50 Best Films of 2021

In many significant ways, the best films of 2021 were way more engrossing and nuanced than those from 2020. The opening of the world in the middle of the Coronavirus scare saw auteurs channeling their art from the world around them, thus producing many instant classics. At the same time, the new voices from film festival tours keep providing a fresh lease of life to cinema as a medium. 

Here are the best films of the year that was, ranging from genre-shifting masterpieces to potent feminist voices. I hope the list resonates with you in some way or the other. This was a list that took more than 365 days in becoming what it is, and I really want to mention a few films that did not make it to the list but are great nevertheless- John and the Hole, Ninja Baby, Nightmare Alley, Pig, Land, A Cop Movie, Stop and Go and The Sacred Spirit. 

50. The Great Indian Kitchen 

On the surface, The Great Indian Kitchen is a rather mundane film. An anonymous Malayali Hindu woman spends a majority of her day cooking and cleaning in the kitchen of her husband's patriarchal home. She is a fairly pretty woman drowned in sweat of household burdens and male-dominated expectations. 

However, in that lies the film's quiet, tremendous potency. Director Jeo Baby tells an efficient story of female emancipation by using the tool of commonality, which we are used to witnessing in our homes every single day and is horrifying to watch on-screen. It also benefits from the presence of sound actors Nimisha Sajayan and Suraj Venrajamoodu, who remain in fine restraint and are vanity-free. 

49. Wet Sand 

A famous short film-maker previously, Elene Naveriani makes her full-length feature film like a true-blue indie yet intimate epic. One that proves the fact that true art doesn't need glossy proportions of aesthetic textures to look visually stunning and be tremendously moving. For one, it seamlessly blends vignettes of Georgia's existent socio-political reality with a lesbian love story brooding in a regressive rural environment. 

Shot in a laid-back and therapeutic manner to capture the coastal village in an investing and organic manner, the film benefits from the beautiful chemistry shared by its leading ladies Bebe Satisashvili and Gia Agumava. However, this lo-fi film finds its soul in the compelling inspiration it cites from works of Tarkovsky and Ozu, meanwhile going all-out to highlight the sheer spinelessness and bigotry of Georgia's reluctant Christian system. 

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

One of the most popular titles from Sundance 2021 and the winner of Best Documentary at the Academy, Questlove's Summer of Soul uses a rather generic interview setup for its documentation. However, what cannot be overlooked is the fact that this sumptuous-looking documentary in itself is a large revolution. 

It finds and remasters the footage of a musical festival held in Harlem, a massive celebration of black identity and an attempt by Tony Lawrence to reinvigorate the public spirits shortly after Martin Luther King Junior got assassinated. There was surely an attempt to erase a crucial event from the annals of history. However, the makers truly go a step ahead and fail this to tell a delightful and spirited story of song and dance, yet again to the masses, and in the most truthful cinematic medium. 

47. Titane 

Julia Ducournau certainly made heads turn when she forced ambulances and walk-outs for her brilliant debut feature Raw, a film too grotesque not to be called horror and too intimate and personal not to be defined as a poignant coming-of-age feature. She follows it up with an even more violent and fucked-up sophomore, which is as much a tender look into the aspect of a found family, as much as it is a sprawling and bloody body horror. 

Respectably gender-fluid and dividing of opinions about its positioning as a queer allegorical film, it is a very powerful story told about the independence of female identity and a woman's journey of reinterpreting herself, which Ducournau does by challenging the conventions of genre. Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon's wonderful performances are alone worth the price of admission. 

46. Human Factors 

A dysfunctional family is a complex personal institution which is composed of members who are constantly struggling to find their own space and their own voice. Ronny Trocker comprehensively understands this, and employs this aspect in this gritty slow-moving thriller about the realm of a French-German family's home invasion, a vital tool to unravel its distinctive core mystery and the kind of relationship members actually enjoy with each other. 

The European indie is a compelling one because it isn't ashamed to admit its artistic priorities. The film has an uncompromised visual voice, grim and outright gloomy in its aesthetic sensibilities. Secondly, it never tries to become an outright dramatic thriller, even though the occasional thrilling edges it has are perfectly surprising. And lastly, it's an inspiring cross between masterful Michael Haneke sensibilities and a provocative Rashomon ending.

 

45. Parallel Mothers 

The Spanish master of fascinating melodramas gets back with a very queer, yet a very conventionally formed story about a complicated bond shared by two mothers. Following a narrative about two accidental mothers, the middle-aged Janis and a much-younger Ana, the film is a straightforward, but also oddly strange, tale about an unfortunate baby-swap. 

However, what Almodovar wraps at plain sight is that his cinema is one of statements and politics. The injustices of the Franco regime mirror the impending dangers of a fascist crisis in the film. And it portrays it in a very shockingly simplistic and accessible manner. However, the feminist undercurrents of this politics are extremely well-written, and the film itself is technically too sound to dismiss. Additionally, the fact that the politics stands necessarily personal to its radical auteur, introduces us up close to the universal nature of his story. It is precisely this that makes Parallel Mothers a must-watch. 

44. El Planeta 

In her directorial debut itself, Amalia Ulman proves what an extraordinary directorial voice she might turn out to be. In her first feature film, which is also semi-autobiographical in more ways than one, she crafts a black-and-white comedy about a warm but oddly complicated relationship enjoyed by a duo of mother and daughter in a post-crisis Spain. 

There's a specific stylistical decision why Amalia made this film in monochrome- it has the look and feel of mumblecore English comedies from the yore which conveyed simple reflections of truth with these aesthetics, which is also exactly what she has done here. However, under this physical surface, it also lays back the energy in the story of a tragedy that comes hand-in-hand with the lack of privilege. Additionally, it has a great Martin Scorsese cameo in the end, which puts to rest all those mid-tier Stan Lee cameos. 

43. Moon, 66 Questions

A very famous short film director from before, Greece's Jacqueline Lentzou makes her suitably low-key directorial debut with a film which explores a familiar territory. Artemis, a Parisian belonging to Athens, returns to her homeland at the phone call of her mother for taking care of her very ill father. We have all seen stories about young individuals taking care of their dying parents on-screen. However, what makes a difference this time is that the story actually unfolds from Artemis's supposedly artistic viewpoint. 

Lentzou successfully highlights the tremendous pressure on youngsters and the freedom they are robbed of when taking care of these elder people who have lost their senses in some way. She never loses the sight of her delicate minimalism and looks through Artemis's state of mind through visuals of outer environment, conversations between family members, directions of homeotherapist and even the astronomical space. It's naturally poetic and elevated by Sofia Kokkali's almost star-making turn as Artemis. 

42. The Novice

Before making this arresting feature debut, director Lauren Hadaway was responsible for the incredible sound department work in Damien Chazelle's Whiplash. She brings the same resounding energy in The Novice, a character study of a queer college freshman obsessed with a sport she has no previous experience in. Alex, a queer woman with a renewed interest in varsity boating, commits mentally and physically to her fascination with varsity boat, and desires to get ahead in the rowing team of her university. 

Hadaway takes Alex's plea and first supplies her complex character with a wonderful leading actor. Isabelle Fuhrman elevates the film with her characteristically powerful, near-perfect performance. After this, she transports us into Alex's interesting and immersive mental scape with a compelling use of technical flair, from cinematography to sound design to the excellent editing. However, the writing is bulging with a personal catharsis here, heightening the film's impact to the broadest of extents. 

41. The Killing of Two Lovers 

David and Niki's is a dysfunctional family beyond redemption. In fact, their familial relationship feels like the culmination of a film. The warmth has already been replaced, that slice of cake is lost among the many food items kept in the deep fridge. However, it seems like David has not given up on trying, and is trying to do his best to get his family together. 

Robert Machoian's grippingly focused feature isn't entirely invested in dealing with its messy familial dynamic though. Through processed technical qualities and a flawless cinematography set-up, it tests the limits of masculinity and defies the meaning of a 'toxic man'. It turns a relatively laid-back film from somewhere into a more visible and chilling thriller. The performances and writing are a big plus of this poignant film about male angst, helplessness, and loss of a mutual affection. 

40. Nitram 

One of the more diverse English-language filmmakers, Justin Kurzel ditches his appetite for taking his stories to wild and adventurous directions in order to get very real (and superbly indie) with his Cannes-acclaimed thriller Nitram. A film based on the story of Martin Bryant, the mass assassin behind the bloodiest chapter in the history of Tasmania, the film initially drew controversies because the audience back there suspected a possible humanization of the monstrous criminal. 

Rest assured, the claim doesn't have a point because the film doesn't negate the man's chilling and unhuman violent tendencies. Because through his character study, it points fingers towards an irresponsible system which gives out its weapon-manufacturing industry in an extremely accessible fashion. Caleb Landry-Jones elevates the film's storytelling to unimaginable extents, his presence as the unsettling lead informing tremendously this baffling gut-punch of an experience. 

39. Full Time 

Eric Gravel's Venice-premiered sophomore feature, Full Time is a breathlessly paced and breakneck character study of a twenty-first century single woman on the run. Following Julie, who works as a head chambermaid in a Parisian hotel but lives in a remote village slightly farther from her workplace, it basically follows her through her days, on a constant lookout for a nanny for her two little children and the negligible rest she gets through the week. There are also days when the traffic rush prevents her from reaching on time. 

Full Time is a technically processed film. The editing and smoothly transitioning writing are all in sync. However, what constantly elevates the film is Laure Calamy's excellent performance. As Julie, her tiredness and frustration can be seen through very explicity, a genuine mark for a great performance. 

38. Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry 

I ditched my tendency to avoid music or musician based celeb documentaries for once in order to watch this acclaimed Apple TV+ documentary about the initial years of the iconic teenage sensation of our times, up until her Grammy win recently. And my perceptions and expectations about the form of this documentary were fairly changed by what I saw. 

RJ Cutler efficiently uses verite style filmmaking to dive into what we see of this bright star, only revealing her insecurities from the world and her own vulnerable teenage core. It's a fairly domestic film about a girl whose entirely incidental rise to fame was followed by her journey of making music which connects the hearts of millions of youngsters from across the globe. Without getting into the making-of process, it smartly and quite impressively looks into her generation and the changes she has been experiencing. 

37. The French Dispatch 

What makes We Anderson work well is how delightfully and cohesively he supplements rich and precise aesthetic details to different forms of life fusing with each other very diversely. This is only the second live-action film of his that I have watched. However, it has drawn me in like few such comedies could.

 

The French Dispatch is a three-film anthology about expatriate European journalists who, after the death of the head of their publication, decide to publish a memorial edition highlighting three of their best pieces. The film is hyper-articulate, richly textured and filled in with a great ensemble. In fact, its big heart and an even more massive spirit is so brimming with richness that one might feel an emotional disenchantment from the material. However, it is so intelligent and eloquent a film that the emotion and the substance cease to matter and what stays with you is the wholesome end product. 

36. The Last Duel

Ridley Scott is one of the most processed and experienced masters of nuanced mainstream American filmmaking. With an ensemble of his times and suitable use of big-budgeted action choreography and visuals, he tends to craft engaging mainstream films which resonate in one way or the other. He returned to action with two films this year. While one of them was a distasteful campy mess, the other one was simply fantastic. 

Set in medieval France, the film based on a true-crime novel of the same name dissects chivalric masculinity and its implications on women of the household. Through muscular, gripping English-language filmmaking exerted on European settings, the film makes a plea for #MeToo style feminine justice deeply resonant and powerful. Further, it goes a step ahead and makes the 'truth' ring louder than anything else by using the classical Rashomon storytelling! Props to Jodie Comer's masterful performance. 

35. Bergman Island 

Using simplistic words to describe processed auteurs does more harm than good to their filmic legacy. However, the one word which can aptly describe the Mia Hansen-Løve's body of work is sublime. Her work is, in proportionate measure, healing, substantial and minimalistic with Bergman Island, the first film of hers that I have seen. 

Set in the Faro Island (associated very intimately with the life and times of Ingmar Bergman), it follows a filmmaking-screenwriting couple Chris and Tony as they meditate on the process of their next scripts and deal very internally with the strain in their marriage. The film almost feels like a wonderfully personal recollection, more so because its narrative-within-the-narrative is an instrument used to deconstruct the very element of meta-cinema. Watch it for its heavenly visuals and Mia's fantastic grip on the wiring of her characters. 

34. Hive

Kosovan filmmaker Blerta Basholli experiments with a cinematic sub-genre which is far from unfamiliar in cinema of the day, so much so that it has overgrown now: the sub-genre of biographical cinema. However, the Kosovan filmmaker is well aware of the staleness of the foreground, and therefore treads upon it with so much care and deliberation that she makes one of the most important films of the year based on it.

Hive is the real-life story of Fahrije, a half-widow with a missing husband who lives with her children and a frail, old father-in-law. Her loneliness is consuming her, but she refuses to surrender to the toxic patriarchal environment of her village and starts, along with the village's other women, a business of making Ajvars. The film presents to us a very inspiring portrait of feminine courage and resilience. The story might be from a Kosovan village but it is so powerful to watch that it rings universally. Also, Yllka Gashi rocks in the leading role as middle-aged Fahrije. 

33. A Hero 

The plagiarism controversy drew in a very ugly blemish on both this film and the career of its wonderful renowned auteur, Asghar Farhadi. However, there is no denying still on how powerfully the real-life story of Shokri has been translated by Farhadi here. Starring Amir Jadidi in the leading role as Rahim, the film's premise is a complex one about a prisoner's kindness backfiring towards him in an unkind manner and how social media verdict can be potentially unforgiving. 

Personally, it took me several hours to process the film, given the fact that it has been engineered in a moving and devastating manner. The simple, slow-burn approach of Farhadi is what makes him an irreplaceable genius, which is also what helps the film's thrilling edge to get more palpable.

32. Pebbles

PS Vinothraj's Pebbles went on to get submitted as the Indian entry for the Best Foreign Language Feature in the Academy Awards. And safe to say that it was totally their loss for not nominating it. Directed with utmost honesty and immediate conviction by Vinothraj in what is essentially his debut picture, the film follows a father-and-son duo as they travel through the scorching heat of the rural Madurai. 

The father is a violent alcoholic who has yet again inflicted his violence on his wife, who has yet again run from the abuse to her own place. Yet again, he picks his son from the middle of the school to fetch his wife who is nowhere to be found, and yet again, they walk towards their home. The film captures this mundanity without any silken precision, with handheld camera movements, tracking shots and many such usual devices seen in a road movie. And yet, there are sporadic moments of powerful and well-made drama which internally come to life. 

31. I Was a Simple Man 

The Honolulu-born Christopher Makoto Yogi is a perceptive observer of the singular motion which we call life, and he breathes it into the lush, colourful visuals of his laid-back homeland of Hawaii. His third feature, carrying the fragrance of a new long novel condensed in only four chapters, is a wonderful exploration of life, death and (most of the) things in between. 

The film, focusing on a dying old man named Masao who is consumed in his own lyrical ghost story, presents us with a strange philosophical proposition- which is, for humans, nothing is impossible. This is proved by the fact that dying, while difficult, is inevitable. And yet, at times, humans can't help but fail to resist the obsession with vignettes of their past, and the past itself becomes a supernatural entity. These are such complex themes and Yogi brings them out with sumptuous use of colours and enthralling staging.

30. The Story of Southern Islet 

We have a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film already this year (more about which later), but this dazzling, hopelessly personal debut picture has the broad, vast detailing that we have come to expect from a majority of his Thai masterpieces. Malaysian filmmaker Keat Aun-Chong, setting the film in his own village, starts off by finding his rhythms in the mundane. The film looks like one about the migrant experience- Cheong, a Chinese man, has fallen sick after a row with his neighbour and his wife, the more educated Yan, has to go against her conscience to seek help from the rural shaman. 

Through this simplistic log-line of a premise, Keat initiates his mysterious and unique world-building, the foundation itself of which is so immersive that it would be hard to take your eyes off the screen. A folk horror on paper but much more meditative than its genre boundaries on screen, this is a vital piece of social cult horror stemming partly from his memories and partly from his nightmares, and is original in its entirety. 

29. The Girl and the Spider

Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher, the two talented German filmmakers responsible for the 2018 chamber drama The Strange Little Cat concieve another seemingly simple work which fascinates in its pauses and moments of simplicity like few two-hour feature films could. On its plain surface, the film only depicts a girl being helped to move from one flat to the next, which is only at the other end of the road. 

Actually, this film captures this singular mundane movement in fractured fragments of family members and friends interacting with each other and simple phenomenon like arrival of cats or spilling of liquids. However, in such simple moments, Zürcher brothers craft a film immediately magical and mysterious. It feels like they have thrown darts on the aim and thankfully, most of them have landed. So richly therapeutic is the film that I feel I can watch it every single day of my life. 

28. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

When anthology films simply don't stick to each other, even three feels like a crowd. However, you cannot expect such a misfire from the Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Although the Cannes success and Oscar recognition for Drive My Car is what really put him on the map, do make time for this sweet little film that he concieved between the emptiness of Drive My Car and debuted in the Berlin Film Festival last year. 

Composed of three magical tales with fascinating coincidences that tell a lot more about human conversations and their ability to bind individuals than the situations and the plot themselves, this is a wonderfully co-existent feature where the characters meet at the crossroads even as they don't in the most practical sense. This is one rare, gorgeous trifecta. 

27. Milestone

In his debut film Soni itself, Ivan Ayr rusticated a banality from the surface to follow two cop women from Delhi NCR, and thereby dissect through their eyes the casual misogyny and sexism around them. He follows it with a sophomore feature which is even more microcosmic and surprisingly, even more poignant. Milestone follows Ghalib, a middle-aged trucker who has traversed thousands of kilometers and is most probably on the brink of retirement. However, loneliness has followed him all his life and his profession is the one and only thing after the loss of his North-Eastern wife which bridges him to some form of activity.

The film's protagonist Ghalib, and the younger supporting character Pash, are poetically named but without even a shred of poetry in their lives. Milestone is a visually cold but moving character study which follows the wrestle of working-class people with their identity and their everyday battle with a lack of companionship. It also doubles up as a compelling case study of middle-aged people and their definition of misery. On the acting front, Suvinder Vicky is an extraordinary stand-out. 

26. The Hand of God 

Paolo Sorrentino, in his own movie memoir which works as a (more than) semi-autobiographical art, has a distinctive clarity of perspective. Following Fabietto, a young kid who has an unparalleled love for both cinema as well as Diego Maradona, the film is brooding with little worlds and characters in Naples. 

The first half of The Hand of God is so delightful and fun that it can very literally blow a bubble. It is cosmically self-aware and is populated with vibrant characters and weird situations. However, with the second half, the enjoyable tone gradually, slowly shifts and starts getting a more tonally reflective shape, because the film in the end is essentially a meditation on the filmic nature of coming-of-age, that gloriously messy process. 

25. Red Rocket

With the American indie auteur Sean Baker, you need to expect empathetic touches glistening from the most unlikely spaces. His storytelling methods have only evolved from the iPhone-shot transwomen in Tangerine to the far-from-Disneyland pleasures of The Florida Project. In Red Rocket, Baker successfully tries his hands on a full-fledged black comedy. 

Essentially revolving around Mikey Saber, an unlikeable ex-pornstar who can ruin a good day with his sheer presence, the film churns out a suffocating situation where you have to root for the man no matter what the circumstances. However, with the tongue-gagging 35 mm cinematography, compelling writing that doesn't rely on instruments of sympathy or manipulation and an excellent career-defining performance by Simon Rex, you hardly care for the nature of the ride, and rather enjoy it. 

24. Italian Studies 

Adam Leon, who made the fairly successful romantic drama Tramps for Netflix, has probably constructed the most resounding and engrossing film about memory loss, one which leaves you in an almost trance-like state. Following a novelist and short story writer named Alina Reynolds who has suddenly started to forget her own identity and trivial things about herself, the film practically brushes through the strands of her golden hair. 

The best part of the film is Vanessa Kirby's excellent performance. She deconstructs the character with an effortless ease and without even an iota of sensational histrionics. However, the film on its own is also exceptionally made as a cross between something as thrilling as Josephine Decker's Shirley and as nuanced as something made by Godard. There's an alarming tenacity to the material exercised here. 

23. Compartment No. 6

The winner of Grand Prix along with 'A Hero' at Cannes last year, Juho Kuosmanen's Compartment No. 6 is, to quote a friend, not the conventional Finnish Before Sunrise that it has been so casually dubbed as. This is a very original, charming and healing film. I don't know about you, but travelling in the compartments of a train is therapeutic for me. 

This therapy is exactly what Kuosmanen provides, but the first experience in this long train journey that Laura, excellently played by Seidi Haarla, endures is one that is a mix of horror and reservation. Soon enough, it waters down and what it progresses as is equal parts romantic and warm, extremely enticing in its simplicity and very provocative with relation to the present times.

 

22. Once Upon a Time in Calcutta 

Aditya Vikram Sengupta is a confirmed auteur now. He debuted with Labour of Love, a film which easily escalated to become the best non-Hindi Indian film of the last decade. In 2018, he followed it with Jonaki, an abstract but fairly purposeful film stemming out of dreams and memories of a dying grandmother, a highly enchanting and surreal film with moments which are painful to watch. 

He follows them with a film, which in his own words, is his most accessible to date. Thankfully, that doesn't mean amplified dramatics and broad perspectives because this is a muted, charming and powerfully convincing look into the decaying areas of a city which is simply masking its ruins with progression. The director, in a masterly way, depicts his irritations and reservations from the city, coating it with the empathy he has for its people. Look out for Sreelekha Mitra's compelling leading performance! 

21. Everything Went Fine 

One of the finest surprises of the year was Francois Ozon following his mediocre gay romance Summer of '85 (2020) with a touching and understated comedy. Based on the book of the same name by Emmanuelle Bernheim, the film follows the latter during the last days of her father's life and his urgent plea for euthanasia.

 

Yes, you heard that right. A book adaptation, traversing comedy and in fact extracting it from a father's urge to die at his chosen time, an advocation of this condition. While the film could have gone incredibly wrong, it doesn't because the adapted screenplay is written very economically and the direction is fairly accessible without unnecessary allegories. The acting talent involved is a big plus here! 

20. The Humans 

Stephen Karam ominously re-imagined the conflicts of a dysfunctional family into a twisted, apocalyptic horror film in the form of The Humans, his Broadway musical play which also grabbed the Tony award. For his feature-film debut, he translates it on-screen. And the results are just as gripping and singularly wonderful as watching Anthony Hopkins movingly fade away in The Father, another play adaptation from last year which depicted an old man's dementia as a thriller. 

The film, set on the night of a Thanksgiving meal which a family is set to enjoy in the newly bought Manhattan apartment of their youngest daughter Brigid and her partner Richard, builds up the tension slowly, steadily but sure-footedly. With an almost morbid sense of art direction and casting, the film movingly and ingeniously builds up the frustration and pff-putting warmth of a complex family dynamic, putting it at the forefront and leaving one suitably cold. 

19. Mass 

Fran Kranz, mostly known for his supporting-actor roles in mainstream Hollywood productions, makes an extraordinary directorial, and more importantly, writing debut with Mass. The film, set in real-time at the single location of a lower chamber of an Episcopal Church, becomes the meeting ground of two sets of parents, who confront each other in the aftermath of the closure. It doesn't mean that the injury has vanished into thin air, and the grief still remains. However, the catharsis built up to that point is what constitutes this film. 

By the standards of a regular chamber drama, it must be said that the film is a 111-minute confrontation, nursing wounds and giving us an image of the happenings which occured in the 'flashback' of the film, events which the film doesn't bother showing to us in its charismatic focus. However, the acting talent involved is so excellent that there is no need for such excesses. It's a profoundly personal study of mourning, staged with distinctive movement and originality of approach. 

18. Feathers 

The cine-artists from the contemporary world represent strong, sensory socio-political voices through their art, voicing their concerns in the dialogues of their scripts and designing of their frames. However, sometimes the artists go so all-out with their messages that the 'cinema' of it all vanishes into thin air. Omar Al-Zohairy, having said that, truly announces his powerful voice with his debut film. Where he is different from these artists is particularly the striking thing about him- he turns his comment into an art-form. The film is a dark, tragicomical satire on perpetual state of poverty and the worse state of feminine impoverishment. 

The film, starting initially with the tone of a folk-tale, follows a lower middle-class woman whose husband has been turned into a chicken by a magician who came to entertain the kinfolk on her son's birthday. The rest of the story is indeed about her trying to get her husband back to normality, but more importantly, it is about her journey to sustain herself. The film's impressively dry approach towards the stifled life of a working mother drives the maximum impact here. It's a strong film to arrive, one which reflects the truths associated with its country in the truest artistic landscape, not much different from what Ray did in a different manner in his Pather Panchali. 

17. Rocky 

Two films in, Tamil filmmaker Arun Matheswaran might emerge as an auteur in future. His emblematic blend of simplistic narratives, often with revenge and vengeance at their centre, and stylistically infused gore and violence, clear the clutter of similar narratives which are to be found in more mainstream Indian cinema. However, his violence of panache is exactly what makes him so divisive, especially with his recent sophomore feature Saani Kaayidham, a confident and robust exploitation film. 

But if you buy a blend of substance and massacre, do not fail to check out his strongly ambitious debut film Rocky, which is basically a man avenging the loss of his family from a powerful upper-hand criminal. I know- the film sounds nothing like a great art-house film should, and sometimes the action borders on KGF-level staging. However, the poetic wisdom and visual conviction of this film takes such bland and routine mass stories for a stroll and just give them a push to fall off the cliff, lulling them to the death sleep in which they belong. 

16. Sardar Udham 

Shoojit Sircar is one of the best film-makers we have today in Hindi cinema. He reflects the contemporary human realities by choosing simple stories, and extracting the right amount of humour and heart out of them (case in point, the deeply moving meditation of October and the heartwarming comedy in Piku). However, Sardar Udham is his finest film so far, and it has the kind of mastery he himself will have a hard time topping.

Charting the story of the revolutionary Udham Singh, a disciple-cum-friend of Bhagat Singh who bravely caught the eyes of the world after shooting Michael O'Dwyer in a public hall, the film is grippingly staged but it never becomes about the man himself or the 'crime' which he executed at public display. Without chest-thumping ideals of nationalism and by the aid of an extraordinary leading performance by Vicky Kaushal, the film unimaginably soars. 

15. The Worst Person in the World 

Joachim Trier's razor-sharp urban dramas often convey sharp truths about the world, in a way that most filmmakers can only struggle to match up to. The Worst Person in the World, which premiered at Cannes with a resounding applause and a well-deserved Best Actress nod for its leading lady, the compelling and beautiful Renate Reinsve, is his conclusion of the officially formed Oslo Trilogy, films around characters inhabiting the city, the previous two of them being Reprise and Oslo, August 31st. 

The film navigates through the romance, career ambitions and life-in-general of a young woman Julie, who is, in a typical young-woman fashion, very indecisive about herself, and her hard time realizing that she must do something about it. Through a fairly complex and novel-like structure of twelve chapters, a prologue and an epilogue, the film chronicles her love life in a span of four years, which apparently involves her turning thirty. Also starring an exquisite Anders Danielson Lie in a vital supporting presence which forms the heart of the film in more ways than one, this twisted knot tied between the traditional story of a coming-of-ager and and a romantic-comedy is so charismatic that it is bound to turn into an instant classic. 

14. Flee 

This year, the competition between animated films was mostly dumped as a pointless tug-of-war by this startling animated 'documentary', a film by Danish film director Jonas Poher Rasmussen about Amin Nawabi, an Afghani migrant and a gay academic who is successful in life and is getting married to his boyfriend very soon. The film has Amin telling his story with extremely laudable honesty, even if in triple layers of cinema. 

Initially, I was skeptical of the medium. What the fuck is an animated documentary? How can the highest point of fabrication be used for delivering something so earthbound, untouched and polar-opposite? Thankfully, the first fifteen minutes were enough to clear the clutter. This is a wonderful humanist achievement in film form, which layers the identity of its protagonist with animation and excellent voice enactment of Riz Ahmed. And the following portions of the running time are absolutely harrowing to watch.

13. Passing 

One of the most skilled and fascinating actors of Hollywood right now, Rebecca Hall brings a distinctive subtlety and potency to her debut as a director, the best film to emerge from the Sundance Film Festival of the year and unfortunately subject to a direct-to-home Netflix release without a crucial audience applause. Passing is a visually striking debut piece that uses black-and-white as a filter of sorts to suck in the 'racial' colours which define class and identity in the US. 

Adapted from a novel of the same name written by Nella Larson in 1929, the film follows two women on opposite sides of the racial spectrum. But the thing is that Clare has secretly 'passed' as white, owing to the slightly fairer texture of her lineage, while Irene has made peace with her respectably positioned life at Harlem. The drama here happens at the crossroads, but it so deeply moving in the manner of its complexity and framing that one cannot help but submit to Hall's clarity of vision and perspective, never bothering on the melancholic trappings of the past and revisioning the spectrum to suit the contemporary times well. 

12. The Fallout 

In her debut picture, known actress Megan Park shows the kind of understanding about the life of teenagers that we generally don't associate with American teen dramas. She starts off conventionally, with another generic school day of Vada and her friends. However, there is no looking back into this kind of a tried-and-tested territory after the film enters into a darker alley than the one it inhabited.

Featuring a very impressive performance by a very talented Jenna Ortega, The Fallout is a deeply moving and uncomfortable study of trauma among youngsters and how they have a hard time processing it. It is an empathetic and touching look into the constructs of mental health and how even a little push can lead to destruction. Also, the spotlight on a recently highlighted criminal issue of the US is very poignantly expressed. 

11. C'mon C'mon

After looking at life through parental lenses (in Beginners and 20th Century Woman) and warmly embracing us into yarns of coming-of-age and relationships with films which feel like a collection of beautifully articulated essays, Mike Mills hits us with a third affecting and affectionate charmer that completes an unofficial series of such films in their own right. 

Following a radio journalist Johnny who is traveling around NYC documenting children and their perspective of their lives and their respective futures, and taking care of his nephew Jesse in the process, this exquisitely shot black-and-white film features two of the strongest performances by men this year and is a sweet, saccharine drama about listening to oneself and being hopeful on the face of dark. There's only love and light in this film and I could not resist my temptation of hugging the screen when the film was playing out. 

10. Spencer 

I know that in this world of many biographical films, it is a very bold statement to make. However, I stand by this fact that Chilean master Pablo Larraín makes the best of them all, not restricting himself meanwhile on the medium. Be it the grieving first lady of Jackie or the offensive political poet in Neruda, he makes his worlds come to life by showing a precious little of them, the spotlight always being on what- and rather who- the character truly is. 

Having given this little background, let me also give you a great starting point on his biographical works. Spencer, a gothic horror fable inspired from the tragic and endlessly romanticized life of Princess Diana, is a deeply moving and immediately suffocating account of female emancipation and her muted, confirmed rise against the system. Featuring a terrific performance by Kristen Stewart which is also actually the finest of the year and the decade so far, the film provides a carefully constructed and elaborately designed first hand experience of the stifling conditions which fuck Diana's mental health up to many extents. 

9. Drive My Car 

The obvious return of Ryusuke Hamaguchi in this list! I had written a briefly long write-up for my Letterboxd account when I first watched this incredible cross of three auteurs- Hamaguchi himself, Murakami and Chekhov- but as distant as I'm getting from its first watch, it is growing on me just as much and I don't want to brush that feeling off my sleeves, at least not anytime soon. 

Drive My Car is a four-hour meditation on love, yearning and letting go. It's a running time so typical of an epic and atypical for such a knotty, compelling film as this. However, the reason why it fits just masterfully, is because it never tries to condense or standardize the tragedy of art or the art of tragedy. Hidetoshi Nishijima features in a star-making turn and Toko Miura fascinates as the supporting wheel to the story. 

8. Writing with Fire

Until and unless you're living under a rock or you accidentally stumbled on to this article without the knowledge of what it stands to celebrate, you should be aware of the storm that the Indian documentaries are on the pedestal of global film festivals such as Sundance and Cannes. A winner of the Best Documentary feature at Sundance of the year and a nominee in the same category at the Oscars this year, Writing with Fire by Sushmit Ghosh and Rintu Thomas is the best Indian film of the year. 

A compelling film through and through without any pretentious technical designing, the film tells an important story which was in a severe need to be told- that of Khabar Lahariya, one of the only media houses which are run by women. These, at that, are rural, often low-caste women who are subject to abuse from all four corners of the suffocatingly regressive environment in Uttar Pradesh which they are subject to. It's a masterpiece on liberation and functions as a brave, bracing and brilliant study of what forms the horror of the regime which India is surviving since 2014. 

7. Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson films, no matter what the tone, always manage to leave their audiences with a train of thoughts, whether they're extraordinary westerns like There Will Be Blood, fascinating character studies like The Master or gripping intersectional dramas such as the kind of Phantom Thread. The latter, he follows up with a film so delightfully stimulating and so nostalgic that you'll be left with quite a lot to remember and chuckle, even more to sit back and think about. 

Conveying the director's love for the saccharine and melancholy-dipped 1970s, Licorice Pizza is one eloquently written coming-of-age love letter of a film, like a very committed worker taking a recreational tour to the Richard Linklater lane. With exquisite cinematography and editing, extraordinary leading performances by actors who are only making their debut, and superlative writing, Licorice Pizza manages to be just the right amount of flawless to become one of the best films of the year. 

6. The Green Knight 

David Lowery is one of the finest contemporary cine-artists we have today in American cinema, a treasury trove in a constant need to be unraveled. He constructs incredible anti-establishment genre pieces with more internalised outbursts than passages of total external activity. His second collaboration with A24 after his personal masterpiece A Ghost Story, is a medieval Arthurian masterpiece written in anonymity, which doubles up as a gripping coming-of-age story and a stunning eco fable. 

Starring Dev Patel in one of the year's most astounding performances as the eponymous Sir Gawain, the film charts his journey of returning the revenge, a story heard and told through many Christmases since it got registered in its entirety. However, Lowery extracts pleasure not from the proceedings but from the surreal, even more active and actively dim-lit pauses, defining the femininity, sensuality and chivalric madness of this act with pin-point precision. Regardless of how you feel about this polarising film, The Green Knight is a must-watch. 

5. The Power of the Dog

Jane Campion, the American mistress of dryly amusing and at times wonderfully affecting dramas, paused her career for nearly a decade since her last film, Bright Star (2009). And her return to her game proves that she wasn't wasting all that time after all. Based on an adapted screenplay from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog is western fiction at its most brutal and brilliant. 

Divided very neatly into chapters but never condensing the internalized combustion of its complex central character, or the even more complicated two supporting players around him, The Power of the Dog features Benedict Cumberbatch in a screen presence so razor-sharp, that it is in fact an instant classic. Ari Wegener shoots the 1925 Montana with a fresh lease of life, which only enhances the already furnished mastery of this incredibly revisionist piece of psychosexual thriller which is bound to leave you in awe of its craft if you don't go in with a set of expectations and pre-concieved notions. Too much of an ask from an English film with a cast this mainstream? I know. Fuck off. 

4. The Souvenir: Part II

While it should not be a very groundbreaking information to deal with that Joana Hogg followed her incredibly understated and moving The Souvenir with a sequel even more impressive and way more compelling than its source (given the genuinely rooted and convincing nature of the source film which could hardly pave the way for a continuation which is not just as great if not more), we were not quite prepared for the beautiful and heartfelt coming-of-age journey that this second part has given us. At that, when both Hogg and Swinton junior have loosened their shackles and reservations quite a bit. 

The film finds Julie a more processed woman than the one we made her out to be in the first part. She is a budding director who has placed camera as her own personal altar before the world. It reflects her better than perhaps even the film could, and yet, precisely that forms the film's biggest strength- its ability to travel through the exact coping mechanisms of Julie. Its end note- a film-within-a-film structure, is done with more astute attention and cerebral purity than the one attempted by the makers of Bergman Island, a broader film talking about a straining romance and female identity. More importantly, it organizes cinema as nothing less than a literal way of growing up in ways large and small. 

3. The Lost Daughter 

My viewing experience of Maggie Gyllenhaal's debut was incredibly close and personal, given that its source text, the novel of the same name written by Elena Ferrante, was one of the first books which I read through the first wave of Coronavirus. The movie adaptation felt like an artistic satisfaction and a wholesome closure, and in what a way. 

Extraordinarily sensuous and intermittently campy, Gyllenhaal's focused and gripping approach towards the film's serpentine and complex look at the duties of motherhood makes for a very engaging and troubling drama in equal measure. Flawlessly performed by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman as the younger and older selves of each other, the film benefits from its staunch female gaze, and a very important outlook towards female relationships that makes the story itself worth hearing. 

2. Petite Maman

At this phase of my life, it feels as if everything around me and inside me is so wrong that survival feels like a gift in itself- everything that I do, no matter how okay is might be, feels like an act of forbiddance. Celine Sciamma wonderfully projected this already with her beautifully mounted 2019 feature film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). With Petite Maman, she provides a compelling remedy to the same. 

Starring the gifted Sanz twins as complexly tied young individuals, the film follows the kind of animated and delightful fantasy premise that suits a mainstream, big-budgeted picture just fine enough. However, the wisdom and conviction exercised by Sciamma towards her material feels just on-point and warm and lovely, far from how we're used to see these narratives on-screen in fact. This is a personal, reflective mood piece on coming-of-age and to forge relationships with unvarnished sincerity. It's a compact narrative which morphs into a hard-to-describe experience. 

1. Memoria

Thai master Apichatpong Weerasethakul made heads turn when he marched to Cannes with a film outside the perphery of his motherland, a Spain-set bilingual film with English actress Tilda Swinton as the lead, Everyone expected it to be a change of tone, and an accessibly driven feature film experience with a mainstream elevation. However, the Thai master knows better than that and definitely does better than I've seen him do in the works of his native language. 

Memoria is a definitive audio-visual experience at its most sensory. Perhaps this is also what makes the film a very hard one to process- how can one base the entire analysis of a film based off its absorbingly haunting and healing auditory experience, or the fact that it is supernaturally consuming when it comes to its sparse, meditative visual aesthetics and textures? By appreciating the nuance of its diverse supernatural commentary, and by knowing a precious nothing about what the film actually is, you can.