10 underappreciated movies from the 21st century

And where to watch them!

The New York Times has released a list. *Pause to allow ‘Lacrimosa’ to intensify*

Over the last week, their wide-ranging effort to poll filmmakers, stars, and “influential film fans”¹ to aggregate the Best Movies of the 21st Century² has generated a predictable if still fun-enough discourse:

-Which esoteric yet still mostly mainstream fare will make the cut?
-How will voters strike a balance between a list of Criterion Collection titles and a couple blockbusters that make them look normal?
-Where will Mulholland Dr. fall this time?

As someone who had to tune out 50 versions of this exact conversation weekly when Film Twitter was in its heyday, it’s kind of boring to stare at a rearrangement of David Lynch, Wong Kar-wai, Alfonso Cuarón, etc.

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For transparency’s sake, those first two filmmakers would easily make my own ballot… but I think we get it. They’re generation-defining artists, etc.

My (mostly boring) ballot… for some reason this got deleted from the initial email when it went out.

Aggregate lists are only interesting to me if I can see individual submissions. For example, being able to see what Julianne Moore thinks about the first 25 years of cinema in the new century is awesome.

In the spirit of shaking up consensus a bit, I’d like to take this opportunity to shout out ten great movies that I didn’t see discussed much, if at all, during this entire exercise. That’s not to say that they were all excluded entirely³, I just think they’re worthy of being in the conversation.

Also, to bring underseen movies more to the foreground, I’ll be leaving out extremely well-known auteurs like Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Hayao Miyazaki, and Clint Eastwood, as much as I love them.

Let’s rock🤘

10 underappreciated movies from the 21st century

Tokyo Sonata (2008)- Streaming for free on Tubi

I feel like Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Cure has been steadily growing in estimation over the last few years, thanks in part to the wider acessibility and interest that comes with a prestige Criterion release. Let’s get the same treatment for his 2008 domestic drama, a masterful portrayal of a middle-class Japanese family’s struggles and secrets.

There is the family patriarch who hides his abrupt firing and his embarrassing new job; his discontented, disconnected wife, who becomes entangled with a burglar; and two sons, one who takes piano on the sly, and one who flees home to join the military. This film is an expansive yet intimate psychological tapestry, overflowing with images of quiet yearning and intensity.

Sex is Comedy (2002)- Streaming on The Criterion Channel

Many people, myself included, consider Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl one of the great films of the 2000s. This meta-dissection of her creative process deserves more attention.

Sex is Comedy is about the filming of on-screen sex, and the emotional ripple effect it has on everyone involved. It dramatizes the creation of a languorous long take from Fat Girl, where a filmmaker tries to wrangle two performers to fulfill her vision. As Richard Brody wrote, the film “reveals the high price of that intimacy for the director, for the viewer, and, especially, for the actors. Which leads to another question: Is it all worth it?”

Days (2020)- Available to buy or rent digitally

Tsai Ming-liang shot Days over several years. His images are still and simple; he moves to the sad yet serene rhythms of two men.

The film builds to their intensely erotic connection in a hotel room that ends with one of them quietly giving the other a music box. This brief moment of connection amid a landscape of loneliness is unspeakably moving, and I hope that as the current decade progresses, this extraordinary film continues to expand its reach.

A Prairie Home Companion (2006)- Streaming for free on Kanopy and Tubi

Is Robert Altman still as well-known as a Scorsese or a Paul Thomas Anderson⁴? Maybe in some circles, so apologies if I’m breaking my own rule.

But I simply had to include the director’s swan song, a death-haunted portrait of Garrison Keillor’s radio program. Featuring an expansive ensemble that includes Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, and Kevin Kline, A Prairie Home Companion hones in on the show’s fictional last live performance. It’s an ensemble piece about a fading art form yielding to the demands of the present, one that’s about not only dying, but knowing that you’re dying.

Unfriended (2014)⁵ - Available to buy or rent digitally

I’m not going to pretend this movie is as good as medium-defining works like In the Mood for Love or Mulholland Dr., but it’s much more audacious and formally accomplished than several films that cracked the NYT’s top 20. (Here’s looking at you, Children of Men and City of God).

Anyone who has spent even 5 minutes talking with me about movies in the last decade knows where I stand on Levan Gabriadze’s incredible slasher, which unfolds entirely on a laptop screen. Amid all the teenage drama and bloody comeuppance, Unfriended depicts online thought in real time, dramatizing the scattershot rhythms of internet use to astonishing effect.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2024)- Streaming on Mubi

As ferociously angry as it is funny, Radu Jude’s film is a howl into the overworked, underpaid abyss.

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World³ confronts the relentless inequality, nonstop exhaustion, and casual depravity of the modern age with unapologetic crudeness and a jarring, freewheeling aesthetic. For much of the movie, Jude’s camera rides shotgun as we accompany a production assistant for a Romanian video company during her hectic 17-hour workday. He uses a wide array of visual aesthetics to jolt us at every turn; much of the film is in grainy black-and-white, but Jude also deploys TikTok filters, clips from a 1981 Romanian film, and a cringe-inducing 40-minute static shot that uses an ultra-high-definition color camera.

Notes on a Scandal (2006)- Streaming on Hulu and Disney+ (lol)

Let’s inject a little gleeful pulp and bad taste into the proceedings 😈

Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal is a relentless, propulsive thriller that has at its center one of the greatest performances of the century: Judi Dench as Barbara Covett, a closeted lesbian teacher who instills fear into everyone around her. That is, except Sheba (played by Cate Blanchett, nbd), a newly hired art teacher who awakens Barbara’s obsessive tendencies.

When Barbara finds out that her muse is having an affair with a 15-year-old student, she seizes the opportunity to blackmail her rather than reporting the incident to the school or police. This is a wicked, darkly funny, and endlessly rewatchable film that sustains a feverish pace throughout.

Mistress America (2015)- Available to buy or rent digitally

Speaking of endlessly rewatchable… I’ve seen Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig’s rapid-fire comedy almost 10 times in the decade since its release.

Bolstering one of the young century’s best screenplays, Mistress America chronicles two sisters-to-be as they navigate cross-generational chaos in New York City. The middle stretch of the movie is a screwball masterclass that finds the young women on a road trip to Connecticut to confront a wealthy nemesis.

In the Cut (2003)- Streaming for free on Tubi

Jane Campion’s wrongly maligned thriller is an all-consuming portrait of dangerous desire about an English teacher swept up in a murder investigation.

Featuring a fish-out-of-rom-com-water performance by Meg Ryan, In the Cut is grimy and destabilizing. It’s embedded in its protagonist’s anxiously horny subjectivity; as Doreen St. Félix wrote: ”The chemical constitution of the film mixes with our own: Frannie’s descent into paranoia and fear is our descent; her desire is our desire.”⁶

Hard to Be a God (2013)- Streaming for free on Kanopy

This decades-long passion project from the late Russian director Aleksey German is one of the filthiest-feeling movies you’re ever likely to see.

Set on Araknar, a planet similar to Earth that is experiencing its own Middle Ages, Hard to Be a God tells the story of scientists from our planet who were sent there to study it and then become deities. German’s camera is so embedded in the feelings of this world, of its eternal wetness and clogged sinuses, that narrative all but disappears. Almost every black-and-white frame of this grotesquely beautiful epic is coated in some kind of slime, whether it’s snot, shit, or mud.

And 10 more, for good measure 🤠(And I’m including some bigger-name directors here)

Like Someone In Love (Dir. Abbas Kiarostami, 2012)

Spider (Dir. David Cronenberg, 2002)

Black Book (Dir. Paul Verhoevan, 2006)

Rachel Getting Married (Dir. Jonathan Demme, 2008)

The Assassin (Dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2015)

In Front of Your Face (Dir. Hong Sang-soo, 2021)

25th Hour (Dir. Spike Lee, 2002)

Monrovia, Indiana (Dir. Frederick Wiseman, 2018)

La Chimera (Dir. Alice Rohrwacher, 2023)

O Fantasma (João Pedro Rodrigues, 2000)

Alright, let’s hear some of your picks. What movies from the last 25 years do you think are underrated? Which movie on the NYT’s list is the most overrated?

1. lol

2. Their list, if you so desire

3. If you championed any of them, great job!

4. He served as a backup director on A Prairie Home Companion, by the way.

5.

6. The Reclamation of Jane Campion’s In the Cut