When the Pandemic came and hit us from nowhere in 2020, cinema was possibly one of the most impacted industries in terms to figuring out how to take quality and commercials forward. The entire world came to a standstill and naturally the impact of cinema was widely evident. So much so, that even the Malayalam film industry that has been consistently producing the best cinema in India for a few years now struggled to find its feet. After a terrific 2019 and host of brilliant movies, 2020 was relatively listless for them. But they came back in 2021 and how! 2021 will possibly go down as one of the strongest years of content for the Malayalam film industry and they played the game very smart by ensuring that most of their quality content was available through the leading OTTs of the country and hence they ensured that their consumer base increased far and wide all across India, initiating several cinema lovers to their magic. They played around with genres, periods, storytelling styles but always ensured that the content was always rooted to the local culture, always touched hearts and stirred souls. The plethora of excellent choices they offered also has inspired me to make an exclusive list of my 10 favorite Malayalam films of 2021 for the first time.

2021 has not been a good year for hindi films. As the year was mostly spent in waiting for unlocking of theatres, most of the content was made available to us more through the OTT platforms and less through theatrical releases. But that was not really an excuse for great content not being available to us, as in a parallel universe, Malayalam film industry was dishing out gems after gems (more on that later). Yes there were a couple of exceptional films, but for the times where there is scope to experiment with so much of different kind of content, it is a shame that not much in Hindi cinema flashed this year. So here goes a round up of what worked and what did not work for Hindi films for me this year. Will keep this to just listing of the films for this year (with a link to the individual reviews if a detailed write up was done). As always this is a very personal list, and my 10 favorite films of 2021 is based on what I could watch based on availability on public platforms (and I have not watched a lot of available films by choice too).

2021 was yet another year in our lives where most of us were locked up for a large part of the year in our homes and most of the entertainment that was available to us also came through OTT platforms. This included both movies and web series and there was more content up there to consume than time available to get to all of them. Quantity however did not commensurate with quality and the web series content particularly paled given the previous year had given us content like Panchayat and Scam 1992. There were a few web series however that were really good and stood out on merit of their making and performances, and here we look at the 5 Best Indian Web Series of the year. This is again a very personal list and based on what I have watched in the year. It is hence worthwhile to mention that while in cinema, I indulged into a lot of great movies from all over India including Malayalam, Tamil, Marathi etc., my web series watching for Indian shows was more restricted to Hindi, English and Bangla only, so the list will be reflective of that. Also to be noted that there are a couple of critically acclaimed series that I have not watched this year and hence cannot comment how they are. This includes the hindi show Family Man Season 2 (skipped it because Season 1 did not work for me) and bangla web series Mandar (on the watchlist but haven’t got there yet). So based on whatever I have seen and liked, here goes my top picks for the year.

So just like that, six months of 2021 are already gone. And while we had hoped at the beginning of the year that 2021 would be the year of life opening up again including our regular visits back to the cinemas, sadly that was not to happen. The six months went by with us locked up in the corners of our homes, and watching a lot of cinema that saw their releases across digital platforms – big and small, across languages, genres and themes. There has been a lot to appreciate in what we consumed, quite a bit to feel disappointed, but the overall feeling has been of hope because cinema is becoming far more universal crossing the boundaries of languages and geographies and speaking to our sensibilities with their global human themes. As we are at the mid year checkpoint of 2021, here is then looking at a dozen films that stood out at the top, appealing the most to my sensibilities and making a very strong mark. As always, this is a very subjective list and may not match up with your favorites for the year, but it would be wonderful to know what were your favorite films of the year so far, so that I can also catch up on anything that I would have missed out.