Petite Maman, directed by Celine Sciamma. Photograph: Lilies Films/MK2 Films

And the 2021 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year

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From Petite Maman to The Father to The Lost Daughter, our critic lists his top films of 2021 – and surveys the year in cinema. Have your say in the comments

This was the year that the cinema emerged, blinking, from its enforced hibernation, and the new James Bond film, which was beginning to feel like some sort of commercial or cultural myth, actually came out to tumultuous box office business. International film festivals were once again happening in reality. And some old debates and quarrels have been revived. Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, who has decided against scheduling any films that did not have a big-screen cinema release, pointedly asked his audience at the opening press conference if Netflix has ever nurtured any directors from the beginning of their career.

Answer came there none – although Twitter was lively on the subject afterwards. But maybe 2021 was the time to put this argument to bed. The fact is that Netflix really is supporting major films by major film-makers, including what many believe to be the best of the year: The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion.

The practice of established directors attacking superhero films, and getting attacked for attacking superhero films, continues. (And renowned arthouse director Chloé Zhao scored a miss with her solemn Marvel movie Eternals.) The increasingly remarkable Ridley Scott – who had two colossal feature films released this year – sounded off defiantly against the heroes in tights and capes. And then, when his period drama The Last Duel performed unconvincingly at the box office, he criticised millennians [sic] and their phone habits. Well, if anyone has earned the right to be grumpy about young people, it’s Scott, and his other film, the outrageously silly and enjoyable true-crime black comedy House of Gucci starring Lady Gaga, was a big hit. True to form, Scott dismissed the Gucci family’s complaints on this subject with magnificent hauteur.

Will the omicron variant bring the shutters back down? We have to hope that it won’t. The cinema defied the premature obituaries this year. Of course, streaming services did well – but so did the movie theatres. Like going to pubs, or nightclubs, or sports arenas, cinema-going turned out to be a real-world collective thrill that we were longing for.

But it was in this real world that the movies also gave us one of the year’s most shocking and scandalous stories: the accidental fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the western movie Rust, by its star and producer Alec Baldwin. Baldwin has since given an emotional TV interview on the subject to George Stephanopoulos, in which his tears, though perfectly genuine, coexisted with an obvious desire to control the narrative, pre-empt legal jeopardy and finesse the question of his own indirect responsibility as producer.

And what is still staggering, despite all the discussion, is the still unanswered question – how on earth did a live round get into the prop gun? Yet the question naively overlooks the bigger picture. Could it be that people were casual around guns and ammo on this American movie set because people are casual around guns and ammo in the US generally, where the western film genre has incidentally done much to promote and romanticise gunplay?

The sexual politics of Hollywood, once the hottest of hot-button issues, appear also to have cooled a little since Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in February 2020. In fact, this year we saw glimmerings of what is being called the new “uncancel culture”: a bland new quasi-forgiveness in the air, now that a big wrongdoer has been brought down, precisely the outcome predicted by many at the time. Kevin Spacey (who has no criminal charge against him) has taken a small role in an Italian movie, pointedly playing a cop investigating child abuse. And the continued success of Mel Gibson, whose bigoted, misogynist and antisemitic outbursts are notorious, is one of the film industry’s creepiest phenomena: he is in talks to direct Lethal Weapon 5 and is slated to appear in a John Wick origin-myth TV show.

One talking point that has arisen in 2021 is the debate about abolishing gender categories in acting awards. For some, they have always been an absurdity; after all, we don’t have different awards for male and female directors, or cinematographers, or sound editors. But the division arguably enforces diversity and historically has done its bit to ensure women get their seats at the table.

The Braddies

Rightly or wrongly, I have kept the usual distinction in these Braddies, my personal choices which are distinct from Guardian Film’s best-of-the-year countdown. The nominees are listed in no particular order and readers are invited to vote for their favourites.