My favorite movies of 2021

The year cinema came back, but audiences didn't

Like most people, I stopped going to see movies when Covid hit and stayed away even after theaters began to reopen.

But during the height of the pandemic, I was struck by how much I love movies and how much I missed them, not just because of lockdown but because I’d gone less and less since my kid was born. And beyond that, I realized that I miss movies as a vital form of entertainment for grownups that has been fragmented by Marvel’s domination of the box office and the cultural clout of prestige television.

There are a couple of great TV shows and a bunch of good ones, but what I like about movies is that a screenwriter writes a whole script from beginning to end. That script is read and revised and completed and then production starts. The director and the director of photography capture a bunch of footage and work with an editor to put it together. They watch the rough cut from beginning to end and decide how they want to tweak it. When they’re done, critics watch the whole movie …