REEL | Top 10 Films of the 21st Century So Far

"We won't be like them."

Janus Films / Jet Tone Films

1) In the Mood for Love ¹ (dir. Wong Kar-wai, 2000)

2) Mulholland Drive ² (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

3) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (dir. Michel Gondry, 2004)

4) Ghost World ³ (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001)

5) The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010)

6) Zodiac (dir. David Fincher, 2007)

7) The Handmaiden (dir. Park Chan-wook, 2016)

8) Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho, 2019)

9) Her (dir. Spike Jonze, 2013)

10) Frances Ha (dir. Noah Baumbauch, 2012)

Honourable mentions:

Before Sunset (dir. Richard Linklater, 2004)

The Prestige (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2006)

Universal Pictures / StudioCanal

¹ It's the greatest film I have ever seen every time I see it. In the Mood for Love is sensational filmmaking in its classically universal telling of romantic longing and forbidden love. It's beautiful and heartbreaking in its melancholic hopefulness all the same.

² Lynch's surrealist neo-noir masterpiece is a hauntingly beautiful mediation on the idealized bygone Hollywood dream lost long ago. Mulholland Drive's atmospheric, mind-bending mystery wraps itself in a sultry, forbidden lesbian romance that reveals a far more tragic fable than the glitzy hopefulness audiences are initially introduced to.

³ The first-ever film based on a comic book to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, Ghost World brings famed cartoonist Daniel Clowes' offbeat but grounded adaptation to life for a wholly bleak but highly comedic slice of life.

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