What was the best film of 2021? I’ll be honest: nothing I saw this year is going to top a motorcycle-riding bag snatcher running over a guide dog in the 1976 Italian police thriller Live Like a Cop, Die Like a Man, but as that movie is a): 45 years old and b): expects us to cheer two cops who are working as a literal death squad – they constantly gun down criminals before the criminals can even commit a crime – let’s move on.
For half the year Hollywood was keeping their big titles under wraps; for the rest of the year they couldn’t get them out the door quickly enough. Making any kind of cultural splash – and then converting that into box office – defeated a number of films that in previous years might have done okay. Unless your movie featured Spider-Man, or possibly giant sand worms, you’re not coming out of 2021 with people clamouring for more.
Usually when compiling these lists I find myself latching onto trends as much as individual films. This year pretty much everything stood alone, unless you were an action film with a female lead (The Protégé, Gunpowder Milkshake, Jolt, Kate), or you were me and spent much of the year trying to watch every UK crime film based on a real-life 1996 drug murder in Essex (there’s at least 14 of them, and many are not good at all). Did this relentless pursuit of violent depravity affect my choices? Who can say (yeah, probably).
So in no particular order and with no excuses or explanations, here are my top ten films of 2021:
*High Ground
*Evangelion 3.0.1.01 Thrice Upon a Time
*Another Round
*The French Dispatch
*Red Rocket
*Pig
*The Worst Person in the World
*Licorice Pizza
*Nobody
*Wrath of Man
And here are a bunch of honourable mentions, some of which are probably top ten-worthy but for whatever personal reason just missed the cut.
*The Father
*My Name is Gulpilil
*Lapsis
*King Rocker
*Happily
*Oxygen
*Till Death
*One Shot
*Copshop
*Bill and Ted Face the Music
*West Side Story
*Settlers
*Old Henry
*Titane
*The Card Counter
*Dune
*Spider-Man No Way Home
*Matrix Resurrections
Actually, some of these near-misses do require a little explanation. The Father was clearly an excellent film but I could happily live my entire life without seeing another film about Alzheimer’s; Spider-Man: No Way Home was a fun experience to watch but 70% of the time it was just an extremely well-crafted collection of guest appearances; Titane was really two very different movies spliced together and the second one was a bit of a step down; I really liked The Matrix: Resurrections but it definitely had flaws.
Is King Rocker even available locally? I got a copy via a contact in the UK because I’m a Stewart Lee fan; Oxygen had a brilliant concept but didn’t quite live up to it; Till Death had an ok concept but worked the hell out of it; Lapsis wasn’t the best film but it did an excellent job of literalising the kind of shitty online work that increasingly looks like the future; One Shot was an action movie filmed in one take (with a bunch of blackout moments, so really more like a half dozen takes) which managed to be even better than the concept suggests.
Old Henry was a really good western that deserved a higher profile; Settlers was a really good science fiction film that did a lot of things right (even the one obvious thing it seemed to be doing wrong); Copshop had Gerard Butler; Dune was big! Everything else was just plain decent.
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As for the worst movies of the year, the problem there is that a lot of the movies that were objectively bad – Fatale, Voyagers, Space Jam: A New Legacy – I liked, if for reasons unrelated to their quality. C’mon, Space Jam was a kids movie featuring Pennywise the kid-killing clown and the Droogs from A Clockwork Orange! Voyagers was horny teens in space; it gets three stars just for being accurately described by the line “horny teens in space”.
The other problem is that watching a lot of films that didn’t get a cinema release is a good way to remind yourself that most of the really bad films each year don’t get a cinema release. Even something that was a clear failure – I’m looking at you, Eternals – was still a lot better in just about every way than Essex Vendetta.
So it’s hard to point at a film and say “you failed me in every conceivable way” – unless you happened to buy a DVD copy of Die in a Gunfight in the post-Xmas sales. That is most definitely not a good film, and that’s coming from someone who in 2021 willingly watched at least two action movies starring Ruby Rose.
- Anthony Morris
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