The Best Movies Of 2021, According To Everyone
It's December, which means Best of 2021 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet, and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best movies, albums, songs, books and TV shows. You're welcome.
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The Best Movies Of 2021
10. 'Petite Maman' — Celine Sciamma
In addition to all its other bright, polished pleasures, Sciamma's film embodies a scintillatingly simple solution to the conundrum of filmmaking under lockdown conditions: if circumstances dictate that the scale becomes smaller, zoom in. Petite maman is a tiny suspended moment within time, magnified at high resolution until the microscopic becomes momentous, and the mystery of a child's love for her mother becomes the mystery of all love.
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9. 'Memoria' — Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film begins with a noise—a strange thudding sound that Jessica Holland (Tilda Swinton) hears while she tries to sleep, and then cannot forget. Weerasethakul is a Thai filmmaker who specializes in crashing the unknown against the mundane. Memoria is one of his strongest works, an existential drama whose most compelling scene sees Jessica trying to describe what she's heard to a mystified sound engineer. I would not dream of spoiling any more of Memoria, but I'd also struggle to explain much of it—like all of Weerasethakul's films, it's propelled by a hazy, ethereal logic.
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8. 'Titane' — Julia Ducournau
After a killing spree puts her on the radar of the cops, "Titane" transforms into an ode to chosen families with Alexia now posing as Adrien, the long-lost song of a soulful fire chief (Vincent Lindon). As tender as it is gruesome, Ducournau expertly uses body horror to explore the physical and emotional toll of pregnancy, while also showing the transformative power of deep human connection.
7. 'The Green Knight' — David Lowery
At times, David Lowery's take on Arthurian myth seems as much like a puzzle to be decoded as it is a story to watch. The colors onscreen are vitally important to unlocking the film's meaning. So is the symbolism of everything from trees to moss to skulls to the characters' ages and ethnicities. And so is the tension between reality and the dream sequences, hallucinations, and magically induced visions that haunt protagonist Gawain (Dev Patel) as he sets out on a legendary quest he didn't ask for and doesn't want. The Green Knight is one of the year's most visually striking films, but also one of the films most likely to send people to the internet afterward, looking for explainers and discussion groups to help them unravel all the nuances of what they just saw.
[Polygon]
6. 'The French Dispatch' — Wes Anderson
Wes Anderson's wildly comedic, yet fiercely serious, adaptation of stories and personalities from the classic age of The New Yorker unleashes a self-surpassing torrent of dramatic and decorative complexity, philosophical power, and physical intensity. It's an extraordinary film of the life of the mind-body connection, of history in the present tense.
5. 'Dune' — Denis Villeneuve
Dune has often been described as one of the great, unfilmable science fiction novels. Leave it to director Denis Villeneuve to prove everyone wrong. Dune is a lavish, visually stunning take on Frank Herbert's classic tale. While not every character and subplot makes the cut, the film captures the heady political and philosophical themes of the source material while also kicking off a grand hero's journey for young Paul Atreides. The worst that can be said for Dune is that we have to wait two years for the sequel.
[IGN]
4. 'The Worst Person in the World' — Joachim Trier
As his film draws toward its crushing and elating end, we see what all of this wondering about the future—and all the yearning for the past, both rueful and nostalgic—is really in service of. The Worst Person in the World is, at root, about that most vexing and essential thing: the present tense. Which, as Trier potently suggests in his film's beguiling final scenes, is the only time we've really got.
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3. 'The Power of the Dog' — Jane Campion
For all of the film's biblical grandeur, "The Power of the Dog" never insists upon itself. There isn't a moment in the movie that lacks vision, but the whole thing exudes a tremblingly quiet strength. Just as Savage's plainspoken novel found the author flexing the invisible muscles he developed over a lifetime of fighting his own desire, Campion's equally poignant film leverages repressed passion into an unexpected show of strength. "The Power of the Dog" sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film's ending doesn't stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar.
2. 'Drive My Car' — Ryusuke Hamaguchi
The long scenes of actors poring through a dramatic text, and how the dynamics of the work began to reflect on the dynamics of its interpreters, initially brings to mind a less paranoid version of a Jacques Rivette movie. But Hamaguchi's take on art, life, loss, healing and forgiveness is its own beast, and one of the richest, most rewarding examples of how to turn simple human interactions into compelling cinema.
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1. 'Licorice Pizza' — Paul Thomas Anderson
What we want from artists is purely individualized expression—PTA makes movies only he can make. Licorice Pizza feels like a perfectly reconstructed memory, like someone hopped in a time machine and brought a 35mm camera. Which is not to say it's a documentary—it has all the clever set-ups, brisk editing, and euphoric climaxes of great filmmaking, like Hal Ashby got lost in the Valley and pulled over for a bite. He gets remarkable performances from Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim, two first-time actors representing the sensation of infatuation, if not consummation. He selects songs impeccably, as if touched by John Peel. He shoots L.A. like it's Babylon, a place where people are born and eventually entombed in the glorious, dumb history of this company town. Licorice Pizza is a showbiz movie about all the reckless, dangerous ghouls who haunted the industry, and also a pie-eyed picture of kids just trying to make something of themselves. It's hard to describe why I loved it. But I know that I did.
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Honorable Mentions
If you've already seen the top 10, here are some other notable movies of the year.
14. 'Flee' — Jonas Poher Rasmussen
13. 'The Souvenir Part II' — Joanna Hogg
12. 'Pig' — Michael Sarnoski
11. 'Summer of Soul' — Ahmir "Questlove" Khalib Thompson
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A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point. Items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points). We tried to get every single list from a professional outlet, website, magazine, and industry poll, and this is the results from dozens of those rankings.
