How TIME’s Film Critic Chose the 50 Most Underappreciated Movies of the 21st Century
Whenever I browse through social media or Letterboxd to see what movies young film lovers are discovering, I often see the usual suspects: pictures made by Hitchcock, Coppola, and Scorsese, with a smattering of classic films noir or romantic comedies thrown in. Nothing wrong with that! But it got me thinking about all the terrific, surprising, yet undersung films that, in the old days of moviegoing—let’s say before the pandemic—would roll by week by week. Sometimes they’d do well at the box office and then disappear from our collective memories; other times, they’d open to lousy reviews and audiences would simply fail to find them. Where do underappreciated movies go after they’ve had their chance to shine?
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Here, for one. I’ve compiled a list of films, from the early days of this century to the present, that may have fallen through the cracks upon their initial release, pictures worthy of a second look or a first-time discovery. I look back with great fondness on the texture of moviegoing in the first 20 years of this century, that feeling of stepping into a theater and hoping that you were about to discover something great, or maybe even just something strange and wondrous—a 1930s-style musical with an all-Black cast, like Idlewild, or a magical English-language version of The Magic Flute set during World War I, or a velvety historical romance like Bright Star. Sometimes it’s the modestly scaled, or even ambitious but flawed, pictures that stick with you for years, and decades.
I also note that this list is skewed to, though not limited to, films that American audiences might have missed at the multiplex or at their local indie cinema (when those still existed). For reasons having to do only with practicality, most are English-language films. That’s only because, in compiling this list, it quickly became clear that there was no way to survey the whole of world cinema and assess what might have slipped past English-speaking audiences. That said, there are a few non-English-language films here that I believe warrant some special love, especially in cases of unsung geniuses (like Marco Bellocchio) or filmmakers who went on to make bigger, acclaimed pictures but whose earlier work deserves a spotlight (like Jacques Audiard). Still, there are so many astonishing filmmakers whose works are missing—please forgive me, Hou Hsiou-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang—and your favorites might be missing, too.
But then, this list is intended only as a starting point, a new way of assessing recent film history. What does underappreciated mean, really, outside of any individual’s taste? Your idea of what constitutes a movie that hasn’t gotten enough love is most likely going to differ from mine—but that’s exactly the idea. This list is intended chiefly to get the gears of your own moviegoing memories turning. We’ve all got plenty of lists of the Greatest This and the Greatest That. Time for a list of Movies That Live in Our Memories for Indefinable Reasons—a category that AI could neither generate nor comprehend, because loving movies is the province only of humans.