🥇 Best Movies of 2021
Happy Wednesday! Welcome back to Smash Cut, the most consistently inconsistent movie newsletter (probably). As we round out the year, I bring you an early Christmas present: my favorite movies of the year. Happy Holidays! Enjoy your time, be easy on yourself, and if no one has told you this today, you’re doing great. Love, Karl.
5. The Humans
What it’s about: Brigid’s (Beanie Feldstein) entire family piles into her new Chinatown apartment to celebrate Thanksgiving. Over the course of the night, each family member faces their own fears and shortcomings.
Throughout Stephen Karam’s The Humans, which is set in a two-floor New York City apartment in Chinatown, the bulbs in each of the rooms progressively go out. The space the characters inhabit is literally shrinking and they’re forced to face the darkness — and each other. The tension builds until the final bulb finally burns out and all that they’re left to see is what’s in their heads — existential dread, worry, regret. So, basically, the most New York movie ever made.
If that sounds like horror to you, then you’re right. Though the premise of the film isn’t one that lends itself to the genre it very much is and it oddly inhabits a new subgenre of family drama horror. Although it’s understandable. What is more horrifying than facing the truth in front of people that you’ve known your whole life?
This is one of those movies that I have difficulty talking about because the reason it works is so personal. You can pick out moments of relatability — both positive and negative — throughout the film and with every character. It’s a humane film that begs for empathy for its characters. You feel like you get to know them as well as your own family. If I could say one thing to convince you to watch this movie it is this: by the end, you’ll be sad you can’t hang out in that apartment anymore.
▶︎ Streaming on Showtime (via Hulu or Prime Video)
4. Spencer
What it’s about: Diana, Princess of Wales (Kristen Stewart), commits to one more weekend as royalty to celebrate Christmas with her sons. However, that weekend proves to be a haunting one.
Among the first shots of Spencer is of the basement kitchen of the Sandringham House, where the Royal Family spends the holidays. A sign plastered above the staff boldly reads, “keep noise to a minimum, they can hear you.” And as the film marches on it becomes clear why that sign is a focal point. The “they” feels like a specter that is haunting Diana, Princess of Wales (Kristen Stewart). In that way, Spencer is a haunted house movie.
Chilean director Pablo Larraín, who follows up his *ahem* masterpiece Jackie, hones in on a very specific moment in Diana’s journey with the Royal Family. One where she’s already made her decision causing the walls to close in. We’re planted firmly in Diana’s point of view making for a surreal experience (and one that communicates the feelings of anxiety and depression in a way that almost hits too close).
I’m not completely educated in the story of Diana and the Royal Family and Spencer isn’t meant to educate me. But as an atmospheric piece and meditation on her very particular situation, as well as mental health more broadly, Spencer hits all the right notes. Even during the ending, which gives Diana some of her power back in a cheesier way than the rest of the film is presented, it feels right. Here’s my full review.
▶︎ Available to Rent on Prime Video and Apple TV
3. Flee
What it’s about: Presented in animation to protect his identity, Jonas Poher Rasmussen interviews his friend Amin who tells him the story of how he fled Afghanistan during the Taliban takeover and how it brought (and still haunts him) to his current life in the Netherlands.
Documentarians often find archival footage to piece together the story they’re trying to tell. They fill in the gaps with interviews or reenactments. Instead, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s Flee lets its subject Amin tell the story and then brings it to life using animation. Hearing Amin’s voice as it wavers, the animation often following his lead, makes the entire experience feel intimate. Like he’s telling it just to us.
Rasmussen, who is old schoolmates with Amin, describes seeing him for the first time on a train. He describes him in great detail. Decades later they’re still friends and Rasmussen has taken interest in telling Amin’s story of fleeing Kabul as a child. And the way Rasmussen tells it is the way any other person would learn about their friends’ past. Flee feels like a story that you lie back in a bed and listen to with the storyteller right next to you — and this quite literally happens in the movie.
Though the story is one that few of us have and will ever experience, Rasmussen finds common ground in the way he presents how Amin’s experience shaped who he is today. A lesser film would dwell on the past, Flee explores the past, its effect on the present, and finds hope in the future. Here’s my full review.
▶︎ In theaters now
2. Drive My Car
What it’s about: After suffering a loss, a famous actor and director (Hidetoshi Nishijima) stages an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Through the casting, rehearsal process, and long drives from his hotel to the theater, he and his driver (Tōko Miura) ponder love, loss, and the language of those feelings.
The most impressive thing about Ryusuke Hamagachi’s Drive My Car is that despite its three-hour runtime there wasn’t a single moment my attention left it. If anything, the time it took me to watch it was closer to four hours because I went back to make sure I heard, really heard and understood, every single line. Hamagachi’s screenplay conditioned me to believe every single thing a person says or does matters. And it did.
Each moment of our lives is weaved into the person we are in the current moment. Our grief, our trauma, our successes, our failures affect how we process and live from that point forward. Not only is Drive My Car empathetic to that concept, it’s driven (pun intended) by it. It’s a quiet movie and story save for one or two twists, but it makes up for it with hypnotic human interactions that beg you to hold onto every word and the way that it’s said.
▶︎ In theaters now
1. The Worst Person in the World
What it’s about: Over four years and twelve chapters, Julie (Renate Reinsve) experiments with her relationships, career, and life until she finds who she is truly meant to be. Apparently, that’s many different people.
2021 was a year where I didn’t immediately find a film that hit me where I am in life — which is how I often measure these lists. Not necessarily what is best, but what I feel I needed the most at the time. And that feeling evaded me until Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World came into my life like a whirlwind.
Trier explores our specific millennial anxieties that, in the end, all feel like paradoxes. We’re afraid to settle down — to the point that we blow up anything stable we have — but also of not settling down. We so desperately want to find our purpose, but become too quickly bored to pursue anything seriously. We crave a deep connection with another person but are so hesitant to show them who we are. Having those paradoxes in you truly make you feel like the worst person in the world.
However, Trier isn’t here to chastise our generation. If anything, he celebrates our idiosyncrasies while capturing the very specific feeling of weightlessness that defines your late twenties. All that while delivering a story that is hilariously observed, heartfelt, and emotional. In the end, you may even think you aren’t the worst person in the world. And that’s on what? Therapy.
▶︎ In theaters February 4th
The rest of the list (in alphabetical order). Movies that are currently streaming or available to rent are linked.
📽 P.S. You can see every movie I’ve ever recommended right here.
🍅 I’m also a Tomatometer-approved critic on Rotten Tomatoes! You can find new movie reviews here and here.
Eligible for the 2020 Oscars, but released in 2021. Won Best Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Eligible for the 2020 Oscars, but released in 2021. Won Best Supporting Actor and Best Original Song.