Will our kids watch any of this year's movies?
NYT's Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century gives us some clues.
Hi everyone. I met a friend this morning for coffee at Rigor Hill in Tribeca and they have a really lovely little farmer’s market on Tuesdays with produce from Rigor Hill Farm in the Hudson Valley.
I spent last night in front of the air conditioner eating the Goose (a jam band my husband likes) flavor of Jeni’s ice cream and watching a very young and unhinged Alec Baldwin in Miami Blues. Criterion’s new Miami Neonoir collection is a blast.
Today’s letter includes:
’s thoughts on NYT's Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century (my thoughts are that everyone is getting a little list crazy and traffic hungry); the museum that’s charging visitors $1,000 to swim in their pool; protein soft serve comes to New York; and how The Information fumbled their interview with Zuck.Stay Tuned is a guest column on Feed Me written by Teddy Kim. In this column, Teddy writes about when entertainment comes in contact with tech — and the implications of that. You can read his last column about how New York handled a viral shipwreck, here.
The NYT published its list of the Best 100 Movies of the 21st Century and there’s a lot to discuss. I’ve seen 80 of them, 90 from the readers’ list. Not too bad, although there were some embarrassing blindspots for me: The Royal Tenenbaums, Amélie, The Master.
Lists are usually an exercise in subjective taste. The director’s taste will vary from the screenwriter to the actor, the Tom Cruise action junkie to the A24 zealot. Last month,
wrote about how the Times’ mostly unranked restaurant list felt like a mishmash, serving up the impression that we’re missing a singular trusted voice that has its pulse on the city’s dining scene.That’s even more aggressively true on the film side. Instead of the Times’ critics drawing up the list, they outsourced it to more than 500 industry film lovers and aggregated the most common favorites. Maybe that’s appropriate for the age of the algorithm, where every week brings a fresh batch of streaming slop for us to sift through. It’s also always great for traffic to have 500 micro (and mega) celebrities promoting a story.
But a critic’s job is to introduce new films to the audience, or new ways of looking at old ones. One of the joys of lists is finding the lesser-known films that critics are willing to put their neck out for, and taking a leap of faith to watch them. Sometimes you’re disappointed, but often enough you find a gem that makes the misses worth it.
“Instead of the Times’ critics drawing up the list, they outsourced it to 500 industry film lovers and aggregated the most common favorites. Maybe that’s appropriate for the age of the algorithm. It’s also always great to have 500 micro-celebrities promoting your story.”
That’s why the ballots of everyone’s individual Top 10 lists are actually more interesting to go through.
Just for fun, I helped my friend make a tool you can use to compare your own Top 10 against everyone else’s. You can see that filmmakers like the Safdie brothers pick not only A Prophet and There Will Be Blood, but also more eclectic choices like Snow On Tha Bluff and Team America: World Police. The end result, however, is less than the sum of its parts. Because only the most commonly-selected films made it into the Top 100, the finished product skews more toward predictable consensus choices than rare, surprising picks.
Despite the methodology, there are some insights to mine from the more data-driven approach. There’s an interesting bias away from recency, with the 2020s contributing only half the amount of films you’d expect. That confirms my feeling that we’ve been in a slump since 2016 but it could also be that some films just need the time to age into their reception.
The recent films that did make it onto the list feel ranked too high (Zone of Interest at #12, Anatomy of a Fall at #26). Older ones dominated but tastes have changed. You won’t find aughts classics like Signs, 25th Hour, or Million Dollar Baby, which came in as high as #3 in the 2017 version of the NYT list. The most recent comedy is Bridesmaids, from more than a decade ago.
The biggest jump scare was seeing Parasite at #1, especially when Bong’s much better Memories of Murder is just hanging on at #99. Thankfully we’re spared Everything Everywhere All at Once in the top ten. If this list were made just a few years ago, I promise you it would have ranked much higher than #72. As always, there are some noteworthy omissions. I added some off the top of my head to a Letterboxd list, but for starters: Burning (2018), Mother (2009), Paprika (2006), Margaret (2011), Hereditary (2018), Oasis (2002), and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018).
“The missing superhero genre sort of begs the question of whether the kinds of movies we’re making will actually matter to us even just a few years from now.”
About that last one: for a quarter-century dominated by the MCU machine, there's a striking absence of the superhero genre. We get The Dark Knight (#28) and Black Panther (#96) and then a few more on the readers’ list. But we’re missing many of the more well-regarded entries like Spider-Man 2 (2004), Iron Man (2008), or Logan (2017).
The missing superhero genre sort of begs the question of whether the kinds of movies we’re making will actually matter to us even just a few years from now. With the advent of AI and the dominance of YouTube and TikTok, it’s hard not to feel like the 2025 list is the writing of a final chapter, an inventory list to check off before everything’s put into storage. I’m sure there’ll be a new list in another 25 years, but how many new movies from now will be on there?
I hate to just bash a list, so here’s my own attempt at a Top 100. I have to admit I have a lot more empathy for the list after taking a crack at it. After a certain point, ranking feels like a useful exercise. They’re all great. What are some of your favorites on any of these lists? What do you think was left off?
10 of the best movies I’ve seen this century:
A Separation (2011): Absolute masterpiece. A story about a couple's divorce becomes a social thriller about truth and consequence. Every character is both right and wrong, victim and perpetrator, the kind of moral complexity that’s made richer by Farhadi’s own ethical troubles.
Before Midnight (2013): I think the second movie in the trilogy has the best ending, but overall each film is an improvement on the last. I think it’s the most honest depiction of long-term relationships. The imaginative love of Sunrise is all the more powerful here because you know how much it has survived to get there.
Burning (2018): Lee Chang-dong's slow-burn thriller about class resentment, sexual frustration, and violence, adapted from a Murakami story. The real crime is that this movie wasn’t even nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, when Parasite would go on to win it all the next year and introduce the mainstream world to Korean cinema. Lee unravels the mystery at a languid pace, like a Cheshire Cat stretching its back. The class commentary is subtle, the writing is sharp, and the digital cinematography is gorgeous. Pay attention to the music in the movie.
Children of Men (2006): Alfonso Cuarón's dystopian masterpiece about a world where humans have stopped reproducing. Its political resonances have gone beyond the Iraq War context of its origin and continues to feel hauntingly relevant. Howard Hawks defined a great movie as three great scenes and no bad ones. There are far more than three in this one.
Memories of Murder (2003): Bong Joon-ho's film blends a serial killer procedural thriller with a black comedy about systemic failure. Whenever I get depressed about the uninspiring shot/reverse shots and extreme close-ups of modern movies, I rewatch Memories, which has some of the best staging I’ve ever seen.
Michael Clayton (2007): A legal thriller that’s also a character study of a man sold an American Dream he’s long stopped believing. The movie opened just two days before the Dow Jones index peaked ahead of the misery to come, and looking back, it’s one of the defining films of the Great Recession. Tony Gilroy's script is airtight; the man can write some killer monologues. Here he distills corporate sociopathy to its purest form.
Mother (2009): It lacks the exclamation mark found in Darren Aronofsky’s more well-known film by the same name, but this is Bong Joon-ho’s best movie by far. As entertaining as it is profound, it's a Greek tragedy by way of Korean Hitchcock. Memories of Murder is still my favorite but he transcends genre here in a way that makes this his most mature work.
Paprika (2006): Satoshi Kon's psychedelic masterpiece about a device that allows therapists to enter patients' dreams. It's a fever dream of animation that explores identity, desire, and the subconscious mind with breathtaking visual invention. Not a surprise directors like Aronofsky and Nolan have ripped shots from this.
Still Walking (2008): What begins as a simple family reunion becomes a meditation on grief, resentment, and the weight of unspoken words. The film finds profound drama in the mundane: a mother's passive-aggressive comments, a father's stubborn silences, small cruelties that speak to decades of accumulated disappointment. It’s one of the most quietly moving films I’ve seen.
Yi Yi (2000): Edward Yang's family epic feels like a lifetime compressed into three hours. When I walked out of the theater I felt like I’d just read a novel in one sitting. Yi Yi is about three generations of a Taiwanese family and how we struggle and grow through the stages of our own lives. It’s a movie about coming to an appreciation for what life is, and not just what we wish it were. A testament to the power of empathy and observation.
This concludes Stay Tuned by Teddy Kim.
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Ballerina Farm launched protein soft serve at Happier Grocery.
, a lifestyle and CPG brand by Hannah Neeleman, sells their protein powder in multiple forms (powdered, bottled) at New York’s Erewhon competitor, Happier Grocery. The latest is $10 ice cream. As one of my readers commented, it really is the brand/influencer/trend collision of our time – raw milk “trad” influencer, plus vaguely MAHA farm-inspired products, and a protein-packed ice cream alternative. A couple blocks north, a new frozen yogurt spot called Mimi’s is opening up.Speaking of Ballerina Farm, The Washington Post published a story today about milkmaid dresses as a political statement. It asks, “Is the floral dress now the uniform of the conservative it-girl?” And maybe it is, but it’s also what takes up many of the racks of affordable womenswear stores like Target and H&M, and even Reformation.
is on Substack. All of your favorite magazines will be here by the end of the year.
The Information’s TBPN competitor is having some technical difficulties. The new live technology show, TITV, had a huge guest on launch day: Zuck. Unfortunately, when he came onto the livestream with The Information’s founder Jessica Lessin, the sound cut out. If you fast forward to the last four minutes, you can see the error. It’s rough. I also can’t get a sense why any of the news in this first stream needed to be live, as opposed to a podcast.
Someone save Connecticut’s beautiful Eugene O’Neill Theater Center!
For $1,000, you can swim in the pool at the Hearst Castle. Famously, nobody has done this better than jetsetter extraordinaire Zachary Weiss. I asked him about his past swims in the pool, and this is what he said:
“They host a weekend-long fundraiser for the home and grounds, and I was lucky to ride the coattails of a generous donor. The swimming portion was the undisputed highlight, but I didn’t realize that the grounds are considered a national park. So, while it’s an incredible experience, it’s less resort-y than one might expect, and you may have a hawk-eyed park ranger watching your every move.”
The IP for Fyre Fest sold for less than a quarter of a million dollars… and it was sold on eBay. As a reminder, Billy McFarland ended up having to pay $26mm to the people he defrauded.
brought the Substack to my attention. Praise be.
- published her latest social media brand report – I’m always impressed by how thorough and timely this quarterly series is. In addition to brands joining Substack, they’re also making Wes Anderson-y short films for Instagram, and putting their press trips front and center on the feed.
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Edward Yang supremacy! Yi Yi is so beautifully shot. Mahjong and Brighter Summer Day also worth the length.
My biggest omission is Nuri Bilge Ceylan films, he's Turkish so does not get as much notoriety here but Once Upon A Time in Anatolia, Winter Sleep, and About Dry Grasses have really interesting stories that to me rival a Wong Kar-wai/Yang/Ho/PTA storyline and cinematography
Thanks Teddy! In my house, one of my key responsibilities is to try to have quality entertainment available at all times. Your list was very helpful to me. Have you seen the movie "Sovereign?" We saw it last night and liked it a lot. Strong cast, tight story.
I have a dubbing question for you. A friend in the movie business told me that AI is improving dubbing by leaps and bounds so that eventually dubbed versions will be far better than they are now, i.e., actually watchable.
Have you heard anything about that/do you have an opinion?