Matthew Triponey

2022 was a flippin’ fantastic year for movies.

I don’t have much sense of what the consensus is on these things anymore. I feel like I used to. Maybe I’m no longer plugged into the right circles. Either way, I haven’t heard many people talking about what a phenomenal year 2022 was, so I feel the need to set the record straight on this, as loudly as I can manage it: 2022 was a staggeringly great year for movies! Maybe even the best since I started doing this over a decade ago!

And what a breath of fresh air it was. 2021 was so bad I actually started to wonder if I just didn’t like movies anymore. 2022 was a godsend, reminding me: Yes, I do! Quite a bit! Movies have just been pretty bad for a couple years!

I have never been this excited about my year-end list. Even in years I otherwise think are really good, I usually have a few noteworthy reservations about the last quarter of the entries. This year, I have no problem recommending all of these to just about anybody. For the right price, I’d add just about any of them to my collection. This year, there are no “I admire it more than I enjoy it” entries. There are no trollish “I love this way more than I should” entries. I’d go to bat for all twenty of these. The stuff the old veterans made was par for the course; the stuff the new faces on the scene made burst with potential.

Another thing that strikes me: This was a uniquely strong year for genre movies. I pretend to be fancier than I am, and the state of Hollywood blockbusters has covered for me for a while now. It’s easy to have your year-end lists favor arthouse fare and awards contenders when everything else is focus-grouped to death before you even see the first trailer. It’s not that I don’t love those movies, too — but it was action, fantasy, science-fiction that brought me into this, and when I head out to my local theater, that’s usually what I’m hoping for. I pretend to be a hifalutin arthouse guy — I can be, in the right mood — but more than anything, I want to have fun at the movies. I did that way more often than usual this year. I’m excited to finally have a year-end list loaded with movies that are just plain fun — that made me laugh, that put me on the edge of my seat, that stirred my imagination.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this year a sea change — that’s a tough thing to predict in advance — but there’s definitely something in the air that feels a bit different to me. I’m not sure everyone is moving away from the franchises that have dominated the last decade, but it feels like a sizable new audience has emerged looking for something new. This is an unusually creative slate of movies, with more than one entry I can’t easily compare to anything else. And if 2022 really does mark a new era, I can hardly imagine a stronger start.

(Note: This year, I started watching some documentaries as well. I’ve decided to exclude them from this list because rating/ranking real life has always felt crass to me. You can expect this rule to remain in place for future lists unless I say otherwise.)

20. Emergency
When I first saw this, I said to myself, “Oh yeah, that’s top ten for sure.” And here I am, a year later, narrowly choosing it over Till to round out the list. At no point in the interim did my opinion of it change. It walks a tonal tightrope near flawlessly, very funny most of the time but absolutely gutting when it wants to be. The political angle is incorporated very gracefully. Not one member of the young cast misses a beat. Everyone involved in the production of Emergency is worth keeping an eye on. It isn’t self-conscious, it isn’t — quote, unquote — weird, and yet I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it before.

19. All Quiet on the Western Front
I still have mixed feelings about it as an adaptation — it cuts the things that make All Quiet on the Western Front what it is, leaving just another war movie in its place. It makes the list nevertheless because it is a staggering technical achievement — in that regard, a worthy successor to the 1930 version. It contains several of the strongest movie battle scenes this side of Saving Private Ryan. There might not be as much going on under the surface, but few movies have managed a visual depiction of the degradation, corruption, and devaluation of the human soul on this level. Edward Berger is one hell of a director.

18. Three Thousand Years of Longing
This is going to get the mother of all critical reappraisals in a few years’ time, so I think it only prudent to stake out my ground on Three Thousand Years of Longing right now. I am incapable of understanding how it received mixed reviews. I have utterly failed to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn’t like it at least a little. I am very cognizant of its flaws, chiefly that it falls apart in its last half hour after it abandons its — surprisingly engaging? — M.O. of “woman accidentally unleashes a genie and they just spend two hours telling each other stories about their lives.” But there’s a lot of movie before that happens, and that movie is friggin’ magical. A fairytale for adults that actually feels exactly like that.

17. The Northman
I spent a good chunk of the year thinking The Northman was a lock for my top five. If I had to say exactly what it is about Robert Eggers that appeals to me — other than that he is a damn good filmmaker — it’s that he always goes for it, one hundred percent, nothing left on the table. His movies just…insist upon themselves. They’re the cinematic manifestation of “beatings will continue until morale improves.” Eggers grabs you by the throat and drags you into his world; he has no interest in reaching into yours. I think The Northman is probably his weakest effort, mainly because it has the least going on under the surface. But even if all it wants to be is a blood-soaked tale of vengeance, at least it does you the courtesy of nailing every single beat.

16. The Fallout
HBO released this right at the beginning of the year, and it seems to have been just about forgotten. That’s a shame, because The Fallout is a great movie that I hope heralds big things for all involved. It’s a high school drama that beats with sincerity and, especially, authenticity — these characters, for once, feel like actual teenagers, not an out-of-touch adult’s attempt at replicating what they think the kids are into these days. The two leads are phenomenal. But more than anything, it’s a sensitive, thoughtful portrayal of one of the deepest darknesses confronting American society — not pat, not manipulative, not heavy-handed, and lacking simplistic answers to the trauma of an entire generation. I truly hope The Fallout finds its way back into the conversation someday.

15. Barbarian
You’re probably already sick of me saying this, but I can’t believe Barbarian isn’t top ten. One of the most purely enjoyable movie experiences of the year for me. It’s best seen knowing as little about it as possible, so I won’t say much — just that, as a horror movie, it strikes a perfect balance between “actually scary” and “delightfully deranged.” I watched most of it through my fingers, and yet it also contains my pick for the funniest joke of any movie this year. The gulf between where it begins and where it ends is…impressive. Two thumbs up, more of this, please.

14. Top Gun: Maverick
I flat hate the original Top Gun. I can’t tell you how shocking this is to me. It still feels like a personal, moral defeat that I’m putting Top Gun: Maverick on here. I’d have laughed in your face if you told me that a year ago. But here we are. This is by far THE most dramatic margin by which a sequel has ever been better than the original. Everything I think Top Gun does wrong, Top Gun: Maverick not only does right but does like it’s totally second-nature. It makes all this look easy. Deft, propulsive, fun as hell — Top Gun: Maverick is the first genuinely great franchise blockbuster since…yeesh, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, maybe? A billion-dollar miracle.

13. Decision to Leave
Lesser Park Chan-wook, but lesser Park Chan-wook is most filmmakers’ career-long aspiration. Decision to Leave both is and isn’t a departure for him. There’s no shortage of storytellers who are interested in human beings at their worst; what makes Park Chan-wook stand out is his fascination with human beings at their most twisted — when they are most governed by their primal urges. You could watch most of it with your parents, but it’s still quietly demented somewhere deep within — in the psychology of the characters, the moral lines they cross, the animal wants that drives them. Somehow, there’s also an argument to be made that it’s the prettiest film of Park Chan-wook’s career. Not an easy film to unpack in one paragraph, but rest assured — it’s par for the course, and then some.

12. Turning Red
I remain, as ever, a committed Pixar fan — but even I have to admit that their body of work the last few years has not, for the most part, withstood scrutiny the way it once did. I’m not talking about the “one for Disney” they have to make every once in a while, i.e. Lightyear, although that’s certainly not helping. Their original work, too, has lacked a certain spark recently. Repeat viewings don’t do their movies the favors they used to. Not so with Turning Red. This is the first Pixar movie since Inside Out that I liked more on the second viewing. It’s exactly what the studio needed — new talent at the helm, making something that isn’t a complete departure from the house style but still stands out in tone and style and thematic preoccupation. Turning Red is a lot of fun, beautifully animated as always, and it confronts parent/child relationships in a way that I think is actually very bold for a kids movie. I’m so glad it seems to have found an audience.

11. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Not even in the top ten. Madness. Yeah, I don’t part much from the consensus on this one. Guillermo Del Toro and stop-motion animation are a match made in heaven; frankly, I’m surprised it took this long to finally happen. And his take on Pinocchio is so beautiful, so well thought out, and so expertly realized that I desperately hope it is also definitive and will forestall any further film adaptations of this story. Del Toro threads a lot of his usual trademarks through the old, familiar tale (I’ll always love the way even his “good” supernatural characters are otherworldly, incomprehensible eldritch creatures), but his main contribution is the way he psychologizes all the story beats — takes the scenes you know and ties them together, gives them new meaning. Mostly I’m OK with Del Toro doing whatever he wants at this point, but I sure hope he tries animation again someday.

10. Nope
It’s looking like Jordan Peele is here to stay, and I couldn’t be happier about that. Nope, even more than his last two films, really solidifies him as a superb technical craftsman — someone who knows where to point the camera, how to light the shot, how to move everything within the frame. It also solidifies him as a guy with a gonzo imagination we still haven’t seen the limits of. Nope is sort of unclassifiable. It is horror, but there’s more to it than that. A lot of critics have identified a Spielberg vibe in there; it’s fun, a sweeping adventure, and it wonders at the mysteries of the universe. But there’s also a tongue-in-cheek meanness to it, a condescending sneer as it picks apart the dark side of the industry. The concept here is bizarre, and yet Peele uses it to achieve what actually might be one of the single most disturbing scenes I have ever seen in a motion picture. I don’t think a single day has passed since I first saw it in July that I have not thought about Jupe’s Claim at least once. At this rate, Movie No. 4 is going to be completely bonkers, and I already can’t wait to find out how.

9. Avatar: The Way of Water
OK, I do get to engage in a little trolling here, so if you’ll indulge me for a moment — ahem — neener neener neener it’s my list you can’t stop meeeeeee. For real, though: James Cameron is The Man, bet against him at your own peril. I don’t know how, in the current cinematic culture, we managed to get not one but two actually-good billion-dollar blockbusters in a single year, but like I said: 2022 was pretty special. It’s funny: No one would ever call Avatar a throwback, the entire selling point is that it’s the future of visual effects, but of all the Stranger Things wannabes out there, it’s Avatar: The Way of Water that most feels like an actual 80s movie to me. Its go-for-broke attitude, its cheesy sincerity, its natural meat-and-potatoes functionality — it’s basically Terminator but pretty. It is an improvement over its predecessor in every possible way, including, by what I can only describe as literal magic, the visuals. Call it precipitously reduced standards, but I’m not going to turn down an expensive movie that actually looks like it was expensive. I’m all aboard the Avatar train; give me a hundred more of these. Payakan forever.

8. Close
With respect to All Quiet on the Western Front, if only one foreign language film can compete for big Oscars in a given year, Close ought to have been 2023’s. It’s masterful on a level I can barely get my head around. I think it’s a movie this moment needs — we don’t have much art that explores the way homophobia causes people to pathologize friendship, especially male friendship, and Close does that with a keen eye. I have no complaints with the way it approaches that central issue. And even when it does change tracks, it has such a strong sense of character that you don’t miss a beat. The performances are tremendous; Lukas Dhont puts a lot of faith in his cast, without whom the movie just plain doesn’t work. Close can tell an entire story in an actor’s sideways glance, a pause in a line of dialogue, a subtle movement. Every inch of it is deliberate, and perfectly calibrated. Broke me, then put me back together.

7. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
I’m happy to watch as many of these as Rian Johnson feels like making. He’s so good at this he somehow gives me impostor syndrome even though I’ve never even published anything. Mysteries are hard, but he makes it look like he writes them in his sleep. I don’t think Glass Onion is as cohesive politically as its predecessor, but it makes up for that by being funnier and more energetic. It leans a lot harder into its genre, and I think that’s the right move to set itself apart. Where Knives Out was challenging, Glass Onion is cathartic. Simpler, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. What it means to be is a blast, and it more than accomplishes that much.

6. The Fabelmans
Steven Spielberg is a wizard. He just plain should not be able to get away with what he does. He’s the only person who has ever been good at making movies like this. I feel about The Fabelmans much the same way I do about Pinocchio — so great it also ought to be definitive, a wrap on an entire genre that has in large part been insufferable. It’s the specificity of Spielberg’s approach that makes The Fabelmans sing — where other movies like it simply slap treacly music over shots of film running through a projector and declare that movies are magic, Spielberg says, “Movies are magic to me, and here’s why.” In telling his own story, The Fabelmans increases my impression of Spielberg as a very instinctual filmmaker — a guy who doesn’t always know why he does what he does, just that he likes it and thinks other people will too — and that quality may be his greatest strength here. On paper, this is one of the cheesiest movies of the year. Maybe not just on paper. But Spielberg always knows exactly how far he can take it, at exactly what point you’ll start resisting. He has navigated that balance his entire career, but may never have done it this effectively. The Fabelmans rates among the very best of his more dramatic fare.

5. Tár
I watch movies for a lot of reasons. I want to have fun, I want to think about something, I want to experience life through another person’s eyes, I want to be affirmed, I want to have hope, and sometimes…sometimes I just want to commiserate. Sometimes I want to see a movie that’s so full of hate it winds back around into being kind of delightful. Enter Tár, the rare film that could accurately be described as searing. Cate Blanchett anchors an incisive character study, and Todd Field’s script incorporates cultural debates I’m sick to death of hearing about in a refreshingly nuanced way. It all culminates in what is easily the best ending of any film this year, one that repurposes the opening credits, of all things, as a retroactively hilarious Chekov’s gun. Unique, intelligent, much funnier than you’d think — Tár is really something special.

4. Aftersun
So Aftersun is probably the best movie of the year. I don’t really believe in that sort of thing — the idea of a film being objectively good or bad, objectively better or worse than another film. I think it’s only kind of possible to separate “what I like” from “what is good/bad/better/worse” — every now and then, I’m cognizant of a movie being very well done while recognizing that I’m not quite the target audience. But I feel I have to make a note of it with Aftersun, because the same thing that makes it a miraculous achievement also makes it impossible to analyze relative to other films: I don’t think I have ever seen another movie remotely like it. Every other movie on this is list is playing by somebody else’s rules. Most art — the vast majority — is. Creating something truly new is close to impossible. I think debut filmmaker Charlotte Wells may have pulled it off with Aftersun. There’s no weird trick here — no twist, no revelation, no nakedly unusual thing. It’s all in the way it comes together. There’s a moment — and I think it will arrive at a different time for everyone watching it — when it suddenly clicks. You have that euphoric “eureka” moment where you suddenly understand why it communicates in the way that it does, why it shows you what it chooses to show you, what the larger context is. And that moment hits like a freight train. My personal journey with Aftersun was unlike any I’ve taken with another film. I went from not getting it, wondering what the fuss was about, to kind of appreciating its rhythm, beginning to file it under the aforementioned category of “I admire it more than I enjoy it,” to suddenly being shattered by it, sitting open-mouthed and shellshocked as the credits rolled, then scrambling to the internet to found out what the hell other people were saying about it and reading all of it, in exhaustive detail, well into the night. Aftersun is, simply, an astonishing achievement. I’m not sure I know what to do with it, and that might well be its most outstanding quality.

3. The Banshees of Inisherin
I feel an obligation, the deeper I go into this list, to say more about the film in question — if it’s one of my favorites of the year, I should have a lot of thoughts about it, right? But every now and then my love for a movie prevents me from putting anything interesting into words — the cast is great, the writing is great, the direction is great, what do you want from me? There’s just some sort of alchemy at play that I almost don’t want to understand — I’d rather appreciate the weird spell it casts. The Banshees of Inisherin is that movie this year. It’s just a good movie, in all the ways you want a movie to be good, and somewhere in there is a little spark of a nebulous “special something” that gives it the air of the iconic. If I had to isolate something specific that pushes it to the front of the pack, it’s that it’s essentially Perfect Line Read: The Motion Picture. The year’s best match of actors to material — witty, and bleakly hilarious.

2. RRR
I’m thinking about quitting my job to become a full-time missionary for RRR — traveling from city to city, knocking on doors, asking: “Have you heard the good news?” I have been downright annoying about this movie. I’ve personally recommended it to everyone I know, and I still periodically check in with the ones who haven’t watched it yet to make sure they’re aware that they’re on notice. I said at the outset that this was a great year for having fun at the movies, and here’s the pinnacle. RRR is the most over-the-top, the most ludicrous, the most hilarious, the coolest, the biggest, [insert multiple synonyms for “amazing” here] action movie I have seen in years. Maybe ever! It’s three hours long, and I would conservatively estimate that I spent the last two of those hours in a constant state of screeching like a howler monkey. This movie turned me into a friggin’ soccer hooligan. It is every genre of movie at once, and they are all great. It could’ve settled for just being a meme movie; it certainly has the goods to get away with only being that. And yet it’s also very well made — well shot, well directed, nice looking, as fun to watch as it is to experience. I keep glancing at movies like Tár and Aftersun that probe the human condition with impossible-to-replicate thoughtfulness and thinking: “Really? This movie over those ones?” And then I think to myself: not one single character in The Banshees of Inisherin uses a leopard as a projectile weapon. And I wonder if maybe I’m lying to myself by not putting RRR in the top slot.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once
   Speaking of movies that are every genre at the same time and somehow good at all of them… Look, I get it. I hate being cliched, and even when the Oscars get it right, it’s hard not to feel obligated to pick something different than they did so you can remain one of the cool kids. But this year, being what it was…is this my favorite movie of 2023? The top four or five movies on this list are essentially a tie; they are each spectacularly different pieces of work that I enjoy for very different reasons. I’ve spent months wringing my hands over their positioning. Everything Everywhere All at Once is my favorite…I think? But that margin is so thin in so many directions that it’s hard not to feel like some kind of default, an escape from having to make a real choice. Plus, Everything Everywhere All at Once is so ambitious that it’s almost inevitable that it also feels a bit messy — not quite as assured as the other movies in the top five. But that ambition is sky high, and that the movie reaches its goal so much more often than not is an achievement in its own right. And if it’s a chaotic, messy movie, that’s because it’s about our chaotic, messy lives, in all their beautiful, gross, judgmental, loving, stupid, masterful glory. Everything Everywhere All at Once makes you laugh, it makes you cry, it entertains you, it makes you think; its imagination is boundless and fascinating. It’s all things to all people — that’s the point. That’s the promise. It’s literally in the title. And that brings me back around: yes, this is a worthy choice. I’m content with it. 2023 was a great year for a wide variety of movies. What better to represent it than a movie that has a little bit of all of them in its DNA?

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.