The best film of the year is an easy one: Dune. After 18 months of watching films at home, there was no better experience than going back to a cinema and watching a film that required the biggest screen and the loudest speakers. The only experience like it was when I went two months without eating any chocolate before running the Edinburgh marathon and then scoffed an entire chocolate muffin on the finish line. I’ve never had heroin but Im pretty sure it doesn’t destroy your mind, body and soul like your first taste of a muffin after two months of abstinence and 26 miles of running.

Dune was a bit like that. The fact it is also a great (though flawed) film was just a bonus. I just wanted to be back in the cinema again.

My highest recommendation for Dune though is that I really wanted to know more about how it was made and managed to find some cracking behind the scenes videos to find out more. Check out:

Honourable mentions

A film I wish I had seen at the cinema was my most surprising film of 2021: Amazon Prime exclusive ‘The Aeronaughts’. A film I dismissed when watching the trailer but couldn’t have been more wrong as it turned out to be vertigo inducing and thrilling as Gravity but in a balloon.

With more films being released to streaming rather than the cinema there was also some other gems in ‘Love & Monsters’ , ‘Don’t Tell Anyone’, ‘Stowaway’, ‘Fear Street’, ‘We Care A Lot’, ‘Prospect’, ‘The Green Knight’ and ‘The Dig’.

But nothing compares to actually going to the Cinema and I only hope that 2022 will see more opportunities to go back and that I won’t have to wait until Dune 2 is out in 2023 before returning.