The New York Times recently published their The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list, based on votes from over 500 filmmakers, actors, and influential film fans. At the top of the list was Parasite, director Bong Joon Ho’s South Korean thriller centered on the clash between two families at opposite ends of the wealth divide.
Parasite made history in 2020 when it became the first non-English language film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. “When the movie opened in the United States, Bong was a favorite on the art-house circuit,” read the list’s description of its top pick. “By the time it closed, he had a fistful of Oscars… and the world had a new superstar.”
Reviews for the film at the time of its release in 2019 were equally starry-eyed. The New York Times deemed it the movie of the year, Variety likened it to a dark and uncategorizable movie melée, and Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com deemed it Bong’s masterpiece. As soon as it premiered at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival and became the first Korean film to take home the Palme d’Or, Parasite became a global phenomenon, sparking conversations about class, culture, and cinema like never before.
Bold Claims
However, to call Parasite the best movie of the 21st century opens up a broader conversation about how we define “best,” (not necessarily whether Parasite is a movie deserving of the top spot). When it comes to lists that try to make bold claims about what the “best” is of any medium, it’s essential to look at the criteria behind the rankings.
The New York Times doesn’t specify what criteria it used when making its list. The voting pool, which included high-profile Hollywood names such as Miley Cyrus, Sofia Coppola, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and others, was asked to choose movies “however they saw fit.” Sure, their answers were compiled into a definitive ranking, but it’s more than likely that, as all lists are concerned, personal taste, cultural background, and differing definitions of what “best” is inevitably shape the results, rather than an objective, unwavering criterion.
It’s also worth noting that the list skews heavily towards Western cinema. In the Top 10 picks alone, only three non-Western movies are represented: Parasite, Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love (No. 4), and Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away (No. 9). The rest of the top ten are all American titles, including Mulholland Drive (No. 2), There Will Be Blood (No. 3), and Moonlight (No. 5). However, these non-Western films are films that have largely crossed over into the Hollywood consciousness.
The Times also invited its readers to rank their lists, with 200,000 ballots cast. Their top film of the century so far? Parasite. Though the Top 10 had blockbusters such as Mad Max and The Dark Knight.
The Task of Ranking
The New York Times may have leaned on Western-specific celebrity and star power in curating its list, but other publications have approached the same daunting task of ranking the century’s best films with a little more precision.
Sight and Sound, the British Film Institute’s film magazine, holds a decennial poll, which asks over a thousand critics, programmers, curators, archivists, and academics to name the greatest films of all time. Because the publication has upheld this tradition since 1952, it possesses a heavy authority in shaping cinematic canon. For its list of the best 21st-century films, Sight and Sound took a more nuanced approach and assembled a small but highly regarded panel of 25 of its “finest critics” to “nominate a film that is significant within our cinematic era” What resulted was a carefully curated but also “subjective, esoteric, perhaps even provocative” collection of films that acknowledge the wide expanse of global cinema.
The list is also upfront about its criteria, giving us a peek into the decisions that were made, saying, “With no aspirations to comprehensiveness, this is a subjective, esoteric, perhaps even provocative, collection of films. From the UK to Brazil to China to Lesotho, from independent breakthroughs to Hollywood hits to the utterly uncategorisable, these are the films of the century so far.”
Although Sight and Sound admits to the inherent subjectivity of creating a ranked list, its selection also reflects a deliberate and informed effort to move beyond Western dominance. Yes, it still spotlights major Hollywood successes like Bridesmaids and Get Out, but it also honors the Palestinian dark comedy Divine Intervention, the French erotic drama Anatomy of Hell, and the Japanese animated folklore feature The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, to name just a few.
The BBC also undertook the task of ranking the century’s best films so far in 2016, where 177 film critics “from every continent except Antarctica” picked films that, for them, “prove that this century has given us films that will stand the test of time that you will continue to think about and argue about if only you give them a chance and watch them.” The film featured four non-Western films — Yi Yi, In the Mood for Love, A Separation, and Spirited Away — and six American independent films, some of which were also included in The Times’ own 21st Century Films poll.
The Verdict
To rank the best movies — or the best anything — and call it a definitive list is in itself a paradox. Unfortunately, The New York Times’ list reflects this tension, with a voting pool that remains largely focused on Western cinema, leaving many acclaimed films out of the spotlight.
As Vulture pointed out, the appeal of these lists isn’t the vague biases or the arbitrariness of the results; it’s because “ranking the same 40 or so odd movies in different combinations so you can get into arguments in your group chat is what makes life rich,” wrote their senior news writer Fran Hoepfner. “When push comes to shove, it’s not so easy to pick a Studio Ghibli or a Paul Thomas Anderson film when your thumbs hover over the ballot.”
So while Parasite deserves its place in cinema history, the conversation about the “best” movie of this century remains open and subjective to everyone who cares enough to do so.
