THE 50 BEST FILMS OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM
At the beginning of 2022, industry operator and LWLies contributor Josh Slater-Williams made a pithy comment on social media in response to a list of the top 30 box office earners of 2021. He noted that only four films on the list were not based on existing intellectual property – and one of those films was the low-balling Ryan Reynolds vehicle Free Guy, which references a lot of existing IP as part of its story and production design. So that’s 26 of the top 30 films of 2021 – top in the sense that people were going to the cinema in droves to see them – all either sequels, remakes, refits, literary adaptations, musical adaptations, spinoffs, franchise extensions or, in the case of Jungle Cruise, based on the popular theme park ride of the same name. Piggybacking on existing IP – or, as it’s thought of in the industry, serving content to a pre-existing fanbase – is as old as the hills when it comes to the Hollywood industrial complex. That’s not to say that this mode of filmmaking inherently yields negative results, as among that top 30 there are a handful of indisputable bangers. Yet it’s hard to feel there’s not something wrong when an artform is at a place in its evolution where originality offers scant financial recompense, and those with the commissioning power are risk averse to the point where we’re careening into a glossy monoculture in which newfound progressive ideals are being buried in endless reams of give-the-people-what-they-want candy floss. In response to that list, we offer up the results of a poll surveying the best films of the 21st century – the catch being that every single one is a true original and was put out in the world in the hope that an audience would crave something different, and not more of the same.
50 THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY (2014)
Directed By Peter Strickland
If 2012’s Berberian Sound Studio announced filmmaker Peter Strickland as a maker of metaphysical horror doodles that skirt on the extreme boundaries of genre, then 2014’s The Duke of Burgundy doubles down on that intent. Here he draws on ’70s softcore – those porn epics that actually had a plot! – to tell of a sadomasochistic relationship between two women, set in a world populated entirely by women. A dazzling one-off, and a dark jewel in the corpus of one of the UK’s most consistently idiosyncratic dreamweavers. David Jenkins
49 HIDDEN (2005)
Directed By Michael Haneke
An affluent couple besieged by a videotape stalker are syphons for Michael Haneke’s incisive interrogation of colonialism and the historical, some might say wilful, amnesia of European (an event referenced by Daniel Auteuil’s character), has been described by its director as an example of how collective guilt can be connected to a personal story.
