The 50 Best Movies of 2021

by Jason Dietz, Metacritic Features Editor – January 5, 2022

Here is Metacritic's final list of the 50 best-reviewed movies of 2021, ranked by Metascore. This list only includes films receiving at least 7 reviews from professional critics.

All films released between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2021 in at least one U.S. theater or directly to streaming or VOD/digital services were eligible for inclusion. Short films and reissues are excluded, and so are any eight-hour Beatles movies that were screened as a TV miniseries. Titles are ranked by Metascore (a weighted average of scores from top professional critics) prior to rounding based on scores as of January 3, 2022.

Additional content by Keith Kimbell.

10 of 25 photo by Berlinale

88 Azor

(#14) The debut from Swiss filmmaker Andreas Fontana is a conspiracy thriller set in Buenos Aires in 1980, where a Swiss private banker is sent to replace his mysteriously vanished colleague. There, he circulates among the city's elites as the world around them suffers under Argentina's brutal and oppressive military rule, attempting to perform his now morally ambiguous duties while investigating his partner's fate. Multiple critics compared the unnerving (if a bit plot-light) result to The Third Man and the paranoid thriller cinema of the 1970s.

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“The striking feature film debut from Andreas Fontana brings a prickly thriller sensibility to the closed world of high finance and a piquancy to the phrase ‘dirty money’.” —Wendy Ide, Screen Daily

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