We came into 2021 with optimism and without masks, at least here in Australia. We come into 2022 with less optimism, and masks whenever you're indoors and not actively involved in eating or drinking.
Instead of Bo Burnham: Inside being a document of recent history now happily concluded, it was a document very much for our times and the ways they are still ongoing.
It was a year of fights between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, maskers and anti-maskers. It was a year of variants, delta and omicron and others that may not have even been reported. It was a year of living with COVID as a reality, as getting the virus became a fact of life and an occurrence from which you usually recovered, not the death sentence it seemed like in 2021. Though it did kill a whole lot more people as well.
In terms of the movies, this meant long periods where cinemas were closed again, yet somehow, I saw more movies released in 2021 than I had seen in any other year at the time I closed my rankings (which was, of course, yesterday). This gives you an indication of how the means of distribution are changing, as all Warner Brothers movies had a day-and-date release on HBOMax as well, and Netflix and Amazon continued to feature a host of movies that were gathering awards buzz and watercooler talk -- as long as the watercooler was virtual.
Though all was not lost. Various box office records were still set in 2021, though I can't remember if these were pandemic-era records or actual records. (Maybe actual with Spider-Man.) I kind of stopped paying attention to things like box office in 2021, knowing it was no longer a meaningful measuring stick for a film's success or failure. I do know that quite an encouraging number of people went to the theater to see Dune, meaning one of my favorite movies of the year, which was up against a poor cinematic precedent with David Lynch's original version, will get at least one sequel, maybe more than one. So that means audiences still have a chance to vote with their wallets and help get great movies made and seen. (Though the same could not be said for flops like The Last Duel, which finished even higher on my list than Dune.)
I don't really know what we'll have in store in 2022, but I just hope next year's incarnation of this post is not called "2022: Yet another year inside." And that Burnham does not have sufficient material for a sequel.
To get us started on a looser look back on the best and worst of the year than the essentially numbers-oriented analysis of yesterday's post, let's look at the creative talents who should be most and least proud of the year just completed.
Three who had a good year
Idris Elba - If you wanted a poster boy for the most stylish genre movies of 2021, you needed look no further than Idris Elba. Elba wasn't the vision behind either The Suicide Squad (#14) or The Harder They Fall (#22), but he appeared front and center in both, offering a charisma to match the whizz bang technique of directors James Gunn and Jeymes Samuels. Sometimes we forget that Elba was introduced to us as Stringer Bell in The Wire, where he was unambiguously evil, because everybody loves the guy so much, as recent hopeful discussions of him being cast as the next James Bond will attest. (He's turning 50 in 2022 so it seems unlikely.) Well he was back in villain form in 2021 with one film where he played a good bad guy and one film where he played a bad bad guy. I like Will Smith, but it was easy to see how much more engaging Elba was in the de facto Smith role in this version of The Suicide Squad, which tickled me pink and back again. We know his Bloodsport is (ultimately) going to do (mostly) the right thing, but Elba brings an edge and a presence to the character that leaves us with as much doubt as we could reasonably expect to have. There's no goodness in The Harder They Fall's Rufus Buck, who opens this western by assassinating a man and his wife and carving a cross into the forehead of their son, whom he leaves alive to tell the tale. Because it's Elba, we keep hoping for the menace to have a softer edge, but it's hard to come back from an opening like that. His authority and charisma really showed through in 2021, and as a bonus, if you were watching him on screen, it also meant you were watching a really talented director ply his trade. Two of the year's most clever action movies used Idris Elba as their best visual effect.
Ridley Scott - I didn't like House of Gucci (#79), which was one of my final ten viewings of 2021, enough to make Scott a slam-dunk inclusion on this list. I did include him, though, for the rare opportunity to honor a non-performer in this space, plus the fact that he had his fingerprints on two of my top five movies of the year. I had heard some buzz about The Last Duel (#4) before seeing (and loving) it, from a writer who also praised House of Gucci -- first putting him into my head as a possible "guy who had a good year." But it was my rewatch of Our Friend (#1), and seeing that it was produced by Scott Free (with Scott himself credited as executive producer), that really left me flabbergasted. Even when I think I've got Ridley Scott figured out at the ripe old age of 84, he keeps surprising me. Our Friend doesn't in the least seem like the type of film Scott would gravitate toward, and I tried to figure out if a previous professional relationship with director Gabriela Cowperthwaite explained it. Nope. The three very different sorts of films with his name on them in 2021 all have something different and interesting to say about the human condition, in the form of an epic about knights dueling over a rape accusation, an epic about a warring fashion dynasty, and an epic about fighting disease. (There's gotta be fight of some sort in every Scott movie.) Okay, maybe we shouldn't call Our Friend an epic, but at 124 minutes it does eclipse the two-hour mark. Maybe the biggest surprise is that I had developed a really negative attitude toward Scott following his remarks about young people and their devices, and the famous incident several years back where he listed two of his own movies in his favorite science fiction films of all time. The last few months have gone quite a ways toward restoring his good name with me.
Amy Adams - This was the year Amy Adams' exceptional good taste finally failed her. (Some thought it started last year with Hillbilly Elegy, but I was warmer on that film than most.) I was sure The Woman in the Window (#167) would be the worst film I saw in 2021, so idiotic is its setup as it steals liberally from Rear Window and poorly executes the theft. I really wish my format would have allowed me to include the other of Adams' hands in this picture, as this Marcel Marceau-like hands-against-the-window gesture is a good metaphor for her acting in this film. Some moments are not-terrible, but they all go really big in an epic failure of modulation by Adams and director Joe Wright. Then again, maybe there's no other choice how to play the absurd details of this script about an agoraphobic child psychologist/trauma victim/alcoholic. Yes, there's a lot going on in this film, none of it good. She's more life-sized and milquetoast in Dear Evan Hansen (#163), the adaptation of the popular stage musical that I assumed was good for some reason. I have to imagine this show is completely tedious in whatever format you see it, because only the music itself excels while the lyrics and story are earthbound, forgettable and redundant. In a cast of characters who are all deluding themselves about the truth behind the suicide of a teenager, Adams is probably the biggest sinner as the boy's dupe of a mother. I can't tell if the character really is this stupid, or just appears so because she's being played by an actress who is normally known for her intelligence. Some other year, she will be again.
Melissa McCarthy - For the sake of her marriage, McCarthy has committed to bringing husband Ben Falcone's every half-baked idea to the big screen. This means she has at least one stinker per year. (He's very prolific.) Usually she offsets that with a role that either flirts with or receives an Oscar nomination. Not this year. Oh it was mapped out that way, but Theodore Melfi's The Starling (#155) never turned into the awards bait all involved were certainly hoping it would. Instead, it's a lachrymose little movie about mourning that tries to work Kevin Kline for some eccentric laughs (unsuccessfully), and the rest of the time alternates between performances of grieving and performance of bird-swooping related pratfalls. It has a middlebrow earnestness that never satisfies. The Starling was supposed to take the bad taste of McCarthy's first Netflix movie of the year, Thunder Force (#165), out of our mouths. No such luck. Her annual Falcone obligation is a lowbrow bit of idiocy that has the worst idea how to use Octavia Spencer, among other talented actors. For McCarthy, not fitting the mold of a superhero is the point, as it is for Will Ferrell in most of his films. That doesn't work for Spencer and the movie doesn't work at all. McCarthy is its worst part, as not only does she play it super big, but she also voices the most regrettable of Falcone's jokes, some of which involve (probably accidental) homophobia and implied fat-shaming. Hopefully trading thunders in 2022 -- Thunder Force for Thor: Love and Thunder -- will get her back in our good graces going forward.
Sam Claflin - I have to wonder where Sam Claflin thought his career would go when he started out as sort of a poor man's Hugh Grant in a variety of romantic leads. I almost wrote a separate post about how it's ended up going full villain, and not even the likeable sort of villain Grant sometimes plays (see: Paddington 2). In Every Breath You Take (#168), he plays the most idiotic and cliched sort of villain, albeit one that uses the surface charms that made him worth likening to Grant. He's that hoary old trope of the "handsome psychopath who seduces both your wife and daughter as a means of getting revenge on you," and he doesn't even play it for any irony. Yep, this is a role right out of an early 1990s erotic thriller, and the movie feels like it could have been made then too. (Incidentally, this movie also was a very bad choice for Casey Affleck, who becomes one of the first I can remember with a film in both my top five and bottom five of the year.) If overplaying this ridiculous role weren't bad enough, his next step might have been even worse, as he plays a character who doesn't even get a name. One of the weirdest things about watching Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho (#152) was that in one of the many late second act sequences that function somewhere between flashback and fever dream, Claflin randomly appears, again plying his sinister wares. He's in the movie for such a short time that you wonder why they even cast a known name in this role. Oh, and according to the credits, that role is "Punter #5." (A punter is a person who solicits prostitutes, for my American audiences.) As long as it involves grinning superciliously, I guess no role is too small for Sam Claflin.
Honorable mentions: Olivia Colman (The Father, The Lost Daughter), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog, Spider-Man: No Way Home, The Courier), Naomie Harris (Swan Song, No Time to Die)
Three who had a bad year
Dishonorable mentions: Ryan Reynolds (Free Guy, Red Notice), Brian Tyree Henry (Godzilla vs. Kong, Eternals), Bob Odenkirk (Nobody, heart attack)
He who had the most year
Just a quick honorable mention of sorts for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who may have had more exposure in 2021 than any significant artist has had in a single year in cinematic history. Unfortunately, the only one of his five (!) projects that was a total hit with me was Summer of Soul (#19) ... and I've heard people snarkily say they wish he weren't interviewed in it at all. He was remarkably middle of the pack with his other four projects, In the Heights (#69), Encanto (#73), Tick, Tick ... Boom! (#77) and Vivo (#99). Still, a year where he spread himself this thin and still produced quality work must be acknowledged somehow ... and let's hope the Miranda backlash and burnout that have already begun don't define his next few years ahead.
Parenthood and terminal illness take center stage
Not to bring down the room in what is meant to be a fun 2021 recap post, but there must have been a one-year delay in my reaction to my mother's death, in June of 2020, in terms of the films that most resonated with me. You could ascribe the delay to films being made in the wake of COVID with COVID informing them, but I think we won't really be getting most of those films until next year. Especially since my #1 film, which deals with both parenthood and terminal illness, actually debuted at TIFF in September of 2019, before we even knew what a coronavirus was.
It seems telling that five of my top 15 films dealt with parenthood, terminal illness or both, given that my mother had both Alzheimer's and COVID, the latter only hastening along what the former was working hard to achieve. Obviously I would still be processing her passing, and the films of 2021 certainly helped me do that.
However, it wasn't just that she was my parent where the parenthood factors in. Many of these films made me think of my own role as a parent to my children, and how terminal illness would make that role all the more complicated and poignant.
In addition to Our Friend (#1), in which the characters played by Dakota Johnson and Casey Affleck must figure out how to break the news of her terminal cancer diagnosis to their daughters, you've got my #3 film, The Father, which is perhaps the closest match to my own particular circumstances. Anthony Hopkins' descent toward dementia is witnessed and felt most deeply by his daughter (Olivia Colman), who must make many of the decisions my sister and I had to make about treatment and even daily interactions.
Then at #6 you've got Swan Song, a film in which Mahershala Ali's character, also cancer stricken, considers an experimental technique to clone himself and the full set of his memories so he can effectively replace the damaged version of himself with a clean copy, without anyone knowing the difference. His struggle to say goodbye to his family, when they don't even know what's going on and that they are losing any version of him, was heartbreaking to say the least.
At #8 you've got a less emotionally fraught version of terminal cancer in the co-lead of Saint Maud, played by Jennifer Ehle. She's going downhill and also possibly possessed by the devil, according to her caretaker (Morfydd Clark). That gets at personality changes that occur during the late stages of cancer, a topic Our Friend touches on as well (and that The Father also touches on, though obviously not as a result of cancer in that case).
Then finally my #15, Fatherhood, deals with how a single father (Kevin Hart) addresses parenting a baby girl after an abrupt form of illness -- his wife's sudden death of a pulmonary embolism while she's still in the hospital after giving birth. For much of the narrative this one deals more with parenthood and if you're doing it correctly, a worry every parent feels.
You could even throw in #9 Dune if you want to talk about films examining mothers and fathers and their sons, and both themes are touched on in Drive My Car (#5), though I don't want to stretch the point too much.
We don't control what films resonate with us each year, and I have never thought of myself as a person who is unduly influenced by a particular set of issues that disproportionately affect me. I think that's the best way to be, if you can help it, when you are a film critic. But there's no doubt that something about these themes spoke to me in 2021, making for a fitting farewell to my mother.
My kingdom for a short movie
Movies in 2021 were long.
Forty-three of the 170 movies I saw were in excess of two hours. That's 25 percent. I can't say for sure how this stacks up against other years, because I don't think I've counted before, but it's got to be a pretty high percentage. And given the number of movies that were in excess of 115 minutes but not 120, which I'm not even counting here, the average length has got to be higher still.
I suppose filmmakers view it as good news that studios and streaming services now treat it as a benefit if a movie runs long. Film critics might disagree, both in their interpretation of the films they're watching, and in the length it takes to watch them -- sometimes back-to-back-to-back on consecutive days, or even within the same day. (There was a stretch last week as I was closing out my list when I watched The Eyes of Tammy Faye, House of Gucci, Drive My Car, Eternals and Annette on consecutive days, all of which surpassed two hours.)
Speaking of Drive My Car, that was the longest at 179 minutes. Good thing it ended up at #5 on my list for the year. The shortest of the qualifiers was The Many Saints of Newark at exactly 120. Given what that movie had to cover, it's a miracle it wasn't longer.
I've complained about long movies before and it's not a particularly interesting observation to make about the film industry. But something feels like it changed in 2021. Maybe it was when I was asked by an Australian filmmaker to review a movie he made called Rage, which I actually liked pretty well despite it finishing at only #120 for the year. Even this was 143 minutes. It defies everything you think you know about a low budget film, which would typically require every bit of financing it could scrape together just to reach proper feature length.
There were some short movies out there. One of my big regrets was that I could not get my hands on Petite Maman, the 72-minute film from Celine Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire was my #2 of 2019. In fact, I had a debate about whether to include a 45-minute film I saw via Slamdance, Taipei Suicide Story, ultimately preserving my old-fashioned notion of the lower length limits of a feature film. At times, though, I felt like a year of 170 Taipei Suicide Storys could be just the ticket.
I guess the days are long gone when studios insisted on merciless cuts to get the film down to a length audiences would happily consume. Thanks Marvel!
Latest inductee into the two-timers club
We've got a new inductee into the two-timers club, in other words, actors or others who appear in more than one movie I've selected as my #1 of the year. And he's a problematic one.
Welcome, Casey Affleck.
Affleck joins, among others, the likes of Ethan Hawke, Emmanuel Lubezki, Paul Dano, Kate Winslet and Charlie Kaufman -- Kaufman is actually the lone member of the three-timers club. Affleck appeared in both my #1 of 2017, A Ghost Story, and this year's #1, Our Friend.
As mentioned earlier in this post, he also appeared in one of my worst of the year, Every Breath You Take, so 2021 was by no means a slam dunk for him.
That last is an indication of the sorts of movies he's had to settle for after falling from grace in the wake of #metoo allegations. The allegations against him are disturbing, but at least they are not as bad as those against some other people.
Anyway, I won't deny when an actor is good and when his contributions to a great movie make it that much greater, and that's the case with Our Friend.
So welcome, Casey. No asterisk next to your name. You're in.
Best non-2021
These were the ten best movies I saw in 2021 that did not come out in 2021. Listed alphabetically.
Freaky (2020, Christopher Landon) - It may not actually be one of the ten best non-2021 movies I saw, but this cheeky horror comedy with heart was definitely one of the ten best times I had watching a movie in 2021.
Freaky Friday (1976, Gary Nelson) - I was clearly in a freaky mood in 2021, and could never have guessed what pure joy I would get from our family viewing of this Disney live-action classic.
Gaslight (1944, George Cukor) - I finally got to appreciate the cinematic origins of this term, as well as why the movie that spawned it was classic enough to have introduced the word into our consciousness.
The Harder They Fall (1956, Mark Robson) - The final film of my Knowing Noir series was also Humphrey Bogart's final film, and put the finishing touches on a small bit of Bogart redemption at the end of the year.
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013, Frank Pavich) - This remarkable documentary was responsible for kicking off a Dune-themed final quarter to my year, including reading the novel prior to watching Denis Villeneuve's film -- or most of the novel, as I still have about a hundred pages left (eek).
Key Largo (1948, John Huston) - One of only two older movies I gave five stars in 2021 (along with the next film on this list), Key Largo quickly became both my favorite noir and favorite Bogart movie of all time.
A Matter of Life and Death (1946, Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger) - What a delightful contemplation of life, love, the afterlife, and a romance that crosses over the thin membrane between this world and the next.
On the Beach (1959, Stanley Kramer) - Who knew that nuclear cautionary tales made back in the 1950s -- and set in the city in which I currently live -- could be so eerie and trenchant?
Throne of Blood (1957, Akira Kurosawa) - In a year in which I came across several versions of Macbeth, this was the one that finally turned me around on one of Shakespeare's most alienating tragedies.
Woman in the Dunes (1964, Hiroshi Teshigahara) - The existential properties of sand have never been as profound to me, nor as profoundly realized, as this.
Stats
Just for fun, a look at some stats for the viewing year just completed:
Movies by star rating: - 5 stars (2), 4.5 stars (15), 4 stars (32), 3.5 stars (41), 3 stars (30), 2.5 stars (16), 2 stars (20), 1.5 stars (8), 1 star (6), 0.5 stars (0)
It was nearly comical for me to note how predictably spread out my movies are in a parabolic shape, and how little the shape changes from year to year. Here is the variance from last year in these categories, with a + representing more movies with this rating this year, a - indicating more last year and a zero indicating the same in both years:
5 stars (0), 4.5 stars (-2), 4 stars (+6), 3.5 stars (+5), 3 stars (+1), 2.5 stars (+1), 2 stars (+11), 1.5 stars (+2), 1 star (-1) and 0.5 stars (-2)
And most of that change is due to just seeing more movies, with one exception: the jump by 11 of movies I rated two stars. And there, ladies and gentlemen, you have my explanation for why this feels to me like a very mediocre movie year.
Movies by source - Netfix (44), theater (37), iTunes (31), Amazon (16), screener (10), MIFF (10), Disney+ (9), AppleTV+ (6), Fetch (2), Stan (2), Slamdance (2), Australian Broadcasting Company (1)
Total new movies watched in the calendar year - 277
Total rewatches - 47 (down from 81 in 2020)
2021 movies watched more than once - 3 (Our Friend, Bo Burnham: Inside, Fatherhood)
Another name for ...
Gunda is ... Pig
Pig is ... The Truffle Hunters
Clifford the Big Red Dog is ... Dog Gone Trouble
Sing 2 is ... Ballad of a White Cow
Sing 2 is ... Swan Song
In the Heights is ... West Side Story
The Green Knight is ... The Last Duel
The Tomorrow War is ... Army of the Dead
Don't Look Up is ... Shadow in the Cloud
And finishing with ...
Lighting round
Again sacrificing the "my list vs. the Oscar nominations" portion of "Lightning round." Maybe next year.
Highest ranked film I first saw on streaming - Bo Burnham: Inside (#2)
Highest ranked film I first saw on rental - Our Friend (#1)
Highest ranked film I first saw in the theater - The Father (#3)
Actor who may have won me over - Jennifer Ehle (Saint Maud)
Actor who may have driven me away - Vin Diesel (Fast & Furious 9)
Breakout actress - Alana Haim (Licorice Pizza)
Breakout actor - Alex Hassell (The Tragedy of Macbeth)
Most unexpected performance - Simon Rex (Red Rocket)
Most unexpected performance in a film I actually liked - Benedict Cumberbatch (Power of the Dog)
Best Netflix movie - Bo Burnham: Inside (#2)
Worst Netflix movie - Sweet Girl (#169)
Director who dropped out of my good graces - Sean Baker (Red Rocket)
Director who dropped out of my good graces, runner up - Edgar Wright (Last Night in Soho)
Director who dropped out of my good graces, second runner up - Wes Anderson (The French Dispatch)
Director who is back in my good graces - James Gunn (The Suicide Squad)
Movie that got better the more I thought about it - The Lost Daughter (#23)
Movie that got worse the more I thought about it - Nobody (#158)
Most overrated by critics - Zola (#139)
Most underrated by critics - Our Friend (#1)
Best sequel - Sing 2 (#11)
Worst sequel - The Matrix Resurrections (#170)
Best reboot - The Suicide Squad (#14)
Worst reboot - The Matrix Resurrections (#170)
Best title - Gunpowder Milkshake
Worst title - Hurrah, We Are Still Alive!
Most literal title - Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
Least literal title - Licorice Pizza
Loudest Bruno - Luca
Quietest Bruno - Encanto
Most cars in space - Fast & Furious 9
Fewest cars in space - The Last Duel
Birds - Swan Song, Swan Song, Penguin Bloom, The Starling, Ride the Eagle
Portmanteaus tomorrow!
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