Top 20 Movies of 2021

...So first off, apologies for how long this took. It's mid-February, that's inexcusably late for a Best of 2021 list. But allow me to give my excuses. 2021 started on a hopeful note that we had licked this Coronavirus thing, only it end on the worst spike of infections ever in my area. Omicron could not have happened at a worse time either. It landed right in the red hot December prestige season. When the big Awards were out only in theaters, had to sit at home until the coast was clear. Numbers dropped down by the end of January, so I've been cramming these last two weeks.

Other than that inglorious finish, this 2021 was a very good year for movies. I have seen a grand total of 105 movies released last year. Of those, at least ninety were well worth the time, and only a handful I particularly regret. This was the best year at the movies of my entire life.

After 2020 put the entire industry hold, 2021 was this explosion of repressed energy. All those fantasies people had about a year-long party after the Pandemic, that never happened. However, it kinda happened at the theaters. Thanks to delays and schedule changes, 2021 felt like two years worth of filmmaking crammed into one. No week went by without something amazing to see either in theaters or on streaming.

2021 was an endless buffet where you could gorge yourself senseless - and I did. Therefore, this is a much longer list than I have ever done before. I could not fit all the movies I wanted to talk about into my traditional Top 15. I had to do a Top 20. And even then, I have another ten movies worth of Honorable Mentions that I discuss extensively as well. Then there's another thirty or so movies I've love to talk about that I have to cut for time. There's simply too much to 2021, it is a task that was beyond me. I do not recommend you read this entire list in one sitting.

And yet... with theaters open and movies coming out, important movies too, really fucking good movies, it hardly mattered. The main response I get to these lists from regular people I know is: "I've never heard of any of those movies". I can kick and scream and beg for people to care about the really cool stuff A24 is putting out or the adult dramas or foreign stuff. Great things could come out and have little impact outside a few online circles. Ticket sales have been declining since well before the Pandemic, and now you can feel it. Even with theaters open and a reasonable expectation of safety with vaccines, a lot of people did not come back. Big movies like The Suicide Squad did not do numbers. It would have made half a billion dollars easily a few years ago and was considered a kind of victory at less than $200 million. That terrifies me. If nobody is watching, what are we doing?

On the other hand, Spider-Man: No Way Home was an astronomical hit. That keeps the show going. It's a sign that people can still go to the movies in the massive horde-like numbers they did my entire life. However, it's also a bad sign. It's a sign that the interest is simply not there like it was before. If a movie can be successful, why are so few breaking out? Why does this medium feel so much smaller? Movies used to be the most important artform of them all, a true event like nothing else could be. And they are not anymore except for the rarest of circumstances.

No Way Home is a bad sign for another reason, that being that it isn't very good. I am a total hater on this front. There were much better blockbusters last year, even much better MCU movies. No Way Home is special yet by its nature it is not a sustainable enterprise. People saw it because of nostalgia for other movies that were twenty years old. We've been crying over the cycle of remakes and reboots for decades. With No Way Home, we're watching a star that's run out of hydrogen and forced to self-cannibalize to keep burning. Eventually, you'll exhaust all that nostalgia, and nobody will care about anything anymore. Movies might not slowly decline, but collapse.

Worse is the attitude that the big MCU movies seem to engender in people. There's also been stupid blockbuster movies and people who do not care what the critics think. There was a whole run of Transformers movies not long ago, and the critics hated those, and just nobody cared. The Spider-Man reaction to to criticism is a tribal conservatism. There's a violent reaction from many corners if you dare dislike something or simply question it. This is much worse in the gaming space where people have made a nasty sport of hating Kotaku for nearly a decade now, but it is everywhere now. This is the trend that disturbs me the most.

We can disagree on No Way Home, I hope we do, in fact. I'm glad to argue about movies for hours, I love movies. But when you're offended to a level of real aggression, you're not being just an asshole. You're effectively demanding that people stop thinking so hard about films. You actually do not want to talk about this thing, you simply want to worship it. You don't want to think about it, you want to surrender to it. When you can discuss a movie for its faults or merits, it is a living organism that still has an ecosystem in people's hearts. Once you seal it away into pure tribal points, it's dead. The fans killed Star Wars, not the critics.

Disney does not need you to defend them, and Spider-Man will never love you back. Sorry, Mickey Mouse isn't going to fuck you.

So maybe I'm talking to fewer people this year. Maybe I'm talking to nobody. It's always possible I'm the asshole. But I loved a lot of movies last year and I have frankly too much to say about too many of them. I want these movie to live and breath, I want this medium to thrive. The future is not particular positive, but the sky is also not falling. There are tons of great movies coming out right this second, and tons left to celebrate. So let's discuss the great year that was 2021.

Final note: In contrast to my video game list, where my definition of "2021" is as wide and diverse as the potential of human imagination, I am very strict about what counts as a 2021 movie. To be considered on this list, the movie must have been originally released in theaters, on TV, or on streaming within the calendar year 2021 Anno Domini in the United States of America. Therefore, a lot of movies that made critics' 2020 lists are here. Nomadland and Minari could win Best Picture here, who knows? Mamoru Hosoda's newest movie, Belle, which I saw last fall at the New York Film Festival, will need to wait until the 2022 List because it was not released until this January. That's the rules.

Honorable Mentions (Tier 2):

As I've said, there was just a ridiculous wealth of film glory last year, so to save everybody some time, here are effectively the Honorable Mentions to the Honorable Mentions list. I'd love to talk about them, but we have too much to cover. A lot of these really deserved more attention too, and I feel bad having to just list them like this. If you want to know more about any of these, contact me in the comments or on Twitter.

45. Wrath of Man, dir. Guy Ritchie

44. Licorice Pizza, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

43. Drive My Car, dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi

42. No Sudden Move, dir. Steven Soderbergh

41. The Vigil, dir. Keith Thomas

40. Caveat, dir. Damian Mc Carthy - Note: this was actually the most terrifying movie of 2021.

39. Flee, dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen

38. In the Earth, dir. Ben Wheatley

37. The World to Come, dir. Mona Fastvold

36. The Last Duel, dir. Ridley Scott

35. Those Who Wish Me Dead, dir. Taylor Sheridan

34. The Scary of Sixty-First, dir. Dasha Nekrasova

33. Benedetta, dir. Paul Verhoeven

32. The Power of the Dog, dir. Jane Campion

31. The Father, dir. Florian Zeller

Anyway, now for the actual Honorable Mentions. On their own, these ten movies could have made a perfectly serviceable Top 10 List. 2021 was a good year.

Honorable Mentions (Tier 1):

30. Zola, dir. Janicza Bravo

Zola is, as far as I know, the first movie in history based on a viral Twitter thread. However, this movie is not about social media or the fifteen seconds of viral fame the unlucky few can aspire to in this era. No, Zola is about trash. It is about wallowing in filth and corruption and stank. This is a road trip down to Tampa, with very little Florida sunshine. We aren't hitting the beach, we're cruising aimlessly in gritty motels, dingy strip clubs, and empty office parks during a long, confused night. There's artistry in this skanky vision: Taylour Paige and indie queen Riley Keough are excellent leads. Colman Domingo as the mysterious hanger-on, X is the scariest and most intense villain of 2021. And Janicza Bravo is a filmmaker to remember. Her work in Zola is a confident piece of Florida-sploitation, it belongs in the same conversation as trashy hits like Spring Breakers or Pain & Gain.

29. Nomadland, dir. Chloé Zhao

Nomadland is a beautiful movie with a quietly profound vision of America. It wants to depict a life on the margins, as far outside society as possible. Frances McDormand's Fern is a refugee of an economy that never truly recovered after 2008. Nomadland makes a compelling case that we actually never rebuilt the ruins, we just moved on and chose to build somewhere else. There's an already dead civilization that we ignore within our national borders. But Nomadland is also a movie that's often toothless. A lot of it takes place inside an Amazon shipping facility where Fern finds annual work. This movie treats that factory as an immovable fact of life that cannot be changed or even judged. It's sees Amazon as this permanent and eternal feature of the landscape, like the mountains that Fern explores on her time off. When really, Amazon will be just another ruin within a generation. The land will be eternal, capitalism will not.

28. The Suicide Squad, dir. James Gunn

The Suicide Squad opens with most of our favorite heroes from the first movie triumphantly landing on enemy shores. Joining them is beloved actor Michael Rooker, the apparently-beloved hot young comedian Pete Davidson, and a giant Weasel. Spoilers for the first ten minutes of this movie, but most of those characters are murdered immediately and ruthlessly. From there on, you know The Suicide Squad is a movie that bites - with shark teeth, to be specific. We have a superhero comedy where people are torn to pieces, set on fire, stabbed, and mind controlled by a giant alien starfish. Only James Gunn can take something so brutal and somehow make so sweet and wonderful. Any character can die at any time, but you'll always be sad to see them leave this twisted little family of mutants, psychopaths, and true heroes.

27. Lamb, dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson

Lamb is the kind of movie you see to brag about. "Oh, you think you've seen weird shit? You've seen nothing. Let me tell you about this fucking sheep movie." It's an Icelandic family drama that is not quite a horror film. It is never scary, it's more quietly disturbing and inexplicable. Lamb keeps its cards very close to its chest, it really does not want you to know just what is going on. Rural farmers, Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snær Guðnason) find something in their sheep pen, and decide that they need to adopt it as their own, calling it "Ada". The camera goes out of its way to avoid answering just what Ada is or how much of this is happening is inside the farmers' heads. Just know, there is an Ada, it's an incredible creature, and she is the center of a truly bonkers movie. However, Valdimar Jóhannsson rejects making this film only a joke. He shoots Lamb with all the serious patient intensity of acclaimed dramas like The Power of the Dog or Drive My Car. I do not think this is deadpan delivery either. Irony gets left behind at a certain point with Lamb, and it simply becomes a great drama about a most usual family.

26. PG: Psycho Goreman, dir. Steven Kostanski

In contrast to Lamb, Psycho Goreman will never for a second play like a serious movie. This is an over-the-top horror comedy with buckets of gore. It would laugh at you if you ascribed it further ambitions. Psycho Goreman features cameo voice acting from Rich Evans from the Youtube channel, RedLetterMedia and Stuart Wellington from the podcast, The Flop House, two of my favorite shows that dig into schlock cinema. It dresses up its title character as Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park. The intentions are clear. Plot-wise, Psycho Goreman is virtually identical to the Cartoon Network show, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, only replace the Grim Reaper with an alien killing machine monster man. Same joke, but definitely not rated PG.  

Psycho Goreman is a bit more ambitious than its budget. At times certain effects just fail - one giant brain character leaves the movie early, probably because the costume was obviously falling apart on camera. But I like that they're trying for so much. PG is a big ridiculous movie full of death, musical montages, and "hunky boys". What more can you ask for?

25. Nine Days, dir. Edson Oda

Nine Days is the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope applied to the Pixar movie Soul. That's my very uncharitable read on the movie. If I could shake that notion from my head, I would rank this movie a lot higher. But I cannot, so No. 25 it is. 

In a small wooden cabin in the middle of a desert, Will (Winston Duke) watches a dozen or so lives played out on his many TVs. He's something between a guardian angel and a pre-mortal arbiter. Will chooses which souls get to be born, and which simply do not exist, then watches the results. After one of his humans dies in shocking circumstances, a grieving Will has to replace her, putting together job interviews for all the proto-people coming to visit. Nine Days is embarrassingly sincere about its mission statement, just overflowing with its need to celebrate life. It is achingly positive to the point of corniness. However, you have to respect a movie that can be this confident about its answers for the Big Questions. (Even if, by the end, I am 100% sure that Will chose wrong.)

24. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, dir. Josh Greenbaum

Is Comedy dead? When I think of Comedies, I think specifically of a kind of raunchy, irreverent movie whose primary goal is laughter, did that disappear? Now, film comedies are either superhero films first or children's cartoons or heavy dark humor like Zola. These days, a movie that just wants to make adults and teenagers laugh has no audience. And indeed, Barb and Star should have been a huge hit. I truly cannot understand how this movie was not bigger. I do not know what happened. Streaming or not, covid or not, Barb and Star is too damn funny to have been missed. And everybody missed it.

Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo play Barb and Star, a pair of chirpy middle-aged woman that are mom-core to levels that even God has never seen. During a vacation to Florida, they end up fighting a supervillain out to conquer the world, as one does. Jamie Dornan, of all actors, turns out to have real comic chops as a henchman himbo, a him-henchbo. Dornan works great as the romantic lead. Barb and Star is a joke on bright sunny vacations with Jimmy Buffett music and ridiculously huge tropical drinks. Yet it also knows how much fun those vacations are. We we all deserve to drink and relax sometimes, even lame white moms.

23. Annette, dir. Leos Carax

A lot of musicals came out in 2021, but only one movie was an opera. That opera was the deliciously strange, Annette, which is also the only musical that features a puppet as its title character. As a musical, Annette has very few bangers in the soundtrack. To use the parlance of our times, the music rarely "slaps", besides the barnburner of an opener, "So May We Start", which fucking rules. Instead this is a bitter drama about a famous power couple playing out a dramatic murder-revenge story. Adam Driver, (who plays the same role in every movie now as your worst boyfriend) plays Henry McHenry, a Bo Burnham pastiche whose work is abusively self-obsessed. Meanwhile, his wife, Ann (Marion Cotillard) is a beloved opera star, and increasingly the subject of her husband's toxic humor. This relationship is bad in ways that we usually only see in Charlie Kaufman movies. Sadly their tiny, beautiful puppet daughter is trapped in the middle. I love little Annette. More movies need puppets playing major roles.

22. Pig, dir. Michael Sarnoski

Nic Cage's late-career renaissance might end up poisoned by the irony of his persona. His fanbase now is largely built on 1) his incredible talent for ham, and 2) his bizarre career arc which took him from respected A-lister to starring in Z-grade dogshit like Left Behind in under a decade. That's not a great foundation, he's still a punchline of stunt-casting in many movies, even good movies. Pig is one of those rare movies where he's simply fantastic in it. Despite the title, Cage is not working in a hammy way. He's putting in a very subtle performance as Robin, a hermit ex-chef looking for his beloved pet. 

A lot of critics have compared Pig to the John Wick movies and commend the film for pulling off a magic trick of being a revenge action film without action or revenge. I believe even without that context and certainly without Cage's career baggage, this is just a very good movie. Violence or not, Pig is about a love for an animal, yes, but also a love for cooking, a love for community, and how all those forms of honest work towards positive change can make a difference. You can confront cynicism and greed with sincerity and compassion.

21. CODA, dir. Sian Heder

I just really like these people. 

CODA is a coming-of-age story about a teenage girl who is the child of deaf adults. Last year's A Sound of Metal did a lot to represent the deaf community and its strong systems of support in film. Personally, I do not believe in CODA's authenticity as much. I have read some criticism of it from the deaf community. This is why it ranks only in Honorable Mentions, it lost points for that. 

However, this is a smart movie that wants to be clear that the divisions happening in its central family are just the usual pains of a child outgrowing her parents, not a dramatic split between the hearing and the deaf. Sure, our main character, Ruby (Emilia Jones) wants to pursue singing, which divides her from her parents another way. CODA manages to overcome this split, it depicts Ruby sharing her talent with her family in a gorgeous scene that is going to be difficult to watch with dry eyes. More importantly though, Ruby's family are just the best people. They're too horny, they're too dirty, they're wonderfully imperfect, but they're here for each other. None of this is an exploitation look at a working class family with disabilities. If anything, they're living dream lives.

The Final Twenty:

Okay, time for the main event, The Top 20 Movies of 2021:

20. Malignant, dir. James Wan

James Wan has always been a brilliant horror director. However, I have always felt him to be a bit too slick, too efficient. He's got the chops, he can craft a jump scare better than anybody else in the business. Yet we find him making adequate crowd-pleasing movies like The Conjuring, or he's is outright slumming it in Aquaman. There's nothing wrong with those movie. I liked them both. But, this is horror. Shouldn't horror not be so safe? You were one of the guys behind Saw, James, and saws have a lot of sharp edges, what happened to edge?

Malignant feels like more of a practical joke in concept than Lamb or Psycho Goreman. The title sets you up for another one of these haunted house films made for general audiences, like Insidious or Sinister. The opening of the movie is steeped in the imagery of horror for the basic bitches (not that there's anything wrong with that). Our heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis) lives in a creepy old house full of antiques for no reason that is ever explained. The sets are also set in a building that is twice as wide as the exteriors, it's an obvious error. The anachronistic illogical house only exists as part of the gag. It's your first hint that this not going where you think. Yeah that spooky ghost is creepy, but is it a ghost? Are you sure that's what we are doing?

Between the formulaic ghost movie skin, we keeping getting hints of the twisted bones beneath. There's an over-the-top opening in the most angular and clearly evil hospital this side of the 1999 House on Haunted Hill. Wan or his sound editor made the inspired choice to mix the Pixies into the soundtrack right after a cheesy dramatic revelation. There is a moment, however, when Malignant becomes glorious. That's in the jail scene where Malignant begins snapping its bones, cracking open its skin, and revealing its true schlock goals. I hope you're ready for comes next.

This is no You Should Have Left, this is closer to the work of Frank Henenlotter. It's the kind of preposterous sleaze that Charles Band filled video store shelves with back in the 1990s. The result is pure camp. Far from generic, Malignant was the movie I was the most excited to share with people last year. Everybody should see it.

19. Cruella, dir. Craig Gillespie

I am not terribly proud about this. I wanted to be a more sophisticated person than the guy who put Cruella on his Best Of list. Unfortunately, I am a weak person, and I must be true to myself. Plus, coming up there's one movie of which I'm even more ashamed. I hate Disney's entire live action reboot thing. Their 2014 reinterpretation of Maleficent as a misunderstood anti-heroine did less than nothing for me. In theory, Cruella should be pure devil-like cruelty to me. It has embarrassing ideas, such as Cruella's mom being murdered by dalmatians. It also has the worst soundtrack of any film last year, with endless needle drops that never ceased to be irritating.

And yet... Cruella is great. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you. It's a better retread of 1960s and 70s London fashion than Edgar Wright's disappointing Last Night in Soho, with a far more biting punk edge in its costuming. Emma Stone as Cruella gets to wear the most incredible outfits in this movie. Her wardrobe is straight fire - quite literally on fire at one point. If she is not wearing a wig of a gorgeously rich maroon color, she's got a black and white mane neatly divided down the middle. This is a look. It is all the panache and camp of a Batman villain, but for once, we're celebrating the ham. Stone carries decorates her face with little smirk, pancake white make-up, and eyes that are even more haughty than her English accent. It all comes together into a grand pose. On this list, we stan a Queen.

Disney definitely intended some kind of queer baiting with Cruella. That comes with the token gay character, Artie (John McCrea), the roughly tenth "first" gay Disney character. McCrea plays the role well, despite everything. This is cynical pandering and it sucks. Still, I think there's something here with Cruella and its camp narrative. It is a fantasy of the downtrodden and misunderstood kids getting to grow up into vibrant swans of trangressive beauty. 

I wish the movie had more edge to it. Cruella is another example of Disney getting so close to that queer line without going there, much like Frozen 2. However, I cannot deny the results are absolutely fabulous. I love watching Emma Stone battle a Devil Wears Prada-esque villainous Emma Thompson on the runway. Their opposition is the most electric rivalry of 2021.

18. Luca, dir. Enrico Casarosa

Continuing on this Disney theme, I believe one of their great weaknesses as a brand is authenticity. I'll never buy them as a major force pushing for queer narratives, I'll never buy them pushing for anything really. I'll note, though, that Disney is actually working harder than studios most at diversity. In 2021 they released major blockbusters based around Southeast Asian families (Raya and the Last Dragon), Columbian families (Encanto), and Chinese families (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings). They seem more than capable of getting the surface details right, you'll see lemongrass in Raya and Arepas con Queso in Encanto. I do not doubt the credentials of their diverse staff and diverse voices that Disney is employing, and yet... it's all just the same formula. Shang-Chi is merely a "good one of those" when it comes to MCU movies, Raya is a standard fantasy plot, and Encanto is hardly a 100 Years' of Solitude-level commentary on the struggle of South America in particular. Are you really saying anything meaningful about diversity if all you're going to do is tell the same kinds of stories but with different foods for breakfast?

Luca is arguably the least authentic, the closest to being just a Pavilion at Epcot. However, it is a movie whose artistic inspiration feels wildly diverged from any standard Disney fair. Director Enrico Casarosa (who grew up in this Italian Rivera setting) is not pasting his background onto a Disney template, he has other templates in mind. Luca is set in a coastline town that is clearly inspired heavily by Hayao Miyazaki's Porco Rosso, Casarosa even named it "Portorosso". According to interviews, there's a lot of Fellini inspiration as well, but what I really see is strong influence from stop-motion. 

This is a CG animated film that wants to have the texture and bounce of something like Aardman or Laika. Laika feels like a huge influence in the movie's comedy style, as well. Luca fits closely with things like The Boxtrolls in how it seems to really love weirdness and difference. It has a fantasy gimmick in how it depicts a division between fish-people and land people. Luca is arguing that maybe The Shadow over Innsbrook should not have been a horror tale, outright reversing the racist bullshit of H.P. Lovecraft. 

But more importantly, this is a charming story of little boys being boys. This is a very summery, very sweet story of childhood. A lot of Dudes Rock energy. The relationship between the timid title character, Luca and his slightly older friend Alberto is a great sibling dynamic. Bigger kids know everything to their smaller peers. Luca so badly wants to impress Alberto, while Alberto is playing a worldly role trying to impress Luca. (Can't say I personally buy the queer reading of this movie, but certainly it is not unwelcome.) They get to fuck around and do stupid jumps, dream about owning a Vespa, and break into the human world. Luca is all sweetness. It's slight, but I really liked it.

17. The Night House, dir. David Bruckner

When I went to see The Night House in August, my local theater did not turn on the AC in my auditorium. I sat through the trailers, uncomfortable and sweating. That problem went away soon enough though. There is a jump scare in this movie that might honestly be the best one I've ever seen, an all-timer. Typically there's a very standard rhythm for the jump scare: rising and falling tension, with a spike in the middle that is often the "fake-out" right before the real one. This jump scare came out of nowhere. It burst out right in a moment of safety and comfort in the movie, tearing right open what seemed like a promise of romance into horror. Suddenly, we drove into total disorienting danger. My bones went cold when I saw that happen. I was not hot again for the rest of the show. I wish I had brought a jacket.

Rebecca Hall puts on easily the best horror performance of the year in The Night House. This is a movie about grief and mourning, which every person has to suffer through in their own way. Our protagonist, Beth's method of mourning is a caustic attempt to maintain normalcy. She returns to work at her school, she goes out with friends, and she stays in the house she shared with her recently deceased husband. Beth's reaction to both the reasonable worries of her friends and the spooky spirits who have taken over her life is a blithe sarcasm. She admits tragedy only as a blunt instrument to emotionally bludgeon an obnoxious parent. Otherwise, it's all an air of indifference, even disbelief that anybody might believe her to be in pain. It's all, of course, denial, and the painful truth seeps out in a dozen different ways, including, of course, the dark evil that her husband left behind.

As haunted houses go, The Night House is not at all the standard template. This is not the inexplicable Victorian home in Malignant. This house is a new spacious dream home on a lakeside. It's modern but not obnoxiously ultra-modern. It looks like a home, not a white box with glass walls. And yet, there's darkness and secrets hidden deep inside this place. Maybe blueprints as horror does not work for everybody, but for me, nothing is scarier than Beth flipping through her husband's notes and seeing twisted geometries and optical illusions. This is another unsettling element in a movie full of reflections, maybe even alternate universes. Beth's life did not come undone by her husband's death, it was already a thin lie on top of a terrible history.

16. The Tragedy of Macbeth, dir. Joel (w/o Ethan) Coen

We come to the first cover song on the playlist. There are dozens of adaptations of Macbeth, including a very well-received Justin Kurzel version that released what feels like only a couple of years ago. (Time is growing strange in late-capitalism, turns out Kurzel's Macbeth is somehow seven years old.) This newest English adaptation is not even the only Macbeth that got released last year. There were two different Indian films, Joji and Mandaar, filmed in the Malayalam and Bengali languages respectively based on Shakespeare's play. Macbeth has been translated to medieval Japan, cocaine-fueled Eighties Miami, and a burger joint in Pennsylvania. Seemingly everybody has already done everything imaginable to this classic story. What else is there to add?

The Coen Brother (singular this time) creates a very stark, uncomfortably tight production. This is not a Coenesque Shakespeare, it is closer to Robert Eggers' The Lighthouse in terms of design. Where Kurzel's production went for the gritty realism of a war movie, Ethan Coen's movie is like an artsy black box theater show. It is all black and white, 4:3 aspect ratio, with intense German Expressionist sets of huge white walls of imposing shrillness. We never see full armies or battles. Instead, as if to reject the very notion of cinematic scale, Cohan stages the final conflict on a tiny bridge as a fight between just two guys. He has the English army played by a couple of extras walking down a thin set carrying branches. Fitting with modern stage practice, the casting is color-blind, even accent-blind. Denzel Washington as the tragic King Macbeth is not attempting to sound Scottish. He's a guy from New York interacting with Irish, English, and other American accents.

I mean, really, how could this Macbeth not be on here? You got Denzel, you got Frances McDormand, that's a show I'd buy tickets to. On Broadway or Apple TV+, that really can't fail! This what I call a motherfucking show!

What helps too is that this version also features some awesome horror elements. Stealing the movie even from Denzel is Kathryn Hunter's take on the Weird Sisters, the manipulative prophetesses who bring ruin to Scotland. This version casts them as but a single enigmatic figure, brilliantly turned into a trio by a double reflection in the water. This contortionist, voice changing demon reappears across the narrative, sometimes as an old man, sometimes as the Witches, possibly in league with a Scottish noble, Ross (Alex Hassell), a ruthless honorless man of even greater mystery. You got Gothic horror, "all our yesterdays", murders most foul. The Tragedy of Macbeth is the least surprising success of the year.

15. Shiva Baby, dir. Emma Seligman

I saw a horror movie the other day, The Vigil. I quite enjoyed it. I believe it is No. 40 or so in the Honorable Mentions list. The Vigil is about an Orthodox young man tasked with watching over a dead body all night as is Jewish tradition, and this goes very badly in terrifying ways. He's there, all alone, at night, there's weird noises. You know that fucking corpse is going to move at some point. Anyway, all the ghouls and demons of that movie are nowhere as terrifying as the Jewish funeral ritual at the center of Shiva Baby.

It is not easy being Jewish. There are a lot of people who expect a lot of you. "Why you are thirty-one and not married? No kids? You're still doing that writing junk? My friend's son is a doctor and he makes you look like a bum." Then they wonder why you don't call more often. A Shiva is a Jewish wake, more or less. Everybody crowds into the deceased's house for a very awkward afternoon of bagels, prayers, and forced conversation. It is the worst kind of pressure cooker of interaction with older relatives, usually going through that same awful sequence of questions. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) is an aimless young college student who finds herself trapped in a house with her parents, her sugar daddy boyfriend, his wife, her ex-girlfriend, and a lot of tension. This is the worst situation imaginable.

In theory, Shiva Baby is a comedy, at least that's the genre Wikipedia ascribes to it. The situation is comic, if only because this is so awkward that laughter is the only sane response our brains can manage. But this is all anxiety and claustrophobia. Director Emma Seligman shoots Shiva Baby like a psychological horror movie. Danielle is so disoriented and overwhelmed, she might as well be possessed by a Mazzik. This is not the only non-horror movie I have to talk about made in a horror fashion, we'll get to Spencer in a bit. Danielle's life is a series of awful mistakes and everybody wants an explanation, which she cannot even give to herself. The effect is intense, dizzying, and relentless. 

Shiva Baby does not become a real comedy until the very last scene, which is this beautiful exhale of catharsis. Interestingly, this laughter is generated by an even more claustrophobic, but at least hilarious situation. I won't spoil the moment, but it is a glorious scene of politeness and stubborn Dad energy gone wrong.

14. Red Rocket, dir. Sean Baker

There is a specter haunting Red Rocket - the specter of Trumpism. Set in the Galveston area in 2016, Donald is creeping at the margins of this story, appearing on TV, a looming threat for a new age of falsehood. If anything, I think the running Trump sideshow is a bit too obvious for this story. Critics would have compared the antics going on in Red Rocket to the Great Orange God of our Fraud Age anyway. He's still an easy punch bag if you're struggling to say something. Red Rocket does not need a single personification of fraud to make its point. Everything is fraud now. Today when our new AI cars cannot see stop signs, and the impending new revolution in tech is a pyramid scheme nobody understands, it is all bullshit and we kno wit. The lies are all too big to fail now.

Red Rocket is in discussion with our age of bullshit, but also, kind of inexact metaphor. Which is why I might tolerate its huckster antihero. He's not too big fail to fail, he's nothing but a loser trying to groom a teenager. (Speaking of, I heard a lot of uncomfortable discussion about the age gap in the relationship in Licorice Pizza, that's nothing compared to how problematic Red Rocket's story is.) Our star is Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), a self-professed porn star. At this point he's basically a drifter with empty pockets and no talents - but he still has a huge wang. Having burnt every bridge in LA, Mikey comes home to Texas to try to con his way through his last remaining marks, all people thoroughly familiar with and tired of his nonsense. His ex-wife and her mother let him stay with them, fully aware of who they're dealing with. They know better than to ask too many questions.

Red Rocket is not the most tasteful look at American poverty. Fitting our hero's profession, this is more than a bit of poverty porn. Lil, Mikey's mother-in-law is played by Brenda Deiss, a very weathered-looking woman who is clearly not a professional actor. The swath of destruction Mikey cleaves through this town is entertaining and often cringy in a fun way, however, it's also gross and exploitative. Worse though comes with Mikey's attempts to build a high school girl, Strawberry (Suzanna Son) into his next great star. Paradoxically, Suzanna Son is a star, I think she can be an incredible actress with a bright future, and she's radiant in this movie. Son can sing the shit out of an N'SYNC song. But she sings it entirely in the nude. I almost feel drawn into Mikey and Red Rocket's predation by admiring her.

At least though, there is justice in this movie where there is none in real life. Consequences still existed in 2016. If you've never seen a man with a huge prick run for his life, Red Rocket is the movie for you. Nobody tell me if that penis was real or a prosthetic. Maybe this makes me Mikey's newest mark, but I want to believe.

13. One Night in Miami..., dir. Regina King

Malcolm X looms so large in history that it is almost impossible to see him as a person, as a man. He's become something more like a demigod or saint, something beyond human. Even Spike Lee's dramatization of Malcolm X's life from 1992 was so reverent of the man and his work, that you still largely looked up at him in awe. Choosing Denzel Washington as your lead does not help either, he's always been a bit more than human. What I love about One Night in Miami... is that this version of Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) is just a guy. He's just a dude being a dude, with his buddies. You see in him uncertainty about his choices, a dorky excitment about his new camera, and a bitchy side.

One Night in Miami... is an adaptation of a stage play and you can tell immediately just by the film's structure. We have four characters locked in a room together. The drama is just watching their personalities clash. Each of these four are some of the most extraordinary people of the entire 20th century. We have Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke, the King of Soul, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, the greatest boxer of all time, and Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, the greatest football player of all time, and of course, Malcolm X, the most controversial and maybe the most important of them all. The night Clay wins the World Heavyweight Championship, he invites his buddies to X's motel room. They expect a party but instead find only ice cream and a difficult discussion of all their futures.

These four people were immensely important to the civil rights movement and, therefore, the entire course of American history. We realize all four of these men are about to embark on new paths in their lives and careers. Two of them would be dead in under a year, both murdered in suspicious circumstances, not that the characters know this in the film. For now it's mostly a battle between X and Cooke, each one resenting the other for their militancy or lack thereof. Few movies can use Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind" as an earth-shattering revelation, but One Night in Miami... can. The argument never really gets solved in a cleanly satisfying way, but something has shifted. 

Watching Odom Jr. sing "A Change is Gonna Come" in the finale had me in tears. I cannot quite describe why.

12. Zack Snyder's Justice League, dir. Zack Snyder

Fuck me, why did this have to be good? I was so ready for the four-hour rework of Justice League to be a total disaster, a vanity project full of hundreds of gallons of hot air bursting limply like a prolonged fart. Instead this was fantastic. I hate to say it, but this was a triumph. The true sequel to Batman v Superman, one of the worst movies I've ever reviewed, was a fantastic superhero movie. I hate this so much. I hate being here, living in this reality. My only solace is that Snyder's next movie, Army of the Dead was completely terrible , so at least I don't need to eat an entire bakery's worth of humble pie.

In the fall, the MCU attempted a movie with actual scale and artistry, directed by somebody who  knows their way around a camera. That was Eternals by Chloé Zhao, apparently stunning her boss, Kevin Feige, because she knew how to shoot a scene outside of a green studio. Eternals had a terrible reception, which I thought was unfair. But I'll also admit the movie was clearly inadequate next to the competition, Justice League. Even after my exhaustive review, where the Snyder Cut's immense geologic time scale length somehow defeated me into admiring it, I was not aware how much I actually loved this movie. Eternals woke me up.

I'll admit it, finally. Justice League was a brilliantly-crafted blockbuster. The 4:3 worked. We needed all four of those hours. I want to see this movie again, in theaters, and feel the full force of Snyder's mythological grandeur. He has been trying to turn the DC universe into this epic poem of inhuman dieties clashing at vast scale. Finally in this recut, he achieved it. I am awed.

The Snyder Cut is bloated, ridiculous, and more than a little bit pretentious. It is also a masterpiece. Even the bonkers parts of this movie, I'm left admiring them. You have Cyborg (Ray Fisher) hacking the entire planet, with CG bulls and bears battling in his mind. It takes Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) about five minutes to look at a painting. The movie ends with a promise of a post-apocalyptic future with Mad Max Batman (Ben Affleck) teaming up with the despised Jared Leto Joker. I never thought I wanted to see Snyder's full depraved vision. Now I do. I'm fully Jokerfied now, bring it. Release the Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad while we're at it. Let's see Cronenberg's full Dune.

11. Nightmare Alley, dir. Guillermo del Toro

Nightmare Alley is not a horror movie. If you're expecting spooky ghosts and/or little grubby del Toro goblins, you will be disappointed. Instead this is a vast, beautiful tragedy of neo-noir. Horrible things do happen in this flop remake of a 1947 flop original, but not horror. Guillermo del Toro gets very close to his gothic romance aesthetic from Crimson Peak. Though just when you think you might get to any etherial place of escapism, brutal violence cuts in the way. A horror movie would be better, it would be more fun. It would prove magic is real, which is what all these characters really want. However, there is no magic. We fade back to the mundane Earth, where terrible choices have led us to terrible places.

Structurally Nightmare Alley is two movies, which helps justify the 150 minute runtime. In the first half, Bradly Cooper's Stanton Carlisle is a vagabond who discovers he's a natural fit for the carney life. He's a handsome go-getter who attains a great talent for cold-reading. Stanton quickly rises through the ranks, reinventing himself as a clairvoyant, offering a fraudulent comfort to those in need of a touch of the supernatural. In the second act, Stanton has grown into a star with a John Edward-like medium show performed at the Copacabana in the big city. Enraptured by Lilith Ritter (Cate Blanchett), a mesmerizing psychiatrist and even stronger con artist than himself, Stanton is drawn into bigger and bigger frauds, until he takes one job too big and too risky.

If Nightmare Alley were to wear every one of its great actors as a medal on its chest, it would be more bespeckled in absurd finery than Georgy Zuckov's uniform. We have Bradley Cooper doing a career-best performance along with Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Willem Dafoe, Richard Jenkins, Ron Perlman, David Strathhairn, Tim Blake Nelson, Holt McCallany, and Rooney Mara, who is the weak point, sadly. Mara is given the least to do and it stands-out as insufficent, sadly. Some of these people have tiny roles, one scene, and most still knock it out of the park. And they're given such a handsome movie to work in too. Nightmare Alley has stunning art deco furniture in ravishing sets. Every part of it, even the grungy circus, is great craft on the screen.

Again, audiences showed no interest. Turns out putting on a huge stunning show with exquisite pieces on every level is not enough. (Sigh.)

10. West Side Story , dir. Steven Spielberg

Spielberg spent most of the 2010s being boring. And you know, that's fine, the man is a decade into being Medicare-eligible. When you get old, when you get rich and comfortable, and you get dull. He made a lot of tasteful dramas, the kind of safe prestige stuff ex-President Obama loves to put on his personal Best Of lists. Problem is, movies such as War Horse or Bridge of Spies are not exactly exciting. When Spielberg tried to show off some blockbuster muscle again, he made Ready Player One, a movie that made him seem more ancient and out-of-touch than his dusty collection of Tom Hanks antique-style movies. 

Then Spielberg stunned me by making West Side Story, an absolutely immaculate piece of filmmaking that is more incredible than anything he's touched since Minority Report.

West Side Story is so perfect that I struggle to even talk about it. What is there to add? We have one of the greatest directors of all time, taking one of the greatest musicals of all time, and putting on a fucking awesome show. It is not even as creative a cover as the Coen Brother version of Macbeth. Spielberg did not update the setting or the story all that much. Other than one character being reinterpreted as trans and a song handed to an elderly Rita Moreno, this is all played straight. If you're going this traditional with a classic, you cannot afford to miss a note, and Spielberg does not. Big Capital-C "Cinema", even in huge blockbusters, is hard to find these days. You want a properly glorious action extravaganza? Check out the Jets snapping and spinning across the streets with awesome crane shots. Spider-Man's web-slinging is nowhere near as exciting as Tony (Ansel Elgort) and Riff (Mike Faist) dancing around holes and tossing a gun to each other in the song "Cool".

Ansel Elgort is the one sour note, however. I still enjoy watching him in movies, but as an actor and nothing more. Let's not forget his assault allegations. He's also the one player in the ensemble who least seems to fit the part. The other Jets could be time travelers from the Eisenhower era, where their buddy is just Baby Driver again, with an accent that comes and goes. The other side of this Romeo & Juliet tale is also outshining the male lead. This West Side Story tries to give more energy to the Puerto Rican rival gang, the Sharks. Those actors are often even better. Spielberg includes several scenes of untranslated Spanish to establish Maria (Rachel Zegler)'s home life. The newest version of "America", of course, blows the house down. You have to see that, you just have to.

9. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba the Movie: Mugen Train, dir. Haruo Sotozaki

You might ask yourself: "wait a second, didn't he say Demon Slayer: The Movie was a 2020 film back during his Halloween reviews series?" To that I say: "Shhhhhh." It came to the US in 2021, I'm flexible when it comes to talking about cool movies.

Demon Slayer: The Movie is the best action flick of last year. Other than that first bus fight scene in Nobody and a few seconds of Shang-Chi, nothing in live action could compete with the anime action in Demon Slayer. This will not be our only anime feature on the list either. (If you know me at all, you probably have already have guessed what No. 1 will be.) Certainly no other blockbuster feature dared reach this level of melodrama. You just don't see Western superheroes all sobbing and hugging at the end of the movie, and we'd live in a better place if they could.

This is an adaptation of a popular manga series and anime. This movie is set right after Season 1. Later the studio, Ufotable, reedited this movie into seven episodes to start Season 2, which sure sounds like cynically filling airtime to me. Dragon Ball Super did that a lot too, and it was just as shameless. The question though is, do you need to be a fan of Demon Slayer to like or understand this movie? Yeah, it would help to have seen Season 1 first. This is definitely a movie that is not going to work very well on you if you're not versed in the rhythms of shonen anime. This movie introduces a major character as a weirdo who is very loud about how he eats, then expects him to be a central figure of the final tragic ending. Mugen Train, plot-wise, barely works in film form. The heroes all clearly solve the central problem, and then there's an inexplicable fourth act involving a new villain who comes out of nowhere. That's a side effect of shoving many chapters of comics into a two hour movie.

Still, as weird and as wobbly as that structure is, I respect it. I almost recommend you go to see the movie knowing nothing about the franchise, like I did.

The important thing though is that if its anime action you're after, Ufotable is the best in the business right now. They are masters of a certain kind of mixture of fantasy, horror, and high-speed combat. I strongly recommend people go back and revisit their Garden of Sinners series, it is awesome stuff. Demon Slayer is aimed a younger audience, so while there is body horror and child slavery and mind control, those themes are less brutal than they could have been. This is also a movie that does not shy away from the emotional arcs. Our hero is confronted by the ghosts of his dead siblings in a dream world, and that lands as a proper gut punch. Then he gets to fight vampire-like monsters with a sword with water elemental powers. You can have both tragic resonance and nonsense escapism in one movie, why not?

8. The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, dir. Wes Anderson

As a fan of Wes Anderson, I'm done apologizing. I think Wes Anderson is done apologizing too. His movies always get massive positive receptions, but there's always that backlash. People call these movies "twee", "fussy", and "cold". If you thought that The Grand Budapest Hotel was already too much up its own ass, than The French Dispatch is doing some kind of extra-dimensional non-euclidian spin around and around up its ass over and over to infinity. This is a far more intense blow of Anderson's tightly mannered, obsessively symmetrical designs. It is also a difficult movie to consume. The French Dispatch is not a singular story, but three different tales of Andersonian sarcastic, literary denseness.

Of all his movies, The French Dispatch is the most theatrical yet. Anderson is no longer just obsessed with clean geometry in his shots, he's now using miniatures and backdrops to create sharp divisions between his foregrounds, midgrounds, and backgrounds. If The French Dispatch does not yet look like a stage, he eventually pulls the backdrops out to reveal a stage play adaptation of the very story he's telling. Much like Grand Budapest Hotel, Anderson adds a disorienting depth of layers to all three of the stories. They're all articles within the final issue of the titular French Dispatch, a sophisticated New Yorker-esque publication based around the bluntly-named city of Ennui-sur-Blase, France. But each chapter cuts to the author years after the events, retelling their story. For example, the third story is told by Roebuck Wright (Jeffrey Wright), while on a television interview.

The writerly details of The French Dispatch happen to appeal to me a lot, as somebody who churns out thousands upon thousands of words on his day off. The magazine editor in the frame story, Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray) has one recurring piece of advice for his employees: 'Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose." I was the only person in the theater to laugh at that line, and I laughed at it every time. There's a lot of comedy in The French Dispatch, though its hidden in Anderson's deadpan energy. If you ever wanted a movie with a cartoon chase, a nudist blonde prison guard, and a surprisingly poignant statement about the nature of emigres, The French Dispatch is your movie.

7. Saint Maud, dir. Rose Glass

Hey, that's two movies using the imagery of a woman floating with her back arched impossibly backwards. Unexpected theme for 2021.

Paul Verhoeven's Benedetta got the most press and the most praise. However, if you were looking for female-led mindbending religious horror, there was a lot to choose from in 2021. We also had Prano Bailey-Bond's Censor, where a stuffy conservative English woman is drawn into the sleazy world of Video Nasties. Then there was Saint Maud, the most unrelenting and disturbing of them all. Benedetta is liberatory in transgressions. Saint Maud is a story of depression and repression. Nobody is basking naked in the warm South French air, triumphant. No, this is movie about a woman desperate to find God, screaming to the heavens for help, and nobody but her own broken mind answers.

The titular Maud (Morfydd Clark) lives a solitary monastic life in some frigid English beach town, working as a home healthcare nurse. She's in the salad days of her conversion to Catholicism, God is all around her. Maud can feel his love in intense orgasmic messages. However, despite Jesus Christ having answered every question, Maud finds a problem she cannot solve in her newest charge, Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a bisexual actress with a terminal illness. Our saintly protagonist believes an extra dose of Christ can liberate this sinful woman from her fate. However, if Maud is going to tempt her patient to Christ, her patient will tempt her right back.

This a very dark, often unpleasant look at faith unraveling, and Maud's mind breaking down as well. Saint Maud makes it clear that religion is not necessarily the problem here anyway. Maud, previously known as Katie, has always had an unhappy life swinging from one addiction to another, Christ being the next step after a long run of empty annoymous sex with uncaring men. Sometimes God will speak to her (in Welsh!), but are we sure that's him at all? The Devil also makes a brief appearance in one of the most shocking twists of the entire year. The downfall of this woman is terrifying. Her great moment of glory, when she seemingly finally has an answer, is just a humiliating burst of agony before the end. Saint Maud has the nastiest ending of any movie in 2021.

6. Minari, dir. Lee Isaac Chung

After the last few decades of economic collapse, it is almost cute to even consider concepts like "the American dream". Does Gen-Z even think about White Picket Fences as an aspiration anymore? My generation is only barely reaching any grasp of homeownership and in case Wall Street hasn't fuck us enough yet, we had last year's manifactured crisis of home prices exploding. The fact is that the individualistic fantasy of lone pioneers building their fortresses, be that a homestead on the prairie or a McMansion in Bedminster, NJ, is basically outside of many people's realities now. The closest thing I'll get to even the Simpsons' lifestyle is scrolling through Zillow pictures. We had years of people howling in rage that the promised America was stolen from them, creating awful reactionary politics. But even that has passed. At this point, I do not think the younger generations even want this. The American Dream is not dead anymore, it's practically irrelevant. Something else, something collective and community-based, will have to take its place.

Minari is set well before all of this. Still, it is telling how it had to be set in 1983 because it could not happen today. This is the story of an immigrant Korean family, the Yis, moving to rural Arkansas to fulfill the patriarch, Jacob (Steven Yeun)'s fantasy of the American Dream. He wants it all: the house, the power, and the farmer life. (And if you think owning a home is fucked these days, being a small independent farmer is a cycle of misery and corporate serfdom beyond your wildest nightmares.) Minari subtly tells us how shitty so much of the male-dominated nuclear family can be. Jacob is not a monster, however he is putting pride before his family's welfare, making decisions that endangers everybody, and driving them all to the breaking point. His little boy has a serious heart condition and you moved him hours from a hospital, Jacob! For what? To sell goddamn cabbage in Dallas? The piece of the pie is so meager, it sets us up for a Chekhov-style tragedy.

However, this is not a tragedy.

I am selling Minari as a tenser, more caustic piece of material than it is. It is a battle between an East Asian view of family and the American individualist one. Jacob is fully bought into the idea of family as his project. Meanwhile, his wife, Monica (Hen Ye-Ri) knows she needs a community to assist. She brings in her elderly, loud mother Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) to babysit the children. While there is drama and tensions, including many racial stress with the Southern Whites all around them, Minari is not stabbing at the fabric of America. It is a softer, easy-going kind of ride. It is more a coming of age story during a very fraut summer.

In Minari, the American Dream never quite becomes a nightmare... but then again, this is only Ronald Reagan's first term. There was still a lot of America left to be looted back then.

5. Dune Part 1, dir. Denis Villeneuve

I won't blame the MCU specifically for this trend in movies, but I do not think they are helping either. There just is not a lot of showmanship left. With the run of superheroes, most special effects extravanganzas are all the same kind of movie made the same way often by the same over-worked VFX studios. There were only a handful of movies that truly felt like they were still events by any means. The only movies really impressed me on a technical scale were either works of animation or musicals. Only one traditional blockbuster felt like a real *event* movie, and that was Dune.

Now, let's confess a few things. I am as much a sucker for the works of Frank Herbert as comic book fans are for Spider-Man. When you get an actor to start saying the words "Gom Jabbar", I'm grinning uncontrollably. "Holy shit, Oscar Isaac is talking about 'desert power'!" I'm such a fan that David Lynch's Dune movie from 1985, the one everybody hates, even Lynch, is one of my favorite movies of all time. No, I am not joking. Do I look like somebody that doesn't love baroque fantasy SciFi franchises about baroque nobles, cultural warfare driven by a supernatural drug trade, and giant sandworms? You better believe I'm that guy. Foggy vague mutterings about terrible destinies in the middle of ruthless struggles between Machiavellian warlords out-manuevering each other? Yes, all of that, please.

And even half of a finished Dune project is still a mesmerizing achievement. Denis Villeneueve has been one of the most impressive stylists of the last decade. I do not think any SciFi or fantasy franchise is a better fit his talents for massive scale than this one. We have seen a million spaceships land a million different ways on screen. Somehow the round spaceship carrying the Emperor's envoy in Dune is imposing, a projection of the imperial power that rules this galaxy. It is awe-inspiring, movies can still do that. There is no reason you can't watch No Way Home on a cellphone. Even put the movie in Picture in Picture mode so you can chat on discord as it plays. But with Dune? You should feel that awe. You should find the biggest screen possible and blast the terror of intergalactic warfare and alien lifeforms. Dune is big and should feel big.

All the little technical are love to me. The vehicles all have practical instruments. The Sardukar soldiers float downward in a freakish break of physics. They also have Mongolian warchants and Aztec mass sacrifices. You see explosions of spaceships off in the distance at night, a skybox full of chaos. I cannot wait for Part 2. When that's finished, you can be sure that Villeneueve's full Dune story will be Movie of the Year in 20XX.

4. Spencer, dir. Pablo Larraín

England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, all of you, why do you all keep this royal family thing going? It is clearly terrible. For one, monarchies are an embarrassing anachronism in the internet age, as unbelievable as Roman Emperors forging alliances with the Great Khans of the Mongols (which really happened). But besides the optics, and even the severe democratic issues, this is just a bad thing to do to people. It is an actively abusive situation to the people inside of it. Forget Prince Andrew and whatever other scandal you want to mention, it sounds like a horrifying way to live. A weekend in the life of a royal must be a medieval ordeal of torment and unspoken resentment. It is bad to be the king.

Spencer is a dramatization of the life of Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart), roughly a decade into her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing), who is mostly absent from this movie beside one slimy confrontation. The couple are divorced in all but name at this point and Diana cannot be more done with all of this. He has been cheating on her for years, and Diana is expected to grin and bear that. She's having fantasies of Anne Boleyn, the unfortunate second wife of Henry VIII. Besides Charles being a repugnant human being (enjoy having that guy as king soon, Brits), he's really the least of her problems. When you're a royal, you cannot be a human, you instead must follow a million tiny protocols and traditions, even when your life is collapsing and you want to scream. Stewart is older than she was in the Twilight series, but she still looks very young to me. Her interaction with her children is more akin to being their rebellion older sister than a mother. That is because this Byzantine system of protocols reduces everybody into children, either obedient or naughty. No free will, of course.

The primary villain of this piece is Major Gregory (played by an alarmingly thin Timothy Spall), this bulldog-like authority figure sent to keep Diana in line and play her part in this grotesque Christmas weekend. Spall appears at the end of hallways without warning, a spindly figure of menace. It's like The Tall Man from the Phantasm movies has appeared to bully the English nobility into being quiet little marionettes in Queen Liz's fantasy dollhouse. Other than Major Gregory, who I believe to be fully fictional, Spencer is very accurate. Which his all the more disturbing. The Queen really did freeze her family over winter to keep the heating costs down. Diana really was chastised over her weight and driven to an eating disorder.

Spencer is fully a horror movie until Diana's glorious revelation of her own worth and her greater context beyond this twisted House of Windsor. Before this, she was a Spencer, and after this, she can be anything else. It's here that Spencer turns into a totally opaque art film, with our heroine dancing through the ages, totally breaking the narrative of the movie. It's a goregous escape.

3. The Green Knight, dir. David Lowery

Of the adaptations on this list, The Green Knight is the most interesting retelling of a well-known story. This is also the oldest story. More than 200 years before Shakespeare, King Edward III of England was styling his reign around the legends of King Arthur and knights. The Green Knight is best described as a fantasy movie, but really that's inaccurate. This is a movie set in an entirely mythological history of Britain, about people performing magic and marvels of heroism in exotic locations. Fantasy is a modern genre with modern conventions. You expect wizards and princesses and dungeons and items of power. The Green Knight is not that, it's older, and stranger.

There's an ethereal, smoky feel to the storytelling in The Green Knight. Lowery is actively trying to recreate that sense of a deeply worn tale. A story that's been told a million times, a million ways, and has evolved organically as generations of people have added their own creative inputs. Therefore, it is confusing and difficult to disgest if you're expecting a three act structure. Modern storytelling is a percise piece of engineering compared to the wobbly roughness of folklore. Our hero, Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) does have his Campbellian Hero's Journey, but the story meanders and seems to cycle back on itself. Alicia Vikander plays multiple roles, representing some form of a single feminine which Gawain lusts after. The film is made up of distinct episodic adventures rather than a single cohesive narrative.

Yes, the plot is still about Gawain fulfilling his bet with an undead supernatural knight as promised. That challenge and struggle of chivalric honor is the central struggle of the movie, along with the struggle of Gawain being completley unprepared for this journey. But along the way he runs into highwaymen, a polite ghost, and a 19th century camera. There's a firendly fox spirit and a race of naked giants, which are really cool details, adding to the sense that we are stretching further and further back through time, into the pagan mysteries of this land that Christianity buried long ago. Then there's two different endings given to Gawain's story, a final temptation offered and then overcome.

Dev Patel is great in this movie as just this obnoxious fuckboy way out of his element. But he's still determined to play his role. This is a journey of self-discovery, maybe he is the true heir to his mighty uncle, Arthur (Sean Harris). Or maybe he is not. He could just be a useless coward, unworthy of the task. The Green Knight does feature one of the all-time great close-ups of male shame. Not since The End of Evangelion has ejaculation been such a symbol of utter despair. 10/10 semen shot.

2. Titane, dir. Julia Ducournau

I'm warning you now, this movie is for Sickos Only. If you're not a Sicko, stay away. It's French, and movies do not get more French than this.

Have you heard about that movie where a lady fucks a car? Yeah, you thought Lamb was bonkers? You thought Malignant was bonkers? Nah, you have seen nothing yet. The swirling gyre of movie weirdness goes so much deeper than you can ever imagine, sucking you down to a bottomless depth of extremity. Nobody is prepared for a movie this extreme. A lady fucks a car, murders people, breaks her own nose, and that's not even the half of it. This is a movie about all the nasty and uncomfortable parts of the flesh, a perverse pride in the disgusting things that the female body transforms into. Titane is swallowing male lust and then spitting it back at the male gaze, right in its eyes.

How many outrageous things can you shove into one movie? You want body horror? Yeah, we got plenty of that. You want savage violence? Yup. You want that violence to collapse into a comedy of errors? Got it. You want a slasher story to transform somehow into an awkward gender bender identity crisis? Way ahead of you. Want to see a character attempt to live out a male identity while heavily pregnant with a half-car baby? Definitely. Why not also have drug addiction? Incest? Fetishistic obsession with the mechanical as a perverse translation of daddy issues? Check. Check. Check! It is all here, baby! All you can ever want and more.

I am infinitely impressed with Agathe Rousselle, playing Alexia, the star of Titane. This is her first movie, and she is owning all these batshit concepts, and somehow creating a strong humanity at the center of it all. And her character is a psycho killer that likes to stab men in the ear! How is she also a sympathetic protagonist in a nearly slapstick movie? The Macarena get to be a plot point. Julia Ducournau can do anything.

Of course, this is all deeply fucked. Titane is as perverse and wonderful as filmmaking can possibly ever be. But it is also rather sweet and tender, somehow. Alexia is not a character in search of family. She's more the kind of person out to burn her life down and everybody she knows in it. Yet somehow, family finds her. She plays this ridiculous lie of being a firefighter's son, a lie that nobody believes. And yet, it works somehow. Titane goes from horror to silly comedy to eventually, sincere and warm. She's still sputting out motor oil from places and growing bigger and bigger every scene. But she's found a home, and that's touching, even in circumstances that cannot make any sense to anybody. 

It kinda makes sense to the characters, and that's what matters.

1. Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thice Upon a Time, dir. Hideaki Anno

Is this list for the world or is it for me? Am I attempt in any way to say something definitive about which movies are most important from this year - which ones will live on and matter to people long after the others are forgotten. Or am I just listing things I think are cool? Obviously, that should be clear. This is my list. I am not too worried about how many people will share my opinion. So therefore, I believe I am the only person who has named Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thice Upon a Time as movie of the year. If you picked otherwise, you're missing out. But I also understand why I am alone here.

I am not saying that Evangelion 3.0+1.0 is not an incredible cinematic achievement, because it absolutely is. It is bold and unexpected and incredible in ways that only a Hideaki Anno movie could ever be. No fan ever imagined that Evangelion would turn into a pastoral fantasy in its final installment. (With a worrisome twinge of conservatism baked in there too, I'll admit.) This is also a huge movie, not just in length, but in how much actually happens in it. Even in today's world of gargantuan running times, Evangelion 4.0 has more movie in it than practically anything else that came out last year, other than maybe the Snyder Cut. It is a big spectacle of giant robots, artsy psychological drama, and beautiful animation. On just that level, it should be more celebrated outside just the fandom.

The problem is that this is the culmination of decades of franchise building. Evangelion 3.0+1.0 is excluding in a way no other movie here is. To really feel the full effect of this movie's dramaturgy, you kind of need to have been here since the beginning. At minimum, you have a lot of work before you. You should watch the entire Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series, then End of Evangelion, and then the first three Rebuild movies. A lot of that content is difficult to disgust and deliberately abrasive to the audience. All of that context is absolutely necessary for Anno's project here in 2021. Shinji Ikari comes out in a very different place at the end of this film than he does in End of Evangelion. The emotional effect simply will not land unless you've been through the brutal darkness of that initial franchise closure.

I'd argue that binge-watching the entire franchise still will not give you the same affect. Instead, if you're just catching up now, make sure your initial watch takes roughly twenty years. Between each Rebuild movie, wait an increasingly long time, until eight years between installments. Spend all that time allowing yourself to latch onto these characters in a specific way. Make hundreds of memes of Shinji as the ultimate sadboy, so he becomes purely two-dimensional in your mind. Then allow Hideaki Anno, in this final movie, to tear your heart open. If you start now, you might finish before you pass away from old age.

Let me go back to Spider-Man: No Way Home, again, which is a looming shadow that has haunted us this entire list. That's built on nostalgia as well. Yet in a totally different and much more empty way. You get to see the old Spider-Men actors again, playing the role roughly in the same ways. The new Tom Holland Spider-Man is even violently shoved into the same traditional Spider-Man story, the few things that made him unique erased so that history can repeat as tradition demands, forever and ever. What Anno does is take calcified characters and breaks them open again. Shinji Ikari gets to live again, and live better. Something similarly beautiful and hopeful is happening in Lana Wachkowski's newest Matrix movie. If we're going to bring back our childhood favorites, we cannot have them just play-act the same story again like the MCU demands. That's pointless masturbation. It will never feel as good as it did the first time. You have to experience other things. That's really the final message of these Evangelion Rebuild movies.

Importantly, and I am speaking only for me here, I have rarely had a movie effect me the way Evangelion 3.0+1.0 did. I have never felt more things. If you could measure emotion as a physical object, there would be more mass of feelings in my gut after watching that movie than any other movie generated. It was intense. It is an experience I cherished but also rarely want to have happen again, I am not sure I even recommend it. If I could sell that reaction as a pill, it might kill somebody. All that drove me to write something like 10,000 words about the movie and here I am, writing even more.

I think what a lot of franchise media is offering is this endless childhood. Endless safety in the cocoon of the same kind of stories told the same way. That new awful-looking Jurassic Park movie with Laura Dern and Sam Neill reuinted is another terrible example of it. Now Dr. Grant and Dr. Sattler can fight dinosaurs forever, and nobody ever has to worry or think about anything. The Evangelion Rebuild project is a retelling of the first Evangelion story that completely derails it. No, you're not going to get the same thing again, no matter how much you want it. You cannot be safe in your illusive world of repeated delights. You have to go outside, you have to live, you have to be a complete person. It is a painful struggle, growing up sucks, but it is necessary. You can be more and greater than you are.

At the end of Evangelion 3.0+1.0, Shinji Ikari leaves. He's not yours anymore. He's not Hideaki Anno's either. His existence will not be an endless repetition of giant robots and Gnostic apocalypses. He's better for it, and so are we. That story is over for everybody. The goodbye is sad, but you always have to do it.

Go find something else to watch. Open your mind to more things.

...

Anyway, with all the Major Awards handed out, here's the bonus stuff:

Best Performances 2021:

This is in no particular order, really.

1. Rebecca Hall as Beth in The Night House

2. Agathe Rousselle as Alexia in Titane

3. Winston Duke as Will in Nine Days

4. Kristen Stewart as Diana, Princess of Wales in Spencer

5. Steven Yeun as Jacob Yi in Minari

6. Morfydd Clark as Maud/Katie in Saint Maud

7. Charlene Swankie as Herself in Nomadland

8. Youn Yuh-jung as Soon-ja in Minari

9. Mike Faist as Riff in West Side Story

10. Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcom X in One Night in Miami…

Best Musical Moments of 2021:

There was a lot of movie music in 2021, here's what I think is the best of it. Frankly this should be a Top 10 too, but come on, this is all long enough already.

1. "Bye Bye Bye", Red Rocket (either time it's played)

2. "So May We Start", Annette

3. "You're All I Need to Get By", CODA

4. "America", West Side Story

5. "Paciencia Y Fe", In The Heights

Worst Movie of 2021:

Halloween Kills... the Franchise. What a disaster. It is not like there has never been a bad Halloween movies before. There's a movie where Busta Rhymes fought Michael Myers and won! But even that atrocity was more respectable than whatever Halloween Kills was going for. This is a commentary on the Trump Era (maybe?) where Michael Myers is theoretically the victim of an angry mob, while also ruthlessly murdering sweet old couples just trying to watch TV. Morally this movie is so upside down and confused, I would not be surprised if Michael Myers wrote Halloween Kills himself. The movie certainly has a huge boner for him and has plenty of tedious glory shots to prove how cool he is. But if Michael had written it, I imagine the kills would be more satisfying. Instead we have a long, unpleasant movie of unlikable people screaming at each other, and then sometimes dying in painful, joyless ways.

The worst part is that we still have another sequel to go, and no thank you. Halloween Ends is the next title? I wish you had ended in 2018. That movie ended perfectly with three generations of women defeating a monster. The filmmakers obviously had no idea where to go next and did not have the courage to admit that to themselves.

A Highly Inaccurate Prediction of the Top 15 Movies of 2022:

1. Jackass Forever, dir. Jeff Tremaine - I saw this movie a week ago (that's how late I am) and it's really fucking good.

2. Worst Person in the World, dir. Joachim Trier - Finally releases in US properly in a little while.

3. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele

4. The Northman, dir. Robert Eggers

5. Hellraiser, dir. David Bruckner

6. The Batman, dir. Matt Reeves - Yes, I admit utter hypocrisy here. I just like Batman.

7. Suzume no Tojimari, dir. Makoto Shinkai

8. Disappointment Blvd., dir. Ari Aster - What a title. You're asking for it, Ari.

9. Men, dir. Alex Garland

10. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Part One), dir. Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson

11. Cyrano, dir. Joe Wright - I imagine I will be the only person on Earth who loves this.

12. Knives Out 2, dir. Rian Johnson

13. The Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese

14. Crimes of the Future, dir. David Cronenberg - He's back! <3 <3

15. Bones & All, dir. Luca Guadagnino

Yeah, next year I'm going back to the Top 15 format. 20 is too many movies...