ENTRIES IN PART 2:


José Cabrera Betancort

Programmer
  1. Films released for the first time in 2021:

A comuñón da miña prima Andrea (The Communion of My Cousin Andrea, Brandán Cerviño, 2021)
A Man and a Camera (Guido Hendrikx, 2021)
Criatura (Creature, María Silvia Esteve, 2021)
Destello bravío (Mighty Flash, Ainhoa Rodríguez, 2021)
Easter Eggs (Nicolas Keppens, 2020)
Esquirlas (Splinters, Natalia Garayalde, 2020)
Farrucas (Ian de la Rosa, 2021)
Jaddeh khaki (Hit the Road, Panah Panahi, 2021)
L’enfant salamandre (The Salamander Child, Théo Degen, 2021)
Palma (Alexe Poukine, 2021)
Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance, 2021)
Techno, Mama (Saulius Baradinskas, 2021)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider, Ramon & Silvan Zürcher, 2021)
Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021)
Verdens verste menneske (The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021)
This Rain Will Never Stop (Alina Gorlova, 2020)
Razzhimaya kulaki (Unclenching the Fists, Kira Kovalenko, 2021)
VO (Nicolas Gourault, 2021)
Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt? (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Alexandre Koberidze, 2021)

  1. Older films encountered for the first time in 2021:

Bottled Songs 3: My Crush Was a Superstar (Chloé Galibert-Laîné, 2017)
L’assassinat du duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duke de Guise, André Calmettes & Charles Le Bargy, 1908)
Iztochni piesi (Eastern Plays, Kamen Kalev, 2009), seen in Bucharest International Film Festival

  1. Mention any online or hybrid festivals you attended:

Curtas Vila do Conde 29th edition took place from July 16th through 25th, in summertime once again, and with many sold out screenings, proving that it is possible to return to theatres safely. One of the highlights was Diogo Costa Amarante’s exhibition, “Be Your Selfie”.

Thomas Caldwel

Melbourne-based writer, broadcaster, film critic, public speaker & film programmer

As I do most years, I’ve limited myself to films that received a full theatrical or online release in Australia in 2021, so festival and event screenings (for films more than likely to be released in 2022) are not included.

Top ten films:

      1. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)
      2. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
      3. The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020)
      4. Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2019)
      5. Nitram (Justin Kurzel, 2021)
      6. Verdens verste menneske (The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021)
      7. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)
      8. Procession (Robert Greene, 2021)
      9. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)
      10. Welcome to Chechnya (David France, 2020)

Honourable mentions (listed alphabetically):

Colectiv (Collective, Alexander Nanau, 2019)
Druk (Another Round, Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)
Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
High Ground (Stephen Johnson, 2020)
Kunstneren og tyven (The Painter and the Thief, Benjamin Ree, 2020)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
One Night in Miami (Regina King, 2020)
Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021)
Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell, 2020)
Some Kind of Heaven (Lance Oppenheim, 2020)
Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts, 2021)
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021)
The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020)
The Sparks Brothers (Edgar Wright, 2021)
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2020)

Michelle Carey

Programmer, International Film Festival Rotterdam; Selection Committee, Directors’ Fortnight; Program Advisor: New York Film Festival; Festivals Editor Senses of Cinema

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021)
Il buco (The Hole, Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021)
Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021)
Drive My Car (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan, 2021)
Futura (Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi & Alice Rohrwacher, 2021)
Give Me Pity! (Amanda Kramer, 2021)
Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo (In Front of Your Face, Hong Sang-soo, 2021)
Jadde Khaki (Hit the Road, Panah Panahi, 2021)
Juste un movement (Vincent Meessen, 2021)
Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider, Ramon & Silvan Zürcher, 2021)
Neptune Frost (Anisia Uzeyman & Saul Williams, 2021)
The Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia, 2021)
The Plains (David Easteal, 2021)
El Planeta (Amalia Ulman, 2021)
Re Granchio (The Tale of King Crab, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis, 2021)
Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, 2021)
The Souvenir Part 2 (Joanna Hogg, 2021)

Nicolás Carrasco

Film critic & programmer, Peru

Films released in 2019, 2020, and 2021 seen for the first time in 2021 (in no particular order):

Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)
Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
À l’abordage! (All Hands on Deck, Guillaume Brac, 2020)
Midnight Mass (Mike Flanagan, 2021)
Nos défaites (Our Defeats, Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2019)
Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan, 2021)
Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020)
Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)
Malignant (James Wan, 2021)
Les choses qu’on dit, les choses qu’on fait (Love Affair(s), Emmanuel Mouret, 2020)
Toda la luz que podemos ver (All the Light We Can See, Pablo Escoto, 2020)
Fauna (Nicolás Pereda, 2020)
Esquirlas (Splinters, Natalia Garayalde, 2020)
Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, 2019)
Visión nocturna (Night Shot, Carolina Moscoso, 2019)
#005 (Yonay Boix, 2021)
Responsabilidad empresarial (Corporate Accountability, Jonathan Perel, 2020)
Maat Means Land (Fox Maxy, 2020)
San Diego (Fox Maxy, 2021)
Los huesos (The Bones, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña, 2021)
Isabella (Matías Piñeiro, 2020)
Heliconia (Paula Rodríguez Polanco, 2020)
Catavento (Wind Vane, João Rosas, 2020)
Mi última aventura (My Last Adventure, Ezequiel Salinas & Ramiro Sonzini, 2021)
Trampa de luz (Light Trap, Pablo Marín, 2021)
The Whole Shebang (Ken Jacobs, 2020)
Eternal Beach (Nisi Jacobs, 2021)
Wasteland No.3: Moons, Sons (Jodie Mack, 2021)
Colección privada (Private Collection, Elena Duque, 2020)
A Dança do Cipreste (The Cypress Dance, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, 2020)
The Suicide Squad (James Gunn, 2021)
Nullo (Jan Soldat, 2021)
El perro que no calla (The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, Ana Katz, 2021)
Dorogie tovarishchi! (Dear Comrades!, Andrei Konchalovsky, 2020)
Pejzaži otpora (Landscapes of Resistance, Marta Popivoda, 2021)
Liborio (Nino Martínez Sosa, 2021)
Date una vuelta en el aire (Cristián Sánchez, 2020)
Spogulī (In the Mirror, Laila Pakalniņa, 2020)
The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)
Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, 2020)

Older films encountered for the first time in 2021 (in no particular order):

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (John Hancock, 1971)
Les films rêvés (Dreaming Film, Eric Pauwels, 2010)
Extase (Ecstasy, Gustav Machatý, 1933)
The Mephisto Waltz (Paul Wendkos, 1971)
Submit to Me (Richard Kern, 1986)
India Song (Marguerite Duras, 1975)
Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (Gordon Douglas, 1950)
The Silent Village (Humphrey Jennings, 1943)
Maciste all’inferno (Maciste in Hell, Guido Brignone, 1925)
The Hart of London (Jack Chambers, 1970)
Io la conoscevo bene (I Knew Her Well, Antonio Pietrangelli, 1965)
Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947)
Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949)
Riot in Cell Block 11 (Don Siegel, 1954)
Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978)
Manji (Swastika, Yasuzō Masumura, 1964)
Kawaita hana (Pale Flower, Masahiro Shinoda, 1964)
¿Cómo, por qué y para qué se asesina un general? (Santiago Álvarez, 1971)
Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933)
Chameleon Street (Wendell B. Harris, 1989)
Lettre d’un cinéaste à sa fille (Letter from a Filmmaker to His Daughter, Eric Pauwels, 2000)
Voyage autour de ma chambre (Journey around my room, Olivier Smolders, 2008)
Lourdes (Jessica Hausner, 2009)
Shatranj-e baad (Chess of the Wind, Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)
Asalto (Carlos Álvarez, 1968)
Colombia 70 (Carlos Álvarez, 1970)
Judex (Georges Franju, 1963)
Long hu dou (The Chinese Boxer, Jimmy Wang Yu, 1970)
Bao chou (Vengeance, Chang Cheh, 1970)
Tien ya ming yue dao (The Magic Blade, Chu Yuan, 1976)
Can que (Crippled Avengers, Chang Cheh, 1978)
It Happened Here (Kevin Brownlow & Andrew Mollo, 1964)
Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)
Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947)
Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948)
Hollow Triumph (Steve Sekely, 1948)
Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl, 1945)
Panelstory aneb Jak se rodí sídliště (Prefab Story, Věra Chytilová, 1979)
Winter Adé (After Winter Comes Spring, Helke Misselwitz, 1988)
Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
Schalcken the Painter (Leslie Megahey, 1979)

My favorite film festivals of the year were all from Chile: Frontera Sur, Aricadoc and Valdivia. All three understand the importance of not just showing recent films, but to make them dialogue with film history.

Speaking of film history, Bazofi (Argentina), programmed by Fernando Martín Peña, is still the best film festival in the world. It had just one online edition early this year.

I also “attended” the online screenings at MALBA and Hasta Trilce, also programmed by Fernando Martín Peña, The Cinemadness Movie, programmed by Jim Branscome, and of Cine Club La Quimera from Córdoba, Argentina.

Chess of the Wind

Michael J. Casey

Critic for Boulder Weekly, After Image and michaeljcinema.com

Top Ten Movies of 2021:

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
Verdens verste menneske (The Worst Person in the World, Joachim Trier, 2021)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021)
The Green Knight (David Lowry, 2021)
Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)
Ghahreman (A Hero, Asghar Farhadi, 2021)
Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021)

I saw all but two of the above in a movie theater—six of them at a film festival—filled with strangers all breathing the same air, sharing the same experience, our faces upturned to those magnificent images ten times bigger than any one of us in the room. Still, that sentiment seems like an outlier considering how I saw the vast majority of movies in 2021. While I leaped at any chance to see a movie in the theater with an audience, I saw most of them by myself on a well-worn gray pullout couch in front of a typical-looking Westinghouse flat-screen TV. That’s where I watch the vast majority of the movies I see each week, be it for work or pleasure, and that’s where 2021 expanded my cinematic horizons thanks to the continuing work from Blu-ray and DVD manufacturers. Those ten titles at the top encapsulate some of the great work that made it to screens these past 12 months. But without The Criterion Collections’ release of The Signifyin’ Works of Marlon Riggs, Mandabi (The Money Order, Ousmane Sambène, 1968), and Afterlife (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 1998); Arrow Video’s reconstruction of Major Dundee (Sam Peckinpah, 1965); and some time spent catching up Kino Lorber’s Pioneers of African-American Cinema, 2021 would have felt incomplete.

Other discoveries I’m thankful for:

The short films of Vittorio De Seta
An Angel at My Table (Jane Campion, 1990)
Around the World with Orson Welles (Orson Welles, 1955)
Voskhozhdeniye (The Ascent, Larisa Shepitko, 1977)
California Split (Robert Altman, 1974)
The Lusty Men (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
Only Angels Have Wings (Howard Hawks, 1939)
Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)
Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
Working Girls (Lizzie Borden, 1986)

A Hero

Kevin Cassidy

Cinephile

Favourite new films seen, all by streaming?

1) La civil (Teodora Mihai, 2021)
2) The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (Bill Morrison, 2021)
3) La colline où rugissent les lionnes (The Hill Where Lionesses Roar, Luàna Bajrami, 2021)
4) Druk (Another Round, Thomas Vinterberg, 2020)
5) Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider, Ramon & Silvan Zürcher, 2021)
6) Plan B (Natalie Morales, 2021)
7) Land (Robin Wright, 2021)
8) Little Fish (Chad Hartigan, 2020)
9) The Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2020)
10) CODA (Sian Heder, 2021)

Best old films seen for the first time:

1) Les oliviers de la justice (The Olive Trees of Justice, James Blue, 1962). Seen via Cinema Ritrovato, a genuine masterpiece
2) Les misérables (Henri Fescourt, 1925)
3) Belphégor (Henri Desfontaines, 1927)
4) El esqueleto de la señora Morales (Mrs Morales’ Skeleton, Rogelio González, 1960)
5) Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2015)
6) Morænen (The House of Shadows, A.W. Sandberg, 1924)
7) Shatranj-e baad (Chess of the Wind, Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)
8) Muži bez křídel (Men without Wings, František Čáp, 1946)
9) Als twee druppels water (Like Two Drops Of Water, Fons Rademakers. 1963)

The Worst:

Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

Guilherme Cavalcanti

Culture Injection. Federal District, Brazil

2016-2021 (in order of preference):

      1. Can’t Get You Out of My Head (Adam Curtis, 2021) 
      2. Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021)
      3. A Última Floresta (The Last Forest, Luiz Bolognesi, 2021)
      4. Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
      5. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
      6. The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
      7. Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)
      8. Old (M. Night Shyamalan, 2021)
      9. Tenki no ko (Weathering with You, Makoto Shinkai, 2019) 
      10. Siberia (Abel Ferrara, 2020) 
      11. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020) 
      12. Synchronic (Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson, 2019)
      13. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021) 
      14. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021) 
      15. The Man in the Woods (Noah Buschel, 2020)
      16. Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019) 
      17. Cabeça de Nêgo (Déo Cardoso, 2020) 
      18. Roubaix, une lumière (Oh Mercy, Arnaud Desplechin, 2019) 
      19. Kimi to, nani ni noretara (Ride Your Wave, Masaaki Yuasa, 2019) 
      20. The Year of the Everlasting Storm (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jafar Panahi, Laura Poitras, David Lowery, Dominga Sotomayor, Anthony Chen & Malik Vitthal, 2021)
      21. Abaixo a Gravidade (Edgard Navarro, 2017)
      22. Sisters with Transistors (Lisa Rovner, 2020)
      23. David Lynch: The Art Life (Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Jon Nguyen & Rick Barnes, 2016)
      24. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Turner Ross & Bill Ross IV, 2020)
      25. The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell, 2020)
      26. Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran, Hong Sang-soo, 2020)
      27. The Matrix Resurrections (Lana Wachowski, 2021)
      28. Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021)
      29. No Sudden Move (Steven Soderbergh, 2021)
      30. Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
      31. Malignant (James Wan, 2021)
      32. Close Encounters with Vilmos Zsigmond (Pierre Filmon, 2016)
      33. Ar Condicionado (Air Conditioner, Fradique, 2020)
      34. Ostinato (Paula Gaitán, 2021)
      35. Pajeú (Pedro Diógenes, 2020)
      36. La voz humana (The Human Voice, Pedro Almodóvar, 2020)
      37. Early Man (Nick Park, 2018)
      38. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson, 2021)
      39. Gangbyeon hotel (Hotel by the River, Hong Sang-soo, 2018)
      40. Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021) 
      41. The Gentlemen (Guy Ritchie, 2019)
      42. Entre Nós Talvez Estejam Multidões (Pedro Maia de Brito & Aiano Bemfica, 2020)

1923-2015 (in order of preference)

Tier 1:

Les trois couronnes du matelot (Three Crowns of the Sailor, Raúl Ruiz, 1983)
The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Mononoke (Kenji Nakamura, Sumio Watanabe, Mana Uchiyama, Yoshihisa Matsumoto, Kohei Hatano, Hidehito Ueda, Yukihiko Nakao & Kōji Yamazaki, 2007)
Serial Experiments Lain (Yuichi Tanaka, Masahiro Sekiguchi, Shigeru Ueda & Ryutaro Nakamura, 1998)
Les destins de Manoel (Manoel’s Destinies, Raúl Ruiz, 1984)
Kurutta Ichipeiji (A Page of Madness, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1926)
White Hunter, Black Heart (Clint Eastwood, 1990)
La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, Federico Fellini, 1990)
Kaiba (Masaaki Yuasa, 2008
Trafic (Traffic, Jacques Tati, 1971)
El sur (Víctor Erice, 1983)
Hak se wui ji wo wai gwai (Election 2, Johnnie To, 2006)
Tian mi mi (Comrades: Almost a Love Story, Peter Chan, 1996)
Small Soldiers (Joe Dante, 1998)
Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944)

Tier 2:

The Case of Hana & Alice (Shunji Iwai, 2015)
Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Picnic on the Grass, Jean Renoir, 1959)
Angel (Ernst Lubitsch, 1937)
The Golden Boat (Raúl Ruiz, 1990)
Meshi (Repast, Mikio Naruse, 1951)
Yella (Christian Petzold, 2007)
The Secret of Kells (Tomm Moore, 2009)
Light Sleeper (Paul Schrader, 1992)
To Catch a Thief (Alfred Hitchcock, 1955)
Pola X (Leos Carax, 1999)
Safety Last! (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1923)
A Perfect World (Clint Eastwood, 1993)
I Hired a Contract Killer (Aki Kaurismäki, 1990)
Le doulos (The Finger Man, Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962)
Death Parade (Yuzuru Tachikawa, 2015)
The Abyss (James Cameron, 1989)
Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993)
The Ambulance (Larry Cohen, 1990)
Shaolin sanshiliu fang (The 36th Chamber of Shaolin Liu Chia-liang, 1978)
Mùi đu đủ xanh (The Scent of Green Papaya, Trần Anh Hùng, 1993)
Aladdin (Ron Clements & John Musker, 1992)
Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert, Luis Buñuel, 1965)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Emeric Pressburger & Michael Powell, 1943)
Hak se wui (Election, Johnnie To, 2005)
Kidō Senshi Gandamu 0080 Poketto no Naka no Sensō (Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, Fumihiko Takayama, 1989)
The Duke of Burgundy (Peter Strickland, 2014)
Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010)
Chicken Run (Nick Park & Peter Lord, 2000)
Takahata Isao, ‘Kaguya-hime no monogatari’ o tsukuru (Isao Takahata and His Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Akira Miki & Hidekazu Sato, 2014)
Permanência (Coffee Stains, Leonardo Lacca, 2014)
The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)
Jacquot de Nantes (Agnès Varda, 1991)

2 online festivals

7º Dobra – Festival Internacional de Cinema Experimental [Steve Polta, Cristiana Miranda, Lucas Murari and Luiz Garcia]
5º Ecrã [Pedro Tavares, Gabriel Papaléo, Rian Rezende, Daniel Diaz and Ana Luiza Albuquerque] 

High level of curatorship and diversity of media. In the case of Ecrã, in addition to exhibiting full, mid-length, and short films, it also programmed games, installations, interactive art, performances, and video art.

Short films (in chronological order)

Tier 1:

Couro de Gato (Cat Skin, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, 1962)
Paradise (Ishu Patel, 1984)
Divine Fate (Ishu Patel, 1993)
Starik i more (The Old Man and the Sea, Aleksandr Petrov, 1999)
Jeu (Game, Georges Schwizgebel, 2006)

Tier 2:

München-Berlin Wanderung (Walking from Munich to Berlin, Oskar Fischinger, 1927)
Tam i tu (Here and There, Andrzej Pawłowski, 1957)
Inochi ― sōfū no chōkoku (Sculptures by Sofu-Vita, Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1963)
Babochka (Butterfly, Andrey Khrzhanovsky, 1972)
Top Priority (Ishu Patel, 1981)
Thunder (Takashi Ito, 1982)
Animando (Marcos Magalhães, 1987)
Adeus (Céu D’Ellia, 1988)
Den offentlige røst (The Public Voice, Lejf Marcussen, 1988)
Zöld intelmek minden napra (Green Warnings for Every Day, Sándor Reisenbüchler, 1992)
La course à l’abîme (The Ride to the Abyss, Georges Schwizgebel, 1992)
Fugue (Georges Schwizgebel, 1998)
L’eau Life (Jeff Scher, 2007)
Viagem na Chuva (Wesley Rodrigues, 2014)
Erlkönig (Erlking, Georges Schwizgebel, 2015)
Imhotep (Leo Pyrata, 2015)
Sonámbulo (The Sleepwalker, Theodore Ushev, 2015)
Mitos Indígenas em Travessia (Ancient Stories, Wesley Rodrigues & Julia Vellutini, 2019)
It Matters What (Francisca Duran, 2019) [Dobra]
Fire Fly EYE (Kerry Laitala, 2020) [Dobra]
Magnética (Marco Arruda, 2020)
The Becoming (Mélissa Faivre, 2020) [Dobra]
Cable Box (Rob Feulner, 2021) [Ecrã]
Fogo Fátuo (Night Fire, Beto Brant, Gabriela Miranda & Matheus Brant, 2021) [Dobra]
Nova Pasta, Antigo Baú (Sylvio Lanna, 2021) [Dobra]

Jeremy Chamberlin

In 2021, film was in a state of quasi-hibernation until about September, as until then there was a paucity of good releases that did not help my passion for the medium. There were films released throughout the year, but—mostly because of COVID, but also the tendency for the best films of a year to be released after the summer—most of the films I tried before September were not up to snuff, and many films I would eventually enjoy were only getting screened at a festival far away from me. This was the nadir of a trend that began in 2020 because of the pandemic, along with the weakening of film culture, an integral part of the medium feeling alive. (I did not know how much I valued Film Comment before it was gone.) Part of this feeling of film being in the doldrums came from where I am in my life with the medium. I have already scoured most of the canon and have mostly been searching beyond it for the past few years—there are no vast, untouched expanses of cinema for me to explore, as there were when I was a film neophyte—so now I am mostly looking for diamonds in the rough while I also revisit films I have seen before. For me, a dearth of new releases I want to see is particularly disappointing, particularly when combined with the many disappointments and aggravations of academia, where I finished my Masters in Cinema Studies this year. Fortunately, film made a return in the fall with almost enough excellent, good, or otherwise respectable titles to make up for lost time. (The return to theatres was nice, too, though they have their downsides when it comes to seating and, sometimes, having to put up with other filmgoers.) Unfortunately, this year’s films were all at least a touch below the excellence of Shatranj-e baad (Chess of the Wind, Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976) an intoxicating marvel that only got its theatrical release in the United States this year. Nonetheless, while the process of film (culture) renewing itself is incomplete and not going to be linear—and many problems that existed pre-COVID are going to persist, such as the sorry state of Japanese cinema—it seems to have begun.

This is my fourth contribution to the World Poll, but as I turned to finalizing my comments on some of the individual films I have selected, the comments I would have made felt inadequate, largely as a result of the tightness of the word limit, but there is also that in order to fully and honestly write about why I love my favourite film, Petite maman, (Céline Sciamma, 2021) I would have to write about how I personally relate with it, which I do not want to do in this public forum without enough words. Instead of doing a disappointingly incomplete job of commenting on the below films, I will just list them.

The films below are roughly grouped based on their quality, without being put in any particular order within their groupings. The films were all new this year where I lived; I am treating this list as my tiny contribution to the film-canonization process. The first two films are practically flawless, and the films at the bottom have some substantial issues, but are still worth watching on their own merits. To my knowledge, there are only a couple of films I accidentally missed this year.

The very best

Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)
Night Colonies (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)

First tier

The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Cohen, 2021)
State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa, 2019)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Hidden (Jafar Panahi, 2020)
Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)
Canticles (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2019) 

Second tier

La nature (Nature, Artavazd Peleshian 2021)
Wood and Water (Jonas Bak, 2021)
A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia, 2021)
Los huesos (Bones, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña 2021)
Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
The Green Knight (David Lowery, 2021)
Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)
On Memory (Don Hertzfeldt, 2021)
Lamentations (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020)
Emanations (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020)
I Am Afraid to Forget Your Face (Sameh Alaa, 2020)

Third tier

Jia ting lu xiang (All About My Sisters, Wang Qiong, 2021)
The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (Bill Morrison, 2021)
Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
Temple Sleep (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2020)
Ember Days (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2021)
Terce (Nathaniel Dorsky, 2021)

Daryl Chin

Brooklyn, New York, based artist and film critic

Top 20 films seen this year (in some form of US release):

      1. Paris Calligrammes (Ulrike Ottinger, 2020)
      2. The Village Detective: A Song Cycle (Bill Morrison, 2021)
      3. Rizi (Days, Tsai Ming-liang, 2020)
      4. Om det oändliga (About Endlessness, Roy Andersson, 2019)
      5. Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
      6. Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)
      7. Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar, 2021)
      8. Petite fille (Little Girl, Sébastien Lifshitz, 2020)
      9. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
      10. Her Socialist Smile (John Gianvito, 2020)
      11. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
      12. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
      13. Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)
      14. Été 85 (Summer of 85, François Ozon, 2020)
      15. In the Same Breath (Nanfu Wang, 2021)
      16. Film About a Father Who (Lynn Sachs, 2020)
      17. Ammonite (Francis Lee, 2020)
      18. The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021)
      19. The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)
      20. Tick, Tick… Boom! (Lin-Manuel Miranda, 2021)

I could not come up with a response last year, as the lockdowns caused such a rupture in terms of viewing habits, and it was hard to keep track of exactly what was seen when. Many festivals tried to revert to online screenings, and staring at a computer does not quite compensate for the theatrical experience. If this list were to be expanded (and it could), some movies seen at the beginning of 2021 through various “links” would include I Carry You with Me (Heidi Ewing, 2020), Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Lili Horváth, 2020) and Quo vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020). I did not venture into theaters much this year, and missed many of the Hollywood releases—sorry, West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021), much debated among my colleagues. In terms of movies which finally received some sort of distribution due to the vagaries of the new systems set up, three I would like to mention were: The Lower East Side Trilogy (2017-2018), a “trilogy” of Ernie Gehr’s digital works centred on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which actually was created over a period of years in the early 2010s, but received a streaming link via The Museum of Modern Art for a month during the spring of 2021; Le navire Night, Marguerite Duras’s attenuated feature film from 1979 which received a streaming release through the Metrograph for one week in the fall of 2021; Freud, John Huston’s biographical film from 1961, which was given a home video release through Kino Lorber at the end of 2021, after being unavailable for decades. So there was still much to be seen and admired in terms of cinema for 2021.

Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period of Time

Janina Ciezadlo

Chicago area-based art and film writer. This year her annual Telluride Journal, Merely Circulating, appeared in Offscreen

The Telluride film festival was able to take place in early September, evading any problems with COVID through careful screening of workers, audiences, vaccinations, testing and mask policies. Among the many notable films were Farhadi’s Ghahreman (A Hero, 2021) and Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island (2021). Un fils (A Son, 2021) by Mehdi Barsaoui continues the fluid observational style of Hanson-Løve, and Farahdi where events, in this case rather dramatic events, unfold in the personal lives of people whose class standing does not keep them safe from the difficult social conditions of Tunisia and the violence at its borders. This film just opened in the U.S. back at the TFF, a riveting Russian film Razzhimaya kulaki (Unclenching the Fists, Kira Kovalenko, 2021) concerns the trauma of a young woman caught, like Barsauui’s characters in a violent terrorist attack and suffering from mental and physical trauma. Like Farhadi, Løve and Barsaoui, Kovalenko follows her character through everyday life, but the tenor of everyday life in South Ossetia, an extractive landscape, is violent and unrelenting. While the big name films from TFF are playing in theatres and up for awards, some excellent films seem to disappear. Speer Goes to Hollywood (Vanessa Lapa, 2021) was organized around a collection of audio tapes made by a young director, a mentee of Kubrick (who declined the job), Andrew Birkin, in conversation with Albert Speer the minister of armaments and war production of the Third Riech. They are working together on a movie based on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich. Speer only got 20 years in the Nuremberg trials; he was able to convince the court that he didn’t know what Hitler was doing with his buildings. A high point of the tapes comes when we hear Carol Reed director of The Third Man (1949) telling the young filmmaker not to fall for Speer’s lies. The film was scrapped by Paramount, but the tapes reveal the slippery architect’s dissimulations, his claim to have had no idea of what was going on when he was working for Hitler and his outrageous, given his crimes, desire to “live a normal life, a private life” 

Older Films

Among the older films screened at the Telluride Film Festival was, Mauritanian–born Med Hondo’s extravagant musical tour of the slave trade: West Indies (1979). Working well before what we now call decolonization, Hondo, based in France, used and détourned cinema, theatrical and musical conventions to explore the conditions imposed on Africans by imperialism. The action, which takes place on a set designed as a slave ship, moves though a history of racism from the 18th century to contemporary France; Brechtian irony enlivened by the Black Arts Movement’s valuation of African and African-American aesthetics produced a paradoxically thought provoking spectacle. West Indies was one of Guest Director Barry Jenkins picks.

Older films encountered for the first time in 2021: A friend’s desire to navigate the lockdowns and restrictions of COVID by reading all of Émile Zola’s writings, led us to watch William Dieterle’s bio-pick The Life of Emile Zola (1937), a cleaned-up Hollywood friendly exploration of Zola’s career, and the famous Dreyfus affair. Dieterle or the studio managed to avoid any reference to the anti-Semitism which was a crucial element of the incident in which the officer, Dreyfus, a scapegoat for the crimes of other officers was accused of treason, neither did they include the mother of Zola’s children, his mistress in the happy family scenes. Zola was played by Paul Muni who worked on several films with Dieterle. The director employed an array of Hollywood actors like Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich, Lionel Barrymore, James Cotton and Charles Laughton, among others.

Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940) were particularly interesting during a pandemic when our own vaccines were emerging. We watched nearly all of Dieterle’s vastly wide-ranging oeuvre, getting an education on Hollywood of that era and in what it meant to be a journeyman filmmaker in the 1930s through the 50s. A filmmaker working for the studios during that era needed to have outstanding versatility and at the same time, the ability to ensure that something of his own perspective will endure. 

From his work with Max Reinhardt on A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935), with Mickey Rooney, to Elephant Walk (1954) a colonialist fantasy about Ceylon with Elizabeth Taylor, through Warner Bothers to Paramount, and then back to Europe when McCarthyism dampened his career, the director was adept at any genre from lavish spectacles to urban-based romantic melodrama. Kismet (1944), for all of its Orientalism, had actual Indian dance, choreography by Denishawn, one of the key companies in the development of American modern dance. Several of Dieterle’s films had elements of noir shadowing romantic comedies. I’ll Be Seeing You (1944) is the story of two people traumatized by violence—Joseph Cotton plays a WWII vet and Ginger Rogers plays a woman who was in jail for pushing a rapist out of a window—who meet on a train. Despite the themes of anonymity and past trauma, the film has a happy ending.

Interestingly, none of the local libraries in a suburb of Chicago had his film about the Spanish Civil War Blocade (1938), although we were able to unearth any number of obscure films. We didn’t stream any of the over fifteen Dieterle films we saw, local libraries, quintessentially democratic resources, in the city and suburban systems have amazing holdings. At the end of our tour of Dieterle’s career, we circled back to Zola and watched Jean Renoir’s La bête humaine (The Human Beast, 1938), with Jean Gabin, a lyrical noir avant la lettre, with a clearly fatal femme, based on one of the novels in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series

Hybrid experiences

This year the Charels Eliott Norton Lectures on poetry, previously given by the likes of Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky, were in the hands of Laurie Anderson. The musician, composer, filmmaker (Heart of a Dog, 2015) and performance artist produced a series of kinetic virtual backgrounds for her zoom talks. The six-part series was entitled Spending the War Without You (2021). Anderson’s lyrical voice and possibly free, associative stories, provide us with what she called “a portable philosophy.” “The River,” “The Forest,” “Rocks,” “The Road,” “The City” and “Birds” are now available from Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center on YouTube.

Jesús Corté

Spanish film writer

Recent best features…

Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021)
Hostiles (Scott Cooper, 2017)
Il n’y aura plus de nuit (There Will Be No More Night, Éléonore Weber, 2020),
À l’abordage! (All Hands on Deck, Guillaume Brac, 2020),
Sutiruraifu obu memorīzu (Still Life of Memories, Yazaki Hitoshi, 2018)
News of the World (Paul Greengrass, 2020)
Sylvie’s Love (Eugene Ashe, 2020),
Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2020),
Honki no shirushi: Gekijōban (The Real Thing, Fukada Kōji, 2020),
Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Lili Horváth, 2020)
Kakou no futari (It Feels So Good, Arai Haruhiko, 2019).

…and very good ones

Pig (Michael Sarnoski, 2021)
Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
The Beatles: Get Back (Peter Jackson, 2021)
Seize printemps (Spring Blossom, Suzanne Lindon, 2020)
La volta buona (The Good One, Vincenzo Marra, 2020)
L’equilibrio (Equilibrium, Vincenzo Marra, 2017)
La séparation des traces (Separation of Trails, Francis Reusser, 2018)
Antlers (Scott Cooper, 2021)
La telenovela errante (The Wandering Soap Opera, Raúl Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento, 2017)
Kanojo no jinsei wa machigaijanai (Side Job, Hiroki Ryuichi, 2017)
Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
Un soupçon d’amour (Paul Vecchiali, 2020)
Dareka no mokkin (Somebody’s Xylophone, Higashi Yoichī, 2016)
Maixabel (Icíar Bollaín, 2021)
Official secrets (Gavin Hood, 2018)
Tre piani (Three Floors, Nanni Moretti, 2021)
Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo (In Front of Your Face, Hong Sang-soo, 2021)
Retour à Reims (Fragments) (Returning to Reims (Fragments), Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2021)
Running Wild (Alex Ranarivelo, 2017)
Ray (Paradise, Andrei Konchalovsky, 2016).

Not so new great films…

Serdtse materi (A Mother’s Heart, Mark Donskoy, 1966)
Yumechiyo nikki (Yumechiyo’s Diary, Urayama Kirio, 1985)
Peesua lae dokmai (Butterfly and Flowers, Euthana Mukdasanit, 1985)
Días de otoño (Autumn Days, Roberto Gavaldón, 1963)
Bokuseki (Wood and Stone, Gosho Heinosuke, 1940)
Losing Ground (Kathleen Collins, 1982)
Shin heike monogatari: Yoshinaka o meguru sannin no onna (Three women around Yoshinaka, Kinugasa Teinosuke, 1955)
Texas (George Marshall, 1941)
Joi no kiroku (Record of a Woman Doctor, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1943)
Friendly Enemies (Allan Dwan, 1942)
La neuvaine (The Novena, Bernard Émond, 2005)
Ainsi soit-il (Gérard Blain, 2000)
Sweet Little Lies (Yazaki Hitoshi, 2010)
Maging akin ka lamang (Lino Brocka, 1987)
Hinugot sa langit (Wrenched from Heaven, Ishmael Bernal, 1985)
Out of the Furnace (Scott Cooper, 2013)
Vremya zhelaniy (Time of Desires, Yuli Raizman, 1984)
Doblones de a ocho (Andrés Linares, 1990)
Kirmes (The Fair, Wolfgang Staudte, 1960)
Odoriko (Dancing Girl, Shimizu Hiroshi, 1957)
Border Line (Danièle Dubroux, 1992)
Fuon (The Crying Wind, Higashi Yoīchi, 2004)
Bulaklak sa City Jail (Flowers of the City Jail, Mario O’Hara, 1984)
Hikayatul jawahiri thalath (The Tale of the Three Lost Jewels, Michel Khleifi, 1995)
La Tierra del Fuego se apaga (Emilio Fernández, 1955)
The Forest Rangers (George Marshall, 1942)
Hana chirinu (Fallen Blossoms, Ishida Tamizo, 1938)
Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
Lettre à Jean Rouch (Eric Pauwels, 1992)
Taking sides—Der fall Furtwängler (István Szabó, 2001).

…and very good ones

Dansei tai josei (Men vs Women, Yasujiro Shimazu, 1936)
Holiday Affair (Don Hartman, 1949)
Fior di male (Flower of Evil, Carmine Gallone, 1915)
Sambyaku-rokujugo ya (365 Nights, Kon Ichikawa, 1949)
Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked Among Wolves, Frank Beyer, 1963)
Kanchana sita (Golden seeta, Govindan Aravindan, 1977)
La belle de nuit (Louis Valray, 1934)
Den starkaste (The Strongest, Alf Sjöberg, 1929)
The Guns of Fort Petticoat (George Marshall, 1958)
Así como habían sido (Trío) (Andrés Linares, 1986)
The Sign of the Ram (John Sturges, 1948)
Show Them No Mercy (George Marshall, 1935)
Kawanakajima kassen (The Battle of Kawanakajima, Teinosuke Kinugasa, 1941)
Łódź Symphony (Peter B. Hutton, 1996)
Phenomenon (John Turteltaub, 1996)
Ashita kuru hito (Till We Meet again, Kawashima Yuzō, 1955)
Tap Roots (George Marshall, 1948)
Nezhnost (Tenderness, Elyer Ishmukhamedov, 1967)
Shatranj-e baad (Chess of the Wind, Mohammad Reza Aslani, 1976)
Retrato de mujer con hombre al fondo (Manane Rodríguez, 1997)
The Savage (George Marshall, 1952)
Gränsfolken (Brother Against Brother, Mauritz Stiller, 1913)
Leuchtfeuer (Wolfgang Staudte, 1954)
La donation (The Legacy, Bernard Émond, 2009)
Ueru tamashii & Zoku ueru tamashii (Hungry Soul, Parts I and II, Kawashima Yuzō, 1956)
Het witte kasteel (The White Castle, Johan van der Keuken, 1973)
Tigre reale (The Royal Tigress, Giovanni Pastrone, 1916)
Der Engel mit der Posaune (The Angel with the Trumpet, Karl Hartl, 1948)
Le troiane (Vittorio Cottafavi, 1976)
Streer patra (Letter form the Wife, Purnendu Pattreai, 1972)
Madame de Thèbes (The Son of Fate, Mauritz Stiller, 1915)
The Secret Sharer (John Brahm, 1952)
Romantiki (Children of the Soviet Arctic, Mark Donskoy, 1941)
Tout ce que tu possedes (All That You Possess, Bernard Émond, 2012)
Seidan botan-dōrō (Hellish love, Sone Chūsei, 1972)
Nam Pu (The Story of Nampoo, Euthana Mukdasanit, 1984)
Le huitième jour (The Eighth Day, Marcel Hanoun, 1960)
Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan, 1979)
L’entraîneuse (Albert Valentin, 1938)
Just Imagine (David Butler, 1930)
Two Thousand Women (Frank Launder, 1944)
Le grand jeu (The Great Game, Nicolas Pariser, 2015)
Contre toute espérance (Summit Circle, Bernard Émond, 2007)
They Dare Not Love (James Whale, 1941)

Greatest reevaluations

Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge: Travolta et moi (Patricia Mazuy, 1993)
Der Gang in die Nacht (Journey into the night, F. W. Murnau, 1920)
Hellfire (R. G. Springsteen, 1949)
Alye parusa (Scarlet Sails, Alexander Ptushko, 1961)
Larceny (George Sherman, 1948)
Water and Power (Pat O’Neill, 1989)
Zwischen zwei Kriegen (Between two Wars, Harun Farocki, 1978)
The Mating Game (George Marshall, 1959)
…e la vita continua (Dino Risi, 1984)
Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehort die Welt (Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?, Slatan Dudow, 1932)
Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
The Sheepman (George Marshall, 1958)
Una romantica avventura (A Romantic Adventure, Mario Camerini, 1940)
Say anything… (Cameron Crowe, 1989)
Sangue blu (Blue Blood, Nino Oxilia, 1914)

Jordan Cronk

Founder: Acropolis Cinema; contributor: Artforum, Cinema Scope, Film Comment & Sight & Sound

Fifty favorite new films seen in 2021:

À pas aveugles (From Where They Stood, Christophe Cognet, 2021)
Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
Babi Yar. Context (Sergei Loznitsa, 2021)
Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)
Il buco (The Hole, Michelangelo Frammartino, 2021)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
The Cathedral (Ricky D’Ambrose, 2021)
Cityscape (Michael Snow, 2019)
Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood, 2021)
Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo (In Front of Your Face, Hong Sangsoo, 2021)
Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021)
Drive My Car and Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
earthearthearth (Daïchi Saïto, 2021)
Espíritu sagrado (The Sacred Spirit, Chema García Ibarra, 2021)
Esquirlas (Splinters, Natalia Garayalde, 2020)
Exterminate All the Brutes (Raoul Peck, 2021)
Fabian oder Der Gang vor die Hunde (Fabian: Going to the Dogs, Dominik Graf, 2021)
Ficciones (Fictions, Manuela de Laborde, 2021)
FIRST TIME [The Time for All but Sunset – VIOLET] (Nicolaas Schmidt, 2021)
France (Bruno Dumont, 2021)
Friends and Strangers (James Vaughan, 2021)
El gran movimiento (The Great Movement, Kiro Russo, 2021)
Haruharasan no uta (Haruhara-san’s Recorder, Kyoshi Sugita, 2021)
Honki no shirushi: Gekijôban (The Real Thing, Kōji Fukada, 2020)
Hygiène sociale (Social Hygiene, Denis Côté, 2021)
Întregalde (Radu Muntean, 2021)
Jiao ma tang hui (A New Old Play, Qiu Jiongjiong, 2021)
Koozhangal (Pebbles, P.S. Vinothraj, 2021)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)
Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider, Ramon & Silvan Zürcher, 2021)
Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia, 2021)
No Sudden Move (Steven Soderbergh, 2021)
Outside Noise (Ted Fendt, 2021)Polycephaly in D (Michael Robinson, 2021)
Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt? (What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?, Alexandre Koberidze, 2021)
Razzhimaya kulaki (Unclenching the Fists, Kira Kovalenko, 2021)
Ready Mix (Lucy Raven, 2021)
“The red filter is withdrawn” (Kim Min-jung, 2021)
Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021)
Ryū to sobakasu no hime (Belle, Mamoru Hosoda, 2021)
Saxifrages, quatre nuits blanches (Saxifrages, Four White Nights, Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, 2021)
Les sorcières de l’Orient (The Witches of the Orient, Julien Faraut, 2021)
Ste. Anne (Rhayne Vermette, 2021)
Surviving You, Always (Morgan Quaintance, 2021)
Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, 2021)
Untitled (34bsp) (Philipp Fleischmann, 2021)
V (Taste, Lê Bảo, 2021)
Zeros and Ones (Abel Ferrara, 2021)

Unclenching the Fists

Fergus Daly

Daly’s most recent film is The Mirror of Possible Worlds: Kiarostami on Aran

Earlier in the year, because of COVID, I could only dream of attending a great film festival like the Viennale, of being left astounded by Peter Tscherkassky’s latest masterpiece or deeply moved by Nicole Brenez’s exhilarating introductions to films she’s curated in honour of Amos Vogel. Then, in October, it became a reality. and suddenly I was really there talking about my new film, a film about the nature of creativity, a fictional retelling of the day 20 years ago when we brought Abbas Kiarostami to the Aran Islands to follow in Robert Flaherty’s footsteps. Vienna was quickly followed by Cork, always Ireland’s best film festival, the fine programming of Don O’Mahony continually providing delightful surprises.

I loved watching Bill Pullman in The Sinner (2017-2021) but Goliath (2016-2021) was TV’s best series, an incredibly stylish and melancholy farewell to a certain ethical and political mode of living and the existential risk-taking it demands in the name of a certain idea of community, one that’s quickly fading into history just as the voices of Kerouac and Scott Walker did on the series’ soundtrack.

In Ireland, Dean Kavanagh, our most exciting young filmmaker, completed his latest feature, Hole in the Head (2021), a sophisticated and darkly comic exploration of the meeting point of traumatised memory and image technologies that recalled Atom Egoyan’s great 80’s films like Family Viewing (1987) and Speaking Parts (1989).

Nicole Brenez also provided the year’s finest piece of film writing, Projections. Provisoires. Provisions (2021), which appeared on the Sabzian.be site just before the holiday period, thereby gifting the new year with an astonishing manifesto for thinking the future, at once in politics, in art, and in life.

Best recent films seen in 2021

Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
Domangchin yeoja (The Woman Who Ran, Hong Sang-soo, 2020)
Drive My Car (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
Hole in the Head (Dean Kavanagh, 2021)
Just a Movement (Vincent Meessen, 2021)
The Man in the Woods (Noah Buschel, 2020)
Re Granchio (The Tale of King Crab, Alessio Rigo de Righi & Matteo Zoppis, 2021)
Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, 2021)
White Hole (Eavan Aiken, 2021)

Adrian Danks

Associate Professor, School of Media & Communication at RMIT University. Co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque, former editor of Senses of Cinema

Top 20 favourite new films screening somehow in Melbourne in 2021:

      1. Drive My Car (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
      2. Omelia Contadina (Alice Rohrwacher & JR, 2020)
      3. Summer of Soul (… Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)
      4. Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
      5. Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, 2021)
      6. Notturno (Gianfranco Rosi, 2020)
      7. Om det oändliga (About Endlessness, Roy Andersson, 2019)
      8. Two for the Opera Box (Mark Rappaport, 2021)
      9. Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
      10. The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts the Tonight Show (Yoruba Richen, 2020)
      11. È stata la mano di Dio (The Hand of God, Paolo Sorrentino, 2021)
      12. Buried News (Bill Morrison, 2021)
      13. Benediction (Terence Davies, 2021)
      14. Finding Jack Charlton (Gabriel Clarke and Pete Thomas, 2020)
      15. The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
      16. Soul (Pete Doctor and Kemp Powers, 2020)
      17. Lotte Eisner, aucun lieu, nulle part (Lotte Eisner. A place, Nowhere, Timon Koulmasis, 2021)
      18. Nitram (Justin Kurzel, 2021)
      19. Malmkrog (Cristi Puiu, 2020)
      20. Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020)

TV series:

      1. The Underground Railroad (Barry Jenkins, 2021) – my overall favourite new film or TV series for 2021
      2. Exterminate All the Brutes (Raoul Peck, 2021)
      3. Wandavision (Matt Shakman, 2021)
      4. Uprising (Steve McQueen & James Rogan, 2021)
      5. Muhammad Ali (Ken Burns, Sara Burns & David McMahon, 2021)

10 Favourite older films seen for the first time in 2021:

      1. Az én XX. századom (My Twentieth Century, Ildikó Enyedi, 1989)
      2. Les oliviers de la justice (The Olive Trees of Justice, James Blue, 1962)
      3. The Exquisite Corpus (Peter Tscherkassky, 2015)
      4. Mashgh-e shab (Homework, Abbas Kiarostami, 1989)
      5. La vérité sur Bébé Donge (The Truth of Our Marriage, Henri Decoin, 1952)
      6. Kusa-meikyū (Grass Labyrinth, Shūji Terayama, 1979)
      7. Voyage à travers le cinéma français (Bertrand Tavernier, 2017-2018)
      8. Los santos inocentes (The Holy Innocents, Mario Camus, 1984)
      9. Island Home Country (Jeni Thornley, 2009)
      10. The Devil and Daniel Webster (All that Money Can Buy, William Dieterle, 1941)

Dustin Dasig

Film critic / Communication & Media Studies professor / Security Training Director / PhD student, The George Washington University. Philippines/U.S.A.

My life as a cineaste has to contend with the dominance of Marvel movies in the theaters (which reopened recently in my country). However, thanks to the efforts of foreign embassy and international organisation-sponsored film festivals (QCinema International Film Festival; Cine-Europa Film Festival) my movie-going life continues (albeit virtually). In an increasingly cataclysmic world, being a cineaste in some ways provide effective diversion from the anxiety and doom. Perhaps that is why “best of 2021” preference mirror the prickly tastes that the pandemic has made us become.

 The top five:

      1. Drive My Car (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
      2. Gūzen to sōzō (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)
      3. Flee (Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021)
      4. Petite maman (Céline Sciamma, 2021)
      5. Quo vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020)

 The next ten best:

      1. Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, 2020)
      2. Dorogie tovarishchi (Dear Comrades!, Andrei Konchalovskiy, 2020)
      3. Felkészülés meghatározatlan ideig tartó együttlétre (Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, Lili Horvát, 2020)
      4. Colectiv (Collective, Alexander Nanau, 2019)
      5. Khorshid (Sun Children, Majid Majidi, 2020)
      6. Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
      7. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
      8. Zola (Janicza Bravo, 2020)
      9. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020)
      10. Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove, 2021)

 “Hype for awards’ sake”: Major disappointments fo the year

      1. C’mon C’mon (Mike Mills, 2021)
      2. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)
      3. Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)
      4. Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
      5. Being the Ricardos (Aaron Sorkin, 2021)

Best performances: Simon Rex, Red Rocket (Sean Baker, 2021); Youn Yuh-jung, Minari

Best directing: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car

Best writing: Ryūsuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, Drive My Car

Robert Dassanowsky

Distinguished Prof. of Film and Culture, University of Colorado, Film and Cine-Politics Historian, Indie Film Producer

Top ten films of 2021 in no particular order:

Hinterland (Hinterland, Stefan Ruzowitzky, 2021)
Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)
Nightmare Alley (Guillermo del Toro, 2021)
Große Freiheit (Great Freedom, Sebastian Meise, 2021)
Quo vadis, Aida (Jasmila Žbanić, 2020)
The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
Undine (Christian Petzold, 2020)
Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2021)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar, 2021)

Very honourable mentions:

No Time to Die (Cari Joji Fukunaga 2020)
Domangchin yeoja (The Woman who Ran, Hong Sang-soo, 2020)
The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes, 2021)
Being the Ricardos (Aaron Sorkin, 2021)
Dune (Dune, Part One, Denis Villeneuve, 2021)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (Joel Coen, 2021)
Falling for Figaro (Ben Lewin, 2021)
Spencer (Pablo Larraín, 2021)
Luzifer (Peter Brunner, 2021)
Drive My Car (Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 2021)

Mónica Delgado Chumpitazi

Co-director, Desistfilm.com

Films released for the first time in 2021:

      1. Train Again (Peter Tscherkassky, 2021)
      2. Memoria (Apichatpong Weresethakul, 2021)
      3. Drive my car (Ryūsuke Hagamuchi, 2021)
      4. earthearthearth (Daïchi Saïto, 2021)
      5. El gran movimiento (The Great Movement, Kiro Russo, 2021)
      6. Pejzaži otpora (Landscapes of Resistance, Marta Popivoda, 2021)
      7. Diários de Otsoga (The Tsugua Diaries, Miguel Gomes & Maureen Fazendeiro, 2021)
      8. Eles Transportan A Morte (They Carry Death, Helena Girón & Samuel M. Delgado, 2021)
      9. Dangsin-eolgul-apeseo (In Front of Your Face, Hong Sangsoo, 2021)
      10. The Inheritance (Ephraim Asili, 2021)
      11. Capitu E O Capítulo (Capitu and the Chapter, Júlio Bressane, 2021)
      12. Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021)
      13. A Night of Knowing Nothing (Payal Kapadia, 2021)
      14. Saxifrages, quatre nuits blanches (Saxifrages, Four White Nights, Nicolas Klotz & Elisabeth Perceval, 2021)
      15. Sycorax (Lois Patiño, Matías Piñeiro, 2021)
      16. Rock Bottom Riser (Fern Silva, 2021)
      17. Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
      18. Pr1nc3s4 (Raúl Perrone, 2021)
      19. Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
      20. Ste. Anne (Rhayne Vermette, 2021)

 Older films encountered for the first time in 2021:

The highlight of the year: Eight films by the Italian filmmaker Cecilia Mangini (1927–2021) present by Another Screen.

Any online or hybrid festival with a really good program and experience:

The first edition of Prismatic Ground, a festival centred on experimental documentary (USA).It is wonderful when a new experimental film and video festival comes out. I loved the films of Anita Thacher.

Bette Gordon at Playdoc International Film Festival (Spain). An important tribute to a great American filmmaker. Her film Variety (1983) is indispensable. It was very pleasant that this fest has been able to show this film.

Homage to filmmaker Paula Gaitán at Tiradentes Film Festival (Brazil) and a retrospective at Frontera Sur Film Festival (Chile). Paula is one of the great Latin American filmmakers and her work started being revalued in the last few years.

Nũhũ Yãg Mũ Yõg Hãm (Essa Terra É Nossa! / This Land Is Our Land!, Isael Maxakali, Sueli Maxakali, Carolina Canguçu & Roberto Romero, Brazil, 2020) at Sheffield Doc Fest. A film from an Indigenous community, the Tikmũ’ũn, obtaining the most important award it’s not frequent.

This Land Is Our Land!

Ernesto Diezmartínez

Film critic. Letras Libres. FIPRESCI.

From Mexico, my personal top-10:

      1. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)
      2. Babardeală cu bucluc sau porno balamuc (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, Radu Jude, 2021)
      3. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven, 2021)
      4. Große Freiheit (Great Freedom, Sebastian Meise, 2021)
      5. Belfast (Kenneth Branagh, 2021)
      6. Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021)
      7. No Sudden Move (Steven Soderbergh, 2021)
      8. Espíritu sagrado (The Sacred Spirit, Chema García Ibarra, 2021)
      9. El perro que no calla (The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet, Ana Katz, 2021)
      10. No Time to Die (Cari Joji Fukunaga 2020)

Emanuele Di Nicola

Film critic, journalist, contributor to Spietati and Nocturno

New films (in alphabetical order):

A Chiara (Jonas Carpignano, 2021)
À l’abordage! (All Hands on Deck, Guillaume Brac, 2021)
Ghahreman (A Hero, Asghar Farhadi, 2021)
Benedetta (Paul Veroheven, 2021)
Coming Home in the Dark (James Ashcroft, 2021)
Hunted (Vincent Paronnaud, 2020)
Lamb (Valdimar Jóhannsson, 2021)
Life of Crime 1984-2020 (Jon Alpert, 2021)
Madres paralelas (Parallel Mothers, Pedro Almodóvar, 2021)
PVT Chat (Ben Hozie, 2021)
Qui rido io (The King of Laughter, Mario Martone, 2021)
The Trouble with Being Born (Sandra Wollner, 2020)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Tu mérites un amour (You Deserve a Lover, Hafsia Herzi, 2019)
Un autre monde (Another World, Stéphane Brizé, 2021)

Older Films (alphabetical order):

Dernier Maquis (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche, 2008)
Documenteur (Agnès Varda, 1981)
Erotikon (Mauritz Stiller, 1920)
La voleuse (The Thief, Jean Chapot, 1966)
Ruan Lingyu – Director’s Cut (Stanley Kwan, 1991)
Babfilm (Scenes with Beans, Ottó Foky, 1976)
The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943)
Un monde sans femmes (A World Without Women, Guillaume Brac, 2011)
Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (Visit or Memories and Confessions, Manoel de Oliveira, 1993)
Woman of the Year (George Stevens, 1942)

Bonus Tracks

Il mulino delle donne di pietra (Mill of the Stone Women, Giorgio Ferroni, 1960), new Blu-Ray by Arrow
…e tu vivrai nel terrore!: L’aldilà (The Beyond, Lucio Fulci, 1981), forty years later
Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), twenty years later

Shorts

Hidden (Jafar Panahi, 2020)
Los huesos (The Bones, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña, 2021)
Nimic (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2019)
Quattro strade (Four roads, Alice Rohrwacher, 2021)
Strasbourg 1518 (Jonathan Glazer, 2020)

Books

Chaplin (Peter von Bagh, Cineteca di Bologna, 2021)
The Monster Show: Storia e cultura dell’horror (The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. David J. Skal, Cue Press, 2021—new edition)
Una lettura perversa del film d’autor (Essays, Slavoj Žižek, Mimesis, 2020)
Walt Disney (Mariuccia Ciotta, La Nave di Teseo, 2021—new edition)

Festival and programs

Cinema Ritrovato for the homage to George Stevens
Premio Sergio Amidei for the homage to Hanif Kureishi
Venezia Classici for the restored version of Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese, 1990)
Berlinale online 2021 for all Forum selection

Los huesos

Wheeler Winston Dixon

Author, filmmaker, and critic.

2021 was the year I gave up on theatrical presentations. With the various mutations of the COVID virus still ongoing, and the international death toll hitting 5.27 million people and rising daily, the risk of going out to the movies is simply too great. I’ve spent most of my life in movie theatres, and for years attended the NYFF, going to every single program, but at this point, it seems that streaming festivals are the wave of the future. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Marvel, DC, James Bond, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and other franchise films have for far too long taken over the international box-office, with budgets in the $300M or so range, and now find it difficult to make their money back without a theatrical release. Perhaps this will force in the industry as a whole to scale back, and make more thoughtful films with less reliance on CGI. The studios themselves became less and less important, as Amazon and Netflix emerged as the major production entities. 

I broke down and bought a 75” 8K Samsung “smart” television, and was stunned by the wealth of films new and old that suddenly were available, mostly for free, from a plethora of new streaming services on an international basis. Long form “limited series” projects also took off, as the very idea of a “one and done” movie was called into question by such projects as Hwang Dong-hyuk’s Squid Game (2021), picked up by Netflix for a pittance, which turned into a worldwide phenomenon. In addition, the streaming service Vimeo continued to offer a platform for more radical experimental filmmakers, such as Larry Wang, Bill Domonkos, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Walter Ungerer, Penumbra Carter and many others to present their works online for free, as part of new wave of independent film and video that radically expanded the existing canon. Then, too, larger festivals moved online with a vengeance, and thus films that otherwise might have played a single theatre in one location became internationally available. 

All of this seems to me a good thing. As more and more women and people of colour make their debuts as directors, and the stranglehold of old Hollywood and more traditional filmmaking continues to fade, smaller and more personal cinema flourishes, even as the commercial multiplex cinema grinds relentlessly on, offering less and less value, either as food for thought, or even escapist entertainment. That’s why I’m encouraged by this enormous paradigm shift in the cinema, which allows wider access to the medium on an international scale. In short, while the pandemic continues to rage all around us, and unfortunately seems to be with us for the foreseeable future, a new kind of smaller scale, more intense cinema rising out of the difficulties caused by COVID is clearly on the horizon. 

A few choices, out of many possible:

The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion, 2021)
El Planeta (Amalia Ulman, 2021)
Judas and The Black Messiah (Shaka King, 2021)
Passing (Rebecca Hall, 2021)
Saint Maud (Rose Glass, 2021)
Titane (Julia Ducournau, 2021)
Test Pattern (Shatara Michelle Ford, 2021)
Bergman Island (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2021)
The Card Counter (Paul Schrader, 2021)
The Lost Daughter (Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021)

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