It’s probably too much to ask for a single film critic to try to come up with a list of 10 movies that sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film. But what about a fellowship of two?
Back in January, my fellow film critic Manuela Lazic and I began working together on a long list that initially had more than 100 titles on it. Narrowing things down was hard. We wanted to make picks that were widely known but also capable of slightly renovating our collective comfort zone. Over the years, we’ve both gotten to advocate for some pretty fascinating films and filmmakers, but there’s also something to be said for considering visibility and reach in a project like this—especially since we’re not claiming that our picks represent anything like a top 10 list (separately or together). If I were making a personal list of the best movies of the past 25 years, it would have Wet Hot American Summer and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (whose brilliant Tropical Malady could be called Wet Hot Thai Summer) on it. Manuela might pick The House That Jack Built or Phantom Thread. None of these made our roll call, which is fine (although maybe they’ll pop up in the margins of our conversation).
We spread our picks out as evenly as we could over this 25-year period and also across a variety of styles. On that note, it’s also important to say that all but one of the films on the list are American and that all of them are at least partially in the English language. As long as we’re up-front about that fact, I think we can try to have a larger conversation about American film while also gesturing beyond it, to the places that Hollywood either can’t or hasn’t tried to reach.
We also tried—for the most part—to avoid movies that have already been written about at length (by us or anyone else) at The Ringer, although considering that the site has been around for almost a decade now, some crossover was inevitable (at least one of the picks here is so Ringer coded it sort of hurts, but it’s also a great movie). In the cases where we couldn’t help but pick a film with existing coverage, we’ll do our best to say something new. Which should be easy, not only because the passage of time inevitably shifts critical perspective, but also because the point of this series—more than establishing some kind of canon or making claims for greatness—is ultimately to explore the pleasure of discussion and argument. Some of the movies here are ones we both like and love, but I also know for a fact that Manuela hates at least one of the picks. To be clear, we’re not writing to convince each other or to have an ongoing Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumb war. Instead, we’re hoping that teaming up to explore a group of such resonant movies results in better, smarter, and more evocative criticism. We’re also hoping that you’ll read—and watch—along. —Adam Nayman
Nayman: Manuela, it strikes me that the last time we did one of these back-and-forth dialogues for The Ringer, it was to celebrate Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut as a wonderful and wicked comedy of remarriage. That conversation was part of a longer discussion about the movies of 1999, which some people believe was the Greatest. Movie. Year. Ever. At the very least, it ended the 20th century on a high note: The most pivotal movies of 1999 were charged by all kinds of anxious pre-Y2K anxieties. Looking beyond the ominous apocalypse-now visions of The Matrix, Magnolia, and Fight Club, Eyes White Shut deliriously mashed up millennial New York and fin de siècle Vienna in an attempt to suggest that certain things—social climbing, secret fantasies, and the dirty thrill of hearing A-listers whisper the f-word in a multiplex release—never go out of style. The film’s notorious orgy sequences, scrupulously rooted in research about Viennese secret societies and adorned with the aesthetics of commedia dell’arte, earned Stanley Kubrick and Co. an NC-17 rating; Roger Ebert called it “an adult film in every atom of its being.” The cloaked CGI figures inserted after the director’s death to block out the most explicit sex acts weren’t just concessions to the MPAA but avatars of an encroaching and totalizing image manipulation (and Hollywood puritanism) whose presence made Eyes Wide Shut seem even more out of time.
To paraphrase J. Hoberman, talking about 21st-century cinema means talking about “film after film,” reckoning with the widespread shift from analog to digital at every level (production, projection, promotion), as well as the fact that for filmmakers and audiences alike, cinema has become aligned with—or reduced to—small-screen entertainment. I don’t want to relitigate the loaded question of whether certain crucial television series are actually cinema—Twin Peaks: The Return is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in my life, and it’s very obviously a TV show—but there’s a reason for all the hand-wringing. The supposed sanctity (and profitability) of the theatrical experience has been chipped away at since the advent of television and each successive home video format; it’s not for nothing that filmmakers like Damien Chazelle, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Spielberg have recently depicted midcentury moviegoing on-screen in almost sacramental terms. It’s a thin line between nostalgia and reactionary fantasy, of course, but in starting our series, it makes sense to deal with a movie that—in very different ways than Eyes Wide Shut—was sort of looking backward and forward at the same time: a big-screen spectacle with plenty of ancillary potential through endless special-edition DVDs, a throwback perched on the technological cutting edge.
That movie is Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which casts a long shadow over every successive Hollywood franchise, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And since we’re, spoiler alert, not going to be writing about any actual superhero movies in this series (not even Madame Web, sadly), Peter Jackson’s massively scaled epic about a gang of warriors staring down the forces of darkness will have to qualify as our de facto billion-dollar blockbuster. I’m good with that.
Looking back, it’s frankly stunning to think that New Line Cinema—an independent company that started off screening Reefer Madness for collegiate stoners before checking in with Freddy Krueger and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—signed off (with the backing of Warner Bros.) on a $281 million trilogy directed by the guy who made movies like Bad Taste and Brain Dead. When Warner was looking for somebody to helm Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—the only film that made more money in 2001 than Lord of the Rings—it picked Chris Columbus, a steady studio hand guaranteed not to rock the boat; Jackson’s 1994 breakthrough, Heavenly Creatures, starred the then-unknown Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey as teenage murderesses in love, while two years later The Frighteners was a box office flop sandbagged by its R rating.
Jackson was, to say the least, a risky bet: The seven-minute prologue of The Fellowship of the Ring, which narrates how a precious artifact possessed of potentially world-changing power fell into the hands of a benign and enterprising outsider (“It was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable”), remains a remarkable bit of film-industry allegory. The Lord of the Rings films ended up making almost $3 billion worldwide, a spectacular return on investment belied by infighting over profit sharing. In 2005, Jackson ended up suing New Line, leading to accusations of greed from the studio’s CEO, Robert Shaye, who’d been the one backing him in the first place; soon after, the Tolkien estate filed a claim for breach of contract as well. Shaping the fortunes of all is one thing; dividing the money is trickier.
That’s all backstory, though. Let’s talk about The Fellowship of the Ring. There’s more I want to say about Jackson’s handling of the novels and the film’s casting and iconography, but in the spirit of solidarity and camaraderie, I’ll turn things over to you. After all, you need people of intelligence on this sort of mission … quest … thing.
Manuela Lazic: How wonderful that the last time we got to cowrite together was on Eyes Wide Shut, a film that came right before the era we are now looking at. And with LOTR, to quote Galadriel, it is clear that “the world is changed; [we] feel it in the water, [we] feel it in the earth, [we] smell it in the air.” However unique, strange, and perfectly incomplete Eyes Wide Shut may be, it does, in my eyes, represent a kind of culmination and ending point of ’90s adult cinema (if not of adult films in general). It features two real stars lugging heavy, real-life baggage into the frame; it’s a study of desire and its discontents, and it ends with the f-word. The period of the American erotic thriller, which was, after all, a brief mixed bag, ends with a weird, dissonant bang—and with a little dose of CGI, too, as you mentioned, which in retrospect seems like a sign of things to come. (I wish I could forget the black “dress” plastered onto Florence Pugh’s naked body in certain versions of Christopher Nolan’s 2023 film, Oppenheimer.)
Speaking of special effects: After watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my friends one New Year’s Eve day (an annual tradition), we looked at some behind-the-scenes footage revealing the complex sets and tricks used to make Elijah Wood and Co. look so much shorter than Ian McKellen. While Tom Cruise had (has) the opposite problem, it is striking to see how advanced, meticulous, and effective the in-camera effects are in Jackson’s film compared with Kubrick’s, even though so few years separate them. When you watch the LOTR films today, that fascination persists and stretches in the other direction: In 25 years of big-budget franchise moviemaking, no one has managed to so fully and so poetically use the new tools of movie magic to create a world and atmosphere that feel both as dreamlike and as tangible as in LOTR.
Perhaps it is partly to test and verify this theory that my friends—some of whom are terminally dedicated to the hobbit cause, to the point of crying at each viewing—and I keep revisiting these films at the close of every year, and perhaps it is because it is always proved true that we carry on this tradition. I find great comfort in knowing and feeling each time that it is in fact possible to create an ambitious fantasy franchise in our modern times and have it endure, like the best epics of old. But there’s more to these repeat viewings than the pleasure of familiarity: The Fellowship of the Ring, perhaps more than the films that follow it in the franchise, is a wonder on a multitude of levels, and more of its riches reveal themselves to me at each viewing. As you said, the prologue alone is a thing of wonder that lets on how beautifully constructed the narrative is. Although LOTR may not be a typical “film for adults,” it both takes its audience by the hand and trusts it enough to follow its intricate tale. I am always amazed by how organic its world-building feels, even though one cannot say that it is effortless. LOTR doesn’t need to continuously refer back to itself, à la the MCU; instead, it works by immersing you in a fully formed reality, with all its details and tedium. How incredibly simple yet brilliant to begin the story during a large birthday party, where the personal, the communal, and the mythical blend together seamlessly, where humor, romance, and dark, ages-old compulsions intertwine in a fiery, explosive, and ultimately sorrowful gathering, with Bilbo Baggins leaving behind the wonderful world we’ve just discovered and fallen in love with. It is this sense of minutiae, of ordinary yet magical lives, that anchors the film and makes us care about the large-scale and personal consequences of Frodo’s quest.
It is this emotional latitude, too, jostling us back and forth between hope and despair, that makes the series so compelling. Of course, we largely have Tolkien to thank for that, but there’s something to be said for a small studio betting on a tale so full of hardship and violence, paired with love and friendship, and not diluting it for the sake of commercialism. Gollum’s hateful conversation with himself terrorized me as a teenager, and I still find it incredibly brutal, uncanny, and heartbreaking. Over the years, I’ve also become increasingly sensitive to other aspects of the film—for instance, I now find the moment when Galadriel is briefly tempted by the ring to be bone-chilling, probably because I’ve grown less naive and idealistic about our innate thirst for power.
With time and with each viewing, I become more astonished by the performances Jackson captures and by how much room he gives to each actor (again, very much not what franchise filmmaking is now about). Casting a thespian such as McKellen to play Gandalf was a stroke of genius, and he brilliantly balances his Shakespearean gravitas with the nonchalance of your coolest uncle (apparently, he did not mean to bang his head on a beam in Bilbo’s tiny house but did what any professional actor would and acted through the pain). Ian Holm, also a former Royal Shakespeare Company member, makes Bilbo both trustworthy and frighteningly secretive, much like the android he played in Ridley Scott’s own tale of a world on the verge of annihilation. Yet the casting department on The Fellowship of the Ring didn’t simply walk into the Globe and call it a day. The palette of talent here is wide and diverse, with different acting styles adding their own idiosyncratic touches of color. Sean Bean’s über-serious, melodramatic take on Boromir pairs well with Viggo Mortensen’s more grounded, realistic interpretation of Aragorn, making them convincing brothers-in-arms. LOTR is also a film of vivid visages that complement one another: Elijah Wood’s ethereal beauty as Frodo mirrors Samwise Gamgee’s good-naturedness as it shines through Sean Astin’s open face. I’ve always been partial to Pippin’s whole vibe, as played by Billy Boyd, and if we look beyond the differences between hobbits and men, it is interesting to think of LOTR as a tapestry of different masculinities, from the hyper-virile to the more sensitive type, with all the shades in between. (He isn’t present in the first film, but one of my favorite characters in the series has to be Bernard Hill’s Theoden, a king who cries.)
Do you also revisit this film regularly? What has it meant for you and your view of cinema?
Nayman: I can’t say that The Lord of the Rings has meant that much to my view of cinema, but then I came to it relatively late, after other fantasy epics had already successfully colonized my subconscious. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with The NeverEnding Story and The Princess Bride, both of which exist under the sign of Tolkien but are also self-reflexive: They’re stories about storytelling, and while I don’t think I fully appreciated those elements when I watched them over and over on VHS in the early 1990s, the fact that I’m so drawn to movies that operate with the hood popped open must mean something. Maybe, in the mystic spirit of LOTR, we could call it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There’s very little of that postmodern impulse in The Fellowship of the Ring or its sequels, which were produced completely earnestly and—as weird as this may be to say about a trilogy with such a vast scope and so much narrative and visual detail—in a spirit of humility. I don’t watch these movies regularly; before we settled on The Fellowship of the Ring as our first movie, I don’t think I’d seen it in more than 10 years. Rewatching it, though, I was charmed and impressed by a lot of the things you cited—the precision of the construction, the brilliance of the casting, the blending of tones—but most of all by how fully inhabited Jackson’s sequences feel, both in terms of the supremely tactile production and costume design and also, a bit more abstractly, by some deep, implicit sense of continuity, of a world whose past extends beyond the frame. Think about the scene where our river-bound heroes drift past a pair of looming sentinels and glance up in wonder; the low camera angles and soaring musical score suspend their awe and disbelief alongside our own.
“The books have a historical weight to them,” Jackson said in 2001, after previewing a half hour’s worth of footage of The Fellowship of the Ring at Cannes. “[Tolkien] didn’t treat it as fantasy, and that’s what appealed to us: to make a fantasy as a historical piece.” It’s that feeling of lived-in and occasionally ragged grandeur that makes Jackson’s trilogy so special and elevates it above the other early-2000s blockbuster franchises—not only Harry Potter but also the Star Wars prequels, with their screen-saver backdrops and palpable air of brand extension and fan service. Jackson and his cowriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, showed real courage in paring down and even reimagining Tolkien’s grand narrative, crisscrossing character arcs and shuffling chronology. The risk of alienating the faithful was real, but they kept the core of the story—its plangent call for solidarity among different factions—intact.
Tolkien famously bristled at the idea that The Lord of the Rings was meant as any kind of political or religious allegory, whether for the New Testament, World War II, or anything else. Nevertheless, the lines of the story are long and broad to allow for all kinds of scholarly and spectatorial projections. On the one hand, The Lord of the Rings is a countercultural stoner touchstone; on the other, it’s catnip for moralists and absolutists of all stripes. Last summer, in Politico, Adam Wren wrote about the profound influence the novels had on “Tolkien-pilled Catholic” J.D. Vance, whose venture capital firm, Narya, is named for a Middle-earth in-joke. The Fellowship of the Ring was released theatrically on December 19, 2001, three months after 9/11, and, in that context, the film’s stark, unambiguous images of crusading do-gooders and slavering, fanatical orcs slaked a thirst for violent but ideologically secure escapism. When The Two Towers came out a year later, critics couldn’t help but note the morbid, contemporary evocations of its title. I remember when Mortensen went on Charlie Rose wearing a “No More Blood for Oil” shirt—just in case anybody thought the movie was a tacit endorsement of the American invasion of Iraq.
There is a sense in which The Two Towers is a combat picture, built around the sustained fury of the Battle of Helm’s Deep. The Return of the King, meanwhile, is emotional and elegiac, a series of long goodbyes. There has been plenty of debate about whether Jackson indulged in too many endings, and it’s telling that his next movie, King Kong, similarly stretched its storytelling—and the audience’s attention span—to a breaking point, as if the director simply couldn’t bear to kill his (gigantic, furry, anthropomorphic) darling. As we come up on the end of our first correspondence (I hope we’re not going too long), I want to give you the last word. The Lord of the Rings is massive and contains multitudes; maybe it’s worth talking about its influence, on Hollywood and beyond (like, say, on the tone and aesthetic of Game of Thrones), or thinking about how a filmmaker who talked about trying to thread the needle of myth and history ended up turning to documentaries. Supposedly, the Fab Four almost starred in an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings for Stanley Kubrick; now that’s what I call an alternate timeline.
Lazic: The fellowship went up Mount Doom, and the Beatles climbed to the rooftop of the Apple Corps headquarters—in both instances, the arduous climb led to the dramatic end of an adventure marked by great success, friendship, and clashes of group and self-interest. Also, they all had long, shaggy hair.
The Beatles’ last live performance has qualities similar to those of the LOTR franchise, as you say: It was a historical event that gained mythical proportions but was also a deeply personal moment for its participants, a dimension that Jackson captures in his Get Back documentary. Here, too, he focuses on the mundane reality behind a legendary moment. He had the same approach for They Shall Not Grow Old, aiming to put the spectator in the shoes of WWI soldiers rather than overly concerning himself with the historical significance of the event itself. What’s trickier to reconcile is the filmmaker’s not always fruitful, at times overly confident turn to new technology to accomplish these visions. LOTR feels so much more tangible than Game of Thrones—and the Amazon series The Rings of Power, for that matter. On the other hand, Jackson’s work on “Now and Then,” a “lost” Beatles track released in November 2023, has an uncanny quality. I love the song, but the technology Jackson used to bring it to life blurs the boundaries of what a recording, be it audio or video, truly is—namely, the capturing of a unique moment in time. In a way, The Rings of Power, like many other Hollywood projects lately, was born from the same impulse to reappropriate and reuse past glory. What that impulse misses and sacrifices is the value of spontaneity, of the ephemeral, of surprise. McKellen accidentally hitting his head or George Harrison coming up with the lyrics “I don’t know, I don’t know” for the chorus of “Something” because he literally did not know what to say—there is no recreating those moments, which are what really make these works meaningful. And when, now and then, I miss Lord of the Rings and want it to be there for me, I simply rewatch the original. No one can take that away from me.
This brings us to the end of this first dispatch from the present about the past, unadulterated. To quote John Lennon one last time, “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”
