The best movies of 2021: from Dune to The Power of the Dog

Does the box office count more than the Academy Awards? Here’s our verdict.

Alia Shawkat, Niciole Kidman and Nina Arianda in Being the Ricardos

In 1941, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane did poorly at the box office and won a single Oscar, for best original screenplay. The best picture that year was How Green Was My Valley, for which director John Ford collected his third Oscar. Top of the box office, by a long way, was Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper, who was named best actor.

Three fine films but the one that has since become the perennial No.1 on the all-time greats list is the one that did the worst of the three, with critics, prize judges and the ticket-buying public.

While the media proprietor William Randolph Hearst, who hated what he thought the film said about him, had a significant impact, it’s still a fair example of how any “best films” list is determined by different factors, including history.

Does the box office count more than the Academy Awards? Will the “best” of 2021 stand the test of time or will film fans in 2071 be lauding a masterpiece we ignored?

Further, 2021 is complicated by Covid.

Some of the best new release films I saw in the past 12 months were not at the cinema, or were there but briefly.

With all of that in mind, let’s start with the box office. According to the Box Office Mojo website, top dog in Australia in 2021 is Godzilla v Kong, which I liked, taking $21m.

However the new Bond film, No Time to Die, which is still in cinemas, is second and closing fast at almost $19m. The rest of the top five are the ninth Fast & Furious movie, the Peter Rabbit sequel and the Marvel action adventure Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.

Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, the Oscar winner that came out in March, is not in the top 20.

The global box office numbers have some interesting differences that show the increasing importance of the Chinese market. No.1 is the Chinese-made Korean War movie The Battle at Lake Changjin, taking almost $US900m to date, almost all of it in China. It is in limited release here.

Nicolas Cage stars in new movie PIG

No.2, at $US763m, is another Chinese film, the comedy Hi, Mom. The Bond film and Fast & Furious 9 are not far behind. Godzilla v Kong, our No.1, is in seventh spot.

None of these money-making movies is being touted as an Oscar contender. The possible exception is Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which has been out for only a few weeks and is expected to do well at the box office. It’s visually spectacular – made for the big screen – and would be in my top 25 films of 2021, as would No Time to Die and Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch.

When it comes to best picture and best director, the Oscars buzz, at this point, hovers around five movies.

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, out here in the new year, leads the pack, according to Oscar watchers such as Variety magazine.

The others on the in-the-know lists are, more or less in ranked order, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, Dune, each out now, and Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story and PT Anderson’s Liquorice Pizza, each due on Boxing Day.

Just off this five is King Richard, out this week, in which Will Smith, as the father of tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, is considered a best actor front runner.

The best actress race is considered tight, though Nicole Kidman is considered a contender for her take on Lucille Ball in the just-released Being the Ricardos. Lady Gaga is a chance for House of Gucci, though the reviews of the film have been middling.

There are also some foreign language films we are sure to hear more about, such as Japan’s Oscar submission, Drive My Car, just voted film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle.

I’ve saved the critics to last.

I’ve been reviewing films for almost a decade now, so somewhere near 1000 films all up. My first thought, on every film, is, “What are the filmmakers trying to do here?” My second thought is, “Who is the target audience?” The fact a film does not work for me does not necessarily make it a bad film (once we strip out Magic Mike XXL). Of those 1000-odd films, three have received five stars from me: the hard-to-watch-but-must-watch Australian documentary The Children in the Pictures, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: Final Cut.

That number will increase to four next weekend when I review The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen and starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. It is my film of the year, to date, as I have yet to see Belfast, West Side Story, King Richard or Liquorice Pizza.

The rest of my present top 12, in release date order, are: Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman; Regina King’s One Night in Miami; Sam Levison’s Malcolm & Marie, in which John David Washington and Zendaya also win dialogue of the year; Kevin Macdonald’s Guantanamo Bay drama The Mauritanian; the near future French thriller Oxygen; the multi-generational Kiwi drama Cousins; The Children in the Pictures; Pig, in which Nicolas Cage goes a bit John Wick after someone steals his truffle hunting sow; Nitram, Justin Kurzel’s exploration of the Port Arthur gunman, The Power of the Dog and The Lost Leonardo, which I reviewed on December 4.

No doubt I have missed one that people will be raving about in 2071.