The Top 21 Movies of 2021

2021 was marginally better than 2020 as a whole, but substantially better for movies in my estimation. There was an unusually large deluge of big studio blockbusters and smaller-budgeted projects alike, as many distributors finally released many of their higher-profile projects that were originally scheduled for 2020 releases. There were way too many big movies to see them all, but I did my best and watched around 90 new releases this year. Below are my top 21 movies of 2021, sorted into seven thematic or genre-based trios. You can read more substantial thoughts on each movie in the Letterboxd reviews that are linked at the top of each section — just click the title of the movie to see my further thoughts.

Pig / Drive My Car / Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Three of my favorite movies of the year seem like they have nothing in common with one another: a Nicolas Cage culinary thriller, a three-hour Japanese drama set in the theatre world, and the longest superhero movie ever made. But they all moved me in similar ways because they’re all deeply emotional reflections on loneliness and grief. 

Pig, my #1 movie of the year, reminded me a lot of other great movies –– it’s as if the John Wick of the food underworld teamed up with the modern Portland equivalent of Ferris Bueller’s Cameron Frye to create an all-time great food movie that joins Big Night and Ratatouille in its testament to the power of a good meal — and yet it feels transfixingly unique. Nearly every scene is unforgettable thanks to the haunting bittersweetness that lingers in the air of each strange conversation. Cage delivers a devastatingly powerful performance as a solitary soul who turns his back on all conceivable social conventions to achieve bitter enlightenment — a premise which lends itself to countless moments of tense humor, and even more beats of raw, unfiltered emotional expression.

Pig is available on Hulu.

Drive My Car follows a recently-widowed actor as he directs a production of Uncle Vanya, and offers innumerable somber, quiet reflections on the tensions between love, mourning, and memory. It emphasizes that grieving a loved one is really regretting your inability to know them more fully and love them more deeply. And it repeatedly demonstrates how every person is slightly (or dramatically) different in the eyes of every other person they encounter, even if those different perceptions and personalities are completely paradoxical. The simple filmmaking style complements the seemingly endless complexity of the screenplay.

Drive My Car is playing in select theatres nationwide.

Zack Snyder’s preceding DC films offered a bleaker take on superheroes than we’re accustomed to in mainstream movies, framing iconic characters as lonely, reluctant gods recovering from trauma and torn between heroism and the temptations of civilian life. Now, Snyder’s long-gestating, fully-realized version of Justice League is still bold, broad, and bleak, but provides its heroes — and its audience — with something that his other films pointedly withheld: a strong sense of hope. These moody, isolated deities find solace in one another when they finally unify, and it’s immensely satisfying to finally witness these previously-butchered characters treated with such care. Every member of the titular team experiences a genuinely thoughtful, emotional arc, as they each slowly embrace their roles as the world’s protectors — their collective cynicism and self-doubt fades as they accept their responsibility. It’s almost radically earnest. Unlike the theatrical cut, everyone has a purpose in the narrative, and some of their emotional transformations are quite moving: a tortured Cyborg reconciles with his distant father as he realizes his own self-worth, while the pessimistic, broken Batman of BvS blossoms into a selfless father-figure and a true believer in the goodness of humanity — the apostle Paul to Superman’s very-overt Christ. Aside from pockets of somewhat-shoddy CGI, no expense is spared here, and no stone left unturned — the extensive runtime ensures that every moment, from indulgent action setpieces to quiet character sequences, has sufficient time to expand and breathe. Snyder’s visual splendor is as strong as ever, with exquisite compositions ripped straight from the pages of comic books. The sequences that play out with minimal dialogue are among the most dynamic in superhero filmmaking.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is available on HBO Max.

The Card Counter / The Power of the Dog / Red Rocket

These three dark dramas each explore distinct elements of American masculinity, emphasizing the absurd lengths men will go to for justice, love, and self-preservation. 

Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter follows an isolated gambler with a murky past as he takes a vengeful youngster under his wing and falls in love. It’s an outpouring of frustration and guilt so hyperstylized that it feels like an adaptation of a classic American novel that doesn’t exist. His unusual dialogue can never be mistaken for anything close to realism — instead, it finds its own unique rhythms and sense of poetry in its elevated straightforwardness, and you can tell that Schrader savors every line, particularly in the protagonist’s tormented inner monologues. The visual style nicely reflects the main character’s psyche with flat grey imagery to match his numbness — and punctuations of dizzying, hellish long takes that capture the feeling of nightmares better than almost anything I’ve seen on screen. Oscar Isaac’s performance is the perfect embodiment of the film’s detached but ever-bubbling anguish — a man desperately trying to cover his cruelty with apathy, only for it to reemerge when he attempts to do the right thing.

The Card Counter is available for rental at all digital retailers.

The Power of the Dog is anything but a typical Western. It’s a near-perfect blend of Jane Campion’s signature psychosexual power plays and the kind of mythological Old Testament family dramas that John Steinbeck transposed onto dusty interwar Americana. The movie is boldly patient, refusing to reveal its true intentions and purpose until its final frame, and demands multiple viewings for that reason alone — you think you know where it’s going, especially because of Campion’s other work, and then it zags in a completely different direction in its final moments that recontextualize everything that came before. Reducing its thematic power to “toxic masculinity” is shortsighted — it’s a movie about repression, loneliness, sacrifice, cruelty, and vengeance. Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Jesse Plemons deliver some of the year’s best performances, and Campion pumps every possible scene full of strikingly suggestive visuals and gorgeous compositions — she’s one of our most literary filmmakers thanks to her handle on symbolism and metaphor, as well as one of our most painterly directors with her attention to light, shape, and texture.

The Power of the Dog is available on Netflix.

Sean Baker’s Red Rocket is a striking character study of an awful but weirdly charismatic human disaster, a washed-up ex-porn-star played exceptionally by Simon Rex in one of 2021’s strongest performances. He’s disgusting and magnetic and completely unpredictable — a chaotic mess of pure id unleashed on an unassuming little town who ruins everything in his wake, but acted so compellingly that you almost buy into his BS, and definitely want to see what he does next. It’s Texan Uncut Gems with more emphasis on the personal damage that the modern American drifter/grifter inflicts on the people that he uses to achieve his means. Sean Baker is a good director but an even better editor — the rhythm he establishes with the hilarious expository introductions never really lets up, and the cuts maximize the humor throughout.

Red Rocket is playing in select theatres nationwide.

Licorice Pizza / The French Dispatch / C’mon C’mon

Three of America’s finest filmmakers — the two foremost Andersons and Mike Mills, each of whom has never made a bad movie –– turned out exquisite projects this year that captured a distinct feeling of time and place. Each of the movies captures nostalgia and the bittersweetness of youthful naivete with episodic, vignetted structures. 

Paul Thomas Anderson strikes an impressive balance with his latest movie, the rambling coming-of-age Licorice Pizza. It’s simultaneously a warm, romanticized tribute to the San Fernando Valley of his ‘70s childhood and a sober, critical reflection on the people and culture that occupied it. Like other great movies about showbusiness (La La Land, The Player, Hail, Caesar!), its craftsmanship makes you believe in the power of films while its messaging might make you think we’d be better off in a world where people cared about films a lot less. It repeatedly depicts Hollywood — the idealized cultural apparatus, not the geographic location — as a relentlessly dehumanizing force that chews people up and spits them out. Its landscape is full of misogynists, narcissists, sexual predators, and racists (though that last category is demonstrated in a couple of decidedly-questionable scenes that probably should have been retooled). And perhaps most importantly, PTA’s vision of the entertainment industry frames everyone as a huckster — everybody’s a showman selling a different version of themself to the highest bidder, which fits with Anderson’s thematic fixation on the moral rot and exploitation at the center of the American dream. Everyone in this movie is ridiculously funny — Alana Haim’s unpredictable personality-shifting lends itself to hilarious effect, while Cooper Hoffman excels whenever the veil of maturity lifts to reveal a very-nervous teenage boy. Bradley Cooper, Sean Penn, Tom Waits, Harriet Sansom Harris, and Skyler Gisondo all give unbelievably funny and energetic one (or two) scene performances as different embodiments of Hollywood’s preposterous insanity.

Licorice Pizza is playing in select theatres nationwide.

Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is a lovely string of bittersweet love stories, framed as articles in the final issue of an American magazine in mid-20th century France. The film romanticizes various topics and ideas that deserve romanticization — writing, painting, food, fraternity, sociopolitical ambition, and romance itself, to name a few — but also finds space to poke fun at the flawed people and shoddy systems that mediate our relationships to those objects of romanticization, both overtly and subtly. Anderson is a master craftsman, and this movie looks as gorgeous as any of his others: he experiments with varying aspect ratios, color grading, classical compositions, and even 2D animation. The segmented structure ensures that it can’t quite reach the emotional or narrative heights of some of his best films, but it’s as funny and visually stunning as anything he’s ever made. I hope Benicio del Toro and Timothée Chalamet become recurring Anderson collaborators — they fit his manic deadpan dollhouse energy perfectly without seeming like caricatures.

The French Dispatch is playing in theatres nationwide.

Mike Mills’ C’mon C’mon is a deceptively simple little family drama about an uncle and nephew hanging out. Yet it’s tightly packed with layers upon layers of powerful emotion and thoughtful affirmation of human life. Mills effectively marries the highs and lows of parenting with the bittersweetness of living on a beautiful, dying planet full of grace and terror. Shots of overcrowded Los Angeles freeways and New York skyscrapers simultaneously evoke a sense of loneliness for the people separated by metal and concrete and an undeniable appreciation for the sheer scope of human ambition to create such structures in the first place. Joaquin Phoenix’s radio journalist Johnny explains his passion for audio recording around the thirty minute mark, and tidily sums up the power of the whole movie in the process. He stumbles over his words, but effectively demonstrates how the very act of capturing ordinary sounds with a microphone immortalizes the mundane, imbuing tiny, unremarkable events with new meaning. That’s the mission of the movie itself, and perhaps the ultimate broader purpose of all great art — to recognize the profound beauty of everyday life by paying it extra attention, emphasizing the messy elegance of the contours and angles that we don’t notice as we pass them by. It juxtaposes quiet cab rides with Clair de Lune, suggesting that the tiniest moments can hold the same weight and power as a canonical work of art — if we let them.

C’mon C’mon is available for rental at all digital retailers.

Malignant / F9 / Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar

Some of my favorite moviegoing experiences this year came from profoundly silly movies that recognize and embrace the absurdity of their respective genres. These movies push horror, action-adventure, and comedy to preposterous extremes, and they’re all better for it.

Malignant is glorious campy horror trash with genuinely great cinematography, editing, and pacing courtesy of James Wan and company. It focuses on a troubled young widow as she attempts to solve a series of bizarre murders that she feels a strange psychic connection to. It zags in so many directions that it’s surprising when it zigs in the way you might have guessed at the beginning, constantly playing with the audience’s expectations. The story and dialogue are gleefully bonkers, marrying soap opera conventions with those from slasher, supernatural, and psychological horror. Wan ensures that the setpieces look excellent –– especially an insane action sequence near the finale, which might be the year’s best. It was made to be laughed at and with.

Malignant is available on HBO Max.

Justin Lin returned to the Fast & Furious series with F9, and it ups the ante of America’s foremost macho melodrama in every conceivable way — and, unlike immediate predecessor F8 and recent spinoff Hobbs & Shaw, it totally fits tonally and thematically with the best of the series. Never has the saga felt more like a glorious billion dollar soap opera — this thing is so packed with secret siblings, resurrections, flashbacks and heel turns that the talky bits are almost as entertaining as the smashy ones. The story fully embraces the same level of absurdity as the action sequences, yet still emotionally connects because it all falls under the series’ consistent (but fittingly loose) focus on family and loyalty.And the action has never been better or goofier. Magnets! Rockets! Ziplines! A car swinging from a vine like Tarzan! The setpieces are all just bananas in the best possible way, and Lin frames them with remarkable clarity and cuts at all the right moments. 

F9 is available for rental at all digital retailers.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar further solidifies Kristen Wiig’s status as one of contemporary comedy’s most compelling mainstream stars, and gives her a screen partner who might be even funnier than her –– cowriter Annie Mumolo. The duo plays a pair of midwestern best friends whose vacation in Florida is disrupted by a supervillainous plot to murder everyone in Vista Del Mar. It’s a silly comedy in the vein of Austin Powers or Popstar that seems increasingly rare in the modern cinematic landscape, where every character is funny and every line is a joke –– and it gets better as it goes. It just throws a bunch of colorful, high-energy nonsense at the wall and almost all of it sticks.

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar is available on Hulu.

The Green Knight / The Last Duel / Dune

Some of 2021’s other most prominent genre movies subverted the tropes and conventions that we associate with those kinds of films. These movies use familiar genres like fantasy, historical drama, and science fiction to tell distinct stories with powerful contemporary resonance. 

David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a magnificent exercise in atmospheric fantasy filmmaking. The film’s sweeping visuals give it a fittingly grand sense of scale — the initial interior castle sequences are dark and claustrophobic, which makes the striking compositions and gorgeous colors of Gawain’s quest feel even more expansive and otherworldly. The haunting soundtrack emphasizes ethereal human voices, further enhancing the sense of mysticism. Yet there’s an intimate universality to the emotional side of the hero’s journey. The film hinges on Dev Patel’s powerful, nuanced performance as the protagonist, as he exudes self-doubt, fear, and confusion that make him refreshingly distinct from the archetypal heroes we typically see in epic fantasy stories. He moves with a false confidence that crumbles in the face of most conflict, yet he powers through various obstacles despite desperate insecurity. It’s a pretty phenomenal journey that movingly contemplates mortality, failure, tradition, and honor, and never comes to any easy conclusions.

The Green Knight is available for rental at all digital retailers.

Ridley Scott’s medieval epic The Last Duel boasts a script from Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Hofocner that’s chilling, funny, morally thorny, and remarkably well-paced for a project closer to three hours than two. All the men involved are completely unafraid to make themselves look really, really despicable. I can’t remember the last time a movie maximized its star power to this degree: Damon gives a magnificently nuanced performance as a defensive, whiny knight too confused between his self-loathing and absurd confidence to ever make the right decision, while Driver excels as his slimy, charismatic rival, and Affleck owns every one of his scenes as the carefree, impetuous horndog count. All three of these guys are transfixing as they seem like real, complex people who reveal themselves as more and more monstrous as they occupy more screentime. The most striking creative choice is to make a vacant, selfish husband seem nearly as cold and threatening as a literal rapist. Yet Jodie Comer blows them all out of the water as the survivor at the movie’s heart. She’s all tiny facial expressions and subtle vocal inflections, impossibly sympathetic and lived-in from the very beginning. Her protagonist is written to seem resilient and strong, but the pain and darkness emanating from Comer’s performance in the latter half of the movie emphasizes the fear and reluctance at the character’s core — her persistence continues out of brutal necessity instead of romanticized resolve.

The Last Duel is available for rental at all digital retailers

In Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi worldbuilding and tone-setting outdo his storytelling, which is strange considering the movie’s lack of emotional resonance — but every scene looks great and sounds greater, so it’s tough to be disappointed by its spectacle. The marketing’s insistence on comparing this to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars will undoubtedly leave many feeling dissatisfied, however, as it never attempts to echo either series’ sense of optimistic wonder or interpersonal warmth — it’s decidedly much colder and more distant, only paralleling those blockbusters by rivaling their scale. Yet the staging, staggering visual effects, and rumbling sound design all draw you into the film’s interplanetary world from the opening frames, and don’t let up until the credits roll. Narratively, the conflation of politics and prophecy are somewhat dizzying in the more granular details, but make perfect sense on a broader scale as it ponders destiny, power, and imperialism. The cast is universally great across the board, delivering insane exposition and lingo with dignity and charm. It’s a ridiculously big-feeling movie that makes being the messiah seem like a confusing, upsetting tragedy.

Dune is available on HBO Max.

In the Heights / West Side Story / tick, tick…BOOM!

The movie musical is back! Well, to the extent that the two massive box-office bombs and a Netflix movie signal a genre being back, I guess. But these three films all display unique strengths that display the continued vitality and resonance of cinematic musicals despite the genre’s waning popularity.

In the Heights is not the movie to convert musical skeptics or Lin-Manuel Miranda dislikers. It contains everything that has earned its medium and creator massive fans and understandable contempt: fast-paced lyrics, soaring melodies, exuberant dance numbers, and an overwhelming amount of heart. If any of that sounds unappealing, then this movie won’t work for you, but if you surrender to its terms, it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Every song is a decadent treat, and each performance makes a new star — it’s incredibly difficult to pick a favorite in either category because they’re both so strong across the board (though the title track, “Breathe,” “It Won’t Be Long Now,” and “96,000” all have particularly superb melody and visuals in the former category, and Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera are insanely magnetic in the latter). The overall project is a joyous celebration of family, romance, and community, as well as an exploration of how physical environments foster these relationships. Every minute is engaging, energetic, and deeply emotionally satisfying, and I hope to rewatch the whole thing many, many times in the future.

In the Heights is available on HBO Max.

West Side Story, Steven Spielberg’s musical debut, has five or six sequences that are easily among the best movie musical setpieces this century (and maybe the history of the medium). They’re brilliantly shot, energetically choreographed, and vibrantly performed, making stars of Ariana DeBose, Mike Faist, and Rachel Zegler, among others. It makes sense that Spielberg would thrive in a musical setting — all his other movies place such emphasis on bold blocking and impeccable rhythm that he seems born to tackle the genre. If he’s not my favorite director period, he’s at least my favorite living director of visuals, and the musical gives him a nearly unprecedented opportunity to play to his strengths. Ansel Elgort knocks the movie down a peg or two, but it’s easily the best-directed of the three big musicals this year –– it’s practically impossible to avoid getting swept up in the overwhelming color, choreography, and charm of it all.

West Side Story is playing in theatres nationwide.

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut tick, tick…BOOM! an emotionally-involving and exciting display of how theatrical energy can still feel fresh on the screen. The film fuses Jonathan Larson’s gorgeous music and witty lyrics with excellent editing and solid visual compositions to find a happy medium between Broadway and Hollywood. It tells a familiar but exemplary struggling-artist-in-the-big-city story, and ends up accidentally being Andrew Garfield’s best Spider-Man movie — his protagonist attempts to balance odd jobs, romance, passion, and a sense of duty to make the world a better place, complete with a love-hate relationship with New York and, well, Garfield, who’s as charismatic as he’s ever been. I was shocked by how powerful and moving the last thirty minutes were — the romantic arc is simple but incredibly effective thanks to Garfield and Alexandra Shipp’s bittersweet chemistry, and Larson’s real-life tragedy is just impossibly poetic and infuriating.

tick, tick…BOOM! is available on Netflix.

Raya & The Last Dragon / No Time to Die / The Matrix Resurrections

On the surface, three of the movies that moved me the most this year look like they’re just another action-adventure entry in a long-running studio institution –– Disney Animation, James Bond, and The Matrix franchise. But these particular movies stand out from their predecessors with nearly unprecedented empathy and fixation on unity and love. 

Raya and the Last Dragon delivers the most genuine thematic subversion and the most beautiful computer animation that Disney has crafted in over a decade. Raya’s complex relationship with antagonist Namaari is one of the most intriguing character dynamics Disney has ever put forth in a movie: there’s jealousy, hatred, flirtation, and a feeling of disappointed betrayal in each of their interactions. Yet Namaari isn’t really a villain, as the movie refuses to actually have one. She’s not innocent, but neither is Raya, or any other character, for that matter. The film builds a fascinating fantasy world crippled by natural disaster — the in-universe explanation is chaotic magical forces wreaking havoc, but their place in the story clearly stands in for both climate change and armed conflict. It’s a movie about collective action problems and how everyone — but no one person or group in particular — is responsible for the mess we’ve made. Some people or countries may have more apparent safety and privilege from cataclysm for a while, but we’re all screwed in the long run, and the only way we can stop it is by working together. The film has an aspirational optimism that puts so much faith in the collective potential of humanity despite everyone’s justified cynicism and instinctual self-preservation, and for whatever reason it moved me to tears several times. Every character motivation, large and small, is completely understandable, and nobody is fully right or wrong — everyone’s just trying to survive the chaos.

Raya and the Last Dragon is available on Disney+.

Daniel Craig’s Bond sendoff No Time To Die also proves to be the first time his version of the character gets to have anything resembling fun. Cary Joji Fukunaga manages something I haven’t seen in any prior entry: he makes the core crew of characters feel like real people who genuinely care about each other in a non-professional context, even if they’re weird and can’t express it properly. It makes every moment with two or more team members feel more human and exciting. The action is pretty well-choreographed and shot, but it’s the character dynamics that make the best sequences a joy to behold. Linus Sandgren (La La Land) is an unexpected choice for action photography, but his vibrant turquoises and pinks lend themselves well to the emotional palette of the movie. The finality that the climax offers is shockingly bold for any franchise in 2021, and you have to admire the confidence it took to pull it off. It’s a fitting conclusion to this chapter in Bond storytelling, asserting once again that Britain’s favorite superspy is cosmically destined to be unhappy and completely incapable of having a normal life. That’s the nature of the job, baby.

No Time To Die is available for rental at all digital retailers.

The Matrix Resurrections is the only Matrix movie that genuinely sells the unbreakable romantic bond between its lead duo, and every scene in service of that bond is marvelously compelling despite some major flaws. Like the original movie, it grapples with existentialism, destiny, identity, and the value of truth, and it might be even more concerned with human nature than its predecessors, contemplating the bittersweetness that makes life so painful and so worthwhile. It’s also very overtly a movie about entertainment, reflecting on the nostalgia-driven reboot cycle of modern media franchising, the messy lines between creative fantasy and real-world experiences, our relationships to the stories we consume, and the ways we misinterpret art by reducing it to base-level characteristics. There’s more to thematically unpack here than in any other American blockbuster of 2021. But the element that ultimately sets this apart from the other Matrix movies is its emotional maximalism, trading cool moments for more moving ones. Neo and Trinity have always cared about their world, but this one drives home the fact that they really, really care about each other, as the two actors continually gaze at each other with overwhelming warmth and quiet compassion. It’s a strange, unpredictable, messy mix of cynical metacommentary about Hollywood and boldly sincere romanticism that a lot of people will understandably despise. I adored it.

The Matrix Resurrections is available on HBO Max.