Well, it’s that time again! Another year has ended and I’ve dusted the cobwebs off of the ol’ WordPress to let people know what the best movies of the year were! I keep being worried that we’ll have a year without movies thanks to our ongoing pandemic, but they seem to keep getting made. As usual, it was quite difficult to cut my list down to only 20 films to recommend (the actual top ten and ten ‘honorable mentions’). I didn’t get to talk about Pig, Passing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and a dozen other brilliant films that are absolutely worth your time and attention. It was another great year for movies, and no list should be considered exhaustive.

Notable Absences

As always, there are a number of movies that I simply haven’t had the chance to see yet. Foreign film, in particular, often gets a Christmas release in New York and Los Angeles, and takes a month or more to filter out to the Midwest. Drive My Car, Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn, Memoria, and Parallel Mothers fall into this category. There are also just some films that slipped through the cracks or that I haven’t made time for yet, including Spencer, Ema, Petite Maman, The Worst Person in the World, and The Humans. Nomadland was in this section last year, and was amazing (although isn’t on the list below since it’s clearly a 2020 release), as was Minari, which was good but not as good as everyone seemed to think. Alright, that’s enough about movies I haven’t seen, let’s talk about some movies that I have.

Deliberate Snubs

As usual, these aren’t actually all bad movies, just ones that I’m excluding from the list for a particular reason. Some of them I was legitimately underwhelmed with, and some of them are actually quite good but did something that made me grumpy. That might be a disproportionate level of self-importance, a theme or motif I’m tired of, or even just the wasting of a potentially great idea. I try to include movies here that people might ask about if they weren’t included, or just ones that I want to spend a paragraph denigrating.

• Don’t Look Up – I know this one isn’t actually getting much awards hype, but I’ve got some stuff I need to say about it. I think I’m finally breaking up with Adam McKay. The guy has made some great movies, but the current phase of his career has rendered him insufferable and unfunny. His early comedies are very pleasant, and The Big Short was a legitimately brilliant film that I thought would herald in a new age of ‘smart’ McKay. Alas, this tepid, miserable slog seems to indicate that age is never to arrive. A lot of people have mused in the past few years that Trump and Trumpism have ‘killed’ comedy, and although that is patently untrue (see later on this list for details), this film is the most perfect embodiment of that idea I have seen. If you want to watch over two hours (Why? God why?) of the most easy, slow-pitch, obvious, boring jokes about Republicans and climate change denial, then I guess this might be for you. Even that premise might accidentally slip over into fun occasionally, but this movie is so enshrouded in smug self-superiority that even potential humor is killed in the crib. Maybe there’s an audience for this, but it is not me. Alright, rant over.
• The World to Come – This one I like, but I definitely think it’s getting more praise than it deserves. For some reason ‘revisionist lesbian romance/period piece’ has become an entire indie subgenre in the last few years (and hooray for that, frankly), but this one is only a middling example of the form (and can’t even dream of competition with something like Portrait of a Girl on Fire), but I thought this fell short even of the pretty good Ammonite. The cinematography is certainly beautiful, but the narrative ambles, and feels simultaneously too beholden to its period and too revisionist for my tastes. Not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination, but one I definitely found drifting from my mind after it was over. At least the sex was really good.
• Licorice Pizza – I struggled mightily with whether to put a film in most critics’ top three in the snubs section (but it definitely wasn’t making the actual list, and I wanted to mention it). This isn’t a bad movie at all. In fact, it’s probably even a great one, but I have no patience for it. I am so tired of self-important middle aged white men in Hollywood making rhapsodic, nostalgic films about their childhoods. I have no doubt that this movie is an amazingly accurate portrait of growing up white and privileged in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. I just don’t give a crap about that as subject matter. Add to that its highly problematic (and entirely unquestioned) representation of a relationship between a 15 year old boy and a woman in her late 20s, and you’ve got a recipe for a movie whose beauty and technical craftsmanship can’t overcome its detachment from any relatable human experience (for this viewer at least). Great performances, though. Tip of the hat to Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim.
• The Souvenir: Part II – Joanna Hogg is a brilliant, naturally talented film maker whose life and work were dramatically affected by her relationship in film school with a significantly older drug addict. In 2019, she made a movie called The Souvenir about a brilliant, naturally talented filmmaker whose life and work were dramatically affected by her relationship in film school with a significantly older drug addict. It was really good, and had an authenticity to its portrayal of addiction and abuse that really felt pulled from real life. In 2021, Joanna Hogg made The Souvenir: Part II, a movie about a woman in 2019 making a movie called The Souvenir about a brilliant, naturally talented filmmaker whose life and work were dramatically affected by her relationship in film school with a significantly older drug addict. It was also really good, but Daniel Roberts put it in his snubs section because every beautiful image he saw in it was undercut by a little voice in the back of his head whispering “This is pretentious bullshit.”

Honorable Mentions

These are ten movies that almost made the top ten. There are another ten movies here, but there could easily have been twenty, or even thirty (my initial ‘shortlist’ was forty movies long). As I watch more movies, there always seem to be more I want to give a little shout out or spotlight to for some fun trick or interesting idea. It’s easy to see why some reviewers do 20 or even 25 every year. All of these movies are excellent in their own way, and each of them is worthy for inclusion for a number of reasons. I chose films that I really wanted to talk about for this section, so these aren’t necessarily numbers 11 through 20 or anything like that, just a selection of movies that barely missed the list that have some noteworthy feature that I thought worth highlighting. A couple of these aren’t actually out yet because I caught them at film festivals, but I hope this can be a fun preview (both are coming out in the next two months). These movies are simply presented in alphabetical order. These may fall into the ‘only if you’re really into the idea’ camp for many people, and there are some really weird ones in here too. Maybe you can use it to expand your film horizons!

• Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar – A movie that may have broken free from a lab where scientists were attempting to develop weapons-grade kindness, this is the warmest and most loving movie I saw this year. Middle-aged, lifelong friends Barb (Annie Mumolo) and Star (Kristen Wiig) decide they need an adventure and depart their sleepy Midwestern town for a romantic trip to the most beautiful and perfect place imaginable: Vista Del Mar. There, they find whirlwind romance, new life experiences, and a villainous mastermind’s evil plan to destroy the world (yes that last part is serious). This movie feels like it was made in a different dimension. It’s part of a new crop of films that have come into being during the last bleak half decade that are unapologetically wholesome, eschewing traditional conflicts, and replacing them with a firm belief in the mutual love and kindness of humanity. Although the world around us has been giving us ample evidence of the shortage of those virtues, a growing number of talented filmmakers are trying to provide us with what amount to fables about the potential for human goodness. Plan B is another great example of this from last year, actually. At every chance to develop interpersonal conflict, these movies instead choose to subvert that expectation with love and support between friends, which never fails to surprise and delight an inveterate filmgoer (and conflict addict) like me. Barb and Star may be the current pinnacle of this new style of filmmaking. It’s absolutely off-the-wall bizarre, ludicrously schmaltzy, and has a tenuous grasp at best on both physics and human nature, but no movie made me smile more this year. I can see its schtick rubbing some viewers the wrong way (it really is almost offensively cheerful and bright), but if a childlike part of you still wants to believe in the power of friendship to overcome everything, you couldn’t do much better than this absolutely gonzo experience. (Streaming on Hulu)

• Benedetta – Man, I’m glad Paul Verhoeven is still making movies. It’s been five years since Elle, his twisted and incredibly upsetting look at sexual violence made my very short list of “movies I love but will probably never watch a second time.” His follow up is actually less shocking, despite being a full-throated, have-and-eat-your-cake nunsploitation sex movie. Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) was a real, 17th Century nun who developed a highly charismatic entourage based on mystic revelation, but was eventually tried by the Church for sapphism just as her movement was beginning to gain steam. As is usually the case, Verhoeven has a lot on his mind, but he doesn’t let his lofty themes about political power in the Church or the nature of divine revelation distract him from some really sacrilegious love making (some of which even involves objects of holy significance in…interesting ways). This is only the first of a whopping three movies on my list this year with explicit themes criticizing elements of religion, so either people are making more of them or I’m getting angrier about the subject (could be both, of course). Interestingly, this film doesn’t go in for the themes about sexual repression that one would expect; its sights are set higher, on the way organized religion is used to take and preserve political and personal power, regardless of the authenticity or reality of faith. Much more time is given to the machinations of the Church fathers and the trial of the young woman than one would think for a movie with this premise. Because of that, the movie reads as more anti-organization than anti-faith, likely because of Verhoeven’s own strange relationship with faith in his childhood. There’s enough ambiguity in the last third of the movie to reward returning, too, and reconsidering what came before. It may be held back from true greatness by being a bit overlong and belaboring a couple of its points, but I’m not the kind of guy who can watch a movie with a premise this wild and keep it off of my end-of-the-year list. (Available to rent from multiple streamers)

• Catch the Fair One – I don’t usually put movies that aren’t actually out yet on this list, but I’m taking this opportunity to try to make sure that every human being possible sees this movie when it comes out this February. It’s another in the growing series of films attempting to highlight the dramatically disproportionate abuse of young Native American women in sex trafficking (40% of trafficked Americans are Native American, as opposed to their 2% of the population). Kali Reis (a real-life welterweight world champion boxer of Native American and Cape Verdean descent) plays Kaylee, an ex-boxer whose sister disappeared into the world of sex trafficking and who will stop at nothing to get her back, a trope-y plot that is nonetheless used to great effect here. I try every year to put a face-melter of an action movie on the list, and this is it: a brutal, desaturated, unromantic, grimly realistic portrayal of violence that reminds me of nothing so much as 2017’s masterful You Were Never Really Here. The French rape-revenge movie Sentinelle almost got this spot (and you should 100% check it out on Netflix right now if you can), but this movie has a lot more on its mind. Human traffickers are basically the new Nazis for movies, a group so monstrous that any amount of violence can be perpetrated against them without making the viewer feel bad, but I’ll say that this movie actually manages to push that boundary in some very interesting ways that I won’t ruin. It’s no accident that Darren Aronofsky executive produced this film; it has a cruelty and unflinchingness to it that are right up that grim auteur’s alley. Reis, despite being entirely new to film, turns in one of the year’s best performances, embodying the character with an effortless physicality derived from her actual time in the ring. Filled with a few excruciating long takes that seem as if the tension will never break, and capped by an ending that somehow still manages to out-gut-punch the rest of the film, this is a can’t miss movie for anyone who loves a good revenge thriller. Don’t miss it next month. (Not yet in theaters)

• Caveat – This is another year with a dearth of great traditional horror movies, a state of affairs that is always disappointing to me. Although there are multiple horror movies in the top ten, most of them fall into that horror-adjacent space of the psychological thriller or the horror-toned art film. Caveat is the real deal, though. It’s a very traditional ghost/haunted house story, and is more than satisfied to simply do that job very, very well. The premise is almost laughably absurd: Isaac (Jonathan French) is an amnesiac drifter (sure, why not) desperate for money who agrees to be a live-in guardian (really?) for a troubled girl living in a decaying mansion (NOPE) on an isolated island off the coast of Ireland (AW HELL NOPE). And perhaps the movie’s greatest trick is not just selling that idea, but actually making it a smart and considered part of the plot. There’s a reason things are unfolding as they are, and it shows that first-time filmmaker Damian McCarthy is both highly aware of tropes and intelligently creative in their implementation. This movie has one of the greatest physical restrictions for a protagonist I’ve seen in a horror film (think Insidious Chapter 3’s leg braces, but way way better), and a host of delightfully disturbing images. There’s a scene in a crawlspace that’s one of my favorite purely visual scares in some time as well. This spot was still a bit of a toss-up, though. Werewolves Within was funnier, and Censor was smarter, but both are also arguably only horror-adjacent (horror comedy and psychological thriller, respectively). If you prefer either of those genres, consider this a strong recommendation for those two as well, but if you like a straight-up scary story with striking imagery and smart plotting, this is a real winner. (Streaming on Shudder)

• CODA – I’m sad I couldn’t get this one into the top ten. It’s such a good, and feel-good movie that I want to place it higher despite its rather formulaic setup and execution. An abbreviation for Child of Deaf Adults, the movie follows teenaged Ruby (Emilia Jones) as she deals with the unique struggles that accompany being the only hearing member of her family. This is your typical coming-of-age drama, with a teen struggling to find her place in the world, redefining herself in terms of her hopes for life and obligations to her family, but with the added weight of being meaningfully responsible for her family’s safety and economic success. Troy Kotsur and Marlee Matlin turn in affecting, beautiful performances as Ruby’s loving but demanding parents, and Daniel Durant plays her older brother who feels undermined by the family’s dependence on her. The movie is also a diegetic musical, with Ruby being increasingly drawn to the school choir, an impulse that her family has difficulty understanding. It’s a movie of big, big feelings, culminating in an emotional, heartwarming finale that certainly didn’t leave any dry eyes in my house. From a technical standpoint, the movie is pretty standard, but it has excellent sound design and editing (practically a requirement for a movie with this premise). This is one you can watch with your parents or your (older) kids; I can’t see anyone coming away from it unhappy. It’s probably one of the most crowd-pleasing, easy-to-recommend movies of the entire year, and that’s not as easy to execute as it might seem. The movie is an object lesson in how good writing, good filming, and good performances can overcome not just language barriers, but even the presence of physical speech in a scene. Expect to get misty over hand movements, keep your tissues handy, and absolutely check out this film. (Streaming on Apple)

• The Harder They Fall – I love this movie so much. I’ve seen it twice, and I’m probably going to watch it at least one or two more times with the wife or my friends. I would normally call this a revisionist western, but the movie takes pains to inform the viewer that there’s nothing revisionist about a western that features the stories and adventures of black people, who had the same experiences on the frontier as white people, just at the periphery of the white experience. That’s largely beside the point, though: this is an opportunity for a dozen brilliant black actors to indulge themselves in roles older than movies. Jonathan Majors is the white-hat hero chasing down his parents’ murderer, Idris Elba is the merciless killer with more going on than it first appears, Zazie Beets is the damsel, Regina King is the loyal second, and Lakeith Stanfield turns in a performance as the quick-draw psycho that continues to reinforce my opinion that he may be the best actor of his generation. The list goes on, and every single performance oozes joy; you can tell that everyone present is having the time of their lives embodying all these hoary old tropes and turning them up to 11. The film has a delightful sense of style, as well, with more centered shot setups than you’d usually expect in this genre, and some delightful production design that isn’t too closely tied to boring old reality. Every year I feel like there’s a movie on this list that there’s not much to say about, and this is that one. The setup is the movie. It’s exactly what you’re expecting based on the description above, but I feel like that sells it short. Obviously, you’re going to get more mileage out of this one if you’re a fan of westerns and will recognize the motifs and characters it’s playing with, but I think it’s an easy recommendation for anyone who just loves movies. I spent the entire film with a huge grin plastered across my face, and I think you will too. (Streaming on Netflix)

• No Man of God – Making good fictional movies about real-life serial killers is hard. Shockingly hard, actually. There are a huge number of ethical and practical considerations in making entertainment about these murderers that doesn’t glamorize them or reduce them to nothing more than their disorders. 2019’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile missed the mark on both counts when adapting Ted Bundy’s life, but this film by Amber Sealy manages to admirably balance those conflicting impulses. Primarily shot as a series of interviews between Bundy (a disturbingly intense Luke Kirby) and FBI investigator Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood), this movie has very little ‘action’ in it, but manages to capture a number of essential elements that most leave out. It actually takes a critical look at how the justice system operates for serial killers (rare in and of itself), but more importantly, it manages to take a genre that often boils down to men [specifically men] talking in a room and manages to acknowledge the irreparable harm that these criminals cause to women. Too often the only female presence in these films is lurid crime scene photos tossed on an interview table, but Sealy’s camera frames and contextualizes these murders in terms of the sector of society most directly affected by them. Some have criticized the film for slipping into the ‘takes one to know one’ trope that profilers are barely different than the men they hunt, but I honestly think the movie is doing something much smarter and more insidious. If, as is often said, women are constantly aware of the potential of sexual violence all around them, then mustn’t there be a corollary to that in the male mind? And if there is, what does that say about being a man in the world? The film’s camera probes this question from a number of angles, but refuses to tidily resolve the tension of that basic premise. Anchored by outstanding, upsetting performances from both of its leads, this one isn’t what I’d call a fun time at the movies, but if you’re a fan of Mindhunter and its various cousins, you need to see this meaningfully different portrayal of the conventional serial killer movie. (Available on AMC or to rent from multiple streamers)

• Procession – I mention every year that I don’t see many documentaries, but I always try to fit a few in around the edges, and this one is a powerhouse. Six men from the Midwest, all victims of childhood sexual abuse by the priests or clergy of the Catholic Church, come together to participate in a kind of drama therapy, reenacting experiences, dreams, and memories from their childhoods. Due to death, statutes of limitations, or other causes, these are men who have been denied closure and justice, here attempting to regain a modicum of peace through community and sharing. Despite its horrifying subject matter (and believe me, this is not an easy watch by any metric), the film still manages to have light touches of humor and humanity. Because of the dramatic nature of the therapy, it’s also able to indulge in some more traditional fictional filmmaking techniques (as seen in the image above, part of one of the reenactments). The film also doesn’t fall into the simple polemic of “Catholic Church bad,” despite how easy that would be. It really does focus on the six men at its heart, and at their attempts to heal and make some kind of peace with what happened to them. I won’t lie: this movie made me openly weep, not necessarily at the actual experiences related by the people, but at the very idea that such evil could be not just perpetrated, put protected by so many. Like the documentary masterpiece Shoah (which is also largely composed of people, specifically Holocaust survivors, simply talking about their trauma), I’m not sure if discussion of these crimes can possibly heal these people, but I do know that it’s important to see them, to hear them, to believe them. As a society, we will be dealing with the fallout of the horrifying abuse perpetrated by Catholic clergy for decades to come, but this movie forms a small but vital part of the process to come to terms with what happened. With what was allowed to happen. Important, meaningful viewing. (Streaming on Netflix)

• Stowaway – Do you like hard, near-future science fiction? The kind in which particular attention is paid to realistic and consistent background starfield movement? The kind in which inertia actually matters as a plot point? Just go watch this movie. You don’t need any other info. If you still need to be sold, know that this is an intense, Apollo 13-esque film about a horrible accident leading to incredible peril on a mission to Mars. The ship’s small crew are played by Anna Kendrick (much better than usual), Daniel Dae Kim, and Toni Collette (both as amazing as they always are). A slightly rough launch foreshadows but doesn’t prepare them for the revelation that there is another person (Shamier Anderson) onboard for reasons best left explored by the film. If you know anything at all about spaceflight, you know that missions like these are carefully calculated to the last pound of payload and the last ounce of oxygen, so the problem this stowaway presents is clear and immediate. Although this is probably the least ‘great’ of the movies in my honorable mentions (the characters don’t really have terribly strongly defined arcs, in particular), I don’t really care. This is some deeply nerdy filmmaking, and I loved the many times the movie knew exactly what I was thinking (about the physics or the chances) and promptly delivered exactly that. They keep the crisis constantly framed against the human costs of every decision being made, and slowly ratchet up the tension as things get progressively, inexorably worse for the protagonists. And, although it’s far from the central focus, the movie even has some very nice themes about privatizing the space industry tucked in around its edges. I am a noted sucker for science fiction movies in general, and when they’re this technically well-made I can forgive a few wobbles in the character writing. I almost missed this movie last year and I’m glad I didn’t. It’s a hidden gem that you should absolutely check out, whether you’re a huge fan of The Martian or just love a good crisis movie. (Streaming on Netflix)

• Ultrasound – Once again, I want to highlight a movie that isn’t quite out yet in order to make a strong case for everyone to go see this movie when it drops wide in March. Pulling unapologetically from the playbooks of Lynch, Nolan, and Cronenberg, this surreal thriller absolutely won’t be for everyone. It’s deliberately opaque until at least its final third, but the mystery is so compelling and the imagery so weird that you will constantly want to pick at the edges of it, trying to pierce its inscrutability. The ‘plot,’ or at least what you at first think is the plot, is simple: Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) is headed home from a wedding on a stormy night when he hits a plank of nails in the middle of nowhere. Miles from the nearest town and with a drenched cell phone, he is forced to take shelter for the night at the house of Art (a delightfully creepy Bob Stephenson) and his young wife Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez). In very short order, Art is propositioning Glen to sleep with his young wife for questionable reasons, and things only get weirder from there. There is a lab where an experiment is being performed on human subjects, but we’re unsure how, if at all, it’s connected. Glen tries to move on with his life, but his weird night at Art’s house keeps popping back into his reality unbidden. The movie has a constant, creeping sense of unease that never really lets up, even when things are being revealed at the end. If the film has a weakness, it’s that it might exceed some people’s patience for weirdness or inexplicability. Things are absolutely (and intelligently) resolved by the end, but there will definitely be viewers who check out waaaay before that ending arrives or just lose their suspension of disbelief at the number of twists and turns the story takes. I unfortunately haven’t had a second chance to see this one yet to confirm if everything works as well as I think it does, but my initial impressions of this feature debut by Rob Schroeder is that there’s a great new directorial voice in the wheelhouse of those legends I mentioned above. I can’t wait to see what this guy can do with a budget, now that he’s shown how thoroughly he can get under my skin with little more than a room service tray. (Not yet in theaters)

The 10 Best Movies of 2021

10. Dune (Denis Villeneuve) – In some ways I liken this to my putting Avengers: Endgame in my #10 spot back in 2019. I’m not necessarily sure that Dune is the 10th best movie I saw this year, but I am absolutely sure that it was among my ten best moviegoing experiences of the year. I am a huge Dune nerd (not the biggest one I know, shockingly, but a pretty big nerd nonetheless). I was skeptical that anyone would ever make an actually good adaptation of it (I love David Lynch, and will watch his Dune any day of the week, but am under no illusions that it’s a great film). But if anyone has made a case for taking on the job, it’s Denis Villeneuve. From Arrival to Blade Runner 2049, his sci-fi credentials are nearly unimpeachable. And he actually managed it! This movie, while not a slavish adaptation of the novel, manages to capture more of what made Frank Herbert’s world and characters great than any previous attempt. The casting and performances are all perfect, the reframing of the narrative from Chani’s perspective is ingenious, and the fact that Villeneuve manages to make the dense political tangle of the world readable to the average viewer (through some admitted streamlining and pruning) is impressive. I’m almost painfully relieved that this movie performed well enough for its second half to be greenlit, and hope against hope that Villeneuve will be allowed to continue making these movies, at least through an adaptation of Dune Messiah. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the film is in making such a dense world accessible to the average viewer. I’ve talked to people with zero knowledge of this franchise, people who only love the original 80s film adaptation, and people who have read every single book in the franchise (myself included), and in my opinion Villeneuve has made a movie that will satisfy them all. It pulls some of the best symbolic motifs from the book as well, giving it a visual appearance that is always striking without being overbearing (those charging bulls, wow). Villeneuve makes it all look easy (although it assuredly wasn’t), and continues to solidify his reputation as maybe our greatest living genre director. (Streaming on HBOMax)

9. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader) – This is my favorite Oscar Isaac performance since 2014’s A Most Violent Year, a fact that I do not state lightly or without an appreciation of the man’s astonishing range and increasing ubiquity over those years. Paul Schrader directs with his trademark burning intensity, letting Isaac’s neatness, focus, and tightly controlled movements speak volumes about the character’s inner life. Isaac plays William Tell, a dishonorably discharged veteran who spent his time in military prison learning card counting and handling. He ekes out a living, winning small, cashing out early, and never drawing attention to himself, but his past comes back to haunt him in the form of Cirk (Tye Sheridan), the son of an old friend from the war. Tiffany Haddish also has an amazing turn here as La Linda, a promoter/stablerunner representing World Series of Poker investors who want Tell to go pro in a big way. Torn between his old and new worlds, this film primarily operates as a character study of William Tell’s traumas and neuroses, a bonfire of masculinity and violence that slowly burns out of control as the human drama plays out. To discuss exactly how things spin out of control would be to give away the game, but this is a nail-biting, tense as hell examination of how a man can be broken and what happens after he is. Isaac is perfectly cast here, all smoldering looks and cool bluffs, until he needs to be something else. I don’t mean to harp on his performance, but it really is the central element of the entire movie. He anchors the whole thing. If you’ve seen any of Paul Schrader’s movies (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, or even 2017’s First Reformed), you’ll know not to expect a happy ending, but you might be surprised by where this one ends up. Schrader has been interested of late in character studies that are influenced by a major political or social issue, but not strictly about them. First Reformed had environmentalism, and this new feature has the treatment of humanity by the military (and yes, that phrase is deliberately ambiguous). By focusing on his characters, he avoids being preachy, but by making those characters part of a world and life informed by the real issues of our time, he manages to address them in a more human and relatable way. I often find I respect Schrader’s films more than love them, but this one threads the needle perfectly. (Streaming on Apple)

8. The Kid Detective (Evan Morgan) – I was told that this movie had a twisty, surprising narrative and I spent the entire movie scrupulously examining it for clues of where it was going, and it still punched me right in the teeth. I cannot believe this is Morgan’s first movie. I can’t even begin to imagine what he’ll do next. This is a neo-noir black comedy about washed-up, grown-up, drug-addicted kid detective Abe Applebaum (Adam Brody, an actor we desperately need to see more of in this world). When he was a teen, he solved mysteries for the school principal and the local ice cream guy, who rewarded him with free ice cream for life! Now, a schlubby, pathetic PI still operating out of his childhood office at 32, he slinks into the shop every day where the disappointed old ice cream man begrudgingly passes him another guilty cone. Into his bleak existence comes Caroline (Sophie Nélisse), a high school girl with a dead boyfriend and a lot of questions. Out of this simple, boilerplate noir setup, writer-director Evan Morgan weaves a delightful, twisty narrative with a brilliant resolution that reminds me of deadly serious fare like The Big Sleep or Chinatown, but filtered through a totally absurd, high-school pastiche. The comic surface of everything tricks you into underestimating the movie. Because everything is so silly, you assume the film will make the simplest, most obvious move, and it simply never does. I thought I had this movie figured out three separate times, and I was wrong every one. It’s got a delightful visual flair as well, with a good eye for color and shot composition. Every year on this list I call out my favorite closing shot of the year, and this is it (although competition was fierce this year). Adam Brody is excellent here, playing just the most pathetic guy you can imagine. Prideful but simpering, he accepts the case more to petulantly prove a point than to actually help the girl who believes he can solve a case the police have given up on. I have never seen Sophie Nélisse in anything before, but her Caroline provides a perfect optimistic counterweight to Applebaum’s sad sackery. The two have excellent buddy-cop chemistry. This film will absolutely not be for everyone, to be clear. Its sense of humor is actively mean-spirited, bordering on cruel at times to its characters, but if you have the stomach for it, this is one of the most finely tuned, thorny little pieces of cinema I’ve had the pleasure of watching in some time. And if you had told me when I saw this back in February that there would be a better black comedy to come out in 2021, I would never have believed you… (Streaming on STARZ)

7. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen) – I don’t expect I’ll ever go a year without an animated film on my list. I love the versatility and beauty that it offers to the creative filmmaker. This film has been shortlisted for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Feature, and could easily be nominated for Best Animated as well, a category we too often reserve for children’s films. And it really does deserve the broad acclaim in multiple categories. Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym), as Himself, here for the first time tells the story of his escape from Afghanistan as a refugee. He is on the cusp of marrying his husband, and quietly recounts the story of his journey to Denmark. That journey, his story, is captured in beautiful hand-drawn animation (every frame), and accompanied by an amazing soundtrack that blends delightful needle drops with an understated, classical soundtrack. The whole thing reminds me of nothing so much as an extended episode of one of those storytelling sessions on NPR. The narrative of this movie is simply a man, telling a story about growing up gay in Afghanistan, and how he escaped at great cost to Denmark. But the animation makes it transcendent. Ever since 2008’s Waltz with Bashir it has seemed to me like more documentarians are turning to animation to capture things that couldn’t possibly be filmed: recollections, memories, fantasies. Stills don’t really do the animation justice, but it is a beautiful and fluid thing, segueing from one piece of narrative to the next with the same smoothness as Nawabi’s oddly calming voice. Even if he’s anonymized through animation, Nawabi still manages to put a ‘face’ of sorts on the migrant crisis currently affecting much of the world. Making systemic issues identifiable and relatable is one of the most impressive abilities of the documentarian, and Rasmussen here does an amazing job. It’s clear that a lot of trust has to be established for sharing a story that is so deeply personal, but the story is an important one and Rasmussen puts in the time to get Nawabi to really open up. The story isn’t detached from Nawabi’s current experience living as a naturalized immigrant in Denmark, either. The movie makes a real effort to understand him as a full, complete human being. Not just his traumas, and not just his successes. On reading the description, I must admit I expected something maudlin, but the movie never artificially plays on the audience’s sympathies. This kind of story, by its very nature, features sacrifice and heartbreak, but the movie just wants us to know that Amin Nawabi is a person, and it shows us his humanity with the most beautiful animation put to film this year.

6. Saint Maud (Rose Glass) – I think this is technically a 2019 movie, but due to its U.K. origins and the global pandemic, it didn’t actually wash up on our shores in the U.S. until January 2021, and boy am I glad it finally got here. A fair warning: this is one of those horror movies that really plays out the tension of whether or not it’s a supernatural horror movie or not all the way to the very end. If you have no patience for that kind of ambiguity, this one is absolutely not going to be for you. Everyone else who enjoys horror at all should watch one of the most creepy and unsettling examinations of faith as a kind of disease I’ve ever seen. Maud (a haunting Morfydd Clark) is a live-in nurse who is a little bored with her job caring for the terminally ill Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), but she knows that she’s fulfilling the Lord’s will for her life. She feels her connection to God clearly and tangibly, and realizes that her purpose isn’t to palliate Amanda’s body, but to save her very soul before she dies. But something is a little off with Maud’s religious ecstasies and divine revelations, something dark in her God’s plan for her. He demands…sacrifices, the mortification of the flesh, and the submission of the will. I won’t spoil how everything unfolds, but this is a disturbing, bleak film that borders on the nihilistic. It’s also a brilliant character study, though, looking at what loneliness and trauma can do to a person. That focus on loneliness and on lack of human connection actually makes it a perfect pandemic horror film, even though it was released before the whole thing started. The filming itself brings Maud closer to characters only to have them torn away, leaving her isolated again and again. Who wouldn’t turn to the divine when rejected so thoroughly by mankind? There are layers and layers of trauma and repression buried beneath Maud’s sunken-eyed face, and the movie inexorably peels them back, constantly playing with the viewer’s understanding of the character. Is she pitiable? Evil? Right? This is a movie that didn’t just surprise me but shocked me at more than one turn. This is Rose Glass’ feature debut, and I’m as excited about it as I was after seeing Julia Ducournau’s Raw in 2016. This is a bold new voice in genre film, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. (Streaming on Paramount+)

5. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg) – I love this movie. I love the story of how it was made, on hundred degree days on blistering New York pavement (all the sweat is very real). I love Spielberg’s passion for the project, sketching camera set-ups on site, making a movie he actually cared deeply about for the first time in…a while. But most of all, I love the finished product, which is brilliant, classic filmmaking at its best. It’s no secret that I’m a bit of Spielberg fan/apologist, and I’m so excited to see him do something big and bold and new again. This is the venerable old master’s first musical, but you couldn’t tell to watch it. It blows something like In the Heights, with its crappy compositing and sad attempts to ape the stage play’s sets, out of the water. It’s depressing how many of the 50s-set musical’s songs retain their significance in the modern world, but then, West Side Story is a depressing story. If you’re not familiar with the original, it’s just Romeo and Juliet set in the world of Puerto Rican and Irish-Italian New York gangs. Tony (Ansel Elgort, finally cast in a role he belongs in) is our Romeo, just back from jail and trying to settle down out of his violent prior life. His old buddy Riff (Mike Faist) wants him to come back for one more rumble, though. Maria (Rachel Zegler) is our Juliet, whose violent and protective older brother Bernardo (David Alvarez) is barely kept in check by his strong willed partner Anita (Ariana DeBose). You may not have heard many of those names before (I certainly hadn’t), but they all turn in unbelievable performances. They can sing (god, can they sing), they can dance. Heck, they can even dance-fight! I joke, but the choreography in this film is nigh unbelievable. You can tell the choreographer knew the original literally by heart, and brings it subtly but perfectly forward into a more contemporary space. Subtle but perfect actually describes almost everything this movie does. Remaking such a classic is generally a huge taboo, and has countless pitfalls of being too beholden or too dismissive of the original. Almost every change here works, though, because they are changes that don’t alter the heart of the story. Switching out Doc for his wife Valentina (Rita Moreno), leaving the spoken Spanish untranslated, the updating of the choreography, all done with a deft hand and an eye for detail. The production design is through the roof; no expense was spared on making this one of the most lavish and beautiful films in recent memory. It’s absolutely Hollywood through and through, but it brings the level of heart and sentiment that Spielberg has spent decades perfecting to that budget, and the result is transcendent. This is a nearly perfect film, and maybe the best directed film of the entire year. Don’t miss it, even if Spielberg or musicals aren’t usually your thing. (Still in theaters, eventually streaming on Disney+)

4. Titane (Julia Ducournau) – Where to begin with Titane? The surprise winner of this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes, and also a movie where a woman has sex with cars, and not in a euphemistic sense. Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) was badly injured in a childhood car crash, and had to have a metal plate installed in her skull in order to save her life. This cranial trauma seems to affect her on some deep level, driving a sexual and psychological obsession with vehicles that carries on into her adult life as a car showroom model. Ducournau has been notoriously tight-lipped about the plot of her movie, and I will be too, because the madness needs to be seen to be believed. Every single film writer on the planet has already wasted thousands of words comparing Ducournau to Cronenberg, but the relationship is shockingly apt. Like Cronenberg, Ducournau is obsessed with the physical constraints of the body and what the body can be or do. The horror is disturbing because we’re clearly in a world that doesn’t abide by the rules of the world we’re familiar with, so you’re never sure how far the movie is going to go with its premise (all the way, I assure you). The secondary character in the film is fire chief Vincent (Vincent Lindon), a steroid-abusing, hyper-masculine man grieving the disappearance of his son ten years ago. The two cross paths in a story that examines the boundaries of parenthood, family, and birth (or rebirth). There’s a weird, almost ‘female gaze’ to the movie that feels simultaneously exploitative and exciting. I hate to be so elliptical, but this is a movie that deserves to be discovered (with growing horror, it must be admitted). Ducournau has a great eye for the revolting, and holds nothing back as we learn just what a human body can endure. This is a legitimately stomach-churning watch at times, and that’s from a veteran horror buff. As is so often the case, it’s the idea of what’s happening as much as the imagery itself which churns the stomach. The kills are amazing (and yes, there are certainly kills), and the effects are some of the best I’ve ever seen. This film is unapologetically artsy, but also unapologetically gross, and I admire that tension between the arthouse and the grindhouse. Rarely have I been so delighted to be so repulsed. (Available to rent from multiple streamers)

3. Red Rocket (Sean Baker) – This comedy is so dark I’m not sure even I can laugh at it. I can’t believe someone made a comedy about this premise. It’s monstrous, but it’s all to a very deliberate point. Simon Rex (a.k.a. Dirt Nasty) is the year’s biggest revelation as Mikey Saber, a homeless, hopeless, useless ex-porn star looking to get back into the porn game he was so unceremoniously drummed out of. He washes up at his wife’s rundown home in Texas City, Texas, presented here as a bleak industrial hellscape. The petrochemical refineries and pillars of pollution form the background for scenes of shocking suburban blight. It’s a bleak, miserable landscape that anyone would want to get away from if they could. Mikey has no money and nowhere to stay, but he is armed with oblivious, total narcissism, a secret weapon that seems inexhaustible. He immediately begins slinging drugs to teens and scoping the area for ‘talent.’ It’s hard to express without spoiling the movie how reprehensible he is, and how many chances the movie gives him to turn it around and do the right thing. He seems to be actually incapable of understanding anyone else in his life as anything but a means to an end, a stepping stone to get him back to where he wants to be. And the problem is that Simon Rex is charismatic as hell. You can immediately see why people keep letting him use and abuse them, and why people fall under his influence. He’s just a little smarter than the people around him, and just a little more talented, and he will use that to control them for as long as he can. Sean Baker is a master of what I call “white trash chaos.” He delights in showing the disfunction, darkness, and dirt of people on the fringes of society, crafting these delightfully messy scenes that escalate into screaming matches that remind me too much of some of my relatives. Previously, though, he’s turned his camera on vulnerable populations (trans women, homeless children), finding humanity and heart underneath the grime. Here, though, his subject is unquestionably nothing but grime, and the film, while stylistically and structurally similar to his other work, reads completely differently. I spent most of this movie not actually knowing how I wanted Mikey’s story to end, let alone how Baker was actually going to resolve that tension, that comic presentation of an obviously monstrous person. And when he did, I couldn’t believe it. I think I may still be in shock, but it all makes perfect sense in hindsight. Baker was even warning me how it would end from the very beginning. Filmmaking like this is rare and brilliant, and I think that this is Baker’s greatest movie yet. Titane beat this out for the Palme d’Or this year, but as you can tell by my placement I think Baker was slighted. It feels at times almost as if the director and actor are in a state of tension over the character in an amazing way. Rex feels like he’s doing everything in his power to make Mikey (a character that hews in some ways shockingly close to the actor’s own life) as likeable as possible, when every single thing he does and says makes him more reprehensible. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie quite like it, but I’m glad I did. (Still in theaters)

2. The Green Knight (David Lowery) – This was always going to be on this list, the only question was where. David Lowery making an Arthurian romance-inspired adaptation of the story of Gawain was always going to be one of my favorite movies of the year. I took Middle English in college so I could read Arthurian romances, no joke. This is absolutely, 100% my thing. And Lowery knocks it out of the park. He pulls in material from far broader sources than just Green Knight, including other extant manuscripts and legends about Gawain with which to populate his journey. The movie manages to convey through filming and pacing a different state of mind, a kind of magical fever dream that rejects not just modernity, but the very framework through which it sees the world. Philosopher Charles Taylor claims that what makes our modern world a secular one is not the rise of atheism or agnosticism, but rather the shift to perceiving religion and faith as choices that a person can make. The acceptance of a plurality of religious experience is what makes us secularized. This movie manages to achieve a perspective that honestly feels like it never made this shift. The world of this film is inherently magical, and the magic is as intrinsic to it as gravity or electromagnetism is to ours. It’s over two hours of visiting another plane of reality where everything is allegorical and nothing is as it seems. Lowery wrote, directed, and edited this masterpiece, and his passion for the material is immediately apparent. Watching it, I feel like he loves these stories as much as I do, and I couldn’t have asked for a better steward for them. Dev Patel is amazing in the central role, which calls for a really broad range from the actor. It’s hard to believe this is the same glowing kid from Slumdog Millionaire. And he’s surrounded by a handful of amazing actors who do wonders even with their peripheral roles: Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, and Barry Keoghan are all here doing top-notch work as well. This is one of those ‘every frame a painting’ movies, where almost any still from it feels like a work of art in and of itself. The movie also has a fascination with the idea of looking and perspective. Lowery uses his own camera to emphasize this, but even brings the concept into the narrative of the movie itself. What results is one of the most sumptuous, beautifully shot films in recent memory. Although the narrative takes place almost entirely in nature, it eschews actual natural beauty (as opposed to the next film on the list) for a heightened color scheme and saturation that only enhances the story’s surreal nature. Absolutely the most beautiful movie of the year, bar none, and with the narrative and thematic backbone to support its beauty. (Available to rent from multiple streamers)

1. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion) – Look, I want you to know that I didn’t want to put this movie in the first place spot. Legitimately. I hate agreeing with the majority, to the point that my number one movie last year was Swallow, a movie that wasn’t even on anyone else’s list. I love having controversial opinions and putting weird stuff on my list. But this movie defeated me. I rewatched it, trying to find a reason to put it lower, but it’s just not there. So let’s just get it out of the way: this movie is a damn masterpiece. Yes, Benedict Cumberbatch is as amazing as you’ve heard in it. Yes, despite your erudite opinion that he isn’t much of an actor. Yes, the cinematography is transcendent (swapping New Zealand for Montana, but it’s still beautiful so I don’t care). Yes, the story, taken from one of those supposedly ‘unfilmable’ novels by writer-director Jane Campion is as shocking and surprising as they’re going to say it is at the Oscars when they’re showering awards on it. But I don’t care how popular it is or is going to be, it absolutely is the best movie of the year. Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons play ranching brothers Phil and George Burbank, whose life and dynamic are disrupted when George takes a new wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), who moves in along with quiet, reserved son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, in his best performance to date). For reasons not immediately known, Phil decides that he does not approve of this new wife, and sets out to utterly destroy her through emotional and psychological manipulation and abuse. That’s a dark premise, but I guarantee the actual offing is even more interesting than it indicates. It’s a movie that changes dramatically upon rewatch. Your first time through, you’re obsessed with the mystery, with who’s manipulating whom and what’s really going on. After its devious ending, you start working back through the movie in your mind, realizing how the movie works and is assembled, which demands that you watch it again. And then you revisit it, knowing exactly where it’s going and what it’s doing, and it actually holds up! It’s just as interesting to see the second time because of how carefully crafted it is. It reminds me a little of Parasite, actually, with its self-reinventions and the way the surprises work just as well when you know they’re coming. Although I don’t think it’s quite up to the standard of Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece, it too has a delightfully ethically ambiguous ending that will make you question where exactly your loyalties lie. I could write a paragraph this long about each of the four central performances, which are all shockingly good. This is a movie that hangs entirely on the complex, unspoken psychologies of each of its characters, and if any of them failed to convey that, the whole movie simply wouldn’t work. But everyone here handles themselves with aplomb, their characters feeling effortlessly real, even as you learn more and more unexpected things about them. This is a movie that is about sex and masculinity and power, but without having some trite, greeting card theme ready to be easily teased out. It’s a complex film that demands a lot of its viewer, and is perhaps even more rewarding upon revisit. Absolutely a perfect film; I admit defeat. The Power of the Dog is evidently great enough to overcome my resistance. Don’t miss this movie. (Streaming on Netflix)

And that’s it! The objectively correct list of the greatest movies of 2021 (and also a bunch of other really good movies that you might wanna check out if they sound like your deal). Agree? Disagree? Either way I hope you had as much fun watching movies as I did this year, and that 2022 won’t be quite as terrible as 2021 was. Thanks for reading this gigantic wall of words, and I hope that at least one of these movies provides you with a couple of hours of entertainment. If it does, I’ll be a happy cinemagoer indeed.