My “Ten” Best List for 2021
First off, it’s a list that includes eleven titles, because there was something I just couldn’t leave out. I try to present myself as a somewhat serious writer with this site and in reading a fair bit of legit criticism, I’m led to believe serious writers find the compiling of lists as bane of their existence. A kind of perfunctory chore. They’re not journalism. They’re essentially marketing documents (though no more so than The Oscars), which would be fine if in so many cases, they didn’t pretend to be anything else. But I understand why so many movie lovers eagerly await them and why so many people go to the trouble of making and presenting lists of their own. I admit my culpability by saying that I find them pretty hard to resist myself.
As far as this year’s offerings are concerned, I’ll say what I’ve always said: The more you’re interested in the world and in history, the better a given year for movies can be. The titles listed below are all available for streaming somewhere. I try to avoid Netflix or Amazon but you can also look up the distributor for the film and try their website. This is how I purchase discs. A lot of times with the distributor’s sites, a percentage of the proceeds go to the people involved in picking up the film - that is, believing in it and fighting for it. If you think television is producing more interesting results than film at this point, all I can say is, there’s a whole world out there.
Throughout their wildly evolving history, movies have either been ahead of the times or behind them. Typically most Hollywood fare is behind the times and it’s been this way for a grip. If I have a common thread running through my choices here, picked from a cross section of things I was able to get to this year, it would be films that offer some bearing on the absurd times we’re living in. How we got to this point, how it can be fixed, how we process it, how we’re talking about it.
I believe in the inherently political nature of art, and I can’t hide my preference for films that confront the world I live in, rather than offer escape from it (though I can be a sucker for that too, if you believe it). If a film makes me think about the world or about myself in a way I hadn’t before, there’s a good chance it’ll wind up on my list. The scourge of berserk Capitalism, the interrogation and discovery of Self and the immense task of freeing ourselves from the bondage of both Capitalism and Self were the most common threads I picked up in a lot of the international features I saw this year, good and bad.
Watch and decide for yourself:
1. Can’t Get You Out of My Head
Adam Curtis, UK
Cinephile culture regards BBC film journalist Adam Curtis as a documentarian, though he bristles at that label. His six-part BBC series Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of The Modern World, does what the best journalism sets out to do. It looks past the emotional revelations provided by mere movies and brilliantly charts an entire network of historical cause-and-effect scenarios that form the roots of our contemporary malaise of doubt and dismay.
It synthesizes many of the claims Curtis has made in his previous films: how political power structures have become invisible, how the unholy alliance between psychology and advertising has made us irrational, why hyper-individualism is a threat to democracy, why art has lost its way, the way populations are conditioned to be comfortable with incessant overstimulation and incredulity, how Islamic extremism and American Neoconservatism are the same animal, how left-wing social movements left their momentum high and dry when they retreated into culture, and much, much more. This summation of these recurring themes would seem to make it a suitable starting point for any viewer new to Curtis’ work but connecting the strands of these arguments as Curtis does - across the tumultuous political histories of Great Britain, China, Russia and The United States, respectively - makes for a dizzying experience one can easily get lost in.
I’m an enormous admirer of Curtis’s output (much of which is free on Youtube) and this one has the most food for thought. It’s a work that seems to be thinking on its own as it plays, enjoying its freedom to disorient us. It trains us, challenges us to think bigger, identifying common patterns playing out in the political histories of different developed nations and finding emotional threadlines in the disparate predicaments of political actors and citizens trying to affect real social change.
Stand by strand, Curtis sets these connections against the backdrop of a 20th century timeline that illustrates how institutions that were supposed to serve the public - from the police and politicians to the church and colleges - had been blindsided and overwhelmed by new systems of concentrated industrial power and the social transformations they wrought. Curtis sees the failure of art in its talking the radical talk without walking the walk. He persuasively argues that contemporary art overprivileges self-expression and lacks an alternative political vision of the world. Across numerous political movements that can’t sustain momentum as Capitalism absorbs or disintegrates them, the stories bear striking similarities. That thing that’s causing us to be depressed all the time. It’s more than just Capitalism or Racism. It’s something more elusive and complicated.
And yet, it would be unfair to project a pessimistic ideology onto Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Culture is suffused with pessimism and this is one of its many decoys. The focus is always on power. Curtis taps into one of the fundamental truths of our time - that power has become invisible. It just disappeared. We don’t know where it is but it has a hold over us. Segment after segment, Curtis’s method dives deep into subjects whose surfaces are only scratched by most attempts at cinematic journalism. He employs (as always) an extraordinary arsenal of clips unearthed from the BBC archive as well as a wonderfully eclectic soundtrack. These elements occasionally create the feel of a free-form stream of consciousness that coasts over his arguments in some spots rather than explains them.
Much of his thinking is intellectual and rational but in some spots, it’s chaotic, desperate and irrational. These less grounded stretches may be necessary for approaching what Curtis sees as intractable socio-political structures. Some of the ideas expressed can have the appearance of conspiracy paranoia but - astoundingly - such non-intellectual or anti-intellectual tactics can provide a kind of distillation and punctuation to the onrush of vocalized history. Like all the Curtis films I’ve seen, it’s dense but never abstruse. It’ll twist your mind in knots like a detective story, but it has a proudly pop flavor and should not be too esoteric for a mass audience. Simply put, no one else working in film is saying these things. Or saying these kinds of things with this kind of trippy, discursive brilliance.
2. The Souvenir Part II
Joanna Hogg, UK
Joanna Hogg is like no other British filmmaker working today. Her films are both personal and devastatingly attuned to the inner lives of social classes as they rise up and fall. One class and its confidence is collapsing and the new individualism of the age is rising up. At the same time, the sequel to her 2019 film is a memoir whose emotional notes are beautifully human and richly observed. We continue precisely where The Souvenir left off, following film student Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne), still processing the death of her boyfriend by overdose.
She was deeply in denial about his heroin addiction and now the shooting of her autobiographical senior thesis film has become a shambles of failed communication and lack of planning. She can’t push forward with her vision because she can’t bring herself to confront her feelings about the source of her anguish. Her kindly, upper class parents, (which include Byrne’s actual mother, Tilda Swinton) support her and take out their checkbooks upon request for her projects but are essentially clueless about her inner life. This and her work on a larger scale film, whose put-upon director (a hilarious Richard Ayoade) seems to exist in a perpetual state of sardonic tantrum, contribute to the insight Hogg has into the process of filmmaking as a kind of personal interrogation.
The excitement about discovering filmmaking in one’s youth. The transformation of Julie into what Hogg in an interview calls “a creative, energized being.” There’s a kind of alchemy Hogg exhibits in her understanding of how personal anguish is transformed into art. No doubt “finding your voice,” is a cliched term, but Hogg’s film sees the process as a very real kind of magic and beautifully articulates how that magic happens, while still maintaining a bit of mystery about the process.
Byrne’s performance is one of the film’s many great pleasures. Julie’s gradual assumption of control over her craft and consequently over her soul are quietly and gracefully conveyed. The film she eventually makes is unexpected, delightful and more than a projection of her experiences and influences. It too feels like the determination of a budding artist to pursue her own style. We watch Julie’s film at the end of The Souvenir Part II as Julie wants to see it. Coming at the end of a movie that’s both mysterious and relatable, with images that are luxurious and still tasteful, about the universality of grieving and the sublime possibility of art, the capacity of this sequence for reaffirming why I go to movies in the first place makes it, for me at least, a remarkable achievement.
3. Bad Luck Banging or Looney Porn
Radu Jude, Romania
American features, still mired in their slavishness to linear narratives and stars, lack the nerve to mount a social critique as detailed and incendiary as the one Radu Jude constructs here. We open with a graphic video on a cell phone of a couple having real sex. We learn the woman in the video is a teacher, the video has gone viral and she’s to appear at a hearing with faculty and a number of outraged parents that will decide her fate, an event which we have no reason to believe will be anything other than a farce.
And it doesn’t disappoint. The final stretch containing the hearing is one of the most perverse, hypnotic and demented emsemble sequences I’ve ever seen. It’s very reminiscent of the Russian Orthodox wedding in Kira Muratova’s masterpiece Chekov’s Motifs and Bad Luck Banging.... shares with that and other Muratova films a capacity for crazed reflection on the catastrophic, alienating collision of the hypocrisies of antiquated traditional life and the cravenness and prideful ignorance of contemporary mores.
No film I’ve seen yet has sent up the toxic culture spawned by the internet this savagely. It’s a culture in which the demeaning billboard advertisements smeared all over the city and the obnoxious, combative behavior of people on the street are depicted as commonplace. They’re accepted by citizens as part of the status quo while the viral sex video - which compartively looks like a natural and intimate act of human connection - is what gets held up as obscene (it was impossible not to think of the Bill Hicks bit about “every commercial on television,” more accurately fitting the government’s definition of “Pornography” as that which has no artistic merit and causes sexual thoughts).
Internet culture is also something that Jude argues has made many people more ill-tempered and impatient while accelerating the spread of hate-fueled, far right ideology. That these two developments correlate and how they do so is where Jude - who came up in the Romanian New Wave that’s still going strong in its teenage years - goes further than any big stateside studio would allow an American filmmaker to go. Watch Jude’s merciless, intelligent, literate diatribe all the way to its Bunuelian ending and the familiar, low-risk, easily digestible, pot-calling-the-kettle-black satire of an item like Don’t Look Up looks even tamer by comparison.
4. Memoria
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand
TIlda Swinton is a natural fit into Thai director Weerasethakul’s oeuvre. Wraithlike and curious, she wanders through Bogota investigating or perhaps collecting impressions on a quest to find the source, or at least understand the random metallic thudding noises that apparently only she seems to be hearing. It’s never explained what she’s doing in Columbia or what’s motivating her actions and yet the immense degree of empathy the director has for his characters is, here as ever, profoundly moving. Here the idea of empathy, not just between human beings but with nature and perhaps existence itself is more than just just a dramatic tool. It’s practically a narrative condition. The elevation of this empathy makes perfect sense - as does the understatement of Swinton’s performance - as it preps the audience for the climax of the journey we take with her.
It’s a sort of sonic inner journey in the manner of Joseph Conrad and the way it invites the audience to listen and feel along with the main character is what gives it its hypnotic power. It’s a narrative that keeps slowing down until all the ideas reach a kind of distillation. A new Weerasethakul feature is like a fresh cinematic exploration into the possibilities of film as a medium. It comes in the form of a diagnosis about the world, expressed as a kind of sickness to an ailing body brought about by the out of balance nature of modern life. I’d tell you I was reminded of The Zone at the end of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker but I couldn’t spoil Memoria for you if I tried. It’s difficult to express. That’s the beauty of challenging, mature art; the deep rewards for doing the work of tuning into the artist’s vibrations. So to speak.
5. Her Socialist Smile
John Gianvito, U.S.
Working without a large store of archival footage and materials available to most documentary subjects, John Gianvito fashions an incendiary and much needed look at the life’s work of Helen Keller, whose accomplishments as one of America’s great socialist activists have been virtually erased from school textbooks. And for good reason: She was perhaps the most dynamic expounder of the socialist cause this country ever had, particularly during the most fertile period for socialism in American history - the 1930’s. It’s amazing the way Gianvito turns the lack of available concrete historical materials needed for a project like this into an effective artistic strategy. They’re a kind of structuring absence, robbing us of the sensory options movies provide for information and thematically suggesting the predicament of Keller’s reality.
Chunks of white text on black backgrounds taken from Keller’s speeches come often and in large batches - it’s a movie for people who like to read. There are quotations from interviews, images of nature and footage of newly recorded voiceovers by poet Carolyn Forché. And that’s about it. Gianvito ingeniously uses the deprivation of stimuli to underline the clear-headed way Keller as an activist - passionate and tough-as-nails - saw the struggle for labor rights, suffrage and pacifism. As a method of film composition, it applies to this clear-headed way of seeing politics in the same way as it does to Keller’s struggle for the rights of the disabled and these struggles are inextricably linked. A philosophical and political connection - and just as in Gianvito’s meditative Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, it’s a struggle that calls out to us from beyond the gravesites of its most ardent soldiers and martyrs, inviting us to stand with them against the injustices and iniquities the poor and disenfranchised still face today.
6. Mad God
Phil Tippit, U.S.
look at this. I mean....LOOK at this.
I may lack the vocabulary to describe Phil Tippett’s utterly spellbinding stop-motion animated feature in great detail. It’s a film found crawling through the mud, covered in blood, reeking of piss and caked in shit. I’ve been bothered in the past by the post-apocalyptic echelon of science fiction as a lazy and defeatist escape hatch for facing the world at large. But just with the sheer breadth of invention and intricacy of detail on display here, this particular vision shames the lack of imagination in every other post-apocalypse movie I’ve ever seen in a way that doesn’t even seem fair to some of the better ones.
Mad God’s absence of dialogue and characters demonstrates that those elements are not necessary for working in this genre. The imagery and the sense of loss and human failure it conveys do all the work and then some. A special effects wizard with a resume that includes some of the biggest blockbusters of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Paul Verhoven, Tippett labored over his creation for thirty years, releasing the film in installments every five years. Now as a full length feature, its jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching visuals can be properly appreciated in one package.
Every moment is steeped within a stew of iconographies suggesting an acid trip inspired by images of bombed out postwar Europe, goth and heavy metal music videos, Beetlejuice, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, H.G. Wells, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, H.P. Lovecraft, S&M culture, steampunk aesthetics, Robot Chicken and the more notable stop-motion animations of the Brothers Quay. Apart from its visceral impact, the nostalgic flavor of much of the surreal imagery in Mad God is what makes the theoretical implications of this work fascinating.
Stop-motion animation and other forms of puppetry are often resourceful (and heterogenous) when it comes to blending realistic and nonrealistic elements so as to blur out whatever’s in between them, and this 83-minute genius factory demonstrates this process with more inventive energy than anything I can recall. This should be played on the mounted TVs inside every punk or heavy metal bar worthy of the name. People with a lot of tattoos and piercings who dress all in black are going to want to make babies to it.
7. A Cop Movie
Alonso Ruizpalacios, Mexico
Deep, satisfying, inventive and poignant, this social docu-drama from Mexico seemed to come out of nowhere. It incisively combines elements of fiction and nonfiction filmmaking in setting out to paint the most complete and accurate portrait of the complex, fraught relationship between police and citizens in Mexico City that it can. There’s less delusion in Mexico about the corruption and shiftlessness of the police force than in the United States and it’s a suspicion (or outright contempt) that seems shared by all social classes.
We meet officers Teresa and Montoya, lovers who met on the job when partnered together, being referred to by their peers as “The Love Patrol.” The daily toils of the job drain them, straining their relationship. Mexico City police are underequipped, underpaid and undertrained. They’re also working in a system that rewards corruption and punishes any attempts to take that corruption to task.
We meet the real Love Patrol, who look into the camera and explain the hopelessness of their predicament. We also meet the actors (Mónica Del Carmen and Raúl Briones) who disappear flawlessly into these characters, having to mediate their own issues with the police in order to humanely and clearly portray these individuals on screen. Mexican law enforcement is shown to be an entity that poisons good people trying to serve and protect their communities. It’s impossible not to be dirtied by it, as the actual police have to perform a facade of macho toughness that’s mistaken for bravery and noble jurisdiction over the citizenry. In this sense, they’re actors themselves, something Ruizpalacios brilliantly illustrates.
8. The Velvet Underground
Todd Haynes, U.S.
As a graduate of an interdisciplinary college, I deeply appreciate Todd Haynes’ approach to chronicling The Velvet Underground in this addictive documentary. An interdisciplinary education is a response to traditional education’s emphasis on what it perceives as facts rather than connections. Teaching connections trains us to instead see the larger picture of how things work together. Not just the Who, What, When and Where but the Why of an event, situation or system. So his profile of one of the most influential rock groups of all time calls upon numerous other artistic disciplines to give us a sense of the culture into which The Velvet Underground was spawned and the reach of its influence.
The wealth of video clips and other media materials is dizzying, making this a delight to discover for fans not just of the band, but of the New York art scene of the 60’s and 70’s. If you’re interested in this period and milieu of American culture, The Velvet Underground is something to drool over. Painting, drawings, sketches, literature, poetry - every last scrap of material mentioned or shown in the film is footnoted in what might be the best closing credit sequence for a movie you’ll see this year, laying out the artistic contributions of each figure interviewed or profiled in the movie.
This has the effect of contextualizing the band’s place in pop culture, detailing why - again Why - they’ve been venerated by subsequent generations. And why you should know about them. This sense of purpose works twofold: it shows us what makes something part of a cultural canon. But it also works as a synthesis for many of the themes and motifs running through Haynes’ filmography - particularly the subversion of puritanical 1950’s American values by countercultural rock and roll and/or unbound sexuality. The You-Had-To-Be-There vibe of most music-doc assemblages of interviews, albums and creative differences is refreshingly nowhere to be found. It’s an ice-cool piece of proto-hipster pop collage. Andy Warhol would have been proud.
9. This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection
Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese, Lesotho
The story of displaced communities in Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese’s earth-shaking This Is Not A Burial, It’s A Resurrection is fictional, but I fear that it’s based on real events, as evidenced by the immense proliferation of African diaspora all over the world. For the 80 year-old Mantoa, the ties to her community's ancestral lands are sacred, as spiritual as they are political. She’s preparing for her own death and burial after an exhausting and storied life when she hears that her only son has been killed in an accident. Alone, she has to muster the collective strength of her community as its most respected member in resisting a big land development project for a dam that would flood the burial ground of her family. Her fight is not over and the courage of her convictions is put to the final test as she sees the uphill battle in mobilizing a community further removed from the traditions of its ancestors than she thought.
This will likely be the first film you see from Lesotho, the circular county landlocked by South Africa, as it was for me and its primal power is all the more scary because of the depressing familiarity of the situation. Eminent domain. Mantoa is played by Mary Twala Mhlongo, who at 81 is framed and lit as if she were a force of nature and witnessing her brave, shattering performance gives me no reason to doubt this.
She was cast in Beyoncé’s Black Is King in 2020 and this late-career resurgence is a testament to her undeniably strong presence on screen. Her lined face seems to speak of an entire history, generations come and gone. Mosese films the terrain as if it were a character itself and Mantoa’s transformation into a political and spiritual leader for her community is marked by an almost elemental harmony with the majesty of the land itself. Mhlongo passed away in 2020, not long after the shooting of this film and cinemas all over the world are all the richer for having finally discovered her.
10. Censor
Prano Bailey-Bond, UK
The smartest horror movie I’ve seen this year uses the backdrop of 1980’s horror movie culture and its cynically deployed gore as a backdrop for razor-sharp social commentary. In the UK of Censor (which sports a stylishly gloomy production design), the Thatcher government has cracked down on violent movies, which were heavily censored or banned from public screenings at that time. It was a real-life, media-promoted hysteria that blamed horror for all manner of social ills. But people found ways to get around this scapegoat puritanism and thus “video nasties” gained a kind of hip status as forbidden cultural fruit.
For Enid (Niamh Algar), a lowly employee with the national Board of Censors, the shock of what she sees on videotape begins to become a kind of fascination. A government bureaucrat charged with the task of cleaning up unsavory elements in new releases for public consumption, she becomes drawn to the work of fictional British filmmaker Frederick North. Long-buried questions come up in his deceptively schlocky output. Soon the breakdown of the wall between her world and the fictional one in which she loses herself sets in motion a wild chain of events. The mise-en-scene endows the terrain of yesterday’s genre movies with a stark beauty. Tapping into that beauty is Bailey-Bond’s great achievement.
Aided by Annika Summerson’s claustrophobia-and-chiaroscuro cinematography, a foreboding score by Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, editing by Mark Towns of Saint Maud that captures the hallucinatory slip into madness amidst the pointed 80’s details and Algar’s riveting performance as Enid, Bailey-Bond satirizes and inverts negative perceptions of horror with dazzling imagination.
“For all the horror fans I know, horror isn’t vile or evil,” Bailey-Bond told Sight & Sound in the June 2021 issue. “In fact, it’s somewhere that you can find something quite healing and cathartic, and darkly beautiful. So I wanted to subvert the traditional idea of what you can get from horror. The popular perception is that these movies are harmful, that they can somehow do bad things to viewers and therefore need to be cut or banned.”
The power of the horror world as a force for rescuing someone, offering a person what they want but can’t get in real life, is what makes this such a fascinating watch. It’s an amazing feature debut, adding up to much more than the sum of its parts.
11. Drive my car
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Japan
My mother drove a red Saab like the one in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. In the movie, the car is almost a character itself. In fact, many of the seemingly unimportant elements in Hamaguchi’s film are treated with great attention and care. This is such a respectful film. It never felt like three hours but every moment of it is necessary for its intelligent characterization and measured in its beautifully sustained story about the way performance and other forms of art are informed by the rhythms of life and vice-versa. Loss and loneliness can be worked through the way actors work through a scene; building trust with others, finding a common emotional language, reading into the deeper meaning of the words, articulating what is not said and confronting emotions that are hidden or buried.
As the recently widowed Kafuku moves to Hiroshima to direct a multilingual stage production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya - which includes a deaf Celeste rendering her lines in sign language - he’s annoyed at having a driver assigned to take him to and from the theatre in his own car. He uses a cassette tape playing one side of the text in Vanya with pauses for his own lines as a process for memorizing dialogue while driving. But it has another, more therapeutic purpose. It’s just one of many processes for interpreting and navigating life that Hamaguchi takes great care and patience to lay out. In his fascination with the intersections between theatrical and quotidian forms of performance, he comes up with something Jacques Rivette could have made.
The deep emotional connection Kafuku forms with the demure woman assigned as the driver as the stage production moves along unfolds naturally and gracefully as they discover how much they have in common. As filmed literature goes, Drive My Car is about as rich as it gets. I used to think that Haruki Murakami’s writing was too postmodern to be filmable. And even though this is much a different film from Lee Changdong’s Burning, Hamaguchi and his superlative cast understand Murakami’s language and his capacity to translate the tension of the times (both the setting of the movie and the current culture it was released in) into ambiance. And there’s the significance of setting the film in Hiroshima. It has what Hamaguchi calls a “spiritual background that adds depth to the story.” He adds: “Hiroshima was completely destroyed during the war and rebuilt. In a way, that’s what Drive My Car is about. ”
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