The great­est film of the 21^st cen­tu­ry has been named

Okay, to put that in less hyper­bol­ic par­lance, the best film in the last 15-and-a-half years has been named. All it needs to do is hold out for anoth­er 74-and-a-half years, and it’s real­ly going to be on to some­thing… The lab boys at the BBC Cul­ture dept have polled a group of film crit­ics from around the globe, and their find­ings reveal that David Lynch’s creepy LA body-swap­ping noir/​satire, Mul­hol­land Dr, is the film that notched up the most votes. It is the win­ner. The supre­mo. The best of the best.

The top spots offer lit­tle in the way of sur­prise, with Wong Kar-wai’s rhap­sod­ic almost-romance In the Mood for Love trail­ing at num­ber two and PT Anderson’s furi­ous­ly-wrought oil-drilling saga, There Will be Blood, plac­ing in the bronze posi­tion. Yet the remain­der of the list itself in no way cleaves to more tra­di­tion­al or awards-gar­land­ed fair, with crit­ics opt­ing for more per­son­al selec­tions rather than think­ing too hard about build­ing a canon and what ​“the best” actu­al­ly means.

You can see the full run­down of films right here, and you can see my per­son­al selec­tion of ten below, with anoth­er ten titles which did’t quite make the cut below that. These picks were not in any way sci­en­tif­ic or over­ly con­sid­ered – I hap­pened to have rewatched Ter­ry Zwigoff’s amaz­ing Ghost World very recent­ly, so it was right at the fore­front of my mind. Maybe if I’d re-watched Robert Altman’s The Com­pa­ny instead, that could’ve tak­en its spot? We’ll nev­er know…

1. The Tree of Life (Ter­rence Mal­ick, 2011)
2. Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)
3. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Ander­son, 2002)
4. Ghost World (Ter­ry Zwigoff, 2001)
5. Tabu (Miguel Gomes, 2012)
6. Wendy and Lucy (Kel­ly Reichardt, 2008)
7. The Head­less Woman (Lucre­cia Mar­tel, 2008)
8. Every­one Else (Maren Ade, 2009)
9. Mil­len­ni­um Mam­bo (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2001)
10. In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Cos­ta, 2000)

11 – 20 (unranked)
Pacif­ic Rim (Guiller­mo del Toro, 2012)
In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
Death Proof (Quentin Taran­ti­no, 2007)
Wak­ing Life (Richard Lin­klater, 2001)
The Com­pa­ny (Robert Alt­man, 2003)
Ponyo (Hayao Miyaza­ki, 2008)
Two Days, One Night (Jean-Luc and Pierre Dar­d­enne, 2014)
Stray Dogs (Tsai Ming-liang, 2012)
Like Some­one In Love (Abbas Kiarosta­mi, 2012)
Syn­dromes and a Cen­tu­ry (Apichat­pong Weerasethakul, 2006)

The one thing I’m cer­tain of, though, is that Ter­rence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a dead cert / immov­able beast when it comes to the top spot. I’d have loved to have added his To the Won­der and Knight of Cups to make up what is for me a per­fect suite of movies, but, the strict logis­tics of list­mak­ing must be adhered to upon pain of death.

Read the BBC’s 100 Great­est Films of the 21^st Cen­tu­ry list at bbc​.com