My 15 Favorite Films of 2021

Movies had a smoother ride in 2021 than they did last year, but that's not really saying much.  It was harder to gauge any film's success given that many were released on streaming services at the same time as they were in theaters, but things still didn't look promising.  It's not a great sign when Spielberg or Matrix movies can't even make money.  Basically, if you weren't a comic book film, the box office was not your friend this year.  Sometimes the pearl clutching about Disney's stranglehold on the industry can get a little melodramatic, but it's hard not to feel like anything but the biggest tentpoles will be vanishing over the course of the decade.

That kind of prognosticating is too grim to dwell on for too long, so let's focus on the year at hand.  Since theaters opened back up and films were no longer getting pushed back, I did see more new releases this year: a total of 69.  It's not quite back to the numbers I was putting up in 2018 and 2019, but it's much better than last year's paltry 48 new releases watched.  

And yet, despite that 21 film increase, the number of list worthy material I saw didn't appreciably increase.  I don't want to blame it on the quality of 2021's output, because there are a handful of lauded films that I still haven't gotten to, but either way I didn't necessarily feel enthusiastic enough about my number 16 through 20 films to write full entries on them.  (I'm choosing not to admit that the fact that I'm running closer to my deadline than usual this year contributed to this as well.)  Hopefully, this is the last year that my film list just a top 15, because I hate the unevenness of not having my three end of the year lists all be top 20s.  Anyway, let us tarry no further.  On to the list!

The rules: Any film that got their first non-festival release in 2021 -- whether that's theatrically, on VOD, or exclusively on a streaming service -- qualifies for this list.

Honorable Mentions (20-16)

With a knowingly playful tone and wild swerves, Malignant establishes itself as a new camp classic.  Though it's hard to believe it came out this year, Judas and the Black Messiah was a 2021 movie, one carried by its two titanic performances at the center.  Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark was met with lots of bewilderment, but so was the finale of the show, and something tells me this prickly and haunted film will age just as well.  The epic and zippy Spider-Man: No Way Home delivered a satisfying conclusion to this chapter of Tom Holland's run as Peter Parker.  All of the anarchic antics Eric Andre does on his Adult Swim show translate smoothly to Bad Trip, a hilarious hidden camera comedy.

15. Dune (Directed by Denis Villeneuve)

In a purely definitional sense, Dune is a blockbuster: the 165 million dollar budget, the star-studded cast, the cutting-edge visual effects.  Yet so many of its qualities fly directly in the face of that notion.  This is a film that's far more gloomy and deliberate than the popcorn entertainment we're used to getting -- it operates at a unique frequency that eventually becomes engrossing if you're able to meet it there.  As is typical with Denis Villeneuve films, Dune presents its scope in an unflashy nature that almost makes it more overwhelming, giving the setpieces a quiet majesty.  While the 1984 film approached the challenge of an "unfilmable" story by throwing it out of the window and doing its own thing entirely, this one seems to have come as close as one could to cracking the code.  This may only be half of the story, but it feels like a full meal.

14. Saint Maud (Directed by Rose Glass)

There's a term that was coined in 2008 but has recently had a resurgence in music called "Landfill Indie," referring to a homogenized group of indie bands that are just aping the style of better, more distinct groups.  I'm ready to declare a variation of that called Landfill Horror, because it feels like more and more independent horror films are being made with the same droning pace and very little in the way of actual scares.  All this is to say that I avoided Saint Maud for a while because I thought it was going to be a Landfill Horror film that wasn't worth my time.  In actuality, it's not really a horror film at all -- it's more of a psychological film about a recently devout woman who slowly succumbs to madness.  Led by a fearless performance from Morfydd Clark, Saint Maud is a fantastically bleak look at the way the tenets of religion can cause more harm to the already unwell.  Don't be fooled by the A24 logo and misleading marketing.  This one is much more fascinating than it lets on.

13. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time (Directed by Hideaki Anno)

Back in 2007, Hideaki Anno embarked on creating the Rebuild of Envengelion series, a retelling of his seminal anime Neon Genesis Evangelion.  I felt the same way about the first three films in the series as I do about the re-recordings that Taylor Swift is doing of old her albums: they're cool, and I'm glad they make other fans happy, but they're not on the level of the originals.  The Rebuilds just didn't feel like Evangelion to me.  Well after 14 years, the tetralogy came to a close this year with Thrice Upon a Time, the installment that finally won me over.  At 155 minutes, it's a long film, but there is so much jaw-dropping artistry packed into that runtime.  In the first hour, Anno throws outrageous composition after outrageous composition at your eyeballs, and though the middle of the film gets bogged down in lore and technobabble, the third act brings everything home with a moving procession of his pet themes.  That conclusion serves two purposes, allowing Shinji and the rest of the cast to come to terms with their trauma while also giving their creator the space to say goodbye to a series he's spent 25 years working on.

12. Summer of Soul (Directed by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson)

In the summer of 1969, the six-week Harlem Cultural Festival was held, featuring a gathering of Black music luminaries such as Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Gladys Knight, and Mahalia Jackson.  But for 50 years, the recorded footage of this Black Woodstock went unpublished.  That's the premise of Summer of Soul, the music documentary that aims to be a corrective to that, by finally showing you footage of this legendary event.  As you watch long stretches of these performances, you begin to feel the weight of the tragedy that this never saw the light of day until now, only existing in the memories of its attendees, some of whom get interviewed for the film (along with Lin Manuel-Miranda, for some reason).  Summer of Soul feels like a gift, a chance to watch beautiful restoration footage of some of the greatest musicians ever and learn about the historical context of how it all came together.

11. Undine (Directed by Christian Petzold)

Undine plays its fantastical elements so straight that for a while it's almost hard to believe that the film is actually tackling the folklore it gets its name from.  But that dissonance only makes it more hypnotizing, telling a story of love, loss, and transition that's so slippery you'll find yourself wanting to follow it wherever it goes.  And to strange places it does go, led by the alluring chemistry that leads Paula Beer and Frank Rogowski strike.  On both a literal and metaphorical level, Undine can get a little inscrutable, but it's never any less engrossing because of it.  I wasn't crazy about Transit from a few years ago, but this oddity has gotten me back on the Christian Petzold train in a big way.

10. Bergman Island (Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve)

Even if you're unfamiliar with the works of Ingmar Bergman, there's a deep trove of treasures to be found in Bergman Island, a film about a married pair of filmmakers in search of inspiration who visit Faro, the island where the Swedish legend made many of his films.  There's a playfulness here that's largely absent from the man who gives the film its namesake, both in the way it lightly pokes fun at obsessive cinephilia and in its metafiction angle.  Once it employs a nesting storytelling gambit in its second half, the film cracks wide open, offering a thrilling mirror for its protagonists to reflect upon.  Bergman Island moves at a quiet pace, but its potent all the same, maybe even more so because of its unassuming nature.

9. No Sudden Move (Directed by Steven Soderbergh)

With the Ocean's Trilogy and Logan Lucky under his belt, Steven Soderbergh knows how to make a heist movie in his sleep at this point.  So he went and made a film that operates like a heist written in cryptograms and shorthand.  No Sudden Move is as lean as its cast is distended, slinking around a nearly incomprehensible plot with bold fisheye lens shots to accentuate its world gone catawampus.  Even if you're not following the ins and outs of the events, its rhythms are impeccable, chasing labyrinthine piece-moving with dynamite individual sequences.  Nobody's having more fun experimenting with the form than Soderbergh is, and it's always a delight to be one of his test subjects.

8. Red Rocket (Directed by Sean Baker)

Few things are more satisfying than when a film can revive a person's career, or shows a facet of their skills you were never aware of.  Such is the case with Simon Rex, whom those that were around in the 90s and early 2000s knew as a MTV VJ, rapper, and actor in a great deal of disposable fluff.  But he's an absolute tour de force in Red Rocket as Mikey Saber, a fast-talking and habitually scheming porn star who's slumming it in his Texas hometown after going broke.  Mikey's an absolute dirtbag, and he blithely causes wreckage wherever he goes, which would make him a hard character to watch if Rex wasn't so magnetic in his portrayal.  Like Tangerine and The Florida Project before it, Red Rocket displays an impressive level of regional texture and rich characterization of places and people you rarely get to see onscreen, and it wisely knows how to sit there and watch them go.  The movie is a total breeze, the ultimate kind of film where you want to endlessly want to hang out in its world, so long as it's from behind the safety of a screen.

7. The Card Counter (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Only four years have passed since Paul Schrader released First Reformed, but this year he was already back to doing what he does best: making intense, solitary films about journal-keeping weirdos.  This time around it's centered on a man who served time in military prison for being a torturer at Abu Ghraib, now spending his life counting cards at various casinos around the country.  As always, Schrader does an excellent job at depicting the isolation of his protagonist, emphasizing the sterile nature of every casino floor and drawing out why this atmosphere of controlled variables would appeal to a person like this.  The Card Counter doesn't question whether everyone can find redemption -- it's pretty resolute about the fact that some people may never do so.  But it posits that maybe everyone can strive to find peace and connection anyway.

6. Encanto (Directed by Jared Bush, Byron Howard, and Charise Castro Smith)

Try as Disney might to fool the masses that there is no difference between films made by Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar, there is one to dweebs like me.  Movies like Frozen, Moana, and Zootopia range from fine to pretty good, but their work rarely reaches the emotional and creative heights that Pixar films such as Ratatouille, WALL-E, or Inside Out achieve.  Encanto is the first Disney Animation film since Tangled that belongs in that conversation.  They really outdid themselves this time around, delivering a beautiful story about displacement and familial burdens that appeals to both the head and the heart.  There's not a swing it attempts that doesn't connect: the comedy is lively and gag-heavy, Lin Manuel-Miranda's songs are varied, the directors stage all the numbers with a cinematic sweep, and the big emotional moments in the third act feel completely earned.  Animated films are a growing wasteland of the most brainless dross, so it's nice to occasionally get something with genuine craft like Encanto.

5. Old (Directed by M. Night Shyamalan)

The beach that makes you old.  It's a simple premise, but M. Night Shyamalan makes an entire feast out of it, asking himself "what is everything that could and would happen based on this setup?" and then proceeding to execute the answers to that question with a madman's flair.  Even in his worst films, Shyamalan has always been a visual master, and Old features typically jaw-dropping work.  One of the central tenets of filmmaking is that a cut signifies the passage of time, but he turns that idea on its head, using deft camera pans to let the horror of time progress in continuous takes.  Even the stilted nature of the performances add to the film's eerie, Twilight Zone episode vibe.  Original filmmaking is rarely ever allowed to be as bold and, more importantly, outright fun as Old is.

4. The Power of the Dog (Directed by Jane Campion)

Though she helmed two seasons of Top of the Lake in between, master filmmaker Jane Campion hadn't made a feature-length since 2009's Bright Star.  You'd think with such a long time away, she'd be in a hurry to get to the fireworks factory in her return.  But The Power of the Dog ambles on with her typical restraint, establishing the players in this western in simmering detail.  Have patience and you'll be rewarded with an unnerving psychodrama about repression, isolation and the reverberations that the prison of masculinity can cause.  Power of the Dog is full of surprises, not only in its story turns but in the depths revealed from its triad of main characters played by Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Benedict Cumberbatch, the latter of whom gives the best performance of his career.  Clearly, Campion didn't accumulate any rust in the last 12 years.  She's made one of the most captivating films of 2021.

3. The Last Duel (Directed by Ridley Scott)

Keep in mind that Ridley Scott is 84.  He's 84 years old and made two movies that were put out this year: one of them was a film we don't have to talk about and the other was The Last Duel, his finest work in decades.  The story is a terrific yarn told from three different POVs -- each written separately by its co-writers Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Nicole Holofcener -- as it chronicles the 14th century tale of two men who engage in trial by combat after one of them is accused of rape by the other's wife.  Smart use is made of the storytelling conceit, using it to explore the ways in which our experiences shape our perception of events, while also interrogating the very concept of the "honor" these two men are fighting for.  And Scott proves to be a surprising fit for the material, with his skill for action lacing the climactic moments with an unbearable tension and his ability to transport you to the worlds he crafts enhancing our investment in the smaller moments.  It's good to see a legend get a masterwork out of their system so late in their career.

2. West Side Story (Directed by Steven Spielberg)

On paper, remaking West Side Story is indicative of everything wrong with the movie industry right now, recycling existing IP when the 1961 classic already exists.  It's actually the complete opposite in execution, a work of craftsmanship and verve that we rarely see in the studio system nowadays.  Tony Kushner's script finds new angles on this classic story, adding the shadow of gentrification to the film's central conflict and further emphasizing the disadvantages the Sharks face as Puerto Ricans in a nation that's hostile to their presence.  And while Stephen Sondheim's songs are as agile as ever, Spielberg finds enthralling new ways to render them.  Really, this adaptation is a stage for Spielberg to show that he's still the greatest visual stylist alive.  Through masterful blocking, elegant editing, and whirligig camera motion, the film is a tour of one breathtaking sequence after another.  Remakes may be the sign of creative bankruptcy, but West Side Story is one stunning exception.

1. Licorice Pizza (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson)

Many of Paul Thomas Anderson's films are about the delicate dance between two singular individuals, and in Licorice Pizza he may have landed on his oddest one yet.  Set in the San Fernando Valley in the early 70s, the film revolves around the strange relationship between Gary, a 15-year old child actor and overconfident schemer, and Alana, a 25-year old hothead in need of direction in her life.  Anderson is less interested in moralizing about the pair than he is in exploring what draws them to one another, as well as charting the subtle shifts in their dynamic as time goes on.  Licorice Pizza is a masterclass in the difference between plot and story -- it barely has any of the former but is absolutely bursting with the latter, exhibiting so much curiosity in the complexities of these people and the world they inhabit.  And it does so with a loopy rhythm, laying out a few scenes that proceed with a steady hum and then crackling to life for moments of incredible camerawork, oddball comic setpieces, or interjections from side characters who jolt in and leave just as quickly.  There has been an increase in concern about the state of cinema, and whether great films can still survive in this environment.  Things do look bleak, but it's good to know that for now, a movie as astonishing as this can still get made.

Well, that wraps things up for my best films of 2021 list.  I love reading other lists, so feel free to share yours in the comments.  Or if you have any thoughts on my list, then you can do that too.  To see a complete ranked list of all the 2021 films I've seen this year, along with a list of my favorite performances and some other data, you can find them on this Google Doc.

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2020

2019

2018
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2016
2015
2014
2013