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Best movies of the 21st century: The Dark Knight, Inception or Parasite?

9 October 2026 · Movies

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In June 2025 The New York Times asked some 500 directors, actors and other film people to name their ten favourite movies released since 2000, and Parasite came out on top. Lists like that start arguments, and they should. On GOATvs nobody fills in a ballot: every film is picked or passed over one face-off at a time, by everyone, and the box above shows where this century's best stand in the world's list today. Like the Times, we count the century from 2000.

When everyone votes, one director keeps coming back: Christopher Nolan. The Dark Knight (2008) turned a superhero sequel into a crime epic, and Heath Ledger's Joker won him a posthumous Oscar. The film was left out of the Best Picture race, and the next year the Academy widened the category from five nominees to as many as ten, a change widely linked to that snub. Two years later Inception sent Leonardo DiCaprio into dreams within dreams and left audiences arguing about a spinning top. Interstellar (2014) took Matthew McConaughey through a wormhole, with the physicist Kip Thorne checking the science three years before he shared the Nobel Prize. And in 2023 Oppenheimer finally won Nolan the Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director.

The century also opened with epics. Peter Jackson shot all three Lord of the Rings films in one go in New Zealand, and The Return of the King (2003) won all eleven Oscars it was nominated for, Best Picture among them, tying the record of Ben-Hur and Titanic. Three years earlier Ridley Scott's Gladiator had brought the Roman epic back to life: it won Best Picture, Russell Crowe won Best Actor as Maximus, and "Are you not entertained?" became a line for every occasion.

The year 2019 gave the century one of its best rivalries. Bong Joon Ho's Parasite won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and then became the first film not in English to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Todd Phillips's Joker won the Golden Lion in Venice the same year, and Joaquin Phoenix was named Best Actor on the night Parasite took Best Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International Feature. Filmmakers put Parasite first. The face-off above shows what everyone else thinks.

Some of the century's best came from unlikely places. George Miller was 70 when Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) came out, thirty years after his previous Mad Max film, and it won six Oscars, more than any other film that year. Damien Chazelle made Whiplash (2014) for a few million dollars, and J. K. Simmons won an Oscar as its terrifying music teacher. And Martin Scorsese, after decades of near misses, finally won Best Director with The Departed (2006), a Boston remake of the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs.

Animation has had a great century too. Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away (2001) won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature and stayed Japan's biggest box-office hit for almost twenty years. Pixar answered with Finding Nemo, WALL·E, Up and Coco, and Sony's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) changed what an animated film could look like. They have a list of their own, the Animation Top 100.

Pick your side above: The Dark Knight or Inception, The Return of the King or Gladiator, Parasite or Joker. Then see how this century compares with every other in the Movies Top 100, ranked by everyone.

Vote: The Dark Knight vs Inception

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