Editor’s Note: Welcome to Vanyaland’s Year in ReView coverage for 2021. It’s been a year, huh? Luckily, we’ve had incredible art across the spectrum of music, comedy, and film to help prevent us from going totally insane. As we raise a glass to the year that was, check out all our 2021 Year In ReView coverage as it surfaces throughout the week and into the holidays.
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I’m gonna drop the facade that I put up this time last year and just go ahead and admit a truth: 2020 fucking sucked. Most of the movies sucked. Watching the good ones on a television sucked. Virtual conventions sucked. Virtual film festivals sucked. Having the discourse be controlled by a series of streaming services praying for the death of theaters so that they can trap you even further in the algorithm’s binds sucked. Wondering if the industry would survive in a recognizable form sucked. If 2021 was even a tenth better than the previous year, it would be a vast improvement.
And, sure enough, it was great. Many of us (including — no, especially myself), vaccinated and ready to fucking hang, went back to movie theaters, oftentimes with loved ones and friends, a celebration of connection both with the known people sitting to your left and right and the strangers in the audience. And astonishingly enough, we were rewarded with great films. Here’s a list of my 21 favorite films of the year, listed alphabetically, and I’m so excited to be able to celebrate the year in cinema with you. Be warned: The usual suspects are not on this list. It is, after all, a list of favorites. If you’re searching for a list validating your love for The Power of the Dog or Belfast or Spencer or The Green Knight, well, I highly recommend you just find whatever critics’ groups have already voted and just read their lists of winners.
But first, the honor roll:
Godzilla vs Kong, In the Earth, The Lost Daughter, House of Gucci, DMX: Don’t Try to Understand, Flee, Listening to Kenny G, Finch, The Suicide Squad, What Do We We See When We Look At The Sky, Mass, The Souvenir Part II, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, Last Night in Soho, I’m Your Man, The Guilty, Malignant, The Protege, Vacation Friends, Old, Nobody, Jakob’s Wife, Passing, Summer of Soul, Prisoners of the Ghostland, F9, In the Heights, Don’t Breathe 2, National Champions.
And now, the list:
Annette
I said pretty much everything I wanted to say about Leos Carax’s Annette back when I reviewed it in August, and each of my points holds true. Carax and Sparks have crafted a uniquely stunning musical, full of operatic swings and bizarre choices in service of trying to understand how much artists should take from their lives in order to make their work “honest.” It’s a film about the ethics of emotional exploitation that maintains the wit and verve of your average Sparks record and pairs it with Carax’s unique visual sensibility. It’s a bummer that Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard will most likely go unnoticed in this awards season, and even more of a bummer that Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers didn’t come out soon enough to prepare the legions of frustrated audiences for what they were about to see.
Superlative: “Best Musical Sex Scene of the Last Decade.”
Benedetta
God bless Paul Verhoeven, the ceaselessly provocative filmmaker behind such classics as Robocop, Flesh+Blood, Total Recall, Showgirls, and The Fourth Man. The Dutchman is a living counterpoint to the argument that some folks lose their verve and passion as they age because he’s just as good at poking and prodding the trigger points of audiences as he was in 1988. A tale of plague, lesbian nuns, sword-wielding Christs, and the corruption of the church, Benedetta was half-heartedly protested by the angry faithful when it premiered stateside at NYFF in the fall of 2021, which just goes to show you how incredible it is. In an era where a pithy tweet is considered participating in a “boycott,” it actually got folks off their asses and picket a film release. Isn’t that crazy?
Superlative: “Best Film About a Plague With Zero Metaphorical Meaning About The Current Pandemic.”
The Card Counter
How intensely ballsy was it for Focus Features to drop such an acrid criticism of Bush-era torture policies and our empty, hollow country as a whole on the twentieth anniversary of 9/11? Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter continues the filmmaker’s late-career renaissance and features a career-best performance from Oscar Isaac, the torture-turned gambler looking to change the path that a tortured young man — played with verve by Tye Sheridan — is headed down. It’s cinema reflective of our modern landscape: the lost among the windowless decay of the casino, each, hopeful for redemption and full of regret.
Superlative: “Scariest Willem Dafoe Performance.”
C’mon C’mon
Mike Mills’ lush and gorgeously felt exploration of the blossoming close relationship between a distant uncle (Joaquin Phoenix) and his young nephew (Woody Norman) sports the best child performance in a film in quite some time. How insane is it that a kid holds his own with a two-time Oscar winner at his level? But beyond that, Mills’ film is a lush black-and-white feat of cross-generational empathy in a time when such things are few and far in between. Children aren’t just metaphorical stand-ins for the adult experience or venues for nostalgia: They’re worthy of contemplation and of great art.
Superlative: “Best Temper Tantrum (Adult or Child).”
Cry Macho
Clint Eastwood has spent the majority of his 50-year career as a director directly challenging and questioning his role as a cultural power, and with Cry Macho he offers a rejoinder to his critics who wish to bind him in a political trap. It’s a gorgeous love letter to all forms of Mexican culture from a beloved gringo, and reveals an incredible vulnerability on the part of the director. Plus, one can only wish for the confidence that Clint has when it comes to seducing women 70 years younger than they’re 91.
Superlative: “Best Cock.”
Cryptozoo
Dash Shaw is one of the few artists working in modern western animation capable of preserving his style on the page — where his career as a storyteller began in the pages of alt-comics — as he made his transition to the big screen. The follow-up to My Entire High School Sinking Into The Sea, Cryptozoo is a magical and deeply melancholy look at a group’s attempt to preserve the magical and endangered creatures that perhaps shouldn’t be caged. It’s unlike any film you’ll see this year, and is forever better than the other “magical beasts” movie that you might be tempted to see come springtime. And, hey, you won’t be giving JK Rowling your hard-earned cash if you just watch this instead.
Superlative: “Most Haunting and Watership Down-esque Film To Ruin A Childhood in 2021 With.”
Dune
I wrote a lengthy review of Dune back when it dropped that, in retrospect, seems cooler than it needed to be. But a month or so after it was published, I had the chance to see Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic on IMAX film, and I can genuinely say that it is a unique experience, perhaps akin to what audiences must have felt like when they say Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm or How the West Was Won in the original Cinerama format. It was so much more immersive, so much more overwhelming, that when Josh Brolin is leading his troops into battle during the big raid that makes up much of the film’s second act and the fucking bagpipes return on the score, I started cackling with joy. Dune rules and I’m so glad we’re getting Part II in a couple of years.
Superlative: “Best Worm.”
Ema
Pablo Lorrain’s Spencer is going to inevitably wind up winning some sort of award during this season, mostly thanks to Kristen Stewart’s elevation of a particularly mediocre retread of what the Chilean director did better in Jackie. But his other release of this year, Ema, is a genuine masterpiece, telling the story of a Reggeaton dancer desperately searching and scheming for a way to get her child back from the couple that is fostering him. It’s astonishingly shot, frighteningly compelling in how it unfolds, and features one of the year’s best scores from the musician Nicholas Jaar. Seek it out as soon as you can and be stunned at what Lorrain can do when he’s totally freed of the bonds of the semi-real.
Superlative: “Best Neon-Lit Dance Sequences in a Non-Musical About Child Endangerment.”
The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson’s loving tribute to the New Yorker writers and cultural critics that influenced him has plenty about it to love: Gorgeous cinematography, brilliant performances (from the likes of Jeffery Wright, Frances McDormand, and more in this absolutely-stacked cast), and the kind of production design and general aesthetic that we’ve come to expect from Anderson’s output in the last two decades. But The French Dispatch also inspired my favorite piece of criticism written in the past year in the form of this absolutely astonishing capsule review penned on film social hub Letterboxd by Rolling Stone‘s K. Austin Collins, who is one of the best critics working today. Take a look at it (he has asked that writers don’t hyperlink to it) and learn what it truly means to marvel.
Superlative: “Best Usage of Jarvis Cocker in a Film in At Least a Decade.”
The Last Duel
Ridley Scott blamed millennials for the failure of this brilliantly-written-and-executed period drama, which concerns the crown-sanctioned duel fought by two knights in medieval France, but we’re thinking it has more to do with the subject matter than anything else. The Last Duel is an enormously complicated film, told from a variety of perspectives, that casts an unflattering light on every single member of its ensemble except for its victim. There are few of the creature comforts that one has when watching a historical epic of this scope and consequence: powerful men are deluded monsters, unaware of their cruelties, and Scott’s film takes an unsparing view of their plight.
Superlative: “Best Ben Affleck Performance Since Gone Girl.”
Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson’s joyous tribute to The Teen Movie is perhaps his most outright accessible film for mainstream audiences since Boogie Nights. Its two leads — Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim — have a wonderful chemistry and a delightful screwball sensibility, and the escalating situations that they’re tossed into by fate and ambition are a perpetual motion machine of amusement. It’s blissful, it’s beautiful, it’s aimless, it’s meaningful, and Licorice Pizza is worth all the discourse it’s generating, good are bad. At least people are talking about good art again.
Superlative: “Most Likely To Kick Off A Water Bed Renaissance.”
The Matrix Resurrections
It was inevitable that Warner Bros. would return to the iconic cash cow that is The Matrix series, but it was impossible to predict that series co-creator Lana Wachowski would return to direct. It was even more unlikely that a major studio would let a such an intelligent and thoughtful blockbuster get made in this day and age, but here we are. The Matrix Resurrections is a stirring work of semi-autobiographical science-fiction, a treatise on what it means to have had culture-shifting impact on the world, and also a kick-ass action movie. We’re all the luckier to have it.
Superlative: “Most Likely to Make Millennials and Gen Xers Feel Both Very Old and Young Again At the Exact Same Time.”
Memoria
Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s latest masterpiece caught a ton of flak from the press for its release strategy: It’ll only ever be in theaters, at least on these shores, and after seeing it we have a hard time arguing with distributor Neon’s decisions there. Memoria is a sonic and visual experience unlike any other, unfolding slowly and surely as its protagonist, played by Tilda Swinton, searches for the source of a noise she heard one night in her hotel room. Her quest leads her to dramatic and unexpected places, and the final half-hour of Weerasethakul’s film is one of the most magical and awe-inspiring sequences of the year that demands to be seen on something better than a laptop screen.
Superlative: “Most Tilda Swinton Film of 2021.”
No Time to Die
Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond was one of the most-delayed films of the pandemic cycle — indeed, it was one of the very first dominos to fall in 2020 when COVID-19 began wreaking havoc on our lives and on the release schedule — but it was more than worth the wait. A classic large-scale Bond film melded with the sweet sadness of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Craig’s swan song was directed to perfection by Cary Joji Fukunaga, who nailed the tone and the set-pieces (that staircase fight is one of the best of the year) but who also happens to be one of the most handsome dudes to ever direct a film in general. Seriously, it should be illegal for a dude that hot to be behind a camera. Leave trades like this to the ugly guys, Mr. Fukunaga.
Superlative: “Best Upstaging of an Original Billie Eilish Composition By a Long-Dead Musician.”
Pig
You most likely know what it’s like to be “hangry,” which is the kind of frustration and grumpiness that one develops when they’re hungry enough to get mildly petulant about brunch lines, but have you ever been… sadgry? Melangry? I’m not sure to how to describe the type of emotion that Pig provides, where one is delighted and salivating about the delicious food onscreen while also being torn apart from within by the masterful work of Nicolas Cage in this film. The John Wick logline — local Oregon hermit has beloved truffle pig stolen from him and goes on a quest to get him back — conceals a deeply moving story about one’s inability to move forward after loss, and it was one of the biggest surprises of the year.
Superlative: “Most Likely to Stop an Audience Member From Eating A Baconator After Leaving the Theater.”
Red Rocket
Sean Baker’s sex tragicomedy features the year’s best performance by an actor in a leading role, and I’m saying so simply because I know that there’s no way in hell that Simon Rex — former MTV VJ and star of Scary Movie 3 — will get a nod from the Academy for his work here as a socially-cancerous porn star fucking up and fucking his way through small-town Texas. In a just world, Adam Sandler would be on hand to give him his statuette, having also won for Uncut Gems a few years earlier, but I’m just gonna have to make do with a superlative. That is…
Superlative: “Best Usage of an Unexpected Needle Drop (Forwards and Backwards) in Service of a Great Performance.” Great. Now I’ve got “Bye Bye Bye” stuck in my head again.
The Spine of Night
This animated film, which premiered back at SXSW in a haze of thick nug smoke and sick-ass guitar riffs (at least in my apartment), attempts to do the very difficult: Improve upon both Heavy Metal and Ralph Bakshi’s Fire and Ice by telling an awesome — and metal as shit — fantasy tale using the same rotoscope animation that defined the latter of those two examples. And guess what? It worked like gangbusters. In a year stacked with epics, The Spine of Night stood out as an example of imagination unbounded by both budget and “taste.”
Superlative: “Most Likely to Be Painted On The Side of Your Megadeth-Loving Best Friend’s Van.”
Titane
Julia Ducournau’s Raw was one of the best horror debuts of the last decade, bringing back the intense ethos of the New French Extremity while telling a fascinating coming of age tale. With Titane, she expanded her scope and increased her powers to match. What resulted is one of the most amusing, bizarre, brutal, passionate, empathetic and gorgeous films of this decade or any other. Anchored by an impressive debut performance by Agatha Rousselle and assisted by work from the incredible Vincent London (whom I can only hope to be as jacked as when I’m in my 50s), Titane is a one-of-a-kind experience about finding family in the weirdest of places. And fucking cars. And killing French college kids. And dancing with the boys to Future Islands. Talk about having “something for everyone.
Superlative: “Best Film of the Year, Yes We Are Going Basic With This One.”
The Tragedy of Macbeth
Joel Coen’s first solo venture as a director is a fantastic adaption of the iconic play, preserving the Bard’s text for the screen without losing any of its power. Its gorgeous impressionist interpretation of the play’s setting matches well with the fantastic skills of the cast, featuring the likes of Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. It’s no Throne of Blood, but it definitely does have what may be the best interpretation of the Witches ever put to film.
Superlative: “Best Break-Up Movie.”
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
It’s been a weird year for the superhero movie. Marvel put out three straight duds, with only the last one getting a substantial pushback from fans and critics, while DC had a success with The Suicide Squad that couldn’t, somehow, find an audience. Leave it to Sony, then, to come out with the most ridiculous superhero movie since Batman and Robin in the form of Andy Serkis’ Venom 2. Tom Hardy and company have queered the superhero movie in amusing and endearing ways, and this film doubled down on the insane amount of idiosyncrasies present in this interpretation of the character while removing most of the bullshit. It is a blast, and one of the best times I’ve had in a theater all year.
Superlative: “Most Deserving of the Title ‘Not Another Gay Superhero Movie.’”
Wrath of Man
Guy Ritchie’s heist epic has a number of fantastic qualities: an excellent cast, anchored by Jason Statham and a Shakespearean Holt McCallany; absolutely balls-to-the-wall action full of nihilistic thrills; Scott Eastwood’s piercing blue eyes, inherited from his father, used in service by a director for the first time ever; and Post Malone getting shot in the head (just joking, Post, you’re a cool dude even if Bud Light sucks). It’s the kind of Dumb Dude Heist Classic we get every couple of years when Michael Mann’s Heat decided to asexually reproduce, and it is a blast and a half to watch unfold. More sentimentally, Wrath of Man was both the first movie I saw at my local multiplex after vaccination, and also the first movie I saw with my family when I was able to visit them after two years or so. There are other films that are significantly better on this list, but Wrath of Man will always hold a very special place in my heart.
Superlative: “Best Usage of the Line “Suck Your Own Dick” in an Otherwise Deadly-Serious Action Thriller.”
