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20 Best Movies of 2021

A soul-music time capsule, a funky 1970s rom-com, a sci-fi classic blockbuster and the only sequel we really needed — our highlights of a wild, weird moviegoing year

Photo Illustration by @photoeditorjoe. Images in Illustration: Searchlight Films, A24 Films; Warner Bros.; Utopia

2021 started out as the year that everything was supposed to go back to “normal” regarding the movies, with theatres reopening and the pandemic receding into the background and a deluge of delayed blockbusters filling the multiplexes. Let’s say we were… a little optimistic in terms of things going according to that plan. Yes, the art form is still in the midst of an existential crisis, with the theatrical experience in peril and the lines about what is or isn’t “cinema” becoming blurrier than streaming with a bad Wi-Fi connection. (Movies: now more [like watching TV] than ever!) But the following films — running the gamut from a three-hour epic to a 30-minute monologue, a throwback noir to next-gen animation, music documentaries to auteur memory pieces — reminded us why we keep obsessing over movies no matter what size the screen is.

From Rolling Stone US

1

‘Drive My Car’

Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Happy Hour) returns with yet another marathon-length masterpiece — a three-hour-plus adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story about a theater director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) staging an international, multilingual production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. The gentleman has a storied history with the play as an actor, as well as a connection to one of the cast: a tempestuous, pretty-boy television star (Masaki Okada) who once worked with the director’s late wife. He’s also been reluctantly assigned a driver by his patrons, a young woman (Tôko Miura) with her own crosses to bear. (Between this and his exquisite anthology movie/Berlin Film Festival award-winner Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Hamaguchi has had one hell of a stellar year.) The long scenes of actors poring through a dramatic text, and how the dynamics of the work began to reflect on the dynamics of its interpreters, initially brings to mind a less paranoid version of a Jacques Rivette movie. But Hamaguchi’s take on art, life, loss, healing and forgiveness is its own beast, and one of the richest, most rewarding examples of how to turn simple human interactions into compelling cinema.