My favorite movies of 2021

My favorite movies of 2021

Like most people, I stopped going to see movies when Covid hit and stayed away even after theaters began to reopen.

By Matthew Yglesias

But during the height of the pandemic, I was struck by how much I love movies and how much I missed them, not just because of lockdown but because I’d gone less and less since my kid was born. And beyond that, I realized that I miss movies as a vital form of entertainment for grownups that has been fragmented by Marvel’s domination of the box office and the cultural clout of prestige television.

There are a couple of great TV shows and a bunch of good ones, but what I like about movies is that a screenwriter writes a whole script from beginning to end. That script is read and revised and completed and then production starts. The director and the director of photography capture a bunch of footage and work with an editor to put it together. They watch the rough cut from beginning to end and decide how they want to tweak it. When they’re done, critics watch the whole movie — all the way through to the end — before writing their reviews. And as a member of the audience, especially if you’re watching in theaters, it’s customary to see the end of the movie before commenting on it. In other words, a movie is a finished product whereas TV shows are like a boat that’s still under construction as you’re sailing across the ocean.

Ever since getting vaccinated, I’ve been making a point to get to theaters — with friends when possible, but frequently alone. And I’ve been loving it. Judging by the box office results of 2021, my hope for cinema to come back as a vibrant commercial and artist medium is doomed — tons of good stuff bombed and everything that did well was a sequel. Nonetheless, a lot of good films got made. Also “Red Notice.”

Disappointment of the year: “Red Notice”

I badly miss the 1990s R-rated action movie. It’s not coming back for some pretty profound economic reasons, but for roughly the same reasons it makes sense for a streaming platform like Netflix to invest in making some of them.

I did not love “Triple Frontier,” their initial foray into this terrain, but I did like it. And I loved that it happened because I thought it meant Netflix would make more action movies.

But in 2021 we got “Red Notice” and it sucked. It has big stars and a director whose previous movies I’ve liked. It’s about heists and everyone likes a heist movie. But man, it just sucks! It’s everything that’s bad and annoying about Netflix's original programming, which often seems to be throwing stuff up against the wall for no reason. Netflix claims the movie was a big success, which would be terrible because then they’ll make more terrible movies. So I am begging Netflix executives: go watch the classics like “Predator,” “The Last Boy Scout,” “Die Hard With a Vengeance,” “Hard Target,” “Passenger 57,” “Air Force One,” and “Under Siege.” Then make us some cool movies.

#5: “The Last Duel”

Are you not entertained?

I was incredibly amped for this when it came out. Ridley Scott collaborated with Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Nicole Holofcener on a script. Damon and Affleck are in it with Adam Driver and Jodie Comer. What’s not to like?

Well, America disagreed and did not want to see Damon in a mullet and a suit of armor or Affleck as a weird lecherous count. But the people are wrong and this movie was amazing. You get essentially the same story of a rape and its aftermath from three different points of view. First Damon as the aggrieved husband of the victim, then Driver as the perpetrator, then Comer as the victim. Each run through the story is quite different, but it’s not exactly “Rashomon;” the key facts are in dispute legally, but the three POVs essentially agree on what happened.

What makes the movie fascinating is the use of subtle differences in dialogue, blocking, and acting, as well as the inclusion or exclusion of different scenes that only some of the characters witnessed to totally change the story.

This is the kind of movie that would traditionally count on the star power of its leads to get people to come see it despite a premise with little obvious appeal. But those days seem to be behind us. Still, it’s a classic case of good things happening when a lot of very talented people collaborate.

#4: “West Side Story”

Instantly iconic

I really love “West Side Story,” but I think a lot of the recent efforts to modernize it (putting whole songs in Spanish for the 2009 revival, whatever the hell they were doing in the 2020 revival) have made things worse. My inclination was always to defend the 1961 movie version against critics of its politics by saying that “West Side Story” is no more “about” Manhattan gangs in the 1950s than “Romeo and Juliet” is about the politics of Renaissance Verona.

But Stephen Spielberg and Tony Kushner are really good at what they do, and they managed to actually deliver what people were asking for, building these songs around a book that actually says something substantive about ethnic conflict in Lincoln Square. Their previous collaboration, Lincoln, was a little didactic for my taste (though I agreed with their didactic message), but there are sharp limits to how didactic a movie can be when people burst into song when overcome with emotion or fight while doing ballet. I thought it was a nice balance between fun song-and-dance numbers, a sappy love story, and some sociopolitical commentary.

Rachel Zegler, Mike Faist, and David Alvarez are all just absolutely incredible. And I did not love Ansel Elgort’s singing, but with help from the the script revisions, he brought some real depth to what’s kind of an empty character in the original. Like “Last Duel,” this one bombed at the box office as part of the ongoing collapse of cinema as an enterprise. But what can you do? I think we need more popularism in our politics but less in our cultural commentary.

#3: “Dune”

As previously discussed, I am a major Dune-head and I loved “Dune.”

Denis Villeneuve’s craftsmanship on this movie stands out. People talk about it in a sort of abstract way, but I found Thomas Flight’s video breaking down on a technical level exactly why it’s so impressive to be incredibly helpful. To steal one of his points, these are both scenes with background explosions digitally inserted behind characters. But Villeneuve has arranged his shot to look like an actual photograph of people backlit by an explosion. Both scenes are fake, but the Black Widow scene looks fake.

But I heard an interview with Villeneuve where he said the hardest thing about bringing “Dune” together was the script. He, Eric Roth, and John Spaihts had to make a lot of choices about what from the book to cut and what was left in and how to end the first movie. And I think their choices really worked well. It’s fun to dunk on the slightly slipshod way the MCU throws its visual design together, but I think the real difference is on the level of story. The premise is every bit as fantastical as the weirdest stuff you’ll see in a comic. But like all really good sci-fi, “Dune” is about taking its own fantastical premises seriously. The better stretches of the MCU flirt with taking their own premises seriously, but they inevitably end in a generic CGI slugfest and a handful of quips. “Dune” has really brought the seriousness of some very weird books onto the screen.

I feel ambivalent about putting this at #3 only because there’s going to be a second movie. If it’s as good as the first, that’ll not only be great but will reflect incredibly well on the first “Dune.” But it’s also possible that problems with “Dune 2” will reveal that some of the story choices made to construct “Dune 1” were in fact mistakes. It’s a little bit of an incomplete for me.

#2: “No Sudden Move”

Weird lenses everywhere

This was a pandemic production, shot under Covid-19 protocols, then I believe sent directly to HBO Max without coming out in theaters. It’s really fucking good.

I have to confess, though, that the first time I put it on as a casual stream I got confused and turned it off. It was only after I put it on again in serious movie-watching mode that I got it. Yes, this is a Stephen Soderbergh heist movie. But it’s not light and effortless like “Ocean’s Eleven” — you need to pay attention. If you do pay attention, though, you’ll be richly rewarded with tremendous performances from Benicio del Toro and Don Cheadle. By the time Matt Damon shows up for a cameo, the movie is enthralling, and the scene with del Toro, Cheadle, and Damon is the best thing I’ve seen on film in years.

I feel like this hasn’t gotten the love it deserves, and I really urge you to check it out.

It’s a couple of cool performances, lots of trick shot cinematography from Soderbergh (who DPs his own movies under a pseudonym for some reason) to capture the emotion of a couple of guys who are out of their depth, and a screenplay that actually has something to say about the world at a time when I feel like more and more work is trying to incorporate political themes while staying fairly vacuous.

#1: “The Power of the Dog”

Montana looks like Mordor in this movie because they shot it in New Zealand

The best movies do only-in-a-movie things, and the combination of visuals with music in “The Power of the Dog” — some of it diegetic (that’s the fancy word for when the characters on screen are supposed to be able to hear the music), some of it not, some of it genuinely unclear whether it’s diegetic or not — is really cool.

I will not spoil this movie because I’ve heard some people say their enjoyment was compromised by spoiling. But I will say is that I knew the major plot beats before I saw it, and I didn’t mind. And to me, that’s actually the essence of good storytelling. “Hamlet” doesn’t hinge on your suspense; it’s the artful unfolding of the story that makes it great. Here I would say Jane Campion unravels a mystery over time rather than presenting us with a twist. It’s also a fascinating exercise in doing a character study of some very strange characters — eccentric people who have made odd choices in their lives and continue to do weird things. But all beautifully and compellingly realized. At first, I thought Benedict Cumberbatch’s strange effort to do an American accent was a weak point; but by the end, I was sold on it as a method choice. It’s of course possible that in reality, it’s just bad dialect work.

But however it came together, it worked for me in a just perfectly constructed film that’s been haunting me ever since I saw it.