Well, it is once again That Time Of Year. The last day of the year where we get to look back on the previous 365 days and ask ourselves how we feel about what we’ve done since Jan 1, 2021.
For me, that means it’s time for me to do what I do every year and look back on my favorite movies of the year.
But with all of the hectic scheduling and rescheduling of movies not just in 2020, but also in 2021, I felt like this year a ranking wasn’t fair. So here I’m just gonna list ’em out.
But I’ve watched 82 releases from 2021 and I think I’ve seen just about the best of the best. So here you have ’em.
Disclaimer, I guess, for whatever reason: Films like West Side Story, Nightmare Alley, Licorice Pizza and more came out a little too close to the end of the year so I still haven’t seen them. In case you were wondering why you’re not seeing Sing 2 on the list.
Alright. Here we go!
Let’s get into it.
Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
Barb and Star is one of the year’s most oddball comedies and a great film to come out of quarantine (the first time) with.
The story of two best friends (played by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumalo, who also co-wrote the film together) who get laid off from their furniture store gig, but with a nice severance. So they decide that they are going to treat themselves and visit Vista Del Mar for some well-earned R&R.
What they didn’t plan on was finding love, adventure, and an evil supervillain planning to kill everyone in town.
Barb & Star is low-brow, but its characters are so lovably wholesome and cheerful that everything they get into is funny. Weird, funny, full of life, and total vacation escapism, I want to go to Vista Del Mar with Barb and Star. And I felt like I did, if only for 100 minutes.
The Card Counter
Look, I’m a sucker for three things:
- Revenge films
- Stories where one character is trying to guide another to a better path
- Oscar Isaac
The Card Counter is 3 aces. It’s awesome.
The story of an ex-CIA interrogator who is out of prison for crimes he committed, William Tell is now a poker player. He travels across the country, counting cards, winning moderate amounts to avoid detection and then moving to the next city.
When he meets the son of a former friend, he finds himself pulled into a plan to get revenge on the man that caused the young man’s death, and put William in prison.
Written and directed by Paul Schrader (best known for his screenplays for Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), The Card Counter is a slow burn, but Isaac commands every scene he’s in with his “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” attitude.
It’s slick. See it.
Dune
What a film Dune is.
Denis Villeneuve is pound for pound one of the best filmmakers working today, with some of the best films of the last decade under his belt.
His treatment of the story, where a family is brought to the planet Arrakis to oversee it only to be betrayed and scattered across the planet, is huge in scope but precise in its execution.
Dune is breathtakingly gorgeous, and delivers a stacked cast including Timothee Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Issac, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem, and Zendaya. The cinematography and set design make Arrakis feel like a tangible world. Like they somehow just found the planet and set up shop to film.
It makes you want to work up a wad of saliva and spit it at Villeneuve’s feet–to sacrifice your body’s moisture to him in the Fremen tradition, of course.
It’s that good.
The Father
I try to go into most movies as blind as I can. The Father is one of those movies where going in blind made the entire experience even more rewarding.
The film, an adaptation of the play of the same name by writer/director Florian Zeller, follows a father (Anthony Hopkins) and his daughter (Olivia Colman) struggling to cope with and understand his illness.
The direction is excellent, but Hopkins (who won an Oscar for the role) and Colman give performances so good that I found myself wholly bought into the film’s characters and bought into their pain and struggles.
It’s twistier than you’d expect from a film like this, but it is a truly excellent film.
The Green Knight
The Green Knight is not for the faint of heart.
Gorgeous cinematography, a pitch-perfect performance from Dev Patel, stunning production design, and thoughtful direction make The Green Knight and its cerebral examination of honor in the time of kings, and the cost of that honor, a masterpiece of high fantasy filmmaking.
The Green Knight is the story of a young knight, Gawain (Patel), looking to make his mark under the shadow of his legendary uncle, King Arthur. One day, a mysterious, monstrous knight enters the king’s hall and demands a challenger. When Gawain rises up to the challenge, he finds himself thrust onto a journey that may take his life, but give him a legend of his own.
But this is no hack-and-slash fantasy epic. It’s a slow-paced methodical examination of “what does honor truly mean”?
It’s exquisite and easily one of my favorites (if not favorite) movies of 2021.
The Harder They Fall
The first of two Westerns on this list, The Harder They Fall tells the story of two rival outlaw gangs of Black gunslingers in the Wild West, and dammit if this thing ain’t incredibly sleek, cool, and just everything that I love about movies.
Directed by Jeymes Samuel, The Harder They Fall boasts a cast with Idris Elba, Jonathan Majors, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, LaKeith Stanfield, and Delroy Lindo. Yeah. That’s the cast of THIS ONE MOVIE.
And Samuel made a Netflix movie that feels directed! There’s so much style and clever use of camera here that I just wanted to see more of it. The characters aren’t perfect, but each of them has their own signature “thing” that makes them memorable.
Fingers crossed for a sequel because I want more.
Hellbender
The minute I started seeing talk about Hellbender out of Fantasia Fest, I knew I needed to see it. And luckily, at HorrorFest International, I got the chance.
Written, directed, and starring the Adams/Poser clan of Toby Poser, John Adams, and Zelda Adams, Hellbender is one hell of a coming-of-age story.
Young Izzy (Zelda Adams) lives with her mother (Toby Poser) deep in the woods. They spend their days walking in the forest playing music together in some of the best costumes you’ve ever seen a band wear. But when Izzy discovers that there might be more to her than her mother ever let her know, she starts to toy with her newfound abilities and discover her full potential.
Hellbender rules. Both Adams and Poser blow the roof off of this thing as Izzy and her mother. Their real-world mother/daughter dynamic comes through on-screen and they play a raw and honest portrayal of the push-pull relationship that so many mothers and daughters have with each other.
Check this one out.
Inside
Easily the thing I watched the most in 2021, Inside is part film, part comedy special, and part commentary on the human condition when one is placed in a room for an extended amount of time.
(Remember when we did that?)
Something like Inside which examines so many different things like corporatism, artificiality on social media, fake activism, praise for billionaires, depression and suicidal thoughts, sexting, the demand for creators to “create” and more could definitely feel tonally off, but Burnham is too good of a writer for that.
For example, in one sketch where he’s poking fun at commentary videos, he weaves some of these previously mentioned ideas together, combining a commentary video with his own feelings of self-doubt and how he projects confidence by self-deprecation.
I was thoroughly blown away by the wide spectrum of emotion that I felt through this entire “special”. The music in it is great but Burnham’s skill as a director also takes center stage as each shot feels like it is treated with incredible precision.
This is my favorite thing Bo Burnham has ever done and quite possibly my favorite THING of 2021.
Judas and the Black Messiah
I feel like Judas and the Black Messiah isn’t getting its due at the end of 2021. Perhaps we did a disservice to a film as good as this one by letting it be in the running for the Oscars earlier this year and we burnt out the praise?
But man, that Daniel Kaluuya is something else, isn’t he?
Judas and the Black Messiah, the story of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), the deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and his confidant (LaKeith Stanfield) that slowly sold him out to the FBI, leading to his assassination, is a revelation.
The story itself is captivating, but it’s really driven home by Kaluuya and Stanfield’s incredible performances (that both earned them nominations and a win for Kaluuya). Stanfield brings weight to a tortured soul and Kaluuya is electric.
A clinic in acting.
The Last Duel
I’m sidestepping director Ridley Scott’s disdain for my generation’s filmgoing habits to say that The Last Duel is fantastic.
I will say this though: The Last Duel is not an easy film to watch.
Similar to Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon, the entire film centers around the rape of a woman (Judy Comer) and the conflicting accounts from her husband (Matt Damon) and her attacker (Adam Driver), but Scott navigates the story with care and touches on some pretty powerful themes (both explicitly and implicitly) that are still present to this day.
I’ve seen some pretty horrible and downright dishonest takes for The Last Duel since its release but I was pleasantly surprised by how well Scott directs around the subject matter.
Scott knows how to make a film and it sure helps when you’ve got the performances that he gets from Comer, Damon and Driver.
A heavy film, certainly, but one of 2021’s best.
Malignant
Oh, you didn’t think that James Wan’s love letter to campy to Italian Giallo and 70s/80s B-horror movies would make this list?
Well, you were dead wrong.
Malignant is a movie that seems to have divided audiences and I can see why, but I still don’t understand why. The story of Madison, a woman who begins to see frighteningly real premonitions of death, is a movie that about 20 minutes in feels like something you’ve already seen before.
Trust me. You have not.
Malignant chugs along some mildly familiar territory until it takes a HARD right but even while some of its revelations are easy to predict, it never really matters because the execution is so well done, that I was grinning ear to ear for the final 30 minutes and drinking up all of it.
A wild piece of horror filmmaking that reminded me why I love James Wan.
Mass
The most moving film I’ve seen all year, featuring breathtaking performances all around, Mass is the story of two sets of parents sitting around a table and seeing each other. On one side, the parents of a young man killed by a school shooting. On the other, the shooter’s parents.
But where Mass could easily slip into the political conversations and talking points of such a topic, it isn’t interested in what to do about guns in America, but rather in what we do about our guilt and anger after guns are used against those we love.
The acting is superb. Ann Dowd is probably going to walk away with an Oscar here, but the rest of the cast (Martha Plimpton, Jason Issacs, Reed Birney) is equally excellent.
I was also so impressed with Fran Kranz’s direction. He’s always been the “funny guy” (he’s the stoner in The Cabin in the Woods, for reference) and the subject matter here is so heavy yet handled beautifully.
The whole film essentially takes place in a single room, around one table, yet he knows how to use that minimal setting to great effect and something as simple as camera movement to convey the anger and disarray in the room.
Wonderful.
The Matrix Resurrections
Call it recency bias. I really don’t care.
The Matrix Resurrections might be my favorite film of 2021.
As someone who considers the first film to be a brilliant piece of perfect filmmaking and one of the greatest action films ever made (and also enjoys the sequels–boo your bad taste!) I had a certain amount of fear going into Resurrections.
I wanted something new but I didn’t want to have this franchise leave what I love behind. And oh boy–The Matrix Resurrections did what few legacy-quels can. Not only does it stand out as a brilliant piece in its own right, but it recontextualizes the first three films while also commenting on its own existence.
It’s everything that I wanted and everything that I didn’t know that I wanted in a Matrix sequel in 2021 and I’m so grateful for that.
Minari
I love stories of fathers and sons, and I love stories about people overcoming hardship. But I also love stories with a Grandma who takes zero crap and teaches beautiful lessons about perseverance.
Minari is beautiful. It’s a story of the American Dream and how an entire family needs to work together to achieve it. It is a piece of absolutely gorgeous filmmaking with great performances from Steven Yeun, Youn Yuh-jung, Han Ye-ri, and Will Patton.
By the end of this film, I just loved this family so much and I wanted to give them all huge hugs. Especially Soonja, the wise-cracking, Mountain Dew-loving grandma.
Watch this if you need to feel something in 2022.
The Mitchells vs The Machines
Phil Lord and Chris Miller cannot be stopped (unless it’s Star Wars related).
After their last hit Into the Spider-Verse, the duo stuck around in animation to give us (along with director Michael Rianda of “Gravity Falls”) The Mitchells vs The Machines –the story of one family who becomes humanity’s last hope of survival after the apocalypse is brought about by smartphone AI.
I’m totally in love with just about everything going on in this film. The animation is amazing, the comedy made me laugh hard throughout and the father/daughter dynamic here hit this dad square in the chest.
If you missed this one, you’re not alone. I don’t know a ton of people that checked it out.
It’s on Netflix, perfect for the whole family, and I’m telling you: this movie rules.
Nomadland
Equal parts narrative fiction and documentary, Nomadland feels incredibly tangible and real. It took home a slew of awards including Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Picture.
And you know what? It deserved them all.
Chloe Zhao’s film about Fern (Frances McDormand) a middle-aged woman who feels like she’s hit a wall in life is full of life and hope for those that might feel they might be running empty on hope.
The film follows Fern as she travels the country in her van, staying at various American nomad camps, where she sits and talks with real people. These real stories only make the film more captivating and raw.
So earnest, so truthful, perfectly acted (McDormand won an Oscar for her performance) and directed. Marvelous.
Pig
A movie that keeps giving the fixings of a revenge thriller, but with subversion left and right, Pig is a delectable dish of profound humanism and what it means to love, what it means to lose, and the importance of finding passion in those things that you love.
Anchored by an excellent performance from Nicolas Cage, Pig is the story of a man in the Oregonian wilderness, living with his only partner–his truffle pig. When that pig is kidnapped (pig-napped?), Cage goes looking for it in the one place he hasn’t gone in years–Portland.
Pig feels like, at any moment, it could give in to its John Wick-style setup, but it never quite does. It builds up a world and underworld that feels real and does so with the same quietness and authenticity of its main character.
Don’t let Nic’s filmography for the last decade and a half fool you. The man can still act and given the right project, can truly put forth a performance that is straight impressive. Pig is wonderful and it is one of the most authentic films to come out so far in 2021.
Pairs nicely with Mandy, if you haven’t seen Cage’s other revenge ride from 2018.
The Power of the Dog
Every once in a while you watch a film that catches you so completely off guard that the realization of what you just watched starts to hit you in waves.
The Power of the Dog is that film.
A downright gorgeous looking film from start to finish with knockout performances from its entire cast, including a career-topping performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog is about Phil (Cumberbatch), a cattle rancher whose brother (Jesse Plemons) brings home a new wife (Kirsten Dunst). But while Phil tries to torment his new sister-in-law in order to get his brother back, he soon takes to her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
The film handles a number of themes but does it in a way that never tells you what it is. Instead, it opts to show you everything you need and gives you the tools to piece it together for yourself.
Jane Campion has crafted a breathtaking piece that stands with the very best of the year.
A Quiet Place Part II
I’ll say it: For my money, A Quiet Place Part II is better than the first.
John Krasinski takes on the writing credit here as well as directing and delivers a film that I’m sure made Spielberg proud. He makes the smart decision to make the kids the stars this time around and give them compelling journeys throughout.
A Quiet Place II is more restrained, more controlled and in my personal opinion, a more compelling narrative than the first film and I’m very much looking forward to what he has to offer in Part III.
Red Rocket
Sean Baker is so damn good at telling stories about people; creating characters that feel so real that it almost feels like you’re watching found footage.
Whether it’s trans prostitutes in the LA twilight in Tangerine, Willem Dafoe’s hotel manager in The Florida Project, or poor sad sack neighbor Lonnie and his stolen valor in Red Rocket, every character in Baker’s films feels like they are living their life and Baker is just filming it.
Red Rocket is no different.
Red Rocket is the story of a washed-up adult film actor who finds himself back in the hometown that no one wants him in. In his attempts to get back on his feet, he swindles, lies, steals, manipulates, and objectifies others to get what he wants.
But while the main character Mikey is honestly detestable, the charisma of Simon Rex’s performance makes him thoroughly fun to cheer for. Even if you cheer for his demise instead.
Shiva Baby
High-strung, funny, claustrophobic, and just plain great, Shiva Baby is the worst family get-together of your nightmares.
The story of a young woman who runs into the older married man she’s currently sleeping with at a family shiva (funeral), Shiva Baby is a Thriller Lite that hits its story beats with pinpoint precision.
In this comedy, one moment of dread leads to another as each new revelation (accompanied by a wonderfully unsettling score) leads to an increasingly stressful evening at the shiva.
Director Emma Seligman also cleverly shoots her film like a horror movie, making tangible the very horrific feeling of watching all of your secrets slowly dribble out in front of your nosy family.
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