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Jacob Mouradian’s Top 10 Films of 2021
This time last year I was lamenting on the tumultuousness of 2020, and how despite all the closures, public health crises, and political upheavals, cinema kept on kicking and entertaining us through all the chaos and uncertainty. Ironically and/or disappointingly, the same still holds true for 2021.
Reopening procedures throughout the United States have seen mixed or downright negative outcomes due to bureaucratic mismanagement and capitalistic hubris. New variants of COVID-19 continue to sweep through our populace, shutting down entertainment venues and other aspects of public life that we were happy to finally see come revving back to life. The planet’s getting hotter with no foreseeable saving grace (hell, the ocean caught on fire this year!). Socioeconomic discontent feels like it’s rising to all-time highs.
Cinema and other forms of art and entertainment are not solutions for these issues in and of themselves, but they can act as parts of a greater whole. They can be steppingstones in our own cultural and political educations, leading us down paths of enlightenment and engagement we might not have otherwise traversed. Other times these media are simply salves for the hardships of daily life, offering up the smallest bit of respite amidst an increasingly distressing world. Like all art forms, cinema expands our perceptions of the world, of our possibilities, and even our dreams. That expressivity is the sort of stability I crave in this uncharted world ahead of us, and it’s what keeps bringing me – and millions of others – back again and again and again.
2021 showed us that cinema, despite all fearmongering and doomerist trolling to the contrary, is here to stay. And just like us, it’s rapidly adapting to suit our new reality.
It was quite a challenge to narrow this list down to just 10 titles – especially when, thanks to FilmBook, I had the opportunity to attend the SXSW, Tribeca, Fantasia, and Locarno film festivals (all within the span of five months) and caught more new releases from around the world than I ever had in any prior year! But after looking back, these are the ones that stuck with me the most, that affected me on some profound level, or were just too goddamned fun to ignore.
Also, to repeat my 2020 mantra: as with all sorts of media categorization, lists like these should be seen less as a definitive declaration of taste and more so as a timestamp of interests as they exist here and now. Because canon is ridiculous, lists are subject to future change.
Jacob Mouradian’s Top 10 Films of 2021
- Brotherhood
Director Francesco Montagner sneakily diverts attention away from the film’s documentary confines, letting its strikingly narrative setup hit you with an incredulous wallop. His creative choices are evident by his trusting and unobtrusive camera, letting the three brothers Jabir, Usama, and Uzeir reveal their lives to the filmmaker in their own time and on their own terms. If anything, Montagner’s film hints at an illogical narrative impulse that permeates all of humanity and speaks to the commonly recurring ways we crave connection and understanding to each other – be we a city-dwelling film crew or rural farmers. Of course, the gorgeously-shot Bosnian countryside certainly aides in the film’s beauty, too.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Aswang
Filmed in the wake of Rodrigo Duterte’s election in the Philippines in 2016 and his ensuing war on drugs, Alyx Ayn Arumpac’s documentary is a disparaging dive into the dark side of a country victimized by their own government. Using the titular cryptid as a jumping-off point, Arumpac examines how irrational concepts and ideologies spring about to make sense of a nonsensical reality. That juxtaposition makes us question whether said beliefs are the actual danger, or if it’s the puppeteers manufacturing them instead. Heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating in equal measure.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Quo vadis, Aida?
Bosnia and Herzegovina’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar got beaten out Denmark’s Another Round back in April, but that in no way discounts Jasmila Žbanic’s harrowing account of a U.N. translator in the hours leading up to the Srebrenica massacre during the Bosnian War. Jasna Duricic plays the titular Aida, a Bosnian woman, who’s being pulled in multiple directions to save her family and her fellow Srebrenican townspeople from the encroaching Serbian troops. Duricic’s performance is a balancing act of poise and anxiety as she fights against the clock in a continuously backstepping form of compromise, perfectly matching the film’s righteous sense of anger and frustration over bureaucratic malfeasance and forgotten history.
- A Brixton Tale
Gentrification isn’t just when trendy white hipsters move into underserved Black neighborhoods and start filling them with craft breweries and artisanal cafes. It’s also the exploitation of the marginalized people’s lives for personal artistic gain, and that can be just as psychologically destructive. A cross between Michael Haneke’s Benny’s Video and Antonio Campos’ Afterschool but with a more humanistic approach, directors Bertrand Desrochers and Darragh Carey showcase the poisonous nature of social detachment and how dangerous the art that stems from that mindset can be. There’s even a critique of the weaponization of both the camera as a tool and white femininity as a social construct, and a suggestion that a mix between the two is downright deadly. A striking feature debut that carries on the British tradition of kitchen sink realism into a grittier, grimier realm.
- Judas and the Black Messiah
We can argue until we’re blue in the face over the optics of a mega-corporation within the Belly of the Beast producing a biopic about one of the most radical Black communists the United States has ever known, and we can get into semantics over the sincerity and/or accuracy with which this messaging actually plays when it’s filtered through numerous different producers and comes attached with a $26M price tag (and trust me: as an avid listener of too many leftist podcasts to count, these arguments are and have been happening). But even on a surface level it’s still an amazing feat to see something so enlightening, sympathetic, and radically oriented get a wide release within our modern neoliberal hellscape. On top of that, Shaka King’s direction is energetically tempered and the performances he gets from Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Dominique Fishback, and Jesse Plemons are all phenomenal.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Hellbender
One of the biggest surprises of the year for me, but a wholly welcome one at that! The Addams family (no, not that one) has made a name for themselves in indie circles over the past decade for their ultra-low-budget films of auteurist sensibilities as well as their family-centric mode of production, and while Hellbender doesn’t waver from any of those distinctions it might be the family’s most refined outing yet. Such a blend offers up playful scares and rough-around-the-edges DIY fun, but buried beneath those twigs is a prickly and complex rumination on spiritual corruption, self-determination, reformation, and historical awareness – particularly in how it applies to institutionalized misogyny and what that suggests about future cultural literacy. A real treat for all future Halloween binges.
- Tin Can
It takes a lot for a movie to make me squirm and potentially throw up, and Seth A. Smith’s pandemic-set psychological thriller takes the nasty, gross cake in that regard. Smith utilizes minimal locations and industrial settings to make us feel just as claustrophobic as his characters do: while they are trying to figure out the puzzle of why they’re trapped, we’re trying to figure out the puzzle of Smith and co-writer Darcy Spidle’s entrapping narrative. We become aware of the ironic parallels of the characters’ inorganic settings to the deadly flaws that exist within their own psyches, and how it’s not just a fatal fungus that can leave you feeling dead and at a loss of humanity. Body horror at its disgustingly finest.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror
The fact that three documentaries have already made my Top 10 list is kind of amazing to me, but what’s just as amazing is this absolute tome of knowledge that documentarian Kier-La Janisse has constructed here. Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a deep dive into what initially sounds like an off-hand branch of horror and examines how its tendrils bury deep into various other genres, literary movements, and cultural histories the world over. There’s not an excessive amount of flair nor medium experimentation going on here, but the sheer breadth of knowledge that Janisse covers makes it play like its own college-level anthropology course. A necessary watch for any self-proclaimed cinephile, horror fan or not.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Minari
Sometimes a soft-spoken film is all you need to make a profound statement, and that’s exactly what Lee Isaac Chung did here. There’s an episodic and slice-of-life nature to this whole endeavor, but Chung allows each of those moments to simmer and ride out their ultimate purpose. It’s an atypical portrait of the hollowness of the American Dream in that it reveals how it’s not one defining factor that makes it a difficult goal to achieve but rather it’s a concurrence of numerous trials and tribulations. It may feel episodic at times, but it adds up to a thorough and life-defining whole.
You can read my full review of the film here.
- Swan Song
No, not the Mahershala Ali vehicle (I still need to see that one); the Udo Kier one.
One of my other 2021 film festival surprises that I nearly passed up, and that I’m so glad I didn’t. At first glance it seems likely to be a typical indie dramedy that plays off more quirk than quip, yet director Todd Stephens reveals so, so much more is going on underneath its mildly campy surface. What seems like a silly road trip soon turns into a treatise on the historical shifts of queer identity, the thorny nuance of small-town life, the necessity to know one’s own history, and the pain of ultimately being abandoned to it. Swan Song is as tear-jerking as it is funny and Kier puts in a truly understated performance as a bitter aging queen. One of the most emotionally complex films I’ve seen in a long while, and that I can’t wait to revisit time and time again.
Honorable Mentions
Ultrasound and Seobok were some understated sci-fi that definitely left a mark, as were the physically-intense psychological thrillers like Catch the Fair One and The Novice. Kid Candidate took a humorously earnest look at GenZ political action, while Agnes make for head-scratching horror. Ballad of a White Cow and Zahorí were both moving bits of human drama, and Leos Carax made another striking comeback with the idiosyncratic musical Annette. And Pixar made wonderful waves with Luca – arguably one of their best and most affecting films in years.
2021 Films I Have Not Seen
Hooboy! Despite seeing loads of films at all those aforementioned festivals, I sort of missed out on the wider releases. A24’s return to theaters with The Green Knight, Zola, and The Tragedy of Macbeth completely passed me by, as did all of the big Cannes names like Titane, Benedetta, Red Rocket, Drive My Car, and A Hero. Other festival big-hitters I’ll have to wait on, as well, from Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Mass, and CODA. And of course, the animation geek in me is quite bummed to have missed Flee, Encanto, The Summit of the Gods, The Spine of Night, and Belle.
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