The Best Films of 2006-2024

There are only two rules that all film critics must abide by. They are:

1. You must watch an entire movie to write about it. If you walk out or turn a film off early, your opinion is incomplete and therefore not valid.
2. Every year in December you have to make a top ten list.

Those rules were instilled in me while I was an impressionable film student, and I have followed them ever since. “Ever since” is now an embarrassingly long time ago. 2024 marks my 10th anniversary at ScreenCrush. And this year’s top ten list is, I believe, my 20th year making an annual top ten list.

I say “believe” because in our digital world, things are not always permanent. Most of the websites I’ve written for through the years no longer exist. (Anyone else remember REACTOR Mag? How about The Dissolve? Am I the only one with fond recollections of The Reeler?) Most of my former employers that do still operate today are shells of their former selves, and what’s left of their archives are a bunch of broken fragments.

My 2024 career milestones made me curious to see if I could find and preserve all of my top ten lists. With some Googling, and a little digging on the life-saving Wayback Machine, I found every single best-of list I wrote from 2006 to 2024. (I’m fairly certain I submitted a top ten for 2005 to the annual Village Voice Film Poll, but sadly that publication no longer exists either.) These top ten lists are now preserved here on ScreenCrush, at least until someone else takes over and wipes its archive.

I slightly dreaded looking back on my picks from the past. It turns out I stand by every single one of these lists. I might quibble about the order of the films in some cases, but pretty much every title that’s become a canonical classic of the early 21st century is represented. And the ones that haven’t become generational favorites remain movies I personally love quite a bit. (I’m really happy with my #1 movie of 2011, for example.)

But that’s just my opinion; now you can see and judge for yourself. Collected for the first time in one place, here is every annual top ten movies list I’ve ever made, from 2006 to 2024.

READ MORE: The Worst Movies of the Decade, According to ScreenCrush