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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #30 to #11
This is the fourth part of the IFSCA Best Films of the Century (So Far) list, which I administered. Welcome back to the fourth installment in the IFSCA’s Best of the 21st Century so far! We have so far counted down from 100 to 76, 75 to 51, and 50 to 31. Many of the films we’ve highlighted so far have been classics, and here come twenty more. These are numbers 30 through 11. Link: https://ifscritics.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/100-best-films-of-the-21st-century-30-to-11/
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #50 to #31
The third part of the IFSCA Best Films of the Century (So Far) list, which I administered. We’re crossing the halfway point in our Best of the Century list! We’ve already counted down from 100 to 76 and 75 to 51, and among them are many modern classics. Now, as we dive into the top half of the ranking, we’re going to visit the wilds of Toronto, worlds of superheroes, quiet days in busy cities, and everything in between. Here are our numbers 50 through 31 of the IFSCA’s Best films of the 21st Century so far. Link: https://ifscritics.wordpress.com/2025/10/03/100-best-films-of-the-21st-century-50-to-31/
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #75 to #51
The second part of the IFSCA Best of the Century (So Far) list. In addition to organizing and administering this list, in this section I also contributed a write-up for Brokeback Mountain (#73). Welcome back to the IFSCA’s 100 Best Films of the 21st Century! In our last post, we counted down from number 100 to number 76, and today we carry on with numbers 75 to 51. We’ve had some great films mentioned so far, and there are so many more to come! So without further ado, here are our 75th to 51st favourite films of the century so far!…
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The IFSCA 100 Best Films of the 21st Century (So Far), #100 to #76
Inspired by the New York Times poll of the same name, I organized and administered a poll of the membership of the International Film Society Critics to determine the films that we consider to be the 100 best of the 21st Century so far. In addition to adminstering this list, in this section I also contributed write ups for Another Round (#99) and Columbus (#96). A lot can happen in 25 years: Birth, love, school, children, and more, but if you’re lucky, you get some really great movies in between. From romantic comedies to gothic thrillers to heartfelt dramas to…
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‘The Lost Bus’ Can’t Find Its Way Through the Flames | Exclaim!
On paper, this movie should work. Acts of heroism in dire circumstances make for good watching, but Greengrass fails to deliver on the film’s promise of tension and thrills. Meanwhile, there’s a whole crew of first responders actually fighting the fire who we almost never get to see in the movie. The story of how PG&E didn’t maintain their power lines very well, and how they weren’t able to shut the power off immediately when the firefighters asked, never gets told, and no PG&E employees of any meaningful variety appear at all. In 2019 the California Department of Forestry and…
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Eleanor the Great Review: An Excellent Showcase for June Squibb | That Shelf
Grief is among the most challenging of human emotions. It’s a coupling of despair at loss, the ennui of loneliness, and the fondness of memory. It is a persistence of love, but also an absence that can leave us scrambling to fill the void it has created. Eleanor the Great is a film marketed as a light-hearted dramedy about a nonagenarian forming an unlikely friendship with a twenty-something, and it is that, but it’s also a film about that void; how we approach and deal with it, and the lengths that some of us will go to fill it. Link: https://thatshelf.com/eleanor-the-great-review-an-excellent-showcase-for-june-squibb/
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‘Black Rabbit’ Series Review: Jude Law and Jason Bateman As Brothers | Movies We Texted About
We don’t choose our family. Love them, hate them, they are our families, and we are stuck with them. Some of us are blessed with living, supportive ones; others not so much, and the rest fall somewhere in between. Black Rabbit is a story of brothers who fall somewhere in between. Jake (Jude Law) and Vince (Jason Bateman) Friedken grew up in New York, the sons of a loving mother and a violent father. In the wake of their father’s death, they spent their formative years hustling, with dreams of making it as a band and later, a high-end restaurant: the titular Black Rabbit. At the…
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Nika & Madison Review: TIFF 2025
In Canada, we have an ongoing crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women. According to research done by Statistics Canada, women of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit descent are six times more likely to be murdered than their non-Indigenous counterparts. They also face assault, both physical and sexual, at disproportionately higher rates, and the perpetrators are caught less frequently. If none of this information was bad enough, there’s also the fact that this violence is rooted in systemic oppression by a settler colonial state, and that the RCMP are complicit in, and in some cases perpetrate, these acts. These statistics remain shocking, no…
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“Modern Whore” Is an Entertaining and Necessary Doc on Sex Work | ForReel
Sex work is work. Let’s get that out of the way right off the bat. Society has traditionally looked down on sex work, and in particular sex workers, for various reasons rooted in dubious morality (and religion), but the fact remains that sex work is work, and sex workers are deserving of respect and dignity. They are, after all, human beings. This is the worldview – which is the correct one, at least according to this critic – that Andrea Werhun advocates for in Modern Whore. This new documentary from Werhun and director Nicole Bazuin seems to break open doors…
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Before The Naked Gun, ‘Police Squad!’ Was on the Case (Review) | Movies We Texted About
The filmmaking trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker (better known as Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker or ZAZ) made their mark on cinema early in their careers. They began with The Kentucky Fried Movie, an anthology film of sketch comedy that did quite well critically and commercially, and then with their sophomore effort, they all but created a genre of film. Airplane!, released in 1980, took the idea of a parody film and cranked it up to eleven. The film is a lean 87-minute parody of the disaster film Zero Hour! that the filmmakers stuffed to bursting with some of the funniest slapstick, absurdist, sight gags, and wordplay that had been…
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“Noviembre” Is a Gripping Tour De Force That Turns History Into Harrowing Theatrical Experience | ForReel
On November 6th, 1985, a left-wing guerrilla group called Movimiento 19 de Abril (M-19, for short) stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia. The intent was to hold the Justices of the Supreme Court hostage and force a trial against President Belisario Betancur. What happened instead was one of the deadliest attacks in Colombia’s ongoing war with leftist rebels. Tomás Corredor’s Noviembre re-enacts this event, but rather than a large-scale sweeping action film that depicts all sides, it focuses on a single microcosm of the event: several rebels holding a dozen or so hostages in a single bathroom, while…
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Meadowlarks Review: TIFF 2025 | That Shelf
In Canada, we like to think of ourselves as progressive and inclusive and, relative to other nations today, we most likely are. That hasn’t always been true; our history is littered with heinous events and policies that persecuted the Indigenous peoples of this country. One of the main efforts to erase Indigenous identity and culture is known as the Sixties Scoop, an approximately four-decade period in the late Twentieth Century when government policy allowed child welfare services to ‘scoop’ children up and out of their families for the express purpose of having non-Indigenous families adopt them. We, as a nation,…
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“Burning” and the Art of Captivating Storytelling | ForReel
Storytelling has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time. From cave paintings to campfire stories to novels to film, at our core, we want and need to tell stories, and our memory is key to the process. What we write is informed by our remembered experiences, as is how we perceive and react to what is happening around us. This idea is central to the new film Burning (Ot), a Kyrgyz film written by Aizada Amangeldy and Dastan Madalbekov, and directed by Radik Eshimov. In the film, the citizens of a small town gather in…
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Spike Lee Retrospective: “Inside Man” | ForReel
Spike Lee is best known for racially and politically charged dramas like Do the Right Thing, He Got Game, Da 5 Bloods, and BlacKkKlansman. While these are some of the films that he might be best remembered for, he was not above more studio-friendly fare. In 2006, he also made one of the slickest heist films of that decade with Inside Man, starring his frequent collaborator Denzel Washington (who also stars in his newest film Highest 2 Lowest) as a New York City detective tasked to negotiate with a gang of thieves led by Clive Owen after they take hostages…
I am a Rotten Tomatoes-approved, freelance film & television critic and podcast host from Vancouver, Canada! I am a co-founder of the Cascadia Film & Television Critics Association and a voting member of the International Film Society Critics, Pandora International Critics, and the Online Film & Television Association.
I maintain bylines at Exclaim!, Awesome Friday!, That Shelf, ForReel, Movies We Texted About, KeithLovesMovies, and I can be heard regularly on the Contra Zoom Podcast and The LAMBCast.
