Stephanie Chuang’s Top Ten Films of 2021

2021 was a year that began in strict lockdown and ended in cautious reopening. Films that were meant to be released in 2020 and subsequently delayed reluctantly opened this year to much less pomp and circumstance once it became clear that we were in the pandemic for the long haul. For me, this year saw my return to school, and also my return to theaters. I was delighted to be able to see films with my friends on the big screen again, many of which I had been looking forward to for over a year. After the disappointment that was 2020, it’s undeniable that 2021 was an improvement both in film and overall.

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Spencer Malmberg’s Top 10 Films of 2021

2021 was honestly not my favorite year for movies, and we are going into a highly disappointing Oscar season by the unredeemable amount of nominations for Don’t Look Up. I did like a lot of movies this year though; I also watched way more movies from 2021 then any year I have before. At the time of writing this I have marked down 82 movies from 2021 on my Letterboxd, which is a crazy amount of times I sat in a theater. There wasn’t a lot of box office success, and definitely an even higher impact on Oscar pick season in the late fall and winter movie runs, but it was fun to watch a lot of very different stories and look at the different techniques in which filmmakers go about their movies.

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Review: ‘Flee’ is a Beautifully Intimate Portrait of an Afghan Refugee

What does it mean to have a home? Comfort? Security? Privacy? According to Amin, the mononymous subject of the recent Danish documentary Flee, home is somewhere permanent, a place where you no longer have to run. Amin Nawabi, a name that the film directly acknowledges is a pseudonym, fled his home in Afghanistan at a young age and eventually made his way to Denmark, where he began an academic career. Flee finds Amin on the brink of a new chapter in his life, as he and his boyfriend plan to get married and buy a house. But before he can settle down, Amin feels the need to address his past and tell the whole story of his years-long journey.

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