Making Lists

New York Times

05-07-2025

What did you rank as your top movies of the 21st century? Did you include 'La La Land,' which landed at No. 16 on our list of readers' picks, despite not appearing at all on the list by actors and directors? I struggled to determine how I would rank a movie as one of 'the best.' Was it one that left me astonished when I saw it? One that stayed with me long after watching? Or should I choose films that somehow felt important in the history of cinema? And what does 'important' mean anyway? In 2000, I loved 'High Fidelity' and 'Best in Show' — but of course I hadn't seen 'Moonlight' or 'The Royal Tenenbaums' or 'Tár' yet. What did it mean if my list diverged wildly from The Times's lists? From those of my friends? I found myself inanely worrying that my picks weren't serious enough, that they didn't adequately convey my tastes or aesthetic.
What is the purpose of a list ranking 'the best' of something, anyway? Is it to establish a canon, a definitive record, etched in stone? Is it to inspire questions and conversations and arguments about what makes something good? The very fact that we are stopping to consider the movies we love and debating their relative merits, interrogating what our picks say about us and the culture, is glorious. If we bemoan how the majesty of moviegoing has been diminished and replaced by slack-jawed streaming of algorithm-designed 'content,' then a project that lifts us out of the endless scroll and helps us remember why we love movies in the first place is a welcome tonic.
I love the way a big list forces me to question and define my tastes, to consider what I like and don't and why, to sharpen my critical takes against those of others. But the best part of engaging with the films of the 21st century is how the list prompted a cascade of memories of the past 25 years. I remember the exact theater in which I saw 'Y Tu Mamá También' in 2002, the friends I was with, where we ate afterward. That restaurant is definitely not there anymore. I remember seeing 'Melancholia' in 2011, talking about it over drinks in a weird bar in Midtown. What was my drink order in those days?
The objective quality of a film is fun to debate, but it's a lovely sort of ecstasy to think back over one's quarter-century of movie-watching experiences, to use those movies to populate a memory palace. The film is just the catalyst for a million other reminiscences.
Making a list of the movies you loved over the past 25 years is a way of organizing those years, a kind of post-factum diary. If you were to riff on each of your top 10 movies, what long-forgotten details from your history might be dislodged? You might remember how 'The Hurt Locker' floored you in 2009, but you might also remember the rainy day on which you saw it, your raincoat — what happened to that raincoat? — the car you drove to the theater, the job you had then or the person you were dating. We're forever cramming our brains with more information. Take these 10 movies and use them to sift through some of the accumulated sediment, to make order out of the chaos.
If I can rouse myself from reverie, I'll commit myself this weekend to some of the 11 movies on the main list that I haven't seen and want to. (How is it possible that I've never seen 'Spirited Away'?) Or maybe not — 'F1' and 'Sorry, Baby' are in theaters, and it might be more satisfying to get a jump on 2050's list.
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