Best of 2021: Movies
I’m awful at watching movies the year they come out. Partly this is because the pandemic has made going to a movie theater much less appealing, but even pre-pandemic I often hadn’t seen many of the movies nominated for the big awards in time for those ceremonies. So it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that none of my movies on this list were released in 2021, although seven of the ten movies came out within the past three years. As always, this list doesn’t include any rewatches. At the bottom of the page, after my number one movie of the year, I’ll include a list of Top 10 with rewatches, just in case anyone is interested.
Very quickly, I do have some runner ups/honorable mentions: Red Sorghum (beautiful cinematography with an unexpectedly brutal turn about halfway through), Wait Until Dark (maybe the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn’t make), Ex Machina (a well-plotted, calculated movie that feels as cold as its A.I. subject), and Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris (super great, but at only 27 minutes is more of a short than a full-length movie).
Without further ado, here are my ten favorite movies I watched in 2021.
10. Memories of Murder (2003)
Everyone knows Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 smash hit Parasite, his seventh feature-length film. Memories of Murder — a crime thriller from 2003 — is his second film. While it doesn’t feel quite as polished or as tight as Parasite, it’s an engaging and entertaining story of two mismatched cops trying to solve a series of murders. Frequent Bong collaborator Song Kang-ho plays one of the detectives on the case, and it’s easy to see why Bong casts Song so often: his performance is a real standout — funny, intense, gripping. It’s hard not to compare Bong’s earlier work to his later work, particularly when my first introduction to him was Parasite, but Memories of Murder holds its own. Although the movie felt a little long even at 130 minutes, this was a strong and surprisingly brutal movie.
9. Nomadland (2020)
Although not a documentary, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Jessica Bruder’s nonfiction book of the same name certainly feels like a documentary. That’s because, aside from Frances McDormand and David Strathairn, the cast is all non-professional actors — mostly people playing themselves. It reminds me a little of Abbas Kiarostami’s 1990 film Close-Up, since it’s an interesting blend of fact and fiction.
My favorite aspect of this film is Joshua James Richards’ cinematography. Heavily influenced by Emmanuel Lubezki’s work with Terrence Malick, Richards has some gorgeous shots of the southwestern landscape. In my blog post earlier this year about Nomadland, I wrote about how it’s the cinematic lovechild of Malick and Chantal Akerman’s brilliant 1975 film, Jeanne Dielman. I stand by that assessment, even if only my film geek friends will understand it.
8. On Her Shoulders (2018)
Alexandria Bombach’s documentary follows human rights advocate Nadia Murad as she meets with politicians around the world to share her story. In August of 2014, when Murad was 19 years old, ISIS kidnapped her and forced her into sexual slavery. She managed to escape after three months of captivity and has since devoted her life to helping women and children who are victims of genocides and human trafficking.
What I like about On Her Shoulders is that — as the title implies — it shows the weight of Murad’s story on this young woman now in her 20s. The journalists and politicians she meets with are all affected by her story for the brief time they’re together, but for Murad they are just another person in a seemingly endless line of people with whom she shares her trauma. We see the effect that has on her. I also enjoyed moments that are more subtly subversive, such as when Murad meets with a conservative parliament member who doesn’t know how to wrap up the meeting, so the politician just kind of laughs and goes, “Well…” Tiny moments and details like that really bring On Her Shoulders to life.
7. Monrovia, Indiana (2018)
I love Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries. It’s such a shame that they’re nearly impossible to watch, because his films are some of the best of the best when it comes to that genre. Even Monrovia, Indiana, which feels like a lesser Wiseman, is still better than most other documentaries out there.
The fact that Wiseman eschews commentary or voiceover is both a blessing and a curse, as it makes films like this one a bit of a Rorschach test. I think he’s being critical of life in a small town, but is that just me? Does that tell you more about who I am and my own biases? Still, I can’t help but feel like the intentional intercutting of people looking bored in class, at a funeral, or at town hall meetings is a deliberate dig at each of those institutions. Then again, Wiseman does that all the time.
Depending on who you are, this could be a scathing indictment of rural life, or maybe it’s a pleasant reminder of what life is like somewhere other than a coastal city. Either way, your mind probably won’t be changed by the time you’re done watching. But I don’t think that’s the point. If Wiseman wanted to change minds he’d use narration or talking heads. Instead, what you get is what it is — it’s up to you to draw your own conclusions from there. And it’s precisely because you have to make that judgment yourself that watching Monrovia, Indiana ultimately tells you more about who you are than it does about who Wiseman is.
6. Never Look Away (2018)
Sometimes a movie really impresses you because of what it achieves: powerhouse performances, intricate plots, memorable scenes. Other times I find myself really liking a movie simply because I didn’t have many bad things to say about it. Never Look Away, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 3-hour film based loosely on painter Gerhart Richter’s life, is an example of the latter. Sure, the acting is very good, the music (by my man Max Richter) is gorgeous, and the story is interesting, but none of those elements felt like they were in Super Amazing territory except for Caleb Deschanel’s cinematography, which was stunning. While I realize this hasn’t exactly been a rave review of a movie I marked number 6 on this list, here’s what I will say in its favor: I started this 190-minute subtitled movie at 8pm on a Wednesday night. I thought I’d get maybe halfway through and then finish it another day, but I watched the whole thing more or less in one sitting. That’s a testament to the movie’s pace and how involved I got in its world.
Never Look Away follows an artist named Kurt who, as a child in World War II Germany, has a young aunt who is forcibly sterilized by the Nazis and then euthanized. As Kurt grows up in post-war east Germany, he meets a young woman with the same name as his aunt. That’s not the only connection to Kurt’s past, but I’ll spare the rest to avoid spoilers. Much of the movie is devoted to Kurt finding his artistic voice, and it’s those quiet moments of Kurt making art that pad the movie’s runtime. The thing is, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Kurt (or, rather, the artist standing in for Kurt) as he painted, sketched, and honed his talent. As much as the movie is promoted to be an investigation into how Kurt’s past intersects with his present, it’s really more a story about how Kurt grows and develops as an artist.
5. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)
Here’s an example of a documentary where the subject is more interesting than the film itself. However, the subject, Marion Stokes, is so fascinating that she elevates this rather standard documentary into one almost as interesting as she was. Stokes was a Black civil rights activist who, beginning in 1977, began video taping cable news channels 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This obsessive project continued until her death in 2012. By the end of her life she was recording on up to eight VCRs at once.
The raw footage she recorded — of which we see a good amount but not nearly enough of — is fascinating. It charts the early days of cable news and the 24-hour news cycle, the growth of Fox News, all the way to the last major news event which coincided with her death: the Sandy Hook shooting. While this was the premise that got me interested in the movie, my favorite parts were actually before Stokes became a recluse obsessed with recording the news. In the late ‘60s she was a TV producer who often appeared on a panel show called Input. The selections from these appearances are stunning — Stokes speaks quickly, passionately, and freely about civil rights. She’s brilliant, and you can see how her experience in television ultimately shaped her obsession.
The only major drawback to Recorder is the quasi-dramatization of past events. This seems to be a new trend in documentaries, and I don’t like it. Here’s an example: During a talking-head interview with one of Stokes’ hired hands, we see newly filmed footage of actors re-enacting the event in the interview. But unlike more traditional re-enactments, these only show you snippets of the actors — say, their shoulder or hands, never their face. It’s a quasi-dramatization that completely takes me out of the moment. Does director Matt Wolf think the audience will get bored if we simply watch and listen to the interviewee describe this scene? Why show us through the gauzy filter of a cheap re-enactment? I’m not a fan of this choice, and those are the worst moments of Recorder.
4. Mangrove (2020)
Mangrove is the first film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, five films which follow West Indian immigrants in London from the 1960s to the 1980s. Although we haven’t finished the entire anthology, this first entry is an amazing starting point for the series.
I will admit that I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like Mangrove when we started it. The first act of the film is definitely the clunkiest. In trying to show how often the local police harass restaurant owner Frank Crichlow, the scenes can often feel needlessly repetitive. I understand these scenes illustrate the growing frustration and anger Crichlow and his regulars feel toward the police, but I think McQueen could get to the inciting incident — a demonstration against the police that turns violent — faster and it would still have the same impact. Regardless, once this event happens, the rest of the movie is a gripping courtroom drama. Excellent performances and excellent writing make for one of the most visceral movies we watched all year.
3. Minari (2020)
The problem with watching a critically acclaimed movie after it’s become critically acclaimed is that I enter the movie with extremely high expectations. Sometimes that can mean a movie doesn’t live up to the hype. But in very rare instances — such as Lee Isaac Chung’s family drama, Minari — the movie is so good it not only meets those expectations, it exceeds them.
Minari is a tightly focused and beautiful slice-of-life story that’s ostensibly about the Yi family but is really about the American Dream. Steven Yeun as patriarch Jacob Li is just as intense and amazing as he was when he played Ben in Lee Chang-dong’s Burning. Han Ye-ri as Jacob’s wife, Monica, is also incredible, as are the two child actors, particularly Alan Kim who plays David. But the real star here is Youn Yuh-jung as David’s grandmother, Soon-ja. Youn was riveting in every scene. There was one moment in particular (when she said to David, in heavily accented English, “strong boy!”) that I got chills because it was exactly how my own Korean grandma would speak to me as a child. I’d never had an experience like that watching a movie.
Chung does a great job balancing drama, comedy, and tension without the movie feeling either too serious, too ungrounded, or too intense. That’s not an easy balance to strike. Altogether, Minari is a very enjoyable, deftly-made movie. I hope it’s the first of many more movies focusing on Asian Americans in America in contemporary times, as that’s not a combination you find all too often.
2. Ethnic Notions (1986)
If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s intense satire Bamboozled, then you’ll doubtless remember the powerful moment near the end of the film where we leave the world of the movie and enter the real world. Lee compiles clips of Black caricatures throughout early film and television history: anything from Hollywood films to Saturday-morning cartoons. These dehumanizing and demeaning depictions of Black people are extremely powerful on their own, but their power is heightened watching them two hours into Bamboozled.
What I didn’t know is that Lee was using a lot of the same footage featured in Marlon Riggs’ 1986 documentary, Ethnic Notions. This hour-long doc feels like a PBS special with it’s low-fi budget and black-curtain backdrops. But what the film lacks in production values it more than makes up for in ideas. Riggs has a clear thesis and presents it efficiently and effectively. Through interviews and clips from various media, Riggs examines common Black stereotypes (anything from the Sambo to the Pickaninnies to the Minstrels), how they came to be, and the effect they had not only on white people but also on Black folk themselves. It’s one of the most direct and damning indictments of racism I’ve ever seen.
1. The Double (2013)
I’ve already talked about how much I love Richard Ayoade. His TV series Travel Man: 48 Hours in… was one of my favorite TV shows a couple years ago; his book Ayoade on Top, a satirical monograph on the disastrous Gwyneth Paltrow movie View from Top, is scathingly hilarious; and I loved his writing/directorial debut, Submarine. I’m not quite sure why it took us so long to get around to The Double, Ayoade’s sophomore film as writer and director, but I’m glad we finally did. It’s funny, intriguing, strange, and all around my favorite cinematic experience of the past year.
The Double is an adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novella with the same name. We follow Simon James (Jesse Eisenberg), an achingly boring bureaucrat who works in a dystopian world very reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Simon has a crush on a coworker named Hannah but is too timid to approach her. Enter the titular double: James Simon (also played by Eisenberg) who has all the charisma and confidence Simon James lacks.
This sets off the events of the rest of the film, some of which you can probably guess given the premise, but many of which will be a surprise. Ayoade balances drama and comedy without making the world feel too nihilistic or absurd, which I appreciate. Think of the setting as if Brazil and Metropolis had a baby. Think of the story as if it were written by Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch. And think of the shots as if they were filmed by Wong Kar-wai or Jean-Luc Godard. Oh, and it also has Wes Anderson-esque humor, but imagine if Wes Anderson were actually funny. That’s The Double in a nutshell, and I absolutely loved it.
Top 10 including rewatches:
The Double (2013)
Ethnic Notions (1986)
Thank You for Smoking (2005)
Solaris (1972)
Citizen Kane (1941)
12 Years a Slave (2013)
Mangrove (2020)
Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001)
Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)
The Birdcage (1996)
