Mixed Metaphors

“The part about going to the movies that was so thrilling was not the film itself…but being around other humans, tearing up at the end and realizing that the people on either side of me were sniffling, too.” — How Life Resumes, NTY, Melissa Kirsch, 2/19/22

Things change. As I write, the Academy Awards are a week away on Sunday, March 27. I usually post my annual, A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films, well in advance of the Oscars. Since the event is approaching, the deadline for this review is here.

Award shows this year, those that didn’t cancel their in-person events, were delayed. The same was true of many of the films from 2021. Studios hoped people would feel safe enough to return to theaters in person so they postponed premieres. Most didn’t feel safe, including me.

I made the exception for three films this year, House of Gucci, The French Dispatch and Licorice Pizza. Each time, I chose the theater where I felt safe, the AMC Madison 6, which for the past few years has been my preferred filmgoing venue. Each film-viewing, all matinees by choice, averaged a small audience of about a half-dozen movie-goers.

Box office receipts dropped dramatically this year, and films that premiered only in theaters didn’t find their audiences. The changing demographics of who watched films in theaters and what films were successful at the box office couldn’t financially sustain some theaters. Films like Steven Spielberg’s, West Side Story, which were only shown in theaters until recently, failed to meet projected earnings.

Another unintended consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the changing habits of filmgoers are the number of movie theaters which have closed across the country. I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I moved here as a young adult and cinephile in 1974. Since my arrival, I’ve witnessed the closing of many of my favorite venues. I posted this list on social media. It reminded me too of the how media outlets in general have vanished, the closing of book, music, and video stores.

   Question: What do the following have in common?

• Capitol Theater
• Strand
• University Square 4 Cinema
• Hilldale
• Orpheum
• Stage Door
• Esquire
• Westgate
• Middleton Theatre
• Market Square Cinema

…and soon AMC Madison 6 (formerly Sundance 608).

Answer: Movie theaters which have closed (not including drive-ins). I saw movies in them all (if my memory serves me, including The Capitol, before it closed to become the Madison Civic Center in 1974.

AMC Madison 6 will close when Hilldale Mall expands.

Before I introduce the criteria and my selections for A Filmgoers Guide to the Best Films of 2021, a note about streaming subscriptions. Many of this year’s films premiered exclusively on streaming services. I’ve limited my subscriptions to the following: Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max. I also watched films which were available on Spectrum On Demand. Films offered exclusively on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Disney + I didn’t get to see. The films I wanted to view, but didn’t subscribe to the services included the following: The Worst Person in the World, CODA, and Being the Ricardos, which unfortunately eliminated them from being considered for this year’s best films list.  

Notes on the Criteria for A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films

As in other years, first, before I share A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2021, this is a reminder that I’m a cinephile and not a critic. I offer my thoughts and impressions on the films I saw this past year and comment on what worked for me, what didn’t, and what transported me. Movie-going is, for the most part, a solitary experience. When seen in a theater, it is shared anonymously with others. Like other forms of art immersion, we respond intimately with the medium, emotionally, viscerally, and intellectually.

I choose films drawn from my favorite genres. I like biographies, LGBTQ-themed movies, crime and suspense dramas, coming-of-age stories, dystopian future fantasies and satire, well-done romantic or black comedies, relationship and dysfunctional family dramedies, and documentaries. On the flip side, genres that typically don’t appeal to me are action-hero/comic book films, period dramas, horror, or ultra-violent or exploitation films, especially when women and children are victims. Films that pass the Bechdel Test earn extra credit, especially stories from a woman’s point of view, even more so when produced, written, or directed by women, or feature a strong female lead. I seek out movies made by a short list of favorite directors and writers who often work with a familiar repertoire of actors, and finally, independent films often make my annual list of best films.

Now for the movies… 

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2021

(Not ranked, except as noted. All official movie posters courtesy of the film production studios.)

Best Narrative Films

Note: This year there was a four-way tie for my favorite film of the year. Each of the four films were dramatically different, yet each moved me in profound ways. They are as follows (in no particular order): The Power of the Dog, Drive My Car, Belfast, and Licorice Pizza. I’m hard-pressed to choose between them, much like a parent who loves all their children, but for different reasons. The following list is a baker’s dozen of Best Narrative Films. Add-in six Best Documentaries and Best Foreign Language Film and we have my picks for this year’s 20 Best Films of 2021. Note: Again, this year’s list does not include a Best Animated Film (I didn’t see any of the full-length features).

I reprise these bonus special categories: Honorable Mentions, Films I Didn’t See and Dream Double Feature, lastly, a critically-acclaimed Film I Didn’t Like (or, Abandoned).

1. Power of the Dog – First, this was slow-moving, plodding narrative, yet the beautiful cinematography of New Zealand, which stood-in for Montana of the 1920’s, kept me engaged while the primary characters, their relationships, back stories, and motivations were introduced. Since this story was a slow-burning psychological drama, it required both the time and attention to be prepare us for the journey we were taken on. Jonny Greenwood’s score, characterized by a haunting piano, reflects the building tension between the characters and the downfall of one of them. 

From Wikipedia, “The Power of the Dog is a 2021 Western psychological drama film written and directed by Jane Campion. It is based on Thomas Savage‘s 1967 novel of the same title. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Shot mostly within rural Otago, the film is an international co-production between New Zealand, Greece, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia. The Power of the Dog covers themes such as love, grief, resentment, jealousy, masculinity, and sexuality.”

Spoiler Alert: 

From a review in The Guardian, “The setting is 1920s Montana, where two brothers run a profitable ranch: charismatic but boorish Phil Burbank (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), who affects a fancier style of clothing and millinery than sweaty Phil and aspires to the high social standing of his elderly parents who evidently staked them in the business. Phil, an instinctive bully, calls his brother “fatso”, encourages his men to mock him, and is obsessed with the fact that George is parasitically reliant on Phil’s tough competence, which he learned from a charismatic rancher called ‘Bronco’ Henry that he once idolized and who taught him the trade. But lonely, dysfunctional Phil is in fact emotionally reliant on his quiet, dignified brother and these grown men share a bedroom in their big house like kids.”

“So Phil is outraged when George marries a widow from the town: this is Rose (an excellent performance from Dunst), a former cinema piano-player now running a cafe, with a sensitive teenage son called Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who waits tables for which he creates intricate paper flowers, to much sneering homophobic abuse from Phil. And yet Phil is oddly transfixed by Peter’s delicate papery fronds, a visual echo with the strips of rawhide from which he later makes a menacing rope. Once Rose moves into the home, Phil makes it his business to harass and abuse her, as she descends into depression and alcoholism, but then appears to take a strange fatherly interest in Peter himself, offering to teach him to ride and take him out into the remote hills to school him in the rancher ways, just as ‘Bronco’ once apparently did to him.”

What made this film impactful for me was how trauma and the unresolved experiences we carry with us from the past, can have tragic consequences in the present. This film is not for everyone. For this viewer it was like watching a tragedy about to happen in slow-motion, without having a clue on how the story would end. I’m grateful I stuck with it. The Power of the Dog was both beautiful in its setting and ugly in the machinations of its lead character, both thought-provoking and emotionally wrenching. Not a film for the faint of heart.

A couple of personal notes: First, I’m a fan of Jane Campion’s directorial work. I’m not a fan of mansplaining and misogyny, so I was pleased with Campion’s smackdown of Sam Elliott at the DGA Awards:

As reported by Variety, “Director Jane Campion didn’t hold back Saturday night at the DGA Awards when asked for her response to caustic and homophobic comments that veteran actor Sam Elliott made recently about Campion’s Oscar contender The Power of the Dog.”

“I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. He’s not a cowboy; he’s an actor,” Campion told Variety before the ceremony. “The West is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist.” 

Lastly, I’m a huge fan of Jesse Plemons. He surprises me in every role he chooses. He reminds me of another favorite actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman.

2. Drive My Car – I finally watched the critically-acclaimed Japanese film, Drive My Car this month when it was offered on HBO Max. It’s a long movie, clocking just under three hours. I watched it in two sittings, the first was only 20 minutes when the lead character and the red Saab 900 were introduced. Gratefully, the second sitting engaged me and I surrendered to the slow pace of the storytelling.

From the Janus Films website, “Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins – with the help of his driver – to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace.”     

The film is rich with metaphors, including the stories we create and tell ourselves, the scripts we follow, the secrets we keep, the journeys we take, and the guilt we harbor until we are able to finally let go and accept the outcomes and reality that remains. Along the travels in the red Saab, we learn how to love ourselves first, to truly understand, accept, and love others; we also learn to first accept responsibility so we can forgive ourselves. We learn the cost of grief and our ability to endure it. The interaction of actors in Chekov’s play, Uncle Vanya, compare and contrast with the real-life characters, foremost the actor and director, Yusuke Kafuku and his driver, Misaki Watari.

3. Licorice Pizza – First, full disclosure, Paul Thomas Anderson is one of my favorite directors. He has helmed some of my favorite films, including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Hard Eight, There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, and Phantom Thread often writing the screenplays which feature a repertoire of actors that appear in a number of his films. He creatively imbues his movies with music that reflects the era of his stories and has partnered with some of the best sound designers. He is the uncredited executive music producer on two of my favorite films of his Boogie Nights and Magnolia. In Licorice Pizza, Jonny Greenwood (who also did the sound for Phantom Thread) has selected music from the 1970s and  wove it through the movie like connective tissue, and added nonintrusive, yet evocative orchestral music in the background. The art direction, cinematography, and casting are consistently spot on.

The leads in Licorice Pizza are both newcomers, Anderson worked previously with Alana Haim on music videos with her sisters, and Copper Hoffman is the son of Philip Seymour Hoffman who was featured in a number of Anderson’s best and most successful films. Some of the cameo performances were both playful and well-cast, Amy Rudolph, Anderson’s wife as a casting director, George DiCaprio, Leo’s father, a waterbed salesman, Tom Waits, movie director, and Sean Penn as actor Jack Holden (based on actor, William Holden) and Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, Hollywood hairstylist and former boyfriend/producer of Barbra Streisand who steals every scene that he’s in.

The story is a lighthearted, coming-of-age, first-love romp that takes place in the San Fernando Valley in 1973. Cooper Hoffman’s character, Gary Valentine, is loosely based on producer and child actor, Gary Goetzman, according to Wikipedia, “…had starred in the film Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, and eventually started a waterbed company and pinball arcade.”

During a pandemic year that featured films that tackled difficult and thought-provoking themes and stories, this was needed break. I watched it again today as I drafted this review. It’s a bright, hopeful, and effervescent film.

4. Belfast – Along with Passing and C’mon C’mon, Belfast was filmed in black and white which helped visually articulate its time and place. Sometimes, in this filmgoer’s view, b/w films, like still photography, can be riveting in its point of view. We pay attention to the small details, the light and shadows.

Kenneth Branagh, actor, screenwriter, and director, created this “semi-autobiographical film which chronicles the life of a working-class family and their young son’s childhood during the tumult of the late 1960s in the Northern Ireland capital.”  Along with the b/w cinematography, Van Morrison’s music provided a compelling and bluesy backdrop to the narrative. The cast featured Caitríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Colin Morgan, Josie Walker. and Jude Hill.

The story is told through the eyes and misadventures of Buddy, played by a young Jude Hill, as he attempts to understand the conflict that he witnesses, in both in his family home and on the streets of Belfast. This is a political story as experienced by a family and their neighbors. Watching the news unfolding in Ukraine and the refugees seeking shelter, safety, and new beginnings, I thought about this film.

5. House of Gucci – This was one of the films I saw in a theater. I enjoyed the film despite its length which would have benefitted from tighter editing. The lead actors, Lady Gaga and Adam Driver were watchable throughout the film. The story was part dysfunctional family drama, a depiction of ‘the lives of rich and famous”, Italian-family crime story, and campy fashion display with questionable wigs, prosthetics, and over-the-top performances by Jerod Leto and Al Pacino. Jeremy Irons, Selma Hayek, and Jack Huston on the other hand gave smaller but consistently compelling performances. I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot. All-in-all, despite its flaws, I recommend the film with reservations and will watch it again sometime in the future. It’s campy and features some of my favorite actors.

6. The French Dispatch – I think it was only the third movie I’ve seen in a theater since the pandemic began 20 months ago. I’m a huge fan of Wes Anderson’s imaginary, quirky worlds and storytelling style, part picture book, morality play, commentary on the culture and a certain preciousness which reflects his curiosity, wonder, and almost compulsive attention to detail. I also enjoy his casting choices, the repertoire of actors, score, and especially his art direction and production aesthetics.

All these qualities exist in The French Dispatch and like many of his other films, makes it a challenging film to review and even describe in a manner that gives it justice. I’m not going to try. Instead, I suggest you watch the trailer, and read a review or two if you’re the kind of person who can tolerate a degree of spoilers, or the pedantic opinions of film critics and scholars.

Here’s a quote from a NYT’s review which resonated with me: “He might be the most passionately literary of living filmmakers, the one whose movies are most like books. Maybe that’s a strange thing to say about an artist with such a recognizable visual aesthetic, but Anderson’s meticulous pictures are themselves evidence of his bookishness. The sound design of The French Dispatch, enlivened by Alexandre Desplat’s playful and knowing score, is punctuated by the scratching of pencils and the clacking of typewriter keys. When a character is credited, during a television interview, with having a photographic memory, he is quick to correct the record. “I possess a typographic memory,” he insists, and the distinction offers a clue about how Anderson’s mind works.”

As a cinephile, storyteller, and writer, I enjoyed the subject of this film, the characters, the titles introducing articles, individual ‘magazine stories,’ the animation, and all the detail in the art direction and production values, plus the faces of some of my favorite actors in quirky roles. Wes Anderson, if nothing else, creates his own eccentric fantastical worlds and conveys his stories, which unfold like fables, life lessons, or children’s storybooks.

I appreciated his homage to the written word, magazines like The New Yorker, and the writers he paid tribute to in the film’s dedication. He also captures the satirical essence of France and the spirit of French intelligentsia.

Now, full disclosure, there was so much visual detail and themes to parse in each ‘magazine article,’ I was concurrently struggling to keep up and surprisingly, a bit overwhelmed and/or bored. My mind wandered. I was an ADHD viewer, which I’ve experienced watching his films in the past. One response I have is his ideas cause my mind to wander off track and I sometimes lose the thread of the storyline.

Lastly, do I recommend the film. Yes, with qualifiers. It’s a cornucopia of ideas, a visual feast, and challenge to sometimes find than follow, the narrative. There are no other films quite like Anderson’s, and to a degree, he is an acquired taste. In my view, it’s impossible to simply sit back and take in his films, stories, and characters. The viewer is required to pay close attention, to engage visually and intellectually, and if you let your mind wander like I did, you may lose your way in your own reverie, which may not be a bad thing and may be one of Anderson’s many creative intentions.

7. King Richard – The film chronicles Richard Williams 78-page coaching plan to train and launch two world champion women tennis players, his daughters Venus and Serena. Richard is an imperfect parent, spouse, coach, and man, yet dedicated with his entire being and resources to overcome the challenges of race and his family’s Compton, California origins. Will Smith plays Richard Williams. Critics have given the film mixed reviews and the screenplay glossed over some of Richard’s matrimonial and parental male dominance and privilege, yet this viewer cheered on the young tennis phenoms and the family’s dedication to the sport and commitment to raise successful young women in an environment that in many ways is stacked against them. Will Smith will likely win a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.

8. Don’t Look Up – First, I’m a fan of some of the work of Adam McKay, director of Don’t Look Up. From his IMDB page, “Adam McKay (born April 17, 1968) is an American screenwriter, director, comedian, and actor. McKay has a comedy partnership with Will Ferrell, with whom he co-wrote the films Anchorman, Talladega Nights, and The Other Guys. Ferrell and McKay also founded their comedy website Funny or Die through their production company Gary Sanchez Productions.” In alleged recent reports, Ferrell and McKay had a falling out when McKay didn’t cast Ferrell in the lead role of McKay’s new HBO limited-series about Magic Johnson and the L.A. Lakers, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

McKay’s films that I’ve enjoyed include this one, of course, plus Vice and The Big Short. The latter film, like Don’t Look Up, feature a great ensemble cast of actors. McKay is also a prolific writer and executive producer. Limited-series that he produced which I watched, include Into the Storm, a documentary series about the identity of Q of Q-Anon, and the fictional series, Dead to Me.

The film is described as, “Two low-level astronomers must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy planet Earth.” The astronomers are played by Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy and Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiaskyas. Meryl Streep plays President Orleans, and Tyler Perry and Cate Blanchett as newscasters. Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, and Timothée Chalamet are just a few more well-know actors that fill out the lead characters.

Don’t Look Up is loosely based on true events and is a tongue-in-cheek satire which is the hallmark of much of McKay’s dramatic comedy collaborations.

9. The Card Counter – I saw writer, director Paul Schrader’s new film on 9/11/21, The Card Counter starring Oscar Isaac, Willem Defoe, Tiffany Haddish, and Tye Sheridan. I decided not to post this mini-review that today, due to the subject matter of the story. I didn’t want to post it on the 20th Anniversary of 9/11 because of its dark and disturbing subject matter.

From an NPR review, “It’s likely no coincidence that ‘The Card Counter’ is being released so close to the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Schrader can be bluntly didactic when it suits him, but here he’s sincerely inviting the audience to reflect on the legacy of Sept. 11, including the crimes that Americans have committed in the name of justice.”

The film is not for the faint of heart. However, I’m a fan of Schrader’s dark, intense stories about redemption including his screenplay for Taxi Driver, and his recent film, First Reformed. Schrader’s lead characters in each film, Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and Ethan Hawke in First Redemption, plus Isaac in The Card Counter, competently, convincingly, and compellingly embody the stories of flawed, troubled souls.

Oscar Isaac plays William Tell (the name is a metaphor and most likely not a coincidence, referring both to poker and the expert marksman who assassinated an evil leader). Tell is a former military interrogator at Abu Ghraib, who was convicted for his abuse and crimes. He spent 10 years in prison where he learned to embrace the daily routine and predictability. He also learned to count cards.

After his release from prison, he becomes a mid-level casino blackjack and poker player. Tell attempts to play under the radar since he’s card counter. Tiffany Haddish’s character, La Linda tries to recruit him as a player in her stable of gamblers. She represents anonymous backers who will split high-stake tournament winnings with the player.

Soon Tell accepts her offer. He has an encounter with a young man, Cirk, who makes a proposal to Tell. Cirk’s father was also was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib, and unlike Tell was not prosecuted, but instead his wife abandoned both him and their son, he beat Cirk, and ultimately committed suicide. Cirk tries to enlist Tell’s help in seeing revenge of the person he holds responsible for his father’s death spiral.

Instead, Tell decides to mentor and rescue the young man by accepting Haddish’s offer to make large sums of money by playing high-stakes poker, enabling him to reform Cirk, and hopefully turn his life around, wiping out his debt, encouraging him to forgive and reunite with his mother, and return to college.

Tell and Cirk hit the road travelling to different tournaments and rendezvous with La Linda. The three, grow fond of each other and a sexual chemistry develops between Tell and La Linda.

For Tell, it’s an existential effort to rehabilitate and redeem his own soul by helping this young man right his life. There’s much about this film that’s hard to watch, the violence and the reminder of how we failed as a nation treating suspected terrorist prisoners. We witness, much like we did in Taxi Driver, and First Reformed, the lead characters’ struggle with their demons. Isaac’s performance is often expressed internally in his journaling at night in the cheap motels he prefers to stay in, which he alters to create a familiar locked-down environment.

I recommend the film. It’s thought-provoking, disturbing, AND difficult to watch. It’s a reminder that we’re all flawed human beings and sometimes we choose to seek redemption by saving another person’s life.

10. Passing – Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut is a story about racial identity and ‘passing’ in 1920’s New York. It featured two childhood friends played compellingly by Ruth Negga and Tessa Thompson and their spouses as adults, costarring Alexander Skarsgård and André Holland respectively. There were many creative choices which made the story more intimate and visually rich. From a review in the Chicago Tribune, “Hall shot “Passing” in the boxy 4:3 aspect ratio deployed by filmmaking of the era depicted, in supple black and white. Cinematographer Edu Grau’s strategies favor reflective, angled mirror images — literally, characters photographed in mirrors — and reminders that fixed identity is elusive in this universe. Throughout the film we hear composer Devonte Hines’ bittersweet, ghost-shrouded piano theme, and it’s just one component of a very rich sound design. Costume designer Marci Rodgers works freely and sometimes out of period, giving Clare in particular a forward-leaning character line suggesting bold, dangerous women of ‘40s or even ‘50s Hollywood.”

What made Rebecca Hall’s decision to select Passing as her directorial debut more personal and powerful was when Hall learned of her own Black heritage as detailed in the PBS series, Finding Your Roots. It was in fact her mother, American opera star, Maria Ewing who passed.

11. C’mon C’mon – First, there are directors who make ‘smaller’ films that are original, intimate, poignant, and reveal the inner lives of its characters. Mike Mills is one of those directors and I will seek out his films which include, Beginners and 20^th Century Women. In addition to being a filmmaker, he’s a graphic designer and artist, and his visual sense of design and imagery make it on the screen, and in the case of Beginners, in his lead characters livelihood.

Like a handful of directors, there’s a small cadre of actors whose choice of roles always pique my curiosity and entice me to view their newest work. One of those actors is the eccentric and mercurial Joaquin Phoenix. Stories about storytelling and lived experience, and the point of view expressed in the innocence and unpredictability of youth, were additional draws.

All of those elements coalesce in C’mon C’mon. A story summarized as follows, “Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) is an emotionally stunted and softspoken radio journalist who travels the country interviewing a variety of kids about their thoughts concerning their world and their future. Then Johnny’s saddled with caring for his young nephew Jesse. Jesse brings a new perspective and, as they travel from state to state, effectively turns the emotional tables on Johnny.”

The film is part road trip, parenting lesson, and family drama. C’mon C’mon is a b/w film with great first-person POV cinematography. It’s described as, “A sweet, sad movie about a single man who learns a bit about how tough it is to be a parent when he takes charge of his nephew for a while.” The young actor who plays the nephew, Jesse, played by Woody Norman, acts toe-to-toe with Phoenix.

From The New Yorker review, “Jesse is a precocious, idiosyncratic child, filled with inspired whimsy that both masks and reveals his loneliness, his vast and unspoken emotional needs. (For instance, he has an elaborate bedtime routine that involves pretending to be an orphan, and pretending that Viv—or, now, Johnny—is a parent whose child has died and whose place Jesse will take.) Jesse is a voracious learner and, even more, a lightning rod of emotion that he channels with an instinctive, impulsive sense of drama.”

This is a small film with a big heart.  

12.The Lost Daughter – There were three draws for me to see this film. The first, the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal, plus the casting of the two leads playing the same person at different ages, two actresses whose work I’ve grown to appreciate, in both the depth and range of characters they play, the true hallmark of great acting.

The Lost Daughter, is summarized online as, “A college professor confronts her unsettling past after meeting a woman and her young daughter while on vacation in Italy. Her obsession with the woman and her daughter prompts memories of her early motherhood.”

The vacationing professor and her younger self as mother are played by Olivia Coleman and Jessie Buckley respectively, and costars Dakota Johnson, Ed Harris, and Peter Sarsgaard. I admit to being a little distracted when I attempted to identify a previous performance by Jessie Buckley. Then I remembered the mesmerizing role she played in a film from 2020, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which also made my Best Films list that year. She costarred with another Jesse, Jesse Plemons. The movie was adapted for the screen and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Like The Lost Daughter it was a haunting, melodramatic thriller.

The Lost Daughter received mixed reviews and didn’t garnish the award nominations some critics believed it deserved. Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut left me hungry to see more of her work. When women tell stories featuring women’s stories, it’s a reminder of what’s missing in cinema. Kudos to Gyllenhaal and the three women leads, Coleman, Buckley, and Johnson, in my view was her best performance to date.

See this film and judge for yourself.

13. The Many Saints of Newark – First, full-disclosure, one of my favorite genres is mob movies. The Godfather films (at least the first two in the series), I’ve watched multiple times and The Godfather, my all-time favorite film. The Sopranos, my all-time favorite limited series, which I’ve also binge-watched multiple times. Needless to say, that when the prequel to the Soprano’s story premiered, it would make my must-see list, and also, not so much for its filmmaking art, but for sentimental and nostalgic reasons it would make this Best Films list.

From Wikipedia, “The Many Saints of Newark (marketed with the subtitle A Sopranos Story) is a 2021 American crime drama film directed by Alan Taylor and written by David Chase and Lawrence Konner. A prequel to Chase’s HBO crime drama series The Sopranos, it takes place during the 1960s and 1970s in Newark, New Jersey. The film follows a violent gang war from the perspectives of mobster Dickie Moltisanti and his teenage nephew, Tony Soprano, in the midst of the city’s 1967 riots. It stars Alessandro Nivola as Dickie and Michael Gandolfini as Tony, the character originated by his father in the series, with Leslie Odom Jr., Jon Bernthal, Corey Stoll, Billy Magnussen, Michela De Rossi, John Magaro, Ray Liotta, and Vera Farmiga in supporting roles.”  

I especially enjoyed the performance by Michael Gandolfini who played the young Tony Soprano, who is James Gandolfini’s son. I look forward to future films featuring this actor.

Best Documentaries

(Not ranked: Except as noted)

1. Summer of Soul (Best Documentary)
2. Julia
3. Exterminate All the Brutes
4. No Ordinary Man
5. Life of Crime 1984-2020
6. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstock in Time 

Best Foreign Language Film

Drive My Car

Honorable Mentions

(Narrative films, not ranked)

1. Bergman Island
2. Flag Day
3. Spencer
4. Tick, Tick, BOOM!
5. Nightmare Alley
6. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
7. Red Rocket

Films I Didn’t See

(Still on my must-see list, not ranked)

1. The Worst Person in the World
2. Being the Ricardos
3. CODA
4. Parallel Mothers

Dream Double Feature

Drive My Car and Locke – Films where most of the important scenes and dialogue occurred in cars.

Film I Didn’t Like

(Critically-acclaimed film I abandoned)

West Side Story

What’s on your list?

See you at the movies… sadly, unlikely.

Related Reading from Mixed Metaphors, Oh My!

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2020

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2019 

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2018

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2017

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2016

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2015

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2014

A Filmgoer’s Guide to the Best Films of 2013

Waxing Sentimental 

Additional Reading on Filmgoing During a Pandemic

How Life Resumes