We certainly have not resumed full normalcy as we continue to battle this pandemic, but at least we have movies—even more than last year. With certain reservations about how they were premiered, released, and distributed, this year in film brought back more festival favorites like Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” more massive franchise golden geese like Cary Joji Fukunaga’s “No Time to Die,” more awards-friendly fare that had been held over, like Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story.” And as such, we have a Top 25 this year that nearly looks like it could be a product of any voluminous year, of any other award season in which our contributors are cramming screeners and attending screenings (in this case, if they are comfortable).
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There was, as in every year, a lot to love. As such, we have plenty of honorable mentions that were close but didn’t make the cut, including “Last Night in Soho,” “The Last Duel,” “Censor,” “Undine,” “Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time,” “Luca,” and “In the Heights.” And it was such a busy year that certain movies beloved by different voting bodies didn’t even make anyone’s top ten list, at all. Looking at you, “Belfast.”
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Below is our collective Top 25, as made from 30 contributors who submitted their personal Top 10 lists. P.S., a couple of these films are technically 2022 and will be released early next year to the wider public (“A Hero,” “Worst Person In The World“), but we managed to survive through this entire year, so we can live with this discrepancy.
25. “Nightmare Alley” (Guillermo del Toro)
Guillermo del Toro returns from Oscar glory with “Nightmare Alley,” a remake of Edmund Goulding’s 1947 film and adaptation of the book by William Lindsay Gresham. But there is no doubt as to the del Toro interest factor in the movie, which casts a loving golden hour on the lives of carnies, taking us behind the scenes of their impossible feats that serve as a type of con to awed viewers. Bradley Cooper gives an incredibly calibrated performance as a smooth-talker who becomes well-versed in mentalism and later uses it to make money outside of the carnie life with his partner in con, Molly (Rooney Mara). Cate Blanchett later enters the picture as a sly psychiatrist to the wealthy who wants in on Stan’s cons, while it becomes a gripping, epic parable about the dangers of hubris—Stan starts to believe too much of what he’s making up. “Nightmare Alley” may not reach the overall success of “The Shape of Water,” but it continues to prove his status as a master filmmaker. – Nick Allen (Our review of “Nightmare Alley”)
24. “Memoria” (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
This year’s return of big tentpole movies has been about getting us acclimated to loud films again, but only one loud bang from the otherwise sleepy “Memoria” is all we need to share its dreams. Tilda Swinton’s character Jessica becomes fixated on recreating such a thudding sensation, which wakes her up one early morning. It becomes the piece of grandiosity that she chases through different chapters of this saga set in Colombia, a country that writer/director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Swinton fill with their artistry and their ease. “Memoria” takes the viewer to many elusive, elongated set pieces, with pacing that practically encourages viewers to daydream during it. This is filmmaking of endless curiosity, in which the primary goal is to stop, then look, and then listen. – Nick Allen (Our review of “Memoria”)
23. “The Lost Daughter” (Maggie Gyllenhaal)
There’s something elusive about Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut, “The Lost Daughter,” but it compels rather than repels us. The viewing experience is deliberately disorienting as Gyllenhaal aligns us with the slippery perspective of Leda (Olivia Colman, peerless), a vacationing writer who toggles fluidly between memory, reverie, and reality. The ease with which the film immerses audiences in its lushness belies a meticulous narrative and visual construction from Gyllenhaal and all of her collaborators. In adapting Elena Ferrante’s text, Gyllenhaal pinpoints the novelistic not in sprawling narrative or grand thematic pronouncements, but in the tiny moments, her actresses share between frames or across time. Her luminaries, which include Colman and Dakota Johnson, shine a light onto the vast, dark chasm separating cultural expectations of motherhood and its actual lived experience. It’s a revelatory film—not to mention liberatory, too. – Marshall Shaffer (Our review of “The Lost Daughter”)
22. “Drive My Car” (Rysuke Hamaguchi)
2021 may go down as the year of Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who directed not one, but two magnificent films, “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” and “Drive My Car.” Much like Lee Chang-dong’s sprawling Haruki Murakami adaptation “Burning,” Hamaguchi takes a short story and transforms it into a novelistic odyssey of the soul, providing a similar sense of somber loneliness to the author’s trademark, but with a considerably softer, more life-affirming touch than Lee’s film. “Drive My Car” follows a grieving actor turned theater director named Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), as he stages a multilingual version of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” in which the cast members speak their native languages (Mandarin and Korean sign language among them). After being diagnosed with glaucoma, Kafuku’s producers insist that he be driven around by a chauffeur (Tōko Miura), which leads to the pair bonding over past regrets and dead relationships. There’s another layer to the story involving the actor Kafuku casts to play the lead/titular role (Masaki Okada), but that’s a mystery better left undiscussed for those who have yet to see the most ethereal, rejuvenating, and heart-rending film of the year. – Andrew Bundy (Our review of “Drive My Car”)
21. “A Hero” (Asghar Farhadi)
No one is entirely blameless in Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s latest examination of the choices individuals make and their unexpected consequences. Serving a sentence for failing to pay his debt, Rahim (Amir Jadidi), a divorced father in a new relationship, is allowed a few days of freedom to solve his situation. But when he returns a missing purse (and the gold in it) to its owner, the media and the authorities become enamored with his seemingly selfless honesty. That is, of course, until the picture-perfect narrative constructed around him comes into question. Farhadi’s uncanny talent for building stories with nearly unfathomable moral ambiguity reaches new humanistic heights with Jadidi’s slow-burn turn as a humble, yet desperate man. Even if the premise is recognizable within the artist’s oeuvre, the many pieces that Farhadi lays out in this social realist drama coalesce into one of the year’s most riveting cinematic feats. – Carlos Aguilar (Our review of “A Hero”)