Favorite 25 Films of the First Quarter-Century
and the 26 runners-up!
2025 began with me pledging to Substack monthly, only to retreat mid-year into seasonally, and now finds me belated with my fall post but staving off the suspense with this tallying of my somewhat-canonical, somewhat-contrarian, admittedly partisan but altogether honest accounting of what I take to be at this moment in time my favorite films of the first quarter-century (and, unsurprisingly, the baker’s two-dozen (i.e. 26) runners-up). Voilà and vive le cinéma!
Top 25 of the first 25
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2001)
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)
Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
Y Tu Mamá También (Alfonso Cuarón, 2002)
35 Rhums (35 Shots of Rum, Claire Denis, 2003)
In the Cut (Jane Campion, 2003)
Two-way tie and Richard Linklater-Julie Delpy-Ethan Hawke double feature: Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry-Charlie Kaufman, 2004)
Caché (Michael Haneke, 2005)
Two-way tie and Andrea Arnold double feature: Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2010)
4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
Lust, Caution (Ang Lee, 2007)
La mujer sans cabeza (The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel, 2008)
Wendy and Lucy (Kelly Reichardt, 2008)
Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)
Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
Appropriate Behavior (Desiree Akhavan, 2014)
Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017)
Three-way tie and Pedro Almodóvar-Penelope Cruz triple feature: Volver (2006), Dolor y gloria (Pain and Glory, 2019), Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers, 2021)
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma, 2019)
Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021)
Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022)
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni, 2024)
Runners-up
Bring It On (Peyton Reed, 2000)
Two-way tie and Agnès Varda double-feature: Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000) and Visages Villages (Faces Places, 2017)
À ma soeur (Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat, 2001)
Two-way tie and Tsai Ming-liang double feature: What Time Is It There? (2001) and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003)
Shijie (The World, Jia Zhang-ke, 2004)
Unrelated (Joanna Hogg, 2007)
Two-way tie and Andrew Bujalski double feature: Beeswax (2009) and Support the Girls (2018)
Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari, 2010)
Three-way tie and Andrew Haigh triple feature: Weekend (2011), 45 Years (2015), All of Us Strangers (2023)
The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev, 2011)
Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)
Oslo, August 31 (Joachim Trier, 2011)
Frances Ha (Noah Baumbach-Greta Gerwig, 2012)
L’inconnu du lac (Stranger by the Lake, Alain Guiraudie, 2013)
La vie d’Adèle (Blue Is the Warmest Color, Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013)
Clouds of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, 2014)
20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016)
Aquarius (Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016)
Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2017)
Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski, 2018)
All of the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, 2022)
Pacifiction (Albert Serra, 2022)
Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, 2022)
Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)
All We Imagine as Light (Payal Kapadia, 2024)