I so wanted to like Flow. I’d heard good things from usually reliable critic friends who’d seen it already and told me it had enchanted them and their pets.

There’s no dialogue and as real animal calls were apparently used on the soundtrack, I enlisted Lenny the cat to help write the review. He’s been known to prick up his ears and take a well-aimed swipe at a screen if the yowls and miaows are convincing enough. Lenny is particularly happy when David Attenborough serves up suitably small squeaky mammals and chirping birds for his viewing pleasure.

It’s not often we hear barely a single gunshot in a movie set amid Mexican drug cartels, but that may be the way it is for people who actually live amid Mexican drug cartels.

In Sujo, Mexico’s bid for the next foreign feature Oscar, we experience violence the way many who inhabit violent places actually experience it – mostly embedded in the fabric of life, only occasionally directly. 

Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one.

Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.

Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old German director in existentially questing mode.

How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.

Everything Everywhere All at Once lived up to its title Sunday night at the 95^th Academy Awards by managing to win nearly everything everywhere almost all at once. The fragmented, seriocomic celluloid head trip won seven of the 11 Oscars for which it had been nominated, entering record books several times over not least for having two Asian actors amongst the recipients.

Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in July 2020.

It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. 

Like every other artform, cinema suffered greatly in a year of lockdowns. But despite an ever-changing outlook, theartsdesk still managed to review over 130 films in 2021!

Long-awaited blockbusters and no-budget indies fought for screen space big and small, but only a select few achieved five star status. Here are the 2021 releases our critics deemed perfect:

The Dig (28 January 2021)