The 10 Best Movies of 2021
What a rebound from 2020
10. ZOLA
Directed by Janicza Bravo
This was like a psychedelic trip you simultaneously want to escape from and be trapped by. I couldn’t believe what was happening and each minute leaving me more intrigued than the previous. Can you freaking imagine being in Zola’s position? I might of had a heart attack. As a spectator, I felt all the anxiousness of Zola and just felt down right uncomfortable.
It felt great to leave the theatre feeling like I’ve just seen something so different. It didn’t try to be ostentatious or pine for awards it just told the story of a trippy “see it to believe it” journey and i was happy to be along for the ride.
Early screen efforts in showing SMS conversations and status updates required the audience to read fly-by word bubbles and pop ups that made typical subtitles feel like easy mode.
Zola instead takes inspiration from the likes of Scorsese’s Age of Innocence or Gerwig’s Little Women. There, depicting letter writers and receivers reciting with elan their dictation to the unseen man inside the camera.
Here, though, lovelorn debutantes are substituted for the titular stripper. And her medium of choice…. is the Twitter diatribe.
Rather than feed viewers (aka followers) reams of her now infamous saga, Zola takes the audience into her world of electronic exchange through dialogue, action, and lyrca.
The film never gets to a point where it reaches the peak chaos hustle it promised in its marketing. Nor does it attain the spontaneous insanity of its source material. While trying to guide viewers into an understanding of its wacked out world, Zola the film is ultimately overly cautious.
TL;DR — nicholas braun big tall
9. Pig
Directed by Michael Sarnoski
Grief is an indescribable emotion. It eats away at your existence until you’re left in a constant state of emotional paralysis. Pig epitomizes the harsh disposition of what it means to be self-sufficient, as well as the agony produced by grief. The tough circumstances in this movie relate to life, which is the most difficult challenge for all of us due to its unpredictability and never-ending cycle of challenges. The film muses on the nature of existence itself through these themes of sadness and changes. Every day that we wake up, part of us dies. Everything is going according to plan one minute, and then your entire world comes crashing down the next. It’s impossible to predict what will happen. It’s easy to feel as if life is moving too quickly or too slowly. Everything always feels the same, yet everything is always changing. Pig, like a tidal wave of darkness, embodies this message.
Nicholas Cage portrays a figure whose silence is the loudest thing about him. His portrayal is devoid of any artifice, and he presents Rob as knowledgeable and attentive while remaining intense and unexpected. Cage’s subtle restraint in this performance allows him to provide us with one of the most fascinating character studies in recent years, as he understands when and how to peel back the layers of his characters’ heavy past.
The incredible thing about Pig is that it’s a film that makes the most out of a simple concept that seems so alien, and placing it in such an ordinary setting — creating that sense of disconnect between one world and the outside. But in how committed Nicolas Cage is into this role, you’re only coming to see the world through his own eyes, for every moment he’s suffering so greatly, and I think that’s what speaks to what makes Pig anywhere near as great as it is.
Everything about Pig is so beautifully made, established, to the point where it doesn’t feel like any other revenge tale but you experience the sort of grief that Cage’s character is putting himself through.
8. Bergman Island
Directed by Mia Hansen-Løve
Bergman Island does not look like a movie but a distant memory or a dream. With a mysterious and ambiguous plot, the filmmaker explores dynamics as a couple, imitating and making numerous references to Bergman’s cinema. Mia Hansen-Løve seeks her artistic principle in Ingmar Bergman; however, Bergman Island is no tribute to the Swedish filmmaker. It works, like all reflections, in the simplicity with which it disguises the original appearance of the idea. A filmmaker in a crisis like Chris will not find her loving and creative principle in Tony, a director based on the infatuation with cinema that makes him a psychotic with too many certainties.
So, this is not one of those dramas. It’s a story within a story, at least I think so, as I still am not sure of some parts of the film, however it’s like one part of the story is a continuous exploration of the themes of the main story. It’s very straightforward and yet I am puzzled. Any cinephile has heard of the island where Bergman would go to work, to isolate himself from other souls, it has that legendary status for those who love cinema. So, what happens when you actually go to the island? You find all sorts of characters, from the highest fans, to simple tourists to the complete obnoxious people who look at cinema’s personalities as royalty and won’t let you get away if you even dare to say something inaccurate.
So, what is the film really about? Confronting our idols? Perhaps, and in a sense that is confronting ourselves and the stories we create, wether they’re real or imaginary. Nevertheless, “Bergman Island” never feels like a heavy film. It’s so so light, with a touch of summerlight, I just felt so in peace while watching it, like a film for introverts you know? And may I say, Chris and Tony had a great relationship. How many couples do you see in films that actually seem right to each other and are good to each other without getting too much? Not that many actually, they really got a good balance with one another.
7. Nine Days
Directed by Edson Oda
Being alive is messy. Out there in the world in the hopes that the values instilled in us are enough to get us through the day. and whether they’re the rights ones to begin with. Whether we’re strong enough with what we know to be true.
“i don’t want you to do what i think is right; i want you to do what’s right for you”
The sane deep-self view; boils down to knowing the difference between right and wrong. what i thought, initially, to be the whole thematic purpose the film in particular seeks with its characters to attain, with the revolving door of people coming in and out throughout their nine day trial to witness what it is like to live — and if they’re worthy of it. But the sane deep-self view is more than knowing between right and wrong. It’s having the capacity to self evaluate. Re-evaluate. To change. The changing conditions around us that allow for reflection. The very same conditions that may have shaped the way we perceive what is right and what is wrong. In the case of the film those conditions are the people. Complex, layered, human itself conditions that flood the isolated house with different takes on how to handle the hardships and cruelty of the world. We watch throughout these nine days how all these people challenge Will’s sane deep-self view on what it means to be alive. How for some, a singular moment is all they really need to experience to see the beauty in living before departing. But others, one is simply not enough. because being alive to some — based on the conditions that led them to believe in what the prospect of it actually means — is different to what you or i think. because of the values instilled in us. Because being alive is messy. But also…because being alive is precious. It makes sense that the film be wholly empathetic towards these many views. Open to opinion. How much are we actually shutting out? How much are we willing to listen to reason at the expense of losing some of that attained sane deep-self view we desperately cling on to; even when — in the eyes of those around us — we’re wrong. I think I’d like to open myself to change. And if presented the opportunity: to experience many moments throughout my 24 years of existence again. But maybe you don’t. And that’s okay. Being alive is delicate.
Nine Days is a powerfully contemplative narrative about all the contradictions that come with being born into this unpredictable, often unfair thing called life. Nine Days leaves us with plenty to discuss after viewing. The filmmaker’s approach is often bleak and slow-moving, yet his film excels in pushing us to examine our own attitude and appreciation for the gift of life. It asks how we define what a good life is in the face of the pain that often accompanies being alive. Nine Days hits hard as it asks its questions about what constitutes a life well lived and who is worthy of life. At its core, this is a film about the value in life itself unrelated to what a soul might accomplish.
“have you ever reckoned the earth much?”
6. C’Mon C’Mon
Directed by Mike Mills
The portrayal of children as they really are is perfect. They are shown to be intelligent and equally as important to society as adults. Along with learning through the children he interviews, Johnny learns just as much from Jesse as Jesse does from him. I loved how the story builds each character into a better version of themself through the help of family. In the end, Johnny is able to come to terms with his issues and verbally admit them. This encourages Jesse to admit his problems in a very raw manner, one that is accurate to what it actually looks like to come to terms with something.
The performances from the main trio were exceptional. If the Academy doesn’t forget this film entirely, I hope that at least two members of the cast are nominated. Joaquin Phoenix has an even better, and strikingly different, performance than his last film. His subtle acting ability is so powerful and proves that there’s a reason he’s one of highest regarded actors working today. But what’s even more shocking is that the child actor, Woody Norman, is equally as great. Norman is clearly going to be a star as he is already on par with some of the most accomplished actors in the business. His deliveries never slump and he has the perfect American accent. It’s pretty amazing that he’s an English actor as it it never once shows. Finally, Gaby Hoffmann masterfully portrays a mother in her rawest form: tired and mentally destroyed. All of her problems feel undeniably real and I can’t get over how genuine her conversations on the phone felt. She delivers so much raw emotion and is just as memorable as the others.
Despite being a warm comfort blanket, the feeling of resigned melancholia settles over like fog invading cities on a rainy day. There’s a constant consciousness of drifting apart, like logs separating from each other in a gently flowing stream — relationships evolving and perishing in the current of time. C’mon C’mon wears its beating prideful heart right on the sleeves, with glistening bandages covering the gaping wounds — and whispers words of wistful wisdom.
5. Spencer
Directed by Pablo Larraín
Jonny MotherFucking Greenwood.
Spencer is such a dark film. It is openly disrespectful to reality, but this allows it to examine Diana from a new perspective, one that is metaphorical rather than literal. It is set in an unnamed year, with imagined characters, placing Spencer in a unique universe with which to reimagine Diana. Kristen Stewart sells every moment, embodying Diana entirely, in spite of the film’s style-driven approach and deviations from fact. Spencer bathes in the absurd, both due to its indulgent artistic flourishes and the inherent farcicality of royal life. Spencer is an art film that deconstructs a person and her surroundings and her legacy, much like Jackie did. However Larraín’s obsessive merge of fantasy and fiction is even more heightened here
Spencer is an audacious piece of art, provocative and scathing in its depiction of royalty. This is not a film about anyone real. It is a complete fiction, about events that did not happen and a fantasy that is absurd. However it is very real in its imaginings of the sort of tragedy that Diana Spencer found herself in. It speculates about history, and finds a unique angle with which to view it. Art should be this bold and daring and probing. Spencer is a work of genius, that finds something new to say about a story that has been told so many times before.
Spencer illustrates claustrophobia and panic to remarkable poetic effect. Pablo Larraín makes no apologies for showing Diana’s braking psyche and while it will obviously leave some members feeling cold, for me, it delivered on everything it needed to, making me care about her life and wanting to see more from her sadly doomed future. The bar was high given all the praise and yet Spencer still surprised me. This is anxiety filmmaking at its finest.
Spencer is too aggressively anti-establishment to please everybody, but its refusal to conform to the norms of cinema, genre, and cultural tradition will ensure it finds love amongst those willing to seek out something different and challenging. Kristen Stewart is superb at the centre of it all, and Pablo Larraín’s vision is truly special. Spencer is a triumph of artistic expression, and a brilliantly realised, profound, real-life fantasy.
4. Dune
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
You know how all you weirdos stood up and applauded in Endgame when Cap picked up Thor’s hammer? Well that was me when the Big Worm showed up.
Creating a faithful adaptation of Dune brings many limitations. If you want to tell the entire story it must be split across multiple movies and deal with a large cast of complicated characters. To capture the epic scale and alien worlds requires a blockbuster budget and hence commercial interests, bringing further limitations. Now a very dense book has to be made accessible, with more action and more explanation. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is not a perfect film, but I cannot imagine much better being achieved given the limitations of being a faithful adaptation within a commercial enterprise. I can see different potential versions, made with different visual approaches or choosing to excise different subplots, but they would almost certainly not fare better. This Dune is a retelling that is simple enough to grasp yet complex enough to not patronize, while also being one that sets the stage for greater movies yet to come, if they are made.
This Dune emphasizes the themes of destiny and fate. It presents galactic politics as manipulated and designed to predetermine destiny. Colonialism is played up in the movie, with oppression and power key to its world. Dune is also a spiritual movie, but rooted in a strange social construction where there are those who wait for a messiah and those who create them. By choosing to end where it does, this Dune becomes almost purely the journey of Paul Atriedes until he is no longer Paul. This is a truly epic work, both in that it is set across four planets, but also because it touches upon so many profound elements from the novel, to do with faith, leadership, fear, love, and hate. This is not some quip-filled action movie, it is serious science-fiction that tackles ideas and builds a rich universe that is a truly alien view of humanity. To the credit of Dune, it has not lost the substance of the book by putting the plot on the screen.
Images of jihad. There is no destiny, just centuries of planning. The politics of faith dictates that there are followers, there are leaders, and there are those who shape the leaders. Lady Jessica has made her son all powerful, and integral to this film is the maternal relationship at its centre. While the journey belongs to Paul, it is through Jessica that we witness his transformation and will him to succeed. She loses touch with who he is, but all that she shows is love. Paul must kill and no longer be Paul, children must grow into adults, a duke’s son must become a giant. One thing that this adaptation gets absolutely right is ending exactly when it does, on the precipice of destiny.
Dune is all about converging interests. Colonialism and its evils are explicitly shown in the film, another stepping stone in the grandest of plans. Religion in Dune is a fakery of science, spread amongst the people by those in the shadows who determine the future. The story is at the centre of destiny, as characters live by faith, honor, or greed, slotting into the predictable paths and traveling down them exactly as expected. This film compromises on so little, making clear and understandable all the ideas it presents. This is only the beginning.
Pure orgasmic visuals.
3. The Green Knight
Directed by David Lowery
Gorgeous, ethereal, mythical, with costumes to die for. The structure of The Green Knight is that of a quest, of course, which means meeting people along the way. While Dev Patel anchors the film with a solid presence, both Barry Keoghan and Alicia Vikander get standout sections of mischief.
Outside of the surface level beauty — of which, this is a feast — what I like about The Green Knight is how it’s ultimately about the uselessness of many acts of celebrated heroism. Here, a young man (Patel) — who rests his wine hangovers in a brothel and has some familial ties to King Arthur (Sean Harris) — desires to be a knight for the honor and respect that comes with it. But he hasn’t put in the work. A Green Knight is conjured and provides a challenge: strike me with a sword and you will receive the same cut from me in one year. Seizing this as an opportunity to show bravery, Sir Gawain delivers what should be a fatal cut. But the earthy Green Knight replenishes and for Sir Gawain, his heroism will be achieved in accepting his fate a year later. (Ralph Ineson’s voice is the perfect tenor for the Green Knight, seemingly coming from the earth’s core itself.)
Poems will be written, songs will be sung, and parades will be held, but what point would this act of acceptance of his fate hold? The quest puts Sir Gawain in the position to do more honorable actions when put on a path of righteousness. But the expression — if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it still make a sound? — is applicable to one’s private deeds as well. His mother (Sarita Choudhuryki) fashions a chance to cheat death with a spell sown into a garment. Which is more noble, to accept a pointless death or to escape it? The tone, like a riddle, remains mysterious from opening to end.
Honor in war is death, but honor in nature is life. Humans choose war so much for fleeting honor. And nature is paying the price.
I hope the fox is doing well.
Cum belt.
2. Titane
Directed by Julia Ducournau
Disturbingly heartwarming & blissfully horrific.
What is real, anyway? What is realistic? Chances are that what you find to be rooted in reality is completely different from the person sitting next to you on the theatre. I think I’ve reached the point in my life where anything that ever happens in a film (or any artform) is processed in my mind as credible. I just don’t look at something and go ‘hmm, that’s a bit far-fetched’. This is a realm of infinite possibilities, so why not revel in it? If a creator wishes not to answer a question, why would I linger around that fact? Titane is beautiful, brash, and a big middle finger to proponents of standardized art. I can’t quite place it in a single genre, and I think that’s beautiful for a movie to be.
Julia Ducournau’s Titane is an expectation obliterating view of a female serial killer’s journey through automobile copulation fused with the desire for family and human connection, inevitably revving up to a somehow wholesome conclusion despite being the spawn of pure uncompromised derangement. From the opening moment our protagonist with a titanium cranium ‘throttles’ a fiery muscle car, Ducournau’s confident direction is on immediate display as she further establishes herself as one of the most innovative minds in the genre. Even having themes of gender identity especially in relation to gestation that I’ve yet to fully unpack. In a film containing such inventive body horror, the narrative is somehow more shocking.
In a world where all bets are off, where a woman fleeing from the world can meet a man trying desperately to grab (and at the same time let go) the remaining, tattered shreds of his world … what if nothing was impossible? The whirlwind of familial tragedy, identity, deliverance of life and machines. The terror of inter-human relationships, lies and perversion, blood and motor oil. This synth-infused, deep-color madness of a tale is a glimpse into such a world, and it could only ever have been brought to us by one of contemporary cinema’s brightest stars, Julia Ducournau. Broad strokes of implausible nightmares stack together to form a concentrated, piercing feeling that resonates within others. I am compelled by the language, the depravity, the metal under our skin. I have nothing deeper to say about Titane than that it made me feel emotions, and that I was enamored by its dance of total freedom. Sex, steel and savagery. Heartbreaking and horrifying in equal measure is the final sequence, brought to us by the indelibly talented Agathe Rousselle and Vincent Lindon.
1. Licorice Pizza
Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson
PTA BABY I LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!
This feels like the movie he’s been trying to make for his whole career and in fact this movie reminds me of the way his career started, pulling out all the stops and displaying his influences, making a splash as if he may not get another chance. But he’s a more refined and older filmmaker now and the influences are more interesting, in particular the work of Hal Ashby, and this film shares that somewhat shaggy structure of his, the guy who also pioneered the “problematic age gap” bittersweet stoner comedy with Harold and Maude, a movie that deeply inspired Rushmore, which I think in turn deeply inspires Anderson here.
Gary Valentine is a Max Fischer type, an ambitious teenager who acts beyond his age and is a striver, a hustler, with an entourage of other young boys who he uses for his enterprises, who also relentlessly pursues an older woman who does become his friend but has to constantly fight him off and try to find more suitable (in age only) partners. But in a lot of ways this is Alana Haim’s movie anyway, she’s been chosen for deeply psychological reasons by the director (she’s the daughter of a high school teacher he was fixated on as a teen ((what an alpha chad move)) ) and this amazing blend of his seventies San Fernando Valley memories, the stories told by his friend Gary the character is modelled on, and the showbiz gossip Anderson was exposed to as a kid from the world of his father Ernie (whose voice we even hear on tv at one point, one of the main sounds of the seventies) makes for an immersive film experience.
Every square inch of this film is meticulously constructed to such an extent that you’re just waiting for something to disrupt it. At times, it’s somehow dull and beautiful in equal measure, probably because each tiny, repetitive movement is shrouded in mystery but is simultaneously dangling at some type of palpable precipice. The bare-bones setup allows Anderson to slowly but surely tinker with expectations, playing with what these characters perceive to be well established as he works in and out of young romance, quirky comedy, and impassioned drama. There are moments that linger too long and moments — especially regarding the relationship dynamics — that could use more gestation (that opinion will probably change upon rewatch), but Anderson ultimately nails the atmosphere because he provides you just enough insight into the characters’ relationships to their environment. The setting and time period are of the utmost importance. It’s like a psychoanalytical art project with the precision of a master chef.
For years I’ve been trying to find ways to describe the feeling I get whenever the credits roll on a PTA movie, and finally, Demi Adejuyigbe put it best: “…and very first time i watch a movie of his i come away having genuinely felt like i’ve changed, like I’ve seen a new angle on something i thought i knew. it fucking rocks.”
Honorable Mention: INSIDE, Spider-Man No Way Home, Shiva Baby, The French Dispatch, Lamb
