The UNDISPUTED Top 10 Movies of 2021

1. Summer of Soul - The first movie I saw in a theater after Pando I: The Original, and wow do I recommend seeing (and hearing) it that way. It's unfathomable that all this high quality footage of the 1969 Harlem festival, featuring top of their game performances from Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Mavis Staples, Sly and the Family Stone, etc, etc, sat around in someone’s basement unwanted until now. Director Questlove does a great job cutting the performances together, and intercuts newly shot footage of the artists like Marilyn McCoo and original attendees seeing their performances for the first time in 50 years. It’s instructive, too: this footage puts the lie to the reputation of Harlem in (white) popular culture at the time as just a scary, crime-ridden pace where bad things coud happen to you. The audience shots show some of the happiest, most photogenic festival crowd you’ll ever see, especially in comparison to all the dirty hippies at Woodstock a few hours north that same summer. And it starts off with a 5 minute Stevie Wonder drum solo! It’s exhilarating.                                                                                                                                        

2. Drive My Car - Well, it’s a 3 hour long movie that spends a lot of time with a theater director getting driven around in his old Saab memorizing his lines from a cassette tape, but somehow it’s also completely absorbing and never boring. It’s a movie about grieving and being honest with yourself, has one of the most unique and powerful sex scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, a great little gag featuring lampreys, and some good rehearsal tips for all you directors out there. 

3. The Power of the Dog - Jane Campion’s Western that's downright Hitchcockian without all the behind the scenes directorial sexual harassment (I'm assuming. Maybe it's sexist to assume Jane Campion isn't trying to force herself on that big slice of American cheese Jessie Plemons between takes? Kirsten Dunst would give her a face full of chiclets if she tried, tho.) Cumberbatch leads a great cast as the domineering cowboy with a not too hidden secret, bullying everyone in his path including his brother’s new wife and fragile teenage son. The movie appears to be a simple character study of people living at the closing of the American “wild” west era, but by the end the focus shifts and you realize you were watching a different film the whole time.

4. Licorice Pizza - There are no bad Paul Thomas Anderson movies, and Licorice Pizza is an unsurpisingly very good and funny movie about mis-matched people warily circling an ill-advised relationship while they try to figure out their lives. Thomas buids the vibe on a progression of funny episodic vignettes set in very scummy, late-Nixon 70’s Southern California. 1,000,000x better than Tarantino’s gauzy version of a similar time period in LA in his footfetishy Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

5. The Velvet Underground - I also watched this documentary in the theater, and it also sounded great. There’s not much existing contemporaneous footage of the band to be had, so Todd Haynes had to be creative, using montages and split screens with static Warhol screen tests of the band-members at the time, while filling the blanks with talking heads from relevant people who were along for the ride. And, of course, it features the best possible soundtrack around. If you’re at all interested in this band, it’s just straight crack. 

6. This is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection - Set and filmed in Lesotho it’s a surreal story of an old woman struggling to deal with the death of her family and town at the hands of encroaching post-colonial “modernization,” made literal by plans for a dam that is set to wash away her home. Played with intensity and a face for the ages by actor Mary Twala, it’s a modern fable that also allows us dumb Americans to hang out in an area of the world that will not be familiar to most of us. In that way, it reminds me of last year’s Brazilian movie Bacaru, but more thoughtful and nowhere near as pulpy. 

7. Annette - A musical without any catchy songs (other than the excellent opening scene), that features a weird wooden little girl puppet for most of its length? Oh, and Adam Driver plays a stand-up comedian with an aggressively terrible live act that you get to witness for many, many minutes.  Yet somehow this inventive, infuriating, intensely acted film sticks with you. I don’t know, it works. Another movie where the final scene teaches you what the movie is about without hitting you over the head. Director Leo Carax is a trip.

8. Macbeth - Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in an expressionistic, Wellesian Macbeth production directed by a Coen Brother? Yes

9. West Side Story - I’ve got bad news, folks. The new West Side Story is actually good. Speilberg updates a dated but still justifiably legendary musical with better context and no dumb brownface casting. Some of the performances, especially Ariana Debose as Anita and Mike Faist as Riff are great. Bringing in Rita Moreno for an important role as the coffee shop owner with her own song...good choice. Ansel Elgort…isn’t terrible? (I mean in this movie, I heard he may be a terrible human but have not done the research, as they say) The songs are still great and it’s directed by a guy who knows what to do with the camera. Worth it just for the new “America” Number 

10. Parallel Mothers - Near peak Almodovar, where people deal with melodramatic coincidences and do terrible things but you still sympathize with them. Penelope Cruz carries every scene of this movie about addressing the crimes of the past and the tragedies of the present. They say this is Almodovar’s first “political” film, but it’s not preachy. Not for this Non-Spaniard, non-fascist viewer, anyway. I guess if you’re a fascist that wants to bury the crimes of the past, you might get a little pissy.

Hounourable Mentiouns:

• Green Knight: An Occurrence at King Arthur’s Court with Dev Patel as a feckless version of Gawain and Alicia Vikander as a literal Whore/Princess figure(s). Set in a tired Camelot that reminds me a little of Connery’s Robin and Marian's Sherwood Forest but much more sinister.

• The Last Duel: Affleck/Damon/Driver with newcomer Jodie Comer directed by Ridley Scott. In a pre-Marvel era everyone would be raving about this. 10x better than Gladiator, and the titular Duel is a cinematic tour-de-force that takes up the final 20 minutes of the film. Comer is strong as a woman trapped in horribly repressive circumstances, and the three male leads do a nice job playing three very different a-holes.

• Dune A: Somehow, Villeneuve made a Dune film where you understand what’s going on, the action is gripping and Jason Momoa is f*cking great. It’s not subtle, lacks color, and is nowhere near as daring as Lynch’s version, though.

• No Sudden Move: Soderbergh begins the movie with 5 minutes of Don Cheadle walking up a street in 1950’s Detroit. That’s a good thing. Also, Benicio Del Toro. And a reunion of jerkface Matt Damon and Brendan Fraser from School Ties. More people should see this.

• Pig: Logline: Nicholas Cage as Sad Portland Culinary John Wick who doesn’t fight much. You’d watch this, right?

• Nightmare Alley:  If the original foundational noir didn’t exist (go see it on Criterion Channel), I’d probably rank this higher. This version is good, and much darker in the second half than the original, but overall it’s a little too glossy for me. Del Toro didn’t exactly build his career on subtlety, however.

 

Favorite thing to watch that wasn’t  a movie: The Beatles:Get Back doc 

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Things I haven’t seen but want to:

Lost Daughter, The Worst Person in the World, Titane, Memoria, Bergman Island, Bad Luck Banging