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...
10.
The Lost Daughter, dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal
Maggie Gyllenhaal's directorial debut, adapted from the eponymous Elena Ferrante novel, unspools the psychology of its protagonist like the long, unbroken string of orange peel that serves as a memorable motif. The film powerfully resists reducing this thorny woman to her sometimes unscrupulous actions; it invites us only to feel her insoluble tangle of disappointments, frustrations, shames, and desires, her ambivalent relationship with a motherhood that will forever be burned into her identity. Olivia Colman outdoes herself in a performance of both profound withholding and self-mortifying release.
9.
Luca, dir. Enrico Casarosa
Pixar's best film since 2017's Coco is the studio's most intimately-scaled outing yet. Dispensing with the hectic plot convolutions and heavy-handed feints toward profundity that characterized Soul, Casarosa's Luca is blissfully refreshing for committing itself to depicting nothing so complicated as childhood friendship. At the same time, it apprehends deeply how foundational (and complicated!) our early peer relationships can be, while also offering a lucid, colorful, big-hearted allegory of the LGBTQ experience.
8.
Red Rocket, dir. Sean Baker
Although hardly like The Lost Daughter in most ways, Red Rocket is a similarly bracing character study of an individual who often confounds good sense. Baker's film also revolves around an utterly magnetic performance: as washed-up porn star Mikey Saber, Simon Rex is a manic ball of garrulous braggadocio and flagrant mendacity, an icon of white American male entitlement at its most tumid. Red Rocket takes an unflinching look at this sadly familiar figure - and the broken culture that fosters it - while boldly mingling pathos and cringe comedy. Special kudos to Bree Elrod as Saber's wife and foil to all his bullshit.
7.
Dune: Part One, dir. Denis Villeneuve
In a popular movie landscape clogged with anonymously-shot, perfunctorily-directed studio product, Villeneuve's Dune: Part One stands out for restoring audiovisual artistry, weight, and purpose to mass-media entertainment, representing a type of epic big-budget studio filmmaking that seemed to have gone extinct long ago. The film's sheer magnitude - its galactic-size wide shots; its canny juxtapositions of scale; its kinetic, always legible action choreography; and its enveloping sound design - provokes awe and exhilaration, especially in a theater.
6.
A Hero, dir. Asghar Farhadi
Asghar Farhadi's films thrum with a moral complexity that is as breathtaking as it is humbling. There are no heroes or villains, despite the title of his latest, only gray zones and impossible choices, irresolvable ethical quagmires and contingencies to which no one is impervious. As in his past films such as A Separation and The Salesman, Farhadi crafts a byzantine narrative of multidirectional cause-and-effect relationships, generating screw-tightening suspense from seemingly minor actions that snowball beyond individual agency, reflecting the vast, fragile network we call society.
5.
C'mon C'mon, dir. Mike Mills
C'mon C'mon is the kind of film that makes you believe that humanity might just make it after all. It conveys this sense of hope not by proffering sappy bromides, but by dramatizing the possibilities for a polyvocal, intergenerational dialogue of empathy and mutual learning. Mills bridges the distances between adults and children, and provides channels of communication - particularly in his documentary interview segments - that extol the value of young voices. In the year's most exceptional screen-acting duo, Joaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman create a stunningly tender rapport, modeling a version of male socializing the world could use far more of: vulnerable, emotionally candid, and giving.
4.
Licorice Pizza, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Speaking of superb screen-acting duos: Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman in Licorice Pizza. As an aimless 20-something and an overweening child actor-turned-entrepreneur, respectively, the incipient actors add another indelible, psychologically vivid pas de deux to Anderson's catalog of eccentric couplings. Their deliciously protean, showbiz-orbiting relationship grounds the film's archly antic (and magnificently palpable) 1970s SoCal in a glorious sense of yearning and fruitful emotional connection.
3.
tick, tick... BOOM!, dir. Lin-Manuel Miranda
In addition to its remarkable number of movie musicals, 2021 was notable for some very fine films focused on the process of translating life experience into art (Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II). Lin-Manuel Miranda's tick, tick... BOOM! belongs to both categories: an adaptation of the eponymous Jonathan Larson stage musical, it's also the story of that show's creation. By extension, it's an exemplary and nuanced portrait of the vagaries of a creative mind, and a vibrant tribute to the capricious social and cultural contexts that inform and transform its work. Andrew Garfield's astonishing, lissome inhabitation of Larson dances arm-in-arm with Miranda's intuitive grasp of cinematic rhythm and movement.
2.
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, dir. Radu Jude
The transgressive, revolutionary spirit of Dušan Makavejev and other politically radical European auteurs of the 60s is sparked back to blazing life in Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn. Confrontational and formally audacious, Jude's film mercilessly vivisects the moral conservatism and mass media-exacerbating anomie of our global capitalist present; in a middle third that would alone be one of the year's best films, it explodes narrative in a thrillingly pointed compendium of sociopolitical horrors and mordant cultural observations. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is hilarious, terrifying, and no-holds-barred in its diagnosis of societal deterioration, as lacerating a satire as the cinema has ever seen.
1.
Memoria, dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Even in a year as bountiful with great cinema as 2021, one film simply towered above the rest. Apichatpong's latest (and dare I say greatest?) psychospatial journey into human perception, Memoria feels monumental in its phenomenological scope and e/affects, in how exquisitely it uses film form to evoke the skein of memories, histories, myths, and embodied sensations that comprise the palimpsest of reality. In his characteristic fashion, Apichatpong employs playful, sinuous modulations of duration and sound to usher us ever deeper into the liminal spaces of perceptual experience, to the point where boundaries between past and present, self and other, wake and dream, cease to exist. To travel alongside Tilda Swinton's Jessica as she slowly loses her temporal bearings in the Colombian jungle, slipping into a porous membrane of ego-attenuating intersubjectivity, is to experience cinema's magic trick - really Apichatpong's - of bringing us into contact with the sublime.
And my closest runners-up, in convenient pairs...
The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen
The Green Knight, directed by David Lowery
Two very different visions of medieval hubris and misbegotten chivalry, one rendered in austere, brutalist black-and-white geometry and the other in sylvan greens, ochers, and browns. Both hypnotic audiovisual immersions in the archaic and occult.
West Side Story, directed by Steven Spielberg
In the Heights, directed by Jon M. Chu
Spielberg continues to prove he shouldn't be underestimated; what seemed like a deeply unnecessary remake turned out to be a shrewd, vigorous adaptation replete with his customarily expert classical Hollywood craftsmanship. Chu's film, meanwhile, brings a delightful musical to the screen for the first time with energy and panache to spare.
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