Best of 2021
A Mid-Decade Check-In on the State of Cinema - Part II
Ten of my Favorite Films from 2021
In 2021, President Trump incited a violent insurrection to prevent the peaceful transfer of power; Joe Biden was inaugurated as president; COVID vaccines became accessible; the United States withdrew from Afghanistan in calamitous fashion; winter storms shut down the Texas power grid, a heat dome cooked the pacific northwest, and Hurricane Ida battered the southeast; Derek Chauvin was found guilty for the murder of George Floyd but Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of murdering two people “in self-defense”1; Oprah interviewed Meghan and Harry; Brittany Spears was set free; and ten more great movies came out.
10. West Side Story
In my review of Wicked: Part One, I argued that the movie-musical genre’s sensibilities were incompatible with notions of realism a la Tom Hooper. There are, of course, exceptions, and Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story is among them. It’s the classic story fashioned from scrappier material.
In West Side Story (1961), streetfights unfolded with the twirling grace of trained ballet dancers. Their choreography is undeniably impressive, but the fluidity of their movement makes the violence feel far less visceral, so violent conflict at the film’s center leaves less of an impact.
Speilberg’s remake is a more rugged retelling of the clash between The Sharks and The Jets and the forbidden love that blooms amid the furious feud. The less graceful staging of violence also more effectively problematizes the racism at the center of the gang conflict, a dynamic the original film presents uncritically, as though it's simply a fact of life, which undermines the senselessness of the story’s tragedy.
In both style and substance, Speilberg’s West Side Story is one of the few remakes whose existence is warranted, reconfiguring a cinematic classic for a new generation by tempering some of the more effete sensibilities of the 1961 original.
9. Spencer
Following Jackie (2016), director Pablo Larraín travels across the pond to find another tragic feminine figure in political and public life. Spencer tells the story of Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart), who attends the royal family’s holiday gathering in the winter of 1991. With her husband, Prince Charles, embroiled in a cheating scandal, Diana considers divorce in a gilded lion's den filled with contemptuous royals whose menace simmers under their couth facade.
While Jackie was quite good, the film and its titular character sought to maintain distance. Jackie Kennedy’s remoteness was of her own making. The same cannot be said for Diana in Spencer, as Diana seeks freedom and autonomy from a dysfunctional family intent on punishing her for her husband’s misdeeds. In that regard, Spencer allows us to get closer to its subject, deeply feel her anguish, and ultimately cultivate more empathy.
Spencer is harrowing in interesting and unexpected ways. Jonny Greenwood’s score cultivates a deep unease that pervades the film, transforming an opulent holiday with royalty into a downright nightmare.
8. Nightmare Alley
Guillermo Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley is a stirring reimagining of William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel of the same name, first adapted for the screen in 1947. Situated within the neo-noir subgenre, Del Toro’s take on the story is decidedly contemporary as it seeks to deconstruct the genre framework it operates within.
The noir genre is known for the femme fatale archetype, an alluring woman whose cunning sexual wiles and manipulative nature lead to the moral ruin of the masculine protagonist. In Del Toro’s Nightmare Alley, the noir genre's black-and-white morality is swirled into a muddled gray of systemic exploitation and abuse in service of personal advancement. Nightmare Alley’s road to ruin is tragic and disturbing, defying and deconstructing generic expectations at nearly every turn.
7. C’mon C’mon
Anyone who follows Acquired Tastes knows that I don’t shut the fuck up about Mike Mill’s sophomore feature, 20th Century Women. C’mon C’mon, Mill’s third film, continues his intergenerational exploration of “the American family” on an individual and collective level with his oeuvre’s signature brand of introspective serenity.
At the center of the film is Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix), an uncle called to care for his estranged sister’s son, Jesse (Woody Norman), while his mother attends to a crisis within the family. Johnny attempts to reconcile his avuncular responsibilities with a professional project in which he interviews children nationwide. In his newfound role as a caretaker, he forms an intimate bond with his esoteric nephew.
Johnny’s relationship with Jesse and his attempts to understand the boy he barely knows is paralleled by numerous interviews with real children who share their experiences and outlook on life. Via Johnny’s work as a radio journalist, C’mon C’mon renders a fascinating portrait of an open-hearted man trying to understand a generation of young humans as they actively work to understand the world they’ve been born into, a complex tapestry of wonder, hope, fear, and despair.
6. The Tragedy of Macbeth
Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is not a contemporary reimagining of the source material. Enemies of The Bard and his writings, be warned. However, viewers willing to battle with The Bard’s prose will be delighted to find that Coen puts his spin on the story of Macbeth via his stark, striking black-and-white cinematography and inspired casting choices.
Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand give captivating performances as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. However, Kathryn Hunter’s performance as The Witches steals the show, delivering grim portents with stunning dramatic gravitas and a grotesque physicality that is downright unforgettable.
5. Dune: Part One
Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, a 1965 science fiction novel whose sprawling complexities were thought unadaptable for the silver screen, is a monumental cinematic achievement. It is an epic in the truest sense of the word, harnessing the power of contemporary filmmaking tools and industry experts to do the impossible.2
Dune: Part One begins the story of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), heir to Duke Ledo Atreades (Oscar Issac), as they are ordered by the galactic emperor to abandon Caladan, their oceanic homeworld, to become feudal overseers of the desert planet Arrakis, known to the native Fremen as “Dune.”
House Harkonnen, known for their grotesque brutality, has failed to quell Fremen’s desert rebellions, which have hindered the extraction of “spice.” Spice, a psychedelic drug native only to Arrakis, is crucial to astral navigation and facilitates all intergalactic commerce, and so “he who controls spice controls the universe.”
As the noble House Atreides is ordered to displace its archrival House Harkonnen as Arrakis’ overseers, they are plunged into a complex web of intergalactic power structures vying for political, economic, intellectual, and spiritual dominance.
For the uninitiated, Dune may seem daunting because, well, it is. To put it in the simplest terms, it’s Game of Thrones in space. It’s Star Wars, but with substance.3
Numerous moving pieces are at play as Villeneuve sets the stage for the epic culmination of Dune: Part Two (2024). In that regard, Dune: Part One has the unenviable task of introducing and positioning numerous factions: their leaders, goals, and allegiances. Yet Dune: Part One sets about the task with aplomb, and viewers need only trust that Villeneuve’s film won’t leave you in the lurch.
So when Reverend Mother Superior Gaius Helen Mohiam of the Bene Gesserit subjects Paul to the Gom Jabbar to see if he might be Kwisatz Haderach, it’s okay if you don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. Let the confusion wash over you and trust in the process. In time, all will be revealed.
4. The Green Knight
David Lowrey’s The Green Knight tells the tale of Sir Gawain (Dev Patel), a nephew of King Authur of no renown. Never having brushed up against death, Gawain has no tales of valor to tell and is the laughingstock of his fellow knights.
At an Arthurian feast, the round table is visited by the mythical Green Knight. Any man who lands a blow will win the Green Knight’s axe but must suffer the same blow at the hands of the Green Knight in one year's time. Seizing the opportunity to become a man of legend, Gawain decapitates the Green Knight.
For one year, Gawain revels in his newfound renown as the subject of legend. However, as the seasons change, the untested knight fears the second half of the bargain. Faced with the prospect of his own mortality, Sir Gawain sets out on a quest to stop the inevitable in a cinematically poetic and narratively episodic parable of medieval fantasy.
3. Judas and the Black Messiah
Released in the wake of public protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah tells the true story of the American government’s conspiracy to destroy an organization fighting for Black liberation from state-sanctioned violence by any means necessary.
Like so many Americans, William O'Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) wants nice things. So when a certain sports car catches his eye, like so many Americans, he seizes an opportunity to take what he wants. Except O’Neal is a black man in the year 1968. So, when the police catch him, he makes a deal to become an FBI informant and infiltrate the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in exchange for his freedom.
The Black Panther Party, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), protects and serves their community in ways that Chicago’s white police department refuses. For their willingness to use force to protect their neighborhoods from police harassment, the Black Panthers are characterized as terrorists.
While embedded within the Black Panther Party, O’Neil realizes the extent to which he is complicit in his own oppression. As he becomes increasingly entwined in an organization crusading for collective justice, his selfish deal with the (white) devil, predicated upon the American virtue of individualism, portends a clash between the purported values of American society and their dissonance with historical reality.
Judas and the Black Messiah is a tense, timely, and thought-provoking thriller that interrogates the ways we are individually complicit in perpetuating collective oppression by power structures defined by race and driven by capitalism.
2. Inside
Bo Burnham’s Inside captures the maddening isolation of pandemic lockdowns in a flooring artistic project that cements Bo Burnham as one of the most brilliant contemporary comic minds and a master of cinematic form.
After his 2016 stand-up special Make Happy, Bo Burnham quit comedy. His relationship with the audience, always defined by contemptuous irony, had begun taking a personal toll. In what was to be his swan song, Burham takes a musical sledgehammer to the edifice of stand-up comedy, tearing down the medium through which he rose to success.
It was a shame to see him go, but as he explains so poignantly in “Can’t Handle This (Kanye Rant),” he cannot resolve the tension between an obligation to entertain and the desire to remain true to himself. He ends a nearly six-minute musical rant about Pringle cans and burritos by veering into an examination of the tortuous dynamic of simultaneously needing and fearing an audience.
With scathing vulnerability, he exposes his untenable circumstances, telling the audience to their faces:
Look at them; they're just staring at me, like "Come and watch the skinny kid with the steadily declining mental health And laugh as he attempts to give you what he cannot give himself"
He admits he “can’t handle this right now” and leaves the stage to write on Sesame Street, hoping that writing music for children will soothe his weary soul.
Five years later, the world has been engulfed by disease, death, and tragedy. As the world stopped and life as we knew it felt forever changed, Bo Burnham returned to comedy to cope with his decidedly unsoothed soul.
Inside, a one-man show set entirely in his backyard shed, is an artistic renaissance for Bunham. Acting as the writer, director, cinematographer, performer, editor, and audio engineer, Inside is a stunning display of creativity as a therapeutic coping mechanism, channeling despair and rage into art that is as deeply personal as it is widely resonant. It’s also a brilliant exercise in deception, as Burham performs an indisputably authentic mental breakdown whose presentation is meticulously contrived, a feat only achievable by masters of their craft.
1. The Worst Person in the World
Joachim Trier’s film centers on Julie (Renate Reinsve), a woman nearing her thirties who isn’t quite sure what she wants to do in life. The details of her journey are singular to her experience, but the uncertainty at her character’s core is eminently relatable.
Told in twelve chapters, with a prologue and epilogue, The Worst Person in the World has a novelistic sensibility that rarely comports with cinematic storytelling but works wonderfully in Trier’s film.
The Worst Person in the World delves into the agonies and ecstasies of intimacy in a profoundly human fashion. It exudes empathy for all its characters, neutralizing the reflexive judgment typically heaped upon characters who, because of their personal flaws, inadvertently hurt those they love in ways that cut deep.
Dejection and disappointment are part of the tapestry of life that Julie is still weaving. She must fashion it to her own satisfaction and no one else's. Doing so doesn’t make her the worst person in the world, even if she disappoints people in the process. Julie is not a malicious person; she is just a person who is messy and conflicted as she tries her best to find genuine contentment, whatever that may look like.
Did I leave your favorite 2021 film off the list? Let me know in the comments!
What cinematic delights await us in 2022? Be sure to return for the next installment of Acquired Tastes’ Mid-Decade Check-In on the State of Cinema to find out.
Until then, happy holidays, my fellow Film Freaks.
via the “they’re coming right for us” legal doctrine of “self-defense.”
While Villeneuve was not the first to adapt Herbert’s novel, he was the first to do it justice. Previous efforts included Jodorosky’s Dune, “the greatest film never made,” a 1984 adaption by David Lynch (who is embarrassed by the project to this day), and a 2000 television miniseries for the SyFy network that, admittedly, I have not seen.
Star Wars might’ve had substance if The Last Jedi’s (2017) divergence from canonical dogma wasn’t met with hordes of “superfans” pissing and shitting and crying about Star Wars exploring a different, more interesting narrative and thematic direction. Alas, The Rise of Skywalker (2019) is the shiny, vapid schlock that the “galaxy far, far away” ultimately deserves.