Month: December 2021

The last pandemic cinema had to face was the Spanish Flu which lasted from 1918 to 1920. The film industry was not what it is today, and 100 years later, it faces the same threat. But cinema has forever existed in a state of flux – the art of telling stories will never go away. And after a blistering 2020, 2021 had to once again reintroduce audiences to theaters. From Sundance to Cannes, and Zola to No Way Home, this year delivered films from PTA, Del Toro, Campion, Ducournau, Villeneuve, Baker, Coen, Wright, Anderson, Mills, Trier, Sciama, Scott, Wachowski, Lord & Miller, Spielberg, Verhoeven, Schrader, Hayes, Wheatley, Larraín, Weerasethakul, and Hamaguchi. So as we say every year: if you didn’t think it was a good year for films, than you didn’t see enough. Here are the best films of 2021.

10. LICORICE PIZZA

Occurring chronologically sometime between Inherent Vice and Boogie Nights, Licorice Pizza returns Paul Thomas Anderson to the San Fernando Valley in the middle of the oil crisis and a mayoral election. Once again assuming the role as cinematographer, Anderson captures the back-lit, sun-drenched aura of ‘70s Southern California as a backdrop to a relationship between a 15 year-old child actor and a 25 year-old career-less girl. The film’s sporadic set pieces stack on top of one another making for one of the year’s more memorable moviegoing experiences and ended up packing select theaters when they needed it most.

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9. SPENCER

A biopic on Princess Diana has been coming for some time now, and Pablo Lorrain’s portrait satisfied expectations. Focusing on Diana Spencer (Kristen Stewart) attending a family gathering following her husband’s tabloid-affair scandal, Spencer spends half the film in Diana’s face to portray the public’s suffocating view of her, and Lorrain treats her unraveling delicately. Featuring perhaps the best of Jonny Greenwood’s three (!!!) scores this year, Spencer not only subverts biopic expectations, but uses the empty purpose of the royal family as a vessel to do so.

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8. CODA

The most heartfelt and tear-jerkiest film this year, the Sundance-winning Coda is just as emotionally fulfilling as it sounds: the only hearing child of a deaf family decides to pursue a career in singing at her family’s consequence. Featuring killer performances from Emilia Jones and Troy Kotsur, the film’s simple elements function so well that it feels like a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and gives a whole new definition to how “the silence can be deafening.” The protagonist’s story at first seems like its doomed for failure, but the resolve is anything but. We haven’t seen a Sundance winner this fulfilling since Whiplash.

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7. RED ROCKET

Where has Simon Rex been the last 18 years? Known primarily (at least until now) for his role as Uncle George in Scary Movie 3, Simon Rex has somehow managed to come out of the shadows to actually be a serious awards contender. Sean Baker’s latest is a portrait of middle America circa 2017, centered on a male porn star who comes home to Texas City, Texas in order to make a decent living, spurring any lies and embellishments to make him appear as “successful Hollywood.” With a loose spine to it, Red Rocket could certainly be “better” in terms of being a homogenic whole, but we wouldn’t love it as much even if it was so. Upon first viewing, Red Rocket may not amount to much, but you’ll think about how much you laughed and enjoyed yourself that you’ll feel compelled to return.

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6. MEMORIA

More meditative than narrative, Memoria does not work on a conscious level, but an unconscious one. The sound plays a character, even going so far as to create a symphonic piece comprised of car alarms. Tilda Swinton anchors this film as a supposed widow haunted by a deep, low, “booming” noise to which she can’t find the source of. I remember seeing several audience members doze off during the film (me included.) But, I feel if I told that to Apichatpong Weerasethakul, he wouldn’t be mad.

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5. TITANE

This year’s Palme d’or winner proved to be the wild ride it was hyped up to be. Julia Ducournau’s body horror thriller has little to no dull time (despite its stakes being more grounded in its second half than the first). Regardless, its assault on masculinity is one to be studied, because of how unapologetic its tone is. And boy is it a fun ride. Despite what one thinks it may “mean,” it brought back the insanely fun time we haven’t seen in a theater since, well, perhaps Good Time. But I hate to make comparisons, because Titane’s cinematic signature is one that stands on its own.

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4. PIG

Knocking Babette’s Feast off the top of the list as the ultimate movie about food, Pig doesn’t sound as appealing on paper: a perfectly casted Nic Cage as a truffle hunter going after his stolen pig. But that’s merely the surface of it. Because beneath it is a fascinating commentary on class and how we ultimately find and consume our food. The film effectively peels back its layers to reveal its bigger picture, going to show that, at the end of the day, we’re all eating the same food, but it’s how we consume it that separates us all.

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3. DRIVE MY CAR

There’s something intimate about a car ride with another person. We do it all the time, but we overlook how vulnerable we often become with one another. Perhaps the film with the longest prologue this year (the opening credits come in around the 50 minute mark), Drive My Car is all about internalization. A man finds his wife having an affair, but decides to do nothing about it. She then unexpectedly passes away, with his only solace being driving his car while rehearsing lines for a stage play he is directing. However, he develops an eye issue, forced to hire a driver. The conflict that’s been internalized is then forced to be externalized, and the silence and length that are at first tricked for self-importance, then becomes necessity, as Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Misaki (Toko Miura) find common ground in suppressing emotions. The ice is thawed, and these emotions are then relinquished on stage. It often feels you have no way to let go of these bottled feelings, until there’s a proper way for you to access them, like the intimacy of a compact vehicle.

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2. THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD

If you’ve struggled with regret for years, if you’ve constantly beat yourself up from something long ago, if you can’t seem to forgive yourself, then this film will empathize with you. The title says it all. It’s the feeling you have when you feel you’ve done something irreversible but had no choice, that feeling you get when it hurts you to hurt someone else. Many love stories are about the person who’s heartbroken, but this film is for the ones who had no choice but to walk away.

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1. A HERO

A Hero takes on the notion of preconceived identity. On parole from being jailed due to debt, Rahim (Amir Jadidi) embellishes a story about him returning a bag of gold coins to its rightful owner, which then snowballs. Stakes. Jeopardy. Tension. It’s all there. What follows is a spiraling, crippling doubt if a felon can redeem himself by doing a good deed, ending with a resounding sentiment: a good deed isn’t a badge of honor.

What makes a filmmaker exciting? It means that their best work is still ahead of them. There are amazing filmmakers coming out of the woodwork every day, each one better than the last. But if we had to bet on one filmmaker as the most exciting filmmaker on the planet, it’s Paul Thomas Anderson. Paul Thomas Anderson has traversed the cinematic spectrum, if there ever was one. But the fact that he’s still able to keep us on our toes at the mere sound of a new film, with all its mystery surrounding it, is something worth noting, and thank god we have at least one filmmaker that does so in such a mystifying fashion. In honor of Licorice Pizza hitting theaters nationwide on Christmas day, here’s our ranking of every Paul Thomas Anderson film… so far.

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9. HARD EIGHT

At one point in the 90s, it seemed like if any auteur wanted to break in they had to direct a gangster drama, or at least something to that degree – Reservoir Dogs, Sexy Beast, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels… you see what I mean. It seemed like an easy buck to bet on.  Hard Eight was Anderson’s calling card. Having been developed and funded via the Sundance Lab, Hard Eight technically has two versions: one cut that its distributor released, and the other Anderson tried to push himself (even going behind the distributor’s back to submit his version to Cannes himself.) But thankfully, Criterion re-released Anderson’s cut of the film, even under its original title – Sydney. It not only launched the careers of John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, and a career-best performance from Philip Baker Hall, but introduced the world to Anderson’s promising use of constantly rolling cameras and practices of a true cineaste. The low ranking of Hard Eight on this list is less an indictment of the film than a testament to the extraordinary films Anderson would produce in the coming decades.

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8. LICORICE PIZZA

For better or worse, the jury’s still out on Licorice Pizza. But everyone’s immediate reception has been near-unanimous, claiming it as a “perfect PTA” movie. Take that for what you will, because this writer is still more or less gathering their thoughts as to where it stands in his filmography. Following a summer romance in the San Fernando valley in the ’70s between a 15-year-old high school child actor and a 25-year-old career-less but hopeful girl, Licorice Pizza returns Anderson to his wispy ways of filmmaking. The film has a looser spine to it, allowing for the film to rely more on sporadic sequences to keep the pace going. Whereas his previous films had maybe one or two set pieces, Licorice Pizza is nothing but cinematic set pieces. But this is not a review of the film. It’s a fun watch (one this writer will definitely be returning to) and definitely eclipses some of his earlier work, but one can’t help but feel the airy-ness harking underneath that doesn’t ground the film in its circumstances. The soul of his fun whacky scenarios is there. The mystery, however, isn’t.

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7. PHANTOM THREAD

Every PTA film always has some sort of shade of mystery draped over its release, this one in particular when rumors started spreading that Paul Thomas Anderson was tackling a fashion stylist icon of the ‘50s who dressed royalty. Everyone’s eyes shot toward Charles James, the famous British-American haute couture stylist who was notorious for his eccentricities. However, that proved not to be the case. But one can notice some similar idiosyncrasies in Reynolds Woodcock. Phantom Thread was the next step in Anderson’s evolution of becoming the ultimate auteur, so much so he began taking the reins of cinematographer for the first time, trusting his actors to direct themselves from the page. The result is a gothic Victorian romance where one is well aware that the film’s director is at the helm of every creative aspect, much like Woodcock is over his profession and female partners.

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6. INHERENT VICE

The enigma around this one didn’t necessarily revolve around Anderson (BTS photos regularly surfaced), but rather the fact that it was an adaptation of a Thomas Pynchon novel, the only one he’s ever allowed to be adapted. Even though the two aren’t mutually exclusive, one can see Anderson’s fingerprints all over the novel. Originally intending to adapt Pynchon’s Vineland, but ultimately found it too difficult, Anderson returned to the ensemble casting and took notes from neo-noirs such as the Long Goodbye, Repo Man, and documentaries such as Hollywood Mondo. With the film’s huge cast of players, one leaves the theater feeling like they just smoked a fat joint. With so many tiny moving parts, the film is best when you stop trying to understand it, and rather let yourself understand it.

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5. PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE

Featuring arguably Adam Sandler’s most awards-worthy performance of his career, Punch-Drunk Love is PTA’s shortest, but sweetest film to date. Centering on a hermit novelty item salesman who doesn’t know how to be vulnerable, the film’s an idiosyncratic love story that bears resemblance to the French New Wave and musicals of the ’60s. What at first seems cryptic (the car crash, the harmonium, the airline mile scheme) eventually turns into a fascinating chain of events that knocks Sandler’s Barry Egan down, only for him to find the courage he’s desperately looking for in love. We wouldn’t see another PTA picture like this until Licorice Pizza.

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4. THE MASTER

Often referred to as “that scientology movie” upon its release, The Master is perhaps Anderson’s most ambitious film, and his first without his usual cinematographer Robert Elswit, this time with Mihai Malaimare Jr. behind the lens. It’s also probably his most mysterious film to date, mainly because the public didn’t know much about it. But it was that mysteriousness that made it so infectious. Almost everything about it seemed to be pointing in the direction of peculiarity – the 70mm roll out (the first film to be shot on 70mm since Henry V), the similarities between Lancaster Dodd and L. Ron Hubbard, the secret surprise screenings in NY and LA – it all added to its idiosyncrasy. But above all that, it boasts Joaquin and PSH’s best roles to date, Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic score, and the closest thing one can get to 3D without the 3D: it’s the 2001 of the 21^st century.

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3. BOOGIE NIGHTS

At only 27, Paul Thomas Anderson produced what would dub him the “most exciting filmmaker on the planet.” Boogie Nights contained an exuberance fueled by the oncoming of the ’80s with a narrative and characters that seemed to shift into an era of hyper cultural inflation. It showed his command over ensemble pieces, as well as his mastery in climactic set pieces (the drug deal sequence with a meth’d out Alfred Molina). It was something so ambitious to take on at such a young age, and yet even more magnificent to pull it off effectively. It resuscitated Burt Reynolds’ career with his only Oscar nomination, and demonstrated that Anderson is truly an actor’s director.

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2. MAGNOLIA

Perhaps the most whimsical of his filmography, Magnolia follows several San Fernando Valley inhabitants on a rainy day in LA, whose characters are plagued by trauma they can’t seem to let go of. It’s a beast of a movie – a 3+ hour runtime, a stacked ensemble cast, and a climax that’s Anderson’s best set piece in any of his films. And among his ensemble films, it easily ranks as his best. It’s a circular flowing narrative that’s his most poignant – by the end of it, you feel like you’ve felt something intangible. Upon first viewing, you see the story – the chance run-ins, the theme of coincidence… But upon second viewing, you see a parable: a pattern of flawed characters repeating their mistakes. Featuring Tom Cruise’s best role to date (and what would be his last Oscar nomination), Magnolia will rank at the top for most of Anderson’s fans.

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1. THERE WILL BE BLOOD

Anderson’s films tend to take place in the San Fernando Valley, but this was the valley before the valley. Anderson’s epic of a drunk-with-power oil baron who takes over a small religious town and challenges faith will be the one remembered by film historians and critics. Anderson, whose previous works up until that point included the playfulness of Magnolia and Punch-Drunk Love, had produced a film that bore comparison to the likes of John Ford and D.W. Griffith. Absolutely no one saw this dark turn coming, but it was a milestone indicating that Anderson was now leaving his whimsical fanboy era of filmmaking into embracing his true fascinations – the history of California oil, the spell of scientology, and haute couture fashion of the ‘50s. TWBB will be remembered not only for introducing a protagonist that will forever haunt the history of cinema, but because it’s an echo of an echo – an evolution in how we portray the past, one whose oncoming of new technology was perched right at the forefront. When you watch it, you see the cinematography of Days of Heaven, you hear the score of The Shining, you see a John Huston western… He wasn’t your film geek’s favorite filmmaker anymore. He was everyone’s.