The best films of 2021: The ballots

When it comes to retrospective lists, The A.V. Club is a unified front: These are the best movies of the year, we say authoritatively, as if engraving the results onto a stone tablet. But the truth is that our just-published rundown of 2021’s finest films only looks like an act of consensus. It is, by its very nature, more of a compromise—a list assembled from many other lists, an aggregation of respective tastes. For a more complete picture of the last 12 months in cinema, you have to look beyond the official ranking to the respective opinions of those who made it—a group of 10 contributors who spent all year in the A.V. Club review trenches. The ballots that follow, which we combined semi-scientifically (we did a little massaging here and there; don’t check our math), offer an alternative vision of 2021. Through passion picks and superlatives—including some outliers, a.k.a. movies that that made one list and no others—they paint a fuller picture of what made this year in movies so memorable.

A.A. Dowd

When it comes to retrospective lists, The A.V. Club is a unified front: These are the best movies of the year, we say authoritatively, as if engraving the results onto a stone tablet. But the truth is that our only looks like an act of consensus. It is, by its very nature, more of a compromise—a list assembled from many other lists, an aggregation of respective tastes. For a more complete picture of the last 12 months in cinema, you have to look beyond the official ranking to the respective opinions of those who made it—a group of 10 contributors who spent all year in the A.V. Club review trenches. The ballots that follow, which we combined semi-scientifically (we did a little massaging here and there; don’t check our math), offer an alternative vision of 2021. Through passion picks and superlatives—including some outliers, a.k.a. movies that that made one list and no others—they paint a fuller picture of what made this year in movies so memorable.