What are your favorite movies that came out in 2021?

1. Days - Best movie I can't recommend to anyone. Brutally slow, but beautiful to look at and I was absorbed the entire time in its depiction of urban malaise.
2. Pig - Lovely little story of loss, big Nic Cage fan so it was wonderful seeing him this committed and serious. The shaky camerawork got on my nerves a little but I thought it was wonderful.
3. The Card Counter - Wake up babe, new Paul Schrader movie about the atrocity that most currently interests him. Paul Schrader kind of makes the same movie over and over again with a different political central core, and this isn't as good as the last time (First Reformed), but I'm always there for it because he's great at it.
4. Dune - Big fan of the book, thought it was basically unadaptable, ended up very impressed. Particularly liked Paul being turned from a more typical teenager into a Shinji Ikari figure who's forced down this path despite his ability.
5. Matrix Resurrections - Love every Matrix movie, and that didn't change here. Felt less like a fourth movie and more like a visual adaptation of a retrospective director's commentary, with Lana Wachowski basically giving us notes on how the world changed since The Matrix and how she feels about a lot of the movie as a result, and hammering in some of its thematic throughlines and what really mattered all along. Loved seeing it.
6. West Side Story - Even real world actions aside, thought Elgort was a clear weak link here, but loved absolutely everything else. The choice to frame this during the construction of Lincoln Center (calling back to the real world circumstance of the 1961 movie's creation) made its central conflict so much more tragic, useless, and crushing.
7. No Sudden Move - Wonderful little "job gone wrong" paranoia heist movie from Soderbergh, the king of heist movies. Especially liked the ridiculous wide angle lenses used in this that messed with surroundings and seemed to leave the characters in frame stumbling through an unnavigable distorting space.
8. The Last Duel - Billed as #MeToo Rashomon, but I think that did a bit of a disservice to the film. It's really a movie about truth's irrelevance in relation to power and systems of social influence. Even in "justice" there is erasure of agency.
9. C'mon C'mon - Love any movie that treats the struggle of adolescence with this much respect and lack of condescension. Great Joaquin Phoenix performance, and the more segmented structure with its themes of memory worked really well.
10. F9 - Family.

Movies I haven't seen from this year yet that I wanna get to - The Power of the Dog, Annette, Licorice Pizza, This is not a Burial it's a Resurrection, Petite Maman, Found, Zeros and Ones, We're All Going to the World's Fair, a dozen others I can't immediately remember.