Top 21 movies of 2021
By Jake Skubish
21. Bergman Island
Bergman Island is a film dweeb’s paradise, and its plot may cue anyone who’s not a film dweeb to run as far from the movie as they can. The film follows two filmmakers who visit an island known for being the home of a famed filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman. The filmmakers take this retreat to draw inspiration for the films they are currently writing, and midway through the film, as one of the filmmakers describes her film, we cut to an extended segment where that film takes place on screen.
If this sounds a bit meta and exhausting, it is, at least for a little while. Bergman Island begins as a film made to be admired rather than loved. But when it cuts to its film-within-a-film the emotional stakes set in, and and you can enjoy it without ever having seen a Bergman film. By the conclusion, you can’t help but marvel at the inventiveness of the perspective shifts; they are not just innovations of form, but critical components of understanding the character’s emotional entanglements. Bergman Island has a layered ending that sticks with you, and I can’t wait to revisit the film. Bergman Island is available for digital rental.
20. Barb and star go to Vista Del Mar
A depressing side effect of superhero movie domination is the loss of studio comedies: once movies like Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy started going for laughs, we ceded the comedy terrain to the ever-expanding universe of capes and tights. Enter Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, a gleefully weird and unabashedly silly comedy from Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo. Wiig and Mumolo play Barb and Star, longtime friends who lose their jobs and sense of direction in life, only to try getting back on track with a trip to a Florida resort. Unfortunately, their timing is not ideal: a mysterious villain, also portrayed by Wiig, sends her henchman Edgar (Jamie Dornan, obscenely gorgeous and genuinely hilarious) to kill everyone in the town.
Barb and Star allows Wiig’s singular comedic energy to roam unleashed. Overly self-contained in projects like Bridesmaids, Wiig is at her best when she is absolutely nuts, and Mumolo is the perfect complement to her unorthodox vibe. Barb and Star is the rare comedy you’ll want to quote forever, and is so much on its own wavelength that loving it feels like an inside joke.
Want to make your day a little better? Do yourself a favor and go watch “Edgar’s Prayer.” Seagulls in the sand, can you hear my prayer? I can, Edgar. I can. My own prayer? That in the comedies of the future, we can trade capes for culottes. More Barb and Star, please. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is available on Hulu.
19. Shiva Baby
Shiva Baby is a horror movie masquerading as a comedy. The quick, 78-minute film stars Rachel Sennott as Danielle, an aimless college student forced into attending a family shiva. There, she suffers one repeated discomfort after another: the attendance of her sugar daddy; the pestering of her ex-girlfriend; the overbearing neuroses of her parents. If you thought Uncut Gems was stressful, just wait.
Shiva Baby should be celebrated as the arrival of two unique new talents. Sennott delivers one of the very best performances of the year as Danielle. Rather than devolve into angsty shtick, Sennott’s performance is endlessly fluid; Danielle is smart, bold, weak, petulant, self-assured, and completely fragile, but never all of those things at once. And director Emma Seligman makes it clear that, even though Shiva Baby is her debut film, she already has her own visual style. I can’t wait to see what she makes next. Shiva Baby is available on HBO Max.
18. No Sudden Move
If the release of No Sudden Move didn’t make a splash, it may be because director Steven Soderbergh is too prolific: he’s directed five movies in the past four years, with another due out in two months (not to mention producing last year’s Oscars ceremony). But no Soderbergh movie is quite like any other, and No Sudden Move is yet another inventive genre iteration, albeit with a familiar cast of Soderbergh favorites. Benicio Del Toro and Don Cheadle star as a couple of criminals looped into a scheme that turns out to be far bigger than they bargained for.
The pacing of No Sudden Move is slow but menacing. The characters speak in controlled tones but always feel as if they are hurtling toward a fate completely outside their control. No Sudden Move reckons with this lack of control over one’s fate and the power held by those who do control our destiny. Try as we might, we’re still playing by their rules. No one else gets it quite like Soderbergh. No Sudden Move is available on HBO Max.
17. King Richard
A lot of criticism about King Richard described it as a standard, formulaic sports movie as if that were a bad thing. Sports movies are formulaic for a reason: when the formula works, it produces greatness. Richard Williams knew the same applies to sports itself, and King Richard charts the inspirational rise to greatness of Venus and Serena Williams as they follow their father’s plan down to every detail.
What the lazy commentary about this film ignores, and what King Richard shows, is that even when you have a good formula, success is really, really hard to pull off. Not everything in Richard Williams’ plan is wise, and despite the Williams sisters’ role as producers of the movie, the biopic provides an honest look at the shortcomings of their father’s single-mindedness. In the end, though, King Richard cements itself as a top-tier sports movie because, like Moneyball, it is more about the process of reimagining what it takes to succeed than about reveling in that success.
I loved every minute of King Richard, and cried a lot throughout the film. Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton are excellent as Venus and Serena, and Aunjanue Ellis, portraying the girls’ mother Oracene, provides an important counterweight to Will Smith’s performance as Richard. But Smith towers over them all, and completely owns his part. It’s the best sort of Oscar bait, a filet mignon dangling on the end of the fishing line. Smith is really going for it, and he deserves the Oscar. King Richard is not currently available to stream.
16. Dune
Dune was my most anticipated movie of 2020, and in January 2020 I wrote, “I can’t believe I have to wait almost a full year for this one, but it will be worth it.” Well, it ended up being nearly two years, but Dune finally arrived in theaters this October.
In two and a half hours the film covers just half of the source material—but it’s a breezy 2.5 hours, nimbly introducing the vast array of characters while constructing the grandiose backdrop of Arrakis. It’s a complex sci-fi world, but director Denis Villeneuve manages to bring it to life in a way that those not familiar with the book can appreciate. Dune is a visual spectacle, and as an act of adaptation succeeds in mirroring the thoughtful, deliberate pace of the book. There are big action set pieces, the highlight of which is the escape from an impending sand worm. But much of Dune is politics and lore, and the film manages to hold intrigue through these slower moments.
And yet for all my Dune love, I can’t shake the feeling that this adaptation is really only half a movie. I understand the decision to cut the film in half; it’s a structurally challenging text to adapt. But in its full arc, Dune provides an exploration of imperialism and environmental degradation, and more fully reckons with Paul’s complicated role as a messianic figure. Lopping off the second half shortchanges the perspective of the Fremen, and while Javier Bardem gives the Arrakeen natives some much-needed character, this truncated version of Dune is a story of royals.
Thankfully, Dune: Part Two is coming in 2023, and once I see the full six-hour cut my esteem for this project might rise. I can’t believe I have to wait almost two full years for the next one, but it will be worth it. Dune is available for digital rental.
15. Titane
How to describe Titane? I could try to lay out the plot, but the film is constantly on the move, never quite what you thought it was five minutes prior. Consider the IMDb description: “Following a series of unexplained crimes, a father is reunited with the son who has been missing for 10 years.” Reader, this is not the plot of Titane. But it’s also not not the plot, either. Anyway, it’s it’s best you don’t know too much going in.
At times I was wary of where Titane was headed; director Julia Ducournau has been roundly praised as a visionary and rightfully so, but the film’s hyper-violence and genre bending can feel at times like formalistic playthings rather than narrative choices. But there is an emotional core to Titane; it is unconventional and amorphous, but the film contains an odd warmth that holds the stylistic framework together.
I saw a lot of good movies in 2021, but rare is the film that leaves me totally mystified at how its director pulled it all off. Not everything in Titane works, but Ducournau is a magician. I left the film confounded but in awe of what it made me feel, and that is an achievement. Titane is available for digital rental.
14. Passing
Passing is an impressive directorial debut from Rebecca Hall. The film is based on a 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, which follows two childhood friends who reunite and becomes increasingly entangled in one another’s lives. One, Irene (Tessa Thompson), is a Black woman with a Black husband and children. The other, Clare (Ruth Negga), is a Black woman with a white husband, and a secret: she’s passing as white, and her bigoted husband has no idea.
The film is presented in an elegant black-and-white frame from Hall, who shows as much control behind the camera as she has in her performances in front of it. It’s a fastidious aesthetic, but black and white often bleed into one another in creative ways. Negga first appears on screen in a spacious room filled with sunlight, and the overwhelming brightness makes her nearly invisible—reflective of her aims. The illumination is darker and calmer, meanwhile, back inside Irene’s home.
Hall showcases a rare ability beyond her technical prowess: creating a story that’s difficult to pin down. Passing possesses an unshakeable depth, a feeling that there is more substance under its foundation than can be perceived. This is owed in part to the brilliant performances of Thompson and Negga, expressive but always guarded. Passing is available on Netflix.
13. Red Rocket
With his breakout indie hits Tangerine and The Florida Project, director Sean Baker dug into the overlooked alcoves of American life, redefining what many would consider the “fringes” of society as fundamental slices of the national experience. His characters were lovable and possessed an inspiring gumption in the face of challenging circumstances: two sex workers sorting out a messy situation on Christmas Eve; a destitute family trying to piece together a life in a motel outside Disney World; the motel manager trying to keep his business afloat. If the experiences themselves were foreign to many viewers, the resilience in the face of life’s toughest moments was always recognizable.
Red Rocket finds Baker returning to another community, this time in rural Texas, defined by its economic marginalization and sense of alienation. But his protagonist is decidedly not lovable, or is perhaps uncomfortably lovable despite his obvious moral failings. The film stars Simon Rex as Mikey, a fading porn star who returns to Texas to move back in with his estranged wife and deal drugs until he can scrounge up enough cash to get back to Los Angeles. While in Texas he meets a 17-year-old named Strawberry, begins dating her, and then tries to recruit her into the porn industry as his way to get back to industry acclaim.
If this sounds detestable, it is. Red Rocket is an examination of narcissism as a defining trait of the American psyche, and while Baker would never make a film so simple as an outright moralizing finger wag, the film is certainly reckoning with the wreckage created in the wake of incessant self-interest. All Mikey can see is what things could be for himself.
As Mikey snakes his way through life in pursuit of the future he thinks he deserves, news segments of Donald Trump on the 2016 campaign trail appear occasionally in the background of scenes. The juxtaposition seems to push back against the idea that Trump created a monstrous citizenry. The 45th president is incidental. Mikey is grotesque, he’s abhorrent, and he’s who we’ve always been. In Red Rocket, as in that election, American narcissism always finds a way. Red Rocket is currently playing in theaters.
12. Summer of Soul
Questlove directs Summer of Soul with a light touch, evidently understanding the most consistent truism about music documentaries: the best moments are always the performances themselves. The film celebrates the Harlem Cultural Festival, a massive event in New York featuring legendary artists such as Stevie Wonder and Nina Simone. The festival took place the same summer as Woodstock, but with its Black performers and mostly Black audience, received little of the fanfare or generational symbolism granted to Woodstock’s white hippie-palooza.
Between magnificent musical performances, Summer of Soul weaves in a story of the surrounding context: the recent assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., the rise of the Black Panther Party, the continued struggle for civil rights. Yet the most evocative historical narrative takes place within the confines of the festival. As the film itself notes, the footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival was stored away for decades, and the very excavation of it for this documentary is a powerful act of self-recognition (the documentary’s alternative title, …or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised, speaks to this fact).
Summer of Soul revels in the glory of witnessing a space that existed by and for Black people in a historical moment that may have felt as if everything outside its walls did not. It’s hard to imagine any history lesson elucidating this as clearly as Nina Simone’s performance of “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” shown near the end of the film. Perhaps even more affecting are the interviews with festival attendees in Summer of Soul. The footage is not only an opportunity for them to reminisce on a beautiful moment from the past, but a chance for them to affirm what they had partially forgotten, that this space and this moment were real. Summer of Soul is available on Hulu.
11. Homeroom
The breakout documentary of Sundance 2020 was Boys State, a look at the annual week-long mock government event at the Texas Capitol. Although it contained glimmers of hope, Boys State was mostly a damning look at the nastiness of American politics. Consider Homeroom, the best documentary I saw at Sundance 2021, the anti-Boys State: it centers on a group of deeply inspirational high schoolers working tirelessly to make the world a better place.
Homeroom takes place in Oakland and tracks a high school graduating class through the 2019-2020 school year. The film starts with a focus on student leaders’ efforts to defund the sizable police presence in their school district. In the latter half COVID-19 arrives and throws the school year into disarray. What makes Homeroom special is its ability to make clear that when the pandemic started, the struggle did not stop. The world never really went on pause if you spent your time seeking a new path forward. This movie makes me believe in one. Homeroom is available on Hulu.
10. Don’t Look Up
Don’t Look Up shares many narrative parallels with director Adam McKay’s last great achievement, The Big Short: a group of knowledgeable insiders trying to warn the public about an impending calamity, only to find an unresponsive and uncaring audience. This time around the consequences are even more dire: two scientists (Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) discover a meteor will hit Earth in six months and wipe out humanity, but the government appears unwilling to do anything about it.
Despite these apocalyptic stakes, though, I found Don’t Look Up to be less cynical than The Big Short. That evisceration of the U.S. financial system ends with the awareness that, even though these guys were right and the profited massively, there were no winners or structural changes as a result. In Don’t Look Up, even when the system’s ability to respond to disaster appears bleak, McKay maintains a faith in the people fighting to change it anyway. “Everything is theoretically impossible until it is done,” DiCaprio’s character heroically declares midway through the film. Within the scene, it’s a moment of brutal irony, with catastrophe soon following this moment of promise. But read another way, it’s also a moment of profound optimism from McKay: we are hurtling toward destruction, and it looks unavoidable, but we can always try.
Don’t Look Up has largely been eviscerated by critics, and much of the analysis has condemned the film for its lack of subtlety, or cleverness, or the obviousness of its satire. Perhaps my tastes are unrefined, but I don’t think there’s any need for coyness when the message is we’re all going to fucking die. I’ve always appreciated McKay’s mission in this sense, his belief in the virtue of simply and directly telling the truth. Even when his thesis is disastrously wrong, as it was with Vice, he’s always known who the villains are. Sometimes, there’s value in just saying it, and in Don’t Look Up the truth is delivered in a way that’s both outrageously funny and completely terrifying.
It’s a tactic that recalls Spike Lee’s School Daze, or any number of Lee films, in which the directly screams at the audience: Wake up! Don’t Look Up is a film full of righteous fury, an appropriate response to the world if you’re paying attention.
Late in the film a character leads others in a prayer to God: “We ask for your grace tonight despite our pride.” McKay knows people have screwed things up, but he always aims his ire at the feckless monsters in charge. Don’t Look Up is a film that reminds us our collective demise is something we all have in common, and prays to God that this fact inspires us to act rather than resign ourselves to a doomed future. Don’t Look Up is available on Netflix.
9. Petite Maman
Céline Sciamma is a delicate filmmaker. She produces works of art so precious it feels as if they may evaporate the moment the end credits roll on screen. In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Sciamma employed this approach to make a brief 18th-century romance feel like a timeless, defining expression of love. Petite Maman moves in the opposite direction, presenting an intensely personal, small-scale story of friendship and familial empathy.
The film stars Joséphine Sanz as Nelly, an eight-year-old traveling with her parents to clean out her mother’s childhood home after Nelly’s grandmother has died. While staying at the home, Nelly meets a new friend, Marion, who is building a treehouse in the nearby forest. The friends grow closer as the fantastical nature of their connection grows more apparent.
Petite Maman is a triumph of editing; it runs at just 72 minutes, and the script is as masterful for what is left unsaid as what is communicated aloud. Sciamma has a knack for creating images that are not gaudy but stay with you long after the film ends. A father smiling at his daughter as he shaves, two friends looking admiringly at their tree fort, a mother and a daughter sharing a moment of true understanding: these images from Petite Maman say far more in seconds than most directors can muster over an entire career. The film crescendos in the most affecting music cue of the year, a rare moment of cinematic flourish from Sciamma that pushes the film’s grounded human tale to new heights. Petite Maman will be available on Mubi on Feb. 4, 2022.
8. Licorice Pizza
Licorice Pizza is a story about love, if not necessarily a love story. Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s ode to his California youth follows the relationship between Gary (Cooper Hoffman), an ambitious 15-year-old, and Alana (Alana Haim), a directionless 25-year-old won over by Gary’s charm but limited by their age gap.
The two approach life in opposite ways. Gary believes everything in life revolves around him, and nearly everything that happens suggests he might be right. He starts flimsy business ventures and antagonizes authority figures, yet never appears fazed by anything thrown at him, with the exception of brief falters in his expression that betray his insecurity about Alana’s romantic reticence.
Alana moves through life without much control of anything. Her career prospects are dictated by Gary, her romantic prospects are dictated by her dad, and how she sees her purpose in life changes from one moment to the next. The relationship between Gary and Alana is an exploration of the contrast between feeling as if you can create your own world versus feeling as if everything in the world is happening to you, and how the respective shortcomings in each of those perspectives collapse onto each other.
Anderson presents this story with his trademark visual control. Licorice Pizza is replete with beautiful and precise compositions that I suspect I’ll need a second viewing to fully appreciate. His realization of the film’s central relationship, meanwhile, is much less precise. Gary and Alana exist in a space between friendship and romance. Anderson manages to provide them with an ending that feels both resolved and open-ended. But where their relationship ultimately ends up may be less important than their journey toward recognizing that they need each other in their lives. Licorice Pizza is currently playing in theaters.
7. C’mon C’mon
C’mon C’mon is the sort of movie that grows and grows and grows until all of a sudden you realize that it owns your whole heart. The film follow a radio host named Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who must look after his nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) while Johnny’s sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) deals with a family emergency. C’mon C’mon comes from director Mike Mills, whose previous works Beginners and 20th Century Women were also gentle explorations of family dynamics.
The film introduces us to Johnny by way of interviews he is conducting with America’s youth: what are their hopes and fears for the future? “I think the most important thing is just being aware of what’s going on around you,” one interviewee says, describing a common failing of adults. The quote sets the stage for the entire film, a slow-moving exercise in becoming more aware of the world via human connection.
And yet C’mon C’mon has no grand realization, no single profound moment of truth. Nor is it Johnny’s movie. Johnny, Jesse, and Viv grow and learn together, not in the way fictional characters do but how people do in real life, which is to say, partially and haphazardly. The movie ends on a virtuoso sequence from Mills, who balances this narrative subtlety with cinematic beauty. C’mon C’mon is currently available in theaters.
6. The First Wave
Every one of us suffered through a massive disruption to life when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, but to a large extent the true horror of the virus was shielded from public view. Sure, the disease was lurking everywhere we went, but the pain and loss of human life were contained to overcrowded hospitals. The First Wave takes us inside those hospitals, and the film is a monumental achievement of historical documentation. It should be required viewing for every American, and especially anyone who ever suggested this pandemic was being blown out of proportion.
The film is unrelentingly emotional; I cried in nearly every scene. Those tears were, miraculously, equal parts mournful and joyful. The First Wave never shortchanges the pain suffered by COVID-19 patients and their families, but it also makes a point to showcase the boundless capacity humans have to care for each other in our most dire moments.
The film deftly weaves in the protests following the murder of George Floyd into its narrative of frontline care. The social outrage never feels shoehorned in because director Matthew Heineman convincingly draws out the connections between COVID-19 inequities and police violence, making a powerful statement about a nation that so little values Black lives. And on a technical level, The First Wave is astonishing, with camera crews embedded inside a hospital as patients sick with COVID-19 surround them. This commitment only serves to further highlight the necessity of the story being told, a story too long unseen. The First Wave is available on Hulu.
5. The Green Knight
The most visually impressive movie I saw all year, The Green Knight is a revisionist fantasy epic, indulging in the grandeurs of the genre while challenging its core beliefs. At its center is Gawain (Dev Patel), who enters into a foolish pact with the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) that puts him on a path toward danger and self-actualization. Director David Lowery leads Gawain on a gorgeous odyssey as tries to define his place in history.
The beauty of the landscape on Gawain’s journey juxtaposes the aspirant leader’s ambitions. While such epics might typically use lush sceneries to emphasize the significance of man’s path toward greatness, in The Green Knight the elegance of the natural world only highlights the small place that Gawain has within it. In a moment of respite, characters discuss why the Green Knight is green. “Green is the color of earth, of living things, of life,” one says. “We deck our halls with it and dye our linens. But should it come creeping up the cobbles, we scrub it out, fast as we can … Whilst we’re off looking for red, in comes green. Red is the color of lust, but green is what lust leaves behind, in heart, in womb.”
Such it is with Gawain’s journey: he will accomplish what he may, but fail or succeed, he will fade away and the earth will remain. Is greatness folly? A stunning final 15-minute segment of the film wrestles with the answer. It’s a fascinating destination, and a glorious journey to get there. The Green Knight is available for digital rental.
4. Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry
Coming-of-age stories can be reductively summarized by their protagonists’ belief that to be young is to be misunderstood. Few films, however, have more compellingly reckoned with this belief than The World’s a Little Blurry. The documentary charts the recording of, and tour for, Billie Eilish’s first album, “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?,” an immaculate piece of music that catapulted Eilish into the A++ list of pop stardom.
The film chronicles Eilish’s struggle for recognition, but also wrestles with where that recognition can and should come from. How emotionally legitimate can the relationship between a celebrity and her fans really be? When your life is dramatically thrown into the public eye, how do you maintain relationships with family and friends? Throughout a daunting journey Eilish remains a fascinating figure, forever honest in the face of unyielding bullshit. The film manages to be at once an act of humanization of a teenager whose life becomes defined by outside perception and an act of mythologization of an artist with seemingly few creative peers.
The World’s a Little Blurry is an amazing portrait of celebrity, fandom, empathy, family, growing up, the creative process, and self-love. And it doesn’t hurt that the music is perfect, too. Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is available on Apple TV+.
3. Bo Burnham: Inside
Inside was written, produced, and directed entirely by Bo Burnham inside his home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The show maintains the structure we’ve come to expect from Burnham, delivering his thoughts on depression and social anxiety in a series of self-effacing musical numbers. It’s significant that, despite the premise of the special being spurred by the pandemic, Burnham does not mention it once. Yes, the virus drove us all indoors, but Burnham’s thesis is that this sheltered life is how we experience the world when the digital realm becomes primary, pandemic or not. “The outside world, the nondigital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital, digital space,” Burnham laments.
The ever-present problem with Burnham’s bemoaning of the internet’s ills is that he is making this point by himself spewing content into the void. He takes on this contradiction with his usual flair for self-awareness: “Is there anyone out there? Or am I all alone? It wouldn’t make a difference,” he knowingly remarks. But self-awareness can only get you so far, and the show does have a sort of old-man-yells-at-cloud energy. This is not a flaw, per se, but the futility of his effort is accentuated in a production so thoroughly pessimistic.
How is it possible, then, that Inside feels so comforting to me? I think it’s because I can identify so precisely with the conditions Burnham is decrying. This is the paradox of his message: the internet flattens everything into nothingness and despair, but on the end of each one of those infinite data points is an individual person having an experience. Inside might disappear into the abyss, but I’ll still have felt something watching it.
When Burnham says it wouldn’t make a difference whether anyone is out there, he’s right: we get nothing out of giving to the internet. Inside shows how the internet operates as a perverse black hole of empathy, where we try to give everything of ourselves over to each other and get nothing back in return. The value of the show is its articulation that we all know we’re doing it. We’re all stuck inside, alone, but we’re all there together. Bo Burnham: Inside is available on Netflix.
2. The French Dispatch
The book “Accidentally Wes Anderson,” published last year, cements the director’s status as the current filmmaker with the most easily identifiable aesthetic. The book captures sceneries from real life that seem to emulate Anderson’s glorious, pastel-laden, fussy style. The implication is that his visual approach is easily replicable, but the director himself does not seem to be insulted—he provides the foreword for the book. Because as much as some may criticize the director for the congruity of his style film to film, it’s nothing but the highest compliment that people have begun to see the real world reflected back through Wes Anderson’s eyes.
The French Dispatch elevates his visual language beyond aesthetic choice, as a means to better understand the world and to see it in a more interesting way. The film tells three stories from a fictional magazine called “The French Dispatch,” a transparent ode to The New Yorker. The vignette format optimizes Anderson’s skills. I’ve enjoyed recent Anderson films like Moonrise Kingdom and Grand Budapest Hotel, but the elaborate world-building can grow a bit tiring by the end. Rather than shortchange the emotional payoff of his characters’ arcs, The French Dispatch’s anthology approach breathes new vibrancy and urgency into each tale.
The film is ultimately not a salute to a high-society magazine, but a tribute to what the best of that magazine’s writing represents: a penchant for finding meaning in life through an exploration of its idiosyncratic details. An imprisoned artist, a failed student revolution, a chef’s role in a minor kidnapping plot: these are fascinating stories, but ones that may be overlooked if you’re not searching for them. Consider the magazine editor’s repeated refrain: “Try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Everything in The French Dispatch, the magazine and film, is deliberate.
When the editor, played by Anderson stalwart Bill Murray, insists to a writer than an emotional coda be left in a story, he contends, “It’s the whole reason for writing it.” But the writer, played by Jeffrey Wright in one of the year’s best performances, doesn’t see it that way. His interest is in the details that led up to that moment, everything peculiar and intriguing about people that could even make a coda like that worth mentioning at all. “I couldn’t disagree more,” the writer replies.
The French Dispatch is the best Wes Anderson movie since The Royal Tenenbaums was released twenty years ago. I can’t wait to see the world through Anderson’s eyes again. The French Dispatch is available for digital rental.
The Worst Person in the World
Something I’ve learned by watching an outrageous number of movies is that it is pretty easy for a movie to make me cry. Far more rare is a movie that sticks with me long after it’s over, a film that seeps so deeply into my consciousness that it feels as if it’s moving alongside me in the world. Few movies I have ever seen have possessed this quality more than The Worst Person in the World, one of the great cinematic joys I’ve ever had.
The Norwegian romance follows Julie (Renate Reinsve) over the course of four years in her mid-to-late twenties as she tries to navigates the complexities of love, career, and purpose. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, and perhaps the best I’ve seen at capturing the directionless feeling of being a twenty-something Millennial. Julie is not the worst person in the world, but her aimlessness leads her to believe that sometimes she might be. The movie presents Julie’s journey without judgment, allowing her to careen through mistakes, pivots, and occasional moments of glory. Her guiding instinct is emotional impulsivity, and she bounces back and forth between reckless abandon and guarded trepidation. “Sometimes I just want to feel things,” she laments in a moment of turmoil. Don’t we all?
Movies reflect the world, but they also take us out of it, and this possibility of self-withdrawal was especially enticing in 2021. I felt the opposite with The Worst Person in the World, a film so full of understanding about the struggle to navigate life that I felt thrust into life anew. It continues to stay with me, shaping my sense of the world as I navigate my own path forward, grasping at the beauty of the fact that through mistake or fortune, every step we take makes us who we are. The Worst Person in the World will be in theaters Feb. 4, 2022.