Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty
If box office numbers are any indication, the pandemic has fundamentally shifted the way we consume content (RIP Quibi). We’ve become intertwined with our phones, doomscrolling the news of the day while comfort-food programming plays in the background. The New Yorker coined this “Ambient TV”—“soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous” shows like Netflix’s cutesy travelogue Emily in Paris, where viewers can dip in and out without paying too close attention. At the cinema, it’s even more dire. Five of the ten highest-grossing movies this year, including the top four, were Marvel superhero films, and the rest were studio blockbusters (F9, No Time to Die, A Quiet Place Part II, Free Guy, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife). No independent film managed to crack the top 40.
And it’s a damn shame, because there were so many outstanding independent and foreign films released this past year—so many, in fact, that only one major studio movie made our top 11, and several barely missed the cut, including Procession, a devastating documentary on pedophilic priests; Rebecca Hall’s Passing, centering a Black woman passing as white in 1920s Harlem; the religious-horror flick Saint Maud; Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut The Lost Daughter; Paolo Sorrentino’s sun-kissed coming-of-age drama The Hand of God; and Roy Andersson’s absurdist satire About Endlessness, probing life’s niggling mundanities.
Here are the top 11 movies of 2021.
11. Shiva Baby
Emma Seligman’s feature filmmaking debut, an expanded version of her NYU thesis, is a claustrophobic, utterly engrossing nightmare about a young woman (Rachel Sennott, brilliant), trapped at shiva and forced to dodge the land mines that are her hectoring parents, a bitter ex, and… her sugar daddy.
Where to Watch: HBO Max
10. Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
There are so many moments in Questlove’s documentary, a thrilling cultural artifact reviving never-before-seen footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, that stir the soul. Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Nina Simone, and a host of others light up the crowd at Harlem’s Mount Morris (now Marcus Garvey) Park, but the most memorable sequence comes courtesy of Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson, whose rendition of the gospel number “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” the favorite song of the late Martin Luther King Jr., who was murdered one year prior, moves mountains.
Where to Watch: Hulu
9. Annette
Much attention will be given to Spielberg’s West Side Story, a dazzlingly directed if emotionally hollow remake of the 1961 classic, but the year’s finest movie-musical was this gonzo collaboration between French filmmaker Leos Carax (Holy Motors) and the band Sparks, chronicling a brutish stand-up comedian (Adam Driver) and an opera singer (Marion Cotillard) who give birth to a musical prodigy… in the form of a wooden doll. A stinging caricature of celebrity culture that sinks its hooks in you from its roaring opening number.
Where to Watch: Amazon Prime
8. Dune
While there are a few too many cologne-ad shots of Timothee Chalamet, tousled hair dancing in the wind, staring out at the vast desert with brooding eyes, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has designed a stunning sci-fi world of warring factions killing one another over precious (and scarce) natural resources that does justice to Frank Herbert’s seminal 1965 novel. Many have tried, most notably Alejandro Jodorowsky, Ridley Scott, and David Lynch, but the French Canadian finally succeeded.
Where to Watch: On-Demand
7. Flee
Danish documentary filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen met Amin Nawabi as a child; and here, for the first time, Amin opens up to his friend about his family’s harrowing journey from 1980s Afghanistan to Denmark, and his life growing up as a gay man in a culture that isn’t so welcoming to his kind. Amin’s narration is brought to life by vibrant animation reminiscent of Waltz with Bashir, underscoring his brave story of survival.
Where to Watch: In Theaters
6. Petite Maman
French auteur Celina Sciamma has followed up her acclaimed romance Portrait of a Lady on Fire with this stirring and fantastical meditation on grief, following a young girl who, having just lost her grandmother, ventures into the woods where she encounters a girl her age. She soon realizes this is the childhood version of her mother and is then able to convene with the girl’s mother (her grandmother), witnessing her innermost hopes, dreams, and sadness.
Where to Watch: In Theaters
5. Drive My Car
Grief is the theme once more in Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest—one of two excellent films he helmed this past year, along with Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy—the tale of a theater actor (Hidetoshi Nishijima, a revelation) who, already grieving the loss of his four-year-old daughter to pneumonia, loses his screenwriter-wife to a brain hemorrhage. He then, aided by a female chauffeur, confronts his trauma via a series of long, scenic drives.
Where to Watch: In Theaters
4. The Green Knight
David Lowery’s adaptation of the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight sees Dev Patel’s young knight embark on a formative quest to face the mythical Green Knight. It’s not only the most visually arresting movie of the year—its each and every shot, accentuating by Andrew Droz Palermo’s kinetic, swooping camera—inspiring awe, but also marks the return of Oscar winner Alicia Vikander to a story worthy of her talents.
Where to Watch: On-Demand
3. Titane
Julie Ducournau may have caused walkouts at Cannes with her cannibalism Bildungsroman Raw (the French are getting rather prudish these days!), but her return to the fest nabbed her the Palme d’Or, making her only the second female director to do so. It’s a fever dream of a film about a woman (Agathe Rousselle) who, after suffering a traumatic brain injury from a childhood car crash, is sexually stimulated by the act of murder and the rumbling of cars. She is eventually taken in by a macho firefighter (Vincent Lindon) mourning the loss of his daughter, and the two lost souls burrow deep into the recesses of their psyches, exploring gender dynamics, parental roles, sexuality, and loss.
Where to Watch: On-Demand
2. The Worst Person in the World
There’s a strong whiff of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag in Julie (Renate Reinsve), the languishing protagonist of this, the final entry in Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier’s Oslo triptych. Over the course of twelve chapters, the twenty-something Julie sprints toward and away from love, falling first for a controversial cartoonist (Anders Danielsen Lie) and then a less complicated barista. It’s a riveting portrait of a modern young woman’s peaks and valleys, in all their wondrous complexity.
Where to Watch: In Theaters (Feb. 4)
1. Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson is one of our finest living filmmakers, and this ‘70s-set saga about a 15-year-old child actor/hustler (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) who forms an unshakable bond with a 25-year-old photo assistant (Alana Haim, of the band Haim) in the San Fernando Valley is his most personal project yet. It’s an achingly tender rendering of adolescent longing and ingenuity, set in the shadow of Hollywood, with remarkable turns from Haim, Hoffman, and Bradley Cooper as coked-up pussy hound Jon Peters. At the risk of being cliché, they really don’t make films like this anymore.
Where to Watch: In Theaters