Top Ten 2021

In 2021, film limped back. Pandemic-blighted productions relearned how to bring a movie into the world. Movie theaters opened their doors one by one, except those that had been permanently shuttered. High profile releases oscillated between streaming service and big screen. The theatrical experience struggled for relevancy; the very definition of cinema shifted beneath our feet. Folks who hadn't been to the theater in a year deliberated about when it was safe enough to experience the medium in its finest form.

Yet the art perseveres, as it always does, as it ever will.

Some films I missed:

Drive My Car; The Father; Coda; Passing; The Power of the Dog; The Souvenir; Prisoners of the Ghostland; Last Night in Soho; Licorice Pizza; Memoria

Untoward Awards

Most Disappointing: Don't Look Up
Most Inane: C. I. Ape
Most Nonsensical: Space Jam: A New Legacy
Most Generic: Mortal Kombat
Most Infuriating: Spider-Man: No Way Home
Most: Titane

Can't Remember: The French Dispatch
I Wept: The Worst Person in the World
Most Improved: The Suicide Squad
Sophomore Slump: Space Jam: A New Legacy

Kindred Spirits: Don't Look Up & God's Not Dead: We the People
Kindred Names: Pig & Lamb

Best Names:
3. Don't Look Up
2. Benedetta

1. Pig

Worst Names:
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home
2. Space Jam: A New Legacy
1. God's Not Dead: We the People

Worst Superhero: Eternals
Worst Adaptation: that one scene i saw from Dear Evan Hansen
Worst Sequel: Space Jam: A New Legacy
Worst: God's Not Dead: We the People

Honorable Mentions

The French Dispatch - Wes Anderson's fascination with frames reaches its apotheosis in his tenth film. We're not used to feature length short fiction, and Anderson's discordant bundle does nothing to ease that discomfort. Each of these vignettes, nested within the framing narrative of a peculiar editorial magazine, has a different approach to film. The mediums blend-- painting, theatre, cooking, manifesto are refracted through the lens of editorialism, which is then refracted back through film. It's a story about process, a story about Edits. The onslaught of dialogue and information is too exhausting to keep up with, but if you let go of the mandate to follow along, the visual experiments begin to dance.

The Green Knight - Much fantasy is content to toss robes and swords on modern norms. It's hard to find fantasy that transmutes the possible. The Green Knight is Medieval in more than just affectation, donning narrative modalities and moralities that feel alien to a contemporary audience. The strangeness of this cowardly knight's tale is sometimes offputting, sometimes surreal, always undeniably rich. The film's immersion largely issues from top tier sound design (Johnny Marshall) that rips us into another realm.

No Sudden Move - Late career Stephen Soderbergh has a peculiar fascination with flat, fisheyed cinematography. His experiments with iphone-style moviemaking continue to produce dubious results, but his sense of narrative is sharp as ever. This period piece slices up the Detroit diaspora that surrounds a crooked auto industry. Noir is the chosen mode. Soderbergh's actors are strong as usual, with Don Cheadle holding down the fort, and Brenden Fraser's supporting performance well worth mentioning. It's a plodding, nasty movie that worms its way through gnarly sociopolitical ambitions before landing squarely back in the mundane venality of everyday life under capitalism.

Lamb - I expected a satirical bent from Lamb, but the Icelandic film prefers to be a folk-horror domestic drama. It's about a couple of shepherds who have a half-lamb child, though the movie is reticent to joke about it. The visual effects are unsettling, but they aren't played for humor or horror nearly as much as you'd expect. It took some digestion to get on the movie's wavelength, but there is something very clever about playing such a silly premise so straight.

The Suicide Squad - James Gunn has spent more of his career innovating superhero films than just about anybody, and his journey to this movie is a whole dang history lesson. At this point in his career, he has honed his impish tendency toward deconstruction. Gunn and company set out to tell a tale of colonialism, American hegemony, and prison industrial complex in the form of a colorful blockbuster. Although the left-leaning commentary (necessarily?) falls short, it's a rare commendable effort. The movie is also fun as hell, and has more intentional visuals than just about any of its peers. My Review.

Malignant - This movie doesn't have its head on straight. I admire that.

I watched 33 films released in 2021. Here are my top 10.

10. The Matrix: Resurrections

If your film franchise has an avid fanbase, it will generate vitriolic discourse unless the movie does not have a single new thought in its head. Entitlement has smelted IP fandoms into hate groups. The threats of violence, the bullying of cast and crew members off social media, the review bombing, the artistic demands-- it's a paradigm that demands regurgitation and punishes original thought.

The Matrix: Resurrections was going to be born into this discourse machine whether it liked it or not. Lana Wachowski leans in. She confronts burning questions of legacy, entitlement, nostalgia, and fan loyalty. She lets these puzzlings infect the beloved universe she co-created decades ago. Resurrections is a metanarrative about rabid fans, ignorant bureaucrats, and the search for meaning that can happen when you're forced to drink from the well of your own success. The film is never better than when Neo is wrestling with existential questions amid the bitter grind of work, sleep, therapy. Despite disappointing action and a shaggy plot, The Matrix: Resurrections deserves a spot on this list for being so bold as to confront its own raison d'etre, and demand reflection.

My Review.

9. The Worst Person in the World

The Worst Person in the World is a tidy little dramedy, following the ins and outs of the life of Julie (Renate Reinsve). We see her waffle between courses of possibility. She changes her profession, she changes her look, she falls in and out of love. There are enough visual flourishes here and there to remind us that we're in good hands as we enjoy the crisply constructed drama.

Then the bottom falls away and we are thrashing about in an endless pit of despair. It's not a tone shift so much as a perspective shift. The Worst Person in the World deeply respects the rhythms of personhood, and this lets it sketch a portrait of grief as a process of becoming.

8. Benedetta

Every five years, Paul Verhoeven releases a new movie, and I opine about how incredible it is for a septuagenarian / octogenarian / nonagenarian / centenarian to make one of the most vital and vibrant movies of the year. That will keep happening every five years for decades to come, right?

Currently 83, the Dutch director (shooting his second French-language film in a row) refuses to settle for mediocrity. This satirist still has sharp talons. Benedetta is a Plaguetime piece that tackles sexuality, class, and systems of belief within the Catholic church. This subject matter often drums up obvious conclusions (as in 2019's functional but unimaginative Saint Maud), but Benedetta's turbulent themes never resolve into easy answers. Part of this is the inscrutability of Benedetta herself, who seems at times like our rooting interest and at times like a monster. We feel close to her, but the film refuses us access to the particularities of her inner turmoil. The extent to which nihilism has taken root in her heart is left to the temptations of interpretation.

7. Macbeth

The question is begged: Why more Shakespeare?

I dunno, but if there is more it better be weird. Joel Coen, the second sibling director on this list going solo for the first time, situates this Macbeth in a world outside of time. The black and white cinematography blends with the brutalist sets to straddle the theatre/cinema divide. You get the impression that if the players were to walk a few paces off camera, the world would cease to exist. This frees Coen up for all sorts of playfulness, as when a silhouetted throne room duel subtly replaces the pillars with a backdrop of trees. The most otherworldly assault of all comes in the performance of the witch[es], at once singular and multipartite. Kathryn Hunter bends the language through their body, forcing us to shake our heads and admit that we've never seen it done that way before.

6. Zola

Zola achieves lift. The tone is a freshwater slap to the face, and the pace never slackens. There aren't many movies 'based on a true social media exchange,' so it is good and right for Zola to move unlike anything else you've seen. The plot runs us through the ringer, as two women navigate a wild weekend of scamming and sex work. The sleazeballs are one thing, their relationship with each other is another. Danger builds, inhumanity mounts, and the crackling narration drags us further and faster forward until our heads spin.

5. Inside

I feel more certain calling this the first great piece of pandemic art than I do calling it a movie. It's a sketch comedy special for one thing, a piece of avant-garde theatrics for another. Bo Burnham has no time for clear categories; he has come for the head of comedy itself! Inside is the culmination of Burnham's existential spiralings, but it is not an experiment for experiment's sake. Burnham leverages our pandemic anxiety to bring us along with him in a sensitive discourse on despair. Shooting an entire feature film in one room should get awfully old, but Burnham's lighting and editing wizardry makes us forget that we're seeing more of the same. Bo stands at the precipice, staring beyond the familiar, and speculating for the rest of us about what lies below.

My Review.

4. Spencer

I fell in love with Spencer within the first five seconds. A long static shot of a treeline behind a field shouldn't inspire such passion, but there was just something about the shot framing and color grading that hooked me in. As the bravura opening sequence continues, we see the snappy mechanisms of British Empire at work. A million little missions just to make sure the royalty has a nice dinner.

Spencer is Pablo Larraín's second consecutive movie scrutinizing the ruling class from an outside eye. Both Jackie and Spencer are concerned with celebrity, not in the usual obsessive fetishistic way, but with a keen eye towards the monstrosity that celebrity culture creates. Yes, we all know who Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana are, but who might they actually have been beyond the opacity of pretense? What kind of malformed person emerges from mass public scrutiny? We can sympathize with these figures suffocating under the colonial machine, yet cinematographer Claire Mathon makes certain to remind us of the intoxicating splendor of absolute power.

3. Titane

What the hell is Titane? Is it the story of a misanthropic serial killer? Trans body horror about the insidious double standards of 'passing'? A touching father daughter reconciliation story? A techno-existential nightmare about shagging cars? Julia Ducournau's second feature reaches the same heights of grotesquerie as her first, Raw, but the scope is even grander. Seemingly incompatible story threads tug at your attention, but they manage to pique investment rather than diminish it. I honestly couldn't tell you exactly how I feel about the lion's share of Titane, but I know that I did feel, and that those feelings were ungraspable. The slippery signifiers of Titane's storytelling are a perfect analogue for the evermoving terrain of sexuality itself.

2. West Side Story

Watching West Side Story was a homework assignment for me. Having a tremendous respect for Spielberg, but little interest in musicals, and no use for West Side Story in particular, turning on this remake felt like 'getting it out of the way.' It took a good 90 seconds to disavow me of my low expectations.

This movie moves. Spielberg's camera coverage of Justin Peck's choreography is unmatched. Dancers fling fro and forth, colors swirl across the screen, crowds bunch and coil and weave, bodies generate and release tremendous tension. The camera whips about with verve, always highlighting gestures and never obscuring them. When these characters are running, they are full out running. This only works because the sets don't feel stagey. Spielberg has built a living breathing urban environment that waxes orderly or disorderly depending on the business of the characters. It's an oddly fascinating take on blending realism with theatricality.

The strengths of the worldbuilding and pleasures in the performance are bolstered even further by a script that is better than it has any right to be. West Side Story avoids the trite 'why can't we get along?' approach to Hollywood stories about race. Instead, it's an actual bottom to top exploration of Racecraft, the process by which race is created and thrust upon us. The tragedy isn't just that these are stupid kids who don't understand the world; the tragedy is that they understand the world all too well, and feel powerless to do anything but succumb to it.

1. Pig

The most humbling aspect of my evolving cinephilia has been my relationship to Nicolas Cage. He was once my least favorite actor. Hammy, undisciplined, oh so easy to make fun of. Not like my favorite actor, Johnny Depp-- such depth, such charisma! Here I am feeling foolish because I couldn't have been more wrong. Cage can pump out the stinkers like nobody's business, but he is a legend of cinema. What I interpreted as bad acting was a thoughtfully berserk orientation towards play and technique. Often the razor's edge of success with such a performance has everything to do with the director he happens to be working with.

Along comes Pig, a critically ballyhooed film that seems to be a revenge flick about a truffle farmer whose pig companion is stolen. I entered the movie expecting another high octane late career turn along the lines of Mandy and Willy's Wonderland. I was blown away to instead encounter a slow-moving character drama, anchored by perhaps the finest performance in Nicolas Cage's career. And he's working squarely in the range of naturalism! There is nothing showy about his portrayal. Nothing screechy or deranged. This is a master at the height of his craft, adding layers of depth to the pain of loss and the terror of change.

Pig is a parable of sorts, desperately seeking glimmers of authenticity in a world of beleaguered brands and prescribed career paths. Fit the mold or be forgotten. This film touched tenderness in me that I hadn't recognized. Cage's work here is a small quiet voice of grace within the modern maelstrom, and proof that he has the chops that some Oscarbaiting actors could only dream of... he was just waiting for the right movie.