My Favorite Films of 2021
and a few from other years.
This is my “Favorite Films of 2021” list. But unlike a lot of these lists you’ll see, mine is unranked, incomplete, and I cheated and included first-time watches of older films.1 I’ll keep it spoiler-free and I’m not reviewing films here, just sharing why each item on the list was special to me.
The French Dispatch (2021)
I’ll start with one of my favorites (of my favorites). Wes Andeson doubles (triples?) down and becomes even more himself. There’s a sense in which this one tips further into the surreal and absurd. The amount of intercutting and movement between narrative frames is quite intricate. Where Wes used Aspect Ratio precisely in The Grand Budapest Hotel to delineate time period, here he just uses it almost willy-nilly for certain scenes or individual shots seemingly simply because… it seems to work for that shot.
I genuinely don’t know of another modern (popular commercial) director who is playing with the form in such a unique, original, and truly free way. Conventions be damned, even Wes’s own. I couldn’t imagine how his style was going to evolve past The Grand Budapest Hotel as that felt like a kind of summit, and I can’t imagine where it will go from here.
The Beatles Get Back (2021)
Peter Jackson’s 8 hour Beatles doc for Disney+ is what got me through having COVID. There are a lot of people who just won’t have the time for the length of this documentary, or the interest, but I found its laid-back pacing created a very unique experience watching a documentary that I’ve never had before. Setting aside the fact that it’s The Beatles, I’ve never watched a documentary that just put on screen so much raw creative process. Relatively linear and uninterrupted, we just get to sit in the studio with John, Paul, George, and Ringo and just watch them work. It’s a bit mundane in places but that only adds to the fascination. I love getting to be a fly on the wall, and it was great to hang out with “The Four” while I was sick in bed.
The Humans (2021)
Is “late-capitalist domestic horror” a genre? I’m not sure I’ve ever watched a film that so perfectly renders a location as an expression of the character’s internal anxiety (at least not in this way, setting German Expressionism aside). This film is the location. Without ever actually visually warping the environment, it gradually feels as though it’s closing in around the characters. Adaptations of stage productions are often fraught, but the performances here from the entire cast (especially Steven Yeun, who’s revealing himself to be world-class) make the single location script engaging and unnerving.
Rat Film (2016)
It’d be wrong to say Theo Anthony’s essay film-style documentary is about rats. Rats in Baltimore are the primary subject matter, but only insofar as the rats’ existence and behavior are a reflection of a very human story. Like a more somber, feature-length episode of the amazing HBO series “How To With John Wilson,” Rat Film is a freewheeling, diverging exploration of a fascinating subject.
Licorice Pizza (2021)
One of the things I love about Paul Thomas Anderson’s period work is that the films aren’t just period pieces in terms of the location and costume design, but also in terms of how they’re shot. The whole visual vibe of this film is beautiful. The film already feels old. The soundtrack is great too.
There’s been a lot of talk about the film’s more controversial elements, and I won’t address them here. (I more or less agree with Broey Deschanel’s excellent breakdown of the issue if you’re interested in that). All I’ll say is that I walk away from every PTA film with a weird conflicted, unsettled feeling about the characters and ending and this one is no different.
The Harder They Fall (2021)
Jeymes Samuel’s directorial debut had a goofy grin plastered across my face for two hours. Maybe not the best film I watched all year, but easily the most fun! Samuel engages Western Genre Tropes with an energy and lightheartedness that justifies treading over that tired ground. The cast is great.
The Green Knight (2021)
A medieval, hallucinogenic, symbolic exploration of death and rebirth from David Lowery? I’m in. I’ve shared my thought pretty thoroughly in this video.
The Big City (1963)
Satyajit Ray was one of the most recommended directors in my comments sections recently, and I’m so glad I finally took the plunge into his filmography in 2021. The Big City is delightful, heartwarming, and expertly crafted. I highly recommend it.
Sans Soleil (1983)
Chris Marker’s masterwork is impossible to describe. Documentary? Travelogue? Essay? Is it nonfiction or fiction? Marker bends time and space and shifts seamlessly between topics to blend cultural observation and critique with history and personal musings. It’s a singular piece of work. I love films that make me have to re-evaluate my conception of what a film can be and go “oh, you can do that?” And this is one of those.
Some Kind of Heaven (2020)
Some Kind of Heaven is a documentary about the largest retirement community in the US. The hook here is that it’s shot with almost a Wes Anderson kind of aesthetic. It eschews the naturalism that most docs use in favor of a more stylized approach, but one that allows you to really get inside the characters’ experiences. (Yes I said characters. They’re real people, but they’re also characters –watch the film and you’ll know what I mean). It dives headlong into a specific place but finds characters and struggles that are emblematic of much larger more universal themes.
Bo Burnham Inside (2021)
Is Inside a comedy special? Not really. It’s not really a movie, or a television show either. It’s a liminal piece of work made during a liminal time, and it’s maybe one of the best pieces of cultural criticism we’ve seen in popular media in the last 5 years (at least). Nobody else has so woefully conveyed the barrage of mixed emotions that social media and modern society on the internet can produce especially when they’re amplified by isolation, as Bo Burnham does in Inside.
Pig (2021)
Unexpectedly one of my favorite films of the year. An astounding work from first-time Director Micheal Sarnoski. I don’t want to say too much about the film because it’s much better to go in blind if you can. I’ve covered it in depth in my recent video. But I’ll say this, even if it looks like a film you won’t like, give it a chance! Also, Nicolas Cage shows once again that he truly has the chops given the right material- this is some of his best work.
That’s all for now, and that’s far from a complete list of everything I loved from last year. The Lost Daughter, Drive My Car, The Souvenir Part II, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Titane, Judas and the Black Messiah and many others were great watches that I thoroughly enjoyed.
I’m including old films because there’s such a recency bias to “best of the year” lists and often the best stuff I watch for the first time in a given year isn’t from that year it’s from the past.
Apu trilogy is a must watch by Satyajit Ray