Greg’s Top Ten Films of 2021
“Maybe with good luck, we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”
Looking back on 2021, the major theme has to be the return of theaters. Going from sitting at home and streaming movies for most of 2020 to being able to finally watch a film on the big screen served as a potent reminder of what is lost when theatrical exhibition is removed from the cinematic experience. Not only is there a big, bright wall in a dark room that enables an imagined space, but they also provide a communal element that’s shared with friends, family, and strangers alike. What they have to offer — spectacle, shared experience, dialog — cannot be replicated at home in isolation. The importance of (safely) returning to these spaces can not be understated, particularly if we want a rich and diverse medium that extends beyond franchises.
More so than any one release, the return of theaters was notable based on the simple fact that they enable exhibition; when theaters came back, so did the movies. Combining both the regular 2021 slate with the holdovers from 2020 resulted in a wealth of notable releases. We got new Spielberg, Campion, del Toro, Anderson (both Paul T. and Wes), Hogg, Wachowski, Baker, Coen, Carax, Schrader, Scott (x2), Verhoeven, Mills, Villeneuve, and many, many more. With so many films, and after the collective experience of last year, the act of moviegoing felt both incredibly gratifying and rewarding in 2021.
The films on this list go hand in hand with that experience. Naturally, you should seek these films out by your preferred means. But when you’re done reading, maybe check your local theater listings and see if any of these films are still playing. Bring a few friends to share in the experience and go watch one on the big screen. I promise you won’t regret it.
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Honorable Mentions
Pig (Michael Sarnoski), Dune (Denis Villeneuve), Old (M. Night Shyamalan), Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven), The Green Knight (David Lowery)
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10. Army of the Dead
Take a ragtag crew of mercenaries trying to pull off a bank heist, drop them into a quarantined, zombie-infested Las Vegas, and add in an impending nuclear bomb detonation and you have Zach Snyder’s thick-skulled action flick, Army of the Dead. By traditional marks, this is not a good movie, but personally, I think this movie kinda rules. Pulling from both the heist and zombie genres, Snyder creates a familiar narrative held upright by the director’s penchant for spectacle and action. The logic on display often doesn’t make a lick of sense, but in its loud, macho bravado, a willingness to accept the absurd emerges that gives way to satisfying mayhem. Bullets fly, and zombies die. Which is all you really need when the concept is as high as this.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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9. Red Rocket
When washed up porn star Mikey Saber returns to his hometown, he is not greeted with open arms. His estranged wife almost calls the cops on him. Employers refuse to hire someone with his kind of work experience. And people around town generally distrust the intentions of this charming city slicker. But Mikey won’t let his misfortunes get him down, not for long. He’s turning his life around, and when he meets a young seventeen year old named Strawberry, he immediately sees a way to get back into the porn industry.
Red Rocket is a one of the most idiosyncratic character studies in some time. Instead of aligning yourself with the protagonist, director Sean Baker paints a complex image of a charismatic manipulator whose warped view on life causes him to do terrible things. Mikey is actively grooming a young teenager to his personal benefit, but at the same time, his positively radiant aura will try to trick you into thinking he’s a good person (due in large part to a top-tier performance from real life porn star Simon Rex). As Dante so cunningly wrote in his review, exploring this “suit case pimp” reveals insight into the distorted realities of the American Dream and the immoral psyche of someone dead set on achieving it, no matter who they may cross or burn in the process. Coupled with the film’s setting, Texas City, a dying industry town forgotten by the rest of the country, Baker makes a convincing argument for how decrepit the American Dream has become, particularly for those who are excluded from its reach. Baker’s dissection could be bungled in less experienced hands, but it’s his attention to nuance that makes this character study particularly adept, further adding to Baker’s continuing body of work of America on the fringes.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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8. Memoria
When I saw Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria at the New York Film Festival, it was the one film that I could point to as having a collective hold on its audience. The film is narratively rather simple — discovering the source of a loud, sonic thud only heard by an expatriate botanist (Tilda Swinton) residing in Columbia. In its ambiguity, the film suggests a connection between the historical past and those in the present day, a temporal connection across time and space so to speak, but Weerasethakul’s methodical pace and focus on auditory vibrations make for a completely sensory experience, one that requisites a theatrical visit to fully appreciate. While other films provide thematic or narrative satisfactions, Memoria offers something completely its own, at times indescribable and evasive. If there was a way to succinctly describe the feeling of this film, it would be this quote from Abbas Kiarostami regarding his favorite films: “Some films have made me doze off in the theater, but the same films have made me stay up at night, wake up thinking about them in the morning, and keep on thinking about them for weeks.”
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7. C’mon C’mon
Mike Mills knows how to make a good, quality piece of sentimental cinema. His latest tearjerker, C’mon C’mon, follows an early forties radio journalist named Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who watches over his nephew Jesse while his parents are addressing a family emergency. As a kid, Jesse doesn’t fully understand what’s going on, and as an adult, Johnny doesn’t know how to tell him, let alone figure out where he is directionally in his own life. Both these characters, in contrast to one another, explore the enormity of life and just how difficult it can be traversing it, from parenting to interpersonal relationships, down to individual choices. The film can be deeply affecting when it thinks on these ideas, particularly when Mills plots his film with a number of auditory readings that act as pensive breaks between segments of the film. These moments can be from one of Johnny’s radio interviews or a story he is reading to Jesse, but they primarily serve as a means of evoking an idea or feeling in the moment — a reading of Claire A. Nivola’s Star Child never felt so existentially large and just one deployment of “Clair de Lune” is enough to make the best of us well up with emotions. In all its speculative wonder and tender beauty, C’mon C’mon provides something meaningful for those struggling to navigate what’s in front of them, which feels like most of us these days.
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6. Drive My Car
While Ryusuke Hamaguchi released two films this year, his adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story Drive My Car is the one that left quite the impression on me. Hamaguchi adapts a fifty page short story into a three hour Sunday drive that slowly, but eloquently, unpacks facets of grief and how we process it. The message comes by way of a man who lost his wife over two years ago and can’t reach any sense of closure on how she left. While directing a stage adaptation of Uncle Vanja, he finds mutual relation with his stoic driver who is processing her own guilt and a younger man who previously had an affair with his wife, the pairing of which help him reconcile the emotional trauma he has let fester for all these years.
Hamaguchi’s deft control of pace and precision — notably experienced when we are traveling with our characters in a hot red SAAB 900 Turbo; who knew a car could be shot in so many compelling ways? — turns the innocuous into the pronounced. Dialog has the ability to sever a scene with piercing revelations. Performance brings long repressed emotions to the surface. And characters open up to the possibility of renewal. Hamaguchi orchestrates all of this into a beautiful, breezy three hour film that’s as transfixing as it is cathartic.
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5. Licorice Pizza
Paul Thomas Anderson does not miss, and his latest film, Licorice Pizza, is right on target. Set in the San Fernando Valley in 1973, Licorice Pizza tells the story of Gary Valentine and Alana Kane. Gary is a fifteen year old who acts twenty-five. Alana, a twenty-five year old acting fifteen. They both have a complicated and flawed relationship when it comes to acting their age, but their hangouts and hijinks in the Valley end up forming moments in each other’s lives that prove seminal. As PTA’s lightest and most romantic film, Licorice Pizza largely consists of episodic happenings where Gary and Alana come in and out of the orbits of various 1970s celebrity icons; these characters not only help construct the film’s cultural pastiche, but they also act as foils for both Gary and Alana who grow and develop from the failings of these adults. Funny and charming and unforgettable, Licorice Pizza is a neatly focused film that catches two characters when they were young and with someone who truly mattered, during a time and a place when they needed each other the most.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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4. The Worst Person in the World
Fittingly told through the lens of a dark comedy, Joachim Trier channels the tumult of the late-twenty-something milieu with The Worst Person in the World. Headlined by a nuanced performance from Renate Reinsve, the film focuses on Julie, a twenty-nine year old just trying to figure out what she wants from life. Her problems are her own, yet not unfamiliar; as we watch Julie struggle to formulate her own path forward — individually, interpersonally, or otherwise — it feels as if we are watching some kind of eerie reflection of our own experience that we know to be true about our twenties. Trier underscores the feeling of being torn in these moments of consequence, capturing the ever so nuanced specificity of not knowing whether any given life choice is the right or wrong one and the subsequent self-loathing that accompanies it. Some of my favorite films resonate with me on a personal level, and what I like so much about this film is how Trier extends a sympathetic hand to audiences who similarly feel adrift. Consider it new cannon for people figuring out their twenties.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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3. The French Dispatch
Using an omnibus narrative built around a fictional magazine based on The New Yorker, Wes Anderson tells three separate stories centered around the shifting tides of art, politics, and human interest in his latest film The French Dispatch. Like previous Anderson efforts, this is a film where aesthetics are front and center. Squared frames. Pastel colors. A curio cabinet cast. It’s easy to write off these aesthetics as merely ornamental, but to do so, I think, would discredit the underlying precision of one of America’s premier working auteurs.
Light and whimsical on the surface, but astute and meaningful just below, it has become something of an endearing trademark for director Wes Anderson to so eloquently package heavy hitting themes in decadent devices. Case in point arrives at the end of the film’s third story, “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner.” For nearly thirty minutes, Anderson depicts the comedic antics of a food critic’s police ride-along during a rescue mission. While much of this story is to be believed an all out romp, right at the end Anderson inserts an impressively concise, but monumentally weighty, scene that reorientates this cuisine caper into a sentimental tale of loneliness and desired belonging — this article’s opening quote so belongs to it. It’s this brand of precision, these flashes of creative brilliance, scattered throughout its entirety that makes The French Dispatch so strikingly remarkable and the work of a true master.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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2. Titane
There’s a visceral quality to Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning film, Titane, that sticks with you. Images of graphic metamorphosis, violence, and autoerotica are among the reasons the film is so striking, but it’s significant that the film imbues these images with substance as well. Ducournau’s implementation of body horror is a fine tuned vehicle for her humanist concerns with love and humanity, two sentiments that play out with warmth and sincerity by the end of the film. Amalgams of distorted flesh and carnal metal conjure notions of resilience and transformation from our two leading characters who find one another broken and in disarray; the realization of both through body horror and narrative amounts to two characters who compliment one another and come to learn they are deserving of each other’s (platonic) love.
Titane understands the ability to afford this no matter the severity of one’s failures, grievances, or sins that might otherwise make someone unlovable. Sometimes it takes the reciprocated love of others to realize what worth we have. To be so messed up, so damaged, and feel the compliment of someone else’s love is truly a special sentiment, and it’s why I find this film to be such a sensation.
You can read Cinema As We Know It's review of the film here.
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1. The Souvenir Part II
Of all the films this year, Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II feels the most inspired by the possibilities of cinema. Picking up right where the original left off, Part II sees Julie — a stand in for Hogg during her time at film school played by Honor Swinton Byrne — on the other side of a toxic relationship that tragically ended in the death of her lover. In the wake of her loss, she directs her student thesis hoping to reconcile lingering questions while moving on from her past. Singular as both a sequel and as a personal act of expression, Hogg looks back at her younger self with enough experience to make sense of it all. She parallels her struggle with grief along side an arduous creative process and ends up making a film about the nature of art itself, that art can serve as a mode of understanding life and all its complexities.
As Julie forges forward on her film, a film that mirrors the events of Part I, she starts to find her creative voice. Spats with her crew serve as early indicators that her “memorial” to her dearly deceased is illformed, something Julie works through and develops as she grows into herself as a director. Finding out what her film is and deciding it on her own terms becomes a mode of answering the questions she still has about her lost love, making Part II as much of a film about self-discovery as is it is about grieving.
Notably, Hogg pulls the camera back in Part II, creating a meta-textual film where the production of the first film becomes the plot of her sequel, albeit from the perspective of her younger self. By folding the two films in on one another, Hogg has made something that is not only additive to the original film, but also completely necessary to how we see Julie’s story continue. Considering both its form and its substance, it cannot be understated how mammoth this film feels, to the director, to the audience, and to cinema itself. In my mind, it’s one of the most dazzling, spellbinding, and essential sequels ever made.
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