For someone like me that was practically breastfed in a movie theater, it surprised me how strange it was to first step into one after the pandemic. And to see this massive movie palace filled with only three ticket holders was sobering and sad. But joining long lines at the NY Film Festival buoyed my spirits immensely and many of my favorite directors rallied this year to turn out exhilarating and audacious films. Here’s my top 10 for 2021.
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not be Televised). Questlove beautifully weaved together never-before-seen footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. With amazing performers like Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, Gladys Knight, B.B. King and many others, the film also chronicles the angry urban mindset at the time, most evident during the electrifying performance by Nina Simone. Then there is the holy beauty of performances like Mahalia Jackson. An important historical record and an intense joy to experience.
Annette. The dazzling new film by Leos Carax (Holy Motors) is about the tumultuous love affair between an edgy, stand-up comedian (Adam Driver) and a renowned opera singer (Marion Cotillard). It’s done as a crackpot musical, with the score by the legendary band The Sparks (Ron and Russell Mael), which is sublimely surreal. Then there’s their baby Annette, all done with puppetry that’s bizarre and wonderful. And like Pinocchio, she does morph into a real girl, played with aching brilliance by Devyn McDowell. The movie destroyed me, I loved it so much. And made me realize that it was part of a rarified genre of anti-musicals that I find myself always gravitating towards.
The Tragedy of Macbeth. Joel Coen’s thrilling cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” is visually stylistically extreme. The stark and stunning production design of Stefan Dechant and the luscious black & white cinematography by Bruno Delbonnel– it all seems haunted by German Expressionist cinema. Scene after scene startles with inventiveness, but never obscures the text thanks to a brilliant cast. Denzel Washington gives a towering performance as the power-mad Macbeth. It’s hard to imagine anyone having the kind of bigger-than-life presence on screen to stun in scenes when he starts to unravel, bellowing madly in empty, arched hallways. He’s truly great. Frances McDormand is a chilling Lady Macbeth. She exudes the ferocity and cunning of her character but when she’s with Denzel their conspiratorial plotting almost has an erotic texture. When you get to her mad scene you see the whole arc of her bloodthirsty ambition and its tragic end. The rest of the cast is absolutely peerless in this powerful yet artistic triumph.
The Velvet Underground. An artful, thrillingly cinematic documentary by Todd Haynes about the seminal art-rock band The Velvet Underground. Haynes uses a trippy multi-screen approach mixing underground films alongside interviews with surviving band members, friends, relatives and those in the 60’s scene. The documentary charts how the band came together and how Andy Warhol promoted them and designed the outrageous album cover art- with a banana skin to be peeled down to reveal a purple banana. Warhol also forced the band to include the cool German beauty Nico, whose ghoulish, deadpan delivery actually suited the band’s alternative mystique. Nico only lasted for the first album and went on to record her own unique music (often produced by John Cale). The chronicle of the band’s fractious fallings out is rather heartbreaking when you hear the discordant, visionary rock music in the background. A truly audacious labor-of-love by Todd Haynes.
Red Rocket. Director Sean Baker’s exhilarating dark comedy is about an unlovable loser and washed-up porn star Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), who shows up broke and beaten-up back in his Texas hometown looking for a place to crash with his ex-wife (excellent Bree Elrod) and her disapproving mother. Mikey weasels his way in and ends up selling weed to earn money, romancing a sweet 17-year-old girl named Strawberry (Suzanna Son) who works at the Donut Hole, filling her head with his bullshit while equally sleeping with his ex and using the goofy neighbor next door to drive him around. Simon Rex is an inspired choice in the lead. The former TV VJ who has his own X-rated brush with infamy has a wonderful, weathered, weary presence in the film. He’s a con man, ready to bluster and lie but also desperately able to dream on despite the crushing odds against him. It’s a story about a real dick but it sure rises to paint a darkly humorous, poignant portrait of lives forever dancing on the razor’s edge.
Titane. The fabulously fucked-up second feature film by director Julia Ducournau (Raw) begins with pure female rage. A young girl- Alexia- keeps kicking aggressively from the back seat of a moving car, aiming at her father at the wheel. It causes an accident and a titanium implant is put in her head. Years later we see an older, even angrier Alexia (fearless Agathe Rousselle) with a job dancing lewdly on top of custom cars and stabbing (with a metal hair rod) those who dare ask for an autograph. She gets fucked by a car (you read that right). Goes on the run from the law. Cuts her hair. Binds her breasts with tape and smashes her nose in a restroom so she can pretend to be the missing child of a fireman captain named Vincent (Vincent Lindon). It’s even madder than that, but it all has a sense of deranged logic. Scene after scene fries your brain.
Vortex. Gaspar Noe’s new film is a shattering portrait of an elderly couple shakily hanging on by a thread in their cluttered, lived-in flat. The great Italian director Dario Argento plays the husband, with heart problems and attempting to write a book about dreams and cinema, while his dementia-addled wife (Francoise Lebrun/The Mother and the Whore) wanders around the apartment agitated and confused. Their son (Alex Lutz– excellent) has serious problems of his own and is raising a little boy. He tries (in vain) to talk them into moving to an assisted living center because they just can’t take care of themselves. But their love; their history is in this apartment. The tragedy is that their vibrant lives are now cruelly diminished by old age. As grueling as all this is, Noe frames it in split screen and artful ways, and with great tenderness as well as sadness. The finale is one of the most poignant and profound I have seen on film in many years.
Parallel Mothers. This exquisite, intensely moving new film by Pedro Almodovar stars Penelope Cruz as Janis, a highly-regarded photographer in Madrid. While shooting a handsome archeologist Arturo (Israel Elejalde), she asks his help with a dig in her family’s village to reveal all the men that were dragged out of their homes by authorities and shot, killed and buried in unmarked graves during the Francisco Franco reign. Her affair with him produces a baby and she finds herself at the hospital with another woman- Ana (Milena Smit), giving birth as a single mother at the same time. Their lives become inextricably bound by fate. Played rather straightforward without the usual stylistic flourishes, but still packing a major punch thanks to a stunning performance by Penelope Cruz, who has evolved through the years into an amazing actress.
Pieles (Skins). Even I was dumbstruck by the outrageous, hilarious and transgressive Spanish film directed by Eduardo Casanova. It’s a wildly stylized collection of interconnecting tales about individuals unwholesomely, and sexually, attracted to people with deformities. The production design is a riot of pinks and lavenders that makes you feel like you are drowning in cotton candy. But it is so darkly funny and surprisingly moving in such a sick way I just loved it. I don’t want to give too much away because of the demented joy of just letting the film reveal itself in ways that have you laughing and gasping in the same breath. Produced by Alex de la Iglesias (Perdita Durango), you can spot a lot of the regular actors he uses and they are all spectacular. There’s the expectant father Simon (Antonio Duran), obsessed with an eyeless prostitute named Laura- who grows into an Iglesia favorite, the wickedly funny Macarena Gomez). Prepare to be stunned and delighted by this deranged treat.
The Most Beautiful Boy in the World. Heartbreaking documentary by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri about Bjorn Andresen, who won the part of Tadzio in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice. Visconti warned his whole crew that it was “hands off” Andresen during the making of the film, but afterwards Bjorn was catapulted to dizzying stardom. In Japan, the androgynous-looking Bjorn became a pop legend and was memorialized in Manga comics. But the documentary investigates the tragedies and inner demons that followed Andresen afterwards. One’s heart is broken by many of his stories and as we follow the bedraggled, long-haired Andresen smoking in his apartment and wistfully chronicling his difficult life. It’s hard to say this is a cautionary tale because it’s impossible to imagine the same kind of convergence of elements of child stardom, but this film will haunt your dreams.
Beautifully written, Dennis.
I haven’t seen a single one of the movies on this list and I literally want to see all of them now. Thank you!