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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

4

‘The Viewing Booth’

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz had an idea: Put out an open call to Jewish-American university students, have them view a variety of news clips regarding interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian citizens (a situation which he knew about firsthand) and interview them about their thoughts on what they see. He’d document the results on film. One participant in particular, a young woman named Maia Levy, fascinates him; their interactions range from conversational to combative. And as we watch him watch her watching these snippets on the Occupation, all of which range from highly partisan to outright propaganda, the entire notion of whether our belief systems can be changed, or are merely reinforced by the information we receive, is put through the proverbial ringer. What starts as a social experiment becomes something much deeper, and by the end of Alexandrowicz’s extraordinary buffet for thought, you realize this documentary is only partially about Israel. It’s about seeing freedom fighters versus insurrectionists, a leader versus a con man, a plague versus a hoax. It’s about arguing over whose lives matter. It’s about the culture divide and the reality gap that’s quickly turning into a collective abyss that we’re all staring down into. (You can check out the movie here.)

3

‘Beginning’

It opens with a nine-minute shot of a church service interrupted by a firebombing — still the most unsettling, violently shocking screen image we saw in 2021 — and ends with an elliptical act of retribution straight outta the Bible. In between those two jaw-dropping sequences is one of the most audacious debuts in eons, courtesy of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. Our heroine, Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili), is a preacher’s wife and part of a Jehovah’s Witness congregation that resides at the base of the Caucasus Mountains. A detective (Kakha Kintsurashvili) from the big city who’s arrived to investigate this act of religious persecution feels that he has the right to commit crimes of his own. And from there, Kulumbegashvili slowly, deceptively sets the stage for a thriller that hides its faith, hope, and desire to smite the wicked behind an austere, rigorously formalist style of filmmaking. Pat close attention to the parable delivered in the first scene. By the time you find yourself watching that final moment unfold, you’ll realize how the movie has brought everything full circle — and that you’ve just seen the work of an artist who’s only begun to show us what she can do.

2

‘The Human Voice’

Pedro Almodóvar released a feature this year, Parallel Mothers, that deftly combines a Sirkian maternal drama with a wallop of an indictment about Spain’s inability to reckon with its past. Yet it’s his short take on Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue, in which a woman goes from grief-stricken to revenge-seeking, that’s stuck with us ever since we saw this back in March, and what he and Tilda Swinton accomplish with a few sets, some showstopping gowns, an axe and a lighter is nothing short of miraculous. The Scottish actor’s anything-goes arthouse sensibility fits her auteur’s vision of glamor and madness like a hand in a Gucci glove, and the duo manage to cram more humor, tension, drama, camp and lushness into 30 minutes than most films do in 90. It’s like mainlining 10cc’s of pure, uncut cinematic bliss. We stand a legend x 2.

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.