25 from 25: LeavittLens’ Top 25 Films of the 21st Century
“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”
- Soren Kierkegaard, “Journals and Papers”
Memory is never just “back then,” or “I remember when,” or a series of fluttering half-thoughts stored in photos and journal entries and conversations with those who were there. The past is never just the past: memory is a pulse, a wave of life that ripples down into our now, so much so that we can just as easily say the past is our present. It is at least that every then is constantly becoming new thens, and our now is simply only a million thens built upon one another. We are, all of us, at every moment, being passed through and shaped by memory - the meals our mom used to make, old haircuts and clothes, the first day at school or at work, a whiff of that old perfume, those first few notes of the song we’d never stop playing, the levitating moment when we first held our children, the feeling of rain on our face and wind in our hair and sand between our toes, all of it written together as an orchestral creation of life, beauty, goodness, pain, loss, grief, and hope. In this sense, the popular advice to “live in the moment” is at once sagely sound and utterly nonsensical, sound because the moment is always only what we have, a sacrament as Caussade put it, a holy moment so filled with unutterable wonder that the only sensible response would be to receive it as the pure and gracious gift that it is, but nonsensical because the moment is never just the moment, and to live as if it is an island all its own would be to deny the truth of the moments that shaped this one. Memory, then, is the way we can adequately live in the moment, the only way we define who we are and where we’ve come from and who we thus want to be here. It’s why the scriptures are so insistent on communicating the theme of “remembrance:” it is how we bring ourselves back together, how we understand who we are, how we become re-membered.
The last year has been filled with re-membering for me: between arriving into my thirties, living through the first quarter century of the millennia, welcoming my first baby and first book into the world, and generally reflecting upon my own physical and emotional joys and pains, exploration of memory is even now actively informing how I understand myself, my world, and this pilgrimage to God I am privileged to walk. One result, of many, has been my development of lists: categorizations of experiences, cultural artifacts, historical markers, and relationships that have created my now, and all my coming nows. From a musical autobiography playlist, annual photo reflections and notes with my wife, or simply time in solitude and prayer to listen to my life, forms of list-making have proven to be spiritual practices in the art of memory and presentness.
With some added downtime given the recent arrival of Zoe Lauren, Emily and I’s first child, another list idea came to mind for me: a quarter-century filmic catalog. Not only is this an exercise in excellence, engaging the beauty of this remarkable, multi-sensory artistic medium: it is an exercise in re-membering, better understanding our selves, our culture, and the stories we are convinced of or reckoning with.
So here’s how this will work: with just over 25 weeks now left in 2025, I will be releasing a once-weekly announcement of my 25 best films from the first 25 years of the 21st century, along with a few reflections on each of them. My hope is to capture not only the greatest accomplishments in film the last quarter century, but also adequately consolidate the messengers, means, and meanings we’ve articulated, wrestled with, and embraced over the years. Keep an eye out for my weekly installment of these, every Saturday from now until the end of the year - I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts on these films, what you think I might have missed, and how you’ve understood your own journey through the lens of film.