It’s mostly the internet’s fault, but in the past 25 years, the lines we drew in the 20th century got blurry. Time and space have collapsed. Now you can attend a meeting across the country, text your long-distance boyfriend halfway around the world, and watch a decades-old movie from another hemisphere on TV at home, all in one day. We’ve learned to make friends with people we’ve never met and develop obsessions with things we’d never have known about had we lived at any other point in human history. The story of the 21st century, among other things, is a tale of crumbling contexts and newly porous boundaries.
Small wonder, then, that our 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list, created by polling hundreds of directors, stars and other film professionals, shows the same trend. Every list tells a story about its maker or, in this case, makers. It’s clear, for instance, that the movies they remember were mostly not reboots, remakes or franchise fare, which have become Hollywood’s bread and butter. Star vehicles are fading. And while streaming has elbowed in and upended how we watch movies, there’s only one film on the list produced by a streamer — No. 46, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” which Netflix gave a respectable theatrical release.
All interesting trends, some encouraging and some troubling. But what strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture.
Until pretty recently, for instance, common wisdom held that commercially successful genre fare and self-serious awards films didn’t overlap, and that auteurs would pick a lane and stay there. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” (No. 28) seemed like an outlier in this respect, a Batman movie so good that when it failed to be nominated for best picture in 2009, the academy changed the number of nominee slots from five to 10. But since then, other horror, superhero and action flicks have increasingly sneaked into awards conversations, including “Get Out” (No. 8), “Mad Max: Fury Road” (No. 11), “Black Swan” (No. 81) and “Black Panther” (No. 96).
That may explain the triumph of 2022’s best picture winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (No. 77), a whimsical and occasionally deranged pastiche comedy blended with a sincere-hearted family story that pays obvious, sometimes ironic homage to a number of genres: martial arts, melodrama, science fiction, surrealism, even video games. In fact, some of its references also appear on the list, like Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (No. 4) and Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (No. 16).
“Everything Everywhere” taps into another collapsing category as the 21st century wears on. The line between Hollywood (which is to say, American) movies and world cinema has often been insurmountable, with English-speaking audiences reluctant to read subtitles and imported films frequently seen as hoity-toity art-house fare, not of interest to more general audiences.
That line has occasionally been crossed; even a more casual movie fan is likely to have seen “Crouching Tiger” or Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amélie” (No. 41). But plenty of international films on the list were considered niche upon release, the kind of movie you go to a specialty theater to watch.
But sneaky things have been happening lately, thanks in part to midlevel distributors like A24 and Neon. In recent years, non-English-language films have become wider audience must-sees, talked about by both cinephiles and moviegoers who may not have sought out international art-house cinema in the past. You can see that with films from the past five years like “Roma,” Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” (No. 26), Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” (No. 12), Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (No. 38) and Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” (No. 95). Each made waves stateside regardless of its country of origin. Similarly, “Everything Everywhere” serves up a sizable helping of Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue alongside English, and much of Celine Song’s 2023 drama “Past Lives” (No. 86) is in Korean.
And of course, there’s the film at the top of the list: Bong Joon Ho’s bloody and hilarious satire “Parasite,” the 2020 best picture winner and the first non-English-language picture to take that honor. The triumph of Bong’s film — which is entirely in Korean, with a Korean cast, set in Seoul — was hailed as a testament to the diversifying makeup of the academy, with more international members and broader tastes. But in the past it also would have been unlikely to be a box office hit, let alone, dare I say, to top a list like this one.
To my eye, this is all good, but other examples of context collapse have been more ambiguous. We watch movies differently now, with less rigid division between big screen and small, between communal experience and individual. That means we have more choices, but also more that overwhelm. Streaming platforms have changed what it means for a film to be “released,” or what even counts as a movie. (It didn’t make the list, but Ezra Edelman’s five-part documentary “O.J.: Made in America” won an Oscar in 2017, before the academy decided anything with episodes couldn’t be a movie.) Comedies like “Bridesmaids” (No. 32) and “Superbad” (No. 100) raked in huge profits at the box office, but today they’d be more likely to go straight to streaming.
Some barriers still seem to remain. Only four Black directors have movies on the list, and only a handful more Asian and Latino directors. Only 11 of the films were directed by women, and none were in the Top 20. No movies from Black or Latino women made the list. While these numbers are the same or better than the percentage of filmmakers from underrepresented groups who make up top box office earners today, it’s still indicative of who gets to make movies that we see right now.
I can’t say what the next 25, or 100, years hold for the movies. Changes in technology and commerce have always shifted the business and, in turn, the art form. All I know is that when we make this list again in 2050, the story it tells will be something I can’t even conceive of today. I hope it’s as full of creativity and innovation and passion and just plain fun as this one is. See you at the movies.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
The post The Story of Movies in the 21st Century Is One of Context Collapse appeared first on New York Times.
