Hi, this is Daniel Garber at the Movies for culturalmining.com and CIUT 89.5 FM.

I’m back again to tell you my choices for the best movies of 2021, high brow and low brow, both Oscar worthy and mainstream including genre movies, conventional and experimental, big stars and unknowns, high budget, low budget. This year is especially strange because the award season was pushed forward a few months and lots of movies were dug up and released rom years earlier. And, at least in Toronto, movie theatres were barely open most of the time. So it’s hard to know whether a movie is from this year, last year or somewhere in the future.

I see and review hundreds of movies each year, so how do I narrow it down? No sequels — the movies have to stand alone —  no documentaries (even though there were some amazing ones this year) and no franchise or superhero movies.  These are all movies that were released over the past year, either at festivals or commercially. 

Here are what I think are the best movies of the year, in alphabetical order:

Benediction (Terence Davies) An acerbic look at the life and loves of British poet Sigfried Sassoon

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (Junta Yamaguchi) a brilliant low budget sci-fi comedy about small-scale time travel, done without special effects

Cryptozoo (Dash Shaw) whack arthouse animation about a zoo for mythical creatures 

Drive My Car (Hamaguchi Ryuske) a long and pensive movie about a play director whose actors can’t understand one another.

Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Andersion) is a brilliant coming of age story set in the early 1970s in the San Fernando Valley

Lune (Aviva Armour-Ostroff, Arturo Pérez Torres) about a bi-polar anti-apartheid activist in Toronto and her relationship with her daughter

Mothering Sunday ( Eva Husson) — set in the 1930s about a clandestine love affair between a n orphan servant who later becomes a writer and her young upperclass neighbour.

Pig (Michael Sarnoski) a movie about a reclusive truffle hunter (Nicolas Cage) who enters the restaurant world in search of his kidnapped pig

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion) a new-style of western about the secrets of a Montana rancher in the 1920s

Petite Maman (Céline Sciamma) about a little girl who encounters her mother when she was her age

Spencer (Pablo Larrain) an imagined character-study of Princess Diana’s mind during her Christmastime break top with Prince Charles.

Titane (Julia Ducournau) A deranged serial killer who has sex with a car and then disguises herself as the long lost son of a fire station chief. 

Undine (Christian Petzold) about an etherial romance between a woman who works in a museum and a man who thinks she’s a mermaid.

There are lots of other great movies that deserve a mention:

Lamb (Iceland)

I’m your Man (Germany)

True Mothers (Japan)

Moffie (South Africa)

Sun Children (Iran)

One Second (China)

Wildhood (Canada)

Last Night in Soho (UK) 

French Dispatch (US)

Don’t Look Up (US)

Benedetta (France)

Tick Tick Boom (US)

And one again, here are the best movies from 2021 that  are somehow special or amazing or shocking or surprising or moving.

Benediction

Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

Cryptozoo

Drive My Car 

Licorice Pizza 

Lune

Mothering Sunday

Pig

The Power of the Dog

Petite Maman 

Spencer

Titane

Undine

This is Daniel Garber at the Movies, each Saturday morning, on CIUT 89.5 FM and on my website, culturalmining.com