Yes, You Need to See ‘The Power of the Dog’ and these Other Great Movies of 2021.
After all the hype, 2021 was not quite the year that the movies came back. People started returning to the theater in fits and starts. But even with multiple tentpoles from No Time to Die to Eternals opening on thousands of screens, revenue was up from 2020 but still down from 2019. Simultaneous screen-and-stream releases took some of the urgency out of rushing to the IMAX, as did, well, the continued pandemic.
The good news, though, was that even though the real world was a combination of terrifying, irritating, and confusing, the world of cinema felt nearly as rich as ever. The number of top-rank directors putting out top-rank work was almost dauntingly long: Paul Thomas Anderson (Licorice Pizza), Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch, so idiosyncratically focused it felt nearly pointillist), Simon Baker (Red Rocket), Joel Coen (The Tragedy of Macbeth, whose beautifully stark visual style feels like a movie-long ode to the Shakespeare cinema of Orson Welles), Guillermo del Toro (Nightmare Alley, his first movie in many years that felt like more than the sum of its pastiche), David Lowery (The Green Knight, fuzzed-out psychedelic Arthuriana), Paul Schrader (the very odd but very brave The Card Counter), Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World, a free-wheeling portrait of a free-spirited woman from a very buttoned-down director), and Denis Villeneuve (Dune).
No, Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci was nothing special, just like his previous disappointment All the Money in the World, maybe he just needs to avoid Italy-set true crime stories. But The Last Duel was the best, most mature work Scott has done in a very long time. Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up did not have the stiletto slash of The Big Short, but its loopy sci-fi satire of disinformation and willful blindness in the face of disaster already feels like the best fictional movie about pandemic behavior since Contagion.
Blockbusters were hit-and-miss as usual, but at least the entire industry was not putting everything on the success or failure of Tenet, like last year. Though F9 was tiresome and The Matrix Resurrection a curiosity, their presence was at least welcome for not being part of the Marvel machine. Disney’s efforts covered a range, from dull Avengers-style ensemble (Eternals) to serviceable action-comedy (Black Widow) to top-notch Hong Kong wuxia throwback (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). No Time to Die sent Daniel Craig’s Bond off in style while boxing the series into a dramatic corner, which could potentially force the producers into more creative directions down the road.
2021 saw a strong crop of nonfiction releases as well. There were eerie views of what the near future has in store for us (Ascension), bracing depictions of moral outrages (Attica), glorious portraits of American music (Summer of Soul, The Velvet Underground), and dramatic investigations of political conflict (The Neutral Ground, President).
Whatever else can be said about the modern filmmaking scene, somebody out there is funding some truly brave and strange work. While misfiring more than hitting the target, Leos Carax’s Annette was certainly a more daring take on the musical form than Lin-Manuel Miranda’s dutiful adaptation of tick, tick…BOOM!. Vladimir Johannsson’s Lamb took an unnervingly serene and straightforward approach to the mythological horror that intrudes on an Icelandic farming couple. Nicolas Cage proved that he can still dig in for deeply felt character work in Michael Sarnoski’s Pig — a curious revenge story about a star chef-turned-recluse and his faithful truffle pig. Laden with body horror, wanton homicides, and predatory sexuality, Julia Ducournau’s Titane is best described as everything that would be banned in Gilead, a category that feels deserving of its own award.
The Best Movies of 2021
1 / The Power of the Dog
A ferocious performance from Benedict Cumberbatch might be the centerpiece of this teeth-grindingly tense frontier drama but it’s far from the only thing on offer. Jane Campion’s epic adaptation of the Thomas Savage novel about two brothers running their family’s Montana ranch is both a potent melodrama about a co-dependent sibling relationship upended by new arrivals and a thoughtful dive into the damages wrought by repression. While Cumberbatch’s nervily bullying character never quite openly threatens the new bride (Kirsten Dunst) of his slow and too-trusting brother (Jesse Plemons), or her effeminate son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), his bullying manner is so laden with secrets and calibrated self-hating violence that at times experiencing the movie can feel like watching a lit fuse burn down. Watch here.
2 / The Velvet Underground
In 1998’s Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes created a fictional portrait of the 1970s glam-rock scene that turned the fiery creative juncture of David Bowie, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop into a jumbled mess with a star-studded but imitative soundtrack. With this lovely and immersive documentary, he goes right to the source. Rather than trying to recreate the Velvet Underground’s oft-imitated and never-matched style of jangle-pop irony or import smart people to discuss the band’s influence, he has the members (John Cale and the late Reed, mostly) tell it like it was and blasts the music at top volume. (The droning decadent bombast of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” pretty much speaks for itself.) Haynes wraps the viewer in the band’s late-60s/early ’70s avant-garde, hippie-hating aesthetic by presenting the story in a scrambled split-screen format that says more about what made the band than three hours of learned commentary. Watch here.
3 / Ema
One of the year’s many erotically rebellious movies, Pablo Larrain’s fairly free-form drama is ostensibly about dancing, sex, politics, power, and relationships. But really it is about taking a no-holds-barred actor like Mariana Di Girolamo and just setting her loose. As the titular character, a Chilean dancer who abandons the company run by her husband (Gael Garcia Bernal) to pursue a perverse campaign of revenge, seduction, and guerrilla reggaeton performances — all of which is only marginally connected to her attempt to regain custody of their pyromaniac son — Di Girolamo presents an unnerving portrait of freewheeling forward momentum that blows up pretty much everything in her path. She and her fellow dance renegades entertain themselves with a flamethrower when things threaten to get dull, a problem that Larrain’s movie does not have. Watch here.
4 / Red Rocket
Simply put, if the American film scene had more directors like Sean Baker then going to the multiplex would be an immeasurably more awesome experience. Practically the only filmmaker out there who can consistently depict the lives of the poor in starkly real terms without resorting to platitudes, condescension, or gratuitous pain, Baker’s films like Tangerine and The Florida Project show in living color how people who have fallen through the cracks find each other. The setting this time is a scrubby Gulf Coast town next to a looming chemical plant where down-and-out porn actor Mickey (an electrifying Simon Rex) has returned home penniless but bubbling over with schemes. Initially coming off as a wily and irritatingly motormouthed but generally harmless grifter — dealing some weed, conning his semi-ex-wife into letting him crash with her — Mickey shows his true colors after meeting a teenaged girl who he thinks is his way back into the adult film world. The movie’s magic comes not just from Baker’s ability to thread comedy into down-and-out margin-dwelling drama but showing how dependent people’s survival is on each other. In theaters.
5 / Ascension
Every few minutes in Jessica Kingdon’s luminous and eerie documentary about the plasticky banality of modern China’s headlong dash into the consumerist trap, you can find a moment that could be worth its own essay. The sex doll assembly line where the figures’ exaggerated features are in stark contrast to their bored producers. The stacks of Make America Great Again material waiting for the next container ship to haul them halfway around the world. Rooms filled with salespeople shouting along to slogans mixing nationalist fervor with capitalist frenzy. Influencers working at a sweat shop pace to get those likes. It all slides past with a dream-like grace that ten, twenty years from now will seem downright prophetic. Watch here.
6 / Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
If recent movies can be trusted (and when can they not?), whatever has happened to Romania since the 1989 overthrow of Nicolae Ceausescu's Soviet-backed regime appears to have left the country uncomfortably stranded between modernity and reactionary philistinism. This gonzo pandemic-set satire from Radu Jude is structured in three radically different parts. The documentary-style beginning and Theater of the Absurd conclusion are a comedy of manners about Emi (the ferociously deadpan Katia Pascariu), a school teacher hauled before a disapproving committee of parents after the sex tape (which starts the movie) she made with her husband was leaked online. Jude is unsparing yet still deeply comedic in his slashing portrayal of not just the expected targets of hypocrisy, corruption, greed, and puritanism, but also COVID-era conspiracy-mongering (which appears to differ little from Romania to America, with one random parent shouting out “Fox News!”), blind nationalism, and the poisonous anti-Semitic and anti-Roma attitudes infecting everything. The middle section is a visual A-Z essay on the absurdity and moral catastrophes of postwar Romania whose resigned yet lacerating anger further sharpens this raw, hilarious, sneakily intelligent comedy. In theaters.
7 / Zola
Describing a movie as just about the only worthwhile thing produced by Twitter in, well, ever, is not faint praise. Zola takes Aziah Wells King’s viral Tweetstorm from 2015 about a dysfunctional road trip and turns it into a lurid, jittery, frenetic, Harmony Korine-esque story about America in extremis. Zola (Taylour Paige) is a black waitress and onetime pole dancer who takes a chance following Stefani (Riley Keough) — generally referred to as “this white bitch” in Zola’s narration, which has the learned skepticism of somebody who learned things the hard way—to Tampa to supposedly make great money dancing. Stefani’s frantic hustler vibe and the bad energy brought by her sad sack boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and pimp X (Colman Domingo) make it clear that nothing will turn out as she has promised. But though Zola’s tempered watchfulness could make her willingness to go along with the manic Florida melodrama suspect, Paige confidently portrays a woman who knows she should know better but is also just wanting to see where this ride will take her. Janicza Bravo’s direction is fiery, confident, and funny, pushing her actors into places that verge on comedic parody but retain their humanity; never an easy trick. Watch here.
8 / Final Account
Many nonfiction works about the Holocaust have focused on capturing the memories of its still-living victims before their accounts are lost to time. Luke Holland’s stunning documentary takes a different approach: He wants to talk to the perpetrators and their enablers while they were still alive. His years-long odyssey takes him from one anodyne setting to another — rest homes and tidy retiree’s attics — to interview the people who made the Nazi extermination machinery work. The people he talks to, soldiers and office workers, mostly don’t spout Nazi cant. But neither do they take much responsibility, engaging in gymnastic moral deflection when not treating the genocidal ideology of their youths as some nostalgic memory, focusing on happy memories of Hitler Youth summer camps rather than the evils they helped perpetrate. Watch here.
9 / Licorice Pizza
Is this a coming-of-age movie, a Golden Age of California lark, an unlikely romance, a quasi-musical about hucksterism, or what-the-hell indulgence from a filmmaker who has earned the right to generally do what he wants? Pretty much all the above. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s goony and lovely Licorice Pizza, a woman in her mid-twenties (musician Alana Haim in a knockout debut) is romantically pursued by a wide-eyed teenager (Cooper Hoffman) whose Golden State huckster optimism either clashes with or complements her somewhat drifting cynicism, depending on the moment. Anderson mines the same seemingly banal Valley territory of Magnolia and Boogie Nights for those movies’ flickers of firefly transcendence, often brought about by a perfectly timed song or bit of lovely weirdness (Tom Waits and Sean Penn staging a drunken fiery motorcycle stunt on a golf course for no damn reason, Bradley Cooper as a wingnut Hollywood chaos agent who seems derived from The Player outtakes). The whole thing clings together on a wing and a prayer but it succeeds in large part through sheer enthusiasm for the joy of storytelling. In theaters.
10 / Quo Vadis, Aida?
When the Serbian army tore through Bosnia in 1995, the genocide that followed was as predictable as nearly any atrocity in modern history. Jasmila Zbanic’s infuriating drama shows how the United Nations, ostensibly there to protect the civilian population, abdicated its responsibilities and allowed the mass killings to take place in broad daylight. Based on the massacre at Srebrenica, the movie follows the increasingly desperate attempts of UN translator Aida (Jasna Djuricic) to save not just her family but her fellow townspeople from the thuggish Serbian soldiers looming outside the UN camp. Aida frantically plays every one of her few cards, cajoling and lying as she tries to convince the soldiers to remember their humanity (some of them were her former students) and the UN to remember their duty. Harrowing not just for the banality of evil on display but how it shows the horrors clicking into place. Watch here.
Other Bests / Worsts
Honorable mentions: Attica, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, Flee, The French Dispatch, The Green Knight, The Killing of Two Lovers, The Last Duel, The Mitchells vs. the Machines, Passing, Pig, The Souvenir: Part II, Summer of Soul, The Tragedy of Macbeth, The Worst Person in the World
The disappointments: Cherry, Encounter, Eternals, Finch, The Many Saints of Newark, The Matrix Resurrections, Reminiscence, The Suicide Squad, The United States vs. Billie Holiday
Director: Simon Baker (Red Rocket)
Actors: Richard Ayoade (The Souvenir: Part II), Nicolas Cage (Pig), Jasna Djuricic (Quo Vadis, Aida?), Alex Hassell (The Tragedy of Macbeth), Riley Keough (Zola), Martha Plimpton (Mass), Renate Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World), Simon Rex (Red Rocket)
Ensemble: The Humans
Music: The Mitchells vs. the Machines
Cinematography: The Tragedy of Macbeth
Debut director: Emma Seligman (Shiva Baby)
Breakthrough performance: Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza)
J.G. Ballard Award for Homicidal Automotive Eroticism: Titane
