The 10 best films of 2021

When the pandemic shuttered movie theaters in 2020 and upended movie studio release plans, it resulted in a year of smaller screens and smallish dramas. "Nomadland," "First Cow," "Sound of Metal" and "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" were exquisitely crafted and unforgettably haunting. But they weren't "Lawrence of Arabia."

The big screen came back in 2021, for a while, before Omicron reared its head and sent us back to streaming.

But regardless of where a film was shown this year, the most memorable movies were those of great ambition in which filmmakers took bold chances and made us forget the limitations of the day, expanding the scope of our world with peerless performances, timeless music and apocalyptic satire. The films may have been obliquely aware of the pandemic, but the beauty of the works on the list below — including the non-fiction titles — is that they derive their power not from current events but from a humanity that transcends the day's news. We will one day get past this pandemic, and these films allude to what awaits us there.