The 100 Greatest Movies Of The 21st Century: 10 - 1
Here we are – after revealing 90% of the list, the time has come to unveil the top 10: the best films of the 21st Century, as voted for not only by Empire critics, but by you our readers. It’s a final instalment of knockout movies, full of all-time classics that have come to define post-2000 cinema. Get caught up on 100 – 91, 90 – 81, 80 – 71, 70 – 61, 60 – 51, 50 – 41, 30 – 21, and 20 – 11 on the list here – and stay tuned to Empire Online as we unveil more information about Empire’s upcoming 100 Greatest Movies Of The Century magazine issue and podcast special.
10. Lost In Translation (2003)
Just as Wes Anderson had done in The Royal Tenenbaums, Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation made profitable use of a rumpled, weary, wry Bill Murray. But it was Scarlett Johansson that was the revelation here: her thirteenth film felt like her real arrival. The set-up – mismatched couple stuck together in an unfamiliar city – could have lent itself to a more conventional fish-out-of-water romantic comedy, but Coppola’s deadpan anti-romance instead leans into the emotional dislocation of its two central characters adrift in an alien (to them) Tokyo. It’s as if the film itself has jetlag: a mumblecore sensibility translated to a more formal aesthetic, with the final joke that we can’t catch what Murray whispers in Johansson’s ear. All we know is that it wasn’t "I love you". This isn’t a film about two souls finding each other: it’s about two strangers being lonely together. Almost magically, it’s romantic in spite of itself.
9. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece is part fantasy, part historical war movie – in which the fantastical sequences are hardly a reprieve from the fascistic horrors besieging the real world. Caught in the middle of it all is young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), by day tending to her pregnant mother and avoiding the ire of her brutal stepfather, Sergi López’s Captain Vidal, and by night taking on three otherworldly tasks in order to gain immortality and return to the fairy kingdom that creaky faun Pan believes she comes from. del Toro evokes the real and the unreal with equal care and vitality, creating a film full of unforgettable imagery – whether its Vidal receiving a Joker smile at the hands of a rebel, or the terrifying eye-handed Pale Man chomping the heads off fairies as he chases Ofelia through his banquet hall. It’s hauntingly beautiful, the greatest example of del Toro augmenting the monstrousness of humanity evil with actual fantasy monsters, with a tragic, transcendent climax that’s hard to shake.
8. Get Out (2017)
“I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could.” With razor-sharp dialogue and astute observations, Jordan Peele’s debut film as writer-director announced him as a masterful filmmaker – scratching at the surface of supposedly-liberal America to expose the festering racism hiding just beneath a progressive veneer. Blending satire with genre tropes, he hit on something special with Get Out – a film about the horrors of prejudice and the social anxiety experienced by African-Americans in predominantly-white spaces, delivered with gripping twists, laugh-out-loud gags, and resonant visual metaphors. Daniel Kaluuya became an international star for his turn as Chris, the photographer who leaves the city to meet his white girlfriend’s parents – and discovers there’s more than meets the eye. Eerie, supremely entertaining, with an all-time-classic scene as Chris descends into the ‘Sunken Place’, Get Out has everything that makes a horror movie great – and it even cracked the Oscars, winning Best Original Screenplay, and earning Best Picture, Director, and Actor noms. Peele ushered in a new era of social-horror – an effect set to be felt increasingly in the decade to come.
7. Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
The culmination of the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, bringing together every corner from the cosmic Guardians Of The Galaxy to the Earth-bound Captain America, should have been a triumph – and it is, but it’s also an epic tragedy that’s daring enough to let its villain win and wipe out 50% of all known life. Perhaps the most seismic mega-blockbuster of the 21st Century, Infinity War is a streamlined behemoth of sheer entertainment – bombastic action studded with character explorations (a broken Thor recounting every family member he’s lost to Rocket is heartbreaking and bittersweet) and big, proper laughs. In short, it’s the apotheosis of everything that became Marvel Studios’ signature – bright, colourful, splashy spectacle, with a genuine affection for its roster of heroes – managing to be sprightly as well as universe-threateningly epic. And with that jaw-dropping finale it created a genuine cultural moment – an iconic piece of popular entertainment that impacted a generation. What a legacy.
6. The Social Network (2010)
Few but Aaron Sorkin would have seen a classical tragedy in the origin story of Facebook. But that’s what makes The Social Network so spectacular – a none-more-contemporary tale with all the oldest storytelling tenets: friendship, revolution, greed, and betrayal. Pounding along on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s thrumming electronic score, David Fincher’s film delights in the paradox that a man with no social skills of his own created (or did he?) the digital tool that united the entire online world, sacrificing his lone personal connections along the way in order to become a tech billionaire. Jesse Eisenberg is pitch-perfect as the jittery, ice-cold Mark Zuckerberg – a thoroughly modern Machiavelli, setting up the site as a way to score women (in every sense), talking down to everyone he meets at breakneck speed, and swindling Andrew Garfield’s Eduardo Saverin out of his share of the business. To make this film in retrospect, at the end of a moment, would be impressive enough – but a decade later, The Social Network feels increasingly prescient as the butterfly effect of Facebook (“Drop the ‘the’, it’s cleaner”) spiralled into Cambridge Analytica, the rise of the alt-right, and an entire generation raised on social media. Fincher and Sorkin pulled this off in the middle of it all – filmmaking soothsayers of the digital era.
5. Moonlight (2016)
While utterly cinematic, Moonlight is the closest moviemaking gets to poetry – it’s such a powerfully concentrated, impressionistic piece of work that every moment in it contains multitudes. The story of Little (aka Chiron, aka Black), a young black gay man growing up in Florida, is told in three distinct chapters – his youth, adolescence and young adulthood – that are vastly different from each other, each segment revealing the small but seismic moments that reverberate through his life and transform him completely in the years we don’t see him. Incorporating childhood recollections from writer-director Barry Jenkins and playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose unproduced theatre piece the film is based on, the film feels like a memory – sensory and tactile, evocative and lived-in. If Mahershala Ali deservedly got plenty of praise on release for playing Juan, the dealer who acts as a father figure to young Little, the three actors who play Chiron over the years are exemplary – the vulnerability of Alex Hibbert, the haunted eyes of Ashton Sanders, the impenetrable masculinity of Trevante Rhodes all informing each other. Moonlight is bruised, remarkably tender, completely shattering without ever grandstanding – it’s a miracle the Oscars rewarded it.
4. Inception (2010)
How do you follow up a gamechanger like The Dark Knight? You use your box office clout to make a gigantic, original, narratively-complex blockbuster the way only Christopher Nolan can. A summer movie set in the swirling subconscious, Inception is a film about the power of ideas that has plenty of its own – positing a sleeping mind as the scene for an anti-heist, picturing man-made dreamscapes that look like James Bond movie sets, and setting up a dizzying conceit of dreams within dreams within dreams with each operating at different speeds. That it’s clear enough to keep up with is impressive – that it’s also a non-stop piece of rollercoaster entertainment is phenomenal. The architect of all this beautiful chaos is Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb, whose own suppressed trauma threatens to topple the whole operation. But for all the movie stars at play – Tom Hardy, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Caine – it’s the filmmaking that’s the real star here. Creating giant practical sets, using miniatures, crafting folding cities with VFX, nothing feels out of Nolan’s reach. An instant classic, with an ambiguous final shot destined to remain spinning indefinitely (or will it?) in the mind of viewers for decades to come.
3. The Dark Knight (2008)
After delivering the ultimate Bruce Wayne movie with Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan put his dark knight to the test – clashing with Heath Ledger’s shuffling anarchist Joker. Everything about The Dark Knight feels grand and mythic – not just its imagery (the Joker setting piles of cash ablaze, the Two-Face reveal, the gleaming Gotham cityscape), but its sweeping narrative arcs that turn heroes into villains, lovers into martyrs, and gangsters into monsters. Nolan’s film reflects an America struggling to come to terms with the trauma of 9/11 – depicting the Joker as an urban terrorist whose motivation is solely to spread fear and dissent among the inhabitants of Gotham. He calls himself a “better class of criminal” – and The Dark Knight is, more so than a superhero film, a crime saga, right from that astonishing opening bank raid. There are action sequences here, including an adrenaline-pumping Batmobile chase, but even its set-pieces – from the race to save either Rachel or Harvey Dent, to the two-boats showdown – are more moral quandaries writ large. It’s a better class of blockbuster, a better class of comic book movie, and a better class of Joker – Ledger’s endlessly fascinating interpretation only growing more iconic as time ticks on.
2. The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001)
There has never been a cinematic fantasy saga like The Lord Of The Rings – and its opening chapter remains its crowning achievement. When Peter Jackson – the Kiwi filmmaker with a history of lo-fi splatter gore movies – disappeared for years to shoot his Tolkien adaptation, nobody knew what to expect. When The Fellowship Of The Ring finally arrived, it was better than anyone could have hoped for – a stunningly cinematic, appropriately mythic re-telling of the first book, with heart, humour, and a promise of much more to come. With its rosy evocation of the Shire, spine-tingling trip to Rivendell, fearsome diversion to the Mines of Moria, and eventual Uruk-hai showdown at Parth Galen, it has the most satisfying range of the series, bolstered by a perfectly-handled opening sequence depicting the history of the One Ring. It’s the contrasting scales of it all that thrills – the magnitude of the task at hand, the diminutive stature of its Hobbit hero, the length of the journey to come, the sheer depth of Middle-earth. With a little help from New Zealand’s most jaw-dropping landscapes, Jackson brought Tolkien’s world to real, tangible life. Fellowship took fantasy seriously at a time when the world at large didn’t – and cinema is all the better for it.
1. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
30.years passed between the arrival of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Mad Max: Fury Road. That’s three decades in which the fourth instalment of Max Rockatansky’s story seemingly swirled and brewed and bubbled away in the mind of filmmaker George Miller, a dusty, oily fever dream taking on a deranged life of its own before spewing forth, fully formed, onto the screen. There’s a purity of vision to Fury Road that taps directly into the parietal lobe – it feels entirely unfiltered, completely without compromise, utterly batshit insane in its conception and execution, no idea too bonkers or unwieldy, no practical effect too tricky to pull off. If its construction is mind-boggling, its premise is gloriously simple – a straight-up, near-non-stop chase movie through the post-apocalyptic wasteland, with Tom Hardy’s grunting Max quite literally along for the ride, strapped to the front of War Boy Nux’s car while the life is drained out of him. If it’s his name in the title, the movie equally belongs to Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa – a rebelling lieutenant of warlord Immortan Joe, who has made off with his bunch of breeding brides. She’s an absolute force of nature, face smothered in ash, her mechanical arm never directly addressed, a feminist action hero for the ages who quite literally steers the film. The driving sequences are electrifying, staged with complete clarity among all the chaos, Miller creating total spacial awareness as the fleet of vehicles thunders through the desert. Nothing about Fury Road is mediocre – it’s an unhinged piece of art, an astounding piece of action cinema, a visionary piece of filmmaking. Any day spent watching it is, truly, a lovely day.