Allegedly with vaccinations and boosters we got back to normal in 2021--or maybe more to the truth, we got to the "new normal?" In any case we did get back to seeing movies in a theater, but in limited capacities and with proof of vaccination and/or a negative test, and masks on. That said, big movies were back in the form of Bond ("No Time to Die"), "Dune," and "The Matrix Resurrections," though some like "Top Gun" Maverick" continued to wait it out while other hotly anticipated big screen goes, Steve Spielberg's remake of "West Side Story," recent Oscar winner Chloé Zhao's Marvel entry, "The Eternals" and Adam McKay's "Don't Look Up" came up short of commercial and critical expectations.
Marvel as expected continued to expand its universe on both the big and small screens with the afore mentioned "Externals," the hybrid (and controversial) release of "Black Widow" and small screen hits, "Loki," "Hawkeye" and "Wanda Vision" among the many--and just as the mega Marvel-verse looked to be running out of gas and struggling to reinvent itself, out comes "Spider-Man No Way Home" which has critics giving it thumbs up and is the first and only film to earn over 1 billion dollars in 2021.
For my list of best films of the year, many were considered but not all can make the final list. Some small budget curios that resonated were Michael Sarnoski's "Pig" staring Nicolas Cage as a distraught truffle hunter whose swine is swiped and the wonderfully weird "Annette" from the mind of Leo Carax didn't make it. Others close but not making it were Wes Anderson's love letter to the mid century story telling at the New Yorker, "The French Dispatch," Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s powerful, animated documentary about an Afghan refugee “Flee,” and Rebecca Hall's impressive directorial debut about racial norms and politics, "Passing."
10. The Killing of Two Lovers
Robert Machoian’s taut portrait of an unconventional marriage begins with a pick in the eye as a disheveled, clearly emotionally troubled man with pistol in hand – whom we later learn is named David (Clayne Crawford) – hovers over his wife, Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) sleeping peacefully alongside her new boyfriend Derek (Chris Coy) in a nondescript bedroom. It’s hard to decamp from that scene, but Machoian does so dutifully as we dive into the backstory of how Nikki and David parted and her union with Derek came to be – it’s not an illicit tryst and this is definitely not your typical love triangle, but an out-in-the-open relationship, with kids involved. The film’s told mostly from David’s tortured POV, and yet the plot moves in surprising, character-driven ways. The performances feel lived in; look for more from these talents.
9. Titane
A surreal and thoroughly haunting psycho-horror that goes to places few would expect and is definitely not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Alexia (Agathe Rousselle, brilliant in her first major role) has a massive metal plate in her head (and a nasty scar) from a car accident as a child. As a young woman she lives at home with her parents while working as an erotic dancer at an auto show club and spends her spare time adding to her totals as a serial killer. Her means of dispatch are brutal and to the point – she’ll even clean out a whole house with just a hairpin and a bar stool. The film morphs some as Alexia, looking to evade the police, poses as the long-lost son of a fire chief (Vincent Lindon). Director Julia Ducournau, who notched the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the film, has been down the road of bloody and weird before with her 2016 debut “Raw” (about a young woman with cannibalistic urges). She pushes the envelope more here, dipping her toe into an outré artiness that bears the same strange edge as “Annette” (2021) or, say, “Neon Demon” (2016). After all, there is sex with a vintage Cadillac and no muffler to prevent pregnancy.
8. Zola
The first movie adapted from a tweetstorm. No, not an incoherent, three-in-the-morning political shaming from @realdonaldtrump (account suspended) but one from a 19-year-old Detroit server and exotic dancer named A’Ziah “Zola” King, who chronicled her 2015 shitshow of a road trip to Florida after being enticed along by a fellow dancer under false premises. The 148-tweet thread that plays out like “Hustlers” (2019) on steroids even garnered King an exchange with “Selma” (2014) director Ava DuVernay: “There’s so much untapped talent in the hood,” DuVernay said. Zola’s response: “I’m not from the hood tho Ava. Ima suburban bitch. Still love you tho.” Riley Keough is fiery and Oscar worthy as an interloper who chums up with the titular Zola (Taylour Paige) and gets her to come on a cross state journey to Florida, where the big pole dancing gig, is really hooking. Zola having none of it refers to her new found friend as “the white bitch.” The brilliant Day-Glo cinematography is by Ari Wegner who’s even more year end award worthy for her work on “The Power of the Dog” (below).
7. The Card Counter
More of the gritty same from Paul Schrader a film critic turned screenwriter, turned director, who’s long been busy at the task of plumbing the tumult of men at war with themselves and the rest of the world. Take Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” (Schrader penned this 1976 Martin Scorsese classic) or Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988, another Scorsese collaboration), let alone Schrader’s last critically hailed directorial effort effort “First Reformed” (2018), in which Ethan Hawke plays a priest struggling with his faith, sobriety and place in the world. The big ante here is the casting of Oscar Isaac (“Ex Machina,” “Inside Llewyn Davis”) as a troubled gambler who goes by the curious pseudonym of William Tell, and Tiffany Haddish as La Linda, something of a muse of the championship poker circuit who matches players with silent backers interested in a cut of the action. The stakes rise to a breaking point when Isaac’s gambler encounters the son of a fellow Abu Ghraib stationed marine (Tye Sheridan) with a score to settle with their CO (Willem Dafoe). It’s a somber internal journey that goes to some very dark places along the path to redemption.
6. The Power of the Dog
Jane Campion, the director of “Sweetie” (1989) and “The Piano” (1993), who hasn’t made a feature film since 2009 (the Keats biopic “Bright Star”), returns to the big screen with this fabulous-looking Western based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. The setting’s Montana in 1925, with the Burbank brothers Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Electric Life of Louis Wain”) and George (Plemons, “Detroit,” “I’m thinking of Ending Things”) running a prosperous cattle ranch. Soft-hearted George handles the business end, while Phil manages the cowhands with a maniacal swagger. George weds a single mother named Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and at first it seems like a happy union, but Phil’s harping on Rose triggers her to drink to escape his quiet cruelty, and he bullies her effeminate son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). George gives wide deference to Phil’s gruff, cutting demeanor. Savage, who was closeted at the time the novel was published, wrote it from his experiences growing up on a cattle ranch. The cast is impressive, most notably Cumberbatch, known mostly for his cerebral roles as Sherlock Holmes and “Doctor Strange” (2016), is unexpectedly brash and imposing here, and Smit-McPhee, the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” (2009), is vulnerable but with a steely resourcefulness. The real knockout is the cinematography by Ari Wegner ( “Lady Macbeth,” “Zola”), which employs ingenious framing devices to showcase the sumptuous beauty of the golden northern plains.
5. Quo Vadas, Aida
Jasmila Zbanic’s taut “Quo Vadis, Aida?” takes us back to the raw horror of ethnic cleansing during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the 1990s. Seen through the eyes of the U.N. interpreter of the title (Jasna Djuricic, fantastic), the film focuses on the small town of Srebrenica, where Bosnian refugees are being aided by U.N. forces as the Serbian army approaches. It’s a harrowing ordeal as Aida tries to arrange safe passage for her ethnic Bosnian husband and son. History would later record that the Serb army under the command of Ratko Mladić would murder and rape more than 7,000 civilians. Other western-made films such as “Welcome to Sarajevo” (1997) and Angelina Jolie’s “In the Land of Blood and Honey” (2011) have tackled the genocide-fueled conflict, but none so inwardly emotionally and intimately as Zbanic’s caught-in-the-crosshairs depiction. It’s one that truly and rightfully won’t let us forget. The film is an Academy Award nominee for Best International Feature Film.
4. The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal, the actress best known for her turns in “Secretary” (2002) and “Adaptation,” (2002) gets behind the camera for her directorial debut with this adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel about a woman struggling with loss and trying to find solace in the present. It’s a tight, intimate portrait of a person looking to move on but gets caught up in the dramas of others. Olivia Coleman (“The Father” and “The Favourite”) stars as Leda Caruso, a comparative literary professor from here (it’s not explicit but fair to assume Harvard) on ‘working’ vacation at a Greek resort who clashes with a raucous crowd of partiers from Queens. The title entity, is the child of one such “Jersey Shore” revealer (Dakota Johnson) who Leda locates. Strange matronly relations ensue as well as a rewind into Leda’s mercurial past littered with life and emotional fabric altering choices. Coleman who’s already notched an Oscar, is at the top of her game and Jesse Buckley (“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”) as the young Leda also delivers a deeply felt, award worthy turn.
3. Licorice Pizza
Fans of Paul Thomas Anderson’s early, quirky works – “Boogie Nights” (1997) and “Magnolia” (1999) – will delight in his latest, a love letter to his childhood Encino, CA in the 1970s--in time and place nestles neatly between Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist Manson fable “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019) and Anderson’s aforementioned meander of the 1970s porn industry. The film focuses on a child star named Gary (Cooper Hoffman, son of frequent Anderson collaborator Phillip Seymour Hoffman’) aging out of roles at age 15 and his long burning crush on a photography assistant named Alana (pop star Alana Haim who knocks it out of the park it in her big screen debut) ostensibly ten years older. Along the way they encounter big stars of the era, most indelibly the mercurial Jon Peters (an infectiously gonzo Bradley Cooper), Barbra Streisand’s hairdresser turned beau and producer, whose antics and lifestyle were the basis for the steamy Warren Beatty-Julie Christie flick “Shampoo” (1975), and a boozy, swashbuckling William Holden incarnation played by Sean Penn and fictionalized as Jack Holden.
2. Drive My Car
Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s brilliant adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short about grief and loss tells the story of a theater director Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima ) married to a playwright (Reika Kirishima) who he is aware of carries on with lovers, then one day she is gone from his life. The rest of the film is Yûsuke putting on a production of Checkov's "Uncle Vanya" in multiple languages in Hiroshima. Due to an ocular condition and theater protocol, Yûsuke is not allowed to drive his car, where he listens to and works out kinks in the play, and is mandated a chauffeur (Tôko Miura) to drive his red Saab. The staid inner emotional journey is a knock out delivered with deep affect by Nishijima. 2021 marks a calling card year of sorts for Hamaguchi (Asako I & II) whose “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” also came out to critical acclaim.
1. The Green Knight
David Lowery’s cinematic adaptation of the late 14th century Middle English chivalric romance (a poem about an odyssey, to be more precise), “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” is a hypnotic wonderment. The cast and filmmaking are superb. “The Green Knight” is also the edgiest Medieval rendering since John Boorman’s “Excalibur” (1981) mixed arty filmmaking, sex and dark psychodrama into the cauldron of drama that is King Arthur’s court. The yarn has Gawain (Dev Patel) on a quest to return the axe of the Green Knight whom he beheaded one year hence. It's a long fantastical journey with giant, trickery and lasses along the way. The ensemble cast is exceptional (Kate Dickie, Barry Keoghan, Sean Harris, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton and Sarita Choudhury as Guinevere), but the film is Patel’s, and he shines in the part of a man wanting much without doing. The other stars here are the incredible cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo and the lush Irish landscape that poses for his lens.