The Best Movies of 2021

I know you’re excited, because literally no one has been asking for this article.  This is the definition of an exercise in futility.  However, if you have OCD and you put things in lists, it’s only natural that you would write movies sixth months late so maybe ten people will read half of it. 

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.  

The Best Movies of 2020*

There must be a cut-off date for writing a year-end review, however the standard end of the year deadline has never quite worked for me.  While the Academy Awards is as fraught as a political convention, using the ceremony to delineate completion of a review works well.  Luckily for me, the Awards were pushed back into late April, which gave me a chance to catch-up.  The issue with writing a year-end review of the best films is that the bulk of those films aren’t released to the public until the following year.  In the past, I’ve tried to watch as many films as possible quickly to release my review as close to January first as possible, but that’s like trying to eat sushi, hamburgers, and steak all in the same meal.  Films are meant to be savored, which is why I waited until April.  I could’ve chalked it up to the Pandemic taking away all meaningful understanding of time, but blaming the film industry is far more satisfying.  

Speaking of the film industry, I write this review while the industry sits on a precipice (although some may argue it’s already fallen into the ravine).  The pandemic has caused the industry to shift from theaters to streaming, an inevitability made present and real by circumstances.  With the grandeur of the cinema lost as the scope and scale diminished, many companies pushed their big-budget productions to the future.  For movie lovers like myself, this gave smaller-budget projects the chance for some limelight, and while some succeeded, the entire experience was diminished, because culturally we saw behind the curtain of the film industry and found just a man not a wizard.  Mid-level budget movies aren’t being made anymore.  Films with bite and consequence and political scope are either limited or scrubbed out.  A great example came in this year’s award-nominated Judas and the Black Messiah.  A film littered with brilliant acting and limited writing.  A film about the Black Panthers that tells the audience literally nothing about the Black Panthers.  Whether it was the studio system or the artists themselves it’s purely semantics, because it all ends up the same.  The marrow of the powerful version of this film was sucked out and the shell of a good movie, but not a great one remained.  As we move back into the theaters, I fear a world of IP and franchise is all we will be left with; a world where entertaining superhero movies neglect story in place of spectacle.  This cinematic world was in the tea leaves for a long time, I just failed to read them correctly. As we return to film production, I pray there is still room for artists to make art unshackled from corporate restraint.  Even if those movies fall few and far in between, they will still be supported by film goers like myself.  

On a personal note, movies were a godsend for me during the Pandemic.  My friends and I created weekly movie groups that watched films and discussed them over zoom (a practice I hope to continue into the future).  Films brought stability to my life, one of the few things that was able to successfully do so.  I’m grateful for this.  Since many of those friends are the ones that read this review, I decided to streamline my rather loquacious entry.  I blocked my top fifteen into four different categories and decided to only pontificate on the top five.  Without further ado, I give you my Top Fifteen Films of 2020 (plus a few months in 2021).  

Category 1: Well Made, but Flawed 

Movies: (15) The Half of It, (14) Da 5 Bloods, (13) One Night in Miami, (12) Judas & the Black Messiah, (11) Mank, (10) Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom 

The first category is filled with movies that fulfilled many checkboxes, but failed to get a mark in all of them.  The Half of It is a beautiful, coming-of-age LGBTQ film that just lacked bite, whereas Da 5 Bloods was all bite and bark without enough coherence.  Both One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom fell prey to the same pitfalls - a play failing to subvert formula and become a full-fledged movie.  Judas and Mank both struggled in the screenplay department.  However, these weaknesses are only blemishes on otherwise good artistic endeavors.  In the case of four of them, we are given four of the best acting performances of the year: Chadwick Boseman (Ma Rainey), Daniel Kaluuya (Judas), Kingsley Ben-Adir (Miami), & the criminally overlooked Delroy Lindo (Bloods).  There weren’t four better performances this year than these four great actors.  For me, Kaluuya is the stand out performance of the year as the hauntingly beautiful portrayal of Fred Hampton.  Both The Half of It and Mank shine in the directing department.  The Half of It’s Alice Wu and the great David Fincher excel with their eyes behind their respective cameras, the only thing that enhances Mank above The Half of It is the brilliant, yet understated cinematography of Erik Messerschmidt.  

Category 2: What a Joy! 

Movies: (9) The Old Guard, (8) The Vast of Night, (7) Palm Springs, (6) Tenet 

“What a Joy” encompasses four films which may have individual problems, but were overlooked due to their pure enjoyment factors.  The Old Guard was my action movie for the year.  Charlize Theron is one of the best living actresses because she brings gravitas to every performance even when she’s just an axe-wielding super soldier with immortality.  The Vast of Night is a brilliant little low-budget science-fiction movie.  Where Ma Rainey and Miami fall short in their play to screen adaptations, The Vast of Night manages to shoot a film like individual moments of a play.  Palm Springs was my comedy of the year and should’ve found Cristin Milioti with an award nomination.  It’s a smart take on time loops stuck firmly inside of a romantic comedy and it’s extremely re-watchable.  Finally, there’s Tenet.  I won’t begrudge you if you didn’t like Tenet.  Much like other Christopher Nolan movies, you either go for his style or you don’t (I hated Interstellar).  Tenet worked on me.  The set pieces are phenomenal and the concepts, while difficult to understand, are intriguing, but the movie works because of the charisma of its leads.  John David Washington and Robert Pattinson show what’s possible if James Bond had a partner.  

Category 3:  The Great Films of 2020

Movies: (5) Small Axe: Mangrove, (4) Another Round, (3) David Byrne’s American Utopia, (2) Nomadland 

(5).  Small Axe: Mangrove 

Any of the compendium of five films within the Small Axe cannon constructed by the brilliant Steven McQueen could easily find a spot on this list.  Lover’s Rock is another that I thoroughly enjoyed, but Mangrove is catnip for me.  A drama about civil rights history that ends in a courtroom.  Mangrove is everything The Trial of the Chicago 7 is not.  As a great lover of all things Aaron Sorkin, Chicago 7 really didn’t work for me and concluded in a heap of liberal wet dreams.  Mangrove is a far superior film that expertly crafts a character narrative into a far larger story.  Shaun Parks as Frank Chrichlow gives one of the top five performances of the year and the movie sings from an accomplished and professional ensemble.  Mangrove is a history that feels all too familiar, but is little seen by American audiences.  I would encourage watching all of Small Axe, but specifically singling out Mangrove.  

(4).  Another Round 
    Americans telegraph their films too much and in doing so, they limit the imaginations of their audiences.  It feels like American audiences are too stupid to see the forest beyond the trees, so American filmmakers have to spell out consequences and concerns.  This isn’t the case with Another Round, Thomas Vinterburg’s brilliant look at alcohol.  After a birthday party, four friends who work at a Danish prep school decide to become working alcoholics.  They drink during the day and stay sober at night to see if it will improve their day jobs.  This film wouldn’t work in America.  It would take a hard-line stance and the last thirty minutes would be a descent into darkness.  Instead, the ending of Another Round is the best ending of the year.  This movie shows you all the different sides of alcohol and potentially alcoholism without taking a narrative political stance.  It’s led by the incomparable Mads Mikkelsen, whose slow-burning firecracker of a performance shows why he continues to be one of the most underrated actors on the planet.  His scene in the teacher’s lounge is the funniest of the year and caused me to rewind and play it over and over again.  

(3).  David Byrne’s American Utopia 

David Byrne stands onstage pointing to a prop of the human brain.  He’s dressed in a grey velvet suit and wears no shoes.  He sings, “Here is an area of great confusion.  Here is a section that’s extremely precise.  And here is an area that needs attention.  Here is a connection with the opposite side.”  Before watching American Utopia, I didn’t have a connection with David Byrne, sure, I’ve listened to a handful of popular Talking Heads songs, but they’ve never been a major part of my musical lexicon.  I thought watching this “movie” would be a good way to pass two hours while I did other work on my computer.  Instead, I sat mesmerized by the most joyous expression of the human experience.  I loved this film, and yes, it really is a film.  The reigns of the camera were handed off to Spike Lee and this, combined with Da 5 Bloods, proves that Lee is singular in his craft.  He uses the camera to shift the perspective of this Broadway show and truly turn it into a cinematic adventure.  American Utopia is a direct connection to the American soul and the calling card of justice in the form of Hell You Talmbout should be shouted from the rooftops as we continue to search for the colors of the American dream.  

(2).  Nomadland 

For some, Nomadland fails to reap the political and social ramifications that force people into the lives of the nomad.  For others, the movie isn’t enough of a story to transcend its docu-drama leanings.  For me, it spoke to my heart and trapped me in a longing for the great unknown.  This is a beautiful film about suffering through tragedy and seeking refuge in the world - the actual real world.  Criticisms about this film gloss over the celebration of a life that is too long forgotten in this country.  And unlike many American films, Chloé Zhao’s understated directing allows for a limitless viewing of societal issues rather than a narrow, forced, and focused one.  This movie brought me to tears with Francis McDormand giving the performance of a lifetime.  She is one of our greatest American actresses and should be lauded for her deeply, soulful role as Fern.  Nomadland finds its beauty in the often-overlooked, the heard but not really seen.  In a year like we’ve just had, I can’t think of anything better to focus on.  

Category 4:  The Masterpiece 

Movies: (1) Portrait of a Lady on Fire 

(1). Portrait of a Lady of Fire

Technically, Portrait of a Lady on Fire was released in 2019, but due to a limited release, I wasn’t able to see it until it reached Hulu.  Exactly one year ago today, I watched Portrait and it has stayed with me everyday 365.  It’s a master stroke created by one of France’s most striking minimalist directors, Céline Sciamma.  The movie is a trance-like worship of the female gaze.  It’s easy to get lost in Sciamma’s cinematic eye and as you follow a common plot, you realize you are not watching a common film.  Sciamma is entirely in control of her artistic aesthetic.  She weaves the camera around two magnetic performances by Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel.  In a film devoid of men, we are left without scandal and unnecessary exposition.  What unfolds is a real love that burns with desire.  It leaps off the screen and infects the heart of the film goer turned cinematic explorer.  Portrait is unlike any film I’ve seen in the past decade.  It’s unique minimalism allows the audience to become ensorcelled in Adèle Haenel’s eyes.  This movie earns my strongest recommendation as not just the best film of the year, but as one of the top films of the century.  

The Best Movies of 2019

The time has come for my year-end review in movies and I’m writing that review at the end of March…in 2020…for 2019 films.  Every December, my schedule increases at the exact time when all the best films are released, so I figured the extra time would allow me to see more of them.  I was wrong.  Despite catching up on many forgotten films from the past year, there’s never enough time in the winter to accomplish everything.  This list will be missing a few movies that based on their subject matter and publicized artistry, I suspect could have weaseled their way into the top ten.  Films like Scorsese’s Netflix marathon The Irishman and Sciamma’s intimate character portrayal in Portrait of a Lady on Fire.  Perhaps they will be on my 2020 list, but I know they won’t be - why?  Because for some reason I continue to be stuck in the mold of trying to calculate movies by year.  

The Academy Awards has completely indoctrinated me.  I’ve been brainwashed into reviewing films based on an arbitrary year designation.  This cultural phenomenon to make year-end review lists makes sense considering its a time honored tradition created when writers ran out of ideas on how to craft Christmas articles.  Instead, we review and rank things.  This tradition has become extremely toxic.  The biggest problem with the Academy Awards, other than the fact that it’s more political than an American election cycle, is that it creates binary arguments.  We tear down movies that would otherwise be favorites because we think there are films that should be deemed as “the best.”  In the process, we lose sight of a lot of the artistry that goes into the making of the films.  The Shape of Water isn’t a bad film - in fact, I considered it a worthy nominee - but will it stand the test of time the same way as something like Dunkirk?  Shakespeare in Love is actually a really well-crafted tale, but it’s no Saving Private Ryan, so as the history of cinema evolves we tear down Shakespeare in Love when really we should celebrate it.  This year, 1917 received a lot of criticism, when really it deserves a tremendous amount of praise (you’ll find it on my list).  Can’t we celebrate films without denigrating other ones?  I used to be a much more pessimistic movie goer, always looking for a film’s faults.  Now, I try to appreciate all the work that went into crafting it and only truly criticize a film if it felt like its artistic authors didn’t care.  With all of that in mind, let’s celebrate some films!

A few honorable mentions:

15.  The Art of Self-Defense: A wonderful little dark comedy - thankful that my best friend, Braden, made me celebrate my birthday.  

14.  Long Shot:  Smart comedies are hard to find - especially comedies that play with gender stereotypical tropes.  Charlize Theron is insanely funny.  

13.  Uncut Gems:  While intensely disturbing and disruptive, this chaotic film proves that the Safdie brothers will be working for a very long time in the business.  

12.  Blinded by the Light: Such a delightful film.  It carries both weight and soul as it weaves its way in and out of two of my favorite things: Coming of Age stories based in desire and The Boss, Bruce Springsteen.  No film in any year will ever beat out the importance of The Boss in my life.  

11.  Knives Out: A really great take on modernizing the Agatha Christie model.  I look forward to rewatching this film without the pretext of looking for the twist.  

10.  Booksmart 

Many have compared Booksmart to Superbad in calling the film the modern, female version of the latter.  I think this takes a reductive view on the movie.  While Superbad is a funny film, Booksmart, much like the title implies, is a very smart film.  It interweaves exposition with character development; it connects metaphor and theme with smart storytelling.  Booksmart is an excellent inductee into the coming of age Hall of Fame.  In recent years previous inductees have included, Lady Bird, Moonlight, An Education, and Juno.  In much the same way Juno charmed audiences with its slangy language, Booksmart articulates how teenagers think and how they feel when they think.  Booksmart is a fun joyride through the heartbreak at the end of adolescence.  

9.  Jojo Rabbit 

Jojo Rabbit, a film marketed as a satire against hate, came along at an important moment in both cinema and American politics.  It took a different approach in trying to answer the questions of our times by infusing humor into a darkened climate and culture.  I think the movie best succeeds when it dives head long into either the main character arcs or the dark comedy.  A lot of the surface level humor is funny, but doesn’t leave a lasting impression.  However, scenes like Stephen Merchant as a Gestapo head officer, understand both the gravitas and the injection of humor inside of an extremely darkly comedic scene. 

8.  Avengers: Endgame 

Endgame was just a good time at the movie theatre.  In a time and age, when so many cultural cinematic events fail to live up to their high expectations (Game of Thrones, Star Wars, The Hobbit), Endgame delivers a suitable end to ten years worth of stories.  It completed the story arcs of both Captain America and Iron Man in ways that lived up to the grandeur of their characters.  

7.  American Factory  

American Factory was my final movie watching experience for this list and it was a great way to end.  This award-winning documentary tells the story of a Chinese company coming to save the day - until the day actually arrives.  After a shuttered General Motors plant in Moraine, just outside of Dayton, Ohio stops production following the recession, the former employees are struggling to survive. In steps Fuyao to create a new space for jobs and an improved economy - but it comes at a price.  It’s the Chinese way or the highway.  What follows is an introspective look at the differences between Chinese factory workers and American factory workers.  This isn’t a film with villains, but rather a culture clash between people failing to communicate.  In our current environment, American Factory is a must-watch film and one of the most important documentaries around. 

6.  Toy Story 4   

When they announced a fourth installment of Toy Story, I figured it was a cash-grab and was hesitant to watch it.  I’m very thankful I got over that preconceived notion.  I can count on two hands the number of films that have legitimately made me openly cry - Toy Story 4 is one of those movies.  In a touching send-off to a twenty-five year character arc, Woody ‘finds’ himself and in doing so,  helped the audience feel a little less lost.  This movie helped me make up my mind about switching career paths and going to get a second masters.  Years later, I will get to tell my kids that I became a High School Counselor in part because of an animated toy cowboy in search of a home.  

5.  The Peanut Butter Falcon 

Shia Labeouf and Dakota Johnson might be eccentric people to say the least, but they sure are fascinating to watch on screen.  The Peanut Butter Falcon is a feel-good, warm apple pie movie with an extra dash of brutality.  A simple story that matches a down-syndrome boy from an assisted-living home with a fisherman on the run and a social worker all in search of a backwoods version of a WWE wrestler.  Audiences will notice connections to films like 2012’s Mud, but where that veers into noir, Falcon veers into the heartstrings.  LaBeouf is the perfect actor to pair with Zach Gottsagen, the Down-Syndrome actor who plays the lead.  If you’re looking for a heartwarming film with a little bit of an edge, Falcon is the movie for you.  

4.  Official Secrets 

The best movie on this list that I bet almost no one else has seen.  Official Secrets is director Gavin Hood’s second consecutive film where he tackles systematic issues within the British political system.  The first film, Eye in the Sky made my top ten movies of the decade list and Official Secrets is an excellent vehicle to showcase Hood’s abilities.  The film is a straightforward docudrama about Whistleblower Katharine Gun, who tried to warn the British public about the illegal actions of members of the UN in the Invasion of Iraq.  The film takes a linear path from the initial action taken by Gun, to the Press, to the blowback and trial.  This isn’t a film that’s in anyway inventive in terms of production - it’s just a really good story, a really important story, and one that’s well-acted especially by Matt Smith, Ralph Fiennes, and Kiera Knightley as Katharine Gun.  

3.  1917  

There’s very little I can say that will add to the discourse surrounding 1917.  There are plenty of people who think the central conceit of a “one-shot” or a cut together to look like “one-shot” concept makes the film a flash in the pan.  I’m not one of those people.  One shot movies like 2015’s Victoria or the opening of the Bond film, Spectre are catnip for me.  I thought 1917 was a feat of technical genius and one of the most beautifully captured films of my lifetime.  Cinematographer Roger Deakins is one of the greatest to ever hold that title and he expertly executes this heart-pounding race.  One of the lost elements in the conversation surrounding 1917’s technical achievement is the great work done by George MacKay in the lead role.  MacKay does wonderful body acting paired with very little dialogue; his face is captivating like watching a lost child in a sea of faces.  

2.  Little Women 

Little Women was one of the best times I’ve ever had at the movie theatre.  Greta Gerwig, in just two films, has cemented herself as one of the best directors working today.  No matter what she makes going forward, I will be there on opening night.  Gerwig’s Little Women is like watching a Aaron Sorkin script inside of a period dramedy.  It’s engrossing and impeccably well-acted.  The chemistry built between Laurie and Jo (Chalamet and Ronan) is electrifying, but is outdone by the chemistry built between all four sisters.  Ronan continues to make her claim as the new Meryl Streep, but the best performance of the film and of the year goes to the amazing Florence Pugh.  I first saw Pugh in 2016’s Lady Macbeth and sang her praises at the time.  However, she outdoes that performance by leaps and bounds in Little Women by making one of the novel’s least interesting characters and turning Amy into one of the film’s most captivating characters.  Amy’s scene with Laurie, better known as the Marriage is an Economic Proposition scene is the best of the film.  Little Women is one of the most delightfully original takes on a classic to ever arrive in the cinema.  

1.  Parasite     

I sat in an empty theater for ten minutes until I called my best friend.  I said,  “It feels like a bomb just went off in my head,” and then I exited out of the theater into a very different world than the one I was in previously.  Far too many films get bogged down in theme and allegory and in trying to prove their message, they forget to tell a complete story.  Parasite weaves in between these two paths to provide the best film (perhaps) ever made on income inequality and simultaneously a brilliant thriller.  Once the comedy of errors beginning takes a turn, you won’t know what hit you.  Bong Joon Ho is a master and he perfectly cast an ensemble that knows how to exact every ounce of his artistic palette.  I’ve never seen a film quite as uniquely captivating as Parasite.  The film is culturally urgent while also connecting Karl Marx with Alfred Hitchcock.  Bravo, Parasite, bravo.