The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century

Every generation gets its defining teen comedy. For the 21st century, that’s “Superbad.” The script by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg — about pals named Seth (Jonah Hill) and Evan (Michael Cera) trying to get laid before they graduate high school — is both hilariously profane and surreptitiously sweet. The director Greg Mottola took the antics and elevated them with retro opening titles and an uproarious sequence involving phallic cartoons. But “Superbad” is also a feat of casting, introducing moviegoers to the talents of Hill, Cera and Emma Stone.

The first clue that this Korean police procedural isn’t bound by Hollywood genre conventions comes in the opening moments: A detective (played by Song Kang Ho) summoned to investigate a dead body in a rural outpost arrives by hitching a ride on a plodding tractor. The grim laughs continue when other hapless investigators fall quite literally into the crime scene. The director Bong Joon Ho has strong ideas about the limits of men facing unfathomable evil, and he explores them with his hallmark mix of unexpected humor and sharply observed drama.

It would be easy to assume that this Werner Herzog documentary about Timothy Treadwell, who spent many summers cohabitating with Alaska’s brown bears, would skew educational. But Treadwell wasn’t an expert in the traditional sense, and this film is more about a man grappling with his place in the world. Treadwell left behind hours of self-recorded videos, and his camera’s microphone was on when he and his girlfriend were mauled to death in 2003. We watch Herzog listen to those moments, making it the most haunting audio you’ll never hear.

Alfonso Cuarón’s action film is one of the 21st century’s greatest thrill rides, a real-time survival story about an abandoned astronaut (Sandra Bullock) who must find her way back to Earth while confronting the trauma she has long suppressed. With groundbreaking special effects that outshine most recent releases, Cuarón crafts a suspenseful story that suggests the true terror of being lost in space isn’t the prospect of certain death — it’s being alone with your thoughts.

There’s so much to love. It’s a superhero spectacle that actually has something important to say, about how identity, history and responsibility intersect. Wakanda, the Afrofuturistic world where the story takes place, is a visual wonder. The women (played by Angela Bassett, Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o and Letitia Wright — all excellent) aren’t just sidekicks or love interests. Michael B. Jordan, as the tragically villainous Killmonger, has never been more swoon worthy. And, of course, Chadwick Boseman shines in the title role, sadly one of his last before dying of cancer.

At first, Julie (Renate Reinsve) may strike you as a dilettante. An Oslo college student, she changes majors like outfits; later, in her 20s, she dates tetchy Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie) while fantasizing about a life spent with the simpler Eivind (Herbert Nordrum). But this empathetic dramedy from Joachim Trier never judges Julie for her indecision, since a life lived robustly is bound to include some detours. How are you supposed to find yourself without looking everywhere first?

The image of a nearly bald Samantha Morton shouting “Run!” is just one reason Steven Spielberg’s Philip K. Dick adaptation is still haunting. In this dystopia, crime is stopped before it happens thanks to the foresight of human “precogs” like Morton’s character. Tom Cruise is appropriately on edge as a falsely accused police officer, infusing a deep sadness into his actions as he draws closer to the center of a huge conspiracy. A gnawing agony powers Spielberg’s noir in which color has almost been drained from the world.

“I’m not a miracle worker, I’m a janitor,” Michael Clayton tells a disgruntled client of the law firm he works for. George Clooney, in his finest performance, delivers the line with a mixture of seen-it-all bitterness and intelligence. His character is nominally an attorney, but really he’s a fixer trying to undo the damage after a colleague (Tom Wilkinson, at his absolute best) goes off his meds and finds his moral compass. What that does to Clayton’s conscience is the crux of the writer-director Tony Gilroy’s gripping thriller.

Sword-and-sandal epics were long out of fashion when Ridley Scott charged in with this exciting drama full of intrigue and action. It helped that he had Russell Crowe, as the honorable soldier out for vengeance, working at the height of his artistry and a fresh, unaffected Joaquin Phoenix as the emperor longing to be beloved. The film set off a mini-resurgence in the genre, but none of the imitators understood that spectacle needs heart to match. That’s what made “Gladiator” so gripping.

Few movies about adolescent girls are quite this raw or daring. Andrea Arnold’s story concerns a girl (Katie Jarvis) who desperately wants to be a hip-hop dancer, a pursuit her mother’s new boyfriend (Michael Fassbender) encourages. But really the film is about her awakening passions, sexual and familial and more, and the ways in which this seemingly tough girl is achingly vulnerable. It’s fearless and electric, one of Arnold’s finest.

Before Greta Gerwig struck out on her own to make “Lady Bird,” the first sign of her ascension was “Frances Ha,” which she co-wrote with the director Noah Baumbach. Gerwig also stars as Frances, a woman in her late 20s who is holding onto her youth in a way that is both irrepressibly joyful and deeply immature. Shot in nostalgic black and white, “Frances Ha” is a character study that captures the moment adulthood takes hold.

The plot of Christopher Nolan’s dazzling, ambitious space epic is a puzzle that even today remains mind-bending, mirroring how little we understand about where we are in the universe and why we exist. At its center is Matthew McConaughey as a widower who leaves behind his father, children and an Earth ravaged by climate change to join a NASA team trying to find a new planet. For all the far-off horizons, the movie is at its best exploring the precarious yet seductive concept of home.

The “I” is Agnès Varda, the pioneering filmmaker who helped kick-start the French new wave. With an intimate voice-over and hand-held digital camera, Varda travels throughout France to consider the personal and political identity of gleaners, people who traditionally collected grain left in fields after harvest. The result is a profound, uncommonly tender and searchingly philosophical dream of what it could mean to live in the world — take only what you need, share everything you have — that is itself a tour de force of cinematic gleaning.

With the first installment of his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Peter Jackson did the almost impossible: He brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth to life in the hills of New Zealand, appealing to longtime fans and newcomers who might be wary of the jargon about elves and orcs. The film set a new bar for fantasy blockbusters with makeup and effects that still hold up, and set pieces that are immersive and occasionally terrifying. As soon as Howard Shore’s score kicks in, it’s hard not to feel transported.

The opening scene of Celine Song’s debut feature beguiles you: Late at night in a New York bar, a woman (played by Greta Lee) is seated between two men (Teo Yoo and John Magaro) and it’s unclear who they are to one another. The closing scene with the same three people, filmed in one take on a sidewalk, may well shatter your heart. In between, Song’s story unfolds in New York City and Seoul and is filled with exquisite reflections on time, love, fate and reinvention.

The endless one-liners, the absurd set pieces, the big dumb sexist lunk of an anchorman played with just the right amount of lunacy by Will Ferrell, at arguably his best — this comedy is the perfect antidote to whatever ails you. Does the story make sense? Not really. Does that matter? No. You’re there for the jokes, the rumble between rival news teams and the sense that cast members had the time of their lives making this movie. Plus now we all know “San Diago” means “a whale’s vagina” in German.

Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” is here to bum you out in ways both breathtaking and contemplative. Kirsten Dunst stars as a bride who is falling apart, all the better to match the state of the world, which just might be about to collide with a rogue planet. When it comes to bleak and brutal, von Trier does it best, yet the Danish auteur somehow manages to make total annihilation a thing of beauty in the process.

The Coen brothers dug into the 1960s folk scene by focusing on one of its losers. The title character, played by a breakout Oscar Isaac, is a sad sack, mourning the loss of his musical partner, and a jerk, prone to taking advantage of supposed friends. Llewyn’s music is good, but not Bob Dylan good. This makes the movie one of the quintessential works of art about being an artist on the outside of greatness. The irony that the film itself is great is just the kind of karma Llewyn deserves.

Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary masterpiece concerns the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. Really, though, the subject is the incredible capacity of the human mind to compartmentalize and rationalize monstrous acts of cruelty toward other people. The way Oppenheimer goes about it makes for a movie that plays like psychological horror — all the more petrifying because it is nonfiction.

Where is the line between the drive for perfection and unhealthy obsession? Natalie Portman took home the best actress Oscar for her role as Nina, a ballerina whose competition with a rival (Mila Kunis) for the lead role in “Swan Lake” pushes her into madness. The director Darren Aronofsky ratchets up the tension and disorientation in this psychological thriller until our heads are spinning along with the dancers. The scenes depicting Nina’s hallucinations infuse body horror with an unforgettable dark grandeur.