BEST MOVIES OF 2021 (Lists)

[Chris Knipp]

My other choices - Indiewire Poll

Best Director
Wes Anderson

Best Actress
Kristen Stewart

Best Actor
Will Smith

Best Screenplay
Spencer

Best Documentary
Summer of Soul

Best Undistributed
Things We Dare Not Do

Best Cinematography
Dune

[Chris Knipp]

The Indiewire Poll https://www.indiewire.com/gallery/be...the-year-2021/

1. The Power of the Dog
2. Licorice Pizza
3. Drive My Car
4. Flee
5. Titane
6. Summer of Soul
7. Memoria
8. The Card Counter
9. The Green Knight
10. Parallel Mothers

Richard Brody's (New Yorker) favorites (which may make more coherent sense because they are not a poll): https://www.newyorker.com/culture/20...movies-of-2021

[Johann]

Thanks for these lists.
Great to have a heads up on the best of the year…

[Chris Knipp]

Lots more to see though which will take a considerable time as Oscar knows.

[Chris Knipp]

LAST AND FIRST MEN

The Stunning Feature Debut and Cinematic Swan Song from
Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson
Narrated by Tilda Swinton

Now Playing Exclusively at Metrograph In Theater and At Home
Expands January 14

I've watched and admired a screener of this but haven't been able to review it; but for lovers of film as art it has a special place as a kind of refined still-image-based black-and-white sci-fi comparable to Chris Marker's wonderful Le Jetée.

From the review by Roger Luckhurst for BFI's Sight and Sound:

This 70-minute experimental film brings together a daunting conjuncture of elements. It is a Jóhann Jóhannsson film, conceived, shot (with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen) and scored by the Icelandic composer, but left incomplete at his death from an accidental overdose in 2018. Jóhannson is principally known for his minimalist film scores, which process orchestral sound through tape loops and electronic glitches, and in particular for his soundtrack for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), where the music is integral to creating the strange elegiac tone of that melancholic encounter with aliens bearing unusual gifts.

Last and First Men is a non-narrative meditation in the same mood, but is closer to Jóhannsson’s concept albums, which combined the holy minimalism of Arvo Pärt or John Tavener with science-fictional bleeps and gurgles typical of the synth gloomsters of the late 70s New Wave. Given this post-apocalyptic mood, it is inevitably hard to avoid the trap of bending the film around the knowledge of Jóhannsson’s early death, turning its reflections on end times into a last testament.

[Chris Knipp]

BEING THE RICARDOS (Aaron Sorkin 2021)

Richard Abele's review for The Wrap eloquently describes this movie's many faults that I saw but can't write about because I am recovering from surgery on a broken right wrist, and it would be dispiriting to enumerate them anyway. I'm afraid Abele is right that Sorkin is not a director. He can be an excellent writer, as he was in creating "The West Wing" and scripting The Social Network. From the sparkle of the latter you'd never know he could create the drabness of Being the Ricardos.

[Chris Knipp]

FILM COMMENT'S 2021 BEST LIST


1. Memoria
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Colombia/Thailand/UK/France/Germany/Mexico/Qatar

Of all the mysterious objects engineered by Apichatpong, Memoria may be the most enigmatic—and, through a masterstroke of sonic design, the most transfixing. Jessica (Tilda Swinton), an expat living in Colombia, finds herself afflicted by a curious aural hallucination, a blunt metallic womp suggesting the impact of a phantom orb against the surface of... her skull? The cosmos? The cinematic apparatus? What follows can only be described as Apichatpongian: mischievous narrative game-play; personages who phase-shift through multiple realities; bliss-inducing detours and divertissements (an extended musical jam session that Jessica wanders into ranks with the supreme pleasures of the director’s oeuvre); the patiently calibrated and marvelously confounding evanescence of time and space. The genius of Memoria resides in its auditory premise: even more than Jessica, the spectator is riveted by the intermittent, unpredictable detonation on our tympanic membrane. What does it all mean? No thoughts, just vibes—but riddle me this: if a memory falls in the mind, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?—Nathan Lee


2. Drive My Car
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan

The vehicle at the whirring heart of Drive My Car bears a sly anomaly: the steering wheel is on the left, rather than the right, where it should be in Japan. Cars are already liminal spaces—to travel in one is to be both inside and outside, moving and still—and this aberration makes the red Saab 900 of the film, and the tale that winds around it, feel even more like a miracle of mechanics. Taking as chassis a thin Haruki Murakami story about a widowed actor who opens up to a young female chauffeur about the infidelities of his late wife, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi engineers an elaborate narrative contraption that holds control and contingency in equal poise: the film’s voluble dialogue and intricate moving parts draw their power from the mysteries—human, vehicular—that neither speech nor plot can explain. It’s a conceit brought out thrillingly in the film’s central set piece, a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya, in which language becomes a chasm rather than a bridge, refracting the experiences of the characters with nearly blinding clarity.—Devika Girish


3. The Souvenir Part II
Joanna Hogg, UK

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir ends with the director’s on-screen surrogate, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), gazing out the massive door of a student-film studio at a gray sky—an image that could suggest freedom. But, as The Souvenir Part II makes clear, it is one of intense ambivalence. Now that her private education with an older, cultured man is over, Julie must return to a place (and form) of learning that’s far more bracing and practical: film school. Through the excruciating process of actually doing the thing—and facing the questions and reservations of those around her—we see Julie becoming an artist, a self-actualization that almost drives me to tears. The other central conceit—seeing a fictional version of Hogg attempt to direct a film about her life within the film we are watching about her life—is as coolly lush as Nico’s “Sixty Forty,” the song woven throughout this sequel.—Violet Lucca


4. Annette
Leos Carax, France/USA

Though Leos Carax’s gesamtkunstwerk teeters and sways under the weight of its many contrivances, it somehow, against all odds, manages to take flight. Annette is a singular work: part rock opera, part celebrity satire, part pop-art mindfuck, part dissection of the ties that bind. Roping together all these disparate elements—from Adam Driver’s brooding performance as a sociopathic stand-up to the elaborate set and character design to Ron and Russell Mael’s relentlessly peppy tunes—is the same overwhelming Romanticism that has saturated Carax’s work since Boy Meets Girl (1984). And yet, Annette may be the Carax film with the lightest touch. A movie this morose and self-involved shouldn’t be so fun—or so profound. As the final scene makes clear, animating all the artifice, from the fake island to the crooning puppet that plays Baby Annette, are an understanding of human frailty and a sincere love for the flawed creatures that, corny as it sounds, compel Annette to sing.—Clinton Krute


5. Days
Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France

There is the singular day—a bounded measure of hours—and then there’s days, the hefty, formless accrual that makes up a life. What better name for Tsai Ming-liang’s first narrative feature in almost a decade? Tsai remains interested in time without story, though the durational centerpiece in Days is new: the slow atrophy of muse Lee Kang-sheng’s ailing body. Once a novel affliction in The River (1997), Lee’s pain has since lapsed into the common fate of aging. Seeking reprieve, his character chances on Anong, a young Laotian migrant worker in Thailand, and the two share a moment of tender synchrony. The scene coaxes us into surrender: some rhythms are better felt than seen. Still, midway through Days, when faced with a long, static take of a sun-strobed wall, I instinctively sought out movement—a lizard, a quivering leaf, any motion to index change. And so I missed, until the last second, the fact of a darkening sky. The gift of Tsai’s cinema is this encounter with time as a feeling. Night falls slowly, then all at once.—Phoebe Chen


6. The Power of the Dog
Jane Campion, Australia/New Zealand

At the heart of Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog is a perilous shortsightedness, embodied in the ambiguous silhouette of a hungry dog that only some can see in the jagged contours of a Montana mountain range. The wealthy Burbank brothers are especially burdened by such poetic myopias: the malicious Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), who revels in the filth and machismo of ranch life, only respects the ultramasculine; and for all his gentleness, George (Jesse Plemmons) cannot quite see his new wife Rose (Kirsten Dunst) floundering under his brother’s torment. Rose’s effeminate teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), is perhaps the most opaque of all, albeit the least disguised, surrounded as he is by adults caught in the patriarchal grasp of stifling, all-too-familiar roles. The film, too, is in disguise, revealing itself in an unexpected finale to be a meticulously mapped erotic thriller, begging for a second viewing to appreciate its ingenuity.—Kelli Weston


7. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Japan

2021 was another rotten year, though perhaps not for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who asserted his status as one of contemporary cinema’s key figures with two much-celebrated features. Whereas Drive My Car is the more polished of the two and derives from a short story by Haruki Murakami, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is a work no less ambitious, comprising three discrete yet thematically continuous stories. The first will feel the most familiar to Hamaguchi fans, tracing the fraught and secretive resolution of a love triangle; the second, about a plot to set a honey trap for a macho creative-writing professor, conjures Philip Roth in its portrayal of desire’s unpredictable contortions; but it is the third, an obliquely postapocalyptic lo-fi sci-fi about a case of double mistaken identity, that feels the most now. Heterogeneous, unstable as a matter of principle, and utterly reactive to a world gone chaotic beyond the frame: few moral tales feel as modern as this.—Dan Sullivan


8. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
Alexandre Koberidze, Georgia/Germany

Alexandre Koberidze’s What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? is a film of curious propositions. On a bridge in the Georgian city of Kutaisi, passersby are invited to hang for two minutes from a pull-up bar and win a nice dinner. (Later incentives involve cash and cookies.) The bar is charmingly off-kilter, much like the curse that keeps apart would-be lovers Giorgi and Lisa, who, after two chance meet-cutes, wake up in new bodies. The bar is also a frame: it offers us a way of viewing the lives that pass through it, including those of Giorgi and Lisa, who, having lost everything, encounter their city as though it were new. Koberidze voices the narration, at one point pausing to consider the violence of our era before returning to his characters. Their eventual reunion is no less a feat of cinematic magic than the everyday rituals of the schoolchildren, pharmacists, and multispecies soccer fans who make their home in this ancient city.—Genevieve Yue


9. Benedetta
Paul Verhoeven, France/Netherlands

Ambition, delusion, and ecstasy mingle in the story—inspired by real events—of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century Italian nun who claims to experience mystical visions of Jesus and is put on trial for her sapphic liaison with the younger, alluringly feral Sister Bartolomea. Male-gaze naysayers miss the point: in this tale of pestilence and politics, Paul Verhoeven delves into the power of spectacle and the spectacle of power, affirming his place as one of cinema’s greatest social critics. Benedetta may be set during a plague long ago, but it is a film for our own sick times, concerned as it is with the hypocrisy of governing institutions and the worldliness of those who claim to be guided by higher principles. It depicts a universe, all too familiar, in which good-faith attempts to distinguish between truth and lies are forever frustrated by leaders who play by different rules. Sure, the CGI is a bit laughable—but isn’t subtlety sometimes overrated?—Erika Balsom


10. Undine
Christian Petzold, Germany/France

Undine (Paula Beer), the water nymph whose earthly existence depends on a faithful lover, is cut loose early in Christian Petzold’s beautiful and mysterious reworking of the European myth. During an intense breakup initiated by her boyfriend, she quietly, fatefully declares that she will have to kill him. In an ongoing interplay between legend and reality, Undine works as lecturer in a museum dedicated to the different incarnations of pre- and post-unification Berlin. Her twist of fate comes in a stunning scene, both comical and magical, when in the spillover of a shattered aquarium she meets the man who is clearly her destiny, an underwater diver (Franz Rogowski). The city of Berlin, shown in both its gleaming real-life surfaces and elaborate mock-ups, gradually gives way to a more fluid, ethereal realm—the watery underworld where Undine and her beloved diver can coexist, forever faithful in their own way.—Molly Haskell

Read the full list