The Best New-to-Me Movies Of 2021
“Dashiell Hammet said ‘life is full of falling beams’, and he’s right, but life is also full of falling blossoms – good things happen, too.” – Dennis O’Neill
I was going to get this list done on time. I really was. But then 2021 didn’t turn out to be much better than 2020 had been, and I was swamped and stressed, and now I’m in the midst of directing a movie of my own and as swamped and stressed as ever, albeit in (I hope) a productive way. Not that the timing of these things really matters, because after all, the whole point of these lists is to celebrate stuff that is new to me, regardless of how old it might be. But it still makes one feel a bit guilty, pushing “publish” so late.
Anywho, enough self pity – here’s some stuff I really loved last year:
1. Raw (2016, d. Julia Ducournau)
“I’m sure you’ll find a solution, honey.”
Freshman year is hard for Justine. A student at a veterinary school, Justine is a star pupil – her parents were both graduates of the academy, her “cool girl” sister is part of the reigning administration of student leaders – and as such is resented by her teachers (one unsympathetic professor tells her that exceptional students like her make the other students depressed and “scare off good doctors”) and snickered at by her classmates, who sense innately that she is nervous, shy, a virgin and bad at making friends. But an alarming change is beginning to take place inside Justine. A vegetarian, she has such a violent reaction to eating a rabbit kidney as part of an initiation ritual that her entire body breaks out in an itchy, peeling rash. But having been given this first taste of meat, Justine starts to develop cravings. She tries to steal a hamburger patty at the school cafeteria, and eats gas station schwarma with embarrassing abandon. She takes to sneaking meat – raw, uncooked meat – from her roommates’ fridge in the middle of the night. And from animal meat to a more outre type might not be that great a leap…“Raw” feels, for much of its first act, like a fairly classic if terrifically executed coming of age story – Garance Marillier is brilliant in the lead role, emotionally exposed to a degree that’s almost embarrassing (anyone who’s ever felt awkward and uncouth around cooler classmates will immediately empathize with her – I did), and Ella Rumpf is equally terrific as her older, seemingly effortlessly cool sister. But all along, there are signs that something more deeply sinister is going on. The hazing rituals at the veterinary clinic involve plenty of bog standard cruelty – freshmen forced to wear underwear on the outside of their pants, terrified kids rousted from bed to crowd into a drug fueled party – but there is also an image of freshmen crawling on concrete that looks like something out of a zombie film, presaging something truly strange to come. Hanging over everything are the enigmatic opening images: two long, wide shots of an open road; a figure (we can’t really see who it is, young or old, male or female) ducking into a ditch; a car driving down the road; that same figure jumping in front of the car, sending it careening into a tree; and the mysterious figure walking slowly, menacingly, toward the car…David Cronenberg has been cited by many as a comparison point for “Raw”, not least by writer/director Julia Ducournau herself (this is her feature debut, and an astonishing debut it is), and the film does indeed play at times like a lost French language feminist Cronenberg film, not least in the simultaneously clinical and compassionate way it views its characters, like a not unsympathetic scientist watching the subjects of a demented experiment. “Raw” goes to some shocking places (I’ve had to look away from the screen both times I’ve seen the film; there were stories coming out of the film’s Toronto Film Festival screening of viewers literally fainting), but more shocking is the way it refuses to judge its two central characters, seeing in them twin avatars of female power, unleashed and unconstrained. Sisters Justine and Alexia are in that very precarious college-age stage – given the pleasures of young adulthood without any real responsibilities – and “Raw” goes to some wild and wooly places showing them emerging from the cocoon of adolescence into the power and potent terror of adulthood. It’s a thrilling piece of work.
2. Mishma: A Life in Four Chapters (1985, d. Paul Schrader)
“They don’t even know that art is a shadow…that stage blood is not enough.”
Yukio Mishima was an author, actor, playwright and poet who became increasingly enamored of right wing Japanese politics. At the age of 45, he and several members of his self founded “Shield Society” – a kind of miniature civilian military core – took command of a military base and demanded the opportunity to speak to the assembled soldiers, hoping to inspire them to overthrow Japan’s 1947 Constitution, which had stripped the emperor of his power and prestige; when his speech was met with heckling from the soldiers, Mishima committed ritual seppuku. None of this seems to add up – the weakling poet who reforged himself as a warrior, the man of words who died in the midst of a military action – and the contradictions inherent would seem to make the creation of a biographical film about Mishima almost impossible. Biopics tend to simplify and smooth out contradictions, often resorting to a sickening reductiveness, of the “his mother didn’t love him, that’s why he was a monster” school. “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” is a thrilling reinvention of the genre, in that it makes those contradictions its core. Paul Schrader’s film (co-written by Schrader and his brother Leonard) proceeds on three separate, simultaneous tracks: handheld, pseudo-documentary scenes depicting the last day of Mishima’s life; silken black and white “flashback” sequences depicting “backstory” events – showing Mishima’s evolution from a timid, frail child into an athletic, virile he-man; and brilliantly stylized adaptations of three of Mishima’s stories – “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion”, “Kyoko’s House” and “Runaway Horses” – envisioned as a series of technicolor expressionist fantasies by designer Eiko Ishioka. “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” offers a kind of kaleidoscopic view of its subject; the various narrative lines start to feel like a house of mirrors, the Mishima of the flashback sequences somehow “explained” by the characters in his fiction, fragmenting its central character into various component parts – his artistic ambitions; his fluid sexuality; his vanity; his frailty; his militaristic fetishization – and letting us find the resonances where we will. This is perhaps Schrader’s masterpiece as a director - sometimes accused (even by admirers) of being a “cold” filmmaker, “smarter than he is talented” in Pauline Kael’s blunt assessment, this is arguably the picture where his precision as a filmmaker comes to its full fruition. There is beauty and, yes, emotion in the formal beauty of the filmmaking, in John Bailey’s stunning cinematography, in Ishioka’s constantly startling designs (my favorite: the conspirator’s chamber that bursts apart like a house of cards), in Philip Glass’ brilliant score, which recycles the same basic thematic material into endless variations. It’s a dizzying, intoxicating film, a high wire act, the kind of movie that would seem impossible to pull off. (Not just aesthetically, but practically – Schrader had to call in favors from executive producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to get the film made, and ran afoul of Mishima’s estate, which to this day has blocked the film from being commercially exhibited in Japan.) Making a work this daring, this bold, would seem to be as impossible as trying to explain a man as complicated as Mishima. And yet the man existed, and so does the film.
3. Die Nibelungen: Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924, d. Fritz Lang)
“Dedicated to the German people.”
That dedication christens both halves of Fritz Lang’s two film fantasy epic, and begins to feel more and more sinister as said epic unfolds. Adapted from the poem “Nibelungenlied”, and produced during Lang’s true halcyon period – the 1920s into the 1930s, when he made a series of increasingly daring masterpieces – “Die Nibelungen” in many ways is for the fantasy genre what Lang’s later “Metropolis” would be for science fiction, a trove of endless inspiration. Both films are full of breathtaking sights and visions, the kind of imagery that actually deserves to be referred to by the cliché of a “storybook come to life”, and the slight unreality of the effects only makes them more potent; nobody can forget Siegfried’s show stopping battle with a fire breathing dragon – made of plaster and rubber, extending something like 70 feet and weighing tons, Lang’s dragon does not look “real” in the way a CGI creature would, and yet there is something hauntingly evocative about it, its plaster eyes seeming to contain a real thinking intelligence, its death throes pathetic and moving. The whole of “Die Nibelungen” strikes the same stunning balance between artifice and verisimilitude. This is perhaps the apex of Lang as an architectural filmmaker, constructing worlds with a kind of mathematical precision – every image seems precisely calibrated, whether it’s the shimmering vision of an invisible Siegfried (Paul Richter) helping King Gunther (Theodor Loos) win the heart of Brunhild (Hanna Ralph), the fearsome Huns crawling insect-like across the bottom of the frame, or the mock heroic images of the proud Burgundians posed statue-like, in geometric formations, against their enemies. Those last images may have been the ones that most impressed Adolph Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, both of whom loved “Die Nibelungen”; Goebbels praised the film as one of the models “to which German filmmakers should aspire”, according to Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan, and Leni Riefenstahl essentially recreated the film’s rigid pageantry on a mass scale in her Nazi propaganda films. And yet the closer one looks at “Die Nibelungen”, the stranger the notion of it as an example of German excellence becomes. For all its fantasy trappings, this is a story of treachery; Siegfried may be the classical hero, naïvely innocent almost the point of stupidity, but as soon as he arrives in the halls of Burgund, seeking the hand of the beautiful Kriemhild (Margarete Schon), he is drawn into deceit. Siegfried helps King Gunther, a weakling and coward, win the hand of the warrior queen Brunhild through trickery, and later disguises himself as Gunther to rape Brunhild in their marital bed. (Brunhild for her part remains angrily defiant – “I am your prisoner! I will never be your wife!” she snarls at Gunther, even before learning he has tricked her into their marriage.) All of this deceit leaves Siegfried with well earned guilt, and earns him no trust within Gunther’s court; having sullied the hero, Gunther’s scheming lieutenant Hagen Tronje (Hans Adalbert Schlettow) betrays and murders Siegfried, in a cowardly and underhanded manner. This betrayal at the end of the first film sets the stage for a series of betrayals that populate the second half; the glorious fantasy and adventure of the first film telescopes into claustrophobic paranoia and violence in the second. Kriemhild, who seemed the virtual stereotype of a submissive German dream woman in the first film, transforms into a kid of Valkyrie of hatred and death, scheming to force her husband King Etzel (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) to wage war on the Burgundians. (Schon, who in the first film seems a bit too pat, a bit too wide eyed to be believed, pulls off a pretty remarkable transformation into a kind of living totem of revenge; and Klein-Rogge, a Lang stalwart who played Rotwang in “Metropolis”, brings real if not exactly understated feeling to his grotesque role as the King of the Huns, blinkered by love and admiration for a queen he has won in a political game.) The two film saga climaxes with a palace siege, the proud to the point of arrogance Burgundians being smoked out of their stronghold; virtually every character in the film seems driven by blinkered, stupid notions of “honor” that succeed only in getting them killed. It feels chillingly like a precursor to the arrogance, stupidity and waste that was to come in Germany. Maybe the Nazis should’ve taken a closer look at their “favorite movie”. Maybe they should’ve taken notes.
4. Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, d. Vincente Minnelli)
“Wasn’t I lucky to be born in my favorite city…?”
Some movies are pure bliss. MGM studios – and specifically Arthur Freed’s producing unit – created more than their fair share of bliss over the years. I’ll profess to being something of a MGM skeptic – Louis B. Mayer’s emphasis on “family values” has always struck me as slightly pernicious bullshit, a glossy lie even before you find out what a monster the man himself was – but when their movies worked they worked, and “Meet Me in St. Louis” is as delightful as anything the studio ever produced. A picket fence collection of vignettes from the short stories/collected novel of the same name by Sally Benson, taking place between the Summer of 1903 and the Spring of 1904 in a St. Louis so bucolic that the seasons are introduced with literal storybook images coming to life, it’s a technicolor fantasy of early 20th century America, where the Smith family (Leon Ames is the comically overworked father, Mary Astor his wise wife, Lucille Bremer, Judy Garland, Joan Carroll and Margaret O’Brien his brood of adorable daughters) call themselves “poor” but live in a mansion and have a cook (Marjorie Main) and have all the time in the world to get into adventures and throw parties and (in the case of the teenaged girls) pine after “the boy next door”. This should all be so sickly sweet it’s disgusting, and yet “Meet Me in St. Louis” is a virtual balm for the soul. Director Vincente Minnelli marshals the full force of MGM’s production apparatus – delectable technicolor, stunning sets and costumes – without allowing it to overwhelm this charmingly small story about charmingly ordinary people. “Meet Me in St. Louis”, in the midst of its MGM bombast, has ample room for small touches: the moment where Mary Astor, nervous the neighbors might overhear her daughter’s important phone conversation, goes to shut the front window; Judy Garland’s quietly pained reaction to being told by the boy she likes that her perfume reminds him of his grandmother’s. Simple scenes take on a mythic resonance through their handling: the Halloween episode, with Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) the “little” kid not allowed to partake in games with the others, becomes a fever dream of childhood fears and exhilaration, capturing the “child’s eye view” feel that “To Kill a Mockingbird” would strive for nearly 20 years later, and arguably doing it better; a sequence of Garland and her paramour turning out all the lights in her house – a slow, delicate stroll – becomes the most romantic thing ever seen on the silver screen; “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, sung by an older sister to the heartbroken younger on the eve of a big move (when you’re a child, the thought of moving takes on apocalyptic connotations), has rightly become a kind of anthem for perseverance through change. The cast all strike the perfect note of commitment, with special praise due to Ames and Astor, who invest understated emotion into what could’ve been stock “parental” roles. (Even little Margaret O’Brien, verging at times on being too cloying, is ultimately effective – the running gag of her character’s ghoulish hobbies, burying her “dead” dolls in the cemetery, keeps her from being just a “cute kid”, and her emotional crying scenes are so convincing they’re honestly upsetting – you want somebody to run in and tell the kid, “Jeezus, it’s just a movie, you don’t have to get so worked up!”) If the film’s songs aren’t the barnstormers of “Singin’ in the Rain” or “The Band Wagon”, that also feels apropos – the songs should feel like the kinds of familiar chestnuts that ordinary people casually sing under their breath, around the house. In possibly the best scene of the picture, Judy Garland’s performance of “The Trolly Song” doesn’t feel like what it is – a tour de force star turn for one of the great performers of the 20th Century – but the swept away, dreamy confessions of a lovesick teenager. Simple pleasures have rarely been so satisfying.
5. The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933, d. Fritz Lang)
“When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.”
It didn’t require any special insight to sense that Germany in 1933 was headed in a very, very bad direction – the rise of Nazism, of Hitler, was chilling both within and without the country. Fritz Lang’s own associations to the Nazis are somewhat suspect (his wife and frequent collaborator Thea Von Harbou stayed in Germany during the war years and continued faithfully writing propaganda works; Lang made grand claims about how quickly he fled the country, but biographer Patrick McGilligan makes it pretty clear that Lang cozied up to the Nazis and took his time extricating himself from Germany), but Lang, one of the great chroniclers of his times, must’ve sensed what way the wind was blowing. Perhaps it was just commercial considerations, as McGilligan insinuates, that inspired Lang and Von Harbou to bring back Dr. Mabuse, the star of Lang’s grand two part silent epic; or perhaps there was something deeper at work in Lang’s mind. Dr. Mabuse had first appeared – in Norbert Jacques’ serialized novel and Lang’s almost-released-concurrently-film – in the midst of Germany’s horrifying post-World War I recession, a time when German public life was in a state of chaos. Mabuse would reappear at a time when the Nazis were casting their avaricious, greedy eyes toward the rest of the world. Mabuse had in 1922 been, in essence, an embodiment of everything dysfunctional and decadent in German society – a master criminal, a gang leader, a hypnotist, a sexual sadist, a master of disguise, he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere at once, both a flesh and blood puppet master and a “shadow” as David Kalat put it in his essential critical study “The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse”. By 1933, the shadow side had won out – Dr. Mabuse was reduced to a madman scrawling insane plans for an “empire of crime” from his sick bed (shades of “Mein Kampf”), and yet his diseased thoughts seem to be enough to send Germany into a downward spiral. (Myth has long held that Lang put actual Nazi slogans into the mouth of Dr. Mabuse, claims that I’ve never seen substantiated anywhere; but certainly the Nazis, who banned the film, must’ve found something fishy in the good doctor’s grand claims about an empire of crime.) “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” is not only a sequel to Lang’s earlier “Mabuse” epic (in a sense it’s one of cinema’s first “lega-sequels”, picking up from the events of nearly a decade prior), it’s also a sequel to Lang’s masterpiece “M”, carrying over that film’s Columbo-esque master detective Lohmann (Otto Wernicke) and acting as the pulp flip side of that film’s procedural coldness. Lang doesn’t exactly go for suspense – that implies empathy, and Lang’s German cinema is too cold for empathy; “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” is more like a steel trap of a narrative, where the various narrative lines (mad Mabuse scrawling away in his cell; intrepid Inspector Lohmann, doggedly working toward the truth; a regretful Mabuse lieutenant whose attempts to “go straight” threaten disastrous consequences for himself and his beloved) form a maddening tapestry, separate rail lines heading toward the same destination, the same cataclysmic crash. Madness is ultimately the entire point of Mabuse’s reign of terror – his underlings sell drugs to the underclass for cheap prices, blackmail rich and powerful men without offering actual terms, and undercut the country’s currency not to get rich but simply to send the nation into a tailspin of decay and corruption. (In a political era where we’re constantly reminded that “the cruelty is the point”, this all feels chillingly relevant.) Continuing his experiments with sound from “M”, Lang stages some of his best set pieces in “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” around bold auditory effects – an opening set piece obscures all dialogue under deafening machine noise; a fleeing secret agent’s footsteps are silent, but an explosive oil drum has the aural force of a locomotive; villains use traffic noise to obscure a gunshot, the sounds of modern life literally countenancing murder. Even more that “M”, “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” feels like a fist raised in the face of the mechanized horrors of modernity. The Nazis suppressed the film, although there is evidence to suggest that Joseph Goebbels was a fan, screening the movie privately for friends while publicly banning it. It would be Lang’s last German film before fleeing to the US, and it acts as a defiant and brilliant capstone to his greatest filmmaking period.
6. Sexy Beast (2000, d. Jonathan Glazer)
“It’s not what you’re saying. It’s all this stuff you’re not saying. Insinnuendoes.”
Gal (Ray Winstone) is a master of “insinnuendoes”. A retired British gangster residing with his wife and their married friends in Spain, he lives a life of leisurely inactivity, sunning himself by the pool (“I’m sweatin’ here; roastin’; boilin’; bakin’,” Ray Winstone purrs in his gravel pit voice, incongruously clad in a tiny yellow speedo; “you could fry an egg on my stomach”), seeming almost a caricature of old fashioned British masculinity. But his eyes betray him – reveal the depth of his love for his wife, reveal the kindness he feels toward the young boy who tends his garden and cleans his pool, and reveal the utter, pants shitting terror he feels when he’s told that Don Logan (Ben Kingsley) is coming to visit. Don Logan is the opposite of Gal – short, wiry, angry on principle, he fluctuates between terrifying silences and machine gun blasts of obscenity. If Gal is a case of “still waters run deep”, Don is very, very shallow, and constantly in motion; he has such bottomless insecurity that the only way he can cover for it is by putting everyone on their back foot. Don has come to Spain to offer Gal a job – be part of a crew pulling off a seemingly impossible heist for the smooth London tough Teddy Bass (Ian McShane) – and he does not like hearing that Gal is retired and would prefer to stay that way. “Sexy Beast” uses the rudimentary elements of a thousand genre films – the story of a tough guy pulled out of retirement for “one last job” – but it’s really all about character, all about the dueling personalities of these two men. Don, on the surface one of the most fearsome gangsters in movie history (Kingsley is scary and funny in equal measure), is in essence an adolescent boy, terrified that he’ll be embarrassed in front of the London gangsters who commissioned him with putting a team together, throwing a literal temper tantrum when he doesn’t get his way. (The film’s most famous bit of dialogue is Kinglsey simply shouting “No, no, no, no, no!” at Ray Winstone for what feels like years.) And Gal too is not quite what he seems on the surface – under Ray Winstone’s girth (he has the build of a linebacker gone slightly to seed, as that speedo clad opening delightfully demonstrates), there lurks the heart of a sensitive boy, really, truly, fervently in love, so in love that he and his beloved float through the night air while “Lujon” plays on the soundtrack. He has left his gangster past so far behind that he can’t even play the role of a tough guy anymore. “Sexy Beast” similarly feels like it’s only masquerading as a crime pic; there’s the requisite violence and plot twists and laddy intensity, but director Jonathan Glazer’s choices feels consistently, delightfully “off”, from the music (retro lounge for Gal’s visions of his dream life in Spain, pounding electronica for the world of the London gangsters) to the sneaky humor to bold visual touches like the POV of a boulder rolling toward Gal, almost killing him. The film itself pulls off a similar high wire act, never letting its eccentricities crush it.
7. The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015, d. Marielle Heller
“You have a kind of power, you know. You just don’t know it yet.”
Minnie (Bel Powley) doesn’t feel like she has “a kind of power”, no matter what her mother (Kristen Wiig) tells her. She’s 15, interested in being a cartoonist (Aline Crumb is her idol), surviving in a household where her mother is trying new recreational drugs on a seemingly daily basis — life as a teenager feels unstable in the best of times, and Minnie’s situation is not the best. Things only begin to make a kind of sense when she begins a relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, Monroe (Alexander Skarsgard), who is basically the poster child of a two-faced “nice guy”; he sleeps with Minnie and gives her her first sense of sexual empowerment, but he also undercuts her (“Why do you ask such stupid questions?”), belittles her art, and turns his sexual abuse of her into a weapon: “You have some kind of hold on me,” he sighs to the child he’s committing statutory rape against. Minnie is too young to understand that her relationship with Monroe is wrong, wrong, wrong on multiple levels – it’s only when he finally screams at her that she’s a fucking child that she gets awoken, as if from a dream; she’s happier living within the comforting illusion that she’s an “adult now” that she’s had sex, that what she’s caught in is love rather than abuse. What makes “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (adapted by writer/director Marielle Heller from the novel by Phoebe Gloeckner) so arresting and disturbing is that it sees this story unflinchingly through the eyes of the titular teenage girl. Rarely has “depiction does not equal endorsement” been put to the test as thoroughly as it is here; one hopes that any thinking audience member will understand that Minnie is a talented, confused kid, that Monroe is a sleazy piece of shit, that Minnie’s mother is a well meaning but basically incapable screw up, and that the “free wheeling” 1976 San Francisco Minnie is growing up in is maybe not the most stable environment. (The 70s has become something of a fetish object for filmmakers of late, but Heller and cinematographer Brandon Trost’s ‘70s San Francisco feels not like an art directed nostalgia tour but a real place, the air hazy with cigarette smoke and dust.) There’s no outside narrator, no “objective” person coming into Minnie’s world to say “Um, this is profoundly wrong”; we see Minnie’s story from her own confused vantage point, and the friction is both unsettling and engrossing. “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” often made me flinch, but only from the truth; this is the sort of movie that’s so honest it’s painful – honest about the messiness of familial relationships and friendships, honest about the ways we lie to ourselves about the things that are bad for us, honest about how monsters can be likable and people who do bad things aren’t necessarily monsters. All the performances are stellar – Kristen Wiig superb as the mother (her final line – “if anybody asks, I’m you’re sister” – is as heartbreaking as it is funny), Alexander Skarsgard daringly playing Monroe as equal parts charming “nice guy” and scummy manipulator, and Bel Powley fearless and brilliant as Minnie, creating a portrait of a smart, talented kid in over her head that is empathetic without becoming simplistic or sentimental.
8. I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, d. Charlie Kaufman)
“It’s good to remind yourself the world is larger than the inside of your own head.”
There’s a despair at the heart of Charlie Kaufman’s work. It’s been there since the dazzling days of “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation”, movies marketed as “quirky comedies” but suffused with pain, loneliness, desperation. That bleak streak has only become more apparent as Kaufman has become the director of his screenplays. “Synecdoche, New York”, his directorial debut, was the story of an artist who constructs a facsimile of his own life and finds himself unable to control either his fictions or his reality. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, adapted by Kaufman from the novel by Iain Reid, in a sense plays like the inverse of “Synecdoche” – rather than a story about a character externalizing their demons, it’s a film that burrows inside the labyrinth of a person’s mind. A young woman (Jessie Buckley, absolutely brilliant) is going on a car trip across a snowy landscape with her boyfriend (Jesse Plemons) to meet his parents at their farm. While they seem the perfect picture of a cute young couple, something from the beginning seems…off. “I’m thinking of ending things,” the young woman’s interior narration tells us – whether her life or the relationship (or both) we’re not entirely sure, but clearly she’s looking to jump ship, and this is before the journey begins to curdle into a slow motion nightmare, the wintry landscape becoming increasingly terrifying (anyone who has lived in the Midwest and seen vicious winter weather will be able to relate), the young man’s parents (Toni Colette and David Thewlis) revealed as terrifying grotesques, Mother flitting from one exaggerated emotion to another like a badly programmed automaton, Father spewing vaguely reactionary nonsense in a tone that makes it difficult to tell if he’s legitimately unhinged or just backward. Something is indeed wrong at the heart of the world in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, and the film’s final act begins to pull back the doors on the narrative in ways that are rather astonishing. Of all the films on this list, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” was the one that most transformed for me on repeated viewing, becoming almost a completely different film. Jessie Buckley’s young woman may be the door through which we enter the story, but the film is really about Plemon’s Jake, a crippled, defeated man hiding under the shell of a likable young guy, smiling bravely and nodding agreeably as he watches his dreams and ambitions turn to sand. Kaufman’s earlier films were about characters (usually men) caught in spirals of self destruction and delusion, desperately clinging to illusory hopes, but there was absurdist comedy mixed in with the desperation. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” sends us straight into the vortex; the movie’s apparent inscrutability on first viewing is something of a balm – on revisit, the howling, yawning loneliness at its center becomes almost unbearable. One has moments, at 2 or 3 a.m., staring in the bathroom mirror, when it feels like the entirety of life is a missed opportunity. “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” is that feeling stretched out into an entire film – a film about fears of rejection, abandonment, thwarted desire, and how these fears don’t go away but fester, bottle up, threaten to swallow us. On first viewing I couldn’t decide if the film was brilliant or incoherent; it unsettled me, but I found it hard to identify with, or perhaps I was too disturbed to want to identify. On revisit, I think it might be Kaufman’s masterpiece – his most unflinching look at the essential loneliness of life’s voyage.
9. Ronin (1998, d. John Frankenheimer)
“No questions. No answers. That’s the business we’re in.”
“There are no bad ones,” the screenwriter Lem Dobbs once opined about film noir. The crime genre is among the most malleable in all of cinema – there’s something elemental about these stories of (mostly) men testing themselves against fate while in the commission of a robbery or a heist or the capture of a criminal; they work when they’re intricately plotted, they work when they’re stripped to the bone, they work when they’re executed with immense skill and even a lot of the bad ones kinda work on some basic, gut level. “Ronin” exists within the world codified by the great French master Jean-Pierre Melville, a world of no-nonsense professionals whose backstory is kept to a minimum, where the dialogue is terse and the filmmakers know that we know that they’re playing with iconography. A band of thieves (Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgard, Skipp Sudduth) are summoned to France by a mysterious woman named Deidre (Natascha McElhone) who works for an equally mysterious, unseen “Mr. Big” who wants the assembled thieves to steal a briefcase containing…diamonds? Nuclear codes? Drugs? Deidre won’t say. (Roger Ebert joked that the briefcase probably contained the glowing briefcase from “Pulp Fiction”.) The briefcase is, of course, an archetypal MacGuffin – an object that doesn’t matter so long as all the characters want it – but then the entire plot of “Ronin” is a Macguffin, an excuse by director John Frankenheimer and screenwriters J.D. Zeik and David Mamet (under the pseudonym Richard Wiesz) to stage dialogue sequences filled to the brim with snappily oblique patter (“You worried about saving your own skin?” “Yeah I am. It covers my body”) and terrific set pieces (the film’s central car chase is rightly remembered as one of the all time greats, a combination “French Connection” and “To Live and Die in L.A.” in Europe that would be ludicrously unbelievable if it weren’t so damn exciting). Like the best of the New Wave crime films, “Ronin” is self aware, able to kid the cliches of the genre while also indulging them; a movie like this is basically a straight style exercise, and “Ronin” delivers, its visual surfaces all steely precision, its performances perfectly calibrated. This is maybe De Niro’s greatest “movie star” performance, all his charisma and gravitas as an actor channelled into the kind of mid career “aging tough guy” role that Robert Mitchum and William Holden did so well in the ‘70s; he has the weight of a Humphrey Bogart or a Jean Gabin, not slumming down to the pulp material but bringing weight and wit to it, and generating both great bromance chemistry with Jean Reno and great “big dick” rivalry with a young, squirrel-y Sean Bean (“I ambushed you with a cup of coffee!”). If “Ronin” suffers at all, it’s perhaps in its third act – some of the ambiguities of the first 2/3 get explained away, and a set piece at a Russian ice show is well executed but feels like gilding the Lilly after the movie’s breath stopping car chase. You can feel a well executed studio movie crowding in on the stripped down perfection of the first two acts. No matter. At its best, “Ronin” is a steely, precise gem.
10. Killer Joe (2011, d. William Friedkin)
“Your eyes hurt.”
So says Dottie to Killer Joe, taking both he and the audience by surprise. Killer Joe (Matthew McConaughey) is a Texas police officer who moonlights as a contract killer. He has been hired by Dottie’s family, the Smiths – in Roger Ebert’s words, “the stupidest family I’ve ever seen in a movie that’s not a comedy” – to perform a job: patriarch Ansel Smith (Thomas Haden Church), a man with both the countenance and comprehension of a stupefied cow, and his son Chris (Emile Hirsch), who is wilier if not smarter, have concocted a plan to have Ansel’s ex-wife killed, on the belief that her estate will go to Chris’ somewhat spacey younger sister Dottie (Juno Temple). The Smiths will split the inheritance, and Killer Joe would get a cut of the loot too, but Joe isn’t in the habit of taking jobs where he’s not getting paid up front, so he strikes a deal: Chris, Ansel and Ansel’s current wife Sharla (Gina Gershon) can pay Joe his end on the back…and Joe will “take” virginal young Dottie as his collateral. If you’re already finding yourself reeling, “Killer Joe” might not be the movie for you; where “Ronin” condenses the conventions of the noir thriller to a kind of masterful minimalism, “Killer Joe” pushes them to their furthest extremes. Tracy Letts’ script (adapted from his own play) is frequently jaw dropping in its content, and behind the camera, William Friedkin gives it both knees; this is “Hurricane Billy” with all the stops pulled out, screenwriter and director unfolding a yarn that pinwheels back and forth from absurd black comedy to truly appalling horror story with freewheeling abandon. (The film was rated NC-17 for “graphic disturbing content involving violence and sexuality, and a scene of brutality”, and it earns every bit of that rating.) The cast are all terrific – it’s really a chamber piece, these five awful people squabbling and sniping at each other in confined spaces – but the film comes down to a two hander between Temple and McConaughey, in parts that ask them to go place many actors wouldn’t dare. Temple manages to make her seemingly unplayable character comprehensible – Dottie is naïve but not stupid, sympathetic while never becoming a straightforward victim — and all McConaughey’s charms as an actor are put to literally lethal use here. His sculpted physique and face seem chiseled out of iron; his Southern drawl has a coiled intensity during even apparently benign conversations (Killer Joe is a man of few words, but most of them are pointed); but it all comes back to his eyes. “Your eyes hurt,” Dottie says, and we understand what she means. Those burning baby blues are the eyes of a coiled cobra, deadly and self amused. They hypnotize Dottie, and they hypnotize us too – forcing us to watch things we can’t bear, and making us laugh at things we’ll feel guilty about afterward.
BEST ACTOR – Anthony Hopkins, “Nixon”
Anthony Hopkins doesn’t look or sound anything like Richard Nixon, and yet when the real Nixon finally appears via archival footage at the end of Oliver Stone’s Shakespearean stab at the 37th president of the United States, it’s a whiplash inducing moment. Hopkins becomes Stone’s conception of Nixon so thoroughly that the illusion is seamless. I’ve never felt so sympathetic to somebody I find so politically and morally offensive, and a lot of that is down to the way Hopkins embodies Nixon as essentially a tiny, frightened man hiding in the skin of a great leader. The key moment comes when Nixon, in the midst of the Watergate tumult, lumbers into a receiving room, and as though flipping a switch forces his face into not so much a smile as a grimace, his lips pulled back in a rictus. The smile may be jolly, but the eyes, that empty thousand yard stare, the bottomless self pity and paranoia…it can’t be concealed.
Honorable Mentions: James Earl Jones in “The Great White Hope”; Daniel Kaluuya and LaKeith Stanfield in “Judas and the Black Messiah”; Ben Kingsley and Ray Winstone in “Sexy Beast”; Matthew McConaughey in “Killer Joe”.
BEST ACTRESS – Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer, “Lovely & Amazing”
Nicole Holofcener’s affectionate dramedy centers on fractured sisterhood within the Marks clan, headed by matriarch Jane (Brenda Blethyn). The film is an ensemble piece, following a cascade of wonderfully drawn characters – Raven Goodwin is Blethyn’s adopted daughter, Aunjanue Ellis is the nanny assigned to take care of Goodwin while Blethyn is recovering from surgery – but the film arguably “belongs” to Catherine Keener and Emily Mortimer as Bleythn’s two grown daughters, both of whom seem more childish than their wiser-than-her-years adopted sister. Keener’s Michelle is essentially an overgrown adolescent, looking just as gorgeous as when she was elected homecoming queen but personally adrift, making art projects destined not to sell and developing a disastrous infatuation with her teenaged boss (a very young Jake Gyllenhaal). Mortimer’s Elizabeth is an aspirant actress driven to distraction by the mixed signals she gets from her agent and from her partner (she’s not sexy enough – she’s plenty sexy – the casting director is a jerk – but maybe he’s right…?), and overcompensates by “adopting” stray dogs off the street. Both of these characters could potentially be obnoxious, but Keener and Mortimer make them not just likable but lovable; both actors get late-in-the-film moments of clarity and revelation (Keener’s is a silent long take, left alone at a Hollywood party, realizing how superficial she’s been; Mortimer’s is a near miraculous scene where she asks a sexual partner to honestly assess her body, both what he likes and what he doesn’t) that are flawlessly performed.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Joan Blondell in “Gold Diggers of 1933”; Garane Marillier in “Raw”; Thomasin McKenzie and Anya Taylor-Joy in “Last Night in Soho”; Bel Powley in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell and Tony Shalhoub, “Galaxy Quest”
This 1999 tribute to/spoof of “Star Trek” is just as good as people have been telling me for years – equal parts goofy space opera and tongue-in-cheek character comedy – with a cast to die for. Tim Allen has never been better than he is here, as the Shatner-esque fading star, and Sigourney Weaver is wonderful as his co-lead, but the movie really belongs to a trio of inspired supporting performances: Alan Rickman as the Shakespearean ham forever tortured by his association with this sci-fi nonsense (“By grabthar’s hammer,” he groans, well and truly sick of his stupid catchphrase); Sam Rockwell as a one episode “Red Shirt” who fears becoming equally expendable in real life; and Tony Shalhoub as the old pro who accepts his enlistment into a real space corps with the bemused resignation of an experienced day player benignly saying the lines and taking the paycheck.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Edward Arnold and Walter Huston in “The Devil and Daniel Webster”; Boris Karloff in “Bedlam”; Delroy Lindo in “Da 5 Bloods”; Alexander Skarsgaard in “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Julie Hagerty, Lost in America
Julie Hagerty really should’ve been a bigger star – it was a delight seeing her turn up in “Marriage Story” a few years ago, just as delightfully “off” as ever. “Airplane!” is one of the funniest movies ever made and she’s brilliant in it, but “Lost in America” might be her singular comic masterpiece, matching co-star Albert Brooks joke for joke as the apparently placid suburban wife who reveals the soul of degenerate gambler. As in “Airplane!”, Hagerty plays every scene 100% straight, and that’s what makes it so damn funny.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Ana de Armas in “No Time to Die”; Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard and Rosalind Russel in “The Women”; Dominique Fishback in “Judas and the Black Messiah”; Juno Temple in “Killer Joe”.
BEST SHORT FILM
“A Dog’s Life” (1918, d. Charles Chaplin) I’ve been doing a silent comedy watch/rewatch with my brother this past year, and having seen this for the first time, it might be tied neck and neck with “One A.M.” as my favorite short Chaplin. The sequence where Charlie manipulates an unconscious Albert Austin as though he’s a puppet had us roaring, as did the brilliant bit with Sydney Chaplin as a food cart vendor.
BEST ANIMATED FILM
“Education for Death” (1943, d. Clyde Geronimi) A world war 2 propaganda film from Disney – if not suppressed, then certainly quietly “forgotten” by the studio – a grimly effective vision of a German youth’s transformation from sensitive child into unthinking Nazi automaton.
FAVORITE SCORES OF THE YEAR
1. Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter, “Mickey One”
2. Philip Glass, “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters”
3. Mark Lawrence, “David and Lisa”
4. Jim Williams, “Raw”
5. Paul Williams, “Bugsy Malone”
BEST MOVIE SONG
“Benson, Arizona” from “Dark Star”
John Carpenter and Dan O’Bannon’s USC student film turned feature debut is rough around the edges, and not always in a charming way – this sci-fi spoof often has the hazy quality of a dorm room pot session, the kind of thing that seems a lot less funny and a lot more self indulgent when the weed wears off – but god damn have I been unable to get its cheekily corny country western theme song, “Benson, Arizona”, out of my mind. I don’t know that I can in good conscience recommend “Dark Star” as anything other than a curiosity, but if you want to get a taste, just watch the opening credits sequence of slacker spacemen zoning out while John Yager sings “Benson Arizona/blew warm wind through your hair/my body flies the galaxy/my heart longs to be there…” – it’s an oddly soothing sensation. (Shoutout to Bill Taylor, the late visual effects master – you’ve seen his work in “The Thing”, “Blade Runner” and “Cape Fear”, among many others – who got his start on this film, and who wrote the dryly funny lyrics.)
BEST ACTION SEQUENCE – The Mall Fight, “Police Story”
Even in the context of a movie where every action sequence feels like a “Jackass” stunt about to go wrong – the film’s end credits literally show star Jackie Chan being carried off set on a stretcher – “Police Story”’s climax, a bruising, ever escalating fight sequence in a mall, is mind bogglingly audacious, with Chan kicking stuntmen through – and getting kicked, punched and thrown through – seemingly every glass fixture imaginable. It’s ridiculous enough to be a Road Runner cartoon, and brutal enough to draw blood.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
“Bamboozled” (2000, d. Spike Lee) Bracingly funny and painful in almost equal measure.
“Bedazzled” (1967, d. Stanley Donen) Four stars for the scene with the nuns on trampolines.
“Bedlam” (1946, d. Mark Robson) Val Lewton’s cycle of literate and subversive horror films ends on a high note with this “trapped in an insane asylum” thriller; Anna Lee is terrific in the lead, and Boris Karloff’s work here is almost the equal of his career peak in “The Body Snatcher”.
“Body and Soul” (1925, d. Oscar Micheaux) Holds up quite well, and Paul Robeson is remarkable.
“Charlie Says” (2018, d. Mary Harron) The one reservation I would cop to is Sheila O’Malley’s: the movie chickens out at the moment where it really can’t afford to, and isn’t quite willing to look in the eye what these girls (specifically Susan Atkins) did. But it’s otherwise a terrifically acted and challenging watch. I want Mary Harron to make more movies, damnit.
“Da 5 Bloods” (2020, d. Spike Lee) I honestly enjoyed this more than supposed “return to form” “Blackkklansman”. (Which is not intended as a slam on “Blackkklansman” – also a good movie!)
“David and Lisa” (1962, d. Frank Perry) For the first 20 minutes or so of this, I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not – the premise is so arch, the treatment so stylized, the relationship between a young man who can’t bear to be touched and a young woman who can only speak in rhyme so loaded with symbolism it feels too clever-by-half; but it won me over, slowly but surely, and when Janet Margolin ran toward the camera into that radiant, smiling close-up (“John, I’m a girl! A pearl of a girl!”), I just melted.
“Deathtrap” (1982, d. Sidney Lumet) Vicious fun.
“Dinner at Eight” (1933, d. George Cukor) A series of vignettes, basically, but an immensely satisfying series of vignettes.
“Escape from Alcatraz” (1979, d. Don Siegel) Eastwood biographer Patrick McGilligan is right to call bullshit on the moments where Eastwood more or less calls warden Patrick McGoohan an asshole to his face, but otherwise, this is a pretty damn satisfying final rodeo for Clint and Don together.
“The Exorcist III” (1990, d. William Peter Blatty) The studio mandated third act exorcism sequence is so out of left field that when Nicol Williamson as not-Max-von-Sydow came riding in like the cavalry to save the day, I said out loud, to my television, “Who the fuck is this guy??” Up ‘til then, though, this is pretty great, and delightfully weird in the same way that “The Ninth Configuration” is delightfully weird.
“The French Dispatch” (2021, d. Wes Anderson) A confectionary delight. The Benicio Del Toro/Adrien Brody/Lea Seydoux segment was my favorite; Jeffrey Wright is so wonderful in this as well.
“Gold Diggers of 1933” (1933, d. Mervyn LeRoy) A frothy delight most of the way, and then that “Remember My Forgotten Man” number swoops in at the end and knocks the air out of your chest. I saw this at The Heights with a packed house (socially distanced and wearing masks, don’t worry!), and several numbers – the “neon violin” number especially – got audible, appreciative gasps.
“His Kind of Woman” (1951, d. John Farrow) An absolute “lunatics taking over the asylum” picture if ever there was one – Howard Hughes kept tinkering with this film for several years, and it feels like you can actually see Hughes losing his mind over the course of the film, as we cut back and forth between brutal torture sequences and Vincent Price doing Three Stooges style slapstick. It’s delightful, and a good movie to have a stiff drink while watching.
“Judas and the Black Messiah” (2021, d. Shaka King) Damn good.
“Last Night in Soho” (2021, d. Edgar Wright) Edgar Wright is positively drunk on cinema, and I love him for it.
“Lost in America” (1985, d. Albert Brooks) Hilarious.
“Love Me Tonight” (1932, d. Rouben Mamoulian) My only criticism is that there should’ve been more sexy Myrna Loy. (Apparently there was at one point, but the footage was cut and is presumed loss – Movie God, sometimes you are fickle…)
“The Mist” (2007, d. Frank Darabont) You’re wrong. The ending is perfect.
“Movies Are My Life” (1978, d. Peter Hayden) Look, I’m a Scorsese fanboy, so of course I loved this, but words cannot describe how wonderful the opening sequence – with a clearly zonked-out-of-his-mind Robbie Robertson dedicating Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” to a simultaneously deeply touched and deeply embarrassed Scorsese – really is.
“Naked Lunch” (1991, d. David Cronenberg) I didn’t expect this to be as funny as it is, with Peter Weller’s beatnik deadpan delivery becoming more and more amusing as the imagery gets stranger and stranger.
“Nixon” (1995, d. Oliver Stone) “When they look at you, they see what they want to be; when they look at me, they see what they are.”
“Original Cast Album: Company” (1970, d. D.A. Pennebaker) I’m a Sondheim fanatic (RIP to the master) and have listened to that original “Company” cast album on a loop, so I figured I would enjoy this in a kind of passive way; I did not expect it to be this thrilling. One of the most engrossing snapshots of the creative endeavor I’ve seen.
“Panic in the Streets” (1950, d. Elia Kazan) A terrific, terse thriller.
“Pennies from Heaven” (1981, d. Herbert Ross) Devastating.
“A Perfect World” (1993, d. Clint Eastwood) Eastwood’s follow-up to the masterful “Unforgiven” doesn’t exactly rewrite the book – Cagney could’ve starred in a version of this in the ‘30s – but it’s executed with impeccable skill, and Kevin Costner gives arguably one of his best performances, never allowing his character to tip over into complete sentimentality; an escaped convict with a sympathetic past he may be, but he’s also a scary killer, and the movie doesn’t forget that.
“Phenomena” (1985, d. Dario Argento) This is good-but-not-great Argento for much of its runtime – the murder sequences are effective but not quite as daring as in earlier pictures, and the dialogue sequences feel more haphazard than usual – but then they made a chimpanzee, in essence, the CO-LEAD OF THE MOVIE, and it shoots straight up into “masterpiece” territory.
“The Quick and the Dead” (1995, d. Sam Raimi) Terrific entertainment from start to finish. Gene Hackman is basically reprising his performance from “Unforgiven”, but it was a great performance there and it’s great here, too.
“Quiz Show” (1994, d. Robert Redford) Bonus points for the Scorsese supporting performance!
“Real Life” (1979, d. Albert Brooks) News flash: Albert Brooks – pretty funny!
“Southern Comfort” (1981, d. Walter Hill) No nonsense, no bullshit – just pure grit and tension from beginning to end.
“Star 80” (1983, d. Bob Fosse) Scores high on the “great movie I cannot in good conscience recommend you sit through” scale. It’s just so icky.
“The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse” (1960, d. Fritz Lang) Lang goes out swinging with a pulp thriller that feels like a fetishistic compendium of all his visual obsessions and thematic preoccupations.
“Tombstone” (1993, d. George P. Cosmatos) This is almost too much movie for one movie – by the time the second half gears up, it feels like you’re watching the sequel – but god damn is it fun, with a cast seemingly consisting entirely of great character actors. “You tell ‘em I’m comin’ – and hell’s comin’ with me…!”
“Tucker: A Man and His Dream” (1988, d. Francis Ford Coppola) A beautiful and very touching fable.
“Vera Cruz” (1954, d. Robert Aldrich) A terrific, tough minded Western that feels like the direct spiritual precursor to Leone’s spaghetti Westerns.
“The Women” (1939, d. George Cukor) I actually think Norma Shearer is just fine in this, but people aren’t wrong that it’s the “villains” – Rosalind Russell, Paulette Godard, and most of all the incredible Joan Crawford – who steal the show.
OK, I promise not to be so late next year. - C.B.