The 40 Greatest Movies of the 21st Century

Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers” is the second film in the hugely successful Lord of the Rings franchise based on the fantasy book trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. The Oscar-winning movie’s balance of groundbreaking visuals and epic storytelling won over critics and audiences alike.

“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” is set in rural Turkey. The movie tells the story of local officials and civilians who are searching at night for a buried body. The film “is a meditative procedural that maintains feverish intensity throughout its unhurried runtime,” according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus.

Based on the life of Polish-Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław  Szpilman, this saga follows the Szpilman’s experiences during the Nazi occupation. The film won three Oscars, including Best Actor for Adrien Brody and Best Director for Roman Polanski, himself a Holocaust survivor. Polanski did not attend the ceremony as he fled the U.S. in 1978 after pleading guilty to statutory rape.

“Amores Perros” is a brutal crime drama in which three stories intersect around a car accident. The film explores the lives of the characters involved, one of which is a champion fighting dog. The movie was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign movie.

Oscar-nominated sci-fi “Children of Men” takes place in 2027, when women have become infertile. The movie follows a man who helps get a pregnant woman to safety. The film “works on every level: as a violent chase thriller, a fantastical cautionary tale, and a sophisticated human drama about societies struggling to live,” according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus.

“Smart, innovating, and thrilling,” is the critics consensus on Rotten Tomatoes as it goes on praising this complex sci-fi mystery about a thief who can enter the dreams of others and steal their ideas — and ultimately maybe implant new ones. Critics applied words like “spectacular,” “endlessly fascinating,” and “awesomely original.”

The first of two movies on this list directed by Park Chan-wook, “Oldboy” follows a man who, after being held captive for 15 years, is released and now goes on a mission to find the people who kidnapped him and held him captive. “Violent and definitely not for the squeamish, Park Chan-Wook’s visceral ‘Oldboy’ is a strange, powerful tale of revenge,” according to Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus.

“Get Out” is Jordan Peele’s biting and provocative social commentary that is, at turns, a comedy and a horror movie. Peele became the first African American to win the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film has a 98% Freshness rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, and an 86% approval rating from audiences.

“Moonlight” follows the life of a young African-American named Chiron as he struggles to reconcile himself with his sexual identity, beginning in childhood and leading up through his adult years. Chiron is relentlessly bullied, helped by a Puerto Rican drug dealer who watches out for him, he comes to terms with who he is, and reconciles with his drug addict mother and the school friend who had once beaten him up.

“Ida” is the black-and-white devastating story of a new nun who goes on a trip in 1962 to Poland with the mission to discover what happened to her Jewish parents. The Polish drama won the Oscar for best foreign movie in 2015.

Park Chan-wook transposes Sarah Waters’ crime novel “Fingersmith” from Victorian London to Korea in the 1930s. The film follows a woman who is hired as a handmaiden but is secretly working to defraud her employer.

“Talk to Her” tells the story of two men, a nurse and a writer, who bond over being infatuated with two women in deep comas. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish drama won an Oscar for best original screenplay. It was also nominated for best director.

“The Great Beauty” centers on an aging writer going through an existential crisis. After spending much of his life reveling in Rome’s nightlife, he is now looking for a new meaning in the world around him. The Italian drama won the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2014.

Directed by the Coen Brothers, “Inside Llewyn Davis” follows a young singer on his journey of trying to make it in the folk music industry. The movie was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical category.

Kathryn Bigelow made history at the Oscars in 2010. Her low-budget, apolitical Iraq war film “The Hurt Locker” won a total of six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Bigelow is the first woman — and so far the only one — to win the Best Director award at the Oscars. The movie follows three American soldiers, members of a bomb-disposal unit in Baghdad, who are at the end of their tours.

Sofia Coppola was nominated for Best Director for “Lost in Translation.” The film follows a fading actor (Bill Murray) and a young, neglected wife who form an unlikely bond of friendship in Tokyo. Similarly to Campion, Coppola won an Oscar for writing the movie, but not for directing.

An impoverished, cantankerous 31-year-old waitress is determined to become a boxer, and she finds a boxing gym owner to take her on and train her. The two develop a surrogate father-daughter relationship as she hones her pugilistic skills. She’s finally ready for a championship fight against the middleweight women’s champion. Her opponent fights dirty, and finally blindsides her, knocking her into a corner stool and leaving her permanently paralyzed. Bedridden and with a leg amputated for gangrenous bed sores, she simply wants to end her life. Her trainer grants her wish.

Years after the whirlwind romance depicted in “Before Sunrise,” Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) reunite for another romantic encounter. “Before Sunset” ranks among IMDb’s top 250 movies of all time. It was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“Leviathan” is a Russian crime drama about a man standing up to a corrupt mayor and facing the consequences. The film was nominated for an Oscar in the best foreign language film. It won the Golden Globe in the same category.

The blood flows freely in Ethan and Joel Coen’s tale of a hunter (Josh Brolin) who finds dead drug dealers and $2 million and decides to keep the money. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor as the nut-job killer who goes after the money and Brolin, leaving dead bodies along the way. The Coen brothers also won Oscars for Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Picture.

“The White Ribbon” is a chilling German drama about a small village where strange and unexplained events that affect the wealthy residents happen for months. The mysterious incidents exacerbate the odd social code the people in the village live by.

The lives of others was precisely what the notoriously paranoid Stasi, the East German secret police during the Cold War, were concerned with. A Stasi officer is told to spy on a prominent communist playwright — not for political reasons, it turns out, but because the officer’s superior covets the playwright’s girlfriend. The officer ends up protecting the playwright instead.

This fantasy, set in a rural village in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, is the story of a young girl who discovers an underground stone labyrinth, where she meets a faun — half-man, half-goat — who tells her that she might really be a princess of the underground realm. While her real-life stepfather, a sadistic army officer, pursues rebels in the countryside, the girl tries to prove her regal identity through a series of three increasingly difficult tasks. She succeeds, but is shot and killed by her stepfather before reappearing in the underground realm as its beloved ruler.

The gritty Brazilian film “City of God” tells the true story of two children who grow up in Rio de Janieiro’s favelas during the 1970s. One becomes an accomplished photographer, the other a powerful drug lord. The movie has near universal audience approval on Rotten Tomatoes, with 91% of critics and 97% of fans giving the film a positive review.

“The Social Network” tells the story of the Harvard University students who created the social media phenomenon Facebook. Three Oscars went to the film, including Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay to Aaron Sorkin. The movie has a 96% rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes, whose Critics Consensus calls the film a “riveting, ambitious example of modern filmmaking at its finest.”

The martial arts flick about a warrior searching for his stolen sword in 19th century China was a huge hit in the U.S. It was nominated for 10 Oscars and won four, including Best Foreign Language Film.

Australian director George Miller returned to the Mad Max franchise to create “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which was released 36 years after the series’ first film. The movie is a wildly inventive spectacle, with numerous creatively designed vehicles and weapons that populate Miller’s post-apocalyptic world.

A drama set in the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1944, this film is the story of a Hungarian-Jewish prisoner forced to work in the gas chambers. One of his jobs is to bury the remains of the victims, and one day he encounters the body of a boy he believes to be his illegitimate son. Against all odds, he is determined to find a rabbi to give the boy a proper Jewish burial.

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” stands out from other films thanks to its relentless creativity, driven by the film’s director Michel Gondry and co-writer Charlie Kaufman. The clever direction and original screenwriting help highlight a story of heartbreak, in which two former lovers attempt to remove all memories of their failed relationship.

“Dark, complex and unforgettable,” says the Critics Consensus on Rotten Tomatoes about this sequel to “Batman Begins.” “The Dark Knight” pits Batman against his archenemy, The Joker, played here by the late Heath Ledger, whose performance won him an Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. “The Dark Knight” is “probably the smartest and most stylish action movie since ‘The Matrix,'” according to Timothy Mangan of the Orange County Register.

“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” is a Romanian movie about two female college students. One is helping the other get an abortion, which is illegal in the country at the time. The drama won the prestigious Palme d’Or award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2007.

Filmmaker Wes Anderson scored a major hit with this comedy about a lobby boy in a luxury hotel. The stylish film won four Oscars and a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. Critics gave it a 92% Freshness rating, finding it “deceptively thoughtful.”

David Lynch’s thriller was rejected as a TV show before he turned it into one of the most acclaimed movies of the last two decades. The film follows two women: one who is left amnesiac after a car crash, and the other, a wannabe actress, who is trying to help the woman with amnesia find out who she is.

This Pixar animated comedy has been called “inventive” and “powerfully moving” in Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus. A “bold, gorgeous, sweet, funny, sometimes heartbreakingly sad, candy-colored adventure,” according to critic Richard Roeper, it won an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

“12 Years a Slave” was named best picture at the 2014 Academy Awards (the Academy also honored Lupita Nyong’o as best actress in a supporting role and John Ridley for best adapted screenplay). This powerful story of a New York state black man who is kidnapped and sent south as a slave in the 1800s was hailed as “beautifully tragic” by critic Jennifer Heaton and “absorbing and comprehensively thought-provoking,” by critic Frank Ochieng.

“A Separation” is a painful family drama about a wife who wants to leave Iran — and her husband who can’t because he has to take care of his sick father– in search for a better future. The film won an Oscar for best foreign movie.

Wong Kar-Wai’s movie is a love story. Two neighbors who are attracted to each other but decide to keep their relationship platonic because they don’t want to stoop to the level of their cheating spouses.

Filmed over the span of 12 years, “Boyhood” tells the story of a boy named Mason Evans Jr. as he faces the trials and tribulations of growing up. British film magazine Sight & Sound named “Boyhood” the best movie of 2014 based on the opinions of over 100 international film critics.

“There will be blood” is a movie about greed. The film mixes love for family, religion, and the early days of the oil industry to tell the story of a man who grows from a silver miner to a self-made millionaire. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his performance as oil tycoon Daniel Plainview.

“Spirited Away” is about a young girl who finds herself transported to a strange world filled with demons, spirits, and malevolent gods. It is the eighth feature film directed by Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki and won the director his sole Oscar, for Best Animated Feature, in 2003. The movie was distributed by Walt Disney Pictures in the U.S. at the urging of Pixar’s chief creative officer, John Lasseter.