Top 10 Films of 2021: A Funny, Sometimes Infuriating, Year At The Movies

It was another funny year at the movies. (A funny – and sometimes infuriating – year everywhere, really.) 2021 saw the reopening of theaters, though the outlook seems grim for titles not linked to a franchise. Adult fare, mid-budget projects, and even crowd pleasers like “In the Heights” struggled to find an audience. Warner Bros. shook up the industry by announcing that all of its releases would stream on HBO Max the day they hit theaters. On one hand, theaters had something to show…on the other, many worried this move would ultimately hurt the theatrical experience. The Academy Awards held their ceremony at the end of April, widening eligibility for any and all films released through February 2021.

On that note, I did not adhere to the Oscars’ expanded timeline. All films released in the US during 2021 are eligible for this list, which is why you’ll see a title here that was in the awards and best-of conversation around this time last year. As always, I’ll do my best to avoid spoilers, but for those who are particularly spoiler-squeamish, you may want to skip this or that write-up.

No matter how I came to these top 10 films of 2021, whether through the big or small screen, I thought it was a good year at the movies.

10.) SHIVA BABY

Written and directed by Emma Seligman, and based on her own short film, college senior, Danielle (Rachel Sennott), screws around with her sugar daddy, Max (Danny Deferrari), before going to a shiva (like a Jewish wake) with her parents. Gritted-teeth hilarity ensues when Max and his wife show up with their newborn, Danielle is bombarded by family and friends with questions about her future, and Danielle’s old flame, Maya (Molly Gordon), makes a contentious appearance.

This movie lands somewhere between a guffaw and a panic attack. The whole situation feels so damn combustible, with director Seligman’s sweaty close-ups countered by wide shots that keep the focus on Danielle so we can appreciate her reaction to whatever her family and friends are saying from the background. Sennott is wonderful, perfectly capturing that youthful confidence that barely disguises deep-seated anxiety and lack of direction. For me this film recalled a line from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:” “the suspense is terrible! I hope it’ll last.”

9.) THE RESCUE

Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s documentary follows the rescue of a Thai boys’ soccer team caught in a cave for 16 days in the summer of 2018. I must’ve teared up a half dozen times watching this. Not only from the cycles of tension and release but also because of the sheer selflessness and perseverance of the people involved.

This film threads a delicate needle. It has nerve-shredding suspense but never feels exploitative. It’s heartfelt and completely life affirming without being schmaltzy. I think a lot of that has to do with how linear and propulsive it is. There aren’t many frills here. It’s a nuts-and-bolts account of what happened with just enough characterization for the key players. (I love the thread about how a lot of the rescuers were social outcasts and not athletic as kids. “Last for basketball, first for the cave rescue.”) Chin and Vasarhelyi lend a real clarity to their story. They are methodical in laying out what happened, why it happened, and the obstacles. It does so much to raise the stakes, and if you remember this event at all, you already know the ending!

8.) CODA

High schooler Ruby (Emilia Jones) is the only member of her immediate family who can hear. (She’s the titular CODA – child of a deaf adult.) As her parents’ fishing business struggles, she’s caught between helping her family and pursuing her own passions.

“CODA,” directed by Siân Heder, has a heart the size of Jupiter and succeeds wonderfully thanks to its performances. Jones is a revelation. Having learned ASL for the role, she also sings. She’s funny, sad, and sweet. Her family members are played by deaf actors – Marlee Matlin as her mother, Daniel Durant as her older brother, and Troy Kotsur as her father (hilarious in the role). This is one of those modest crowd pleasers, in the vein of “Little Miss Sunshine,” that seems to be more and more uncommon. Some’ll accuse it of being maudlin, though I didn’t feel cheaply manipulated when the credits rolled. There’s a lack of music score, until the final 30 minutes or so, which helps in this regard. While the film largely goes nowhere you don’t expect, it does have little surprises. At one point, Ruby signs to her choir director (without captions), and the context for this conversation is moving and offers great insight into her character.

7.) THE MITCHELLS VS. THE MACHINES

It’s a misunderstood high schooler two-fer here on the top 10. Katie Mitchell (Abbi Jacobson) is a young filmmaker, often at odds with her father (Danny McBride). When she’s accepted to a college across the country, she sees an opportunity to get away from her family (her mother is voiced by Maya Rudolph and her younger brother by Mike Rianda). Much to Katie’s chagrin, all of the Mitchells embark on a cross-country family road trip. One small problem, there’s a robot apocalypse!

Directed and written by Rianda and Jeff Rowe, “The Mitchells vs. The Machines” often gets billed as a Phil Lord and Christopher Miller joint. And indeed, the mad geniuses who brought us “The Lego Movie” are producers. The film has their manic comic energy, with Katie-narrated interstitials and pop culture references. You’ll never look at Furbies the same way again. As so many animated movies look more and more homogeneous, this one boasts a unique style, incorporating some “pencil” strokes in a CGI environment. Like the best of animation, it’s tightly scripted. The final act is ecstatically joyful – a series of emotional payoffs, uproarious jokes, and zany action beats. The MVP is the family dog, Monchi, a hilarious pug who constantly trips up the evil robots that can’t tell if he’s a dog, a pig, or a loaf of bread.

6.) LICORICE PIZZA

This slice of life dramedy finds filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson reliving his glory days in the San Fernando Valley. Set in the 1970s, go-getter 15-year-old Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, the spitting image of his late father Philip Seymour Hoffman) falls for 20-something Alana Kane (Alana Haim, of the sister band fame). The two embark on a journey through a gas crisis, a waterbed company, a mayoral campaign, and the legalization of pinball.

Shaggy, episodic, and sweet (save for a couple crass and lazy jokes involving a doofus owner of a Japanese restaurant), “Licorice Pizza” is pretty great. Hoffman and Haim are effortlessly wonderful. Their chemistry is so strong that it sustains a will-they-or-won’t-they tension over the film’s considerable 133-minute runtime. Many have criticized their age difference, though I didn’t have a problem with it as the characters themselves (Alana especially) acknowledge it’s a problem. Haim in particular is so natural on screen, hurling expletives at teenagers with the best of them. There’s a sequence involving Alana, a runaway truck, and Bradley Cooper as a coked-out-of-his-mind film producer. It’s one of the funniest yet most suspenseful set pieces this side of Tarantino or…well, Anderson’s own sequence with Alfred Molina (also coked out of his mind) in “Boogie Nights.”

5.) SUMMER OF SOUL (…OR, WHEN THE REVOLUTION COULD NOT BE TELEVISED)

“Summer of Soul” documents the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It’s a festival that, rather pointedly, took place the same year as Woodstock but got very little press despite acts like The 5th Dimension, the Chambers Brothers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, and Stevie Wonder.

This is a remarkable documentary that’s part concert film and part examination of the African American experience in the United States. Directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, he and his team of editors seamlessly weave these two threads together. One of the film’s most moving moments occurs when an African American interviewee, who attended the festival as a child, recalls the event feeling like a dream – listening to that music and seeing all those faces that looked like his own. This movie is so engrossing! It helps to have performers this dynamic. I appreciate the observation by Filmspotting producer Sam Van Hallgren that the filmmakers know just how much footage to show to establish a musician’s prowess. Though I could’ve watched these acts uninterrupted, it keeps the pace tight and helps the movie cover a lot of ground.

4.) DUNE

As big and grand a movie as I’ve seen in some time. Adapted from the Frank Herbert novel, House Atreides and House Harkonnen wage war over the desert planet of Arrakis which contains a precious natural resource known as oil…I mean spice! As Paul (Timothée Chalamet), heir of House Atreides, navigates an uncertain future, his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) instructs him in the Bene Gesserit ways which grant users enhanced abilities.

Beyond spice and big worm, I had no knowledge of the source material. But director Denis Villeneuve and his screenwriters, Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, certainly know which elements to emphasize and which to keep in the background to depict a world that feels rich and detailed. They’ve only adapted the first half of Herbert’s book (Part 2 is scheduled to release in 2023). It’s my biggest knock against “Dune,” as it feels like not a full story. Still, that’s a minor criticism given the sheer scale of the film’s vision. The design elements are superlative. Villeneuve shoots as much practically as he can, and where he does use digital effects, he’s often depicting them from a human perspective – either with a person in the frame or from the vantage point of one of our characters. Everything feels REALLY big. The cast is also stacked – apart from Chalamet and Ferguson (she’s especially great), we have Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, and Jason Momoa (charismatic as hell).

3.) THE GREEN KNIGHT

Based on a 14th century poem, “The Green Knight” is about Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) and his travails to keep his word. The titular Knight (Ralph Ineson) enters King Arthur’s court and challenges the men to land a blow against him. Anyone that does must travel to the Green Chapel a year later and receive an equal blow in return. Gawain, in an effort to prove his greatness, beheads the Green Knight only to have the..man? plant? man-plant?…stand, pick up his own head, and depart, but not before reminding Gawain of his vow. Something tells me Sir Gawain wasn’t very good at those instruction-based exercises we did in school.

“The Green Knight” finds writer and director David Lowery offering up a treatise on what it means to be a man and the inevitability of death. If that sounds a little heavy and heady, it is! But the film presents the type of existential horror that only A24 (the studio behind “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”) can provide. In one of the movie’s more haunting exchanges, Gawain asks “is this all there really is [to life, to dying]?” The response: “what else would there be?” Our hero’s tumultuous journey is nothing short of sublime, as Gawain encounters a ghost, giants and a talking fox. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo infuses the images with an otherworldly, almost hallucinatory degree of color. The film even manages to be unexpectedly funny. “My lady, are you real or are you a spirit?” “What is the difference? I just need my head.”

2.) WEST SIDE STORY

Remember when movies felt like movies? Steven Spielberg does! No one moves the camera or stages performers like he does, and no genre rewards that kind of skill set like the musical. So many musicals (all movies, really) defer their set pieces to an editor, but the way the camera glides along with the dancers is dazzling. (The film was shot by Janusz Kaminski.)

You know the story here. “Romeo and Juliet” circa late 50s New York. Young lovers, Tony and María (Ansel Elgort and Rachel Zegler), caught amidst warring gangs, the caucasian Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. But do you know the savvy changes screenwriter Tony Kushner brought to the material? The film opens with an establishing shot of what looks like a war-torn landscape, like something out of Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan” (fewer Nazis, thank God). We come to realize this isn’t a warzone, it’s the construction site for the Lincoln Center. Kushner frames the drama around urban renewal, the two gangs so consumed by their hatred for each other that they can’t see their common enemy. We get a backstory for Tony and a new character in Valentina (Rita Moreno, Anita in the 1961 film), who acts as a bridge between the Jets and the Sharks. Kushner poignantly gives her the song “Somewhere.”

And the performances! Moreno, Zegler, Ariana DeBose as Anita, and Mike Faist as Riff – they’re all dynamite!

1.) THE FATHER

Adapting his own play, filmmaker Florian Zeller dramatizes what it must feel like to have Alzheimer’s. Anthony (Anthony Hopkins), who suffers from dementia, walks through realities and memories with caregivers and family, some of whom are played by multiple actors throughout the film.

Hopkins, and Olivia Coleman as his daughter, bleed empathy, even when his character lashes out. I first watched this movie on the night Hopkins won an Academy Award for it. Because it was Oscar Night, I couldn’t help but think of Best Picture winner “A Beautiful Mind” (a mostly fine movie that unfortunately uses schizophrenia to delve into thriller tropes). Except for a couple moments here and there where the score uses Scary Strings (TM), “The Father” avoids this trap with its depiction of Alzheimer’s. And it’s all the better for it. The illness isn’t sensationalized, it’s presented matter of factly yet cinematically. Zeller stages sequences in such a way where Anthony walks from one room and then we cut into another, which we know doesn’t exist. Or we think we know it doesn’t exist, at least not in that place or in that configuration. It’s all done in the edit and the production design. Not flashy, but very effective.

One of the things I value most in a film is a rich emotional experience. I stress rich because I saw plenty of films last year where my emotional reaction was somewhere between an eye roll and a string of obscenities. But a film that moves me as deeply as “The Father” – hell, a film that moves me as deeply as the last five minutes of “The Father” – is going to be an immensely worthwhile viewing experience.

And finally, some honorable mentions: “Flee,” “In the Heights,” “Judas and the Black Messiah,” “Pig,” “Red Rocket,” and “Tick, Tick…Boom!”

What were your top films of 2021?