Tag: 2021

Posted on

2021: Top 20 Movies

2021 was a weird year for movies.


Allow me, if you will, to take you on a journey into How My Brain Works, an undertaking you surely will come to regret. In a given year, my Top 20 can essentially be broken down into three categories:


• The really good to maybe-great movies. The four-stars-out-of-five. These make up the back half of the list, maybe a portion of the Top 10. These are movies I loved, but that I do have a handful of noteworthy reservations about. They’re not quite all-time favorites, but I may add two or three to my collection.


• The genuinely great movies. These make up most of the Top 5, maybe most of the Top 10 if we’re lucky. It’s a happy compromise if one of these wins big at the Oscars. I have very little negative to say about them — possibly nothing at all. Sometimes they only lack that special, impossible-to-determine something that would proclaim them as all-timers. They’re probably headed for my collection.


• The unqualified masterpieces. Easy five-star movies. Not every year has these. That’s usually, for me, the sign of a mediocre-to-bad year, but not always — I can still, on balance, consider it a solid year if enough movies qualify for the second and third category. Any year that does have entries in this category, it’s probably only one or two. New all-time favorites don’t come along every day, after all.


To me, an average year — movies were as good as they could reasonably be expected to be — looks like, say…2014, when my list had no movies in the first category, but several in the second, and a more or less normal number in the third. A bad year looks like 2016, where I exhausted every movie I would even consider eligible for the third category getting the list together. A good year looks like 2019, where I had a healthy percentage of everything — two in the elusive first category, a handful on the second, and a bunch of movies in the third that I was genuinely enthusiastic about.


Of course, none of that is a hard rule. 2016 actually had at least one movie secure all-timer status for me, and Category No. 2 was pretty well-rounded. It was the gulf between those and the bottom tier that made it so underwhelming on the whole. You had a couple of filmmakers at the height of their powers, and everyone else was whiffing.


I also think of 2013, the other Weirdest Year since I started writing about movies online. I have no idea whether that year was mostly bad or one of the greatest years for movies, period. Her, 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street, Short Term 12, Gravity, Before Midnight, Captain Phillips, Frances Ha. 2013’s top tier was stacked. And once you move past it, you mostly get a pile of mediocrity. I have no idea how that balances out.


I’m having the opposite debate about 2021. I’m not sure whether it’s the worst year for movies since I started keeping track, or if it’s unusually well-rounded. What I mean by this is that not only were there no movies this year that qualified for personal all-timer status, but for the first time since I started doing this, I’m not sure there were any that even qualified for that second category. That’s barring a few rewatches, of course. There are a couple top-fivers I could see advancing once I give them another whirl. But still, I have to admit I can’t remember a year whose movies left me so…uninspired. There was a lot that I enjoyed, but nothing I fell head-over-heels in love with.


But! 2021 also has the deepest bench of any year I can remember. Which is to say that third category was absolutely overflowing.


I am uninspired by this year. But I’m also really excited about almost every movie on this list. I have reservations big and small about all of them, but I was truly enraptured by what they did right. I want to call 2021 a terrible year in movies, but then I remember how many cuts I made finalizing this. Red Rocket, The Card Counter, The Harder They Fall — all really friggin’ good movies that you will see no mention of in the paragraphs to follow. The Matrix Resurrections — I was so sure that was going to be on this list, and it had a December release date. In the last few months of the year, I saw enough great movies that somehow it was dislodged. I also look at what barely made the list: movies I thought were Top 10 candidates when I first saw them. I’m almost embarrassed to put them that low, but I look at what’s ahead of them and have no clue what I’d part with.


So 2021: Good year? Bad year? I can’t even begin to decide. Wherever I land going forward, all I can say for now is that there was still a lot to love.

20. Luca
The most low-key Pixar has ever been, but that’s what’s so great about it. It’s a quiet, funny hangout movie where the highest stakes are a bicycle race. A good-natured fun-for-the-whole family film. It isn’t clear to me how culturally impactful Luca was, whether anyone other than me likes it in any meaningful sense. But I’m holding it close to my heart. It’s also the only movie on this list that I don’t feel would be in another year’s top ten.


19. The Lost Daughter
Your guess is as good as mine how I only managed to put this at No. 19, honestly. Weird year. Olivia Colman has rapidly emerged as one of our foremost talents, and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut may well put her in the same company as fellow actress-turned-director Greta Gerwig. Her first time behind the camera is confident, compelling and distinctive. I’m not someone who gets invested in editing awards, but that the Oscars didn’t even nominate it is nuts.


18. Flee
I don’t usually watch documentaries; I prefer to read news, mostly. But I was intrigued by Flee’s unique approach and decided to check it out. Obviously, my inexperience leaves me ill-equipped to subject it to analysis. And even then, I’m not sure I want to — to me, analyzing a documentary is either attacking the substance of its claims, and if it falls flat on that front, it isn’t a good documentary, or talking about the filmmaking, cinematography, editing, etc., which just makes me feel crass. It’s someone’s actual story, this really happened, this pain exists, how stupid am I for wishing it was better presented? So all I’m able to say is that I found Flee very moving.


17. The Worst Person in the World
I’ve found it difficult to distill my feelings about this movie into a few sentences without restricting it to uninteresting basics. What’s truly special about it is how skillfully it handles individual moments, how every scene contains little surprises, little tics of writing and performance, that constantly shift the context and develop its characters/themes. It’s impossible to explain its transcendence in a few short words because what’s great about it is different in every scene. It’s always revealing itself to you.


16. Drive My Car
You may recall that I said the back half of this list contains a lot of movies that feel like they should be Top 10 contenders. I think on some level I may not love Drive My Car as much as everyone else, which says nothing about how great this movie is because I could convincingly declare it my favorite of the year and still like it less than the rest of you. This is very much a case of “YOU might say this is the best movie of the year; however, I think that it is just…very, very great.” I’m doing this routine because I don’t actually have a lot to say about emotional powerhouses like this. Acting good, writing good, directing good, movie good. Etc.


15. A Hero
We don’t deserve Asghar Farhadi, one of the best, if not the best, storytellers in this genre. With A Hero, he’s crafted another thoughtful social labyrinth where no one is evil, no one is innocent, and ethical dilemmas compound until the only way for the characters to do the right thing is to do the thing they can live with.


14. Passing
As Maggie Gyllenhaal collects much-deserved accolades for The Lost Daughter, we should be sure not to forget 2021’s other actress-turned-director breakthrough — who as far as I’m concerned, acquitted herself even better with this beautifully shot, impeccably crafted, and challenging drama about identity and people’s responsibility to one another. Passing feels like one of the year’s most unsung movies. I feel like we should be talking about it more. Much like Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Hall genuinely feels like a student of this stuff, and she looks at things in a very unique way here. I hope this isn’t the last we hear of her in the director’s chair.


13. C’mon C’mon
And now we’re entering the part of the list where I’m almost shocked the movies aren’t Top 5. Despite nearly all of its production happening in late 2019, C’mon C’mon somehow managed to be the most perfectly 2021 movie of its year. It’s the proverbial “movie we need right now,” one confronting the darkness of our times with battered optimism and a giant, loving heart for all of humanity. Both the leads are stellar. As far as I’m concerned, it’s Mike Mills’ best work, and I might not even think it’s close.


12. Mass
Mass is a thoughtful, even-handed, non-exploitative take on a generation-defining problem most of Hollywood is afraid to touch. The script and performances are the entire show here, and both are more than up to the task. I love 12 Angry Men-style closed-room, real-time dramas, and Mass is a worthy heir. Deeply felt and much more gripping than you’d expect.


11. Malignant
What, you thought I was kidding? I’ve spent half a year saying this was going to be in my Top 20. I do not kid about Malignant. I’m surprised I’m not putting it higher. I still might. This movie is completely cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and I loved every second of it. I didn’t know how badly I’d missed horror movies you cackle your way through until James Wan brought this madness into my life. Cinema.


10. Judas and the Black Messiah
Remember this movie? It was one of 2021’s earliest releases, and ended up getting lumped in with 2020’s films because it fell within the release window — expanded because of the pandemic — of last year’s Oscars, where it won (much-deserved) Best Supporting Actor honors for Daniel Kaluuya. For my part, between festivals and critic screenings, it’s already a pain keeping track of when movies technically released, so as far as I’m concerned, if it never once played before 2021, it’s a 2021 movie. And Judas and the Black Messiah opened the year on a strong note. It’s confrontational, unusually radical, and left me shellshocked.


9. The Tragedy of Macbeth
A Shakespeare adaptation so good it made me reconsider my aversion to Shakespeare. I can’t think of any director, off the top of my head, who reinvented themselves so thoroughly this late in their career. Joel Coen, already a legend, simply solidifies his status as one of the all-time greats with this — possibly the most beautiful and well-shot movie of a year where there’s a lot of competition for that title. This is Macbeth as pure fantasy, haunting and grim. Denzel Washington hasn’t had this much fun in years. Never underestimate the Coen brothers, even when it’s only half of them.


8. Dune
Look, I’m a simple person. All I really want to see is spaceships and explosions and giant worms, and on the rare occasion that such things are given to a filmmaker who will actually shoot them so they are nice looking, I’m pretty much just a cat chasing a laser pointer. Dune is gorgeous and fun, in its grim, austere way.


7. The Last Duel
Easily the year’s biggest surprise. What appeared, on paper, to be the most meatheaded of meatheaded cinema, in practice is almost the exact opposite. The must unsung film of 2021, as far as I’m concerned. It isn’t the first movie to tell a story multiple times, each from the perspective of a different character, but it’s rarely done this well, or this impactfully. Its most egregious awards snubs were in the categories of Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actress for Jodie Comer. It’s been a long time since I last felt the stakes of a movie’s climax this acutely. As an aside, I’m a huge fan of the rare post-movie title card that actually has emotional weight, and oh boy does it ever.


6. The Green Knight
I don’t understand why David Lowery isn’t one of the biggest names in cinema right now. He’s a chameleonic director — not voiceless, but somehow effortlessly speaking the language of every genre he tries his hand at, from the family-friendly warmth of Pete’s Dragon to the artful mystique of A Ghost Story to the easygoing true-story energy of The Old Man and the Gun, and now to high fantasy. The Green Knight is a gorgeous movie, a technical marvel, the sort of fantasy where every frame drips with history. A feast for the eyes, the heart, and the mind.


5. The Mitchells vs. the Machines
At one point, this movie made me laugh so hard and so suddenly that I physically hurt myself. It has unique, detailed animation, and a well-told story, but really it’s just that this is scene for scene one of the funniest movies to have been released in actual years. Genuine fun for the whole family, something for everyone, don’t miss it.


4. Parallel Mothers
It took me a bit to adjust to Parallel Mothers being much more genre than I expected, but once I did, I was all the way in. It’s genuinely fascinating to see a movie that could be classified as drama, that never does anything that couldn’t theoretically happen in real life, somehow come up with a story that feels like it’s never been told before. Not that it is, in the end, an overly serious indie philosophizing about The Meaning of Life — it’s very heightened, piling up several one-in-a-million possibilities in order to create a fundamentally preposterous social situation. But Pedro Almodovar knows exactly what this movie is, and it never does anything it doesn’t earn. I’m not sure what you’d call this, in the end — I’m gravitating toward “social thriller,” but even that doesn’t capture its well-drawn characters and performances, or the handful of things it’s truly sincere about. It’s rare that a movie can make me feel something while also having a certain…dementedness that makes it guilty fun. Parallel Mothers is a masterclass in having your cake and eating it, too.


3. West Side Story
This mainly exists as an excuse for Steven Spielberg to direct a musical, and that is more than enough to justify the price of admission — many times over. From a technical standpoint, West Side Story is a two-and-a-half-hour mic drop of a motion picture. I might barely prefer the original for story, but this version’s direction may have permanently ruined Hollywood musical numbers for me. Now I watch musicals and I just think, “Why isn’t this West Side Story?” This is what big screens and surround sound were built for.


2. Licorice Pizza
The best Paul Thomas Anderson has been since There Will Be Blood. It’s been a while since I last felt like I “got” one of his movies the way everyone else did, so Licorice Pizza comes as great relief. This is without question one of the year’s best screenplays — authentic and funny, with characters so fully psychologized they feel like friends of yours. I’ve missed Anderson in comedy mode, too, and this has some big laughs. Alana Haim isn’t just my personal 2021 Best Actress, hers might be my favorite performance of the year altogether, period, end of sentence.

  1. The Power of the Dog
    I just hope we don’t have to wait another 13 years for Jane Campion to follow this one up. This is the sort of movie that only gets better in retrospect. The more you think about it, the better the pieces fit together. An hour after the movie, revelations will strike you out of nowhere: “Oh, that’s what was going on there!” Great characters, great casting, great writing, great direction, everyone involved in this production showed up with their A-game from day one. It’s a compelling, edgy, psychological drama topped off by one of the year’s best endings.
Posted on

2021: Top 10 Albums

New website, time to reiterate my years-old disclaimers!


Disclaimer the First: I am stupid at music!


This is the only disclaimer, thank you.


I just want to make clear, as always, that I really don’t have any technical understanding of music whatsoever, and I’m not that well-listened. Your proper music critic listened to hundreds of albums last year and can subdivide them by genres I’ve never even heard of; I don’t even remember how to read music anymore. This remains a top ten because I don’t listen to enough to have anything bigger. In any given year, I only give a handful of albums a full listen, and I sort of peruse others until I have a sense of whether they’re for me. I can’t give you a thorough dissection. I just like things, and I like to write about things that I like! Maybe you, if you are as stupid as me, will like them too!


Anyway, from my limited perspective, 2021 struck me as kind of a slow year for music. There are years when it feels like new stuff just gets dumped on me, and then there are years where I have to go looking for something new to listen to. 2021 was one of the latter, usually. It was a bit of a disappointing year, too — a handful of artists I usually enjoy, or who I thought had promise, released new albums that just didn’t do much for me. Modest Mouse, Lorde…does anyone even know there was a new Sleater-Kinney last year?


But some other old favorites delivered in a big way, and I made a couple of fun new discoveries, the way I often do when the mainstays are letting me down. I can’t say it was all bad. A lot of the albums here are going to stay in my rotation for a long time, maybe forever. 2021: Short on really good stuff, but enough great stuff to keep the balance.

10. Squid — Bright Green Field:
This is almost a placeholder decision. I discovered these guys late in the game. I’m still exploring Bright Green Field, and…god, I don’t know how I feel about a lot of this. I don’t have much of a framework for something this out there. But it certainly grabbed my attention, and even if I don’t completely understand it yet, I haven’t gotten bored trying, which usually signifies a future all-time favorite. I love that jazz right now is a marriage of the old-school, highly technical music nerd stuff to dudes with cartoon character voices yelling about complete nonsense. Ollie Judge makes this band for me. I need him to do the full Isaac Brock, just get more and more manic and out of control with each album (just without the part where Brock eventually just…stopped doing that). I think Bright Green Field is more of an album listen than an individual song listen — you sort of need the full context to get the Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts-esque cheerful dystopia vibe I think (?) Squid is going for. At the end of the day, what I’m out for is something different, and Squid…well, enough said. This is the sort of album that either heralds the arrival of a titan, or a quick burnout, nothing in between. Either way, it’s a gift.


9. Psychedelic Porn Crumpets — SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound:
I think I may have exhausted the full scope of everything I could ever say about…sigh…the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets back when I tackled…sigh…And Now for the Whatchamacallit. I think I would call…sigh…SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound a lateral move, neither better or worse than its predecessor and not much of an evolution for the band, which makes it even more difficult to have thoughts about it. The gist of it is that the Crumpets hit that sweet spot of unique and accessible that’s where a lot of the music I love most lives. For that reason, more of the same is good enough for me right now. That said, I’m anxious because this very much feels like a band that can’t sustain the same old thing for another album. Good stuff, highly enjoyable, hope it isn’t the last time I’m able to care about these guys.


8. Courtney Barnett — Things Take Time, Take Time:
I’m enjoying the mellowing-out of Courtney Barnett more than most people, I think. I’m with you, Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit is her best work by a wide margin, I miss it, I hope she finds her way back to that zone eventually. But she’s still a solid songwriter, and she has an “artist for her times” quality that I find underrated — that dull bittersweetness, that millennial malaise, deadpan voice snarking over observations of a collapsing world, not quite masking the genuine fear beneath it. I’m not sure I have the patience for another round of this, but then again, I was worried Things Take Time, Take Time wasn’t going to work for me either. Barnett has my ear. I miss the rock n’ roll, but I can content myself with this.


7. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis — CARNAGE:
Nick Cave does not strike me as the sort of artist who ought to be prolific — he has the energy of a guy who disappears into his attic and reemerges every decade with some painstakingly crafted, gut-wrenching masterpiece — but I’m grateful he is, and somehow he still manages to deliver on the “painstakingly crafted, gut-wrenching masterpiece” part of the equation. It’s nice to see him scale back a little in the wake of Ghosteen, make something a little more digestible, if not much less grim. I know very little about Warren Ellis, and I’m not sure what his contribution was here — there’s nothing that distinguishes CARNAGE from anything else Cave has done with the Bad Seeds of late. But that doesn’t make this any less an unsurprisingly strong outing from a pair of artists who are not often off their game.


6. Iceage — Seek Shelter:
I’m new to these guys! I was not aware they existed prior to this year. My shallow perusal of the rest of their discography was enough to confirm that Seek Shelter is indeed a major sound shift for what used to be a particularly dark, aggressive punk band. But it seems to me like their fans are mostly on board with it, which more than anything is a sign of a stellar album. What they’ve found here at the very least equals their previous work; personally, I think it’s even better, and that’s despite my uncharacteristic soft spot for obnoxious punk. I think the core of what they’ve always been remains intact here, which probably eased the transition; they’ve just transferred it into the trappings of emotive DIY alt rock. Like all the best punk frontmen, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt is not what you would call a good singer, but he’s one of the select few able to turn that weakness into strength. It’s vulnerable rather than grating. And the songs themselves are really strong; Seek Shelter contains a sizable chunk of my favorites last year. There’s album of the year material here; a couple of tracks tending mediocre are all that kept it from the top half of this list.


5. St. Vincent — Daddy’s Home:
I have a weird relationship with this one. I love it, but I don’t; it’s great, but it’s flawed; I could listen to the album all day, but I can’t say the same for most of the songs individually. And you know what? I think that works for it, in a weird way. Given the overall theme of the album, it makes an odd sort of sense for the whole thing to feel like it’s at war with itself. Sometimes raw, sometimes traditional, sometimes overproduced, sometimes bubbly, Daddy’s Home has its fingers in a lot of pots but they all have something good in them. Or at least something interesting. It pales in comparison to St. Vincent’s last two albums, one of which I awarded AOTY status, but most things do.


4. Arlo Parks — Collapsed in Sunbeams:
Arlo Parks is easily the most promising newcomer of 2021. She still needs fine-tuning on a few fronts, but she’s naturally gifted in a way that makes me think she might be a big deal in the making. I’m not surprised to find her working her way into Phoebe Bridgers’ circles. They might be in different genres — Bridgers more a singer-songwriter, Parks more R&B — but their energy is very similar. They’re both strong lyricists with distinctive voices, bittersweet outlooks, and effortless songwriting ability. Catchy, moving, memorable. Collapsed in Sunbeams is very, very good. Parks’ next might be an all-timer.


3. Japanese Breakfast — Jubilee:
I’ve been aware of Japanese Breakfast for a couple years, but 2021 was when I started getting into them. Jubilee precipitated a deep dive into the rest of their discography because it’s one of those insta-great albums that makes you wonder why it took you so long to check it out. I’m a sucker for the alt-pop scene in general, but really, with Jubilee, it’s the simple things: it took me maybe two or three listens for every chorus to lodge itself in my brain and write itself in my heart. It’s music that becomes part of you. The first time you listen to it, you’re humming along by the end even though you don’t completely know the tune yet.


2. IDLES — CRAWLER:
If, on November 12, you heard a sigh of relief loud enough to crack the earth, that was me listening to CRAWLER for the first time. I sort of got Star Wars prequel’d into loving Ultra Mono the first couple of listens — “Is this…not working for me? No, no, that can’t be, it’s IDLES. I just don’t get it yet. Listen to, you know…that thing. I think I like that. Yeah, I like that. I definitely do.” And it took a while for the fact that it is mostly not good to catch up to me. I was sort of primed for disappointment — I thought then, and still think now, that basically all the singles are awesome, and the album has some of the band’s best production to date. But yeah. There are a lot of duds on there. And worse, they’re duds that suggest a band running out of ideas, going through the motions. So it is to my great relief, many months later, that CRAWLER is pretty friggin’ great and I only get more convinced of the fact with each listen. IDLES was in need of evolution, and that’s exactly what they did on CRAWLER. They’ve always denied being a punk band, and CRAWLER’s the first time that hasn’t felt like BS. There’s more variety than usual. You get your bluntly political headbangers, of course, but there’s a lot of atmosphere, a lot of experimentation, a lot of new elements thrown into the mix. It’s the best Joe Talbot has ever been as a vocalist, not that the bar is super high. But more importantly, where Ultra Mono fell back on a lot of generic platitudes — without the tongue-in-cheek, all-loving cheese of Joy As an Act of Resistance — CRAWLER makes it personal. It phrases things uniquely. It feels like someone’s actual perspective rather than a recitation of a party platform. It’s a grimmer, more sincere album than I’m accustomed to from these guys, and I won’t lie — I miss the oafish positivity of their previous work. But this is a very well-rounded, mature album. It swiftly restored my hope that IDLES may yet have a long and fruitful future ahead of them.

  1. Little Simz — Sometimes I Might Be Introvert
    It’s not clear to me, given my lack of interaction with the finer points of music criticism, but it seems from the outside looking in as though Sometimes I Might Be Introvert has achieved Parasite levels of Consensus Best Thing of the Year. If that is indeed true, far be it from me to disagree. I’m glad I managed to get on the Little Simz train just before she solidified herself as a master in the making, so now I can share in the collective cred of having liked her before she was cool. Though if it’s all right with you, I’m planning to keep liking her after. For the life of me, I do not understand how this is not a person with multiple Top Ten hits. Between this and GREY Area, I’m not even sure I have a use for non-Little Simz rap albums in my life anymore. It seems like every rapper eventually has to prove him- or herself on a gargantuan feature film-length album that doubles as a thesis statement of his or her entire life, and Little Simz’ attempt dunked so hard the backboard shattered. I don’t know whether she’s the best rapper working — there are a lot of people in contention for that. But if she keeps this up — if she keeps even fifty percent of this up — that title’s in the bag before 2030 comes around. In the six years I’ve been doing this, I don’t think I’ve ever had an easier time naming a number one.