There’s a little shakeup after my last Top 10 post for 2021. Sadly, I wish there was more, but movies like Dune, Eternals, and Last Night in Soho failed to deliver on their high expectations.
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any worthy entries. The 10 (+4 Honorables) below totally deserve a look before you cancel your streaming service subscription!
After getting lost in the Marvel/Disney/Christopher Nolan Machine, Kenneth Branagh goes back to his roots, telling the tale of his upbringing in 1960s Northern Ireland. The boy he cast to stand in for himself, Jude Hill, exudes all the charm and enthusiasm that will touch every audience member’s heart, he’s anchored by a lovely story about growing up amidst political upheaval, and a spectacular group of British acting talent, led by Ciaran Hinds and Caitriona Balfe.
I wish they would make em like this a little more. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck reunite to star and write in a big movie. They team up with legends Nicole Holofcener to write the script and Ridley Scott to direct it. What results is just a quality Hollywood blockbuster, with battles, drama, and really important points about how history is dominated by male voices, erasing the female role in all of these compelling dramas.
The Palme D’Or Winner at the Cannes Film Festival doesn’t disappoint. Julia Ducournau’s follow up to her other Palme D’Or winner is just as compelling: telling a tale of a woman wronged by humanity but with an affinity for cars. Ducournau’s movie seems perverse and twisted on the surface, but the more layers she peels the more interesting/complicated the relationships/sexual politics get.
The movie about Serena and Venus Williams and their family has a million little pieces moving inside of it, almost all of them excellent. It’s a great sports movie, a great family drama, a great movie about systemic racism and classism, and grade A quality Oscar bait anchored by one of Will Smith’s best performances. This movie’s so rich it just signed a $12 million contract with Reebok like Venus!
What Booksmart wanted to be. The ladies of Fort William up & craft one of the great coming of age movies in recent memory. What makes this Scottish gem stand out is that the movie gives us 6 totally different girls with totally different points of view, taking us on specific and ubiquitous adventures simultaneously with them, exploring sexuality, friendship, and the future. Plus, the 90s setting gives the movie a wonderful soundtrack and simplifies the story to be just about young small town girls living in lonely worlds taking trains to the big city.
Someone once said that if your opening sentence of your story goes “And then the murders began” your story is immediately 25% more interesting. Well, what if your story starts “You wanna hear a story about how me and this bitch fell out? It’s kind of long, but it’s full of suspense.”? Well, what follows is an American tale Mark Twain would be proud of, with Taylour Paige’s Zola taken on an insane road trip to Florida by Riley Keough’s walking cultural appropriation Stefani. Within real life Zola’s tweet storm is a shockingly deep tale about lies we tell ourselves and the power of persuasion, while also an amazing mixture of satire, violence, sex, and suspense.
Like a bat out of some underground Shadyside hell, this Netflix horror trilogy showed up 3 straight weeks and up and delivered on its great RL Stine inspired premise: life in the murder capital of the United States. Leigh Janiak’s vision is a master class of world building, giving us the evolution of Shadyside Ohio from its humble beginnings to its terrifying present day. Janiak sucks us in with homages to various horror genres (Scream, Friday the 13th you’ll recognize immediately), but while doing so, concocts an undercurrent of multiple storylines and mysteries we have to solve along the way, culminating in a brilliant Part 3 twist and glorious ending that left me wholly satisfied with the surprise of the summer.
This movie is about revelations. Rebecca Hall is a revelation as a first time director. Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga are revelations showing the depths of their talent and range of their abilities, and the story is a revelation, telling a complicated tale of identity, anxiety, race, and power. It packs a wallop, but if you’re along for the ride, you’ll be rewarded watching one of the best of the year.
What a run for Netflix! Was it even possible for Sony to one up their incredible 2018 animated hit Into the Spiderverse? For me, that’s a resounding hell yeah with this joy of a film. This Netflix movie finds that perfect family entertainment working on multiple levels, as a stressful family road trip to college collides with an AI enslaving the planet, with the Mitchell’s the only family left to deal with the problem. It’s got a million jokes a minute, really fun side characters, and a big gooey heart, culminating in one of the greatest thought out punchlines to shutting down a computer that I have seen, that I teared up from laughing so hard.
The winner of the streaming wars so far in 2021 is Hulu, releasing this Questlove jaunt. Unbeknownst to most of the population, there was another amazing summer festival in 1969 besides Woodstock: the Harlem Cultural festival, featuring amazing acts like Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson, and Nina Simone, among other great African-American, Puerto Rican, and other cultural acts that lived in Harlem at the time. Questlove takes the recently discovered footage of this amazing fest and frames it in the context of the black, Latino, and black Latino populations at the time, as well as the artists state of mind (as most are still alive). What we get is one of the great musical documentaries of all time, showcasing amazing talent that also has a powerful message and purpose: to celebrate and value culture to uplift the people inside of that culture that don’t get represented as much as they should.
