The 10 best movies from the last 25 years

The last 25 years of filmmaking have seen blockbusters grow bigger, indie films gain new platforms to shine, and international cinema reach global audiences like never before. Filmmakers have played with technology, amplified underrepresented voices and blended genres to take on challenging subjects, all against a backdrop of transformation in how movies are made and consumed. These 10 films have stayed with our critics, writers and filmmakers long after the final credits rolled. How many have you seen?

Amelie (2001)

Is there a more warm-hearted and touching film that showcases the wonders of Paris than Amelie? Is there a more charming actress than Audrey Tautou, playing a pixielike waitress determined to do good deeds? There are many French contenders for best film of this century list – The Artist, The Intouchables, Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, A Prophet, Rust And Bone, Amour, Anatomy Of A Fall, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly and Titane among them – but Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic comedy tops them all. It’s beautifully written, directed, designed, shot, scored, edited and, of course, acted. Garry Maddox

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Wes Anderson first made his mark in the 1990s as American filmmaking’s young fogey, and The Royal Tenenbaums is typical of his style – a wholly original comedy dressed up to resemble a literary adaptation. Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman), his wife, Etheline (Anjelica Huston), and their adult children, played by Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow, live in a Manhattan apartment that feels as if it’s been constructed out of old New Yorker Talk of the Town columns. All three Tenenbaum offspring are prodigies who have ended up as has-beens, a scenario that could have made a Eugene O’Neill tragedy. Instead, Anderson composes a goofy, sophisticated cartoon out of it. Every cast member comes with an eye-catching collection of eccentricities, and there are no false moves. Somehow, you do more than laugh. You empathise. Sandra Hall

Adaptation (2002)

Adaptation is a masterpiece of meta-madness. Directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, the film follows screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) as he struggles to adapt Susan Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) book The Orchid Thief. Watching Adaptation feels like stepping into a funhouse mirror – what starts as a meditative tale about a screenwriter adapting a book about orchids spirals wildly into a ridiculous, adrenaline-fuelled thriller. Cage delivers not one but two brilliant performances, playing neurotic Charlie and his confident brother Donald, who has just sold a blockbuster screenplay for millions. The chaos is the point of the film – life, much like the creative process, doesn’t always make for a clean storyline. Melanie Kembrey

Lost in Translation (2003)

Though its release dates it as a fairly young film, Lost in Translation is a fragment of celluloid from a bygone age, a timeless classic that blends sentiment, humour and pure escapism. What it lacks in the kind of fantastical living postcard of films like Into The Wild or Y Tu Mama Tambien, it makes up for with Sofia Coppola’s crisp and compelling dialogue and superlative performances from Bill Murray as Bob Harris, a fading Hollywood star who comes to Japan to film a commercial for Suntory, and Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, a young college graduate who forms an unconventional romantic bond with him. Is it a voyeuristic glimpse into another world? Or a romantic vacation as the audience members imagine it might unfurl for themselves? The true brilliance of the film may be that the answer to that question is deeply individual. Michael Idato

There Will be Blood (2007)

“I drink your milkshake!” With these four words, Daniel Day-Lewis delivered one of the best performances of his career in the climax of a film that’s as sparse and atmospheric as it is deeply rattling. Set at the turn of the 20th century during the Californian oil boom, There Will Be Blood follows Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis), a former prospector who embarks on a dogged mission to become the wealthiest oil tycoon – at any cost. This is one of Paul Thomas Anderson’s finest films, shining a light on the danger of greed and capitalism and the duplicity of human nature when intertwined with such concerns. Paul Dano’s performance as twin brothers who strike a deal with Plainview is masterful, and Jonny Greenwood’s haunting score ties it all together. Intense and unforgiving, this is the kind of film you might only be able to stomach once – but its effects will linger for years. Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

The Babadook (2014)

Amelia (brilliantly played by Essie Davis) loses her husband (Ben Winspear) at the same time as giving birth to her son, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). As they say, when it rains, it … becomes incomprehensibly traumatic. Irresolvable grief, accompanied by the Babadook, enters the scene. The titular top-hatted monster with blade-like fingers, a ghoulish figure from Samuel’s pop-up book, may look like some satanic marionette, but it is Amelia – held in suspicion by her son, who accuses her of no longer being herself – who feels like a puppet, her resentment and grief animating the monster. The Babadook draws you in by grounding its uncanny aspects within recognisably everyday discomfort: a son seeking emotional attention, acting up at school; inept authority figures; and, of course, yonic slits lurking behind refrigerators. Postpartum depression is real! Along with her last film, The Nightingale, this one established Kent as a director unafraid of the canon. Closer to Australian Gothic than Ozploitation, there’s a brilliant piece of body horror lurking here: the matriarch-witch who transfigures herself, becoming a mother to both child and monster. Salem’s martyrs do not go silently here; they have their revenge, at once vanquishing and nourishing one of society’s biggest boogeymen: maternal indifference. Declan Fry

Moonlight (2016)

There are certain films and certain scenes that are so visceral, they take on the aura of a dream or a memory. For me, this film is Moonlight, and this scene involves Juan (Mahershali Ali), an embattled drug dealer teaching Little (Alex R. Hibbert), a queer black boy who has spent his life searching for tenderness, how to let himself be held by the luminous Miami sea. There is so much to love about Barry Jenkins’ sublime exploration of race and queer desire, which famously won the 2017 Oscar for best picture. The use of visual language. The way he reveals characters–such as Chiron’s crack-addicted mother Paula (Naomie Harris) – trapped in systems and stories, hurtling towards their self-destruction, without judging or diminishing them. But this scene, I think, reveals the power of Moonlight in miniature: it shows us that connection is possible, that beauty is birthright even in a brutal world. Neha Kale

Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)

No credible definition of “film” can afford to exclude David Lynch’s immortal masterpiece, which can equally be classed alongside A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Don Quixote as an event in the history of fiction. That said, anyone embarking on the journey needs to start with the full two seasons of the original 1990s TV show, which gave us the dead girl (Sheryl Lee) wrapped in plastic, the noble FBI hero (Kyle MacLachlan), and the town deep in the enchanted forest, in some respects not so different from your neighbourhood or mine. Commissioned as a limited series for cable, Twin Peaks: The Return picks up the story 25 years later, just as Lynch and his collaborator Mark Frost always implicitly promised they would – even if some think the moral is that you can’t go home again. Asked what this new chapter was really about, Lynch gave a different answer: “It’s about 18 hours long.” Jake Wilson

Parasite (2019)

Bong Joon Ho’s carnival of genres – this film has been called a comedy, a Shakespearean tragedy and a ghost story, as well as a work of genius – made history as the first film in a language other than English to win the Best Picture Oscar, a few months after bagging the Palme D’Or in Cannes. Architecture has a starring role here; it is set almost entirely within a modernist mansion, overlooking the Seoul slums, where a family of poor grifters manage separately to land jobs with the wealthy Park clan. They are cheats; the Parks are exploiters, but neither guesses what horror lurks in the basement. Director Bong manipulates space, light and the camera to heighten the tension rising to hysteria among his brilliant ensemble, but never fails to find the fun in class war. Stephanie Bunbury

Uncut Gems (2019)

It starts with a camera up Adam Sandler’s colon, and it ends with a comically unsatisfying shootout, which more or less sums up the ugly-beautiful appeal of this endlessly rewatchable existential caper from the Safdie Bros, Josh and Benny. They’d already perfected their raw, frenetic, very New York aesthetic on Good Time (2017), but Uncut Gems – made on a budget 10 times its predecessor – was an epic by comparison: a grimy, gutsy artefact of bitcoin-era hustledom, all set to a thrumming score by Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never). Not just a final retort to any fool who still considered Adam Sandler a pariah of modern cinema, the film, a box office success, was also pivotal in helping spawn the cult of A24 and a new wave of gritty American independent cinema. That it also introduced the world to the glory that is Julia Fox (if you don’t call it “uncah jams”, I can’t be with you) is just the final carat on the diamond. Robert Moran