Museum Hours

  At the end of a year in which we all felt rather at the mercy of things much bigger than ourselves, here is my list of the ten best new films that I saw in 2021 (including some at festivals which have yet to be released in the UK) which provided some comfort that humans at their best (and goodness knows we've seen plenty of humans at their worst particularly in what seems to be an ongoing death spiral for liberal democracy in one of the homes of cinema at the behest of a pathetic narcissist who just can't accept that he lost) can entrance each other with empathetic appreciation and aesthetic wonders. In other words the genius of cinema at its best lies in its recognition of the plurality of experience - the very thing that the know nothing reactionaries and authoritarians around the world want to deny us.  Generally, a very strong year probably at least in part because of titles being held up by the pandemic (or more precisely, and sadly, the early waves of the ongoing pandem