Final round-up of 2021 films

I’ve been holding fire on my final picks for the best films of last year, until I could see one of my anticipated favorites, which finally arrived on Hulu:  Petite Maman (MC-93).  Céline Sciamma has emerged as one of the best writer-directors working today, and her latest displays her talents admirably.  It’s a short, sweet fable about mother-daughter relationships.  After the death of her grandmother, and the unexplained decamping of her mother, an eight-year-old girl escapes into the woods where she encounters a similarly-aged girl who looks an awful lot like her and has her mother’s name (the two are played by the Sanz sisters, Josephine and Gabrielle).  Is this dream, imagination, or magic?  From a child’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter, it’s all one marvelous fantasy, indistinguishable from reality.  Sciamma’s sensitive and layered direction yields authentic performances from all, and the cinematography is bathed in fairy tale forest light.  However petite, this film has a breadth and depth of emotion that exceeds its childlike dimensions.
 
I wanted to watch Parallel Mothers (MC-88) again, after a tantalizing but limited viewing on an airplane, so I took a week’s free trial of Starz.  Pedro Almodovar is a master filmmaker, and this is a masterful film.  The mothers in question are played by Penelope Cruz, at her best, and newcomer Milena Smit more than holding her own.  They meet in the maternity ward, and from there the lives of the 40ish fashion magazine photographer and the single teen rape victim intertwine.  And their combined motherhood stories intertwine with a literal exhumation of a mass grave from the Franco era.  It’s a twisted tale, but very smoothly told, with Almodovar in full control of the intensely-colored mechanisms of melodrama, producing one of his “women’s pictures” that truly celebrate the strength of women.
 
While on Starz, I caught up with The Truffle Hunters (MC-84), a documentary that follows neatly in the esteemed tradition of Honeyland, as a Mediterranean account of old folkways of food gathering.  Rather than an aged Macedonian woman beekeeper, this film follows several aged Piedmontese men and their close-knit dogs, as they hunt in the woods for a rare white truffle.  Beautifully and intimately filmed by Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, the film eschews narration for direct encounter, accruing layers of significance in the process, more edifying and entertaining than you might imagine the subject could be.  Try this delicacy, if you can find it.
 
Dream Horse (MC-68, Hulu) is an endearing movie that I recommend if you enjoy underdog (or underhorse) sporting stories, though it’s not anything you haven’t seen before, even if you missed the very good 2015 documentary on which it’s based, Dark Horse (MC-75).  The film’s biggest asset is the ever-reliable Toni Collette in the lead role, as the grocery clerk/barmaid who decides she wants to breed a race horse, and thereafter enlists a supporting syndicate of her neighbors in a down-on-its-luck Welsh mining town.  Damien Lewis plays an equine enthusiast who quits his accounting job to manage Dream Alliance’s racing career, which unsurprisingly reaches great heights.  Euros Lyn is a Welsh director whose credit I first noted for the excellent recent tv series Heartstopper (and another, Capital), but from now on I will take his name as an indicator of quality.
 
To say that Audrey Diwan’s Happening (MC-86, AMC+) puts me in mind of Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always is already to offer high praise, for the portrayal of a young woman in desperate search for an abortion.  Awarded best film in Venice, this harrowing human drama is set in 1960s France, based on a memoir by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, and graced by an immersive, luminous performance from Anamaria Vartolomei.  Up close and personal, honest and wrenching, the film follows a bright literature student unwilling to give up her future to one unfortunate mistake, in a time and place where reasonable medical care is thoroughly criminalized, and desperate measures ensue. With Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake and Robert Mulligan’s Love with a Proper Stranger, this would make a great film series to demonstrate what the overturning of Roe v. Wade might lead us back to.

 
Respect (MC-61, AMZ) deserves some of the same, but not nearly as much as its subject, Aretha Franklin.  Though Jennifer Hudson does a credible job of portraying Aretha onstage and off, this film does not seem to have anything new or interesting to say about the Queen of Soul.  Some of the concert or recording studio performances are well-staged, but it’s a big mistake to recreate the Amazing Grace gospel concert already covered by a famous documentary.  It would have been better to take a more focused approach than following the template of every performer biopic.  Especially since the tv series Genius: Aretha, with Cynthia Erivo, went into Aretha’s family history with far greater detail.  Some fine supporting performances though, particulaly Marc Maron.  The direction is mixed, but ultimately it’s the writing that limits this film.
 
In the same vein, I found Baz Luhrman’s Elvis (MC-64, HBO) more watchable than expected.  I sampled in passing, and wound up watching all the way through.  Austin Butler gives a credible performance as Presley, on stage and off, while Tom Hanks (heavily disguised and frankly miscast) narrates as his manager “Col. Tom Parker,” and Baz’s pizzazz is relatively in check.  But it’s an odd perspective to take, the promoter telling the performer’s tale, and the telling rather by the numbers.  While I was no particular fan of Elvis, his story is worth recounting even within its very familiar outline, and Luhrman colors it with his kinetic, sometimes hyperactive, direction.  Even as debunked by his Svengali, Elvis’ career deserves the overworked accolade of iconic, a bejeweled picture of his era.
 
While my archaeologist son was site-mapping by drone in the Republic of Georgia, I caught up with a film from there that won multiple awards at Tribeca and was recommended to me by a friend.  Brighton 4^th (MC-76, Kanopy) begins in Tbilisi but spends most of its running time among a Russian-speaking émigré community in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach neighborhood.  It follows a former Olympic champion wrestler (played by the same), as he goes to rescue his son, who is supposed to be studying medicine but is actually doing manual labor and running up gambling debts.  The portrait of the émigré enclave is quite strong, mixing humor with no-exit despair.  Definitely provides a glimpse into Georgian characteristics, and the lives of displaced people following a mirage of foreign opportunity.
 
Encanto (MC-75, Disney+) seems like a worthy pick for the animated feature Oscar, even though Flee was a much better film.  Encanto does for Colombia what Coco did for Mexico or Moana for Polynesia, bringing local folklore to life, color, and song (via Lin-Manuel Miranda).  The animation was dazzling, the music catchy, and the story not too hackneyed, with songs rather than chase sequences to keep things moving right along.
 
Having canvassed all the likely titles, I’m now ready to present my own (revised and updated) answer to Metacritic’s compilation of film critics’ Top 10 lists, with description and further linkage at Metacritic’s ranking of the 2021’s best films by numerical rating (given in parenthesis below).  One advantage of this delayed listing is that all these films are now available on streaming channels.
 
My Top Ten
 
Drive My Car (91)
Quo Vadis, Aida? (97)
Petite Maman (94)
Summer of Soul (96)
Rocks (95)
Flee (91)
Parallel Mothers (88)
CODA (74)
The Father (88)
Mass (81)
 
Runners-up (four filmed musicals, followed by four B&W films, four assorted, six foreign, and a pair of lesbian dramas.)
 
Tick, Tick … Boom! (74)
West Side Story (85)
In the Heights (84)
Come from Away (83)
 
C’mon C’mon (82)
Passing (85)
The Tragedy of Macbeth (87)
Belfast (75)
 
The French Dispatch (74)
The Lost Daughter  (86)
Judas and the Black Messiah (85)
King Richard (76)

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (86)
Bergman Island (81)
Hive (71)
A Hero (82)
I’m Your Man (78)
The Hand of God (76)
 
The World to Come (73)
Two of Us (82)

 
My personal “No thanks”
 
The Worst Person in the World (90)
Licorice Pizza (90)
The Power of the Dog (89)
The Green Knight (85)
Pig (82)
Dune (74)
  
Recommended documentaries (aside from Summer of Soul and Flee)

My Name is Pauli Murray (73)
Attica (87)
MLK/FBI (81)
The Truffle Hunters (84)
Stray (83)
Listening to Kenny G (81)
Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It (77)