The 20 best films of 2021

BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick their highlights of the year, including Nomadland, Another Round and West Side Story.

Judas and the Black Messiah

The true story of Fred Hampton, the Black Panther Party leader who was murdered in 1969 on orders from the FBI, becomes high drama in director Shaka King's film, which is by turns suspenseful, action-filled and intimate. Daniel Kaluuya's Oscar-nominated performance as Hampton is so charismatic – he was a passionate revolutionary and a dynamo of a public speaker – that it demonstrates why the FBI feared Hampton would become a Messiah. LaKeith Stanfield brings wiliness and desperation to the Judas figure, who infiltrates the Panthers for the government and betrays Hampton. Beyond these electrifying personal stories, the film's themes of black power and police abuse resonate profoundly with social justice movements today. (CJ)

The Green Knight

The Green Knight features castles, giants, witches and damsels in distress, just like countless swords-and-sorcery adventures before it. But such time-honoured elements have never seemed as mysterious or as magical as they do in this dreamlike film, adapted from the 14th-Century poem by David Lowery (A Ghost Story / The Old Man and the Gun). Dev Patel plays Gawain, a callow knight who is so keen to impress King Arthur (Sean Harris) that he beheads a monstrous tree-man (Ralph Ineson). The trouble is that the tree-man then strolls off, and chivalric honour dictates that Gawain must seek him out for a rematch a year later. His quest can be bewildering, but the imagery and imagination will have you gasping from first frame to the last. (NB)

Raya and the Last Dragon

Funny, colourful and action-filled, this Disney family film set in the fictional ancient Asian kingdom of Kumandra is a delight. Raya is a young warrior heroine (voiced with the perfect mix of spirit and doubt by Kelly Marie Tran) who must find the last surviving magical dragon so she can defeat the powers of evil and save her father. That dragon turns out to be the traditional, energetic, smart-mouthed comic sidekick, played by the ideally cast Awkwafina. With Daniel Dae Kim as Raya's father and Gemma Chan as her fearsome rival, the film is a visual swirl of shape-shifting and fast-paced adventure, featuring a non-sugary lesson about learning to trust. (CJ)

Nomadland

Chloé Zhao follows The Rider – one of 2017's best films – with another humane and hypnotic survey of the kind of marginal American life that Hollywood usually ignores. Adapted from the book by Jessica Bruder, Nomadland stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a retired widow with no children. Like a surprising number of her fellow pensioners, she can't afford to stay in her house, so she packs her few belongings into an old RV and drives around the desert (stunningly shot by Joshua James Richards). McDormand is one of the only professional actors in the cast – in most scenes she interacts with real nomads who recount their own experiences. But she and Zhao blur the boundaries between fact and fiction so skillfully that Fern never seems out of place. Nomadland is a wonderful achievement. Apart from The Rider, there aren't any films quite like it. (NB)

The Lost Daughter

Maggie Gyllenhaal brings a true artist's vision to her first film as writer-director, an adaptation of Elena Ferrante's novel about Leda, a middle-aged professor, whose obsession with a younger mother and daughter she hardly knows brings her reeling back to examine her own past. Olivia Colman makes the imperfect heroine dynamic even in her quietest moments. Always impeccable, Colman has never been better. With Jessie Buckley playing Leda in flashbacks, and Dakota Johnson as the young woman Leda meets, the film is full of vibrant performances. Gyllenhaal captures all of Ferrante's nuance, but makes the story of women questioning their roles as mothers and as individuals its own entrancing work of art. (CJ)

No Time to Die

Daniel Craig's emotional farewell to the Bond series was delayed and delayed, so it was a cause for celebration when No Time to Die finally made it to cinemas, and audiences were reminded of all the over-the-top entertainment that the silver screen had to offer. Cary Joji Fukuyama, the film's director, took a "go big or go home" approach, and spent almost three hours piling on fabulous locations and flamboyant action set pieces, giddy comedy and grave drama. The most impressive part was that, along with the countless callbacks to previous Bond films and novels, there were a number of shocking new developments. That's not bad going, 60 years into a crowd-pleasing franchise. The only question now is: where can 007 possibly go next? (NB)

West Side Story

It would be hard to mess up West Side Story, with music so exquisite it can overcome any problems. It is even harder to create a film as glorious as Steven Spielberg's inspired new version, full of life and energy. The film honours the beauty of the Leonard Bernstein-Stephen Sondheim score, while adding a 21st-Century sensibility that includes a diverse cast and heightened awareness of the ethnic rivalry that divides its star-crossed lovers. Rachel Zegler is the ideal Maria, and Ariana DeBose a kinetic Anita, but Rita Moreno (the original Anita on stage and screen) is the true heart of the film. As a kind neighbourhood storeowner helpless to stop the hatred and violence she sees all around her, Moreno helps makes the classic story new. (CJ)

Passing

Rebecca Hall makes the leap from actor to writer-director – and not many people have done so with such elegance and intelligence. Passing, her delicate, melancholy adaptation of Nella Larsen's novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as two well-to-do black women who bump into each other in New York in the 1920s, years after they were childhood friends. While one of them is now a society hostess and "Negro rights" activist in Harlem, the other has convinced everyone that she is actually white, including her proudly racist husband (Alexander Skarsgård). Shot in gorgeous, glowing black and white, this is a spellbinding drama in which endless grievances and yearnings are implied but left unspoken by its careful characters. (NB)

Drive My Car

Yes, the title brings to mind the Beatles song, but it shouldn't. Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has created one of the most unusual and eloquent films of recent years. Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijma, quiet yet profound) is an actor and stage director whose wife dies early in the film. Two years later he is staging a multilanguage production of Chekov's Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where a young woman becomes his driver. Her history and her grief are different from his, yet together they come to terms with the past and the future. Drive My Car is a film of conversations and theatre rehearsals, of confidences and secrets, all so beautifully lived in that the three-hour running time never seems long or slow. The film light-handedly mirrors Uncle Vanya in its sense of lost chances, wasted time, and the need to go on living. (CJ)

Titane

Titane is a Cronenbergish sci-fi body horror movie about a serial killer (ferocious newcomer Agathe Rousselle) who finds herself pregnant with the oily offspring of a car. And yet, somehow, Julie Ducornau's juicy slice of extreme cinema is even weirder than that summary might suggest. A nightmarish yet mischievously comic and ultimately tender barrage of transgressive sex, bone-crunching violence, lurid lighting and pounding music, Titane prompted more yelps, winces, uneasy chuckles, and gasps of disbelief than any other film this year. It was also the second ever film directed by a woman to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes. (NB)

Petite Maman

Celine Sciamma brings all the visual beauty of Portrait of a Lady on Fire to this very different, dreamlike little masterpiece, which has the aura of a fairy tale and the grip of real life. Nelly is an eight-year-old staying in an isolated house in the woods, which her divorced parents are clearing out after the death of her grandmother. She wanders into the woods and meets another girl, Josephine, her double – the girls are played by real-life twins – whom we slowly come to realise has a supernatural connection to Nelly's own mother. The child's imagination and point of view allow Sciamma to speculate about grief and identity in this lyrical, mysterious, thoroughly absorbing work that exists on the line between magic and emotional truth. (CJ)

The Power of the Dog

Twenty-eight years after the release of The Piano, Jane Campion brings us another atmospheric period drama shot in the wilds of New Zealand. But The Power of the Dog is darker and stranger than her previous masterpiece, and horribly gripping in its own right. It also boasts one of Benedict Cumberbatch's most transformative performances as a venomous Montana rancher who resents his strait-laced brother (Jesse Plemons) and his timid new sister-in-law (Kirsten Dunst). Adapted from Thomas Savage's novel, the slow-burning tale of toxic masculinity seems at first to be an epic Western, but it becomes a brooding gothic melodrama set in a world that feels supernaturally creepy yet completely real. (NB)

Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

This joyous documentary about a long-forgotten 1969 music festival, sometimes called the Black Woodstock, is an intellectually astute, vibrant piece of history. In his first film as director, Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson expertly curates the festival's exhilarating performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson, The 5th Dimension and many others, putting them in the context of the festival's tense political moment, in the shadow of Dr Martin Luther King Jr's assassination just one year before. Expertly balancing entertainment and political purpose, the film isn't a nostalgic journey into the past: it reclaims a lost piece of history, repositioning it for our own era of racial awareness. (CJ)

The Father

Anthony (an Oscar-winning Anthony Hopkins) is a sprightly 80-something who is enjoying retirement in his beloved London flat. His daughter (Olivia Colman) is caring and attentive, but the people and the furniture around him keep changing, giving The Father the feel of a horror movie – and in a way it is. The conceit is that Anthony has dementia, and most of the film is shown from his perspective. It's chilling, upsetting, but utterly gripping, because you never know what will happen next and how it will connect to what's gone before. Not that The Father is a mere exercise in technical ingenuity. Florian Zeller's grief-racked drama, which he adapted from his own play with the help of Christopher Hampton, makes you dread having an infirm parent, and makes you dread becoming one even more. (NB)

The Tragedy of Macbeth

Perhaps only someone with Joel Coen's credentials could have got this commercially unlikely, black-and-white Shakespeare film made, but it's great that he did. His intense, pared-down vision of one of Shakespeare's most accessible and enduring plays is a stunner. Denzel Washington's powerfully contained performance as Macbeth gives us the essence of a man driven by ambition and tortured by guilt. Frances McDormand's Lady Macbeth is his match, and the bond between them sends them on the irreversible path to tragedy. The settings, most of them interiors, are theatrical, geometric and luminous, but the film is pure cinema as we close in on the faces of characters whose every move might bring them closer to glory or to death. Kathryn Hunter is haunting as all three witches in this lucid, richly imagined drama. (CJ)

Supernova

This tender tribute to love and friendship stars Colin Firth as an English concert pianist and Stanley Tucci as his partner, an American author with early-onset dementia. As the men drive through the scenic Lake District in their trusty camper van, they have to face up to the likelihood that this will be their final holiday together – and work out what to do next. It’s a heart-wrenching scenario, but for now the couple is a pleasure to be around: gentle, funny, open, and glowing with uncomplicated affection. The film is, too. Without ever veering into sentimentality, Harry Macqueen’s highly polished script and sensitive direction convey just how precious the men’s connection is, and how devastating it will be for them to lose it. (NB)

Night of the Kings

Harsh realism meets legend in Philippe Lacôte's audacious, genre-bending drama. It is set in a run-down prison in the Ivory Coast, but its soul belongs to the storytelling traditions of African griots and Scheherazade. The inmates, roaming free in a courtyard, enact a ritual in which a chosen prisoner must tell a story all night or be killed. The young victim recounts his first-hand knowledge, or so he says, of a notorious criminal. As we see flashbacks to that tale, fact veers into myth, and a queen with supernatural powers goes into battle. At times prisoners chant and move in stylised, choreographed motions to mirror the narrative, in an artful film that immerses us in the life-saving power of stories. (CJ)

Flee

At a time when migrants are in the headlines on an almost daily basis, Jonas Poher Rasmussen's vital documentary uses a chatty interview format, and limpid 2D animation, to turn one asylum seeker from a statistic into a human being. The Afghan interviewee, a friend of Rasmussen's, recalls his traumatising and exhausting experiences: his father's arrest by the Taliban in Kabul, his family's escape to a Moscow tower block, his terrifying dealings with corrupt policemen and brutal human traffickers, and his solo trip to Copenhagen, where he was forced to keep his past a secret. This is a heart-rending but hopeful film that should be seen by everyone – and by politicians in particular. (NB)

The Human Voice

Running only 30 minutes, this emotionally potent, visually dazzling little film comes from two masters. Directed by Pedro Almodóvar and starring Tilda Swinton, the drama is loosely based on Jean Cocteau's 1930 play, in which a woman talks on the phone to a man who has abandoned her. Almodóvar adds a meta twist as Swinton wanders from a deserted stage set into an apartment, suggesting she is playing a film role. Yet her tumultuous feelings are visceral. In voiceover and on her mobile phone, she speaks to the lover who has left her, cascading from defiant pride to pleading to resilience. In Balenciaga clothes, including a glamourous vermilion gown, Swinton roams around one of the most colourful sets in all of Almodóvardom, giving her character's monologue intimacy and urgency, until her old life goes up in flames. (CJ)

Another Round

Thomas Vinterberg mixes an intoxicating cocktail of comedy and drama in Another Round (or Druk, to use its original Danish title), pouring out an outrageous premise and then combining it with sympathy and respect for the characters. The premise is that a history teacher (Mads Mikkelsen) and three of his closest colleagues decide to cope with middle age by drinking all day and hoping that no one else notices. Their experiment serves as both an uproarious celebration of alcohol and a piquant warning against becoming dependent on it. And Mikkelsen has never been better. His performance is a masterclass in subtlety and reserve, at least until he shows off his wildest jazz-ballet moves in the glorious final sequence. (NB)

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