I’ll keep this brief, but I do think it’s worth mentioning that many of the most memorable films I saw in 2021 were films that re-affirmed the power of human tenderness and beauty in a world where noise, violence, and chaos increasingly tends to drown those things out (“Drive My Car,” “Petite Maman” and others all fall into this subcategory). It was also a year where filmmakers I’ve loved my entire life did some of the best work of their careers (“Licorice Pizza,” “The French Dispatch”), and veteran cinematic storytellers who’ve been in the game for decades proved that they had lost absolutely none of their juice (Steven Soderbergh’s “No Sudden Move,” a certain musical whose title shall be revealed in time).
2021 was quite a year at the movies, and if nothing else, it was a year where some of us got to fall in love with the big-screen experience all over again, even if it was a love affair consecrated mostly via the use of KN95 masks. Thank you all for taking the time to read this list, and I hope some films you loved this year find their way into the top 15.
Also: SPOILERS AHEAD, particularly for “Petite Maman” and “Drive My Car,” but others as well. Tread carefully, is all I’m saying!— NL
15.) “Red Rocket.” (Directed by Sean Baker, Written by Baker and Chris Bergoch) Sean Baker’s America is a grubby, yet strangely inviting place: a candy-colored wasteland of flophouse motels, donut joints, dime-store dreams, and loveless sex. In spite of this scuzzy surface description, Baker is one of our great humanists, and “Red Rocket,” both slang for a dog’s erection and the name of Baker’s rawest film to date, might just be the neo-realist filmmaker’s definitive opus about America’s underground economy, and not just because it unfolds against the balmy backdrop of the 2016 election and the terrifying rise of Donald Trump. The hero of the spectacularly grody “Red Rocket” — a narcissistic, mile-a-minute “suitcase pimp” and former adult film C-lister named Mikey Saber, played with unapologetic, washed-up shithead charm by Simon Rex — is Baker’s version of a quintessentially American, “pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps” grifter archetype. Like many a shameless, self-promoting leech before him, we first see Mikey adrift, en route to his Texas City hometown, where his ex, Lexi (Bree Elrod) and mother-in-law (Brenda Deiss) couldn’t be less thrilled to see him. Mikey, a creature of relentless delusion, will brag his big dick and AVN awards to any poor soul willing to give his dumb ass the time of day, whether it’s his deadbeat neighbor, or the refinery workers who buy the ditch weed he sells so he can sleep on his ex-wife’s couch. “Red Rocket” is a story of the transgression and illicit temptation that transpires when Mikey meets a 17-year old redhead nicknamed Strawberry (confident newcomer Suzanna Son) whom he immediately clocks as his ticket out of his own personal purgatory. There will be those who miss the incandescent heart of “Tangerine” and even the relatively more accessible trappings of “The Florida Project,” not to mention those who find the prospect of a pathetic, unapologetically sleazy male predator creeping on an underage girl off-putting if not outright revolting. This is entirely understandable! Yet, there is something affectingly caustic about the dirtball potency with which Baker commits to illuminating the pitiful details of Mikey’s bottoming-out: while this prodigiously gifted writer-director clearly understands that certain details of his protagonist’s situation are amusing, it’s to his credit that he never takes cheap shots at Mikey, even as he’s being chased around his old neighborhood buck-naked by a a clan of ganja peddlers. For those who can stomach it, “Red Rocket” is actually one of the year’s most empathic movies.
14.) “The Card Counter.” (Directed & Written by Paul Schrader) William Tell is a man acclimated to solitude. Like Travis Bickle, or the despairing, Drano-drinking priest of “First Reformed,” Tell finds meaning in a meaningless world through a rigid, self-imposed sense of routine. When we see him early in “The Card Counter,” he’s behind bars. Why, we don’t yet know. As Tell elucidates the unsavory details of maximum-security life, there is a comforting, instantly identifiable sense that we are watching a Paul Schrader picture: so, yes, another uncompromising Bresson-indebted psychodrama about a man devoted to maintaining ascetic purity over his mind, body, and spirit, only so that he may resist the urge to give in to the kind of roiling internal fervor that regularly makes national headlines for all the wrong reasons. Tell is another one of Schrader’s lonely men: continually sitting in a barren room, pouring his troubled thoughts into a journal, dancing on the knife’s edge that separates obsession from madness. He is embodied by Oscar Isaac in a performance defined by a scorching, pent-up ferocity; it is easily one of the most psychologically complex turns that any actor gave this year, and a tremendous, post-“Star Wars” return for the star. Despite its exploitation-movie title, “The Card Counter” is not the story of a gambler. If anything, the idea that Schrader is playing in this accessible genre sandbox at all is a canny misdirect. Without giving away the movie’s jaw-dropping series of reveals — reveals that only a professional bluffer like Schrader could ever get away with — I will say that “The Card Counter,” like every Schrader film, from “Hardcore” to the underrated “Light Sleeper,” is about the cost of salvation, the weight of ethical responsibility, and how that weight can erode a person’s spirit. Isaac makes Tell a creature of enthralling quietude: much of “The Card Counter” involves watching Tell silently, methodically watching others; as if Schrader were indicting the audience in the very act of bearing witness to one man’s fallout, the enduring theme on which he has made his career. “The Card Counter” may not capture the lighting-in-a-bottle comeback energy of “First Reformed,” but it is still one of 2021’s starkest dramas, and a welcome reminder that we are lucky to be living in an era where Schrader, that blessed lunatic, is still allowed to make movies *this* blistering.
13.) “Bergman Island.” (Directed and Written by Mia Hansen-Løve) The great Mia Hansen-Løve mischievously rocks the boat of arrogant male genius in her playful and exceptional chamber piece “Bergman Island,” which unfolds as a soothingly lovely investigation of a relationship in crisis mode, disguised as leisurely excursion to the famed island home of the Swedish legend who gave the world “The Seventh Seal.” Indeed, “Scenes from a Marriage” feels like it might make a fine alternate title for this director’s most winsome tragicomedy to date, at least in theory. Alas, while Bergman was always one to give in to his smoldering inner anguish, “Bergman Island” is informed by an easygoing, unmistakably European sensibility that could belong to no one but Mia Hansen-Løve. The spirit of Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol lives on through the work of this brilliant filmmaker, whose finest pictures — the sun-dappled youth romance “Goodbye First Love,” and 2016’s aching character study “Things to Come,” yet another showcase for the otherworldly talents of Isabelle Huppert — serve as windows into the souls of her characters. Though she’s working with marquee-friendly movie stars in her latest independent outing, Ms. Hansen-Løve maintains no interest in plot for the mere sake of itself. She is content to let her characters wander, talking through their self-created dramas, occasionally stumbling into surreptitious revelations along their path. So much of “Bergman Island” — one of the year’s best-acted pictures, thanks to Tim Roth and a never-better Vicky Krieps — is about the act of seeing, and being seen; in this instance, being seen (or not) by a distracted romantic partner who shares your artistic passion. “Bergman Island” will undoubtedly register as aimless to those who lack the requisite patience for this story. That would be their loss. This lovely cinematic rejoinder to the presumptuous omnipresence of the male creative urge asks the kind of big questions some of us go to the movies for: Is it more important to create lasting art, or to be an empathic human being? Why do we lionize artistic male geniuses and make excuse for them being shitty dads, lovers, and people? And more to the point, when is the next Mia Hansen-Løve movie coming out?
12.) “No Sudden Move.” (Directed by Steven Soderbergh, Written by Ed Solomon) As a collective movigoing audience, we’ve become so accustomed to shared-universe building and other infantile, feel-good pseudo-mythological claptrap that a mid-budget film made for adults, helmed by a director renowned for his protean professionalism, now feels like a legitimate novelty. Enter “No Sudden Move,” Steven Soderbergh’s most electrifying caper in quite some time: a frosty, hard-boiled noir by way of a domestic home invasion thriller, and yet, because this is Soderbergh we’re talking about here, the film exists as so much more than an excuse to dispense with period-appropriate atmosphere and flinty wiseguy aphorisms. Soderbergh has always made a certain kind of film where the little guys stick it to moneyed bigwigs — so many of his masterpieces, including the gangland character study “The Limey,” his acrid, hilarious “The Informant!,” and yes, his “Ocean’s” jaunts fit squarely into this category — and while “No Sudden Move” is, in many ways, no different, it’s also a film interested in unpacking the thorny paradox of race relations in 1950's America, capitalism as a corrupt aspirational ethos, and the nuclear family under siege. The film is, without question, the sum of its stylistic influences — which extend to diamond-hard B-movie classics like “The Big Combo” and William Wyler’s scorching “The Desperate Hours,” the fatalistic pocketbook potboilers of Robert Siodmak and Nicholas Ray, and the simmering crime literature of hard-luck scribes like Walter Mosley and Elmore Leonard — but it is also so obviously a product of Soderbergh’s extraordinary brain, which moves at the speed of lightning even when his films, like this one, adopt a more leisurely groove. The director’s latest is a return to scum-bum form — the actors seem to be enjoying their freedom on one of the director’s famously drama-averse sets — that also acts as savage critique of American injustice, racial animus, housing inequality, neoliberal hypocrisy, and suburban disillusion. All these aforementioned topical themes are all nimbly addressed here without the filmmaker ever tipping his hand into didactic hectoring; in spite of his eggheaded storytelling tendencies, Soderbergh never once forgets that we came to this star-studded affair primarily for a good time. In the end, “No Sudden Move” is a real jewel: unique, tough as nails, and ultimately, dazzling.
11.) “Judas And The Black Messiah.” (Directed by Shaka King, Written by King and Will Berson) Shaka King’s muscular and ferocious “Judas And The Black Messiah” is a film that practically roars with a sense of hard-won purpose. It is an engrossing, emotionally thunderous adult drama the likes of which we haven’t seen in some time: a gripping and electric period gangland-political crime saga that’s deftly in touch with a side of history too infrequently depicted in movies executed at this level of prestige. Here is, at last, the movie that so many Hollywood studios seem afraid to give audiences: the anti-“Trial Of The Chicago 7,” a wholeheartedly incensed screed against white supremacy cloaked in the confidently stylish garb of an outlaw costume thriller. The movie works like gangbusters as a work of jumpy historical course-correction, but it’s somehow even more successful as an old-school descent-into-the-underworld picture, one refreshingly concerned with knotty ethical inquiries like: Who can you trust? How much can you really know a person? And more to the point, why did the FBI have it in for Fred Hampton? King’s film goes out of its way to portray Hampton as a compassionate political comrade: loyal and good-humored, particularly when bellowing theatrically to crowds of like-minded radicals. Hampton, embodied by the brilliant Daniel Kaluuya, acting aside a slippery Lakeith Stanfield, is depicted as a man who was attentive with his wife at home, especially when she went out of her way to remind the revolutionary civil rights leader of his domestic duties. Hampton’s standoffs with police are realized with the bravura you-are-there immediacy of Michael Mann, although the movie’s setup — in which a rat loses his soul going deep undercover in an organization being torn asunder by infighting and egos at odds with one another — can’t help but recall the analogous dynamic of Martin Scorsese’s Beantown classic “The Departed,” and thus, by proxy, its Hong Kong inspiration, “Infernal Affairs” (shit, I’ll be generous and throw a comparison to Bill Duke’s 90's masterpiece “Deep Cover” in the mix as well). But no matter: in spite of the points of comparison, “Judas” is the announcement of an arresting new artistic voice in the form of Shaka King, whose debut is the kind of thing we hardly see anymore because most films aren’t crafted with this degree of patience, technique, and respect for an audience’s intelligence.
10.) “Pig.” (Directed and Written by Michael Sarnoski) It’s impossible to imagine Michael Sarnoski’s marvelously meditative “Pig” without Nicolas Cage at its center. Of course, “meditative” is not an adjective one normally thinks to associate with Nicolas Cage. “Pig’s” head-scratching logline — Cage stars as Robin, a reclusive truffle farmer whose prized pig/beloved best friend is kidnapped by nefarious thugs — promises a gorier, more straight-to-business drive-in movie thriller than the lyrical howl that Sarnoski’s film ends up being. There are no hyper-histrionic, destined-to-be-memed Cage freakouts in “Pig”: in fact, here, the “Face/Off” actor is so commanding in his stillness that his unmoving scowl, from certain angles, looks to be carved from granite. While “Pig” is not devoid of moments of tension or abrupt brutality, the story it tells mostly plays out as a low-road existential ramble, amusingly staged against Portland’s new-school dining scene. Picture Kelly Reichardt turning her lo-fi Americana lens on the bottom-feeder hellscape depicted in the Gene Hackman-starring “Night Moves” and you’re not too far off. Robin and a bratty, rich-kid fungi middleman, Amir (Alex Wolff, very funny) navigate underground fight clubs populated by disgruntled servers, confront chefs who are framed as fallen underworld kingpins, and dig up secrets about the highly respected man that Robin used to be.” Pig’s” most dramatically revealing scene — and a strong contender for the single greatest individual scene of 2021 — occurs when our duo confront one of Robin’s old sous-chefs, who now runs the kind of insufferable tasting menu restaurant where the dishes are brought to the table encased in foam and served under glass, like a science experiment. The scene is thick with the threat of violence, and yet, the exchange is all the more gripping for the fact that said violence never arrives. Instead, Robin soberly tells his old comrade that his business, this needlessly elaborate monument to culinary ego, is nothing more than a self-aggrandizing dog-and-pony show. Should he stay committed to sustaining the lie, Robin argues, the man will wake up every day “with less of himself.” Bless “Pig,” this mischievous oddity, and bless Cage, giving one of his most affecting performances as a man whose loss has taught him the greatest lesson: that, as human beings, “we don’t get a lot of things to really care about.” This year, “Pig” is one of those things to care about.
9). “C’mon C’mon” (Directed and Written by Mike Mills) Mike Mills has grown alongside his audience, from the whimsical adolescent time capsule of “Thumbsucker” to the young man’s salvo of “Beginners” to the reflections on looming middle age in “20th Century Women.” And wouldn’t you know, Mills has made one of his funniest, most human movies with “C’mon C’mon,” a paean to softness, to the power of listening, to the architectural majesty of American cities, to the magic of children’s brains, and to the singularly awesome possibility of having Joaquin Phoenix fulfilling the role of resident cool, schlubby uncle in your life. Mills understands that, as adults, there is so much that we can learn from children, and “C’mon C’mon” is an impossibly hopeful ode to bonding in a world where it’s all too easy to feel isolated from everyone you know. The film is flush with an effervescent sense of remembrance, as Joaquin Phoenix’s NPR-style radio journalist makes his way through assorted metropolises (Detroit, Los Angeles, New York’s Chinatown, and New Orleans are all captured vividly here via the tactile cinematography of the great Robbie Ryan), interviewing youngsters on what they think the future will be like. These bewitching docu-fictional asides allow Mills an excuse to indulge in his affinity for montages coupled with voiceovers ruminating on the nature of co-existence, but it must be said, “C’mon C’mon” is a looser, less mannered movie than both “Beginners” and “20th Century Women,” both of which worked with the same stylistic toolkit. Even if there’s no mistaking who wrote and directed this new film, it still feels like an evolution of the in-house Mike Mills style, as opposed to an affectionate retread of it. “C’mon C’mon” is about the difficulty of remaining open to change in the face of disorienting life developments, a motif Mills has been playing with his entire career. Together, Mike Mills’ four pictures to date form a kind of ongoing cinematic scrapbook. “C’mon C’mon” is one of my favorite chapters from said scrapbook: it’s a loving, deceptively slight road-movie odyssey flush with shades of Wim Wender’s “Alice in The Cities,” but the gravitas of “C’mon C’Mon” sneaks up on you in a beautifully unassuming way that is entirely unique to Mills’ approach. Here’s to hoping that Mills, who crafted this film as a love letter to his own kid, hasn’t run out of family members to make movies about.
8.) “Memoria.” (Directed and Written by Apichatpong Weerasethakul) Thai searcher Apichatpong Weerasethakul makes what some film journalists refer to as “slow cinema.” There is rarely any plot to speak of in his films, at least not in the tediously literal ways in which we’ve been conditioned to define movie plotting. Weerasethakul is, among other things, a poetic observer of the natural world. His work forces us to confront the sheer enormity of the universe in which we exist. What ghosts, what lost spirits, lurk in the cosmic in-between spaces that Weerasethakul depicts? The adjective “meditative” gets over-used in critical circles, but Weerasethakul’s films really do provide the sensation of meditating: you sort of leave your body as you submit to the tranquil sequencing of his images, which flow like a trickling river. By the time the end credits roll, you practically feel like you’re levitating in your seat. “Memoria,” Weerasethakul’s latest masterwork, asks a lot of its audience. It is one of the most transfixing big-screen viewing experiences I’ve had in years. Admittedly, there were times when I was worn down by Weerasethakul’s seemingly boundless willingness to linger on a shot for what feels like an eternity. Then, there were times where I was nothing less than hypnotized by what was happening on screen, where I found myself incapable of thinking about literally anything else (a rare sensation, these days). At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the experience of watching “Memoria” is something akin to a religious ceremony; Neon’s unprecedented release strategy for the film is brilliant when one realizes that much of Weerasethakul’s film plays like a kind of gorgeously narcotized, nevertheless piercing museum installation piece, which is in no way intended as any kind of any kind of backhanded compliment. “Memoria” grows even more opaque as it continues enveloping its audience in the fog of memory, and as said fog becomes deeper and denser and less certain, it becomes even more difficult to tear your eyes away from what you’re witnessing. I presume that “Memoria’s” audacious embrace of sci-fi psychedelia in its sure-to-be-polarizing climax will raise more than a few eyebrows, but personally, I wanted to stand up and cheer in the theater. Who else is making movies this audacious and bizarre, in this day and age? Only Apichatpong Weerasethakul, of course.
7.) “Petite Maman.” (Directed and Written by Celine Sciamma) “Petite Maman,” the latest from our great chronicler of womanhood Celine Sciamma, is a miracle in miniature, told with the elegance of a perfectly composed short story. It’s a balm for the spirit, an adoring depiction of how little girls laugh, grieve, play, and find their way in the world. What’s more is that the director’s latest — which, at first glance, looks to be a kind of French country picaresque — eventually adopts a beguilingly fantastical approach that elevates the story to a new level of emotional power. The film’s tiny, adorable protagonist is a girl named Nelly, played in an astonishing turn by child actress Josephine Sanz. Nelly’s grandmother has died, and Nelly and her parents are staying at the old woman’s house with the intentions of clearing the place out. Not since Truffaut has a filmmaker displayed such a grasp of what it’s like to see the world through a kid’s eyes: Sciamma understands that much of childhood comes from the act of observance, of letting your curiosity guide you through a big, terrifying, beautiful world that you understand very little of. One day, Nelly happens upon another girl during a walk in the woods. She looks exactly like Nelly. This is Marion, played by Josephine Sanz’s real-life sister, Gabrielle. There’s a reason, we learn, for the two’s surface similarities: Marion is actually Nelly’s mother as a child, stuck in time, reliving her formative years. What a delightful narrative conceit for a movie this is: not only does Nelly get to have her own “Back To The Future” mini-arc with her tiny mother — her “petite maman,” as it were — seeing her as a little person in all her unformed glory, she gets to see her grandmother again, and give her the goodbye that she was never able to give her. As someone who lost their grandmother recently and was not able to bid farewell in any kind of satisfactory way, “Petite Maman” hit me like a ton of bricks. The film understands that the death of a loved one feels particularly crushing when you’re young and have no idea how to make sense of your feelings, and Sciamma respects the integrity of her child performers to a degree that quietly breaks your heart. So much of the entertainment we consume is so numbing and bludgeoning, so to happen upon a film this delicate and sweet is the rarest and most welcome of things.
6.) “Undine” (Directed and Written by Christian Petzold) German master Christian Petzold remains fascinated by the seductive possibility of in-between spaces, and the potential for love to offer a refuge from life’s hardships. In “Jerichow,” Petzold probed the ugliness of an illicit affair that tore three people apart. With the immaculate “Phoenix,” the director spun a captivating golden-age-of-cinema yarn about estranged lovers and emotional rediscovery, bathed in the evocative shadows of a Carol Reed-style WWII-era classic. “Transit,” 2019’s most unshakeable film, was Petzold’s grandest interrogation of what it means to inhabit a liminal space. “Undine,” which sees Petzold at his most romantic, breaks from the director’s established filmography in that it is not a life-during-wartime drama or a smoldering vintage thriller, but rather, an outwardly mythic contemporary love story imbued with an ineffably light touch of fairy tale surrealism. “Undine’s” protagonists, played by Petzold regulars Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, treat their romantic consecration as a kind of personal sanctuary. They are damaged, fundamentally decent people who are actively working to break free from the confines and debilitating loneliness of modern urban life, as it’s primarily manifested in failed relationships and soul-killing industrial labor. At its apex, “Undine” harnesses the enchanting emotional poetry of Jean Cocteau, but all allusions aside, Petzold’s latest reverie — which is also obsessed with the history of Berlin, the city in which it unfolds, to a degree that I haven’t seen since the glory days of Wim Wenders — feels like a film that could have been made by no other living director. If “Undine” doesn’t reach the instant-masterpiece status of Petzold’s last two pictures, it lingers even longer in the mind, so lithe and strangely alive it is in its style. “Undine” might feel like a less fully formed work than “Phoenix” or “Transit;” if those films are portraits, this one is a miraculous doodle, as evidenced by its scant runtime in comparison to this director’s more epic-feeling works. And yet, there is something undeniable, even unforgettable about “Undine” and the many sinuous mysteries it poses: it is a film that stirs up memories of yearning, of love lost and found again, and of the weight that comes with committing your heart to someone. It is a lovely cinematic haiku about seeking out solace and connection in a world of tumultuous confusion, and holding on to that connection in whatever way you can.
5.) “The Power of The Dog” (Directed and Written by Jane Campion) Jane Campion has been telling stories with a bonafide feminine touch long before “representation” became our buzzword du jour: certainly, early, spiky efforts like “Sweetie” and “After Hours” are uncompromising visions of the burdens of womanhood in a world dominated by thoughtless, overbearing men. Come to think of it, same goes for “The Piano,” the terrific, Nicole Kidman-starring “The Portrait of a Lady,” and the director’s gloriously scummy, darkly funny murder-blues ballad, “In the Cut.” There is simply nothing like the texture in a Jane Campion picture, and there are textural images in “The Power of The Dog” that I know will stay with me for a good, long while: a man’s calloused thumb pressing against a paper flower, fingers working to construct a rawhide rope, a smattering of blood on stalks of wheat. The film — a seething, gorgeous, damn-near-perfect neo-Western adaptation of Thomas Savage’s novel about two rancher brothers living and working in the desolate American badlands of the 1920's— is as much of a rhapsodic visual feast as anything Campion has ever made, and yet it is such a thoroughly unnerving experience, so steeped in psychosexual malaise and the dissection of a certain kind of strong, silent masculine archetype, that its subtextual virtues transcend its considerable aesthetic pedigree. Campion pays homage to her progenitors without ever getting Tarantino-level pastiche-y about it: a mesmerizing early shot recalls John Ford’s tendency to shoot his actors through windows, doorways, and other constricted spaces, Jonny Greenwood’s shuddering score recalls his ominous string work for “There Will Be Blood,” and there are even shades of Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” in the depiction of hard-luck American brothers driven to opposing extremities by love and chance. Without giving too much away, I will say that “Power of The Dog” is primarily about the masks we wear to conceal our innermost selves from others. No one in this film is really whom they appear to be: Benedict Cumberbatch’s Phil Burbank is a cruel, damaged man’s man keeping some dark secrets buried at bay, the tragedy of Kristen Dunst’s Rose grows more hopeless as she slowly dissolves into a weeping, alcoholic wreck, and Kodi Smit-McPhee’s gawky young loner, unsurprisingly, turns out to be the film’s most lethal player, hiding in plain sight, a menace in waiting. I left “The Power of The Dog” with chills on the back of my neck, but also, with my faith restored in the possibilities of widescreen cinematic storytelling. What an honor it is to watch a master like Jane Campion work her magic.
4.) “The Worst Person In The World” (Directed by Joachim Trier, Written by Trier and Eskil Vogt) Joachim Trier has a remarkable gift for directing light, ebullient movies about unbelievably heavy subject matter. “The Worst Person In The World,” the third film in Mr. Trier’s Oslo trilogy, is a love story, and also a story of budding self-love. It is a wry and penetrating tragicomedy, peerlessly written, and directed with tender meticulousness and care. It’s a film about the delirious rush of being impudent and feckless and young and feeling everything and nothing all at once. It is certainly Trier’s funniest, most free film: for this bracing story of a young woman fumbling her way through adulthood, the director embraces outright absurdism and dream logic, stopping scenes in freeze-frame as his lead character springs heedlessly through the streets like Denis Lavant in “Mauvais Sang,” even going so far as to indulge in drug-trip sequences and animated interludes. And yet, “The Worst Person In The World” is so casual in its blistering observations about human selfishness and the unquenchable need to love someone that by the time it arrives at its soft-hearted, crushing finale, it’s hard not to marvel at the sneaky grace with which Trier has built to this place of heartache. “The Worst Person In The World” is divided into twelve impeccably observed and paced chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue for good measure. One of the pleasures of the film is seeing the roundabout, nearly novelistic manner in which Trier depicts the passage of time for our lovable screw-up protagonist. Time always seems to elude the characters in Joachim Trier’s films: it is constantly slipping away from them, forever out of reach. We drop in on birthdays, in apartments, at family gatherings, and at upscale city parties. Relationships are destroyed, then mended, then destroyed again. Inevitably, tragedy strikes. There is illness, catastrophe, death. And, ultimately, there is the hope of rebirth, forgiveness, the promise of a new day to come. I’m being somewhat opaque in my description here, but that’s only because you really have to see Trier’s film for yourself: no critical pejoratives can capture the sheer magic of its execution, that’s how first-rate it is. It is a sly humanist masterpiece that understands why we hold on to the things that used to give us joy when we were young long after they’ve stopped making us happy, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I first saw it. Bless this movie, and bless Joachim Trier for making it.
3.) “Drive My Car.” (Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Written by Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe). The transfixing opening credits of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,” arrive forty or so minutes into the film proper, shortly after our protagonist, a melancholic man of the stage named Yūsuke Kafuku, has experienced a tragedy that will derail the rest of his life. I can’t remember the last time a film deployed such a technique — I want to say, the last time I remember it was in Bi Gan’s surrealist experiment “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” — but there is undeniably a temptation to dismiss said technique as self-consciously clever film school gimmickry. That would be a woefully shallow reading of “Drive My Car,” which is as perceptive a film about loss as I’ve seen in years: an exquisite meditation on agony, art, and the amorphous space where the two collide. It is a film that rewards a viewer’s intellectual investment, as its reverberations often arrive in small but insistent waves, thus creating an emotional effect that grows more cumulatively awe-inspiring as the screenplay builds up a head of steam en route to its gut-punch of a climax. Hamaguchi’s latest is an adaptation from a particularly memorable chapter in writer Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, “Men Without Women.” Certainly, Yūsuke, played in a controlled, wrenching performance by Hidetoshi Nishijima, is every inch the typical Murakami protagonist: he’s a pensive, somewhat self-involved fellow, luckless with the opposite sex ,and more at home in a world of records and books than with actual people. Shortly before those opening credits I mentioned, we see Yūsuke’s wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) suddenly pass away from a cerebral hemorrhage. After a car accident renders Yūsuke’s waning eyesight an insurance liability in terms of the production of his latest theatrical undertaking, a take on Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” our protagonist is assigned a driver: the droll wallflower, Misaki (remarkable newcomer Toko Miura) who, like Yūsuke, is also working her way through her own personal trauma. “Drive My Car,” if nothing else, understands the drama of life’s inherently ephemeral nature, and how it is often mined for performance. There is joy in every waking moment, yes, but the burden of being alive is considerable for those who are suffering. It could all be gone in the blink of an eye. With “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi is imploring his audience to savor it all: savor music, savor loving your partner, savor losing yourself in fiction, savor rambling conversations at bars, and most importantly, savor long, aimless car rides with no destination in mind. Savor it all, because, at the end of the day, it’s all we’ve got.
2.) “Licorice Pizza.” (Written and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson) It makes sense that Paul Thomas Anderson had to go home again, particularly in the wake of the chilly pageantry of “Phantom Thread,” and the clinical, Kubrickian classicism of “The Master.” Like Anderson, I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley: a chill, completely ordinary suburban grid that exists between a cluster of mountains, including the San Gabriels. Once farmland, the Valley is now mostly comprised of strip malls, ranch homes, and world-class sushi dives. P.T.A.’s latest 818 triumph, “Licorice Pizza,” is an intoxicatingly warmhearted ode to young love, or something like it, that also happens to be about two Valley kids who find themselves magnetically bound into one another’s respective orbits. Like Lancaster Dodd and Freddie Quell in “The Master”, or Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday in “There Will Be Blood,” up-and-coming teen actor Gary Valentine (a soulful Cooper Hoffman) and the older, only slightly wiser Alana Kane (Alana Haim, delivering the breakout performance of 2021), can’t stop running into each other. The act of running — away from the past, towards some idealized vision of the future — is a visual motif that “Licorice Pizza” returns to again and again, providing euphoric jolts of momentum in an otherwise blissfully unhurried coming-of-age story. “Licorice Pizza” is a hangout movie, a high school romance, a cinephile’s love letter to the rangy, character-focused pictures of a bygone time, a raucous comedy about beautiful young wasteoids, and a fetishistic time capsule of Los Angeles playing itself. It is also a true-blue Southland picaresque that magically captures the breezy joy of those never-ending summers, the ones that feel like the most important summers of your life, even if all you’re doing is wasting time with your friends. A lot happens in “Licorice Pizza,” and also a whole lot of nothing. Gary and Alana go on long walks together. Alana starts hanging out with Gary’s goofball friends. Gary, at one point, is arrested for what turns out to be a case of mistaken identity. Gary and Alana start a waterbed business together, “Soggy Bottom,” which brings them to the mansion of infamously volatile, sex-crazed Hollywood personality Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper, the Mozart of playing raging, toxic assholes). Benny Safdie, Tom Waits, Maya Rudolph, and Sean Penn are all in attendance at the “Pizza” party, but further surprises are best saved for a first-time viewing. “Licorice Pizza” is a towering work of American film art, disguised as a buoyant “Fast Times”-style teen romp, about being young and pretending to be an adult. It’s about running toward the idea of the life you want for yourself, and the art of creating an identity. Sometimes that means opening a neighborhood pinball arcade with your pals.
1.) “The French Dispatch” (Written and Directed by Wes Anderson) Uncharitably dismissed by some as a surface-level auteur indulgence, Wes Anderson’s generous and resplendent “The French Dispatch” is actually one of the Texas director’s most accomplished pictures: a shimmering ode to the romantic solitude of the scribe’s life that unfolds as a dizzying, decades-spanning cinematic bonbon that somehow bottles a spirit that is both madcap and rueful in concert. Like “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” it is another one of Wes’ Russian-doll stories that is itself about the act of storytelling; certainly, the discursive anthology format of the director’s densest confection to date allows for, if nothing else, some of the most liberated filmmaking that Anderson has ever graced us with. The first and finest story, “The Concrete Masterpiece,” is a dry, erudite satire of art-world chicanery and erotic captivity, centered on a moody and gifted painter incarcerated for a violent crime (Benicio Del Toro, wondrously feral), his muse, who happens to be his prison guard (Lea Seydoux, luminous), and an amusingly underhanded art dealer (a sniveling Adrien Brody, who understands Anderson’s fastidious dialogue rhythms like clockwork at this point) who ultimately believes that all art is about making obscene sums of money. “Masterpiece” teems with zippy, Chaplin-level visual comedy, characteristically brilliant use of color and aspect ratios, and painstakingly layered gag work that nevertheless exudes a melancholy undertow (really, all the actors in all the segments are tremendous, unerringly locked in to Anderson’s wilted-cosmopolitan worldview, though Jeffery Wright and Owen Wilson emerged as personal favorites). For Anderson agnostics, mileage will vary on the succeeding chapters — “Revisions to a Manifesto,” a knowingly arch take on Godard’s “Masculin Feminin,” and “The Private Dining Room of The Police Commissioner,” a deliciously jazzy, action-packed Anderson caper that beats with a weary heart — although these imagined tall tales complement each other in ways that are not immediately obvious upon a first viewing. The “Rushmore” director has gifted his fans with yet another ravishingly curated jewel box that also acts as a witty and elegiac remembrance of a forgotten way of life: that is, the act of reportage itself as a fundamentally brave undertaking, one that attempts to mine sense from a world that itself often feels senseless. The film’s bittersweet final scene leaves us with a message of hope: continue writing, even in the face of death, despair, and social upheaval. Or, to quote one of the film’s more significant players: “Maybe, with good luck, we’ll find what eluded us in the places we once called home.”
HONORABLE MENTION:
While most viewers I know seemed to find Leos Carax’s mesmeric and defiantly irrational “Annette” off-putting from frame one, I haven’t stopped thinking about the movie since I first saw it: it’s a work of art so wildly divorced from 99% of what constitutes “independent” cinema these days that I correctly predicted that many theatergoers would leave their screening rooms grumbling in anger and confusion, simply not having the time to make heads or tails of it (all this is a long-winded way of saying the movie is very, very good). That film was co-written and scored by the brilliant and prolific art-pop group Sparks, who got their own terrific showcase in director Edgar Wright’s buzzy love letter to the band, “The Sparks Brothers” (it’s certainly more of a genuine Edgar Wright film than the “Hot Fuzz” director’s ungainly giallo, “Last Night in Soho). Ridley Scott enjoyed a year of releasing fine films and making headlines for his salty shit-talking; I refer to his criminally overlooked “The Last Duel,” and also “House of Gucci,” the latter of which proves that being “good” is no often no substitute for being good, trashy fun.
David Lowery’s “The Green Knight” was a dauntingly unconventional Arthurian epic, flush with moments of beauty, terror, and magic, that nevertheless served as another one of the director’s poetic dirges about the inexorable passage of time. “The Woman Who Ran” was another ruminative humanist gem from Hong Sang-soo, ditto for the winsome triptych “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s other great drama from 2021. “Shiva Baby,” Emma Seligman’s nerve-chafing cringe comedy, was a screamingly funny evisceration of tepid social mores that functioned as a form of long-overdue on-screen representation for sexually liberated Jewish women everywhere. “F9,” the ninth, super-sized entry in the still-going-strong “Fast and Furious” saga, was possibly the most pure fun that I had at the movies this year, although I also had a fantastic time watching the Questlove-directed concert doc “Summer of Soul,” and the Bob Odenkirk-starring “Nobody.” Rebecca Hall’s mostly wonderful directorial debut “Passing” proved that not all movie-star directorial debuts projects have to be embarrassing, while “Zola” was Janicza Bravo’s most tart, acerbic comic provocation to date, buoyed by a go-for-broke comic turn from none other than Riley Keough.
2021 was also a year where some of our more lauded and legendary directors did some of their finest work in years: Steven Spielberg’s unreasonably well-made and entertaining “West Side Story,” which very nearly made this list for its unfathomable technical mastery alone, eats the original film’s lunch. It is a bold, authentically thrilling re-imagining more visually robust and legitimately cinematic than 90% of the movies that saw a release in theaters this year. Joel Coen’s grimly austere “The Tragedy of Macbeth” saw star Denzel Washington lending battle-hardened pathos to the role of the mad Scottish king. This exquisitely moribund cinematic meditation is nothing if not of a piece with Joel and his brother’s enduring fixation on greedy, hapless tyrants unable to escape the brutal limits dictated by their fates (not for nothing, 2021 was also the year that the great Paul Verhoeven gave us the horny nun movie to end all horny nun movies with the hellacious “Benedetta”). As for Lana Wachowski’s masterful “The Matrix: Resurrections,” the greatest “Matrix” since the original, I have no notes. It simply fucking rips, and is one of the best, most imaginative blockbusters I’ve seen in years.
Elsewhere, the Pedro Almodóvar-directed “The Human Voice” was a vibrant, piquant appetizer for the full meal that was this month’s “Parallel Mothers,” and even if Abel Ferrara’s latest apocalyptic screed, the end-of-times tone poem “Zeros and Ones,” was messy even by the Bronx bad boy’s standards, it still managed to capture the all-consuming sense of doom that has suffused so much of our lives since the pandemic began. I hungrily devoured every second of “The Beatles: Get Back,” though many would argue that Peter Jackson’s loving work of restoration is decidedly not a movie, and was similarly surprised at how much I enjoyed the back half of Guillermo Del Toro’s icy re-imagining of the 1947 noir classic, “Nightmare Alley.” And finally, there was “Spencer,” Pablo Larraín’s mannered and magnificent shiver of a film about the interior agonies of Princess Diana of Wales that also managed to work as a ghost story, a love story, a fairy tale, a disturbing odyssey of self-realization, and a work of fiction that offers seemingly definitive proof that the British monarchy are less than human.
Thanks for reading, everyone. See you at the movies in 2022! — Nick
