In his article highlighting the best movies of 2021, Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, "From an artistic perspective, 2021 has been an excellent cinematic vintage, yet the bounty is shadowed by an air of doom.
The reopening of theatres has brought many great movies—some of which were postponed from last year—to the big screen, but fewer people to see them.
The French Dispatch has done respectably in wide release, and Licorice Pizza is doing superbly on four screens in New York and Los Angeles, but few, if any, of the year’s best films are likely to reach high on the box-office charts.
The shift toward streaming was already under way when the pandemic struck, and as the trend has accelerated it’s had a paradoxical effect on movies.
On the other, an online release usually registers as a nonevent, and many of the great movies hardly make a blip on the mediascape despite being more accessible than ever.