Top 10 - 2021

 

What a pleasure it was to have cinema back! Following the COVID-induced moviegoing privations of 2020, it was immensely satisfying (and more than a little overwhelming) to be inundated by the rich cinematic surplus of 2021. While theatrical exhibition as an aesthetic experience continues to feel somewhat endangered - a reality dispiritingly reflected in the box-office successes of factory-assembled IPs at the expense of all else - this past year proved that quality filmmaking is as alive as ever, and that we shouldn't take for granted the ability to sit in the dark with strangers gazing up at a silver screen. 

Many of the great movies of 2021 were big in a way that seemed to propitiously answer our frustrated thirst for the big-screen experience. Musicals made a huge comeback, from the exuberant In the Heights in the summer to the dazzling old-fashioned spectacle of Spielberg's West Side Story to close out the year. The only way to truly take in the maximalist Dune: Part One - and to feel its churning, bombinating soundscape in your bones - was to go to the theater. There were also a remarkable number of high-profile black-and-white features (Passing, The Tragedy of Macbeth, C'mon C'mon, and Belfast among them) that helped distill the pure, fundamentally photographic pleasure of images sculpted from light. Meanwhile, a sublime opus from one of contemporary cinema's most indispensable artists literally demanded to be seen on the big screen - its director and distributor have no intention of ever releasing it for home viewing. No wonder it's also the clear best film of 2021 (no credit if you can guess what it is)!

Note: there are still some major titles I've been unable to see, namely Flee, The Worst Person in the World, Mass, and Parallel Mothers.

On to my Top 10 after the jump...

The Tragedy of Macbeth

THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH   ***1/2

Joel Coen

2021

IDEA:  Upon learning from a witch that he shall one day be declared King of Scotland, the general Macbeth sets out to fulfill the prophecy at all costs.

BLURB:  Sculpted from fog, chiaroscuro, and brutalist lines, The Tragedy of Macbeth is an austerely existentialist chamber piece as sharp-edged and pitiless as anything in the Coen brothers’ oeuvre. Although it may not boast the mordant humor, nor the colorful idiosyncrasies, that characterized the siblings’ work together, it’s no wonder why Joel was drawn to Shakespeare’s Scottish play for his first solo outing; after all, it’s ridden with all the deadly scheming, hubris, and ambiguous games of choice and fate that have long been favored pieces in his films’ eschatologically chaotic cosmos. Here, he’s marshaled a severe, transfixing audiovisual experience that decorticates Macbeth down to the angles of its sturdy skeleton, turning the already lean tragedy into a minimalist, primordial shadow play, delivered straight to the nervous system. One can object to how cavalierly Coen divests the narrative of its historical-political context, or fails to reframe it in a new one, but at the same time, his Macbeth is rather willfully atemporal, engraving into its lithograph-like images the evergreen forces of human folly that howl forth from an ancient past. It’s a resonance felt in the sonorous drumbeat and rumble of the film’s unnerving soundscape; in the stentorian paranoiac monologues of Denzel Washington’s king; and in the ubiquitous ravens and their analog in Kathryn Hunter’s witch, predicting or precipitating a destiny that becomes inescapable. Whether or not we really needed the umpteenth version of this tale of sound and fury, Coen has proved to be an apt fool to tell it.