It has been an extraordinary year for movies, considering how hard we (and the film industry) have had to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. Our critics saw all the top-flight films that hit the big screen, and now they have their picks for the best of the best since 01/01/21. What were your favorites? What are your top picks? What are your plans to see over vacation? Get on your streaming platform, purchase tickets if it is safe, and plan to see our Top 20 Movies in 2021.

• Being the Ricardos

Aaron Sorkin, West Wing creator, has a brilliantly talky biopic. Nicole Kidman plays Lucille Ball. Javier Bardem plays her faithless husband. There was a lot of ‘splainin’ to do on a crisis-filled week backstage at the 1950s I Love Lucy.

• Belfast

Kenneth Branagh’s semiautobiographical masterpiece is about Jude Hill, a sensitive child who plays war with a wooden sword (and a trash can-lid shield) while grown-up Catholics and Protestants fight in the streets. Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds are the warmly waggish grandparents of the hero. It makes you feel like you are part of the tangled town and the unbreakable clan.

• C’mon C’mon

Johnny, a charming, uncoordinated bachelor radio journalist (Joaquin Phoenix), takes Woody Norman, his 8-year old nephew, on the road as he interviews children about the future. Johnny and Johnny’s bond strengthens, just like Hugh Grant in About a Boy. A classic intergenerational story.

• CODA

This is the irresistible story of an CODA, a Child Of Deaf Adults(Emilia Jones), and rising star in her school’s glee club. Marlee Matlin, her devoted and hearing impaired mom, can’t hear her singing, but she (and us) can feel the positive vibrations.

• Cyrano

Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones, an ever-growing figure in Hollywood, portrays the role of the hero in a musical. He lends his vocal talents to a tongue-tied friend, who is wooing a beautiful (who is the object of Cyrano’s unconfessed affection). Although his nose is good, he worries that his height will make him a love buzzkill. Erica Schmidt, Dinklage’s real wife, wrote the script.

• The Duke

Jim Broadbent portrays a retired man who pulls off the greatest heist in London’s National Gallery’s history, stealing the portrait of a duke to force the government into funding elder care. Helen Mirren is a stunning, dowdy, and adoring (but appalled) wife. True story!

• Dune

A Luke Skywalker-ish youth (Timothee Chalamet), joins forces with a freedom fighter (Javier Bardem), to fight a cruel ruler of a desert planet infested by sandworms, Baron Harkonnen. (Stellan Skarsgard)

• King Richard

Aunjanue and Will Smith are both champions for their role as L.A. parents that coached Serena and Venus Williams to the top of all-white tennis.

• Licorice Pizza

Paul Thomas Anderson (Phantom Thread), returns to Boogie Nights’ home turf, San Fernando Valley, to present a nostalgic charmer about a confident teenage boy (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son Cooper Hoffman) set in the polyester 1970s.

• The Lost Daughter

The deeply moving debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal as a director is about a professor (Olivia Colman), who meets a young mother (Dakota Johnson) while on vacation in Greece. This sparks her mixed feelings about motherhood. Ed Harris, 71 years old, is her ideal midlife sweetheart.

• Nightmare Alley

Guillermo del Toro’s stunning, hardboiled remake (1947 noir classic) features a drifter (Bradley Cooper), a carnival barker, Willem Dafoe, a fortune-teller, a magician (David Strathairn), and a scary psychiatrist (Cate Blanchett).

• Parallel Mothers

Milena Smit and Penelope Cruz, both middle-aged mothers, give birth to their children in the same hospital. Their lives are intertwined in Pedro Almodovar’s movie. But it’s not a comedy romp, but a story involving Franco’s brutal Spanish Civil War legacy.

• Passing

Rebecca Hall, actress, directs this emotional adaptation of the 1929 classic. It is about two Harlem friends who reunite, a Black doctor’s spouse (Tessa Thompson), and a bottle-blonde, Ruth Negga, who pass as white. This is Hall’s directorial debut with stellar performances and her blinding intelligence.

• The Power of the Dog

Two brothers who are bachelor ranchers in Montana find their lives changed and their hearts revealed when they go to Montana in 1925. Jane Campion, 67, is thrilled to make her 13th feature film. Is there a more haunting Western than this?

• Spencer

Kristen Stewart plays Princess Di well in this stylized, fictionalized account. But Timothy Spall is better as her royal controller — Spall radiates an infinitely well-bred menace.

• Summer of Soul (… or, When the Revolution Couldn’t Be Televised)

Questlove’s documentary, featuring long-forgotten footage from 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, where 300,000 people watched the top acts like Nina Simone and B.B., is Cinema’s archaeological find of the year. King, Gladys Knight and Sly and The Family Stone were among the many stars who attended the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. It was the event that saw 300,000 people watch the Staples Singers and Stevie Wonder. This documentary won Sundance’s Audience Award, Grand Jury Prize and won Sundance’s Audience Award.

• The Tender Bar

George Clooney (60) directs a heartstring-thumping adaptation of J.R. Moehringer’s memoir about a boy named Tye Sheridan, who is raised without a father in a Long Island bar with many surrogate dads. This includes his uncle, Ben Affleck, his bartender uncle, and his teacher in “the male sciences.”

• The Tragedy of Macbeth

Frances McDormand, who plays a bloodthirsty couple often portrayed in youth, notes that Joel Coen’s new take on them portrays them as “an older couple at their end of ambition rather than at its beginning.”

• West Side Story

Tony Kushner (the greatest American playwright) and Steven Spielberg (the greatest film director), adapt the Broadway musical by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, who in turn adapt the Bard.