2021 was yet another terrible year for the world, but it turned out to be one of the greatest years for cinema in my lifetime. The last time I felt this strongly about a year’s worth of movies was 2014 – and before that, 2007, and 2001. Every six or seven years, it seems, we get one of these remarkable years, a convergence of established masters at the height of their craft and bold new voices establishing lasting legacies, with unexpected pleasures coming at us from all directions.
Except Hollywood. Hollywood’s mainstream wide releases were mostly really bad this year, fueled in part by a near-total creative collapse of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s increasingly obnoxious project (Shang-Chi was the lone theatrical exception). There are a few notable standouts from the big studios, though none of the wide releases that made it onto my Top 20 did particularly well at the US box office. But as has become increasingly clear in recent years, if you’re just focusing on what Hollywood is pumping into the multiplex, you’re doing it wrong. Cinema is changing, in access and distribution and many other ways, and it doesn’t take that much digging to find gems, especially in a year as wildly rich as 2021.
I loved so many films this year so passionately that in addition to the main Top 10, we’ve got an additional 10 runners-up, bringing us to a nice even Top 20, and then five extra ‘leftovers’ I would have felt bad ignoring, so I guess it’s kind of a Top 25. #20-11 have paragraph-length capsule statements, but for the Top 10, I went all out, penning either a mini-review or a short essay for each. That means this is one of the longest pieces I’ve ever published. But the movies this year deserved it, and since I didn’t get to write many public-facing pieces on film this year, I owed it to myself to spend some time writing about all these works that meant so much to me.
The ground rules here are simple: A “2021 movie” means a film that made its commercial debut in the United States in 2021, theatrically or on streaming. Some of these films will be listed as 2020 if you look them up elsewhere, because of festival or overseas debuts, but this is how they come to count as 2021 for the purposes of this list. I also decided, for the sake of simplicity, to ignore the films that technically got commercial releases in 2021, but counted for the 2020 Oscars (films like Nomadland or Judas and the Black Messiah), because it’s tenuous and unclear where or when to count those, and it feels like they belong to last year’s cultural conversation.
Ok then. Deep breath. Here we go.
(And if you love my voice or just hate reading, you can click on the YouTube video at the top of this page to listen to the audio version of this article, with me reading all this text).
Starting with the leftovers and honorable mentions after the jump…
