The Best Films of 2021: Here are John Beifuss' picks, from 'Red Rocket' to 'Cryptozoo' (2025)

This was supposed to be the year when things (whatever "things" are)returned to normal (whatever "normal" means).

Of course, that didn't happen. Even the easy availability of free vaccinations didn't persuade a significant segment of the population to embrace science and community over conspiracy and hostility.

What's that have to do with me making my choices for the Best Movies of the Year, as I have done very year since (gulp) 1996?

Simply that once again, as in 2020, Ihave discardedmy old selection process. (Probably for good.)

I used to consider only movies that had screened publicly in Memphis, on the theory that thesewere films that almost every cinephile, film buff and movie fanin town had an opportunity to see.

But now there are reasons beyond convenience to stay home. I frequently go to the movies (the screenings are almost never crowded, and thus feel "safe"), but who am I to tell you you should?

As a result of this ongoing pandemic reality, I've opened the doors to, well, everything. Though, of course, I've seen only a very tiny fraction of everything.

Most of the movies below did play at a Memphis movie theater or during the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2021. But a few didn't. And most of those that did screen here probably found their largest audiences at home, via Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or some other streaming service.

Opening the doors to everything is intimidating and humbling. I'm very much aware that I likely will encounter in the months to come many movies from 2021 that should be mentioned here.

An unconventional year calls for an unconventional approach. A Top 10list can be found below, but what you mostly will find here are 13 categories containing most of my choices for the best new-release movies I saw in 2021.

I picked "13" because this feels like an unlucky year. But it's actually been a good one for movies, if not for the theatrical movie business, and the evidence can be found in these titles.

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Adults only

Nobody is making movies that feel more alive than those of Sean Baker. "Red Rocket," the writer-director's follow-up to"Tangerine" and "The Florida Project," introduces former MTV "Veejay" Simon Baker as Mikey Saber, an energetic but dishonest blowhard hustler on the skids who decides a small-town Texas teenager nicknamed "Strawberry" (Suzanna Son) willbe his ticket back to the porn-industry big time; the alternately ludicrous and lubricious action occurs against the backdrop of the 2016 presidential election, with Mikey functioning as a prophecy of the resilience of the winning candidate's delusional toxic-male narcissism. Working on location with amostly amateur ensemble, Baker demonstrates yet again that hiseye and instincts are unerring.

"Red Rocket" deserves its R rating, but "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn" — Romania's Oscar entry for Best International Feature—pushes into X territory: It openswith a sexually explicit videotape that lands a teacher (Katia Pascariu) in hot water when herconsenting-adult bedroom acrobatics are sharedonline. With its contentious debates about privacy, its streetscenes ofpedestrians in protective masks, and its chaoticschoolconferences filled with preeningmothers and leering fathers, Radu Jude's social/political comedy tapslike an intubator into a culture gasping for breath.

Hamaguchi's wheels

In February, the Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi delivered"Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy," an original anthology film with three segments; he followed that five months later with"Drive MyCar,"athree-hour Chekhov-infused adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami. InHamaguchi's films, men and women turn to art to redirect the unsatisfying narratives of their lives; the filmmaker manifests this ideawithimages that are as uncluttered and direct as his stories are rich and his characters complex.

Anderson X 2

Two of the most impressive streaks in cinema continued as Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson pulled fromtheir youthful enthusiasms andexperiences to craft films that function like prisms, refractingwhat feels likecandid revelationintocolorful, episodic narrative.

Set in the 1970s San Fernando Valley, P. T. Anderson's"Licorice Pizza" makes an instant movie star of pop-rock singer Alana Haim, while also resurrecting water beds, Wings and hairdresser-turned-Barbra Streisand boyfriend Jon Peters (Bradley Cooper). The vibe suggests "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood," but goofy.

Festooned to the edge of mania with visual marginalia and verbal rococo, "The French Dispatch," meanwhile,is Wes Anderson's indulgent and meticuloushomage to The New Yorker magazine, mid-century; the lapidary, peripatetic creativity —which includes animation, multiple frame ratios, and many digital effects—illuminates rather than obscures ahopeful but not naïvemessage about the agonizingjoy of making art. Confesses a JamesBaldwin-like writer(Jeffrey Wright)in the film's heartbreaking yetenergizing final episode: "I chose this life. It is the solitary feast that has been very much like a comrade — my great comfort and fortification.”

Music

Fashioned by drummer-turned-director Questlove and editor Joshua L. Pearsoninto 117 ecstatic minutes from some 40 hours of footage, “Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised…)” teleports the viewer onstage with Sly Stone, Nina Simone, Mahalia Jackson and the other divinities who performed during the all-but-forgotten 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival; 50 years later, the eventseems less a “Black Woodstock” (as it once was promoted) than a Utopian vision of Black art and community that a larger white establishment was too hostile or disinterestedto validate.

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The “Utopian” judgment rarely was applied to the often dark, druggy and disturbing music of “The Velvet Underground,” but Todd Haynes’ documentary, sculptedlargely from vintage materials, persuasively presents the Warhol-abetted, New York-incubated band as avatars of an enviable rock-and-roll authenticity.

Meanwhile, Penny Lane’s revelatory “Listening to Kenny G” is less biodoc than inquisition into the value — as artist, as commodity, as metaphor — of the mega-successful but much-reviled smooth jazz saxophonist of its title. (Note: Peter Jackson’s epic “The Beatles: Get Back” would be included here, but I decided to follow the lead of the motion picture Academy, which excludes multi-part productions.)

Musicals

Updated bywriter Tony Kushnerfor a modern eraattuned to ideas of gentrification and racial identity butwith its late 1950s setting and nonpareil Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim music intact, director Steven Spielberg'sremake of 1961's"West Side Story"demonstrates that bodies in motion — especially when movingin partnership with a sympathetic and perceptive camera—remain the most thrilling movie special effect.

A much less conventional opus(the songs are by the clever pop-rock duo Sparks), Leos Carax's catchy-yet-alienating sort-of-musical,"Annette," asks whether a standup-comic"Ape of God" (Adam Driver) with a death on his conscienceand a living puppetin his nursery deserves redemption.

O, horror, horror, horror

Here's malice in the palace, centuries apart.

In what functions as director Pablo Larrain's companion to his "Jackie" (2016), which cast Natalie Portman as the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, "Spencer" presentsKristen Stewart as a nerve-rackedDiana, Princess of Wales, who enduresa torturous Christmas weekend with herscornful royal in-laws while in a state of glam delirium. Something wicked this way comes? No, it's just the queen, trailed by her corgis.

The wickedness is more deadly and the witches more literal in "The Tragedy of Macbeth," a sinister Shakespeare adaptation from Joel Coen (directing for the first time without his brother, Ethan) that crownsDenzel Washington as the murderous title king andFrances McDormand as his damned-spot-stained lady. Presented in black-and-white and in the squarish aspect ratio of old movies, the film— indebted to the currently fashionable "folk horror" subgenre — arguably does little that Orson Welles didn't do in 1948 under the parsimonious oversightof Republic Pictures; but why arguewith a new opportunity to experience the unbeatable combination of cinematic expressionism and Shakespearean expression?

Identity crisis

False fronts and concealed identities poison lives and thus communities like a virus in three harrowing dramas pulled from America’s past.

In Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” Benedict Cumberbatch is a 1925 Montana cowboy whose classics degree from Yale is only the most respectable of the extraordinary aspects he buries beneath a foul odor and a fouler temper.

In Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” centered on Harlem a century ago, a Black woman (Ruth Negga) "passing" aswhite disrupts the conventional domestic tranquility of a childhood friend (Tessa Thompson); the black-and-white photography exposes the absurdity of racial codification by reproducing every actor’s face in scales of gray.

Finally, ShakaKing’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” vividly reimagines encounters from history ("Power" and "Passing"are based on novels)by revisiting the betrayal of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya, who won a Supporting Actor Oscar for his work here) by an FBI infiltrator (Lakeith Stanfield).

Knights to remember

Writer-directorDavid Lowery, whose filmographyincludes2017’s “A Ghost Story,” weaves anotherhaunting and profound enchantment by tugging at the tapestry of Arthurian traditionin "The Green Knight";Dev Patel is Sir Gawain, whose quest — highlighted byuncanny images that pierce the armor of space and time — is essentially the literal date with death we all must make.

Based in history rather than poetry, Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel"casts Matt Damon (who wrote the script, with Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener) and Adam Driver as a real-life medieval French knight and squire, respectively, whose soured friendship ends in a formal fight to the finish. Beautifully and brutally choreographed, the climactic combat is motivated more by the knight's ego than by his concern for the welfare and honor of his wife (Jodie Comer), whose rape by the squire is the cruel crux of a"Rashomon"-like multiple-perspective story structure.

Shock and awe

With their most ambitious films to date, twovery different filmmakers praise the loud but otherwise employ largelydivergent but not entirely incompatible methods to inspire dreadand wonder.

Shot in Chile by the Cannes-conquering Thai writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethak, "Memoria"unfolds with a somnambulist's pace and a dreamer's logic. Tilda Swinton stars as a woman repeatedly startled by a sudden noise that no one else can hear; the climactic revelationis both awe-inspiring and deflating, retroactively and reductively recasting the woman's experienceas more a puzzle than a mystery.

With a budget of $165 million that could pay for dozensof the Thai filmmaker's projects,"Dune: Part One" is surprisinglypatient and deliberate for a science-fiction would-be blockbuster.Adapted by director Denis Villeneuve from Frank Herbert's eco-conscious 1965 best-seller, the movieis mesmerizing for much of its three-hour length, especially during its first half, when it prioritizesstatecraft and intrigue and augurs and artful arrangements of strangely costumed individuals and strikingly designed alien vessels; when the emphasis shiftsto fights and chases, it loses a great deal of its grip.

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Tick tick tick

The mystery and traumaof timeand the aging process inspired thesevery different works, eachof which screened during the Indie Memphis Film Festival (as did several other films on this list).

The first of these, written and directed by France's Céline Sciamma,is "Petite Maman," whichpresentstwins Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz as 8-year-old girls whose friendship springs from a mysterythat is part fairy tale, part "Twilight Zone."

If Sciamma charms, Gasper Noéshocks(as always).Presented entirely in disorienting split-screen, "Vortex" casts Françoise Lebru and horror auteur Dario Argento as an elderly couple whose brains become as disordered as their book-and-memorabilia-crammedParis apartment after the wife is stricken withdementia.

(Honorable mention goes to "Old," which is fearsomely compellinguntil a final unnecessary M. Night Shyamalan "twist" transforms a terrifying metaphor about the pitilessness of old ageinto what seems to be apitch for a cable sci-fi series.)

The past in the present

The true-life trauma of recent historic violencemotivatesthese disparate horror stories.

Framingitsimaginative kills like transgressive artworks within mirrors and windows and gallery spaces,Nia DaCosta's reboot/sequel "Candyman" retains the Chicago setting of its influential 1992 predecessor but relocates the shocks to a bougie-artsy 2021 milieu where talent and education ultimately provide no escape or defense from the racist past orpresent; in this context, "Say his name" is more curse than affirmation.

"The Card Counter," meanwhile, is another of writer-director Paul Schrader's portraits of fracturing loner diarists (see also: "Taxi Driver" and "First Reformed") trundling toward penitential violence; Oscar Isaac is the title professional gambler, scarred by his experiences as a guard at Abu Ghraib.

Cryptidsand criminals

Colorful creatures sprung from their cells (in the plots of these movies) andfrom some type of mythology(in the origins of those plots) go on rampages of destruction and sometimesaffection in this pair of tripped-out fantasy adventures.

Written and directed by Dash Shaw with animation directed by Jane Samborski, "Cryptozoo" employs watercolor, pencil and other techniques to painstakingly craft a not-safe-for-kids cartoonabout a sort of "Jurassic Park" for"cryptids" from legend and folklore (mermaids, manticores, more).

Derived from DC Comics, James Gunn's smart-aleck supervillain team adventure "The Suicide Squad" — not to be confused with 2016's one-word-shorter and many-times-awful "Suicide Squad"—is a labor of twisted love bursting withgenuinely funny sick jokes and sicker characters (Polka-Dot Man shoots out lethal polka dots). As one creatively staged set piece follows another,Gunn's ringmaster'sability to keep themultiple personalities and plot threads distinct and the action coherent deserves a gold star the size of Starro the Conqueror (the giant alien starfish that squashes several cast members during the outrageous finale).

Movie addicts

Honor Swinton Byrne returns as an autobiographically inspired budding filmmaker in "The Souvenir Part Two," writer-director Joanna Hogg's follow-up to 2019's "The Souvenir." The earlier film dramatizedHogg's tragic romantic relationship with a heroin addict; this time, in a decision that naysayers may findmore ouroboros than onion (more self-cannibalizing than multi-layered), Hogg depicts Julie's attempt to make a movie about her experiences — i.e.,"The Souvenir."

If filmmaking for Julie functions as a form of demon-purging therapy, it's an activity that invites demons —or something dangerous and unknowable —inIván Zulueta's"Arrebato," a 1979 masterwork of Bava-esque colors, Bergmanesque dislocation and Cronenbergian raptures from Spain that wasunseen in the U.S. until its restoration this year. Like "The Souvenir," "Arrebato"containsa sophisticatedjunkie, in this case a maker of junky horror movies; masterfully played by Eusebio Poncela, he drives past elaborate Madrid movie marquees advertising "Phantasm" and "Superman" as he chases new ways of seeing — and being.

The Top Ten(actually 11, in order of preference, more or less): 1. "Red Rocket." 2. "Drive My Car" + "Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy."3. "The French Dispatch." 4. "Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn." 5. "Spencer." 6. "Arrebato." 7. "The Power of the Dog." 8. "The Green Knight." 9. "Summer of Soul." 10. "Cryptozoo."

The Second Ten (in alphabetical order): 1. "Annette." 2. "Candyman." 3. "The Card Counter." 4. "Dune: Part One." 5."The Last Duel." 6."Licorice Pizza."7. "The Suicide Squad." 8. "Velvet Underground." 9. "Vortex." 10. "West Side Story."

Also: "Benedetta"; "Gaia"; "Godzilla vs. Kong"; "I Was a Simple Man"; "Judas and the Black Messiah"; "King Richard"; "Lamb"; "Last Night in Soho";"Listening to Kenny G"; "The Lost Daughter"; "Mandibles"; "Memoria"; "Nightmare Alley"; "Old";"Passing"; "Petite Maman"; "Pig"; "Procession"; "7 Prisoners"; "The Souvenir Part II"; "The Sparks Brothers"; "Spider-Man: No Way Home"; "Strawberry Mansion"; "Titane"; "The Tragedy of Macbeth"; "Undine"; "Wrath of Man"; and "Zola," to name a few.