My schedule kept me from writing this article, but also a severe lack of interest. I found 2021 to be the worst year in movies since the middle of the 2000’s. Sure, there were delicacies if you enjoy animated films, but for the most part, I found the year severely wanting. I enjoyed my experiences at the movie theater, but that was a mixture of blessedly okay entrees into cinema and getting to attend a movie theatre again. Films like A Quiet Place Two, Black Widow, Shang Chi, The Suicide Squad, and The Matrix Resurrections answered Gabrielle Union’s query in Ten Things I Hate About You. Yes, you can in fact be just whelmed.
Before I get to the list a couple of “pre-trial” write offs. First to The Power of the Dog and Macbeth. Two movies that fit the category of brilliant artistic achievements, but severely lacking in dramatic substance. I found Dog to be as meandering as Jesse Plemons rather than seeking out a completed story. It felt like a vehicle for Jane Campion’s visionary scope and Cumberbatch’s magnificent performance, but it added up to a film lacking in resonance. The same can be true for Macbeth. I really felt distanced from this solo Coen experience. While I give this movie more credit than the 2015 adaptation starring Michael Fassbender, I have yet to find a Scottish play adaptation better that Scotland, PA.
Secondly, we find the category of Zak Snyder’s Justice League and F9. Linked together by excess, but also categorical love. I appreciated watching Snyder’s full vision, even if I didn’t find it very good. It was nice to see a completed version and gave credence to my own chosen profession. In theatre, we show everything. It film, we only see the top on the iceberg. On the F9 front, I loved this truly terrible movie. I love this franchise. It has become my favorite superhero storyline.
Thirdly and finally, just missing my top ten is Nine Days. I strongly encourage devouring this film, but it's impossible to write about this movie without giving it away. Watch it blind. I strongly suggest it just as Katie Stoddard suggested it to me.
In total, I watched forty-six new 2021 movies, these are the top ten.
10. Spiderman: No Way Home
Winner for most enjoyable time at the movie theater. There’s nothing I can add to the conversation surrounding this film. A perfect fanboy piece of entertainment and one of the few times that Marvel has achieved third act supremacy. Entirely worth a watch if only for the Spiderman pointing at each other meme - this movie points at each other for two hours.
9. The Green Knight
A truly masterful performance by Dev Patel, who continues his string of choosing interesting projects and/or making choices in regular ones. Whether he’s acting in The Newsroom, Skins, Lion, or The Personal History of David Copperfield, Patel understands subtly and beauty in the viewer’s eye. The Green Knight isn’t for everyone. It’s hypnotic slow burn casts a spell and you are carried into David Lowery’s vision for two hours. Lowery has yet to make a movie that doesn’t engage all five senses whether he’s crafting a modern noir in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a heartbreaking meditation on the existence of the soul in A Ghost Story
, or one final run in The Old Man & the Gun.
8. The Harder They Fall
A classic western starring an all-black leading cast filled with the best actors and character actors of their generation. Uh, yes, count me in. An imperfect movie that’s intensely enjoyable. I would watch Lakeith Stanfield’s character if he made a forty-hour spinoff. This movie is everything the 2016 Magnificent Seven remake wanted to be.
7. The Rescue
My favorite documentary of the year, but certainly not the only great one. The Rescue tells the impossible true story of the Thai cave operation in 2018 that saved a young soccer team. I encourage giving this movie a watch if only to learn that this rescue operation was truly insane. Made by the partner team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the documentarians mix animation with real life footage. The Rescue making my list should come as no surprise, because of my obsession with their 2018 masterpiece Free Solo.
6. Coda
Congratulations to Coda for winning Best Picture. While I disagree with the academy, Coda is a thoroughly engaging and enlightening movie about love, art, and family. This move isn’t ground-breaking in structure, but by making deaf actors a regular part of the company, perhaps it’s ground-breaking as a whole. I bet you can't watch this movie without cracking a smile.
5. Tick, Tick…Boom
I’m not a fan of movie musicals. I think they rarely understand how to adapt the stage to the screen. Movie musicals feel hollow, two-dimensional. 2021 broke that mold. Andrew Garfield’s performance is my favorite of the year. He embodies a mixture between Jonathan Larson (Writer/Creator) and Raul Esparza (Original off-broadway lead). I love the inventiveness of the staging and the storytelling. Also, as a theatre maker, I’m impressed by Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first directing project.
4. Dune
Marvel take note: this is how you make a blockbuster. Honestly, Dune is on par with its predecessors in terms of scope and style. There is a Star Wars world equivalence available in Dune. As someone who hates needless CGI, this film manages to make the CGI look entirely real. Unlike Macbeth and Power of the Dog which lack substances inside of their flair, Dune connects the two in order to tell a complete, albeit part one, story with the best visuals of the year. Denis Villenueve is a modern early age Speilberg and there aren’t many in the field who can capture his vision.
3. Licorice Pizza
If you can get past the movie being about essentially nothing and the age difference, Pizza is Paul Thomas Anderson’s most accessible movie. Enticing and entirely necessary, the two leads are stand-outs in a year so desperate for new blood. Due to my schedule, I had to watch this movie at home on an iPad, but it leapt off the screen and into my heart.
2. I’m Your Man
My favorite foreign film of the year and honestly the film that made me still write this list after-the-fact. I cannot recommend this film enough. A German “rom-com” that fits into a category I’m calling “Light Science Fiction” in that the film is definitely Science Fiction in origin, but turns into a compelling character drama. English actor Dan Stevens stars alongside Maren Eggert and they are directed by the fabulous actor-turned-director Maria Schrader (check out Unorthodox). In order to get research funding, Eggert must live with a perfect companion robot for three weeks. The Europeans understand science and silence in cinema better than we can ever hope to imagine.
1. West Side Story
It’s so rare that a remake of a masterpiece even comes close to the original. Spielberg’s West Side Story might surpass Kazan’s. Tony Kushner pulls off a miracle by adapting the original text in such a way that pays homage without supplication. This modern take on West Side Story is vibrant, engaging, and stylized in such a way that few movies are and will ever be in the future. Ariana Debose, Mike Faist, and Rachel Zegler steal the film along with the gang ensemble members and a notable performance by Rita Moreno. The blocking and design of "Officer Krupke" is entirely inventive. The production team makes small choices to make the show numbers sing and make sense off stage and on screen. West Side Story 2021 reminds us that some stories are timeless and remaking them with love is the only way to do it.
