ScreenAnarchy's Top 10 Films of 2021

11: Last Night in Soho
(and we get Anya Taylor-Joy staring at us disapprovingly for not placing it in the Top 10...)
12: Limbo
13: Red Rocket
14: Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched
15: The French Dispatch
16: Nobody
17: No Time to Die
18: Hotel Poseidon
19: What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
20: Lamb

10: Licorice Pizza, US, Paul Thomas Anderson

A new Paul Thomas Anderson film always has a high chance of ending up in our top 10, because the man has many fans here in our team and, not unimportantly, his films are generally excellent. Jim Tudor reviewed it last November and had this to say about it:

"Licorice Pizza, with its surprise flavors amid familiar texture, is one of the very rare film feasts that one hoped wouldn’t end. Despite the percolating discomfort of where the central relationship might or might not be heading, it rolls on as inherently watchable. Theirs is a god-awful small affair, but their film is not at all a saddening bore."

Read his entire review here.

9: Malignant, US, James Wan

James Wan returned to horror with a film which divided opinions here at ScreenAnarchy, but boy, did the ones who love it LOVE IT. Check what Mel Valentin wrote:

"Though obviously influenced by the works of other genre auteurs, including, but not limited to, Hitchcock, De Palma, Argento, Cronenberg, Craven, and even Henenlotter, Malignant isn’t a mere, stapled-together copy of other, well-known and semi-well-known films, but a horror entry that stands on its own terms, partly as homage or citation, partly as multiple nods to the genre giants who preceded Wan, but mostly as a wild, hallucinogenic, unforgettable ride, one for horror fans to repeatedly savor and revisit for its high Grand Guignol style, Wan’s frenetic, stalking camerawork, Joseph Bishara’s thrashing, dissonant score, and some of the boldest, riskiest choices this side of frequent collaborator Leigh Whannell’s contributions to the genre they both love, Upgrade and last year’s pre-pandemic classic-in-the-making, The Invisible Man. See Malignant. Then see it again. Chances are, you won't regret it."

Whoa Mel, don't hold back, tell us what you REALLY think!
Read the whole review here.

8: Titane, France, Julia Ducournau

We all wondered what Julia Ducournau would do after her excellent feature debut Raw, but none of us expected something quite this crazy. Thankfully, it was also good enough to win at the Cannes Film Festival. Shelagh Rowan-Legg loved the film and said this about it:

"Titane is a spitfire, no-holds-barred, astounding, sexy, tender, freakish, cinema of the grotesque: a discordant symphony of metal, muscle, ripe flesh, blood, oil, and anger. It is the bonfire and the gentle flame, the fist to the face and the loving arms wrapped around you. It will boggle your mind and break your heart."

Heavy stuff! Read her entire review here.

7: Pig, US, Michael Sarnoski

Nicolas Cage is always worth checking out, because his hits strike hard and his misses are often hilarious. But his portrayal of Rob, a man looking for his stolen truffle-finding pig, is by all accounts a hit. Here is what Mel Valentin says about him:

"As Rob, Cage delivers one of his most subdued, subtle, and nimble performances in recent memory. It’s no less engaging or enthralling, however, than his previous, bigger-than-life performances. His Rob says little and sees everything, occasionally gracing anyone within hearing distance of hard-earned, if sometimes off-kilter, life-lessons. His body languages says more than enough to anyone around him."

That's a strong recommendation, and you can find the whole review here.

6: The Feast (Gwledd), UK, Lee Haven Jones

Many genre films in 2021 had a bit of an environmental tint to them, with messages subtle and often not-so-subtle. One of the best of these was this stylish horror thriller, which I was happy to catch at the Neuchâtel Fantastic Film Festival where I was on jury duty, and where I was allowed to present it with the festival's Critics Award. Our J. Hurtado loved it too, and he wrote this:

"Haven's direction and the sumptuous cinematography from TV veteran Bjørn Ståle Bratberg set the audience at ease by caressing every last inch of the estate and the ensuing carnage with the camera. Writer/producer Roger Williams' story reveals exactly what it needs to at every moment, always giving the audience an opportunity to connect the many expertly placed dots throughout the film until the finale where it all finally makes sense. Among the smartest, most literate, and goriest of SXSW's Midnighters this year, The Feast is hands down the best of the section. A film that will amply reward repeated viewings, The Feast is a folk horror fan's dream come true."

Read his full review here! Meanwhile, I can't wait to get my hands on a Blu-ray of this and watch it again.

5: Drive My Car, Japan, Hamaguchi Ryūsuke

Who dares make a three-hours-long movie adaptation of a Murakami short story? Hamaguchi Ryūsuke does, and when the end result is THIS good, we don't mind at all. An aging actor is forced by his employer to hire a young woman as his driver, and though they are very different, the car becomes a safe place for them both to share secrets in. Dustin Chang reviewed the film and wrote this about it:

"But what he captures so well is the essence of Murakami's usual themes, the mystery and melancholy of life. Hamaguchi expertly expands the slight character study of its source material into a deeply humanistic film, full of beauty and grace."

Read the whole review here.

4: Memoria, Thailand/Colombia, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

In Apichatpong Weerasethakul's new film (his first in six years), Tilda Swinton repeatedly hears an odd sound while in Colombia and searches for its origins. But how do you remember or describe a sound? How trustworthy is your memory of a sense? Dustin Chang reviewed the film earlier this year and wrote the following:

"But as always with Weerasethakul's other films, watching Memoria is like sleepwalking through an unfamiliar territory. It's like a lucid dream; you are not quite sure if you are awake or dreaming. This film, for me, in a darkened theater, provides the best kind of film-watching experience. Let the film wash over you. It's a liberating feeling.
"

Read the entire review here.

3: Power of the Dog, Australia/New Zealand, Jane Campion

It's been a while since we had a feature film by Jane Campion, and her newest one shows why we missed her. A stark drama set within a western background, it shows a tangled web of attachments between the people running a farm in 1920's Montana. Shelagh Rowan-Legg wrote in her review:

"Each scene driven by desire, anger, love, or shame, set against a a stark world where change is slow to come, leaving its characters in a stagnation that eats away at them, The Power of the Dog bristles with longing and jealousy, at once staring straight ahead and sneaking up behind you, leaving its clues like muddy bootprints tinged with sorrow."

Read her full review here.

2: The Green Knight, US, David Lowery

A daring adaptation of ye olde 14th-century poem "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight", Lowery's film doesn't go for the action, adventure, and fantasy, but leaves snippets of all those in. The main focus though is on Gawain's insignificance as a spoilt human in a vast landscape, and how his adventures impact his idea of what it means to be chivalrous, a knight, or even just a man. In her review, Shelagh Rowan-Legg wrote:

"By setting a tone of the unusual, the dark, the austere, and the absurd bordering on madness, The Green Knight offers something unique and unsettling in a fantasy-adventure: a taste of that which would have been the mood of those in that time, when coins were buried at the base of trees because you could be robbed of everything at any moment; when fields of dead and decaying bodies were a frequent sight; where talking foxes and swords drawn from stones to crown a king were accepted on sight. Leaning into the Pagan roots of the story, The Green Knight keeps its story on the side of the beautiful and terrible."

Well written. Read the remainder of her review here.

1: Dune, US, Denis Villeneuve

Villeneuve's long-awaited take on Frank Herbert's science fiction classic finally hit theaters last year, and there were few better reasons to visit an IMAX than this one. Yet when I announced the results this year to everyone who contributed, there was some surprise among the nay-sayers, of which there were quite a few. But make no mistake, Dune won and it won BIG. With a very large margin. Of our seventeen contributors, nine had it in their lists, and four of them in the number one position.

Still, the response was so divisive that I felt sorry I hadn't made a "Screen Anarchists on..." article for it (like this one for Ex Machina), listing all of our opinions on it... Ironically, one of the writers here who weren't all that impressed with it wrote our review: Kurt Halfyard. He wasn't evil about it, but did have misgivings:

"Some key characters are not present in the first half of the film, others are given some more flesh than past incarnations. As it stands, Dune is that 3rd or 4th draft of an idea that loses the thing that made one passionate for the idea in the first place; by polishing the damned thing to death."

Ouch. Then again, he immediately afterwards writes:
"Oh, bloody hell, bring on Part 2..."
So... there.

For added nuance, read the whole review.

And here are all the films which were voted upon by our jurors, but did not get enough points to end up in the Top-20:

A Writer’s Odyssey
About Endlessness
Alone with You
Atlantis
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
Belle
Benedetta
Bergman Island
Beyond the Infinite 2 Minutes (see picture above...)
Black Widow
Candyman
The Card Counter
Censor
Cherry
Concrete Cowboy
C'mon C'mon  Cyrano
Dead and Beautiful
Earwig
Evangelion 3.0+1.0
Exterminate All the Brutes
Faya Dayi
Flee
The Girl and the Spider
Godzilla vs Kong
Hellbender
I Care a Lot
The Innocents
Judas and the Black Messiah
The Last Duel
Let the Wrong One In
Luzzu
Mass
The Matrix Resurrections
Mitchells vs. the Machines
The Night House
Night in Paradise
Night of the Kings
Night Raiders
Nightmare Alley
The Novice
Parallel Mothers
Petite Maman
Pleasure
Preparation to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
Procession
Psycho Goreman
Quo Vadis, Aida?
The Rescue
Ride or Die
Riders of Justice
The Sadness
Saving the One Who Was Dead
Scales
She Will
The Souvenir Part II
The Sparks Brothers
Spencer
Spider-Man: No Way Home
Synchronic
Summer of Soul
The Trip
The Tragedy of Macbeth
The Worst Person in the World
Wrath of Man

And that concludes the list for 2021.
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