Ben Pearson's Top 10 Movies Of 2021

Since /Film's Chris Evangelista provided a spectacular summary of 2021 in the intro of his list earlier this week (don't forget to read Hoai-Tran Bui's excellent list, too!), I'll spare you my similar reminiscence about another tumultuous year. I'll keep it simple: Thank God for the movies that surprised, inspired, scared, enlightened, and moved us, the ones that served as much-needed beacons which continue to carry us through a period of incredible darkness and uncertainty.

Before we begin, I want to give a quick shout-out to a few movies that didn't make my list. Here's to the brazen, joyous insanity of Josh Greenbaum's "Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar"; the jaw-dropping ambition of Denis Villeneuve's "Dune"; the idiotic hilarity of Kitao Sakurai's "Bad Trip"; the lush color palette and quiet profundity of Céline Sciamma's "Petite Maman"; the bleak beauty of Guillermo del Toro's "Nightmare Alley"; the ballsiness of "No Time to Die"; and the excavation and exaltation of "Summer of Soul." 

There were a lot of fantastic movies in 2021. Here are the 10 that stuck out to me the most.

In some ways, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car" is about the act of letting go. Theatre director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Shinomiya) tries to let go of immense pain he experiences after suffering a tremendous loss in the first section of the movie; he lets go of his sense of control when the theater program who hires him insists upon giving him a driver to guide him between his rented home and the theater where he's staging an unconventional performance of "Uncle Vanya"; and his driver, Misaki (Tōko Miura), contends with letting go of the guilt she feels for a traumatic event that happened during her younger days. But something fascinating happens: amid all of this talk about letting go, an unlikely connection begins to form. Not a romantic one, like you'd expect from a conventional Hollywood movie, but a purely human connection — one that manages to feel profound in its simplicity. This is a quiet movie, a composed movie, and yes, a long movie (it's over three hours), but it feels simultaneously epic and intimate in a way that few other 2021 films were able to achieve.

Writer/director Benjamin Cleary's "Swan Song" may be one of the most overlooked movies of 2021, but in my eyes, it's also one of the best. Set about 20 years in the future, the story follows Cameron Turner, a man who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness. But since he hasn't told his wife and young son about his diagnosis yet, a radical option is presented to him: Cameron is given the opportunity to have a clone of himself created which would be not only a perfect physical match, but also possess all of his memories and life experiences. This clone would then switch places with him, sliding seamlessly into his family life and ultimately sparing Cameron's family the excruciating pain of losing him. Mahershala Ali stars as both Cameron and his clone, and delivers a beautifully interior performance as Cameron struggles with whether or not he should go through with the switch. Naomie Harris is excellent as his wife Poppy (who's been dealing with her own set of issues), and the two of them project a deep comfort and familiarity with one another in a way we don't often see in the movies; while many films focus on the early periods of a romantic relationship, this one picks up with the couple already having been together for years. There are tons of reasons to recommend this movie — those stellar performances, Cleary's rock-solid direction, the thought-provoking script, how it incorporates futuristic technology in a subtle but effective way — but the real selling point is its absolutely perfect ending, which I will obviously not spoil here. This is the type of movie people will slowly discover for years, and when they wonder why people didn't talk about it when it was first released, we can raise our hands and say we tried.

2021 was the Year of Lin-Manuel Miranda, but "In the Heights," "Encanto," and "Vivo" can all step aside, because his greatest achievement of the year was his feature directorial debut "tick, tick...BOOM!", an adaptation of an early stage musical by "Rent" creator Jonathan Larson. How does an artist handle the cognitive dissonance of living in a world that feels bleak while also keeping a social life and trying to wrestle their creativity into something tangible and meaningful? Miranda explored similar ideas in his acclaimed Broadway hit "Hamilton," and despite this film being set 200 years later, that conflict continues to feel vital and timeless and something he's fascinated with as a storyteller. This is one of the best movies I've ever seen about the sometimes seemingly impossible choice between art and commerce, and Andrew Garfield delivers one of the best performances of the year as Jonathan Larson, imbuing him with both a tragic sense of urgency and an infectious joy that makes you fully understand why Larson had such a tremendous impact on the generation behind him. I'm thrilled that when I think about Jonathan Larson's legacy in filmic terms, I will now instantly think about this movie instead of Christopher Columbus' borderline unwatchable adaptation of "Rent" from the mid-2000s.

All I knew about "CODA" before watching it was that the title stood for "Child of Deaf Adults," and the movie was supposed to be a tearjerker. I didn't realize it was going to be an inspiring story about a teenage girl faced with an impossible predicament: Does she stay in her small town and help translate for her family, since she can hear while her brother and parents are deaf? Or does she leave them behind and pursue her own dreams of studying music? It's a classic dilemma told from a unique perspective, and writer/director Sian Heder takes the universal idea of parents not understanding their child's artistic expression and makes it heartbreakingly literal: Frank (an excellent Troy Kotsur) and Jackie (a wonderful Marlee Matlin) physically cannot hear their daughter Ruby (Emilia Jones) when she sings. It's a beautiful film about the crushing weight of responsibility, the sacrifices we make in the name of creativity, and the fact that no matter how far we are away from home, the ones we love will always be with us. Is it a little cheesy? Absolutely. But it's also undeniably effective. Consider my tears jerked.

Remember that scene in "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" when Sauron's army brings out that giant battering ram carved into a wolf — the one with actual fire burning inside it — and uses it to break down that massive door at Minas Tirith? "The Harder They Fall" is that gigantic battering ram: a stylish, fiery thing that obliterates barriers will hopefully inspire hordes of followers to scramble through the hole it created. Co-writer and director Jeymes Samuel's Western tells an operatic story, one that feels classic and familiar in that ineffable way that the best stories can sometimes feel as if they've always been sewn into humanity's grand tapestry of storytelling. 

Some might glance at this film and think a Western with an all-Black cast is just a gimmick, or that this movie's narrative is overshadowed by its modern soundtrack, its slick editing, or its immaculate production design. But there's true power in the way all of those elements collide and compliment each other here, forming not just a battering ram to blaze the trail for future generations, but one that announces the arrival of a director who unabashedly embraces the magic of maximalist cinema. Crucially, though, as all of this style is woven into the movie and enhances its settings and dynamics, the lead performances are playing everything with Shakespearean levels of gravitas. We get another star turn from Jonathan Majors as the tortured hero Nat Love, and while casting Idris Elba as a villain is almost cliche at this point (his skills were completely wasted in "Star Trek Beyond" a few years ago), he brings a complexity to this role that muddies the traditional "white hat vs. black hat" juxtaposition showcased in so many Golden Age Westerns. Samuel has said in interviews that he wants to continue making Westerns (at least in the near future), and I'm thrilled that one of Hollywood's oldest genres has finally received a much-needed infusion of new blood.