The year saw a tentative return to in-person screenings, an experience I had deeply missed. Getting to see ambitious, challenging, and moving storytelling on the big screen was something I’ll be sure to never take for granted again. Here are the top films I saw in 2021.
Licorice Pizza celebrates the boundless optimism of youth
I am fully in the tank for Paul Thomas Anderson; so the release of any new film from one of the greatest living American filmmakers marks a significant occasion to be celebrated. With that caveat in mind, Licorice Pizza, his deeply romantic tale of young strivers in the Valley, feels like a special holiday delivery with one of those giant novelty bows on it made especially for me. In the contrast to the icy focus of Phantom Thread (which vies for a spot on the summit of my ever-shifting rankings of his oeuvre), he’s returned to the wide-open sprawl of Southern California. Where Boogie Nights and Magnolia reckoned with ambitions hitting their natural limits, Licorice Pizza revels in the boundless optimism of youth. People may quibble about where it ranks in his pantheon, but I’ll happily take a hundred slices of this shaggy story of feeling of infinite possibilities.
Blue Pill Review: The Matrix Resurrections made me question the nature of its reality
The Matrix Resurrections makes subtext text right from the jump. Lana Wachowski embraces the meta of this new sequel and makes her new film explicitly about the despair of resurrecting the corpse of seemingly long-dead ideas to appease the hunger of a new generation of content producers and consumers. Whether it’s a sneaky scream from deep within an intellectual prison, a rousing successful return to form, or merely an well-intentioned but clumsily realized impulse to revisit old themes is likely to vary substantially by audience expectations and sympathies (or lack thereof). Some may rejoice to follow her and some familiar characters down the rabbit hole once again. Others, like me, may find themselves desperate to eject.
Red Pill Review: The Matrix Resurrections is one final great film to end the year
Challenging what it means to fashion a creative work in a world of endless sequels, it is as brilliant a way to end the year as one could hope for
The King’s Man crashes in as a last-minute entry for 2021’s worst film
An unexpectedly boring blunder that proves to be the biggest cinematic disaster of the year, the atrocious The King’s Man kills any goodwill for a franchise already on its last legs.
Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men is a meditative journey of sound and human experience
A long time coming, this surreal, ambient music-filled journey into the minds of humans far into the future, throws us into Jóhann Jóhannsson’s vision of the world. You see, this will be his first, and only, film in the director’s chair; he passed away far too young in 2018 before he could see its widespread release. With Tilda Swinton’s calm, yet emotionally distant monotone narrating, we embark on a free fall into Jóhannsson’s vision of what we as a race will be like and what we’ll be doing over a billion years in the future.
Spider-Man: No Way Home is for lovers of Spider-Men
The holidays are traditionally a time for reflection, wish fulfillment, gluttony, and reliance on the tremendous power of nostalgia to paper over the messier parts of reuniting with friends and family after time spent apart. So it’s likely in that spirit that I came away from my viewing of Spider-Man: No Way Home in a jubilant fog of appreciation for what might be characterized as an over-stuffed buffet of fan service. Based on the rampant speculation in the lead-up to the film’s release, had this latest installment in the Spider-Man Cinematic Universe been nothing but a live-action version of that Spider-Man GIF, Dayenu. But it was so much more and I loved almost every minute of its excess.
Paolo Sorrentino reaches into his past with The Hand of God
Paolo Sorrentino’s feverish work in Il Divo and both The Young (and New) Pope have utterly dazzled me; so at first The Hand of God at first felt like a huge change of scale. Dialing back from the recent operatics, he confronts the other end of the lifespan from his Oscar-winning La grande bellezza, to give us a closely-observed family drama that’s also a tender ode to his cinematic influences. It may seem smaller than the grand sweep of the Italian mafia or the vast questions of faith and power at the head of the Catholic Church. But reflection, I suppose there is no bigger story than the one about how you became who you are.
With Nightmare Alley Guillermo del Toro masterfully crafts a noir thriller overflowing with atmosphere
Even as it may not see the director make use of monsters or creatures, Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is characteristically strong work from the auteur that revels in the darkness of its noir origins.
Drive My Car is the year’s best three-hour commute
Where other directors might try to compress a sprawling novel into a feature film, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three hour long adaptation of a short story is the definition of patience rewarded. For me, nothing has better replicated the feeling of being completely enveloped by Haruki Murakami’s (translated) prose quite like Drive My Car, with the substantial benefit that his rendering comes without the unpleasant surprise of the squicky and ghosty elements that the novelist is so fond of exploring. I admit to being wary of the long running time when I queued up the screener, but by the end I began to worry that each minute would be the last.