5 Years Later, These Are the 10 Best Movies of 2021
A retrospective ranking of 2021's best films five years on, arguing that despite the pandemic's disruption of release patterns and awards attention, that year quietly produced an unusually deep field of enduring work. It runs from Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth and Villeneuve's Dune down through overlooked gems like Mass and Judas and the Black Messiah, landing on The Worst Person in the World at number one as proof of cinema's growing embrace of international, formally adventurous storytelling. Worth keeping as a corrective list-style piece that pushes back against films (like Licorice Pizza or West Side Story) getting overshadowed by their directors' bigger later hits or box-office flops.