Top 10 Films of 2021

 

A decidedly stronger year compared to last. In contrast to recently ranked years, films from East and Southeast Asia noticeably ranked in high abundance which up til now, hadn't proved to be the case since I initially began ranking new release watches in 2017. Funnily enough, the best film I saw to be considered in this relative geographic grouping is a co-directing effort between an American and a Swede. A case for globalization, or problematic bias for ethnic sensibility? I won't answer cause who has the fucking time. Onto the films.

10) BENEDETTA

(Dir. Paul VERHOEVEN)

A stealthily defined sincerity bizarrely congeals the hallmarks of Verhoeven as seen in this likely penultimate culmination of his long developed mythos. Through the exploitation, bodily afflictions, boobs, and butts of his work, it summits in a strong belief in a redemptive throughline of morality to shine light on a bleak and cynical society not merely by purity and good faith alone, because after all, the system that constricts it isn't either. Let fire fight fire. Pitting sinners against sinners.

*Streaming on Hulu. Available to purchase/rent on VOD by IFC Films

9) TEENAGE EMOTIONS

(Dir. Frederic DA)

The maturing young faces of a challenged nation, preserved in a digital heirloom to be looked back upon by future viewers.  The faces laugh, the faces cry, the faces sing, rap, frustrate, ponder, confuse, deceive, try and smile. Soon enough these faces will define a culture, a system, a community, a state, and an identity. How shall these faces dictate?

*Currently awaiting distribution

8) TITANE

(Dir. Julia DUCOURNAU)

To possibly address a less discussed notion of a film with an already exhausted discourse, the moments before the abrupt shift in dramaturgy expresses itself to me as a stealthily sagacious move by Ducournau, seemingly shot and assembled for a subversion of two varying layers that cheekily function as one. Beneath the surface level rug pulling lies a low frequency hum of libelous rebellion and self humor. As if conscious of an incoming or already mounted reputation for shocking kitsch after the inflated infamy of her previous endeavor, the excess imagery of the film's introduction comes off as being cynically coded to subliminally repeal such a pigeonholing. Overtly languishing in erotica and carnage, Ducournau ignites the canvas with every possible expectation placed on her, letting it swiftly burn up as she lays back and laughs while the metaphorical middle finger raises ever so slightly. Though her post-Cronenberg & Zulawski-ian pastiche has done nothing but satiate me so far, and I very much anticipate the evolution of these thematics, the slight vibrations of Claire Denis established here have me seated for the possibility of work that stretches beyond the strata of genre.

*Streaming on Hulu. Available to purchase/rent on Blu-ray, DVD, & VOD by NEON

7) DEAR COMRADES!

(Dir. Andrei KONCHALOVSKY)

The trials and tribulations of devout patriotism against inconceivable betrayal. The final composition's expositional artifice, which uncannily transitions realism to melodrama against a digital imposition, not unlike rear projection, acutely congeals its thematic renderings to full completion, resulting in the year's cleanest finish.

*Streaming on Hulu. Available to purchase/rent on VOD by NEON

6) WOOD AND WATER 

(Dir. Jonas BAK)

Cross-cultural navigation as an act of behavioral theater. Bak adopts lessons of the Eastern aesthetic to evaluate the voyage, the traversing of one land to another, from room to room, sidewalk to sidewalk. Identifying the oscillating flow in velocity & inertia. How motives and actions tense and ease the perpetuation from one frame to the next. Positive space vs. negative.

*Now playing in cinemas in limited release by KimStim

 

5) THE DISCIPLE 

(Dir. Chaitanya TAMHANE)

Tamhane memorializes the odyssey of the starving and lonely artist with a lucid sense of linearity to be pondered upon with forward and backwards perceptive variation, displaying a unique brand of cinematic intelligence in how its direction undergoes drastic metamorphosis under seemingly mundane structural beats. 

*Streaming on Netflix

4) RIDE OR DIE

(Dir. Ryuichi HIROKI)

Provides a rare Pialat-ian sense of naturalism which appears to actively protest the conditioned veneer of the "cinematic" performance and image. Bodies, in their most severely vulnerable form, bruised, scarred, & harsh, shot with utmost privacy, like subjects in a private booth. When suppression of the central romance can no longer be restrained, its occasional bursts rupture with vehement euphoria. Flesh collides in solidarity and full smiles exchange breaths of the other and are inhaled in close contact. The physical arc of lovers. 

*Streaming on Netflix

3) ZEROS AND ONES

(Dir. Abel FERRARA)

A coherent life of tangibility and reasoning no more. From our dearest loved ones to the constructs and monuments we uphold as most sacred, Ferrara succumbs them all to the crushing apathy of isolating interconnectivity and the exceeding overflow of digital information. Particles to pixels. Trees, skylines, buildings, and people become nothing more than renderings of binary mimesis. Ghosts in the machine screaming for what was before.

*Available to purchase/rent on Blu-ray, DVD, & VOD by Lionsgate

2) FRANCE

(Dir. Bruno DUMONT)

An advanced meta-critique of media construction and the duplicity of images.

An impenetrable object of ultimate modernist design. 

A two-player voyeuristic game. 

*Available to purchase/rent on Blu-ray, DVD, & VOD by Kino Lorber

1) THE WORKS AND DAYS

(OF TAYOKO SHIOJIRI IN THE SHIOTANI BASIN)

(Dir. C.W. WINTER & Anders EDSTRÖM)

Linearity's temporal and spatial variations as an ever-evolving opus. Its maximal scope of duration preserves the andromeda of each day's packed stillness while strangely keeping a rather brisk pace for most of its individual shot lengths, seemingly always keen on shifting dramaturgical variations over one or two decided rhythms. Winter & Edstrom's insistence on surfaces, textures, and terrains, what'd otherwise be inserts in more conventional film grammar, as key expository beats instead map the dense geography of the Basin as an ever-changing and expanding continuous space that only continues to alter with each unique placement of the camera within it. The views become familiar, but never settle into place, and the sounds, both natural and manufactured, cohere into a dimensional space of their own beyond the realm of one's own ingrained auditory capacity. A film that constantly feels in flux, augmenting mere documentation of the mundane into an endless chasm that appears more daunting than its real life components. But most importantly, its neutral stance on life and death, not as opposites in a cycle, but as unyielding states that encase those within them as only being what they are, until they aren't anymore.

*Streaming on MUBI. Available to purchase/rent on VOD by Grasshopper Film