The Ten Best Movies I Saw in 2021

As always, these are my choices among all the movies I saw in 2021, not my choices among the all movies released in 2021.

Three of the films I'm ranking as among my ten best for this year are music documentaries constructed out of re-discovered and re-worked existing footage, and of those three, the purest example, the only that works best as a movie, is without a doubt Amazing Grace. Filmed by Sydney Pollack, this movie captured the live recording of Aretha Franklin's famed gospel album of the same name, January 13 and 14, 1972, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. The audio couldn't be synchronized with the visuals, so the tapes were left in a studio vault for 35 years, after which began a 10-year legal battle to get the finished film actually shown. The results are worth the wait. The movie has tremendous music; that's to be expected. Even greater is the fact that it ends up being a tremendous cultural and anthropological and historical document as well, capturing the intense, even pentecostal, spirituality which attended the heady alchemy of spirituals, soul music, and rhythm and blues which could be heard in Black churches throughout the early 1970s. The penultimate number from the second night, "Never Grow Old," shows a Franklin caught up in the spirit, one of the most moving visuals I've ever seen. A great, important film.

Attack the Block is a straight-up fight-the-aliens flick, and it's fabulous. Like all the best genre films of movies sort, it gives us short but persuasive introductions to all the main characters, then throws us directly into the action, which adheres to all sorts of predictable tropes--though giving them all sorts of new life while so doing--but also surprising us with a couple of clever (but not too clever) twists. By the time--less than 80 minutes in!--John Boyega's Moses makes his triumphant, death-risking dash into the aliens' den, you're cheering just like the crowds outside do. I hope the sequel they're talking about actually happens.

One of these years I'll have to break apart this list, and start distinguishing between "best movies" and "best multi-episode visual production," or some such thing (since calling them "television shows" or "miniseries" obviously doesn't work any more). But until then, I have to call The Beatles: Get Back, all nearly 8-hours of it, a movie, and it's an incredible one. No, I won't deny that it probably didn't need to be that long--but what would I have cut? It's hard to say; clearly the 60 hours of footage which Peter Jackson had to work with from the Beatles' original Let it Be sessions included a lot of dross, just random noodling around the studio, and yet setting up the wonderful music and insights of this film perhaps required giving us viewers as exhaustingly immersive an experience as possible. Anyway, more thoughts of mine here; the point is, this is a monument, worthy of the monumental band which it takes as its subject.

Bo Burnham: Inside  is the first video of any sort by Bo Burnham that I've ever seen; I totally missed his YouTube career, and haven't seen any of his comedy specials or any of the movies he has appeared in or made. So why did I watch this? Primarily because, during the summer, our younger daughters, both of whom had seen the movie, watched a long YouTube commentary on the film which they found kind of fascinating, and wanted to show it to me. So that I meant I had to watch the movie in order to watch the commentary, and so I did. And man, was this an eye-opener. There's a profound--if often inchoate--wisdom to Burnham's sometimes hilarious, sometimes kind of horrifying movie, casting already-exhasting topics like performativity and authenticity in the internet age into startlingly new (to me, anyway) contexts, and doing so with such a sharp musical sense.("Welcome to the Internet" is an evil masterpiece.) Weeks after watching it, I couldn't shake some of the questions it made me ask myself, and that's the sign of a great film. (Oh, and the YouTube commenting on the movie was pretty thoughtful too.)

I'm not sure what exactly led me to watch Douglas Sirk's 1959 Imitation of Life, but whatever or whomever it is or they are, I owe them a debt of thanks. Superficially it's a weepy melodrama, with lots of hammy acting and oppressive music cues. But if you're willing and able--as I fortunately was--to turn off the cynicism and just embrace this overripe story, it's actually immensely rich. It's the story of a bi-racial girl who reasonably sees sexual escape as her best route out of the second-class status forced upon her, no matter who it hurts, and of an honestly striving--though still oblivious--career woman who stands up for liberal truths but apparently had no idea her African-American maid had a rich life outside her orbit, and much more. It effectively wraps smart takes on race, art, culture, class, feminism, marriage, and more into its overwrought running time. I kept getting gobsmacked by the ridiculously unsubtle--but still perceptive--turns the script kept taking, one after another. Well worth it.

I'd heard much praise for the original Swedish Let the Right One In over the years; all I can say is that it's all deserved. Such a strange, creeping, compelling story of bleakness and the weird feelings of love and friendship and attachment which can emerge in the midst of such darkness nonetheless. There's all sorts of marvelous little details in this vampire story; many simply emphasize its omnipresent darkness (the fact that little Oskar is clearly a budding sociopath, surrounded by other fully developed sociopaths) but others surprisingly become a counterpoint to it (Virginia's suicide becomes, in retrospect, almost a hopeful sign of someone trying to hold to the light in the midst of a descent into banal horror). A solid, provocative, kind of lovely horror movie.

Minari is a glorious, humble ode to family and nature, though not, I think, in any kind of romantic way. The family in question is one of constant arguments and deep divides; the natural world is one whose bounty is only incidentally (and at the film's conclusion) shown to be given freely, otherwise being depicted as something that has to be wrested out of the ground with hard labor. Through it all, though, there are constant returns to quotidian decency: David and Anne writing notes, begging their parents to stop fighting; Soon-ja defending the children against unnecessary discipline and bonding with them over games of hanafuda; Paul as a strange kind of guardian angel, guiding the family, against their own expectations, to a spiritual connection with the land. It's a beautiful movie in every way.

Despite being, I think, more familiar with the history of pop music than the average radio-listener in America, I had never heard of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival before, and thus was like millions of others who, when this film was released, was in for a serious education. Summer of Soul really deserves the Get Back treatment; I could have watched nearly 8 hours of these lost performances from more than a half-century ago, and I hope the filmmakers eventually make available on dvd extended takes of these wonderful performances, from the more than 40 hours of footage which is apparently available. But for now, seeing these clips along with contemporary interviewers--for whatever it's worth, my favorite moments were the 5th Dimension (not milquetoast at all!) rocking "Age of Aquarius," and the Reverend Jesse Jackson (still very much the young civil rights radical, before age and ambition took its toll) leading everyone in prayer--made for marvelous viewing.

West Side Story was never my favorite Hollywood musical; while there were segments of the 1961 version that I still consider today probably the most powerful combinations of song, scenery, and dance that I've ever seen on film, over all the elements of the movies story which, in 2021, can't help, I think, but be received as both kind of racist and kind of ridiculous weighed it down. Spielberg's fabulous remake of West Side Story doesn't fix all of that; in some ways, the occasionally heavy-handed script which Kushner developed merely swapped one set of eye-rolling moments for another. But for all that: this is a terrific movie musical. "Dance at the Gym" had me dancing in my seat at the theater, the setting and performance of "One Hand, One Heart" was totally convincing, and giving "Somewhere" to Rita Morena was a genius decision. I was especially captivated by Ansel Elgort's Tony; he made the weakest part of the 1961 movie into, in my view, the strongest part of the 2021 version. So while some parts of this remake didn't fully work for me, those limitations can't stop this brilliantly visualized and executed cinematic creation from landing on my top ten list.

I can't imagine a more total inversion of Spielberg's approach to West Side Story--sumptuous and detailed and hyper-realistic--than Jacques Demy's delightfully bonkers Young Girls of Rochefort. This 1967 movie--a homage to the classic Hollywood movie musical style? or a parody of it? or both?--was simply outrageous in its stylized use of color and costuming, and its story was so crammed with campy musical conventions that it's kind of remarkable how Demy was able to orchestrate it all such that they weren't just crashing into each other.  A student of mine has been urging me to give Demy's films a look for months, and from other movies of his, I know he was capable of taking both a serious and surrealist approach. But Young Girls simply delighted me with its lightness (a pair of musically talented twins looking for love!), its ridiculous choreography (dancers selling Honda motorcycles!), and its total embrace of utterly stereotypical "Frenchness" (the sad older woman who left her lover--who pines for her still!--because he had a stupid name!). Demy understood something which, perhaps, Spielberg should have kept in mind; as great as his achievement with West Side Story was, musicals really kind of have to be a little campy, a little outrageous; you can't make it all grounded and "real." There's not a moment of reality in Young Girls, and dang it, that's what makes it great.