2021: Top 20 Movies

2021 was a weird year for movies.

Allow me, if you will, to take you on a journey into How My Brain Works, an undertaking you surely will come to regret. In a given year, my Top 20 can essentially be broken down into three categories:

• The really good to maybe-great movies. The four-stars-out-of-five. These make up the back half of the list, maybe a portion of the Top 10. These are movies I loved, but that I do have a handful of noteworthy reservations about. They’re not quite all-time favorites, but I may add two or three to my collection.

• The genuinely great movies. These make up most of the Top 5, maybe most of the Top 10 if we’re lucky. It’s a happy compromise if one of these wins big at the Oscars. I have very little negative to say about them — possibly nothing at all. Sometimes they only lack that special, impossible-to-determine something that would proclaim them as all-timers. They’re probably headed for my collection.

• The unqualified masterpieces. Easy five-star movies. Not every year has these. That’s usually, for me, the sign of a mediocre-to-bad year, but not always — I can still, on balance, consider it a solid year if enough movies qualify for the second and third category. Any year that does have entries in this category, it’s probably only one or two. New all-time favorites don’t come along every day, after all.

To me, an average year — movies were as good as they could reasonably be expected to be — looks like, say…2014, when my list had no movies in the first category, but several in the second, and a more or less normal number in the third. A bad year looks like 2016, where I exhausted every movie I would even consider eligible for the third category getting the list together. A good year looks like 2019, where I had a healthy percentage of everything — two in the elusive first category, a handful on the second, and a bunch of movies in the third that I was genuinely enthusiastic about.

Of course, none of that is a hard rule. 2016 actually had at least one movie secure all-timer status for me, and Category No. 2 was pretty well-rounded. It was the gulf between those and the bottom tier that made it so underwhelming on the whole. You had a couple of filmmakers at the height of their powers, and everyone else was whiffing.

I also think of 2013, the other Weirdest Year since I started writing about movies online. I have no idea whether that year was mostly bad or one of the greatest years for movies, period. Her, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Short Term 12, Gravity, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha. 2013’s top tier was stacked. And once you move past it, you mostly get a pile of mediocrity. I have no idea how that balances out.

I’m having the opposite debate about 2021. I’m not sure whether it’s the worst year for movies since I started keeping track, or if it’s unusually well-rounded. What I mean by this is that not only were there no movies this year that qualified for personal all-timer status, but for the first time since I started doing this, I’m not sure there were any that even qualified for that second category. That’s barring a few rewatches, of course. There are a couple top-fivers I could see advancing once I give them another whirl. But still, I have to admit I can’t remember a year whose movies left me so…uninspired. There was a lot that I enjoyed, but nothing I fell head-over-heels in love with.

But! 2021 also has the deepest bench of any year I can remember. Which is to say that third category was absolutely overflowing.

I am uninspired by this year. But I’m also really excited about almost every movie on this list. I have reservations big and small about all of them, but I was truly enraptured by what they did right. I want to call 2021 a terrible year in movies, but then I remember how many cuts I made finalizing this. Red Rocket, The Card Counter, The Harder They Fall — all really friggin’ good movies that you will see no mention of in the paragraphs to follow. The Matrix Resurrections — I was so sure that was going to be on this list, and it had a December release date. In the last few months of the year, I saw enough great movies that somehow it was dislodged. I also look at what barely made the list: movies I thought were Top 10 candidates when I first saw them. I’m almost embarrassed to put them that low, but I look at what’s ahead of them and have no clue what I’d part with.

So 2021: Good year? Bad year? I can’t even begin to decide. Wherever I land going forward, all I can say for now is that there was still a lot to love.

20. Luca
The most low-key Pixar has ever been, but that’s what’s so great about it. It’s a quiet, funny hangout movie where the highest stakes are a bicycle race. A good-natured fun-for-the-whole family film. It isn’t clear to me how culturally impactful Luca was, whether anyone other than me likes it in any meaningful sense. But I’m holding it close to my heart. It’s also the only movie on this list that I don’t feel would be in another year’s top ten.

19. The Lost Daughter
Your guess is as good as mine how I only managed to put this at No. 19, honestly. Weird year. Olivia Colman has rapidly emerged as one of our foremost talents, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut may well put her in the same company as fellow actress-turned-director Greta Gerwig. Her first time behind the camera is confident, compelling and distinctive. I’m not someone who gets invested in editing awards, but that the Oscars didn’t even nominate it is nuts.

18. Flee
I don’t usually watch documentaries; I prefer to read news, mostly. But I was intrigued by Flee’s unique approach and decided to check it out. Obviously, my inexperience leaves me ill-equipped to subject it to analysis. And even then, I’m not sure I want to — to me, analyzing a documentary is either attacking the substance of its claims, and if it falls flat on that front, it isn’t a good documentary, or talking about the filmmaking, cinematography, editing, etc., which just makes me feel crass. It’s someone’s actual story, this really happened, this pain exists, how stupid am I for wishing it was better presented? So all I’m able to say is that I found Flee very moving.

17. The Worst Person in the World
I’ve found it difficult to distill my feelings about this movie into a few sentences without restricting it to uninteresting basics. What’s truly special about it is how skillfully it handles individual moments, how every scene contains little surprises, little tics of writing and performance, that constantly shift the context and develop its characters/themes. It’s impossible to explain its transcendence in a few short words because what’s great about it is different in every scene. It’s always revealing itself to you.

16. Drive My Car
You may recall that I said the back half of this list contains a lot of movies that feel like they should be Top 10 contenders. I think on some level I may not love Drive My Car as much as everyone else, which says nothing about how great this movie is because I could convincingly declare it my favorite of the year and still like it less than the rest of you. This is very much a case of “YOU might say this is the best movie of the year; however, I think that it is just…very, very great.” I’m doing this routine because I don’t actually have a lot to say about emotional powerhouses like this. Acting good, writing good, directing good, movie good. Etc.

15. A Hero
We don’t deserve Asghar Farhadi, one of the best, if not the best, storytellers in this genre. With A Hero, he’s crafted another thoughtful social labyrinth where no one is evil, no one is innocent, and ethical dilemmas compound until the only way for the characters to do the right thing is to do the thing they can live with.

14. Passing
As Maggie Gyllenhaal collects much-deserved accolades for The Lost Daughter, we should be sure not to forget 2021’s other actress-turned-director breakthrough — who as far as I’m concerned, acquitted herself even better with this beautifully shot, impeccably crafted, and challenging drama about identity and people’s responsibility to one another. Passing feels like one of the year’s most unsung movies. I feel like we should be talking about it more. Much like Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Hall genuinely feels like a student of this stuff, and she looks at things in a very unique way here. I hope this isn’t the last we hear of her in the director’s chair.

13. C’mon C’mon
And now we’re entering the part of the list where I’m almost shocked the movies aren’t Top 5. Despite nearly all of its production happening in late 2019, C’mon C’mon somehow managed to be the most perfectly 2021 movie of its year. It’s the proverbial “movie we need right now,” one confronting the darkness of our times with battered optimism and a giant, loving heart for all of humanity. Both the leads are stellar. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Mike Mills’ best work, and I might not even think it’s close.

12. Mass
Mass is a thoughtful, even-handed, non-exploitative take on a generation-defining problem most of Hollywood is afraid to touch. The script and performances are the entire show here, and both are more than up to the task. I love 12 Angry Men-style closed-room, real-time dramas, and Mass is a worthy heir. Deeply felt and much more gripping than you’d expect.

11. Malignant
What, you thought I was kidding? I’ve spent half a year saying this was going to be in my Top 20. I do not kid about Malignant. I’m surprised I’m not putting it higher. I still might. This movie is completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and I loved every second of it. I didn’t know how badly I’d missed horror movies you cackle your way through until James Wan brought this madness into my life. Cinema.

10. Judas and the Black Messiah
Remember this movie? It was one of 2021’s earliest releases, and ended up getting lumped in with 2020’s films because it fell within the release window — expanded because of the pandemic — of last year’s Oscars, where it won (much-deserved) Best Supporting Actor honors for Daniel Kaluuya. For my part, between festivals and critic screenings, it’s already a pain keeping track of when movies technically released, so as far as I’m concerned, if it never once played before 2021, it’s a 2021 movie. And Judas and the Black Messiah opened the year on a strong note. It’s confrontational, unusually radical, and left me shellshocked.

9. The Tragedy of Macbeth
A Shakespeare adaptation so good it made me reconsider my aversion to Shakespeare. I can’t think of any director, off the top of my head, who reinvented themselves so thoroughly this late in their career. Joel Coen, already a legend, simply solidifies his status as one of the all-time greats with this — possibly the most beautiful and well-shot movie of a year where there’s a lot of competition for that title. This is Macbeth as pure fantasy, haunting and grim. Denzel Washington hasn’t had this much fun in years. Never underestimate the Coen brothers, even when it’s only half of them.

8. Dune
Look, I’m a simple person. All I really want to see is spaceships and explosions and giant worms, and on the rare occasion that such things are given to a filmmaker who will actually shoot them so they are nice looking, I’m pretty much just a cat chasing a laser pointer. Dune is gorgeous and fun, in its grim, austere way.

7. The Last Duel
Easily the year’s biggest surprise. What appeared, on paper, to be the most meatheaded of meatheaded cinema, in practice is almost the exact opposite. The must unsung film of 2021, as far as I’m concerned. It isn’t the first movie to tell a story multiple times, each from the perspective of a different character, but it’s rarely done this well, or this impactfully. Its most egregious awards snubs were in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress for Jodie Comer. It’s been a long time since I last felt the stakes of a movie’s climax this acutely. As an aside, I’m a huge fan of the rare post-movie title card that actually has emotional weight, and oh boy does it ever.

6. The Green Knight
I don’t understand why David Lowery isn’t one of the biggest names in cinema right now. He’s a chameleonic director — not voiceless, but somehow effortlessly speaking the language of every genre he tries his hand at, from the family-friendly warmth of Pete’s Dragon to the artful mystique of A Ghost Story to the easygoing true-story energy of The Old Man and the Gun, and now to high fantasy. The Green Knight is a gorgeous movie, a technical marvel, the sort of fantasy where every frame drips with history. A feast for the eyes, the heart, and the mind.

5. The Mitchells vs. the Machines
At one point, this movie made me laugh so hard and so suddenly that I physically hurt myself. It has unique, detailed animation, and a well-told story, but really it’s just that this is scene for scene one of the funniest movies to have been released in actual years. Genuine fun for the whole family, something for everyone, don’t miss it.

4. Parallel Mothers
It took me a bit to adjust to Parallel Mothers being much more genre than I expected, but once I did, I was all the way in. It’s genuinely fascinating to see a movie that could be classified as drama, that never does anything that couldn’t theoretically happen in real life, somehow come up with a story that feels like it’s never been told before. Not that it is, in the end, an overly serious indie philosophizing about The Meaning of Life — it’s very heightened, piling up several one-in-a-million possibilities in order to create a fundamentally preposterous social situation. But Pedro Almodovar knows exactly what this movie is, and it never does anything it doesn’t earn. I’m not sure what you’d call this, in the end — I’m gravitating toward “social thriller,” but even that doesn’t capture its well-drawn characters and performances, or the handful of things it’s truly sincere about. It’s rare that a movie can make me feel something while also having a certain…dementedness that makes it guilty fun. Parallel Mothers is a masterclass in having your cake and eating it, too.

3. West Side Story
This mainly exists as an excuse for Steven Spielberg to direct a musical, and that is more than enough to justify the price of admission — many times over. From a technical standpoint, West Side Story is a two-and-a-half-hour mic drop of a motion picture. I might barely prefer the original for story, but this version’s direction may have permanently ruined Hollywood musical numbers for me. Now I watch musicals and I just think, “Why isn’t this West Side Story?” This is what big screens and surround sound were built for.

2. Licorice Pizza
The best Paul Thomas Anderson has been since There Will Be Blood. It’s been a while since I last felt like I “got” one of his movies the way everyone else did, so Licorice Pizza comes as great relief. This is without question one of the year’s best screenplays — authentic and funny, with characters so fully psychologized they feel like friends of yours. I’ve missed Anderson in comedy mode, too, and this has some big laughs. Alana Haim isn’t just my personal 2021 Best Actress, hers might be my favorite performance of the year altogether, period, end of sentence.

1. The Power of the Dog
   I just hope we don’t have to wait another 13 years for Jane Campion to follow this one up. This is the sort of movie that only gets better in retrospect. The more you think about it, the better the pieces fit together. An hour after the movie, revelations will strike you out of nowhere: “Oh, that’s what was going on there!” Great characters, great casting, great writing, great direction, everyone involved in this production showed up with their A-game from day one. It’s a compelling, edgy, psychological drama topped off by one of the year’s best endings.