The 25 best movies of this century, as selected by BRIAN VINER: From blockbusters to little-known gems, discover if your favourite is on the list... and the classics that don't make the cut
We’re a quarter of the way through the 21st century, which seems like an appropriate time to list the century’s 25 greatest feature films so far, if only in the English language (and leaving out documentaries).
Of course, all film lists are subjective, and what constitutes ‘great’ anyway? The best definition I can offer is this: beyond wonderful writing, excellent direction and brilliant acting, not to mention cinematography, music, costumes and all the other ingredients, a great film must stay in the mind. It should offer something unforgettable, and I think these 25 all do that.
I’ve had to omit some proper corkers, from The Royal Tenenbaums and The Wolf Of Wall Street to Moonlight, The Martian, Dunkirk, Barbie and Oppenheimer.
But I had to draw a line and I had to place my films in order, which might spark further objections.
I hope you’ll agree with my choices, but if you don’t, please take the time to let me know. Like every list of the ‘best’, it’s ripe for debate.
1. Boyhood (2014) Prime Video
A coming-of-age drama like no other, this is a towering cinematic achievement and will surely stand as writer-director Richard Linklater’s masterpiece, even though he has made plenty of other tremendously enjoyable films (among them Dazed And Confused, School Of Rock, Before Sunrise and its sequels, and Hit Man).
Linklater began filming Boyhood in 2002 and finished more than a decade later. His aim was to chronicle a child’s life from six to 18 by using the same young actor (Ellar Coltrane), gathering the same cast twice every year to update the story. Ethan Hawke, who plays the boy’s father, has called the film ‘Tolstoy-esque’ in its scope, and he’s not overstating it.
It’s Tolstoy-esque in length, too; only 15 minutes short of three hours. But then there are 12 years to distil, and Boyhood never outstays its welcome. It is an extraordinary film, brilliantly conceived and marvellously executed.
2. There Will Be Blood (2007) Paramount+
Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting career is one thunderous turn after another, whether his character is kindly or menacing, rational or deranged, decent or dishonest.
No picture, not even Lincoln or My Left Foot, does a better job of showcasing his abundant talents than Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, in which he plays monstrous, obsessively driven oilman Daniel Plainview.
It’s a proper tour-de-force in a truly epic movie, set in the early 20th century and loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, about a corrupt drilling family. The cinematography is fantastic too, as is Jonny Greenwood’s unsettling score.
3. Gladiator (2000) Disney+
I tend to think of the late 1950s and early 1960s as the heyday of the sword-and-sandals epic: the Ben-Hur, Spartacus and Jason And The Argonauts years.
But 40 years later director Ridley Scott gave us Gladiator, and what a gift it was, winning five Oscars, including Best Picture.
Russell Crowe is simply magnificent as heroic general Maximus Decimus Meridius, the nemesis of villainous Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix).
Gladiator also marked the last hurrah of a notorious hell-raiser, Oliver Reed, who played the slave-trader Proximo. During filming in Malta, following a huge bender with a bunch of young Royal Navy ratings, 61-year-old Reed dropped dead.
4. No Country For Old Men (2007) Netflix, Paramount+
Cormac McCarthy’s novel about the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong had come out only two years earlier, and the Coen brothers were persuaded to adapt it.
Their film was crowned Best Picture at the Academy Awards, pipping There Will Be Blood and Atonement among others. Josh Brolin is excellent as Llewellyn Moss, who finds a satchel containing more than $2million, and he gets top-notch support from Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson and Kelly Macdonald.
Yet it is Javier Bardem who steals the show as merciless killer Anton. He won an Oscar and another honour, from the Journal of Forensic Sciences, which deemed his performance the screen’s ‘Most Realistic Depiction of a Psychopath’.
5. Toy Story 3 (2010) Disney+
There simply has to be a Pixar film on this list, and I couldn’t possibly omit Toy Story 3.
For me and many fans of Woody the cowboy, astronaut Buzz Lightyear and co, the inventive third film in the series tops even the first two.
This is the one in which, with 17-year-old Andy about to leave for college, his once-beloved toys end up in a sinister day-care centre.
There’s a glorious escape scene, inspired by all the best prison-break movies you’ve ever seen; indeed director Lee Unkrich claimed that, in pursuit of inspiration, he and his Pixar colleagues watched every one of them.
They crafted a film which is hilarious (as when Buzz is rebooted and starts speaking Spanish) but also touching and poignant – especially in our house, because our firstborn and Andy are exactly the same age. When he was leaving for college, so was she. My wife loved Toy Story 3, but couldn’t stop crying.
6. The Shape of Water (2017) Disney+
Not everyone was smitten by Guillermo del Toro’s Cold War-era romantic thriller, with its heavy dose of magical realism, but for me (as for the Academy Award voters, who anointed it Best Picture) it is beguiling.
It got a whopping 13 Oscar nominations, including one for Sally Hawkins, who should have won.
She is superb as Elisa, who works as a cleaner at a top-secret government ‘facility’. There she falls in love with a creature, half-man and half-fish, which has been brought from the Amazon in the hope that its powers can be used against the Soviets.
7. Joker (2019) Prime Video
The origin story of comic-book fiction’s most enigmatic and distinctive villain could have been the usual exercise in CGI theatrics.
Instead, in the hands of director Todd Phillips and his co-writer, Scott Silver, it is a lacerating story about mental illness, and society’s inability to deal with it properly.
Joaquin Phoenix is amazing in the title role (although he spends most of the film as plain Arthur Fleck, saddled with a neurological condition that causes him to have random laughing fits). His Academy Award was richly deserved, and not only because he lost 52 pounds (in old money, three and a half stone) to play the part.
8. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) Sky/Now
It is said that director George Miller conceived this fourth Mad Max film in 1998 while trying to cross an LA intersection.
With Tom Hardy as the testosterone-fuelled title character (first played in 1979 by Mel Gibson), and Charlize Theron as the one-armed alpha-female warrior who teams up with him as they flee from a vengeful warlord, Miller’s film amounts to little more than a chase through an earthbound hell.
It is Top Gear on steroids: roaringly demented, intensely violent, and in some ways best treated as a spectacular joke.
But it is also thrillingly exhilarating, with incredible cinematography and a vision that is two-thirds Salvador Dali to one-third Hieronymus Bosch.
9. The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) Disney+
Martin McDonagh is an acclaimed playwright as well as a first-rate film-maker, and his dialogue is always worth savouring.
But he will surely never top The Banshees Of Inisherin, about the consequences in 1920s Ireland of a male friendship ending.
Brendan Gleeson plays the melancholic Colm, who tells the kindly, much simpler Padraic (Colin Farrell) that he just doesn’t want to be pals any more. That’s the framework for an exquisitely told story that tackles universal themes: camaraderie, regrets, longing, loneliness.
It’s wonderfully acted (as the perceived village idiot, Barry Keoghan very nearly steals the show from everyone), with fantastic cinematography, a great score and maybe the finest performance by a donkey ever in a movie. Giving Farrell’s character a donkey came at a price, however. The beast not only kicked him, but it cost £75,000 to make a convincing replica, for a later scene in which, spoiler alert, she dies.
10. Best in Show (2000) Buy or rent on Sky, Amazon etc
This wonderful mock documentary was a significant influence on Ricky Gervais while he was working on his TV show The Office, which aired the following year.
It’s blissfully funny, a largely improvised, gloriously observed, relentlessly hilarious mickey-take of dog shows and the people who revere them.
Director Christopher Guest has a great eye and ear for absurdism, and also (like Gervais) a priceless talent for choosing the best possible collaborators, such as his co-writer, Eugene Levy, and actors including Catherine O’Hara, Jennifer Coolidge and Fred Willard. Guest wanted to film at an actual dog show, but couldn’t find one that would let him, so he and his team had to create their own.
11. Little Women (2019) Netflix
There have been at least half a dozen big-screen adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s charming stories about the March sisters, written in the 1860s. Consequently, there was a kind of collective rolling-of-eyes when Greta Gerwig announced she was having another crack.
But I can’t think of a better example of how a familiar story can be given a new lease of life. Gerwig’s Little Women has oodles of heart and a bunch of enchanting performances, even by Emma Watson (Meg), who could have been shown up by the superior talents of Saoirse Ronan (Jo), Florence Pugh (Amy) and Eliza Scanlen (Beth), not to mention Laura Dern (Marmee), Meryl Streep (Aunt March) and Timothee Chalamet (Laurie).
It’s joyful, sad, heart-warming and altogether lovely - one of the most appealing coming-of-age movies not just of the last 25 years, but the last 100.
12. Under the Skin (2013) Buy or rent on Sky, Amazon etc
British director Jonathan Glazer doesn’t make many films but when he does, it’s worth sitting up. In the last 25 years he has made just four, and the other three are Sexy Beast (2000), Birth (2004) and The Zone Of Interest (2023), all strikingly different but widely acclaimed.
Under The Skin, a sci-fi thriller based on a novel by Michael Faber, is the strangest of the quartet.
It stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien in human form who, in and around Glasgow, preys on lone men by luring them into her van and drugging them before… well, if you haven’t seen it, you must. Intriguingly, the alien’s male victims were ordinary members of the public who at first had no idea they were being filmed.
13. Borat (2006) Disney+
If a 21st-century film has made me laugh longer than the mock-documentary Borat, I can’t think of it.
Misogyny and racism were skewered mercilessly by Sacha Baron Cohen’s alter ego, the naïve Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev. But his way of doing that was to make the affable Borat himself (on an exciting first visit to America from his remote village) the embodiment of every imaginable form of bigotry and boorishness.
It’s a work of tremendous daring and, in my view, comic genius.
14. Sideways (2004) Disney+
Who doesn’t love a road-trip comedy? This is one of the best, right up there with – but smarter than – 1980s classics Midnight Run and Planes, Trains And Automobiles.
Sideways tells the story of middle-aged friends Miles (Paul Giamatti) and Jack (Thomas Haden Church), on a trip in Californian wine country ahead of the latter’s wedding.
They’re both losers in their own ways, and the film has notes of melancholy. But it is also hilarious and moving.
15. Manchester-by-the-Sea (2016) Prime Video, Netflix
Casey Affleck won the Oscar for Best Actor, pipping Andrew Garfield, Ryan Gosling, Viggo Mortensen and Denzel Washington to the big prize.
The title refers to a small coastal town in Massachusetts, to which a depressed and anti-social fellow called Lee Chandler (Affleck) reluctantly returns, having left a few years earlier after a family tragedy.
Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, it’s really a study of profound grief.
16. Get Out (2017) Sky/Now, Netflix
Jordan Peele’s debut feature is a horror film, and a very good one, but also so much more. It’s a nail-bitingly tense thriller, too, and above all a razor-sharp satire about racism in America, wonderfully led by Daniel Kaluuya as a photographer who guilelessly goes to spend the weekend with the middle-class family of his white girlfriend.
The movie was shot in Alabama, in the heart of the once-segregated South. But keen to play with perceptions of East Coast liberalism and tolerance, Peele set it in New York State.
17. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) Disney+
Could The Grand Budapest Hotel be the apotheosis of Wes Anderson’s whimsical style? Since then, films of his such as Asteroid City and The Phoenician Scheme have been so pretentiously quirky as to be barely watchable, but this is a joy from fanciful beginning to loopy end.
Ralph Fiennes leads an all-star cast including Bill Murray, Jude Law, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Owen Wilson and Tilda Swinton. Fiennes is the concierge of a belle-epoque hotel in Europe, and his immaculate comic timing leavens the movie’s dark themes of murder and fascism.
18. Paddington 2 (2017) Prime Video, Netflix
Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, died aged 91 on the day that filming wrapped on Paddington 2, and his epitaph on his gravestone at Paddington Old Cemetery reads, ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you’.
As for his cinematic epitaph, that is just as heartwarming. It’s a gorgeous film, funny, sweet and uplifting, with Hugh Grant, as over-the-hill actor Phoenix Buchanan, sending up himself and his profession.
As a result of Buchanan’s villainous machinations, poor Paddington winds up in prison, where of course he wins over even the nastiest of his fellow inmates with his unique brand of polite bonhomie. A delight.
19. Once upon a time in… Hollywood (2019) Netflix
Pulp Fiction will always be Quentin Tarantino’s masterpiece, but this is a cracker too - a compelling, often comedic depiction of the movie industry in the late 1960s, with a violent but glorious twist relating to the terrible Manson murders.
It brims with reverence for America’s pop-cultural history, and is brilliantly cast. Leonardo DiCaprio is fabulous as fading star Rick Dalton, and Brad Pitt matches him as stuntman Cliff Booth. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, the Manson gang’s most famous victim.
20. Hell or High Water (2016) Buy or rent on Sky, Amazon etc
Every list of great films needs a Western and this is a real doozy, even though it’s a contemporary one, without a single wagon train or Apache horseman on a ridge.
Chris Pine and Ben Foster play a pair of brothers who go on a bank-robbing spree across Texas, pursued by a grizzled old Ranger (Jeff Bridges).
The director is a Scotsman, David Mackenzie, but from the way the camera lingers lovingly on the landscape, all those oil derricks and interminable goods trains, you’d swear it was made by someone raised nearer Dallas than Dundee.
21. The Selfish Giant (2013) Buy or rent on Sky, Amazon etc
A stunning exercise in social realism, loosely inspired by Oscar Wilde’s short story, Clio Barnard’s film never got the recognition it deserved.
Set in down-at-heel Bradford, it follows the misadventures of two ragamuffins, Arbor (Conner Chapman) and Swifty (Shaun Thomas), who get mixed up in the scrap business – and it has been compared to the films of Ken Loach.
Chapman had never acted on screen before and said he only went to the audition to ‘get out of lessons’.
22. Mr Turner (2014) Buy or rent on Sky, Amazon etc
Timothy Spall gives the stand-out performance of even his illustrious career as JMW Turner, in a film that chronicles the last third of the artist’s life episodically, without a clear narrative thread.
In its way it’s as bold and unusual as Turner himself, whose revolutionary style of painting divided opinion in early Victorian England (with the Queen firmly on the side of the haters). It’s also good fun; I especially love Turner’s merciless teasing of John Constable (James Fleet). And it is sumptuous on the eye.
23. The Death of Stalin (2017) Sky/Now
Armando Iannucci’s film is a razor-sharp, mischievous political satire about the aftermath of Stalin’s death in 1953, with a raft of lovely performances from an all-star cast including Steve Buscemi, Simon Russell Beale, Jason Isaacs, Rupert Friend, Paul Whitehouse, Michael Palin and Andrea Riseborough.
It was funny and relevant at the time, but the second coming of Donald Trump and the war-mongering machinations of Vladimir Putin give it even more currency now.
24. Phantom Thread (2017) Prime Video
Director Paul Thomas Anderson teams up with Daniel Day-Lewis in another spellbinding period drama, ten years after they collaborated so memorably on There Will Be Blood. The subject matter could hardly be more different, though.
Day-Lewis gives an impeccable performance as the controlling Reynolds Woodcock, a celebrated couturier in 1950s London. He is matched both by Lesley Manville, who plays his icy sister (and, like him, bagged an Oscar nomination), and by Vicky Krieps, splendid as his lover.
25. Jawbone (2017) Prime Video, Disney+
All the best film lists need a dash of unpredictability, and here’s mine. Not because this British boxing drama wasn’t terrific, but because it’s so little-known.
The writer and leading man is Johnny Harris, who drew on his own boxing career. He plays Jimmy McCabe, a shambling alcoholic in need of money. He was once a promising boxer and, seeking one more pay day, throws himself on the mercy of his tough old trainer (Ray Winstone).
It’s relentlessly gripping and packs a proper knockout punch.
Tell us what you think. Do you agree with Brian’s choices? Send us an email with your views to [email protected], marking it ‘25 Films’
