Best (& Worst) Movies of 2021
2021. What a year, huh? I know for a lot of people, this was 2020 Part Two. In some ways, it also was for me.
But when I look back at the media I enjoyed over the last couple years, I do find a significant difference between 2020 and 2021. In 2020, I stuck with things longer, binged shows for longer, and in general stuck to comforting media in order to get through a stressful and traumatic year. There's still some of that in 2021, but I seem to have tried more things this year. There's a much wider breadth of media.
My lists of best media of the year is too long to condense into a single post. So as with last year, I'll be breaking this up by media type, with in-depth write-ups of my favorites for each genre, followed by shorter write-ups for runners-up and the worst entries. As always, media does not have to have been released this year to be considered.
#1
For my favorite film of the year, I shamelessly submit My Little Pony: A New Generation. I actually did see quite a few films that I enjoyed this year, including movies that y'all might consider to be more legitimate. But there was no film that brought me as much joy and excitement as Hasbro's Gen 5 reboot of the My Little Pony franchise.
Set some time after My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, A New Generation introduces a new set of characters who live in a more contemporary version of Equestria. This world has smartphones and video games, but it also has a society that's separated into unicorn villages, earth pony towns, and pegasus cities. A New Generation posits that now, more than ever, we all need to come together and learn to love each other, and I think that's really sweet.
The visual style is certainly much different from Friendship is Magic, but it's true to those designs while also updating the look to be, in my opinion, much prettier and higher budget. And I like that the new group's first quest is to restore magic to the world by taking down a group of fascists. To me, that's a promising start.
#2
2021 was the return of the blockbusters - or at least, films that probably would have been blockbusters if they were releasing in a non-pandemic environment. Hollywood came to bat this year with plenty of Disney and Pixar films, Marvel movies, and so on. But the big budget Hollywood film that surprised me the most was Dune.
I've tried getting into Dune before and never had much success. Its white savior narrative and overly complicated scifi worldbuilding just haven't resonated with me. But Denis Villeneuve managed to win me over, which surprised me, because I didn't much care for his last attempt to revitalize a legacy scifi franchise, Blade Runner 2049.
Dune (technically Dune: Part One) makes clear from the start that nobody involved is a good guy. Even the supposedly sympathetic good guys are presented as agents of an Empire, with vast armies and powerful weaponry that make it easy to subjugate an entire planet. When their city eventually crumbles, it's pretty cathartic.
And yet the filmmaking is top notch. The action moves at a brisk pace for such a long film, the actors are all clearly having a lot of fun, and the cinematography and effects are breathtaking regardless of whether you're seeing it on a big screen. It really does make a difference to see a big action adventure movie that takes itself more seriously than the ubiquitous Marvel movies. The epic nature of the narrative is given substantive gravitas, and a lot of the discussions between characters are compelling. I didn't really expect this film to be my thing, but it really surprised me, and I'm curious to see the next installment.
#3
Those who think I have movie opinions worth listening to and stuck around after I gave my top slot to a My Little Pony movie might want to go ahead and get off that train right here, especially once you see what ended up on my runners-up list, far underneath slots 1 and 3. But I gotta go with my heart, and the movie I enjoyed third-most this year was actually Princess Principal: Crown Handler.
Princess Principal was one of my favorite shows I watched in 2020. It's a story about two childhood friends, a princess and a pauper, who swapped places during wartime and have now reconnected years later. But that's just the backstory; it's actually *mostly* about a group of five girls who pretend to attend high school but are actually involved in high stakes spy heists from week to week. It's thrilling stuff and the characters are a lot of fun, and the two leads are gay as hell for each other, which is super sweet.
Princess Principal: Crown Handler is the first of a series of films intended to follow up on the show's twelve episodes. The film is only about an hour in length, which makes it feel less like a feature film and more like a double-length episode of television. But what an episode it is.
The film is set directly after the events of the first season and follows up on several dangling plot threads. Now that Ange and Charlotte have come to terms with their affection for each other, the story starts asking them if they really plan to hide it from the world forever. I'm really curious where the story is gonna go with this, and I loved seeing the characters return for their most complicated heist yet.
#4
This year, I finally got around to watching all of the Matrix sequels, including the newest one. And I liked all of them! Part 2 surprised me with how many iconic action moments it had, and I loved the scene with the architect. Part 4 was complicated and I'm still sitting with it, but was definitely one of the best experiences I had with a new film this year. But part 3, The Matrix Revolutions, was the one that really blew me away.
The Matrix trilogy was really ahead of its time. Parts 2 and 3 take the structure of some two-part sequels from the 2010s, such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, in which the second half is really an extended third act to the storyline begun in the first half.
So while The Matrix Reloaded has a fair bit of meandering and philosophizing (most of it quite interesting), The Matrix Revolutions is a nonstop action thrill ride from start to finish. And it is anime as ALL fuck. My understanding is that some criticism at the time came from how strangely overpowered Neo's powers are, particularly outside of the matrix. And to that I say: who GIVES a shit when the scenes are this cool?
The battle for Zion is thrilling and fun, if a bit overly violent at times. But the final fight between Neo and Smith is the stuff of legends, which I've definitely seen multiple films take influence from since. Neo's relationship with Trinity is also extremely sweet, and their stories are both brought to fitting ends in this movie.
I especially love the weird metamorphosis of both Smith and Neo, as they slowly become more like each other: Neo able to interact with and control machines, and Smith getting more chaotic and human-like. Regardless of your ability to see a transgender narrative in the Matrix films, that transhumanism is unmissable. The Matrix Revolutions may be a chaotic ride, but it has so much fun getting there, and in some ways feels like the corniest, girliest action blockbuster I've seen in quite some time.
#5
I think the general expectations of Christopher Nolan have been far too high for a decade now. The last unambiguously great movie he made was Inception in 2010. Since then, audiences have simultaneously gotten tired of his shtick, while also continually expecting him to reinvent the summer action blockbuster.
I think Nolan's gotten more indulgent over the past decade, and I think that's really good for him. I also think he's gotten more experimental. The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, and Dunkirk are all films that didn't work for me on various levels, but they're also pretty different from his previous films. Even when his movies aren't for me, I give him a certain amount of respect.
When audiences, movie theaters, and Warner Bros. all expected Tenet to save the entire movie industry just four months after a pandemic had forced hundreds of closures nationwide - yeah, those expectations were a bit high. And as with Nolan's more recent films, Tenet is indulgent and experimental. But unlike Nolan's last three, Tenet really worked for me. Go figure.
Part of it is that, watching at home six months after its theatrical release, I had the time to actually research the movie as I was going through it. The chronological choreography of a lot of the key sequences is pretty complicated, but it is understandable with a little work. And once you're able to untangle all that? Tenet is a damn fun little time travel movie. For real.
But I also think Tenet maybe has more to say than people gave it credit for. This year has been a year full of time loops as a story device, and Tenet was already there in 2020. The villains of Tenet (who, surprise!, also turn out to be the heroes) are trying to escape their climate apocalypse future by returning to their past. And what do you know: halfway through Tenet's runtime, the characters reverse their chronology, and the film's ending happens on the same day as the film's beginning. It's a movie about trying to escape cycles by creating cycles of your own, and the repercussions of that. I have to wonder if this film will age better for people with time - but regardless, for me, Tenet is surprisingly relevant and very fun.
#6
It is no particular surprise that Hilda and the Mountain King is the best and most beautiful (in every sense of the word) episode of Netflix's animated series Hilda, which I will also cover in my "best TV of the year" list. As a ninety minute feature, Hilda has more time and (I suspect) a bigger budget with which to tell its story.
To be honest, it wouldn't be inaccurate to consider Hilda & the Mountain King more a triple-sized finale to season two than a movie of its own accord, as it ties up a solid number of loose ends from the latest season. The event that kicks off the movie's plot actually happened in the final moments of the last Hilda episode, and the movie is off and running without much of an explanation to new viewers.
But I also don't think that'd be entirely fair. While its ties to established continuity are strong, Hilda & the Mountain King's ambitions are enormous, and the movie stands up well on its own as a fable of a girl who's suddenly able to cross species lines she couldn't before, helping bring a sense of understanding between two species on the brink of war with each other.
Some of the story content of this movie, I expected, given some obvious places the series was going with its second season subplots. But there were a lot of great twists and turns that I wasn't expecting, too. This was a shining beacon of the show's greatest ambitions: to tell stories about the beautiful relationships between humanity and nature, and what it means to not entirely belong in either world.
#7
Call me a heretic, but I enjoyed the hell out of Super Mario Bros. from the early 90s. It's not faithful to the games that were out at the time, but a straight movie adaptation of Super Mario World would be really boring. SMB The Movie is a fun and creative romp through a Blade Runner-inspired world. It's corny, it's dumb, and it actually has some pretty great references to the games. I'd actually love to see more movies like this.
#8
The Matrix Resurrections is my second-favorite Matrix sequel, but it's pretty close. I still feel like I'm digesting this movie, what it means, what it attempted, how it worked, and so on. In the moment, this was a great movie watching experience; I didn't know where the movie was going with everything for the entire first hour. The new characters are super fun and super queer, the villains are great, and the Neo/Trinity relationship remains extremely sweet (and pretty trans). The action scene scope is small due to the pandemic, but I don't even mind. This was a great film.
#9
The Matrix Reloaded is packed absolutely full of scenes that absolutely define the Matrix series - which surprised me, given how much people deride the sequels. The discussion with the Merovingian, the car chase, Keanu stopping a wall of bullets, the Architect, and the final flight to save Trinity are all fantastic scenes. The movie is too slow to start, with an entire first act set in Zion that doesn't pay off until Revolutions, but once it gets going, this film works great.
#10
Parasite is a modern day classic. Everybody should watch it. It's a genuinely great idea and it is absolutely ruthless in how it skewers capitalism as a system that pits people against each other. The only reason it's not higher on this list is because it's a bit of a rough watch, especially the climactic party sequence. But this should be required viewing for any cinema student, or really anybody, moving forward.
#11
A few Disney animated films hit their streaming service this year, but I only caught Soul, released towards the end of 2020. Soul is typical Pixar in a lot of ways, especially in structure. But in its emotional messaging, Soul has the same emotional maturity as Pete Docter's other Pixar films (Monsters Inc., Up, and Inside Out). In an animated world in which so many people (including the protagonist) value life as what you've made in it, Soul counters that the value of life is simply the ability to live, which I think is a wonderful and important message to hear.
#12
Every year our household watches a few horror films for Halloween, and the one I enjoyed the most was Happy Death Day, a movie about a girl stuck in a time loop on her birthday who can't stop getting killed by a serial killer. It's funny as hell and has some great twists, and I was really into it.
#13
While its sequel has its place on another less complimentary list, for what it is I thought the original Space Jam actually works really well. It may be an advertisement for shoes, but it's also wacky cartoon fun with a heartfelt message of friendship at its core. The stakes feel low, but they're just high enough to get the plot moving, and it's a fun movie AND a fun game of basketball.
#14
O Brother Where Art Thou is considered one of the Coen brothers' most classic and enduring movies, and is frequently considered one of their best. That reputation perhaps set my expectations a bit too high, cause for me, O Brother Where Art Thou was merely a fun and strange little adventure film about a group of country musicians. Its music will be stuck in my head for years to come.
#15
Studio Trigger's latest feature film, Promare, is the most male character centric film they've made in quite some time. So it wasn't as targeted for me as Trigger's work usually is, but I still had a lot of fun with it. It's a sweet story about love and empowerment, and its climax is suitably over-the-top spectacular.
#16
Ready Player One has a ton of problems, most of them on a story level. At its core it's a story about a white geek going on a standard video game quest, marginalizing the more diverse cast around him. It throws pop culture references at the audience relentlessly. But on the other hand... I really enjoyed seeing people interacting in a virtual world like this. With all the copyrighted characters being thrown around, it really felt like an echo of some of the virtual spaces I've seen in my life, and it was neat to see it visualized on a budget this big.
#17
I had a lot of fun with dumb movies this year, but none more than Digimon: The Movie, a shoddily edited sampler platter of three barely related Digimon projects wrapped in a package of pure 90s. It is amazing and I loved it.
#1
Space Jam: A New Legacy actually angered me. What a waste of money and what a waste of my time. It is ugly and uninspired, it is a tonal mess, it is creatively completely bankrupt, it is tiring and boring, it tries to send the audience off with an emotional ending that is completely unearned. It is cynically corporate at every single level, and I hated every second of it. This held together far far worse than a movie in the 90s that was essentially a fucking shoe commercial. Fuck this movie.
#2
The Conjuring movies (and now cinematic universe, for some fucking reason) have honestly aged pretty badly, even the good ones. But The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (which should go down in history as one of the worst sequel titles alongside Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales) is easily the worst of the trilogy and quite possibly the worst of the whole mega-franchise. It is confusing, boring, and morally abhorrent.
#3
The amazing terribleness of 2025: The World enslaved by a Virus really needs to be seen to be believed. "The virus changed the world. Communism is all over the place." The idea that covid's main effect on the world appears to have been the criminalization of Christianity is amazing. A government agency is three people in a blank basement with a single laptop and some guns. This movie is dreadful and a lot of fun.
#4
Operation Christmas Drop is military propaganda in the form of a Christmas movie. It's the story of a Congresswoman who is threatening to cut the military budget for a (real-life) annual project to drop resources to needy islands in the Pacific. The notion that the US would cut the military budget, especially for a purely charitable/propaganda practice, is utterly ludicrous. Other than that, the film is mostly pretty boring.
#5
Disney put out a lot of stinkers this year; NONE of the Marvel movies worked for me. But the worst Disney film I saw this year was definitely Cruella, an origin story for Cruella de Vil that mostly rips off The Devil Wears Prada, Suicide Squad, and pure unadulterated stupidity. The story about this puppy-killing villain kicks off because puppies LITERALLY KILL HER PARENTS. It is a terrible movie.