how my opinions(?) aren't legitimate. I haven't even begun to start arguing.

Setting aside the wide release argument, which is irrelevant….
Mulholland Drive’s placement (as in its exact placement) in Top Ten lists is also moving the goalposts when you acknowledge it made several Top Ten Lists but then dismiss them for being “mid top ten”. The fact is it was rightly lauded from the start. It’s plot is still discussed and dissected today for its meaning (not that it needs one, I enjoy it for it’s mind boggling mystery). It’s stature has only improved with time. None of which has anything to do with its Lesbian subplot.

As much as I liked The Lord of the Rings and Memento, and I do quite a bit, many of those films that made the list tower above them (imo), and it has nothing to do with being “woke”.

I do think Royal Tenenbaums should have been included, but that exclusion is not evidence of any kind of wrong doing (that is, ulterior motives for the films that are included) in regards to this list here.

Back in the day they would slow release titles, Memento was an instant classic...Mulholland Drive was not. It's a great film but it was a film that was more of a cult classic than a masterpiece.



You mean aside from not having batman in it.



The main character gets cuckolded and then spends 2 hours looking for and dealing with a surrogate for his wife. Which you then have the B story of his driver who is dealing with the loss of her mother that she's responsible for.

So a cult classic cannot be a masterpiece? I don't see how these two are mutually exclusive.
I think you have to rewatch this movie. Anyway, even if one sticks to your description, I still fail to see how this is "female" but Portrait of a Lady on Fire is only "gay" but not "female". You slapped ambiguous monikers onto the films to prove your point but didn't spend enough time thinking. I mean, if Shoplifters is political, then any film on the list is, too, following the idea that all art is inherently political.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Well the film getting a wide release is the point when you say the film was a masterpiece on day one. That is simply not true especially in 2001 when a lot of movies came out that were a bigger deal at the time


The Royal Tenenbaums, Amorres Perros, Amelie, In the Bedroom, Ghost World, The Lord of the Rings, AI, Moulin Rouge, Donnie Darko, Wet Hot American Summer, and Memento.

I still don't get how come being a masterpiece is a transient thing? And how come it's connected to being a big deal on release? Hell, your #1 film Citizen Kane had a really poor reception when it was released and failed at the box office.

No they have an audience, it just wasn't you. And that has no bearing on the quality of the film. Nor does the size of an audience ever have any direct correlation on a films worth. Do you need someone to list the four million examples that illustrate this for you to grasp that?


I'm not surprised my point didn't land on that vacant lot you call an argument.


I didn't claim these films did not have political issues. I claimed that labelling something as political as a reason to suspect its worth doesn't mean ****ing anything. You can do it with any movie you can think of. How about you list some movies you like and I'll point out all of the politics that they include. But I guess you'll excuse those because they likely align with your political point of view.


Basically, once again, you have zero ability to discern anything outside of your own extremely narrow frame of reference.


You talk about gatekeepers alot. But what you're really talking about is you want people you agree with to be the gatekeepers. That share you're biases. Everything else is inherently suspect.

Basically, your exactly as bad as the enemies that you keep imagining.




I clearly can't respond to anything here because you didn't actually say anything


No I'm not saying that. You keep throwing around words like dishonest like people are lying about what they like. Exactly how deep into delusion territory do you have to sink to square your terrible points with yourself?


What I am saying is I wonder if you complained this much when it was just a bunch of white dudes getting accolades? And if not, why? What greater good was that "lie" serving?

And once again, your choice of words is telling. Lie? What lie? The one where people say they like something more than something you like and your brain explodes?

Are you wrong in saying people have biases in regards to what films they might prefer? Of course not. Everyone has some levels of bias. We most often will cozy up with those things which reflect back what we believe in. You do it, I do it, we all do it to some degree...so how does this make it a lie? Is it really that difficult to comprehend that people who believe in trans rights will identity more strongly with a film that humanizes trans people? Or those who are religious will identify with The Silence. Or I will identify with Edith Massey eating eggs in a crib in Pink Flamingoes. This isn't rocket science. We don't need to get into conspiracy theories to explain this phenomenon

Now, does a movie agreeing with your beliefs make it a better movie worth canonization? Definitely not. Art still needs to transcend these biases to have any further meaning. But I suspect those voting on this list can likely do that. Or at least I hope they can.

The question though is can you? Because it can't simply be the Freedom boner Braveheart induces. Or whatever crap movie it is that gets your juices flowing because it's so wonderfully not woke. Because unless you can walk it like you talk it in regards to this kind of analysis, you should probably stop talking about all the phony critics and their phony lists. Because your exactly the same


What the **** are you talking about? Where did I say Asian films have been excluded in the past? Or that Kurosawa is some kind of rare find. Don't project your ignorance onto me.

What I'm saying is Asian films became a very visible entity amongst the cinematic zeitgeist of the last twenty years. This doesn't mean Kurosawa or Ozu were irrelevant before that. But Asian films were particularly hip critically and commercially beginning at the start of the 2000s. They were a part of the pop culture, in a way that Ozu never was.

I would have thought that someone who deifies audience turnouts and box office success as much as you do would grasp that one quicker


Pointing out your terrible logic will suffice.


No shit. And I recommend you don't take up the practice. It will only get much worse, I'm sure.

A few things:

First, I was running a movie message board in the immediate years after Mulholland Dr., and yeah, cinephiles loved that thing immediately. It got tons of love here and on other forums I was using at the time, too. I dunno about being a critical darling, or whatever, but it had rabid fans and defenders immediately.

Second, did I read right that this is based on...six people? Good grief. I can't imagine having any strong opinion, good or bad, about something like that. It's essentially meaningless, except insofar as intellectually lazy people decide it matters in the first place. Of course, getting people to argue about it is one of the ways that ostensibly happens.

Third, while I don't have any trouble believing the list has the slant in question, yeah, some of the one-word summaries of why they qualify are a huge, huge stretch, which others have already pointed out.

One thing I will say is that "this is just a few more people's subjective opinion" does miss a crucial part of this: the imprimatur of coming from established publications.

To be fair, it gets missed because the people mad about these lists always seem to lack either the ability to articulate or the sheer depth of thought to express it in the first place, but it's still there

People get mad about these lists in a way they don't get mad about rando opinions because these lists are published as the products of legacy organizations, and therefore there is an implication of them being meaningful or important. They're putting out press releases about them, for crying out loud, so obviously there's a claim on top of the claim: not only that these are the choices, but that our choices are news in and of themselves (and the resulting irony: arguing about their choices still cedes the premise that their choices should be the basis for the argument).

Creating a list like this in public carries an implication beyond "this is just what we think" in the same way we expect a professional critic to try to examine a film from some kind of attempted neutrality, rather than lower their review with tons of idiosyncrasies the way some random YouTube commenter might.

Everyone is entitled to whatever opinion about film they want, but for film criticism to be an actual thing, and not just a fancy term we use for everyone's responses all the time, there needs to be some attempt, some aiming, for something more than just people's diatribes or reactions or politics or whatever. Something that tries to exist outside of all that, even while it inevitably fails.

I think you just take these lists too seriously. All these major movie lists have their own biases in which they're made, so having a bias for inclusivity isn't anything new. The similarity with all these lists, however, is that none of them are meant to be objective nor should they be universally held above all other lists in terms of quality or accuracy. Film is still dominated by white males, so if you're unhappy with this list, there's plenty more films/lists you can turn to instead for recommendations.

Besides, for so so so many years, Hollywood was pretty awful with inclusivity. People of color rarely ever got major acting roles and it was also sometimes the case that their roles would be given to white people performing in blackface/brownface/etc. Given this, I would say that having more critics go for inclusivity shows we're moving on from the confines of the past and is a good thing (even though we still have a long ways to go).

As an aside, criticizing a list for including political films is a meaningless discussion as all art is inherently political by nature.

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Re: everything is political.

I think this, like "all art is subjective," is something that is inarguably true but needs to be functionally ignored anyway. Also, more to the point, I think it's just kind of dancing between intended and literal meaning. All art is literally political, I suppose (for some sufficiently broad definition of the word), but I also think it's clear that by "political" people mean something more like "puts a thumb on the scale for an issue that is currently controversial in the culture."

I'm all for taking people to task for being imprecise with their language, just so long as we don't confuse that with a rebuttal for the thing they're trying to say, since that's the easy way out.

For me, what these lists always tend to uncover is how much people seem to need some kind of rigidity in these lists. That they should be near unchanging. That having a film rated as the twelfth best of all time, can be counted on to predict a similar placement a hundred years from now. As if this somehow makes its greatness real and measureable and my response to this (of course) is why do we want it to be measurable. Why do we want to set these things in stone. Their malleability through generations actually is a big part of their value. They measure how people think of film at that current moment, what matters to them, what entertains them, what they believe in, what they find aesthetically. And these things are always going to change. Because how can they not? The world changes. So do people. And while the movies remain exactly the same, the way we respond to them is permanently in flux. Which is okay!


Getting hung up on the placement of films, and where they all stand in proximity to eachother, is a stupid thing to argue about or even take remotely seriously. What is important is how these lists allow us a framework to talk about film and what it means and what it says about us.


Now, I do understand that we want a list that is at least done in good faith. That isn't some troll job. But getting worried our favourite movies didn't do as well this year as they did last year, and because a movie with a gay person in it is now considered better is evidence that something corrupt is going on, is pointless.


If you don't like the movie about the gay person or the Christian or the one that seems kinda vegan or whatever, explain why as a film it misses the mark. Or even explain why you don't like the particular message that film has about those things. But to use those elements as the pure reason we can't trust that people like it is pure low brow, incurious nonsense

Fair point.

I just find that criticizing a list for being woke or political is a pretty weak argument in and of itself since (most of the time) it dismisses the films solely due to whatever their subject matter is without getting into whether or not they actually qualify as great films. Siddon has posted numerous times about the films here covering hotly contested political issues, but I've yet to see him address the actual quality of these films, and this is what actually matters. He did this during the Sight & Sound thread, and now he's doing it again.

I mostly agree with this. But when someone's example of a political film is Grizzly Man, I think it's fair to assume the most liberal reading of the term is being used in the argument.

Yeah, I agree with all this. I'd be as suspicious of a list that barely changes as I would of one that changes a lot. I think if either of those things happens it's essentially admitting the list isn't what it's purporting to be. Lists that don't change are just placeholders and there's no reason to announce them any more. And if they change quickly then no one iteration matters and...there's no reason to announce them any more.

More broadly: if our idea of the greatest films does not change it means film is stagnant, film criticism is stagnant, or both are. If our idea of the greatest films changes too readily it means film criticism isn't a thing to begin with.

Right, and that's probably where this gets a little thornier. A lot of people have come to suspect that these lists have increasingly favored criteria based on perceived social good, rather than artistic quality. I recognize these two things cannot be easily separated to begin with. I'm sure someone here will want to argue these aren't even separate things, or whatever. But regardless, I don't think that suspicion is prima facie ridiculous, even if the manner or intensity of it almost always is.

The thing I worry about more is that once you get beyond a certain point, you start seeing it even where it isn't, and you become unable to talk about or notice anything else. Which bears a deeply ironic and striking similarity to the thing it's criticizing.

Yeah, I agree with this completely, it should be a jumping off point. I have a little leeway in that I would obviously not expect people to do this with dozens of films. But maybe picking an example or two would suffice.

Of course, if we're being honest, that probably ends up being a wash, because a few people will say "well, you didn't like it, but other people did," and a few of them will be here and say they liked it, and that's that. But "the discussion never really reaches a firm conclusion" is a problem that wasn't going to go away on this or any other topic.

Right, and that ties into what I said just above (before you posted this, though), about starting to see it everywhere. I kinda sympathize, I think it's actually very tough to notice things without over-noticing, if that makes sense. To be aware of trends and changes and exceptions but keeping a sense of proportionality to it. We're pattern-seeking things, people, and that can be a weakness, too.

Anyway yeah, I dunno what the argument would be with Grizzly Man. I wouldn't blame someone for thinking it was gonna be some environmentalist screed or whatever, but it wasn't, at all. I had the same experience with Into the Wild, which I put off for awhile because I wasn't in the mood to be lectured to, and was pleasantly surprised to find that film, like Grizzly Man, was actually just a nuanced description of a specific man and his dysfunctional relationship to these things. Both could be just as (more!) easily read as cautionary tales about romanticizing the natural world.

It's the Leftist cinephiles who usually claim that. Their reasoning is that if art has no inherent political stance, then it is pro-status quo and therefore is still political. Their idea is that all art SHOULD be political (and for THEIR cause at that) or else it's worthless, supporting the status quo at best and supporting the other side at worst. I've disagreed with that notion for years. I believe that there are areas that aren't (or at the very least shouldn't be) political.

If the official rule of your forum is "no politics,' then this is a matter of necessity. Because if we can't functionally ignore it, we also can't play by your rules and also have a full discussion of art. And we will find the return of the repressed term popping up (directly or indirectly, intentionally, or unintentionally, in clear language or coded language), resulting in a perpetual game of moderator whack-a-mole shunting conversations (many of them fruitful) like the TVA pruning timelines.

Now, I can see the need for keeping people from screaming at each other in what is, in effect, a small tavern standing to the side of the screaching traffic 21st century social media on the street ("Commie!, Fascist!, Phobe! Monger! Whistler!"), but I would not confuse practical necessity with conceptual consistency. Our conversations here have been deformed in the name of civility. Warring about politics is why we can't have nice threads that talk about politics? Perhaps. But let's not pretend that we don't have a winking and whistling economy of partially veiled politics permeating conversations here. The repressed returns. If you cannot separate A from B, then A has an essential relation to B.
And I suppose that we might say that filmic art is "visual," but that some films are, comparatively speaking, more visual than others. Avatar, love it or hate it, is a very visual film compared to more mundane offerings. And I suppose we could speak of those films which we can consume without really looking (the narrative sustained by the dialogue and narration) which would make them, in some sense, less visual. And yet people would look at you funny if you denied that all filmic art is visual for a scruple about some film being more visually rich/dependent than others.

Is the above a fair comparison? In some decades past, I'd say not. That is, if it were 1991, I'd say you were right. I can remember a time when some films were more political than others such that a relatively functional distinction between political movies and apolitical movies was a useful one. And yet even in 1991 we could have a productive and insightful conversation about many films which, according to ground control radar, appeared to be apolitical. And that is because films are always doing politics. Films determine winner and losers. They have their own grammar, their own physics, their own epistemology, their own ontology. Films cannot not do politics in a very real sense, because of their very nature. And let's not forget how much things have changed.

Modern film is, in essence, putting a thumb on a scale for issues that are currently controversial in the culture. This is standard operating practice. To be a progressive means you have to keep pushing. And if we have already secured rights for past groups (e.g., gay marriage), then we have to move on to the next thing (St. George in retirement syndrome). We live in an age of DEI, ESG, but mostly B.S. according to which silence is violence and failure to say things in just the right way will provoke a Twitter mob. Your either an ally or an enemy. Thus we find that the critical reviews war with user reviews at Rotten Tomatoes. New Star Wars movies were good and Super Mario was bad according to the professional critics, but the plebes felt differently. Politics are out in front. Liking Chris Pratt is now political. Consuming Harry Potter is now political. Drinking Budweiser is now political.

We're in a great ideological and spiritual churning in the west. The world is moving under our feet. What was a common sense ten years ago is potentially hate speech today. We've seen dictionary, organizational, and government definitions change (e.g., "woman," "vaccine," "fascism") change rapidly.

It's great that we have this space as a sort of cultural storm shelter, but you're providing it at a price (we're not talking about the many elephants occupying the frame of the camera).

This should already probably be its own thread (and fair warning, I might move it accordingly if this continues), but I'll reply here for now:

Inevitably we just have to have a human element making good faith judgments, which actually isn't that hard, unless people specifically try to line-step or see what they can get away with. When people make good faith efforts to pull back now and then I think the whole "but it's a blurry line sometimes!" thing looks really overblown. People talk about nuance and subtle gradations, but many just dive headfirst into this stuff with entire posts that literally never mention the film that started the argument in the first place. Let's start with eliminating that and then maybe we can fret over the hard edge cases. Edge cases which seem to exist only to justify the cases that aren't anywhere near the edge.

I doubt we'll get to that point, though, because once we get to the point where people are being genuinely thoughtful over those edge cases...we're already out of the danger zone.

Correct. Because the alternative, as I feel I have repeatedly witnessed, is a conversation that becomes deformed more fundamentally and more severely in the long-run, up to and including the effective elimination of the forum's activity. That's the worst deformation: having no form at all.

Yep. I say that's better, in the same way therapists get more constructive disagreement from patients when they make them say "I feel..." instead of "You always..." Also, it tends to weed out the people who literally cannot control themselves enough to even be veiled in their disdain, which is a pretty huge improvement right off the bat.

But yes, moderation is imperfect. Always has been, always will be, as long as it's moderating people. And I'm not a talented enough programmer to create MoFo-GPT.

Yes, there is always a price. I am trying to attract people who like film itself. Anything I do to attract one group will inevitably lead to a reduction in other groups. This is not unique to my rules, specifically, and possibly not even to the concept of having rules at all.

I can sympathize, up to a point. I've conflated a lot of things that superficially seemed the same at first glance a bunch of times too in the middle of a hot take. Maybe I even doubled down when I got called out on how wrong I was. We can be very defensive and stupid in the moment. It's no fun to realize you sound like an idiot.


But when it comes to really really bad takes, the kind that time and time again can be dismantled with literally zero effort by anyone who can be bothered to push back, its not a good look. And it's not even about having a complete about face on the general opinion. If someone doesn't even bother to shore up the obvious problems with their basic premise, and just repeats it over and over again as if they live in a world that can be convinced by a complete absence of logic (yes, we can argue that is actually the world we live in, but I refuse to accept it), there is absolutely no hope. That person wants to believe in the shit that they are shovelling. And at that point my sympathy dries up and flakes away.