Daddy’s back and he’s brought you so content. Not going to drag out this intro by recapping this year of COVID and sorrow (we just lost Betty White as I write this) and instead get right into it. I didn’t include miniseries like Get Back, Mare of Easttown or Midnight Mass as I felt those probably fall more in the the realm of television.
Here’s the arbitrary HONORABLE MENTIONS portion: The Power of the Dog, The Harder They Fall, Judas and the Black Messiah, Psycho Goreman, Saint Maud, Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar, The Sparks Brothers, No Sudden Move, Last Night in Soho, I Care A Lot, Annette, The Last Duel, Spencer, Four Hours at the Capitol, The Dig, Those Who Wish Me Dead, Godzilla vs Kong, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Summer of Soul, The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Ok, here’s the meat of the article. Let’s go!!!
21. Malignant
Look, this belongs on just about every “Best of” list but those so-called “REAL” movie critics are likely too cowardly to include what, for my money, may be one of the great midnight movies of all time, of the very least the best one made on this scale since maybe Showgirls. Horror maestro James Wan’s new movie, Malignant, is more ride than symphony. But it’s a ride to remember. It’s a zany psychodramatic creepfest that, here and there, veers into gory action hilarity, as though Pazuzu had taken over the body of a Batman movie. Around the midway mark, an archetypal sleuth bolts after his parkouring demon perp (it makes sense in context…kind of)—a chase that leads down a fire escape and into a warehouse space, where the cop runs right into…well, you’ll see. The best rides make some unexpected turns on the way to the next drop.
20. Bad Trip
In the specialized subgenre of movies blending fictional characters with hidden-camera pranks and stunts in the style of reality TV (Is there a name for that? A quick Google search yielded no results.), the narrative framework connecting all those trailer-moment set pieces tends to be as rickety as comic conventions will allow. Even a master like Sacha Baron Cohen tends to tie his material together loosely, obviously preferring to expend his efforts on the logistical challenges of his biggest stunts. It’s of little surprise then that Bad Trip, a showcase for Eric André, isn’t exactly a miracle of intricate storytelling. But it does a refreshingly credible job replicating the arc of a studio buddy comedy, perhaps because its characters aren’t Borat-level personalities. There’s something sweetly generous, too, about the way these comic pros sometimes shift focus to non-actor supporting players without humiliating them. Bad Trip isn’t out to expose a seedy underbelly of the American road trip; though there are inevitably plenty of bystanders who film or gawk at potentially dangerous antics rather than assisting our hapless heroes, a few people in any given scene will emerge to offer help, advice, or good-natured commentary. This makes some of the pranks downright gentle and heartwarming, like an early moment where André seeks absurd romantic counsel from a friendly old-timer on a public bench.
19. Luca
After many long years of pursing that seemingly unattainable, magic-in-a-bottle feel of a Studio Ghibli film (WALL-E is the closest to ever get there in its dialogue-free opening half), Pixar has effectively made something that could’ve been made by Hayao Miyazaki himself, albeit likely by design. Luca shows us the world below chiefly from the perspective of its title character, a nervous 13-year-old “sea monster” who’s lived there his whole life. Early into the film, Luca (Jacob Tremblay) defies his parents’ warnings about the dangers of the surface and ventures onto dry land, his gills and green flesh suddenly, magically disguised. It’s here that he meets the devil-may-care Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), another teenage merboy playing at human on the other side of the waves. The pair’s reward for their courage: a quaint Italian town, hostile to their kind but nonetheless brimming with tantalizing delights of the culinary and vehicular variety. Coming from a company that’s become all about interconnected universes, this small scale, low stakes fair felt downright revolutionary.
18. West Side Story
Part of the magic of Steven Spielberg’s majestic, albeit not groundbreaking, adaptation is how it feels at once both classical and modern. Tony Kushner gracefully upgrades certain elements, teetering the eternal Romeo And Juliet clash of warring gangs towards a genuine balance of perspective and sympathies all while Spielberg brings the timeless story alive again through brilliant casting (Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist absolutely run away with this thing) and the virtuosic verve of his staging, all applied to a genre of pure song and dance. Still, in the end, what they’ve all emerged with is a stirringly, reverently faithful West Side Story: a new production that understands the mythic appeal of the material and the undimmed power of maybe one of the most revered songbooks in the history of stage and screen musicals. All this combined with the loss of Stephen Sondheim this year lead to soul-stirring cinematic experiences of the year.
Bless James Gunn. With The Suicide Squad (one of many soft reboots to add “the” to the mix), he gave us John Cena in his skivvies and multiple characters whose prolonged, painful deaths are played for laughs. In many ways, the gleefully profane, anything-goes mayhem of The Suicide Squad feels like a mega-budget version of the Troma Studios productions that gave Gunn his start. And thank goodness for that. Perhaps the best metric for comparing Gunn’s Squad to the 2016 David Ayer dreck is how they treat the character of Harley Quinn. In Ayer’s film, Harley is effectively a side character, obsessed with her boyfriend, who the camera continually ogles in short-shorts and high-heeled sneakers. (To play devil’s advocate, that’s kind of why the character was created back in the 1990’s.) In Gunn’s, she wears a red ball gown and work boots for much of the film and is the focus its most prominent subplot, a save-the-princess scenario where the princess chokes a man to death with her thighs before bashing in the skulls of a couple dozen goons, all to a Louis Prima number. Continuing the colorful whirl director Cathy Yan brought to Birds Of Prey, Gunn punctuates Harley’s big action-hero sequence with bright blooms of CGI flowers that spurt out of the wounds of the men she’s killed. Disney’s loss (thankfully they wised up and rehired Gunn to see out his Guardians of the Galaxy after a dumb, virtue signaling campaign to have him cancelled utterly failed) was Warner Bros gain as Gunn once again gave us the best comic book movie of a given year.
16. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
It’s worth-noting that Roadrunner, a documentary on the late, great Anthony Bourdain, was spearheaded by Morgan Neville, the man behind the great Fred Rogers doc, Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Both are defied figures of television however where Rogers is revered for his seemingly flawless saintlike good, Bourdain is remembered best as an agent of vice; living each day like your last and finding the beauty in our cracks. In other words, he was human and Neville never loses site of that, painting the picture of a man who wasn’t nice but was still kind, a man who was great but not a god. To be clear, Roadrunner is very far from an advertisement for suicide. That would be horribly irresponsible, and also inconsistent with Neville’s style. He excels at tearjerkers. And yes, the end of this movie is quite moving, as Bourdain’s friends, colleagues, and family members attempt to articulate the bewildering void Bourdain left behind. Perhaps saddest of all, Éric Ripert, Bourdain’s friend and fellow chef who discovered his body while they were filming on location in France, simply says, “I don’t talk about that day.” But the majority of the film doesn’t wallow in sentimentality. How could it, when Bourdain is narrating his own life?
15. In the Heights
In 2018, director Jon M. Chu imbued his adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians with classical Hollywood decadence, hanging it all on a framework of well-constructed cultural specificity. Flash forward to 2021, we’re getting Chu’s version of In the Heights and it’s just as incredible. The exciting electricity of a non-white blockbuster cast becoming superstars before your eyes, the maximalist style of a modern smash updating its influences, the intertwining of hyper-specific and broad themes—Chu’s strengths and his cast soar, bringing In the Heights as high as it’s ever been. Head-bobbing bops and moving melodies match rhythmic editing and a vibrant, fittingly populous background that’s constant choreography sustains the perpetual, organic flow of a community. In the Heights is great, and its greatness is amplified by the joy that it will inspire in theaters full of people for years to come. What a phenomenal return to the cinema.
14. Benedetta
The power and body of Christ compel the characters of Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, which ruminates on the raunchy interiority of a lesbian relationship realized inside of the sacred confines of a convent in 17th century Italy. The carnal Catholicism which permeates the film is at this point to be expected from the 83-year-old Dutch filmmaker—but equally so is the film’s ability to utilize eroticism as a vehicle to examine pain, paranoia and power. The same-sex relationship between Benedetta Carlini (Virginie Efira) and fellow nun Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia) is patently portrayed in the film, but it does not restrict them—or any of the other sisters at the Convent of the Mother of God in Pescia, Tuscany—to the singular roles of martyr or zealot. Instead, Verhoeven and co-writer David Birke refuse to vindicate or validate the intentions of historical figures by today’s secular standards, confronting hierarchies that exist outside of the neat categories of “good” and “evil.” Greater than the boundary between blessed and blasphemous is the chasm that exists between the Church and the citizens who follow it. Yet there is a tangible twinge of hopefulness present in the film. Shackles that are either imposed by individuals or institutions can be broken, even if only by way of speculation and imaginative flourish for a nearly forgotten figure.
13. tick, tick…BOOM!
In the most charming moment of Tick, Tick… Boom!, a group of New York City artist types lounge around a cramped apartment in the waning hours of a party. Suddenly, host and aspiring musical theater composer Jonathan Larson (a never better Andrew Garfield) launches into an a cappella tribute to the bohemians who sacrifice creature comforts and paychecks in the hope of following an artistic dream. (Larson would go on to spearhead Rent, a musical I personally hate but is obviously iconic and important) It’s less a fully realized musical number than a semi-realistic rendering of the sort of navel-gazing that theater kids are inclined to indulge in, harmonized vocals and all. On the sidelines, a finance bro watches in awe at the spontaneous group creation happening around him—gawking at a world so different than his own that it might as well be another planet. In his debut feature as a director, Lin-Manuel Miranda can see both points of view here. His adaptation of this deep-cut one-man, autobiographical stage show is an unabashed ode to theater kids, one filled with so many Broadway Easter eggs and cameos it’ll have fans pausing their screens every few minutes to catch them all. But Miranda’s bigger goal is to make the insular, self-involved world of musical theater accessible to those who are more inclined to gape at a spontaneous performance than join in. Much like the two other musicals on this list, Tick, Tick… Boom! is refreshingly unembarrassed by the fact that it’s a musical. But it’s also a musical that tries to deconstruct and remind us why musicals matter.
The Matrix Resurrections is hardly the first “legacy sequel” to hit cinemas recently (see: Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Space Jam: A New Legacy). But in updating a seminal text about generational alienation from more than two decades ago, Lana Wachowski (who directed solo this time, without her sister Lilly) has made a film that addresses the discombobulations of contemporary life, critiques Hollywood’s reboot culture, and serves as a surprisingly sweet work of nostalgia. Wachowski, who had long seemed content to leave the Matrix universe dormant after the back-to-back sequels Reloaded and Revolutions in 2003, is poking fun at the pervading corporate desire to make everything old new again. Does the world really need more Matrix? Wachowski ponders the question both through Neo/Thomas’ (a returning Keanu Reeves) weariness and the strange creative debates that play out on-screen, as eager young game programmers bat around notions of what made The Matrix so appealing in the first place. Was it the action? The twisty plotting? The bullet time? To my delight, Wachowski also holds on to quite a lot of backstory from the often-derided Matrix sequels; as a defender of those too-often misunderstood epics, I was excited to see Resurrections not wipe the plot slate clean and just launch a brand-new Matrix. The evolution of the simulation is laced with some heady in-universe logic, but Wachowski (along with co-writers David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon) also ties it to how the internet has changed since the first film.
Furthering his obsession with building frames around frames, Wes Anderson presents his first anthology film as the final issue of a revered periodical obviously modeled on The New Yorker—a sophisticated structural gimmick that allows him to tell stories within stories within more stories, riffing on the absurdities of, say, the modern art world while also centering the perspective of the intrepid reporters navigating it. The French Dispatch has been confused, as Anderson’s work so often is, for an empty exercise in meticulously dioramic style. As usual, though, the writer-director smuggles profundities and bittersweet insights into the supposedly hollow center of his brilliant comic picaresques. Within this Russian nesting doll, you’ll find affecting performances (including Jeffrey Wright’s lovely take on James Baldwin), affectionate cartoon Francophilia and a dizzyingly dense pastiche of the various artworks that have sparked Anderson’s imagination. Finally, at center is a eulogy for the Arthur Howitzer Juniors of the world: a winsome tribute to unfashionable editorial integrity, celebrating a half-remembered, half-imagined era when the owners of publications actually gave two shits about their writers and the subjects they wrote about. This reporter couldn’t help but get a lump in his throat more than once.
10. The Worst Person in the World
The Worst Person In The World has multiple hallmarks of an overstuffed literary adaptation: narration that comes and goes, narrative divided into episodic chapters, a cumbersome and unclear timespan. But director and co-writer Joachim Trier isn’t actually wrestling a novel into submission; he’s using an original film to chronicle the various careers, hobbies, and relationships of 20-to-30-something Julie (Renate Reinsve), with a novel-in-stories progression through moments deceptively small and surprisingly seismic. Julie remains at the center even as Trier cleverly positions her looking through windows into other lives: the husband and wife loudly fighting in the next room; the cancer patient air-drumming with his headphones on; an anonymous couple on the street, frozen in a kiss during one reality-blurring stunner of a scene. Chapters come and go; the book, like life, is never finished.
9. Dune
It’s worth noting here that the actual onscreen title of Dennis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the 1965 sci-fi staple is Dune: Part One. The script (by Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth) covers only the first half of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel, and the result ultimately feels like half of a movie. Fortunately, it’s an ambitious one, made with the same stylistic intelligence that Villeneuve brought to Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, his earlier forays into smart sci-fi. Having come a long way from his arthouse roots, he has emerged as one of our most reliable and talented directors of suspense and effects. This is not the first attempt to translate the beloved book to the screen, the most obvious example being David Lynch’s 1984 adaptation I’ve never really liked but stand my defense of its effects and production design. I argue Villeneue’s represents a complete (albeit incomplete narratively) package in the script and acting actually meeting the effects and direction. Some narrative shortcuts are unavoidable; like Lynch’s version, for instance, the new Dune opens with extended expository narration. So is a sense of distance from the characters, given the fatalistic plotting of the source material, which also makes the scattered attempts at levity feel forced. But Villeneuve has a few tricks up his sleeve. The cast is uniformly strong, and it’s a credit to his direction that all of the performances—from Jason Momoa’s boisterous Duncan Idaho to Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam to the “inhuman” Harkonnens—believably inhabit the same world. There’s also the effective use of flash-forwards; in providing cryptic glimpses of events beyond the film (to be presumably covered in Part Two), Visions of the future reinforce the impression that all of this happening on a larger-than-human scale, with destinies to be fulfilled.
8. Red Rocket
When Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), the dirtbag former porn star at the heart of Sean Baker’s new movie, returns broke, beat up, and homeless to his small Texas hometown he seems to have nowhere to go but up. But Mikey, as it quickly becomes clear, has never hit a rock bottom he can’t push through to reach unforeseen depths of degeneracy; no sooner has he regained the trust of his estranged wife and mother-in-law than he sets his sights on Strawberry (Suzanna Son), a big-eyed teenager who works at the local donut shop and who this washed-up parasite sees as his ticket back into the Los Angeles adult film industry. Baker’s eye set firmly to the fringe, combined with Rex’s spectacular motor-mouthed turn, enliven both the high comedy and minor-key tragedy of Red Rocket. Crucially, it’s refreshing to watch a film that trusts its audience enough to make up their own minds about the charming grifters who prowl our culture. It’s of little coincidence then we hear speeches of one Donald J. Trump pop up here and there throughout the proceedings.
Together Together is an amiable, successfully awkward surrogacy dramedy that also has the respectable distinction of being a TERF’s worst nightmare. That’s only one of the tiny aspects of writer/director Nikole Beckwith’s second feature, but the gentle tapestry of intimacy among strangers who, for a short time, desperately need each other certainly benefits from the meta-text of comedian and internet terror Patti Harrison’s multi-layered starring performance. (She’s a recurring favorite on Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave.) Stacked with memorable bit parts from a roster of recent television’s greatest comedic talents and casually incisive dialogue that lays waste to media empires and preconceptions of women’s autonomy alike, the film is an unexpected, welcome antidote to emotional isolation and toxic masculinity that meanders in and out of life lessons at a pleasingly inefficient clip. That the tale of fatherhood and friendship is told through the sparkling chemistry of a rising trans star and her entrenched, anxious straight man (Ed Helms) only adds to Together Together’s magic.
6. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
Animated generational divides have never been more like a sci-fi carnival than in The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Writer/director Mike Rianda’s feature debut is equal parts absurd and endearing. It’s easy to feel as lost or overwhelmed by the flashing lights and exhilarating sights as the central family fighting on one side of the title’s grudge match, but it’s equally easy to come away with the exhausted glee of a long, weary theme park outing’s aftermath. Its genre-embedded family bursts through every messy, jam-packed frame like they’re trying to escape (they often are), and in the process create the most energetic, endearing animated film of 2021. You might be able to guess that Katie (Abbi Jacobson) and her dad don’t always see eye-to-eye, even when Katie’s eyes aren’t glued to her phone or laptop. That techno-criticism, where “screen time” is a dirty phrase and the stick-shifting, cabin-building father figure (a wonderful Danny McBride) wants his family to experience the real world, could be as hacky as the twelfth season of a Tim Allen sitcom. The Mitchells vs. the Machines escapes that danger however not only through some intentional nuance in its writing, but also some big ol’ anti-nuance: Partway through the trip, the evil tech companies screw up and phone-grown robots decide to shoot all the humans into space. The Sony film makes use of the same style that made Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse look so crisp and unique, adding comicky shading to its expressive CG. In fact, once some of the more freaky setpieces take off, you wouldn’t be surprised to see Miles Morales or Peter B. Parker swing in to save the day.
5. Titane
Even if you haven’t seen Titane, there’s a chance you’ve heard at least one thing about it: yes, someone has sex with a car. (Actually, it’s two cars, but who’s counting?) Yet even with that information in mind, Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to the cannibal coming-of-age fable Raw defies every expectation. Centered around the largely wordless performance of Agathe Rousselle in one of the most impressive acting debuts in recent memory, Titane breaks new ground in “body horror” by having skulls, wombs, and veins pullulating with grease, metal, and gasoline. For all the shock value of the film, which concerns the unlikely relationship that develops between Rousselle’s on-the-lam criminal and a traumatized firefighter (Vincent Lindon), it’s ultimately as moving as it is lurid and as sweet as it is grotesque: a sensitive meditation on gender, family, sex, and grief, laced with Ducournau’s now-signature intensity.
4. Pig
The blunt title, the John Wick-esque premise (middle-aged hermit hunts down the people who stole his beloved truffle pig), and the words “starring Nicolas Cage” primed expectations for a tongue-in-cheek, over-the-top revenge thriller. Instead, first-time (?!) director Michael Sarnoski serves up a disarmingly sincere and heartfelt portrait of curdled grief, while simultaneously exploring the Proustian ways in which food can do more than merely sustain us. That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have its enjoyably offbeat touches, like the protagonist’s visit to Portland’s secret haute cuisine fight club, which sees restaurant workers bid to pummel tyrannical chefs. But it’s Cage’s beautifully internalized embodiment of sorrow mixed with grim determination that sets the tone, and Pig’s ultimate catharsis arrives in forms—one culinary, the other musical—that are unexpected and genuinely moving.
WARNING: The following is about to be insufferably pedantic in a way that only an English major can provide.
English national identity is an extremely slippery subject, mired in centuries of ambition and small island tribalism. Given how the past decade has crescendoed with debates about what the country really stands for, it was apt of David Lowery to choose this moment to re-examine one of its (and all of fantasy literature’s really) founding legends. Based on a 14th-century Arthurian poem, The Green Knight is a spellbinding epic of myth and masculinity, with a never-better Dev Patel as the foolhardy, naive, brash yet wholly sympathetic Gawain, an aspiring adventurer laid asunder by his ego, challenging the titular monstrous knight to a “game” he is doomed to lose. Gawain’s perilous, episodic quest takes him across the countryside (no coconuts to found here), raising questions along the way about what he, and it, are fated to become. Gifted with an uncommon eye for breathtaking British landscape, an American director has captured some of the very best of the nation across the sea, while unearthing much of the rot clogging its foundations.
Maybe it’s a cheat to include a comedy special as one of the best films of the year but Bo Burnham’s latest feels utterly cinematic (and even played in theaters for a limited time once vaccine distribution was underway) and it’s my list so deal with it. Inside teeters on unfunny in its realism and careens towards becoming an exposition on depression during quarantine. Burnham channels the visceral feelings of being stuck indoors over the last year, maneuvering through comedy’s own role in making us feel better during this time. He covers white fragility, a well-known CEO by the name of Jeffrey Bezos, and the endless nightmarish rabbit hole that is the internet. However, “hiding” in between all of the jokes about white women’s Instagram accounts, sexting, and FaceTiming his mom, is a potent reflection on the comedian’s career as well as a call-out for his own missteps as a teenager when said career began. This comes at a time in comedy where comedians find themselves reckoning with the fact that not every joke they’ve ever made has been in good taste, and that the racism, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia peddled out by comedians is no longer taken lightly. If Inside represents his return to comedy (here’s hoping he steps behind the camera again after 2019’s sublimely cringe Eighth Grade), it’s also his moment of reckoning with the people who were the targets of his early jokes. After taking five years off from stand-up, he comes back older, much wiser, and with some necessary apologies. He’s no longer the teenager immersed in a world of comedy ruled by white men saying jokes without thinking about who’s at the other end of them. If Burnham wished, he could delete the YouTube videos and every syllable of problematic jokes with them, but he knows that’s not the solution. Internet sleuths would dig all of it up anyways. He chooses to be a better version of himself and address it head-on, in typical effective, self-deprecating fashion.
“You can’t even keep your own story straight,” Alana (Alana Haim) tells Gary (Cooper Hoffman) early in Licorice Pizza, Paul Thomas Anderson’s third and flat-out loveliest crack at chronicling Los Angeles in the 1970s. This description actually applies to both of them: two ill-fitting hustlers, one frustrated in her 20s and the other precocious in his teens, trying to piece together their next steps through various small businesses and hijinks. Though their unsteady love story is Anderson’s most immediately accessible movie in years, he still elides or obscures certain narrative details, as in his more obscure work. Here he uses that elusiveness for a different effect, blurring variously strange, magical, and harrowing adventures into a rush of time’s uncertain but inexorable passage. Maybe that’s why the much-discussed age gap between the two heroes registers as more unusual romantic obstacle than flashing red morality alarm: They’re mutually unstuck from both childhood and adulthood, forever (or just for now) running back toward each other. It’s hard to imagine that Licorice Pizza isn’t going to follow the playful design of a sunny Southern California love story. Alana is instantly strange and striking, and—when Anderson introduces her in a dolly-shot with a mini-skirt, kitten-heels, slumped shoulders and a gloriously pissed expression—we are compelled to fall in love with her, just like Gary does, at first sight. Of course, Anderson quickly rejects the notion that Licorice Pizza is going to be a straightforward romance, or even a romance at all. Anderson knows that this ambling, disjointed structure reflects what it’s like to be young, awkward and in love. Each shot, filled with dreamy pastels, glows with a youthful nostalgia. Anderson and cinematographer Michael Bauman balance out this haziness with a unique control of the camera, implementing long takes, slow dollies, and contemplative pans galore. What is it that Alana gets from being friends with someone ten years younger than her? And why does Gary always return to Alana even when she tries her best to put him down? Like gleefully gliding through the streets of L.A. in the midst of a city-wide crisis, it’s a madness you can only truly understand when you’re living it.
Sharks with Laserbeams 