2021

Top Ten Movies of 2021

While the movie-going status quo has changed significantly, 2021 welcomed us back to movie theaters and saw the return of blockbusters in a big way. Many of the larger films were holdovers unreleased in 2020, while indie films from the festival circuit continued to get major platforms on streaming services. Of the record 85 films I saw this year, I’d say around 2/3rds of them were from home, but most of my favorite experiences of the year were still in theaters. Here are my picks for favorite movies of 2021:

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Top “Everything but 2021 Movies” of 2021

I’m going to try something different with this post. Every year, I list my favorite movies of the year, but it pigeonholes the post into avoiding any of the other media I consumed throughout the year – books, TV-shows, video games, and even movies that came out years ago that I happened to come across in 2021.

2021, of course, was the second year dominated by COVID-19, so I spent a lot of time at home and discovered a number of new medias that were pretty incredible. Here are my top 5 of the year:

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‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ Justifies Its Own Existence

I can’t believe I’m writing this, but Zack Snyder’s Justice League justifies its own existence. Actually, I’ll go even further than that: I truly enjoyed the Snyder Cut, despite thoroughly disliking the 2017 theatrical cut. The new version is overly long for a theatrical film, but in an era when Marvel is turning out hour-after-hour of content as TV shows, this HBO Max feature finally makes some sense of what Zack Snyder was getting at in his otherwise largely incoherent DC movies. As an exercise in unadulterated auteur theory, it’s pretty good and thoroughly interesting, warts and all.

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‘Lucky’ (2021): Just a Part of Living in this World

Lucky is a new horror film on Shudder that comes out of SXSW 2020, and is a movie that I came away extremely impressed with. Honestly the film only grows in my esteem the more I think about it, and there’s a lot of substance in its brisk 83 minute runtime. I’ll give my initial [spoiler-free] thoughts before digging into the details of the ending.

A quick plot synopsis: May Ryer (played by Brea Grant, writer of the film) lives with her husband Ted in what seems to be a loving (if somewhat chilly) long-term relationship. One night, May awakens to a masked intruder breaking into her house. When she wakes up her husband, he informs her that “that’s the man that comes every night and tries to kill us.” Together they fight him off and “kill” him, only for the man to disappear, Michael Myers-style. I’ll leave the synopsis at that, suffice it to say that the questions and danger only begin there.

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