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.

19 of 25 photo by Elevation Pictures / Cannes

91 Memoria

(#5) A co-winner of the third-place Jury Prize at Cannes, the latest from lauded Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) finds the director filming outside his native country for the first time. Set in Colombia, the meditative, allegorical Memoria stars Tilda Swinton as a woman obsessed with finding the source of a sound that only she can hear. Like the aforementioned Days, it's another film with long, slow takes and little action—with an added dose of weirdness—so it's not a film for everyone. But you can definitely count critics among Memoria's fans. While some reviewers were disappointed in the ending, most found the film to be spellbinding and transcendent.

“Weerasethakul’s Memoria doesn’t give too many answers. It moves at an interminable pace. But those are mostly strengths rather than faults, methods that force the audience to engage with the thoughts and collective memory buried deep within their psyches. In that sense, Memoria is a sensory explosion, and its dense, immersive shrapnel isn’t easily removable.” —Robert Daniels, Polygon

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