The New York Times's New Best Movies List Has Major Blind Spots

I’m not saying that the entire point of curating ranked pop-culture lists is to get traffic and trigger us Pavlovian mutts to write in “What about….?” But it kinda is, right? I’ll bite. What about Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World? It’s a fantastically rollicking, Swiss watch-precise naval adventure that manages to capture the spirit, style, and stakes of Patrick O’Brian’s epic dad novels. If there was anything remotely resembling justice in Hollywood, this would be a franchise on its sixth or seventh sequel by now. Inclusion here would have been a nice consolation. Alas. And what about Ben Kingsley’s terrifying, hair-trigger turn in Jonathan Glazer’s lacerating crime thriller Sexy Beast? Or the spare existential poetry of J.C. Chandor’s All Is Lost? Or Martin Scorsese’s twilight-of-the-mob epic, The Irishman? Or, no joke, what about Paddington 2—a delicious, soulful, feel-good balm of a film that almost did as much to pull the country out of the pandemic as the Moderna vaccine?

You’ve got to admire how cleverly the Times rolled out the results of their poll over the course of several days. They built suspense as artfully as a young Brian De Palma. But with each new drip from the faucet, I kept waiting to see where my favorite Tom Cruise movies would land. It seemed like we were off to a solid start when Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report tip-toed in at No. 94. But then…tumbleweeds. There are exactly zero Ethan Hunt movies in the Top 100, but 2018’s Mission: Impossible — Fallout easily belongs in the top 20. And you can also make pretty air-tight cases for Edge of Tomorrow, Top Gun: Maverick, and Collateral making the cut as well. We also would have accepted write-in votes for Tropic Thunder.

Speaking of Minority Report, are we really okay with there being only one Spielberg movie on the list? The period that the Times’ list covers encompasses two of the director’s greatest and most mature films, Lincoln and Munich. Both of those pictures wrestle with massively important themes from the past and alchemize what could have been dry, Ken Burns homework assignments into thrilling, living history, thanks their beautifully nuanced Tony Kushner scripts. Lincoln and Munich are two of Spielberg’s finest movies from any century. In fact, I’d argue that both top Minority Report. But hey, we’ll take what we can get here.

One of my biggest beefs with the voting is how serious and stentorian it feels (for the most part). Sure, it’s encouraging to see the inclusion of comedies like Superbad (No. 100), Anchorman (No. 85), Best in Show (No. 57), Borat (No. 53), and Bridesmaids (No. 32), but those selections are bit on the nose. Same old, same old. It’s like a cinema committee met at a top-secret location and decided once and for all what movie comedies were acceptable. A less-notarized-feeling pick like Step Brothers, The Nice Guys, Shaun of the Dead, The LEGO Movie, or Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s stealthily profound The Trip quadrilogy might have goosed things with a jolt of joy-buzzer surprise. Better yet, how about Andy Samberg’s 2016 laughing-gas music-biz satire, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping?

When you’re the “Paper of Record,” your lists are bound to be parsed like the Talmud. No one ever gives you a pat on the back for the 99 picks that feel right—they obsess over the one that feels wrong. However, if there’s a genre that’s emerged from the darkness and been elevated and rejuvenated over the past two-and-a-half decades, it’s horror. Which is why Black Swan is an outstanding pick at No. 81, Let the Right One In feels fine (if a little too high) at No. 70, and Get Out reigns at No. 8. Beyond that trio, the pool of scary movies is mighty shallow. Ari Aster’s Midsommar belongs somewhere in the results, as does Danny Boyle’s original fast-zombie workout, 28 Days Later. What would have been really cool, however, is getting the Grey Lady’s imprimatur on a more bonkers pick like Nicolas Cage’s 2018 midnight-movie freakout, Mandy.

Another genre that feels neglected here is science fiction. The assembled movieland notables are obviously big fans of the collected works of Christopher Nolan—Interstellar at No. 89, Oppenheimer way too low at No. 65, Memento at No. 62, Inception at No. 55, and The Dark Knight at No. 28. But come on, it’s not like he’s the only filmmaker working in that genre. Yes, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival makes the cut (a bit of surprise way up at No. 29), but the absence of the superior, hard-sci-fi one-two punch of Villeneuve’s Dune and Dune: Part Two feels intentional. Other sci-fi flicks that would have received our votes: Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, and Duncan Jones’ Moon.

Action flicks and franchises didn’t fare especially well with the voters either. In addition to the mindboggling dearth of Mission: Impossible movies, there are also no Bourne films (even though they largely defined the genre’s aesthetic blueprint for the past 25 years), no John Wick flicks (the prosecution will reluctantly allow it), and no James Bond outings. We totally get that this isn’t a list of the 100 Best Action Movies of the 21st Century, but even so, the greatness of 2006’s Casino Royale seems self-evident. When Daniel Craig joined the Double-O franchise, he singlehandedly saved one of cinema’s greatest long-running treasures. In Casino Royale, Craig brought Bond back to earth, zapping the wheezy saga with new reserves of emotion, violence, and danger. Our action runners-up: Sicario, Drive, Wonder Woman, Edge of Tomorrow (again) and the gonzo, bone-crunching mayhem of The Raid 2.

Okay, let’s go a little deeper now and start splitting some auteur hairs. Specifically, let’s address the dilemma of "right director, wrong movie." Again, this a thousand percent subjective. Even so, I’m shocked by how many of the voters actually considered Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (No. 49) to be better than the hard-earned romantic wisdom buried within Before Midnight. Or that Volver (No. 80) is actually a better and more profound Pedro Almodovar film than Talk to Her. Then again, I ask these questions as someone who much prefers Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster to The Favourite (No. 52).

Lists should feel fun, not dutiful. This one feels a bit too dutiful. To be fair, any list that includes Christopher Guest’s Best in Show obviously wasn’t the work of a star chamber of killjoys and wet blankets. Still, wouldn’t it be kind of awesome to be waltzing along this list and slip on a banana peel like Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police? Or Park Chan-wook’s batshit kinkfest, The Handmaiden? Votes are votes, and there’s nothing you can do about that. But ideally, lists should be like a killer DJ set. Selections should flow and play off one another. And occasionally, you’ve got to let the beat drop with a hypnotic documentary like Man on Wire or The Beatles: Get Back. (Before you give us a hard time about that last one, yes, we’ve read the Times’s fine print about not allowing votes for movies that were made for streaming. But it seems bizarre to unilaterally prohibit streaming titles from any list that purports to reflect the 21st century.) Which brings me to another nit that seems worth picking: For a newspaper that ostensibly represents New York, the editors couldn’t nudge a few votes toward films that grappled with the most indelible event from the past 25 years: 9/11? Especially since there are two very good ones—Spike Lee’s 25th Hour and Paul Greengrass’s United 93.