It took me until the first week of March 2022 to catch up with every 2021 film on my watchlist, but I did it. The last one I got in was multiple Oscar nominee Drive My Car, which was fine but in my view undeserving of the hype.

I felt that way about a lot of highly-praised 2021 films, including Dune, The Power of the Dog, Licorice Pizza and Passing.

But that doesn’t mean the year overall was a disappointment. On the contrary, I saw a ton of great movies and had to struggle to settle on a top ten. It pained me to leave deserving titles on the outside looking in, so let me pour one out for In the Heights, Zola, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Last Duel and Mass.

I’m happy where I ended up, though. My list includes documentaries, animation, comedy, drama, two foreign language films and a musical. People might be slow to return to theaters, but great films are still being made. Over the next two weeks, I’ll count down some of my recent favorites.

Best Films of 2021
#10 – Red Rocket

Writer-director Sean Baker has carved out a fascinating niche in the three films of his I’ve seen (Tangerine, The Florida Project and Red Rocket). He depicts places you’d never want to go and people you’d never want to meet. But he does it with such empathy and such attention to detail that you feel enriched by the experience.

He also populates his films with non-professional actors, coaxing touching and authentic performances out of “regular” people without a hint of condescension. In that way, he’s like a scuzzier Chloe Zhao.

As in the previous two films, Red Rocket focuses on a sex worker. Former porn star Mikey Saber, played brilliantly by Simon Rex, is a man as charming and polite as he is selfish and toxic. Returning to his hometown of Texas City, he bears the bruises from a beating he no doubt deserved.

He ingratiates his way back into the life, and house, of his estranged wife and mother-in-law, intending to find work and go straight. That doesn’t last. Unable to land a legitimate job, he starts pushing drugs for a local dealer and ends up falling for a 17-year-old donut shop salesgirl named Strawberry (a winning Suzanna Son). In her, he finds somebody who adores him unreservedly (it’s too soon for her to know better) and also a potential ticket back into the porn industry.

This all sounds seedy as hell, and it is, but Baker and his cast deliver big laughs and a buoyancy you wouldn’t expect from the subject matter.

He also weaves in some sly social commentary. The film is set during the summer of 2016, during the run-up to the presidential election, and images and sounds of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seep through in multiple scenes.

Mikey is a slick con artist and a user of women, but you kind of like him. I wonder how far could somebody like that could get in America today?