July 15, 2025
On a Conversation That Missed the Point
On June 23, 2025, The New York Times published a list of the best films of the first twenty-five years of the 21st century, and as usual, it set off a wave of discussions, one of which was held on the Off-Menu portion of CNN's NewsNight with Abby Phillip. Simply put, it was a missed opportunity.
The tone was set early when, after running down the top ten films on the list, Abby Phillip proclaimed, “Some of those movies I have not heard of.” Looking at the list, this seems possible for at least three of the films – Spirited Away, In the Mood for Love, and Mulholland Drive, all of which had limited theatrical releases. Of the other seven, Phillip commented on four of them, The Social Network (#10), Get Out (#8), Moonlight (#5), and Parasite (#1), and the other three, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (#7), No Country for Old Men (#6), and There Will Be Blood (#3), have appeared of numerous best-of lists or nominated for Academy Awards and therefore were heavily discussed on news shows after their nominations were announced. The problem was that Phillip’s comment was greeted with laughter by at least one panelist.
Phillip then moved the conversation forward by asking each of her four panelists to state their favorite film from the list, a logical choice given the inspiration for the segment, and for a moment the focus seemed to be in the right place. First to chime in was Scott Jennings, who touted Anchorman (#85), which he opined should have been ranked #1, and Moneyball (#45). Bakari Sellers then went off the list and praised Love & Basketball, a film recently released on physical media by the Criterion Collection, a company known for releasing quality films. After that, Kierna Mayo lauded Black Panther (#96), which in her view was both a movie and a movement.
Then the conversation went slightly off the rails. Sellers, after some additional conversation about the importance of Black Panther, sought to make a point by asking how the panel felt about Parasite. After a brief silence, he added, “And that is my point.” Exactly what point he was making remained unexplored because the conversation segued to the best superhero movie with Jennings touting Iron Man and looking slightly incredulous when it was mentioned that the film had not made the New York Times’ list. Sellers then seconded Jennings views on Iron Man and added that Black Panther’s $1.6 billion “speaks for itself,” interestingly implying that box office performance equates to quality, a curious claim when one considers some of the other members of the billion-dollar club. When the conversation returned to Parasite, Phillip remarked that she had seen it, but did not remember it.
The show finally returned to the panelists’ favorite film from the list. Christine Quinn talked up Ratatouille (#73) before remarking that she did not share the Times’s praise of The Social Network. She also brought up Brokeback Mountain (#17) and commended the way it turned the notion of a cowboy movie on its head. The final panelists, Pete Seat, then slightly dismissed the list when he declared that his favorite films tended to be comedies and entertainment that “never gets old.” His choice was, in his words, “a little artsy” – The Dark Knight. He supported this description of Nolan’s film by applauding Heath Ledger’s performance as the Joker.
What
followed continued the conversation’s general trend. Jennings lamented the
absence from the list of Wedding Crashers
and stated that he did not recognize most of the films on the list. Seat said
he’d seen 20 of them, so, by that measure, 80 were films he did not consider
deserving. There was both criticism and praise for Moonlight, Phillip stated her approval of the ranking given to Get Out, and eventually someone
mentioned that this year’s Sinners
should be #1. There was then a discussion of Hollywood’s lack of comedies and
whether television shows such as Married
with Children could be made today.
It was Kierna Mayo who finally offered a bit of introspection when she wondered what it meant that they did not know about so many of the films on the list, and she offered a solution. Maybe, she suggested, there needs to be a different marketing apparatus, suggesting that the reason the panel did not know about so many of these films was that the studios did not do their job properly. Phillip was quick to dismiss this idea, however, deriding the films as “artsy-fartsy” and saying that they were too inaccessible to average viewers. Jennings went even further by proclaiming that he “did not want to think so much” or “feel stupid” when he watches a movie. The segment ended with comments on the ethnicity of many of the directors on the list, one panelist showing disbelief over the exclusion of the John Wick films, and a look of incredulity that Brett Ratner’s Rush Hour has been omitted, despite the fact that the film had been released in 1998.
It was truly a sad affair. Of the 100 films on the list, 21 are foreign films, 3 are documentaries, and 4 are animated films. That leaves 72 films, and the majority of them are fairly mainstream. They include Superbad, Gravity, Minority Report, Gladiator, Interstellar, the third Lord of the Rings film, Black Swan, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ocean’s 11, Oppenheimer, Little Miss Sunshine, Kill Bill Volume 1, Whiplash, Punch-Drunk Love, Inception, Borat, Mad Max: Fury Road, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, Bridesmaids, The Departed, Arrival, Her, and The Wolf of Wall Street. These are hardly art films, yet if you had just watched the panel’s discussion, you’d be forgiven for getting the impression that the Times had selected only independent and foreign films that had opened in few theaters and completely eluded the public’s attention.
Admittedly, not all of the films on the list worked for me, and some of my favorites were not included. However, no list is definitive. The same week that the New York Times released their list, Rolling Stone published theirs. In fact, a quick Google inquiry reveals similar lists from IMDB, the BBC, Rotten Tomatoes, the Hollywood Reporter, and Cinema Sugar. These lists are essentially recommendations, pleas for a group’s favorites not to be forgotten in these times of streaming services and series dumps. Those that compile these lists are simply asking readers to give them a chance.
It’s fair to ask whether the panel on CNN had actually read the entire New York Times’s list. When I first tried to access it, only the top ten was available to non-subscribers; now, thankfully, the rest can be viewed online. Below each film, readers can click “I’ve seen it” or “I want to watch it” and at the bottom of the screen is a tally of the number of films you've seen. I was surprised to learn that I had seen 94 films on the list. My six blind spots are Lady Bird, Toni Erdmann, Tar, Aftersun, Fish Tank, and Memories of Murder. Guess which option I clicked for these films.