In June 2025, the New York Times (NYT) released a page humbly titled “The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century.” Their methodology for determining the best movies was to ask a roster of influential creators to name the best films of the 21st century so far. Then, they invited readers to participate in the same activity by choosing their top 10 films of the past 25 years. This is a cool, interactive article. But as soon as I was done, I wanted one more thing.
I wanted to see where my list of top 10 films overlaps with their influential figures, and which influential figures I have the most overlap with.
So, I made a little static site where you and I can do just that. If you are curious which moviemaker your personal taste most overlaps with, go to the website, enter your top 10 movies (constrained to the list of movies selected by the NYT influential creators), and see who you have the most overlap with.
Try it here: overlap
It looks like this:
Follow-up questions:
- Do different professions cluster towards specific movies/genres? (e.g. Do actors really like actor-focused films while cinematographers lean towards more cinematic films)
- Are ballots converging on a small consensus set, or splitting into distinct camps (high entropy vs low entropy)?
- Which voters are most “central” in the overlap graph (degree / betweenness), and are there identifiable taste hubs?
- Which voters have the most idiosyncratic ballots (lowest average overlap with everyone else), and what films drive that?
- Are a few studios/distributors overrepresented relative to their overall output, and is the concentration increasing over time?
- How do selections correlate with critic aggregates (Metacritic/Rotten Tomatoes) versus audience ratings, and does that differ by profession?
- Do early-career vs late-career voters show different selection profiles (recency, experimentation, genre diversity, international reach)?
- How much overlap is there between the average users top 10 and the influential figure’s top 10?
- How popular are the top 100 films, as defined by budget, number of theaters, box office, etcetera?
- Is there a recency bias in the top 100 films?
- Which professionals (actor, director, producer, editor, etc…) are in the top 100 the most?
- Which professionals have the highest hit rate (highest % of projects included)?
- In what ways is the distribution of these films similar to/divergent from the mean corpus of released films (box office, length of theatrical stay, budget, awards, runtime, number of billed cast, etc…)
- How do the films identified here align with/diverge from the film studies canon that will emerge from this era? !remindme 100 years