Jake Coyle's top films of 2021

“The Worst Person in the World,” Joachim Trier’s richly compassionate character study, wasn’t my first movie back in theaters this year, but it was the first film that filled me with all the joy, delight and surprise of going to the movies. Trier’s film, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and properly opens in February, stars Renate Reinsve as an uncertain Oslo 30-something finding her way. I haven’t yet worked out whether it was the movie’s warm, exuberant humanity or the experience of seeing it on the big screen in a theater with other people that moved me to tears. But what’s the difference?

It’s been an extraordinary year in music documentary thanks to revelations like Questlove’s “Summer of Soul” and Todd Haynes’ “The Velvet Underground.” But Peter Jackson’s eight-hour Beatles hang-out is an overwhelming cultural artifact not just because of how it reframes so much about what we know about Paul, John, George and Ringo, but for how it captures artistic creation and collaboration in real time. As much as “Get Back” is about the band’s dissolution, it’s how in sync they can be with one another that’s often astonishing and sweet.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s shaggy-dog story of self-discovery in ’70s San Fernando Valley feels to me like a loose, easy-breathing culmination for Anderson, a virtuoso filmmaker here at his most tender and organic. “Licorice Pizza,” crammed with the comic chronicles of adolescence and young adulthood, is the most lived-in movie of the year.

Even better than part one, Joanna Hogg’s sequel to her deeply autobiographical drama is simply one of the most sublime portraits of an artist as a young filmmaker there is. If Anderson resurrects ’70s California in “Licorice Pizza,” Hogg’s film is just as detailed in its ’80s London. Filmmaking is rarely so acutely personal – and yet generously expansive -- as this.

"The Truffle Hunters,” Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s exquisitely charming documentary, is about old Italian men who scavenge truffles with faithful canine companions. Their tradition, though, is imperiled by the greed of those who would thwart or even kill the dogs so they can better compete for the high-priced delicacy. With lush, pointillist imagery (and dog cams!), the filmmakers unearth an enchanting, vanishing world. (For a truffle-hunting double feature, pair with "Pig," starring a fabulous Nicholas Cage.)

Dogs are a clue to happiness, too, in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s emotional epic, a staggering work of quiet, profound intimacy. There is much under the hood of “Drive My Car”– art, grief, friendship, Chekhov. A lot of movies are described as “a ride,” but Hamaguchi’s melancholy masterwork, where the opening credits arrive 40 minutes in, earns that label in its own uniquely winding way.

"The Mitchells vs the Machines” is a classic family road trip movie, with a robot apocalypse thrown in, along with a pug easily mistaken for a loaf of bread. An antic delight.

Céline Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” was my favorite film of 2019, but I was still unprepared for what a gentle gem her follow-up, “Petite Maman,” would be. In just 72 minutes, Sciamma composes a spare but enormously rich fairy tale about an 8-year-old girl who, in a time of grief, meets another girl mysteriously similar to her in the woods. There’s a magic here that Maurice Sendak would have adored.

A family gathers in a rundown Chinatown apartment for Thanksgiving as darkness falls in "The Humans," Stephen Karam’s chilling adaptation of his own Tony-winning play. Like the apartment, they all have their own painted-over failings and faults, and the conversation throbs with existentialist reverberations. In a flawless cast, Richard Jenkins and Jayne Houdyshell are particular standouts.

Autobiographical doesn’t feel like a natural mode for Paolo Sorrentino, but that’s part of what makes his most personal film so full of wonders. Sorrentino’s film, about a childhood in Naples that stretches from the divine to the profane, from bliss to tragedy, is best when he’s gazing not at himself as a young man but outward, at his seaside city and the family around him.

Also: “Red Rocket,” “The Power of the Dog,” “The Lost Daughter,” “A Hero,” “CODA,” “Titane,” “Flee,” “Dune,” “Annette,” “Riders of Justice”