Hollywood Still Rules: What Films Has the English-Speaking World Embraced Over the Past 16 Years?

The BBC has compiled a list of the best films since 2000. What does it tell us? Does it match what you'd expect?

Mulholland Drive first, In the Mood for Love second, There Will Be Blood third.

The BBC has published its list of the 100 greatest films since 2000. Unsurprisingly, it set off an enormous row.

"Shameful! Birdman isn't even on it."

"No Woody Allen? What exactly are your standards?"

"Clearly, British critics are the worst critics there are."

……

Skim a few comments on social media and the anger comes through. But this is no great matter. Everyone has their own taste in film, and if Birdman had been ranked first, someone would be howling about why Mulholland Drive wasn't.

Still, a word for the friend who blamed British critics for having bad taste: of the 177 critics the BBC invited to vote, 81 were American and only 19 were British. You scolded the wrong people.

The film critic magasa has a line about this: "A ranking always varies from person to person; different voters, different results. Every film fan carries a list of their own. Consulting the authorities isn't meant to make you give up your own judgment." So arguing about the films on the list doesn't get you very far.

That doesn't make the list itself pointless. Precisely because "a list is the history of cinema in condensed form," the more interesting question is what changes sit behind this new ranking of the 100 best films since 2000. And those changes aren't confined to the films. They run through the film industry worldwide, and through the world itself.

Taken as a whole, the list leaves one immediate impression: good films seem to be getting scarcer.

At the top sits David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Most Chinese viewers file it under "mind-benders." Fair enough — the slippery identities, the switches in and out of dreams, the deliberately confusing narrative all earn it that label. But what won these critics over was the eerie mood Lynch builds with the camera, the dream world he constructs out of Freudian theory, and the film's mockery and critique of Hollywood itself.

On Cahiers du Cinéma's 2008 list of the greatest films ever made, Mulholland Drive ranked only 94th. The French have always been picky, and their list has little affection for films made from 2000 onward — just two made the cut, far fewer than in the 1930s through the 1960s, when a dozen or more films from each decade got in.

Another piece of less cheerful news: Hollywood looms as large as ever.

On Cahiers du Cinéma's 100, American films took 49 places. On the BBC's list, American films also took 49 places. After all these years, Hollywood's grip on half the world's cinema hasn't loosened.

The common view these past couple of years is that Hollywood's creativity is thinning out. Effects-driven blockbusters have become the six major studios' lead product, adaptations have crowded out original work, and the industry has grown ever colder toward art films. If a Hollywood in decline can still hold half the territory, the film business starts to look beyond saving.

Before pronouncing the death sentence, though, look closer: some interesting things are happening inside the BBC's list.

On the Cahiers du Cinéma ranking of 2008, the three traditional powers — the United States, France and Italy — held 84 of the 100 places, with Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union sharing 10 more. That was a picture of an industry monopolized by the developed West.

By this 2016 list of the best films of the 21st century, the countries on it have grown far more varied. The US and France are still strong, but the list now also takes in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Hungary, Turkey, Brazil, Thailand and Argentina, and even small nations such as Senegal and Mauritania.

As one side of the industry falls, another rises: the old film powers are fading and new markets are coming up. Cinema is no longer the preserve of rich countries; the art form has been spreading into developing and even less-developed ones.

The decline of the old film powers began in the 1970s. "Television and other leisure activities lured audiences away from the cinemas, and the boom in home video sped the trend up," David Bordwell writes in Film History: An Introduction. "Between 1970 and 1988, theater attendance in West Germany and France fell by a third; in Japan it fell by nearly half; in Spain and Britain it fell by close to a third; and in Italy it fell by nearly three-quarters."

Italy was hit hardest, and its film industry never recovered. Through the 1980s, Italian screens filled up with skin flicks of no artistic value at all. The masters who had made Italy a jewel in world cinema's crown — Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni — died one after another. In recent years Italy has sunk deeper into economic crisis.

Fine Italian films have still won international prizes now and then over the past three decades: Cinema Paradiso in 1989, Mediterraneo in 1992 and Life Is Beautiful in 1998 all took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and The Son's Room won the Palme d'Or in 2001. But Italian cinema as a whole has never recovered the glory of the 1960s.

Italy has just one film on the BBC's list: The Great Beauty, from 2013. It follows Jep, a writer and journalist who made his name young and then spent forty years sinking into a life of parties and excess. Just after his 65th birthday he learns that his first love has died, and only then does he see that he shouldn't waste any more time on things he doesn't want to do. He starts looking again at the Rome he lives in, the way an outsider would.

That arc looks a great deal like the history above. As The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis put it: "The Great Beauty is the story of a man, a city, a country, a kind of cinema."

Everything that happened to Italy happened to Japan too. In the 1950s the American forces occupying postwar Japan decided film was a useful tool for remaking the country, and with the occupiers behind them a group of masters got the chance to shoot. Akira Kurosawa made Rashomon and Seven Samurai in these years; Kenji Mizoguchi released The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu. And Yasujirō Ozu, who had made his name before the war, led Japanese cinema once more with his command of stories about women and family.

Then, in the 1960s, came a double blow — television against film, and Hollywood against Japanese film — and the Japanese industry began to slide. By the late 1970s, annual admissions had fallen from 1.2 billion in 1958 to 150 million, and the number of theaters from 7,600 to 2,300. Toei, Toho and Shochiku, the three studios that had once carved up the Japanese market, started to come apart, and Toho and Shochiku put less money into film every year.

Another blow came from an unexpected direction: animation. Feature-length anime, and live-action films adapted from anime, kept multiplying. Seven of Japan's ten highest-grossing domestic films in 2015 were of that kind; only HERO and Flying Colors were original live-action work.

As with Italy, Japan has just one film on the BBC's list: Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

While the old film nations were losing their influence, the industries of countries once lumped together as the "Third World" were quietly getting started, in the 1960s and 1970s.

They didn't all take the same road. Sometimes politics did the pushing. China, following Soviet film theory, likewise treated film as the most important instrument of political propaganda, and set up regional studios in large numbers to handle production and distribution. That system later cultivated both the audience and the talent that made the Fifth Generation directors possible.

In Brazil, then-president João Goulart supported the film industry as part of his drive to modernize the country. Around the same time, Brazilian directors influenced by Italian and French cinema launched the Cinema Novo movement, using film to record the country's and society's problems and, through them, to press their own political demands.

Sometimes cinema needed more help from outside, as in Africa, where neither government nor commerce was strong enough. It took until 1980, with United Nations help, for Africa to set up its first continent-wide body to distribute films.

Behind all this lay these countries' huge markets. By David Bordwell's estimate, Africa drew about 200 million cinema admissions a year in the 1970s, Latin America 800 million and India several billion.

With demand on that scale, world film output shot up. In 1950, around 2,000 films were made worldwide; by the 1980s, Asian countries alone were making that many.

Globalizing film as a product did not simply mean lifting Hollywood's or Europe's techniques and subjects and dropping them into other countries. Each country worked out a way of telling stories on screen that fit its own character.

Ousmane Sembène was born in Senegal in 1923. At 19 he was conscripted by the colonial power, France, into the Free French forces, and after the Second World War he stayed on in Marseille. By the 1960s Sembène, a writer by then, resolved to portray his own country through film. He studied film in Moscow for a year, then made his first feature, Black Girl, from his own novel of the same name — the story of a French family's abuse of an African girl.

The Sembène film on the BBC's list of the best since 2000 is Moolaadé, from 2004, the director's last. It is set in an African village and follows Collé, the second of one man's three wives. Her daughter has grown up, but Collé flatly refuses to let her undergo the village's traditional circumcision, the cutting away of part or all of the clitoris and the labia minora. The whole village opposes her, her own daughter included.

Nearly every conflict an African country might face turns up in that story: between men and women, between modernity and tradition, even between the values of the colonizer and the colonized. Only an African country wrestling with how to enter the modern world could have made this film.

The Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul, born in 1970, has three films on the BBC's list: Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the last of which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2010.

Of that Palme d'Or winner, Sukhdev Sandhu, a critic at Britain's The Daily Telegraph, wrote: "Much in the film is obscure and mysterious, but that is exactly what draws people to Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Even without leaning on the hard-to-read imagery of the East, he manages to convey Thailand's subtle but important other-worldliness."

That other-worldliness is, at bottom, the strangeness of Thailand as an Eastern country. Open any Apichatpong Weerasethakul film and the thick tropical jungle, the robed monks, the renderings of dreams all seem to carry the viewer into Thailand's hot, wet air.

Directors like Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Ousmane Sembène open up the film industry and fill it out. But on the BBC's list in particular, it is worth asking whether these English-speaking critics chose them out of purely artistic interest. Art, after all — literature or film — is always carried along to some degree by the currents of politics.

Seen that way, the presence of these films also owes something to political correctness: the need to pick films from all over the world rather than stay inside a Western frame. And in picking them, the critics cannot put down the tastes and values that Western cinema gave them.

Moolaadé is a textbook version of the progressive moral tale Western audiences love. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, for his part, likes to bury criticism of the government in his films. "The Thai government really is very corrupt, so I like to reflect that in my films — how change and difference coexist inside the same system. It's one way of looking at things," he said in an interview in Shanghai in 2007.

Then there is A Separation, the Iranian film ranked 9th. David Parkinson, a critic at Empire, noted that it is a film that powerfully challenges Iran's own political and social integrity. Mixed in with the West's blanket sanctions on Iran, a theme like that starts to look delicate.

That is the built-in flaw of any ranking: because it averages out the differing tastes of many critics, it tends toward the middle — safe, even a little timid. And critics themselves waver in their choices simply because a ranking is being made.

How should we read this? We could borrow Edward Said's argument in Orientalism and attack it: "Behind all of this is the West's subtle, hidden contempt for other cultures, and the BBC's ranking is nothing more than a crude Western attempt to use its own language to put non-Western films in order of importance."

But there's no need to go that far. Look at countries like Senegal, Iran and Thailand: that directors there can make films honestly showing the conflicts inside their own societies is, measured against a few decades ago, progress in itself. In many countries, making such a film is still unthinkable.

More important, the BBC's list shows that more and more non-Western countries can now speak to the outside world through film. That ability, and the voice they use — one that doesn't fully match the West's — is precious both to those countries and to the film industry itself. Especially since the industry is still monopolized by a handful of countries, chiefly the United States and France.

As noted earlier, the US had 49 films on Cahiers du Cinéma's 2008 list of the greatest films ever made. On this BBC list, the US again has 49.

While some countries fall and others rise, America holds its position largely thanks to the Hollywood studios' two-track system.

Batman v Superman and Captain America: Civil War (also released as Captain America vs. Iron Man) stand for the side of Hollywood that faces the mass market. This is the blockbuster strategy devised by Alan Horn, once head of Warner Bros. and now chairman of Disney's film studio: big stars, big spectacle, lavish effects, all of it built to hold the audience's eyes.

But Hollywood has a second face: the pursuit of art, or, to put it another way, the pursuit of the Oscars. That face is what keeps Hollywood on lists like the BBC's 100 best films of the 21st century.

Mulholland Drive, ranked first, started out as a pilot David Lynch shot for ABC, a Disney network. There Will Be Blood, ranked third, was made with Paramount Vantage, Paramount's art-film arm. Focus Features, part of Universal Pictures, financed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, ranked sixth.

The commercial side feeds the artistic one, and behind both stands the sheer size of the American market. Only with a large enough audience will a studio dare to put hundreds of millions of dollars into an effects blockbuster — and the fat returns those films bring give it the nerve to back art films.

In a sense, that mechanism is exactly what keeps Hollywood turning out films that go down in cinema history. The pity is that, outside the United States, almost no country has a market taking more than $10 billion a year at the box office, so no other country can copy the mechanism.

Of all the countries mentioned so far, only South Korea comes close to a mature industry. It began in 1999, when then-president Kim Dae-jung made the cultural industries, film included, a driver of Korea's economic recovery and pushed policy to pull capital in. Seventeen years later, the country has the beginnings of a real film industry.

"Korean cinema today is entirely financed by the large conglomerates, which manage production, distribution and release; the system has already completed a vertical, thoroughly commercial restructuring," says Professor Ryu of Dongguk University's film department, describing the industry as it stands — and as it is protected for the future.

The other countries — the Senegal behind Moolaadé, the Thailand that Apichatpong Weerasethakul represents — can hardly be said to have a mature film industry at all. That these directors made the BBC's list comes down largely to the directors themselves. Whether their countries can keep producing films like this after they are gone is a serious question.

This isn't scaremongering. China, after Fifth Generation directors like Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige, has seen a gap open between generations. A film industry too weak to keep producing good directors, or to give them a healthy place to work in, bears much of the blame.

What these countries' industries will look like in the future is too early to judge. But building a mature film industry has never been easy.

Here are the top ten on the BBC's list:

1. Mulholland Drive, David Lynch

2. In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai

3. There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson

4. Spirited Away, Hayao Miyazaki

5. Boyhood, Richard Linklater

6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Michel Gondry

7. The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick

8. Yi Yi, Edward Yang

9. A Separation, Asghar Farhadi

10. No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers

The full list can be viewed here.