top 10 movies of 2021

2021 has come and gone so much has changed so much is the same, but from massive blockbusters to the most intimate indies fortunately filmmaking has had a banner year. As we look back on it in review, these are our picks for the top 10 movies of 2021. Starting at number 10 we're looking at the films that made us laugh and thankfully there were a fair few we had cute if not groundbreaking animated entries from both Disney and Pixar, which charmed us in the same way they always do Wes-Anderson took an extra strength dose of pastel pills and delivered us an anthology of thrice distilled idiosyncrasy. That was predictably delightful while Paul Thomas Anderson combined Philip Seymour Hoffman heir with literally. The entire hem family in a loosely structured hangout movie that may not have been his best, but was his most fun in licorice pizza plan was a hysterical, sex, comedy, romp in the vein of super bad and book smart and Shiva baby was hilarious but also crazy stressful. But our favorite comedy of the year and surely the hardest to pin down was an adaptation of a Twitter threat of all things. We are talking here of course about Zola hey last month 

I went dancing at this cute spot in Florida. Where my roommate's girl made like five g's a night my roommate. Just told me that he going down there tomorrow and he asked me if I had any friends that wanna make some money. You were the first I thought of damn we just met yesterday and you're already trying to take whole trips together. When we leave in adapted from an hysterical series of 148 tweets about why Asia king and this here fell out Zola captures the raw audacious very online energy of its source material in a saga about two strippers heading to Florida to dance together that goes very, very awry while sporting obvious visual shades of spring breakers and the Florida project Kenexa bravo's sophomore feature is contemporary in a way, even those films are not truly reflecting the manic the energy of a generation that grew up online in both admiration and critique it's an insane tale that's as tense as it is funny but if that's not enough to convince you of its worth let us not fail to mention that it includes Greg from succession wrapping Hannah Montana by moguls so there's that in our next two slots,

 we're looking at the blockbusters and here too 2021 came back with a fury this year we got a couple of big-ticket musicals that took sharp melodic tugs upon our heartstrings in the form of in the heights and west side story James bond took big risks delivered a couple of stellar action set pieces and plunged into the deep unknown while stumbling on a few of the fundamentals and marvel began its next series in earnest impressing us with black widow  Shanxi and especially our number nine pick spider-man, no way home, however, even marvel is overshadowed by this year's behemoth hype machine and rightly so our number eight pick know what's in the doom, pain nice knowing you spider-man excuse me in no way home our live-action spider-man took a page from animated miles morales book and found himself faced not with foes from across the marvel cinematic universe but the ghosts of spider-man villains past with a few very satisfying surprises that were both original and amazing Rhett Connie and former versions  of the spider-man saga as the

MCU's phase 4 continued its build out into the multiverse and honestly it was a blast beyond its multi-dimensionality there was nothing particularly revolutionary about no way home, but then again, it wasn't aiming for groundbreaking instead it was exactly the kind of genre-spanning treat the entire world has come to know and love pretty much every single time out from marvel studios, there's a little comedy a little drama some romance

some action great villains clear hero morals and messages and stakes and excitement and emotions and constant entertainment from start to finish it's the latest entry into the world's most expensive and ambitious serial storyline ever told so yeah we like experimental cinema but we like comfort food too and there's nothing quite as comforting as the heroes we've come to know and love saving the universe one more time but then there was dune remaking frank herbert's far-future saga of galactic colonialism thundering across all the big screens and the loudest sound system since late October this sci-fi epic part

1 operated at a magnitude like little else the sense of the scale was nothing short of gargantuan and the universe-building that it served felt wholly realized and wholly real the visual effects were essentially perfect integrating into actual footage without a single seam showing and they made for the easiest fantasy world to get fully lost in since perhaps lord of the rings the resulting world looked and sounded utterly celestial the sound in large part thanks to han Zimmer channeling the late Johan Johansson to a fantastic an effect from the very first moments of the film denis Villeneuve continued to prove that he directs sequences unlike anyone else working today bending space and time and all the techniques of cinema together into a multi-sensory an emotional experience that was in each 10 to 20 minute spans of time something utterly new and while he has occasionally stumbled in the past at tying all his sequences together into a satisfying ending here it was all upside setup and promise an entirely new world wherein we can dream his unique brand of future next up at number 7, we take a brief interlude from fiction films for documentaries Elizabeth chai vasarieli and

jimmy Chen continued their run of pulse-pounding dock thrillers chronicling real-life man vs nature struggles with their take on the rescue of the Thai soccer team in the rescue roadrunner gave us a peek into the behind the camera life of Anthony Bourdain the dissident looked into the the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi flea compassionately animated the story of an Afghan refugee on the precipice of his marriage but most of all it was a great year for music documentaries like to a crazy degree there were four Britney ducks this year alone Edgar wright made the sparks brothers peter Jackson made get back but none were quite as much of a blast as summer of Seoul as far as I could see it was just black people this was the first time I'd ever seen so many of us it was incredible roots drummer amir Questlove Thompson made his directorial debut with this impressive documentary recounting the story of a massive life-changing festival with a mind-blowing lineup in the summer of 69. this was the Harlem cultural festival and Questlove set out this year not to rewrite the record but to finally just write it for the first a time filled with concert footage of stunningly high-quality key interviews with all the biggest players and a sense of not just musical but also cultural revolution the summer of soul or when the revolution could not be televised looks back at and re-energizes a vitally an important cultural moment that has been vulgarized by uneven coverage the result is not just an important historical document of the 

joyful side of a cultural moment but a damn good time if 2021 was an outlier in terms of music docs it was a veritable banner year for period pieces our next two slots are set aside from them and honestly they almost took up three Kenneth Branagh is making oscar waves with his rather sentimental Belfast paul Verhoeven asked us what if like the bible was way sexier than it already is in Benedetta King Richard rendered the Williams sister's upbringing in Shakespearean mode judas and the black messiah came out this year although you'd be forgiven if it felt like forever ago 2021's been a long one but we can't forget this moving tale of power and sabotage in the civil rights era while Sardar udom gives us a nuanced human non-linear look at the life of a 1940s freedom fighter the last duel is ridley Scott proving he's still goddamn hasn't in medieval Rashomon sporting exceptional performances from both jody comer and surprisingly ben Affleck with maybe his best role and worst facial hair in decades but it just misses our list in favor of our number six pick the hypnotic Arthurian riddle of the green knight o greatest of kings indulge me in this friendly Christmas game let whichever of your nights his boldest of blood and wildest of hearts step forth take up arms and try with honor to land a blow against me however, even the green knight cannot match the unparalleled brilliance and the majesty of our number 5 pick jane campion's utterly astonishing the power of the dog, I wonder what little lady made these I did sir my mother was a florist so I made them look like the ones in our garden oh well do pardon me there is an overwhelmingly surreal quality to David lowry's

 adaptation of the Arthurian legend of gowan telling the tale of a the young knight in search of heroism he does not yet possess like that of a the truth that swims in and out of focus dancing beyond our grasp this is not your traditional sword and sorcery epic resplendent with pitched battles and acts of glory and Arthur Guinevere Mordred and gowan are not your parents knights in shining armor clear bastions of the strength of good and evil they like the rest of the green knights are alive with contradictions that the film refuses to even attempt to resolve dreamlike psychological often non-verbal it folds in on itself like a thousand years of retellings all at once a tale reshaped a thousand times for different ends here laid out as all or none it would be unwise to go in expecting a tidy ending but if you came prepared for a fever dream you were sure to leave enchanted the power of the dog jane campion's story of two brothers bucking at their natures in the twilight years of the the wild west and the mother and son who disrupt their dynamic trades in a different kinds of open-mindedness every a single one of the most important answers are there not a single extra there is a cut to the bone efficiency to jane campion's minimalism when it comes to narrative saving space for a depth of psychological richness and sensuality in its place johnny greenwood's score is a literal masterpiece with melodies that will haunt you long after the credits roll and campion has long proven herself the master of frontiers places where the concepts of masculinity and femininity meet at their fringes and here is hardly the exception finding the latent the eroticism of the cowboy lifestyle much like claire denis did with soldiers in beau travail she finds stunning beauty at the extremes of her camera lens both ultra-wide and ultra-tight and wrangles an entire cast worth of brilliant performances even while some initially feel off our

 recommendation is to trust that uncanniness will reveal itself because campion does not make a a single misstep in this slow burn anti-western. We want to take a quick breath at the number four and look at some of the great films we couldn't quite fit in other places on this list we don't have a horror pick making it into our top 10 this year but that doesn't mean there weren't some fascinating options the minimalistic lamb the astonishingly detailed achievement of mad god we have very mixed feelings about titan but it is certainly an exceptionally well crafted film if not always a likable one and we don't think this cinematic year in review is complete without a mention of as far as thrillers go it's hard not to be impressed by both nick cages and the filmmaker's restraint in pig or the anxiety-inducing kitchen confidential the tension of boiling point and there are a couple of films we weren't able to get our hands-on in time to write this list the tragedy of Macbeth eluded us although it's probably available in theaters now as you're watching and we weren't able to make a screening of memoria is one of our most anticipated films of the year but nobody else will have a chance to see it until next year either so we figure it hardly counts but at the top of our grab bag, we have an animated film the final finale to a very a long string of finales. Hideaki Anno's the capstone to the Evangelion epic thrice upon a time over 25 years ago Hideaki Anno revolutionized Japanese animation forever with his neon genesis Evangelion series combining the deeply personal with the massively existential in a genre-expanding epic of battling mecha kaiju but the ending was dense from there anno remade the ending in feature film form too much greater success and truly deserved critical acclaim and then he continued his battle with one of anime's most fascinating narratives with the rebuild of Evangelion series that saw the same story retold from a new angle to mixed success and this year he's offered a third and utterly final ending the the result is not just an example of a great work finding a fitting conclusion but of a brilliant if historically tortured creator wrestling with himself and his own concept of finality and finally finding a way to make peace with saying goodbye for our last three picks we have but one category the broad boring catch-all of drama but oh what a year it has been for good drama from spencer to the card counter from coda to uni lin-manual Miranda behind the camera in tik boom molly woods the disciple Rebecca hall's passing the multi-layered Bergman island and our top three picks in order souvenir part 2 drive my car and come on come on Patrick hi hi how are you I am middling how are you yeah middling as well like Evangelion the souvenir part 2 is another sequel that sees a narrative turning further inwards rather than expanding out in 2019 joanna hogg gave us the semi-autobiographical tale of Julie is a film student who finds herself in love with a heroin addict a searingly an honest take on all the best and worst parts of the binding power of love but this year she

 dissects herself even further examining herself in a state of examination as she follows Julie grappling with her own story of love and loss as she attempts to turn it into her own film that is to say Julie and joanna's stories don't end at their endings but continue onwards in art and memory and the souvenir part two is the story of that and what sounds like a self-referential recipe for dreary navel gazing turns out to be something far more insightful more profound and more moving than even the thing itself is a screenwriter sits up half asleep half entranced in the middle of the night and dictates the story of her dreams to her husband in the morning he tells it back to her so she can use it at work her husband a theater director puts on multilingual plays where actors cannot understand each other's words but must reach across the language barrier to communicate nonetheless, she records for him an entire play with his parts left out so that he can learn his lines one the day she suddenly passes away two years later we find him driving through japan at night still in dialogue with her over those same lines so pass the first 40 minutes of drive my car's prologue before the opening credits even roll simple restrained light on the plot while heavy on emotional complexity the film slowly steers its way into the kind of the grief-stricken quagmire that often makes up the shape of life in the shadow of messy tragedy what follows in the next two and a half hours as director Kuku finally opens up to and with his driver is a quiet epic about the small bridges between us, that language can build and the huge parts of us that can never cross them what will stay with you and what will you forget what scares you what makes you angry do you feel lonely what makes you happy come on come on is a story that has been told a thousand times before someone without children unexpectedly finds themselves thrust into a parental role only to be significantly transformed by the experience but it is neither the story nor the structure that makes this film special it is the way the film treats its subject that elevates it far above the generic crowd director mike mills approach the experience of parenthood with an unparalleled level of naturalism revealing a keen sensitivity to how children think and speak and flow from moment to moment and the inner children of the adults in their care that these experiences can call out of them both beautiful and infuriating for each loosely scripted and heavily improvised the words and the tremendous performances that lead to them end up feeling astonishingly like real life however, it is the way the film regards these subjects and they are unabashed the humanity that elevates come on come on to the level of art, the film turns towards this realism that the actors have created all their brilliance and their messiness their sense and their nonsense with such gentleness and unqualified compassion that it feels as if they and all the childishness which we the viewer deep down possess are infinitely forgiven the result is deeply profoundly moving in a way that the simplicity and ordinariness of the plot would never suggest which is why we think it's one of the best movies of 2021 you're crying? No, I'm not. Yes! you are…2021 has come and gone so much has changed so much is the

 same, but from massive blockbusters to the most intimate indies fortunately filmmaking has had a banner year. As we look back on it in review, these are our picks for the top 10 movies of 2021. Starting at number 10 we're looking at the films that made us laugh and thankfully there were a fair few we had cute if not groundbreaking animated entries from both Disney and Pixar which charmed us in the same way they always do Wes-Anderson took an extra strength dose of pastel pills and delivered us an anthology of thrice distilled idiosyncrasy. That was predictably delightful while Paul Thomas Anderson combined Philip Seymour Hoffman heir with literally. The entire hem family in a loosely structured hangout movie that may not have been his best, but was his most fun in licorice pizza plan was a hysterical, sex, comedy, romp in the vein of super bad and book smart and Shiva baby was hilarious but also crazy stressful. But our favorite comedy of the year and surely the hardest to pin down was an adaptation of a Twitter threat of all things. We are talking here of course about Zola hey last month I went dancing at this cute spot in Florida. Where my roommate's girl made like five g's a night my roommate. Just told me that he going down there tomorrow and he asked me if I had any friends that wanna make some money. You were the first I thought of damn we just met yesterday and you're already trying to take whole trips together. When we leave in adapted from an hysterical series of 148 tweets about why Asia king and this here fell out Zola captures the raw audacious very online energy of its source material in a saga about two strippers heading to Florida to dance together that goes very, very awry while sporting obvious visual shades of spring breakers and the Florida project Kenexa bravo's sophomore feature is contemporary in a way, even those films are not truly reflecting the manic the energy of a generation that grew up online in both admiration and critique it's an insane tale that's as tense as it is funny but if that's not enough to convince you of its worth let us not fail to mention that it includes Greg from succession wrapping Hannah Montana by moguls so there's that in our next two slots, we're looking at the blockbusters and here too 2021 came back with a fury this year we got a couple of big-ticket musicals that took sharp melodic tugs upon our heartstrings in the form of in the heights and west side story James bond took big risks delivered a couple of stellar action set pieces and plunged into the deep unknown while stumbling on a few of the fundamentals and marvel began its next series in earnest impressing us with black widow  Shanxi and especially our number nine pick spider-man, no way home, however, even marvel is overshadowed by this year's behemoth hype machine and rightly so our number eight pick know what's in the doom, pain nice knowing you spider-man excuse me in no way home our live-action spider-man took a page from animated miles morales book and found himself faced not with foes from across the marvel cinematic universe but the ghosts of spider-man villains past with a few very

 satisfying surprises that were both original and amazing Rhett Connie and former versions  of the spider-man saga as the MCU's phase 4 continued its build out into the multiverse and honestly it was a blast beyond its multi-dimensionality there was nothing particularly revolutionary about no way home, but then again, it wasn't aiming for groundbreaking instead it was exactly the kind of genre-spanning treat the entire world has come to know and love pretty much every single time out from marvel studios, there's a little comedy a little drama some romance some action great villains clear hero morals and messages and stakes and excitement and emotions and constant entertainment from start to finish it's the latest entry into the world's most expensive and ambitious serial storyline ever told so yeah we like experimental cinema but we like comfort food too and there's nothing quite as comforting as the heroes we've come to know and love saving the universe one more time but then there was dune remaking frank herbert's far-future saga of galactic colonialism thundering across all the big screens and the loudest sound system since late October this sci-fi epic part 1 operated at a magnitude like little else the sense of the scale was nothing short of gargantuan and the universe-building that it served felt wholly realized and wholly real the visual effects were essentially perfect integrating into actual footage without a single seam showing and they made for the easiest fantasy world to get fully lost in since perhaps lord of the rings the resulting world looked and sounded utterly celestial the sound in large part thanks to han Zimmer channeling the late Johan Johansson to a fantastic an effect from the very first moments of the film denis Villeneuve continued to prove that he directs sequences unlike anyone else working today bending space and time and all the techniques of cinema together into a multi-sensory an emotional experience that was in each 10 to 20 minute spans of time something utterly new and while he has occasionally stumbled in the past at tying all his sequences together into a satisfying ending here it was all upside setup and promise an entirely new world wherein we can dream his unique brand of future next up at number 7, we take a brief interlude from fiction films for documentaries Elizabeth chai vasarieli and jimmy Chen continued their run of pulse-pounding dock thrillers chronicling real-life man vs nature struggles with their take on the rescue of the Thai soccer team in the rescue roadrunner gave us a peek into the behind the camera life of Anthony Bourdain the dissident looked into the the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi flea compassionately animated the story of an Afghan refugee on the precipice of his marriage but most of all it was a great year for music documentaries like to a crazy degree there were four Britney ducks this year alone Edgar wright made the sparks brothers peter Jackson made get back but none were quite as much of a blast as summer of Seoul as far as I could see it was just black people this was the first time I'd ever seen so many of us it was incredible roots drummer amir Questlove Thompson made his directorial debut with this impressive documentary recounting the story of a massive life-changing festival with a mind-blowing lineup in the summer of 69. this was the Harlem cultural festival and Questlove set out this year not to rewrite the record but

to finally just write it for the first a time filled with concert footage of stunningly high-quality key interviews with all the biggest players and a sense of not just musical but also cultural revolution the summer of soul or when the revolution could not be televised looks back at and re-energizes a vitally an important cultural moment that has been vulgarized by uneven coverage the result is not just an important historical document of the joyful side of a cultural moment but a damn good time if 2021 was an outlier in terms of music docs it was a veritable banner year for period pieces our next two slots are set aside from them and honestly they almost took up three Kenneth Branagh is making oscar waves with his rather sentimental Belfast paul Verhoeven asked us what if like the bible was way sexier than it already is in Benedetta King Richard rendered the Williams sister's upbringing in Shakespearean mode judas and the black messiah came out this year although you'd be forgiven if it felt like forever ago 2021's been a long one but we can't forget this moving tale of power and sabotage in the civil rights era while Sardar udom gives us a nuanced human non-linear look at the life of a 1940s freedom fighter the last duel is ridley Scott proving he's still goddamn hasn't in medieval Rashomon sporting exceptional performances from both jody comer and surprisingly ben Affleck with maybe his best role and worst facial hair in decades but it just misses our list in favor of our number six pick the hypnotic Arthurian riddle of the green knight o greatest of kings indulge me in this friendly Christmas game let whichever of your nights his boldest of blood and wildest of hearts step forth take up arms and try with honor to land a blow against me however, even the green knight cannot match the unparalleled brilliance and the majesty of our number 5 pick jane campion's utterly astonishing the power of the dog, I wonder what little lady made these I did sir my mother was a florist so I made them look like the ones in our garden oh well do pardon me there is an overwhelmingly surreal quality to David lowry's adaptation of the Arthurian legend of gowan telling the tale of a the young knight in search of heroism he does not yet possess like that of a the truth that swims in and out of focus dancing beyond our grasp this is not your traditional sword and sorcery epic resplendent with pitched battles and acts of glory and Arthur Guinevere Mordred and gowan are not your parents knights in shining armor clear bastions of the strength of good and evil they like the rest of the green knights are alive with contradictions that the film refuses to even attempt to resolve dreamlike psychological often non-verbal it folds in on itself like a thousand years of retellings all at once a tale reshaped a thousand times for different ends here laid out as all or none it would be unwise to go in expecting a tidy ending but if you came prepared for a fever dream you were sure to leave enchanted the power of the dog jane campion's story of two brothers bucking at their natures in the twilight years of the the wild west and the mother and son who disrupt their dynamic trades in a different kinds of open-mindedness every a single one of the most important answers are there not a single extra there is a cut to the bone efficiency to jane campion's minimalism when it comes to narrative saving space for a depth of psychological richness and sensuality in its place johnny greenwood's score is a literal masterpiece with melodies that will haunt you long after the credits roll and campion has long proven herself the master of frontiers places where the concepts of masculinity and femininity meet at their fringes and here is hardly the exception finding the latent the eroticism of the cowboy lifestyle much like claire denis did with soldiers in beau travail she finds stunning beauty at the extremes of her camera lens both ultra-wide and ultra-tight and wrangles an entire cast worth of brilliant performances even while some initially feel off our recommendation is to trust that uncanniness will reveal itself because campion does not make a a single misstep in this slow burn anti-western. We want to take a quick breath at the number four and look at some of the great films we couldn't quite fit in other places on this list we don't have a horror pick making it into our top 10 this year but that doesn't mean there weren't some fascinating options the minimalistic lamb the astonishingly detailed achievement of mad god we have very mixed feelings about titan but it is certainly an exceptionally well crafted film if not always a likable one and we don't think this cinematic year in review is complete without a mention of as far as thrillers go it's hard not to be impressed by both nick cages and the filmmaker's restraint in pig or the anxiety-inducing kitchen confidential the tension of boiling point and there are a couple of films we weren't able to get our hands-on in time to write this list the tragedy of Macbeth eluded us although it's probably available in theaters now as you're watching and we weren't able to make a screening of memoria is one of our most anticipated films of the year but nobody else will have a chance to see it until next year either so we figure it hardly counts but at the top of our grab bag, we have an animated film the final finale to a very a long string of finales. Hideaki Anno's the capstone to the Evangelion epic thrice upon a time over 25 years ago Hideaki Anno revolutionized Japanese animation forever with his neon genesis Evangelion series combining the deeply personal with the massively existential in a genre-expanding epic of battling mecha kaiju but the ending was dense from there anno remade the ending in feature film form too much greater success and truly deserved critical acclaim and then he continued his battle with one of anime's most fascinating narratives with the rebuild of Evangelion series that saw the same story retold from a new angle to mixed success and this year he's offered a third and utterly final ending the the result is not just an example of a great work finding a fitting conclusion but of a brilliant if historically tortured creator wrestling with himself and his own concept of finality and finally finding a way to make peace with saying goodbye for our last three picks we have but one category the broad boring catch-all of drama but oh what a year it has been for good drama from spencer to the card counter from coda to uni lin-manual Miranda behind the camera in tik boom molly woods the disciple Rebecca hall's passing the multi-layered Bergman island and our top three picks in order souvenir part 2 drive my car and come on come on Patrick hi hi how are you I am middling how are you yeah middling as well like Evangelion the souvenir part 2 is another sequel that sees a narrative turning further inwards rather than expanding out in 2019 joanna hogg gave us the semi-autobiographical tale of Julie is a film student who finds herself in love with a heroin addict a searingly an honest take on all the best and worst parts of the binding power of love but this year she dissects herself even further examining herself in a state of examination as she follows Julie grappling with her own story of love and loss as she attempts to turn it into her own film that is to say Julie and joanna's stories don't end at their endings but continue onwards in art and memory and the souvenir part two is the story of that and what sounds like a self-referential recipe for dreary navel gazing turns out to be something far more insightful more profound and more moving than even the thing itself is a screenwriter sits up half asleep half entranced in the middle of the night and dictates the story of her dreams to her husband in the morning he tells it back to her so she can use it at work her husband a theater director puts on multilingual plays where actors cannot understand each other's words but must reach across the language barrier to communicate nonetheless, she records for him an entire play with his parts left out so that he can learn his lines one the day she suddenly passes away two years later we find him driving through japan at night still in dialogue with her over those same lines so pass the first 40 minutes of drive my car's prologue before the opening credits even roll simple restrained light on the plot while heavy on emotional complexity the film slowly steers its way into the kind of the grief-stricken quagmire that often makes up the shape of life in the shadow of messy tragedy what follows in the next two and a half hours as director Kuku finally opens up to and with his driver is a quiet epic about the small bridges between us, that language can build and the huge parts of us that can never cross them what will stay with you and what will you forget what scares you what makes you angry do you feel lonely what makes you happy come on come on is a story that has been told a thousand times before someone without children unexpectedly finds themselves thrust into a parental role only to be significantly transformed by the experience but it is neither the story nor the structure that makes this film special it is the way the film treats its subject that elevates it far above the generic crowd director mike mills approach the experience of parenthood with an unparalleled level of naturalism revealing a keen sensitivity to how children think and speak and flow from moment to moment and the inner children of the adults in their care that these experiences can call out of them both beautiful and infuriating for each loosely scripted and heavily improvised the words and the tremendous performances that lead to them end up feeling astonishingly like real life however, it is the way the film regards these subjects and they are unabashed the humanity that elevates come on come on to the level of art, the film turns towards this realism that the actors have created all their brilliance and their messiness their sense and their nonsense with such gentleness and unqualified compassion that it feels as if they and all the childishness which we the viewer deep down possess are infinitely forgiven the result is deeply profoundly moving in a way that the simplicity and ordinariness of the plot would never suggest which is why we think it's one of the best movies of 2021 you're crying? No, I'm not. Yes! you are…