This was the year we returned to theaters (after nearly a year away), traveled to film festivals (if we were really, really lucky), and were happily shown a dazzling array of the world’s best cinematic offerings. While by no means the only great films of 2021, these were my ten favorites. They’re invigorating reminders of how transformative, transporting, and enlightening the art form can be—especially when viewed in the dark, finally away from the couch.
This year saw many films about the aches and fires of creation, but few were as delicately, persuasively wrought as Mia Hansen-Løve’s graceful mood piece. Vicky Krieps, watchful and glowing, plays Chris, a filmmaker struggling towards an idea for a new film. She might be Hansen-Løve herself, or she might just be another in this sterling filmmaker’s cast of carefully drawn lead characters.
Just how many meta layers comprise Bergman Island is a question the film begins to ask of itself when Chris’s idea becomes manifest, a story within the story. Mia Wasikowska sensitively embodies Chris’s fictional construction, wandering the same windy Swedish paradise where Chris has found herself. Bergman Island whispers with melancholy, rustles with gentle humor. At first glance, the film seems like a slight little reverie. But there is a sneaky depth here, a murmur of hidden significance creeping out of every old floorboard. Bergman Island will make you want to make something; to hug a loved one like you haven’t seen them in ages (maybe you haven’t); and to hop on a boat bound for the Baltic, notebook in hand.
David Lowery is a filmmaker who thinks about death a lot. As we all do, probably. Rather than run away from those enormous frettings about finality, Lowery has, in his fascinating patchwork collection of films, headed straight for them, crafting awesome and frightening visions of life and its end. With The Green Knight, Lowery takes the ancient legend of Sir Gawain and digs into its starkest implications. As Dev Patel’s brash young knight marches toward his likely doom, Lowery’s film conjures up a heady air of dread and wonderment.
Despite its brutal, desolate fantasy—or maybe, somehow, because of it—The Green Knight maintains a steadfast humanism, reflecting our own messy, irrational selves. To ponder death is boggling; its inevitability can make most of our mortal concerns seem terribly petty. But there is, as Lowery finds it, something rather grand and noble in our smallness. There’s maybe even meaning, should we let ourselves stop and take stock of the varied and miraculous strangeness—all that earthly magic—we’ve encountered on our own journeys toward the imminent unknown.
Saying that a movie feels like a play is often a pejorative, signifying staginess and theatrical dialogue that is ill-suited to the screen. But Fran Kranz’s shattering, and yet never melodramatic, film is like good theater in the best way: it’s a finely performed, grippingly written four-hander that leaves the viewer rattled and spent, buzzing with the thrill of having seen an extraordinarily tricky feat pulled off with aplomb.
The film’s subject matter—two sets of parents coming together to make some peace with one another, years after a school shooting—is about as heavy as can be. In the acting company’s capable hands, though, the material becomes a tool for catharsis rather than miserablist wallowing. Reed Birney, Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs, and a smashing Martha Plimpton are perhaps the year’s most invaluable ensemble, each making somber music of Kranz’s knot of fury and grief. Mass is exhausting—not because it rubs our noses in its bleakness, but because it demands so much of our empathy, prods us to consider forgiveness and understanding as active choices rather than passive allowances. In Mass, Kranz and his cast deliver a startling homily on fundamental compassion.
Unlike Mass, this film, from writer-director Stephen Karam, actually was a play first. What Karam did so ingeniously in adapting his own lauded, awards-bedecked work was figuring out just how the medium of film could deepen the texture of what he’d written, what new psychological truths he could mine with cuts and closeups and ambient sound.
On film, Karam teases out more of his play’s horror, sinking a family Thanksgiving get-together even further into the dark than he did on stage. Jayne Houdyshell brilliantly reprises her Tony-winning role—a sad-sack suburban mom who can’t quite keep up with her kids’ pithy sourness—and is joined on screen by a starry ensemble: Beanie Feldstein, Richard Jenkins, Amy Schumer, June Squibb, and Steven Yeun. They bicker and worry together in prickly harmony, talking about nothing and everything as something ominous closes in toward them.
The Humans is a bracing allegory of the fractured and crumbling middle class, of the paranoid age born of 9/11, of the lonely impossibility of true connection with family you did not choose. It’s a grim film for grim times, but still manages moments of sharp levity, of mordant playfulness. It’s a typical Thanksgiving gathering, basically, albeit one taking place at the end of the world.
Joanna Hogg continues her look back at her troubled, exciting salad days with this followup to The Souvenir, one of 2019’s best films. As Hogg’s stand-in, film student Julie, grieves a dead boyfriend, she throws herself into her nascent craft, working toward discoveries of self and creative purpose. Rather than navel gaze, in awe of her own precocious genius, Hogg uses Souvenir Part II’s memoir as a way to pay homage to a more universal kind of self-assertion and exploration. Honor Swinton-Byrne, as proud and confused Julie, adds new layers to her performance, while a host of handsome men—Richard Ayoade, Joe Alwyn, Harris Dickinson—flit in and out of her life as lovers, thwarters, and almost-mentors.
Much of Part II is quiet and episodic, but the film is building toward something big and declarative, a venture into abstraction that closes with the single most striking final shot of 2021. It’s been a pleasure having Hogg guide us around her past over these last couple of years; in learning more about her (or, some version of her), we hopefully have made assessments of—and offered encouragement to—our own dearly held passions.
5. Flee
The phrase “animated documentary” is an odd one, because something drawn and rendered isn’t exactly real life, as a documentary is meant to be. But director Jonas Poher Rasmussen uses animation to get closer to the truth than he might have otherwise in his harrowing, heartbreaking illustration of a friend’s flight from Afghanistan in the late 1980s.
In interviews, a man called Amin tells his wrenching story: a relatively peaceful life in Kabul falls to ruin with the arrival of the Taliban, sending Amin and his family on a trek toward safety, first in an inhospitable Russia and then in slightly less inhospitable points west. What Rasmussen could not capture on camera is instead staged in animated form, which aptly simulates the impressionism of memory and the surreality of childhood perception.
Flee does not do anything so crass as suggesting that Amin’s story can act as total avatar for all other refugees from war-torn lands. It maintains its specificity, its up-close biography. And yet, in young Amin’s odyssey—which also involves him coming to terms with his sexuality—so many other lives and narratives are evoked, ones that are all too often bundled into one seething collective of trauma and only rarely realized deliverance.
Sweet but not cloying, Mike Mills’s achingly lovely film is a funny-sad paean to the difficulties and joys of helping to raise a child, and to all that can be learned or relearned when trying to explain the world to someone rather new to it. Joaquin Phoenix and first-time film actor Woody Norman have scrappy, winsome chemistry as an uncle and nephew who are yoked together, at first uneasily and then, in slow and credible evolution, as happy partners in mutual care.
Mills has always had a poetic tilt, but in C’mon C’mon he employs his lyrical fugues more judiciously than he has in past films. For all its cuteness and big emotion, C’mon C’mon is disarmingly restrained. It lands some real wallops—prepare to weep when the meaning of the film’s title is revealed—but otherwise lilts along in relaxed rhythm. The film’s profundity lies in how it tethers the everyday to the existential; it appreciates the accumulation of knowledge and experience and communion with other people as the great, and maybe only, project of our lives. Though shot in sumptuous black and white, C’mon C’mon is as vivid as the first time any of us had the simple epiphany that life really can be awfully beautiful.
A slow burn about repression, Jane Campion’s stately and mysterious film isn’t quite a character-study drama, not quite a thriller, and not really a Western. It is an elusive and mesmerizing thing unto itself, awash in light dappled on stunning Montana vistas (well, New Zealand subbing in for Montana) and the mutating churn of composer Jonny Greenwood’s haunting score. It’s anchored by three complexly realized performances, from an arguably never better Benedict Cumberbatch, an eerie and ethereal Kodi Smit-McPhee, and a devastating Kirsten Dunst.
Adapted from a 1967 novel that must have been pretty groundbreaking in its day, The Power of the Dog is by some measure a queer film. But Campion is not so interested in the mechanics of institutionalized homophobia (and misogyny) as she is in the private pains of self-denial, its warping effects and its capacity to curdle jealously guarded secrets into poison. Campion, as ever, has made a film that is at once cerebral and visceral, a holistic, whole-body look at people staggering through the wilderness, struggling to breathe.
2. Drive My Car
Grief, Chekhov, and a gorgeous old red Saab 900 commingle in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s arresting adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story. The film concerns a theater director, Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who has recently lost his wife and is embarking on a new endeavor: directing a production of Uncle Vanya starring an international cast of actors each performing in their native language. (Including sign language.) Against his protestations, he is assigned a local driver, a young woman named Misaki (Tôko Miura), who is contending with her own loss. As the two get to know one another and the play takes shape, the film offers a bountiful meditation on healing through acceptance.
The film’s three-hour runtime may seem daunting, but Hamaguchi makes it glide by, carefully meting out detail and motivation in rich, novelistic fashion. Hamaguchi had another movie out in 2021: the also excellent Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a triptych of short stories about people maneuvering whims of fate and sudden shifts in circumstance. Between these two gems, Hamaguchi produced some of the most thoughtful, generous hours of film this year. His films lift downward gazes up toward the ineffably sublime; they tune wanting ears into the whir of the world, spinning along. Drive My Car is, at its conclusion, not ignorant or dismissive of the hurt of being alive. But it is hopeful—trusting, like many a Chekhov character languishing and longing away in some faraway dacha, that chance may once again work in our favor, somewhere down the road ahead.
When I first saw Joachim Trier’s gregarious, wistful, stylish, utterly winning film, I decided it was a tribute to people who don’t want to have kids, and are thus tasked with figuring out what their lives are going to mean. Because, I suppose, I wanted to see it that way. Afterwards, I talked to friends and colleagues who thought the movie was, instead, about the banal agonies of turning 30, about the unbridgeable chasms of heterosexual coupling, about Millennial malaise. The thrill of Trier’s masterwork is that it is all of those things, and almost certainly plenty else.
With the luminous Renate Reinsve at the center—as Julie, a woman bouncing through Oslo in her early adulthood, uncertain where she should land—The Worst Person in the World is a treasure trove of insight and observation. Is Julie a selfish, heedless disaster? Is she, in fact, the worst person in the world? Or, at least, one of the worst? These questions of fledgling-grownup solipsism might seem airy, thin, well-covered by myriad other movies already. But Trier has more on his mind than mere thirty-something flaneuring.
As his film draws toward its crushing and elating end, we see what all of this wondering about the future—and all the yearning for the past, both rueful and nostalgic—is really in service of. The Worst Person in the World is, at root, about that most vexing and essential thing: the present tense. Which, as Trier potently suggests in his film’s beguiling final scenes, is the only time we’ve really got.
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