The best films of 2021: The ballots

Here's how 10 critics voted in our annual poll on the year in movies

By A.A. Dowd, Caroline Siede, Katie Rife, Noel Murray, Carlos Aguilar, Charles Bramesco, Mike D'Angelo, Jesse Hassenger, Leila Latif, Vikram Murthi | December 21, 2021 | 1:50pm

Film Lists Films

Graphic: Allison Corr

When it comes to retrospective lists, The A.V. Club is a unified front: These are the best movies of the year, we say authoritatively, as if engraving the results onto a stone tablet. But the truth is that our just-published rundown of 2021’s finest films only looks like an act of consensus. It is, by its very nature, more of a compromise—a list assembled from many other lists, an aggregation of respective tastes. For a more complete picture of the last 12 months in cinema, you have to look beyond the official ranking to the respective opinions of those who made it—a group of 10 contributors who spent all year in the A.V. Club review trenches. The ballots that follow, which we combined semi-scientifically (we did a little massaging here and there; don’t check our math), offer an alternative vision of 2021. Through passion picks and superlatives—including some outliers, a.k.a. movies that that made one list and no others—they paint a fuller picture of what made this year in movies so memorable.

A.A. Dowd

When it comes to retrospective lists, The A.V. Club is a unified front: These are the best movies of the year, we say authoritatively, as if engraving the results onto a stone tablet. But the truth is that our only looks like an act of consensus. It is, by its very nature, more of a compromise—a list assembled from many other lists, an aggregation of respective tastes. For a more complete picture of the last 12 months in cinema, you have to look beyond the official ranking to the respective opinions of those who made it—a group of 10 contributors who spent all year in the A.V. Club review trenches. The ballots that follow, which we combined semi-scientifically (we did a little massaging here and there; don’t check our math), offer an alternative vision of 2021. Through passion picks and superlatives—including some outliers, a.k.a. movies that that made one list and no others—they paint a fuller picture of what made this year in movies so memorable.

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Biggest disappointment:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Somewhere on the scale of unsentimental music-biz dramas like and lies Chaitanya Tamhane’s sobering portrait of an aspiring singer coming to the slow-motion realization that determination does not guarantee success. I’ve been beating the drum (or plucking the tanpura) for The Disciple since I saw it on last year’s festival circuit, and remain a little surprised that more of my colleagues didn’t fall as deeply for this Sisyphean antidote to inspirational follow-your-dreams pap. Were they insulted by the scene with the arrogant critic, one of the most witheringly accurate depictions of our kind the movies have yet offered?I’m likewise baffled by the praise lavished on Kristen Stewart’s awkward, mannered performance as Princess Diana in the Pablo Larraín biopic Spencer. Stewart’s gift as an actor is how effortlessly unaffected she often seems, which makes her strenuous, unconvincing labor to disappear into the role of another hounded target of the paparazzi an unfortunate outlier. The movie itself never stops feeling like a dramatic exercise; reserve some blame for screenwriter Steven Knight, relentlessly unpacking the themes of his film through painfully on-the-nose dialogue and competing metaphors.At Sundance in January, critics dismissed Pascual Sisto’s spooky teen psychodrama as an empty Michael Haneke impersonation—an unflattering comparison the director himself courted through both his stylistic choices and how he framed them in the press notes. But look beyond the chilly remove of the camerawork and the central performance to the hidden allegorical depths of John And The Hole, which uses its bizarre premise—and an intriguing metatextual element—to explore the ways adults try (and fail) to prepare their children for the impossible plunge into adulthood.Even as someone who adored the divisively abrupt ending to , I was excited to see David Chase return to the mobster-ruled New Jersey of his towering HBO series. Turns out he should have left it at that jarring cut to black: The Many Saints Of Newark is a crushing letdown, flattening all the funny, profane, complicated idiosyncrasies of its small-screen predecessor into a generic Scorsese-biting origin story, complete with SNL-grade younger iterations of the principle Sopranos cast and a frankly boring rush of jukebox crime-epic incident. Do stop believing.In this case, the surprise is coming from inside the house. Which is to say, while I wouldn’t normally be shocked to enjoy a new James Wan thriller, the first hour or so of his latest convinced me that I was watching one of his weaker fright flicks—a curiously, uh, wan collection of cliched parlor tricks. And then Malignant goes… there, and suddenly even the boilerplate aspects of the film seem justified, as a way to lull the audience into false security before the true bugfuck movie hiding underneath bursts free, bloody and screaming.

Most welcome surprise:

1. 2. Petite Maman3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. A Hero11. Red Rocket12. 13. 14. 15. Perhaps everyone was blinded by the more scandalous elements of Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven’s historical drama loosely interpreting the life of 17th-century Italian nun Sister Benedetta Carlini. Was it the fart jokes? The blasphemous woodworking? The novice nun tongue-kissing the crucified Christ? What I found so engaging about Benedetta was not just the pulpy, impish delight with which Verhoeven films the bawdier elements of his tale but also the radical theological implications of that tale. The film argues that the true messengers of God are the heretics and the queers, and that church hierarchy is, at best, a roadblock to spiritual growth. Amen. Pig isn’t a bad movie. It’s an auspicious debut for its director, Michael Sarnoski, and Alex Wolff gives a great supporting turn. But the hype around the film has proceeded from two assumptions that I cannot get behind: number one, that it’s unusual for Nicolas Cage to give a soulful performance; and number two, that moving the John Wick formula to the culinary world is enough of a novelty to transform the experience. Yes, there’s that scene where Cage dresses down a pretentious restaurant owner. But that’s an anomaly in a movie that buys in so completely to macho chef culture that it presents the concept of an underground restaurant fight club as if it’s gritty reality and not self-indulgent mythologizing.Drive My Car is a very good film, one that deserves to be celebrated. (It made our list!) But I can’t help but feel that the honks for that one are drowning out my preferred Ryusuke Hamaguchi film of 2021, Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy. Hamaguchi’s storytelling style plays differently in the anthology format, as the more compact runtimes turn subtle emotional shifts into thrilling conversational high-wire acts. Hamaguchi’s touch is lighter in this film as well, using a recurring theme of chance and coincidence that sprinkles a touch of whimsy onto masterful screenwriting. I’ve wanted to see Edgar Wright, whose career began with the zombie parody , do a straightforward horror movie for years. So pre-release reports that Last Night In Soho was a terrifying slasher/ghost story hybrid had me excited—as did the first 45 minutes or so of the film. But this seemed to be one of those cases where the filmmaker had a great concept, but didn’t really know where to go with it. Last Night In Soho falls flat on its face with an ending that undercuts everything that came before it. Great dresses, though. In the opening months of the 2020 pandemic, there was one sentiment on which everyone online seemed to agree: Dear God, please no COVID movies. We got them anyway—this year’s SXSW in particular was heavy with them. So my expectations were set pretty low when I watched Language Lessons, Natalie Morales’ shot-on-Zoom dramedy about the unexpected friendship between an online Spanish teacher and her grieving student. But Morales and co-star Mark Duplass really defied the odds making such a sweet, wise, warm film with little more than two webcams and a great script, and Morales is now on my list of directors to watch.

Most welcome surprise:

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Petite Maman 6. 7. A Hero 8. Parallel Mothers 9. 10. 11. 12. Belle13. The Green Knight 14. This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection 15. Quo Vadis, Aida? Fernanda Valadez’s earth-shattering debut about an anguished mother searching for her migrant son—or his remains—presents a singularly scorching look at the increasingly monstrous cartel-related violence afflicting Mexico. The director makes no obvious choices here, but finds in visual abstraction the language to communicate the horror. The devastatingly powerful conclusion left me speechless.There were plenty of remarkable turns by young actors this year, but none of them appear in Kenneth Branagh’s saccharine, black-and-white memory piece about his childhood in an Ireland plagued by the troubles. That this middlebrow movie is considered the current Best Picture frontrunner feels like business as usual for an industry eager to honor the safest of safe choices.On the island nation of Malta, a fisherman relies on his precious luzzu boat, passed down through generations, to provide for his wife and son. But as his livelihood is threatened by waves of changes in a globalized world, he considers leaving the sea for good. Director Alex Camilleri showcases a vigorous performance by first-time actor and real-life seaman Jesmark Scicluna in this ravishing neorealist drama.If everyone was on Jared Leto’s preposterous wavelength, this dreadful snooze of a biopic might at least earn points for camp lunacy. Instead, Ridley Scott’s saga of a venomous fashion family is just an expensive-looking misfire, not even messy enough in its melodrama to be called memorable.This inquisitively titled fable set in the Georgian city of Kutaisi first observes the fated romance of a couple cursed to not recognize each other. But as their arc unfolds amid odd jobs and misconnections, director Alexandre Koberidze intersperses footage of children playing soccer and a subplot focused on the local dogs who are also fans of the sport. In the collection of such luminous moments, and in the director’s melancholic voiceover, the tenderhearted Sky exudes a welcome hopefulness.

Most welcome surprise: The Voyeurs

1. 2. 3. Licorice Pizza4. About Endlessness5. Barb And Star Go To Vista Del Mar6. 7. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun8. Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy9. Memoria10. Zola11. Days12. The Card Counter13. Red Rocket14. Procession15. The Green KnightThe first time I saw Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo’s long-awaited follow-up to , which made another ballot here but just barely, I thought it was merely a hysterical work of sunny absurdism. The second time, I realized it’s also a slyly compassionate portrait of middle-aged womanhood and its challenges to the self-esteem of actresses outside of Hollywood’s supermodel status quo. The third time, it turned into an upbeat musical, halfway between Busby Berkeley and the “Soul Bossa Nova” intro from Austin Powers. The fourth time…Jonathan Larson had a way with melody, his anthemic compositions reliably lighting up some key pleasure center in the brain. But as he wrote himself in the autobiographical musical adapted here by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jonathan Larson the person was insufferably self-important, obsessed with his unrecognized genius to the point of delusion. Coupled with Andrew Garfield’s exhausting lead performance, the theatre legend’s pre-success years play like fan fiction of his own life.In a year that saw Nicolas Cage’s performance in Pig reestablish the actor’s powers of subtlety, a role that showcased his less prestigious (yet no less captivating) crazytown side went largely unnoticed. Who else could keep up with Japanese lunatic Sion Sono in a fantasy-Western sending its leading man into a post-apocalyptic wasteland on a suicidal rescue mission with explosives strapped to his testicles? Cage’s gravitas elevate everything he does, even when restraint isn’t the first thing on his mind.How in the name of Ghidorah does a movie about a giant ape fighting a giant super-lizard come out so dull? Director Adam Wingard hugely overestimates our interest in the puny humans scurrying underfoot, wasting time on unneeded mythology and interpersonal drama that could be spent watching our big beautiful boys duke it out. We were promised the face-off of the century, and got a lot of tiresome sideshows en route to the main event.Amazon should’ve put more advertising firepower behind Michael Mohan’s crafty, funny, deliciously devious erotic thriller. The online masses calling for a reinstatement of sex scenes in the American cinema largely missed a film that not only peeps on one of the most scorching dalliances in recent memory but also playfully dissects our compulsion to perv out. It dares us to watch, then doles out a kinky punishment for our naughtiness.

Most welcome surprise:

1. Memoria2. Pig3. The Killing Of Two Lovers4. 5. Annette6. 7. Petite Maman8. The Power Of The Dog9. A Hero10. 11. 12. 13. About Endlessness14. I’m Your Man15. I’m a sucker for documentaries that constantly interrogate their own apparent thesis, and this one—about Matt DeHart, a U.S. hacker (associated with Anonymous) whose family fled to Canada and sought asylum there—rivals for inspiring cognitive dissonance and forcing us to confront our own knee-jerk assumptions. Did DeHart solicit pornographic images from children, as the government claimed? Or were those charges a cover to obtain and bury whistleblower files that DeHart had in his possession? The answer, as they say, may surprise you. Like virtually every poker-related movie, Schrader’s latest misrepresents what skill can accomplish in the short term when so much luck is involved. (Even the best pros in the world don’t win or nearly win every tournament they enter.) Still, The Card Counter handles gambling far better than it does any of its key relationships. Alleged sizzle between Oscar Isaac and Tiffany Haddish looked like fizzle to me, mostly because she has the demeanor of a Ramada Inn hospitality liaison rather than someone who hangs with reprobates. And it was hard not to laugh when the tensest scene culminated in a grave “Call your mother!” Don’t imagine that many of my fellow voters even saw this obscure Greek romance, though it does star the MCU’s Winter Soldier. Monday—the title signifies coming back to reality after the weekend—is basically Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy compressed into a single two-hour film, following the euphoric-to-comfortable-to-rancorous-to-uncertain trajectory of the relationship between two American expats in Athens. Nothing momentous, but Sebastian Stan and the comparatively unknown Denise Gough (who’s actually Irish) do superb, behaviorally specific work that makes these characters endlessly fascinating.Didn’t really work for me at all, and I’m not entirely sure why. Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman are both terrific, and in theory I admire the movie’s anecdotal period shagginess. But the actual anecdotes—particularly those involving thinly disguised (or undisguised) celebrities—left me cold, for some reason. Ironically, it was during , featuring Bradley Cooper as a manically obnoxious Jon Peters, that I felt myself checking out in earnest. Also, while the chaste romance involving an adult woman and a 15-year-old boy didn’t trouble me, the fact that every other character treats a 15-year-old boy running multiple businesses as if that were totally normal absolutely did.The only thing I hate more than biopics might be sports (poker: not a sport), so I had zero interest in watching the Venus and Serena Williams origin story. As the title makes clear, however, this film is actually about their father and his unusual amalgam of pushiness and protectiveness, which turns out to be a fresh and remarkably compelling angle to take. Will Smith’s richly cantankerous performance holds it all together, and the movie savvily refuses to end on a totally uplifting note (it’s strictly a -style moral victory), understanding that we already know what happened later.

Most welcome surprise:

1. Licorice Pizza2. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun3. West Side Story4. Red Rocket5. Titane6. The Worst Person In The World7. 8. No Sudden Move9. Spencer10. The Green Knight11. Pig12. 13. Luca14. 15. West Side Story would be the musical of the year based purely on Spielberg’s thrilling technical skill, but I teared up at least three times watching this adaptation of a more contemporary Broadway show (originated, in the interest of full disclosure, by my college classmate Lin-Manuel Miranda). For that matter, Jon M. Chu may not be at the Spielberg level, but he sure knows his way around a production number, with some of the best-staged movie-musical scenes of the 21st century so far. See our for one; see the stunning “Pacienca y Fe” for another, a tour de force juxtaposition of family memories and immigration history, very much in conversation with West Side Story’s “America.”Around these parts, folks took a sensible attitude toward the fresh-faced, energized, go-nowhere mediocrity of Netflix’s Fear Street trilogy; my trusted editor A.A. Dowd was appropriately skeptical, if a little gentle on their witless phoniness. But over on the broader movie-critic internet as repped by Rotten Tomatoes, the Fear Street movies supposedly just got better and better as they went along. It’s like everyone was hallucinating the horror pastiches of their dreams based on the movies’ appealing loglines, rather than the movies themselves—a triptych of flabby, nonsensical slasher riffs that synthetically re-process horror tropes into a teen-soap theme park, lousy with careless anachronisms and laugh-free wisecracks.Now, if you’re looking for an actually good slasher movie, check out David Gordon Green’s weirdly reviled follow-up to his . The movie’s storytelling gets a little diffuse, but Green’s ears and eyes are so attentive to the bit players of Haddonfield that Halloween Kills feels, at times, like a gorehound version of his small-town indie character studies like or . Green portrays the elderly Michael Myers as an evil, overgrown child, wandering through his hometown and destroying it piece by piece, turning the “middle movie” status of Kills into an expression of chilling despair.It’s a pulpy western with a dream cast—Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz, Delroy Lindo—directed by a promising artist who seems ready to prove that western revivals aren’t the exclusive territory of Quentin Tarantino. Why, then, does so much of The Harder They Fall feel like Tarantino warmed-over? Despite some zesty stylistic flourishes from director Jeymes Samuel, much of Harder proceeds at a trot, too slow for goofy Desperado status, too cartoonish to resonate as drama.I caught up with Werewolves Within on a whim, several weeks into its theatrical run, with a friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of years, and it remains one of the only comedies I’ve seen in a movie theater since COVID happened. So maybe the circumstances of this videogame-based whodunit-style werewolf comedy helped nudge it onto the lower reaches of my best-of list. But those brief good vibes were enhanced by the movie itself, a dizzying horror farce that takes infectious glee in positioning its ensemble in packed frames and supplying them with rapid-fire banter, asides, and commentary. It’s a delightful capitalization on the promise director Josh Ruben showed with the similarly housebound .

Most welcome surprise: Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn

1. Titane2. 3. Petite Maman4. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun5. Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)6. 7. The Card Counter8. 9. The Green Knight10. Bergman Island11. 12. The Power Of The Dog13. Parallel Mothers14. West Side Story15. FleeAs Oscar-clip-ready as Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as Fred Hampton is, Judas And The Black Messiah is so much more than just a showcase for the Best Supporting (?) Actor of the year. (It’s also very much a 2021 movie, regardless of what the Academy says.) Shaka King contrasts Hampton and his messianic propensity for self-sacrifice with the treachery of William O’Neal (the always excellent LaKeith Stanfield), who betrays the Panthers to avoid prison time. It’s an utterly bleak film with lashings of neo-noir style.So universally adored was CODA, which won an armful of awards at Sundance and sold for a record sum, that I sincerely wondered what was wrong with me when I didn’t warm to it. Every friend I checked in with seemed to be utterly charmed by this tale of a singing teenager with a horny deaf family struggling to make ends meet with their fishing business. Though I’ll concede that Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur are wonderful as the parents, CODA is as inane and predictable as any Disney Channel Original about a doe-eyed teen following her dreams. The film ditches its most interesting elements (did I mention the horny deaf fishermen?) in favor of tedious crowd-pleasing; this is a movie with two big singing performance climaxes. Two!It’s hard not to root for M. Night Shyamalan, subjected to so much casual racism and mistreated by a media that built him up and then seemed determined to knock him down. So it’s comforting that audiences showed up for Old even if critics were divided on this bold, beautiful, frequently hilarious slab of bananas sci-fi. Besides standing among the most purely fun films of the year, it also served as reassuring confirmation that Shyamalan has no intention of flattening his work into a more broadly appealing shape.Where were the jokes? No, seriously. I watched. I listened. Where were they? The sequel to a comedy classic that toyed hilariously with Black American perceptions of Africa was over 30 years in the making, but in the interim they seemed to have forgotten that if you’re going to finally churn out a cynically nostalgic cash grab, you should at least pretend you care.You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, nor a film by its title and plot synopsis. So what could be a more welcome surprise than the discovery that a movie with a title as bad as Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn and a synopsis that suggests a Romanian remake of the Cameron Diaz and Jason Segal “comedy” is actually brilliant: a searing satire of Romanian cultural and political history that also confronts universal moral panic.

Most welcome surprise: Dune

1. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun2. Red Rocket3. Pig4. West Side Story5. A Hero6. Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn7. The Power Of The Dog8. The Card Counter9. Petite Maman10. 11. 12. 13. The Tragedy Of Macbeth14. Last Night In Soho15. Summer Of Soul (…Or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)Like Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story, this remake of Edmund Goulding’s chilling 1947 “carnival noir” (based on a William Lindsay Gresham novel) doesn’t try to radically reinvent a classic. Instead, writer-director Guillermo del Toro and his co-writer, Kim Morgan, dig deep into what they love about Nightmare Alley: the seedy showmanship, the arcane cons, and the depiction of a society where even the savvy get suckered. This is not a better version of Nightmare Alley, but it is rich in its own way, with an ace cast exploring the ugliness that keeps drawing crowds, from generation to generation.Look, comedy is a tricky art form that doesn’t hit everybody the same way. And it’s not like there aren’t hilarious or inspired moments scattered throughout Barb And Star. But the film’s big science-fiction super-spy plot is overwrought and exhausting in an Austin Powers way, and even the fun of hearing Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo talk like pleasant midwesterners loses its charm over the course of 107 minutes. This movie would’ve made a better half-hour Adult Swim special.The wave of critical pans that greeted this psychological thriller were way out of proportion for a movie with so much gusto. Yes, the Rear Window-like plot is pretty dopey, and over-reliant on misunderstandings and coincidences. But Joe Wright—one of the most unapologetically theatrical directors working today—and his ace cast bring a lot of panache to the material, avoiding the trap of making just another dully earnest prestige drama. Writer-director Adam McKay’s (sort of) return to big-screen comedy lacks the two things that made his past hits so beloved: a thoroughgoing embrace of nonsense and a technical polish to rival any blockbuster. The satire in Don’t Look Up is blunt almost to the point of being humorless, the camera moves and editing are jarringly jagged, and while the message is timely (and bolstered by a gently bittersweet ending), very little that happens in the plot is surprising or enlightening.Denis Villeneuve has already made one great science-fiction film in , but it was hard not to worry that the director’s tendency toward ponderousness would be amplified to an excruciating degree in his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s dense, philosophical novel. Instead, Villeneuve and his creative team accomplished what has flummoxed so many before: making Dune’s story not just comprehensible but exciting, and then using its plot as the foundation for a succession of fantastical action sequences that work as pure, pleasurable spectacle.

Most welcome surprise:

1. Memoria2. Licorice Pizza3. 4. The French Dispatch Of The Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun5. The Souvenir: Part II6. Red Rocket7. 8. Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy9. Bad Luck Banging Or Loony Porn10. Pig11. French Exit12. El Planeta13. Days14. Annette15. The Worst Person In The WorldTodd Haynes’ documentary on the most influential underground band of all time embraces and reproduces the aesthetics of the New York avant-garde scene from which the group arose. Offering a handy primer on experimental art, The Velvet Underground is more a vibrant portrait of a scene rather than a traditional music doc, capturing the ineffable power of a disparate group of people marching to the beat of their own drum.Appropriately fun and disturbing for about a half hour, but when Titane ultimately settles into the groove that will take it to its predictable conclusion, it almost completely lost my interest. Barely provocative, unfortunately saccharine, and mostly dull. Plus, it’s one thing for a film to have a dance sequence, but it becomes overkill when you’re topping three.A genuinely offbeat comedy about a fallen queen who fulfills her dying wish to provide a family for her prince son, even if that means amassing a group of generous hangers-on to look after him. Jokes aside, it’s also a moving film about an unqualified mother gaining respect and love for her son the minute she realizes he can keep up with her, rhetorically and emotionally.Mike Mills’ brought together personal, cultural, and political history into an unconventional autobiography. His cloying, myopic follow-up, C’mon C’mon, finds the director coming to a “kids say the darndest things” conclusion by way of This American Life and an insufferably precocious kid. Every twee indie choice and moment of misguided optimism feels spiritually transported from early 2009.Medieval historical dramas aren’t really my thing, but The Last Duel won me over with its devilish humor, its study of masculine idiocy, and an awesome final duel. Adam Driver and Matt Damon play off each other well, but it’s Jodie Comer and Ben Affleck who really elevate the film with their grace and unrestrained id, respectively.

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