Hong Kong was the fifth and final “country” i watched enough movies from (50) to constitute its own entry. Most, but not all, of what I watched fell under the broad categories of either crime or wuxia, but it never felt quite as limiting as my similarly narrow focus on Japanese films did. The wuxia genre specifically is a broad one, with room for everything from mindless gore parties to mournful romantic elegies.

France finished third this year in terms of total films watch (54), but it might have finished first for batting average. The best French films I saw were just as incredible as anything from the rest of the world, there were a ton somewhere in the good to great range, and even the worst were no worse than “ok.”

I came in, granted, with more affection and familiarity for French stars than those from most other countries. Delon and Belmondo and Marceau and Moreau were already old friends to me, and following their names from one film to the next probably helped bump up the average.

That said, familiar faces only lead me to about half of my Top Ten, so maybe it’s just a fluke of sample size.

I watched 50 Japanese films in 2021, but I admittedly could have cast a wider net. 49/50 were either samurai or crime films, and many were both.

Of course, both those genres have an awful lot of room for variance. I saw samurai films that were vicious, bleak, and humorless, and others that were more-or-less comedies where people carried swords around. One crime film might chronicle a blood-soaked war between two rival yakuza factions, while another might be a suburban wife’s quietly desperate quest to find her missing husband.

I overdid it, sure, but I was rarely bored, and almost everything I saw from Japan had something unique going for it.

Now we get to the good stuff, digging into the best of the 201 American movies I saw in 2021.

Given that I watched nearly double as many US films as the next closest country (201 to Korea’s 101), I’m cutting myself a little slack and expanding the US Top 10 to a Top 12 instead of trying to figure out how to cut two of these.