Year in review: The 25 best films of 2021

James Wan has done very well by Warner Bros over the years, launching a massively lucrative horror franchise in “The Conjuring” and hitting the box-office jackpot with “Aquaman”. This earned him the right to go out and make “one for me”, and, boy, did he ever. This bonkers fright flick starts off as a supernatural serial killer yarn before losing its mind in gloriously gory fashion. It’s rare to get an ultraviolet R-rated horror movie from a studio nowadays, and while this film doesn’t always make a great deal of sense, it’s so unabashedly nuts that you’d be a killjoy to care. Here’s hoping Wan gets to indulge this wild side of his creative personality more often.

No tennis father has ever received the degree of scrutiny brought to bear on Richard Williams, an ambitious man who committed the sin of putting his daughters’ best interests ahead of their earning potential. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s film is that rare biopic that feels like it’s providing a nuanced corrective to the historical record. Played with fiery determination by Will Smith, we see Williams as an understandably over-protective father; he knows Venus and especially Serena have the potential to succeed brilliantly, but he demands to have a say in how they’re promoted. Twenty years ago, Williams was viewed as a monster by many white sportswriters. Turns out the monsters were the folks writing the stories.

Emma Seligman’s debut comedy is a classic piece of cringe comedy that, in its compact seventy-seven minutes, boasts more layered characterization and storytelling than most films released this year. At a mere twenty-six years old, Seligman is a refreshingly disciplined and perceptive filmmaker; she’s hardly the first director to tackle the romantic woes of a bisexual woman, but her candor and fearlessness (and the specificity of setting) give this the charge of something altogether new. Her lead, Rachel Sennott, gives a breakout performance as a treading-water twentysomething whose private life inconveniently crashes a family gathering.

Who knows what the future holds for James Bond, but if you could watch this final Daniel Craig effort and not get choked up by the invocation of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service” (via John Barry’s gorgeous “We Have All the Time in the World” cue), what kind of Bond fan are you, really? Like every single 007 adventure save for “Quantum of Solace” (which owes its brevity to a WGA strike), this is an overstuffed affair. But there are built-in stakes on account of this being Craig’s swan song, and, perhaps, the possibility that the Broccoli family is closing the book on their creative stewardship of the franchise. “Dr. No” to “No Time to Die” is a nearly sixty-year arc. There’s nothing like it in commercial filmmaking. No one’s arguing that it wasn’t time for it to die, but we’ll mourn all the same.

Paul Verhoeven takes on the nunsploitation subgenre with all due irreverence in this suitably scandalous tale of a bride of Christ who flouts her vow of chastity and believes she’s a messenger of God - and she’s got the stigmata to prove it! Verhoeven has long been obsessed with the life of Christ (his Criterion commentary for “Robocop” is a must-listen), but he is also a firm believer in the needs of the flesh. These conflicting interests come to a head in this modestly-scaled drama that challenges Catholic dogma without burning it to the ground - although he does plunge the Virgin Mary into some salacious business.

The first motion picture of note to be based on a tweetstorm soars thanks to dynamite performances from Taylour Paige, Riley Keough, and the incomparable Colman Domingo. Director/co-writer Janicza Bravo orchestrates the road-trip tale of an exotic dancer who gets taken for the rough ride of her young life with supreme, stylish confidence. It’s a wild mix of “After Hours” and “Go”, a waking nightmare that you can’t wait to tell all your friends about if you survive. May the next Twitter adaptation be “Nancy Reagan: Throat Goat”.

This surprisingly divisive prequel to “The Sopranos” frustrated viewers who thought they were getting a Tony origin story (which, to be fair, the advertising totally pushed). Instead, David Chase delivered a haunting New Jersey history of organized crime and white flight. Alessandro Nivola plays the father Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) will never know, a violent man who’s got it coming but not in the way he ultimately gets it. Fans of the show will enjoy seeing young, vibrant versions of Livia (Vera Farmiga) and Uncle June (a hilariously frazzled Corey Stoll), but those hoping for a more classical gangster tale will be let down. As always, Chase subverts expectations.

An utterly unhinged valentine to middle-aged friendship from stars/screenwriters Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. The premise feels awfully thin at first like a “Saturday Night Live” sketch stretched out to feature-length, but Wiig and Mumolo somehow keep finding endearing nuances in these wackadoodle characters. Jamie Dornan gets to shine as the lovelorn henchman of a Bond-type villain (Wiig) who plans to unleash killer mosquitos on the resort where our heroes are staying. Yes, it’s that type of movie, and gloriously so (right down to a bar pianist whose entire repertoire consists of songs about boobs).

By far the best video game adaptation in film history, this underseen delight combines the ensemble quirk of an Agatha Christie mystery with the bloody business of a werewolf movie. Director Josh Ruben and screenwriter Mishna Wolff approach the material with tremendous respect for their audience. There may be fan service here and there, but they’ve updated the narrative to work as both a whodunnit and a rom-com. Sam Richardson and Milana Vayntrub are a winning duo; you’re wholly invested in their blossoming romance, but also suspicious of their past and motives. Wolff’s banter is screwball sharp. It’s a shame this got lost in the 2021 shuffle. Let’s remedy that.

Jane Campion’s first film in over a decade finds the director at the height of her powers, which makes you wonder why we had to wait over a decade for her next opus. It’s a U.S. western shot in New Zealand, which gives it a subtle sense of displacement; nobody’s in their environment here, not even Benedict Cumberbatch’s hard man, who towers over the movie as a capable, yet abusive bastārd. Campion’s punctured toxic masculinity before, but never in this most American of genres. It’s an unstinting portrait of male cruelty, one that could miraculously connect with the very people who venerate Cumberbatch’s character. You get the allure of this man, but like Ethan Edwards in “The Searchers”, you want to shut the door for good on his ilk.

It may be Bergman’s island, but, aesthetically, the director most clearly evoked in Mia Hansen-Løve’s finest film to date is Eric Rohmer. Typically, movies about artists are either overly precious or self-flagellating affairs; Hansen-Løve uses her meta premise (the movie is shot on the island where Bergman made several masterpieces) to examine a relationship in decline. That’s the wonder of this movie. Right when the characters are about to wear you out, Hansen-Løve hits us with a richly imagined movie-in-a-movie. What once was understated now has a bit of heat to it. We’ve seen the interior life of artists splashed across the big screen before, but never with such florid urgency. It’s a marvelously clever film.

Paul Schrader is on a late-career heater. After delivering his best film in decades with “First Reformed”, he’s pushed his chips all-in with this moody drama about a war criminal who gambles as a means of coping with his inglorious past. Schrader once again hits the jackpot with his lead, coaxing a career-best performance out of Oscar Isaac. He also teases out a beautifully nuanced turn from the ludicrously talented Tiffany Haddish. Schrader’s Calvinist upbringing and ardor for the French filmmaker Robert Bresson once again form a thicket of guilt and atonement that his protagonist likely won’t emerge from unscathed. Most filmmakers are retiring or going through the motions at Schrader’s age, but he’s never been better.

Fran Kranz was probably best known as the resourceful stoner Marty in Drew Goddard’s “Cabin in the Woods” prior to dropping this emotional depth charge at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. It’s essentially a four-person drama in which the parents of a school-shooting victim attempt to find solace by meeting with the parents of the shooter. Martha Plimpton, Jason Isaacs, Ann Dowd, and Reed Birney form a powerful quartet; once the session begins, the characters and the cameras never leave the nondescript room. It’s a film about forgiveness and faith. Faith in a higher power? Not necessarily. But faith in the innate decency of your fellow human being? Absolutely.

Denis Villeneuve came uncomfortably close to making the most expensive, sweeping pilot episode of all time. For nearly a year prior to its release, this mega-budget, star-studded adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic was treated as a looming disaster. Then came the raves and the crowds, and now we’ll get to see if Villeneuve can pay off his epic narrative as magnificently as he set it up. This success also feels a little like vindication for the director’s criminally underrated “Blade Runner: 2049”.

Joel Coen adds fewer textual wrinkles than one might expect to his adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play; mostly, he’s slashed the tragedy to its essence, which, at 105 minutes, still feels like a full meal. It could be that we’re overly familiar with this story, not just via countless films and stage productions, but how it’s been mimicked in real life. The old resonance is there. The dynamic between Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand is marvelous to behold; we’re used to weary Macbeths, but not so much a weary Washington. This isn’t meant as faint praise, but it’s Stefan Dechant’s severe production design and Bruno Delbonnel’s expressionist cinematography that draw us in. It’s a first-rate “Macbeth”! And if that’s all it is, that’s still pretty great!

Joachim Trier’s boundary-breaking rom-com captures with unabashed humor and horniness precisely what it feels like to flail in one’s twenties. Renate Reinsve is transcendent as a vibrant young woman who has no clue what she wants to do with the rest of her life, and, thus, inflicts her indecisiveness on everyone in her orbit. Unless you’ve lived a terribly boring life, you’ll identify with the wild emotional swings and self-destructive amorousness depicted by Trier in this utterly disarming movie. And chances are you’d like to do it all over again. 

Between the studio and cultural scolds (who couldn’t be bothered to watch the movie first), it’s hard to remember the last time a film got as bum of a rap as “The Last Duel” did this fall. Ridley Scott’s “Rashomon”-esque take on the trial-by-combat between a French knight (Matt Damon) and a dashing squire (Adam Driver) who is accused of raping the former’s wife (Jodie Comer) views its men as entitled, barbarous brats and the victim as an unwilling participant in their feud. Comer and screenwriter Nicole Holofcener - who wrote her character’s version of the story, which Scott presents as the truth - inflame the film with righteous dignity. She is determined to speak out but wants nothing to do with this savage tradition. In the end, she gets what she wants and deserves: a life of her own. 

The blessed cinematic union of filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang and actor Lee Kang-Sheng reaches something approaching an apotheosis with this lengthy meditation on loneliness and the things we do to fill that empty space. This appears to be a sequel of sorts to Tsai’s “The River” (Lee is plagued by neck pain in both), but the affluence of the main character feels incongruous to the hardscrabble life of the person we met twenty-three years ago. It’s not important for the viewer to know this character; watching him undergo a painful acupuncture procedure does the trick. But patience is required, and this is why Tsai remains one of the most underrated filmmakers working today. Most people simply can’t get on his ruminative wavelength.

What sets up as a throwback crime flick in the home-invasion mold of “The Desperate Hours” gradually transmutes into a complex web of deceit that stretches from low-life hoodlums to captains of the automotive industry. It’s all anchored by a never-better Don Cheadle, who brings pıssed-off weariness to the role of a gangster looking for one last score. He’s looking to buy back a family plot, while the people financing his criminal errand are looking to buy the future of America. Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Ed Solomon bite off a lot, but the twists and double-crosses come at a rapid enough clip to keep us from figuring out the big, depressing picture. An adult-skewing thriller that respects its audience’s intelligence? What a rare treat.

You can’t help but feel a little trepidation when a master of world cinema makes their English-language debut with a major movie star, but Tilda Swinton is not the meddlesome type and Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s style is so singular it’d be silly to push him in a more commercial direction. Yes, it’s frustrating that there isn’t a larger audience for his meditative style of filmmaking, but it also allows those in the know to feel privy to a tantalizing secret. Swinton plays a British ex-pat living in Colombia who gets jarred awake by a literal bump in the night. This sound continues to plague her, which is doubly troubling when she realizes she’s the only one who can hear it. It’s a mesmerizingly opaque mystery that more than rewards the viewer’s patience. 

The happiest surprise of 2021. Michael Sarnoski’s tale of a man searching for his kidnapped pig sounds like a wacky, ready-made cult movie, especially with an overcooked ham-like Nicolas Cage in the lead. But Cage, who’s in the midst of a minor career resurgence thanks to the horror/sci-fi duo of “Mandy” and “Colour out of Space”, sinks deep into his role with a palpable sadness. It feels like every film nowadays is about grief to some extent, but here’s a movie that gets straight to the marrow of loneliness and despair. The final scene is a beautiful salve, a wholly earned moment of grace that reminds us why we persist in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Edgar Wright is one of our most gifted stylists, and he’s outdone himself with this sumptuously imagined jaunt back to the swinging sixties of Soho. The film deftly drifts from present-day London to the mod past, intertwining the life of a talented young fashion designer (Thomasin McKenzie) and the sinister travails of an ambitious cabaret singer (Anya Taylor-Joy). Wright and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns spin a deliciously twisty yarn, while the director casts a nostalgic, yet menacing spell that brings all the colors of giallo to the hip environs of this seductively sleazy neighborhood. It’s an intoxicating, top-shelf movie-movie that gets you drunk on the transporting potential of cinema.

Haruki Murakami’s lovely short story becomes a full-blown, three-hour masterpiece in the hands of writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. The film doesn’t require a cold watch to work the first time through, but you’ll be glad you hitched a ride on this road trip knowing as little as possible. It is, as seemingly all films are nowadays, about grief, but how it arrives at this destination, and who’s involved in driving it there is a brilliant surprise. Hamaguchi obviously takes liberties with his source material, and every decision is an improvement. This is a movie to savor.

Maybe now folks will feel guilty for snarking on “Rent”. That Jonathan Larson died before his pop-culture sensation debuted at the New York Theatre Workshop doesn’t put him above criticism, but he was basically instrumental in reclaiming musical theater for Gen Xers. You won’t find a bigger Larson fanboy than Lin-Manuel Miranda, nor a more talented one. This is the “Hamilton” maestro’s feature filmmaking debut, and it’s a visually inventive triumph that matches the searing emotional pitch of Andrew Garfield’s take on Larson. This is a stunningly assured piece of cinema from an artist who knows from critical backlash. But there are no axes to grind here. Just a too-brief life to cherish and celebrate.

Ever since the wild USO dance/brawl in the unfairly maligned “1941”, cinephiles have been desperate for Steven Spielberg to make a musical. Finally, at the age of seventy-four, he’s done it, and it’s the most exuberant thing he’s done since “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (and, for a while, the most colorfully shot film of Janusz Kaminski’s career). It’s also, as we’ve come to expect from Spielberg, a deft piece of thematic smuggling that confronts America’s troubling new nativism. Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s work arrived in the early tumult of the Civil Rights Movement; they gambled on hope (with a price), and, with rebellious elder Boomers on the cusp of their teens, were right to do so. Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have a much tougher task in this age of disingenuous racial panic, but they expertly thread that needle. Never, ever doubt Spielberg’s populist instincts. He chose the right musical for the right time. But he can’t pry open closed minds. If “West Side Story” is divisive in 2021, the hope of 1957 and the potential of the American experiment have been fully extinguished.