Best of 2021
My top 25 films of 2021, with some bonuses
Time for some list-making! I already shared my top 25 movies of the year on social media on New Year’s Eve; here they are again with some additional commentary on movies I haven’t yet written up for this newsletter. Where I’ve previously written about a film, I will link to the prior writeup for your perusal!
Honorable Short Film Mention: Still Processing
Photography is very much part of filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s heritage (her dad studied to be a cinematographer in Hungary). In this moving—and, fittingly, richly-shot—short, she unearths some unseen and undeveloped childhood photos to commemorate two of her brothers after their untimely passings.
25. Passing
Rebecca Hall’s clean and spare adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novella makes a case for itself on the strength of its performers and its well-chosen images. Tessa Thompson shines but I’m enamored with how Ruth Negga projects confidence from a place of utter precarity.
24. Poppy Field
A short Romanian debut that’s clearly indebted to Cristian Mungiu’s cinéma du stress. It’s the first I’ve seen from Romania to foreground a gay male subjectivity, and it wryly turns a non-event (a conservative protest group derails a screening of a movie with lesbian content) into a site of tragic irony for its protagonist, a cop with a secret boyfriend.
23. À l’abordage!
22. Azor
The world of Swiss banking collides with dictatorship-era Argentina in this financial thriller where everything is at stake but nothing really happens, which somehow makes it all that much more unsettling.
21. Întregalde
A movie about how gay people in traditionally Orthodox countries are literally left to grow old, alone, losing their minds, saved from death only by the hapless and nearly ineffectual interventions of liberal democrats.
20. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
19. Great Freedom
18. The Inheritance
A house of Black radicals in Philadelphia learn their history, stage a poetry reading for the community, and decide on house rules by majority vote (“we are a shoeless house!”). Will appeal to fans of Godard’s La Chinoise and anyone who has spent enough time in Left organizations to fondly relate to the travails of young organizers and idealists but not so much (or so little) time as to have the gag reflex kick in at the sight of something so familiar.
17. All Light, Everywhere
16. The Tsugua Diaries
15. Bergman Island
14. Licorice Pizza
Oil is a messy queen who lives for drama; remember the time she shut down production on No Country for Old Men because she wouldn’t stop billowing smoke on the set of There Will Be Blood? Though her Oscar-eligible co-star Daniel Day-Lewis may have stolen all her thunder back in 2007, make no mistake: oil is one of the best actresses working and her turn in Licorice Pizza proves it. It’s easy to see how a late-film oil embargo jams the gears of the plot—everyone’s running out of gas!—but a quickly tossed-off line by Alana Haim gestures at the bigger and more nefarious picture: the burgeoning water bed business that has henceforth been the driving force of the film’s action is in jeopardy because the materials in the beds are derived from oil. It’s surely no coincidence that this film, set in a time where the material world is increasingly built on and clothed in oil-based synthetics, should be juxtaposed in PTA’s filmography right against Phantom Thread, a movie where World War innovations in petrochemical manufacture have not yet thoroughly seeped into the make and mold of civilian life (but where natural poisons are still plentiful, if one knows which trees to look under). Reynolds Woodcock’s anxiety in that earlier film takes on new meaning when looking forward to the multi-blend fashions that would supplant his world of handcrafted natural fibers by the time of Licorice Pizza. I’m committed to this esoteric reading of PTA’s filmography as the best contemporary cinema of climate change because Hollywood hasn’t been sending their best otherwise; plus it’s more fun to talk about this movie from this angle than to rehash the age gap discourse for the millionth time.
13. Atlantis
A lightly futuristic tale of postwar trauma in Ukraine told with some of the most immaculate photography of the year. (Atlantis is technically a 2019 release, but it received a virtual theatrical run in early 2021.) With liberal use of radical colors and textures that remind me of the large-scale environmental tableaux of Edward Burtynsky, Valentyn Vasyanovych finds both surprising warmth and bitter cold in the lives of his world-weary cast. This isn’t his first film, but he’s the up-and-comer I’m most excited for heading into the new year.
12. Friends and Strangers
11. Quo Vadis, Aida? (reviewed for Athwart)
10. The French Dispatch (reviewed for Fare Forward)
9. Memoria
Like Jonas Bak’s Wood and Water, Memoria is a film about a Western European woman with an unsettling, undiagnosed ailment who travels to a foreign country where a family member is suffering from an illness of their own and spends a lot of time respectfully befriending locals and having meaningful conversations with them. Bak is obviously indebted to Apichatpong (Joe) Weerasethakul, who, it’s hard to believe, is only 21 years into his feature filmmaking career. Memoria is Joe’s first time shooting a film outside his home country of Thailand, and all the features that endear people to his indigenous cinema can still be found here in his romp around Colombia with Tilda Swinton (and, for some reason, Jeanne Balibar): the meditative long takes, the gently supernatural comedic touches, the out-of-left-field cinematic mic drops. Neon has boldly chosen to exclusively screen Memoria theatrically; ridiculous cinephile that I am, I scheduled my holiday travel around making a stop in New York to see this at IFC Center during its one-week run. Most people lucky enough to make it out to a theater to see it this year will write home about the hair-raising sound design of the last 30 minutes of the movie. For me, for some reason, the sensory memory that followed me out of the theater was the image of Tilda and a lion-maned Juan Pablo Urrego walking the streets of Bogota after a visit to a terrarium vendor, beautiful chance fellow-travelers on a road at once wondrous and mundane.
8. Wood and Water
7. Annette
An excellent case study in the shockingness of alterity, because the spectator could not have possible come up with this movie on their own. The 26-year-old Leos Carax who sent Denis Lavant cartwheeling down the sidewalk to David Bowie has grown into a man of unadulterated idiosyncrasy and no less exuberant emotional impulse. The Mael brothers make for good collaborators on this musical stripped of subtext, except for one very important thing: you can’t easily make a film about child abuse with real children, so why not use a puppet instead?
6. Days
God I need a massage.
5. West Side Story
This movie is so well blocked that it simply embarrasses nearly every other movie released this year (including some of the highbrow fare on this very list). Mise en scène alone doesn’t make a movie (“But what if it does?” whispers the little devil-horned Janusz Kamiński that suddenly appeared on my shoulder), but it matters more for a musical. The Spielberg–Kushner rendition of West Side Story lets the Robert Wise version alone and leans harder into political awareness (a key distinction, I would say, from political correctness) not merely by writing it into the script but also by building it into every material aspect of the production. Sometimes it gets a bit hokey, Ansel Elgort brings all his personal baggage to the screen in a way that will either alienate you or not, but none of that matters because I will watch “America” approximately 300 times once it’s inevitably uploaded to YouTube and be floored by Spielberg’s total mastery of this medium every single time.
4. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
3. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s influences on the first of his two films this year are obvious: Ozu, Hong, Rohmer (it’s more specifically a riff on Rohmer’s anthology film Rendezvous in Paris, but with the added complexity of tying the three episodes together with stronger thematic resonances). A coincidence of sorts is the starting point for each story in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which, as the title suggests, is as interested in chance as it is in the ways that people use their imagination to muddle through matters of love. The conclusions of each episode tend to be a bit more grim than anything Rohmer ever cooked up, but the third chapter, about two old friends who run into each other on the metro and later realize they’ve each made a grave mistake, knocked me sideways with joy.
2. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
The length of a 9-to-5, if you watch it all in one sitting (I did not), this docufiction hybrid by German photographer–filmmakers C.W. Winter and Anders Edström captures life in a Japanese town of fewer than 50 residents in exacting visual and auditory detail. Both a serene piece of environmental observation and a humanizing story about aging, The Works and Days is greatly interested in the spaces that the elderly live in, work in, play in, and eventually die in. According to the program notes, it was “shot for a total of 27 weeks, over a period of 14 months,” and it’s evident in the precision of every shot and sound effect that not a day of the production went to waste.
1. Drive My Car
Misaki, the driver of the titular car, has lucked into a steady job as a chauffeur in the gig economy. She takes seriously her role, which entails not just ferrying the actor/director Yusuke from point A (his hotel) to point B (the arts center where he’s completing a residency and directing a production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya) safely every day. She has to learn the ins and outs of the car, which is Yusuke’s own; she has to be consistent and dependable; and as the movie stretches on toward the three hour mark, she increasingly has to decide how much to let Yusuke into her inner world as he inevitably discloses some of his from the backseat. Drive My Car, adapted from the same-named Murakami short story, is like Hamaguchi’s previous films: a little bit strange, peppered with contrivance, somewhat visually plain until, unexpectedly, it isn’t. But here I felt that all the hallmarks of his work—the long duration, characters who at length verbally attempt to articulate their mysterious interior lives, art works as serious features of people’s actual lives and not just contentless names to be tacked on to a script to make certain audience members smile for getting the reference—coalesced into his most narratively and emotionally satisfying film yet. Maybe he’ll never make another movie as good as this or Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy again, but anyone who makes both in the same year has more than earned their laurels as one of our contemporary greats.
And now for some other bests—
Best Director
Jonas Bak, Wood and Water
Leos Carax, Annette
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Steven Spielberg, West Side Story
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Memoria
Best Actor
Cooper Hoffman, Licorice Pizza
Lee Kang-sheng, Days
Hidetoshi Nishijima, Drive My Car
Franz Rogowski, Great Freedom
Fabrizio Rongione, Azor
Best Actress
Jasna Đuričić, Quo Vadis, Aida?
Alana Haim, Licorice Pizza
Toko Miura, Drive My Car
Joséphine & Gabrielle Sanz, Petite Maman
Tilda Swinton, Memoria
Best Supporting Actor
Carloto Cotta, The Tsugua Diaries
Elkin Díaz, Memoria
Mike Faist, West Side Story
Simon Helberg, Annette
Jeffrey Wright, The French Dispatch
Best Supporting Actress
Ariana DeBose, West Side Story
Émilie Dequenne, Les choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait
Carmen Iriondo, Azor
Fusako Urabe, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Park Yoo-rim, Drive My Car
Best Ensemble
Drive My Car
The French Dispatch
Licorice Pizza
West Side Story
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Best Editing
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Drive My Car
Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
Memoria
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
Best Original Screenplay
Bergman Island
The French Dispatch
Licorice Pizza
The Tsugua Diaries
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Best Adapted Screenplay
Benedetta
Drive My Car
The Power of the Dog
Uppercase Print
West Side Story
Best Cinematography - Film
The French Dispatch
Memoria
West Side Story
Wood and Water
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
Best Cinematography - Digital or Hybrid
Annette
Atlantis
Întregalde
Quo Vadis, Aida?
What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Best Original Score
Annette
Azor
The French Dispatch
The Power of the Dog
Spencer
Best Sound
Annette
Dune
Memoria
West Side Story
The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin)
Best Hair and Makeup
Benedetta
Dune
The French Dispatch
Licorice Pizza
Passing
Best Costume Design
Annette
Dune
The Green Knight
Licorice Pizza
West Side Story
Best Production Design
Dune
The French Dispatch
Licorice Pizza
Strawberry Mansion
West Side Story
Best Documentary
All Light, Everywhere
Il Buco
Procession
Summer of Soul (or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Taming the Garden
Best Animal
The bird that shits in that guy’s eye, Benedetta
The hog the farmers kill, The Works and Days
There was a horse in The Power of the Dog, right? Did it do anything? I mean there’s one on the poster
Nic Cage’s pig, Pig
Peekaboo cockatoo, Friends and Strangers
Best Ending
Annette
Drive My Car
Great Freedom
Licorice Pizza
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Queer Palme
Days
(Runner up: Great Freedom)
Best Movie Poster
Scenes of the Year
Dancing, Le Sel des larmes
In the sound booth with young Hernán and in the house with old Hernán, Memoria
Germany ✈️ Hong Kong, Wood and Water
America, West Side Story
First encounter with the sandworm, Dune
The auditions, Drive My Car
Duet/duel, The Power of the Dog
So May We Start and the spinning conducting shot, Annette
Let Me Roll It, Licorice Pizza
Most Anticipated Movies of 2022
In Front of Your Face, Benediction, The Cathedral, Reflection, Killers of the Flower Moon, Nope, Tori and Lokita, One Fine Morning, God’s Creatures, White Noise (with strong reservations)