The Bastard King – 8.5

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This is sort of a Don’t Look Up for lions: why are we fighting over something trivial like different eye color when our entire species faces extinction? The story could not have been told more intimately if the director had used animation. Extraordinary documentary footage of two lion prides in southern Tanzania shows the lions making love, raising cubs, hunting giraffes and zebras, squaring off, killing each other and suffering the effects of climate change and habitat destruction. A sepia-tinted palette and percussive music raised the art quotient above a simple documentary. The anthropomorphism was a bit heavy, but not if you see the blue- and yellow-eyed lions as stand-ins for the humans in the audience.

The Phantom of the Open – 8

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I laughed, then I cried, then laughed then cried some more. With so many laugh-out-loud one-liners and tried-but-true heart tugs, it was easy to overlook the absurdities in the amazingly “based-on-a-true-story” plot (to begin with, that Maurice Flitcroft could shoot a 123 in his first round of golf). Mark Rylance is pitch-perfect in the role of a middle-aged naif who shoots for the stars, and Sally Hawkins is at her empathetic nicest as his wife. The disco-dancing sons are a treat, as well.

Top Ten 2021

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Without much effort, my Top Ten for 2021 could all be movies made outside the U.S.; only a personal affinity for Don’t Look Up, a movie more scorned by the critics, prevented a shutout. Whether this had anything to do with Covid restrictions on film production, I don’t know. I do know that it relates to my preference for movies about real people and real-life situations, a genre that seems to mainly reside outside Hollywood. I’ve relegated the single most affecting movie I saw, In the Same Breath (made in the U.S. but filmed largely in China), to a separate category of Documentaries and will list the ten best feature films in alphabetical order:

A Hero The title is just as ambiguous as the numerous moral issues addressed directly and obliquely in this warm but chilly thriller from Iran.
Belfast Wonderful actors inhabit Kenneth Branagh’s recalled childhood and a historic time in Van Morrison’s Northern Irish capital.
Don’t Look Up  On the one hand, this is the most ‘unrealistic’ film on this list. On the other hand, it’s the starkest depiction of the world I feel I’m living in.
Drive My Car Quietly engrossing, this film about theater delved the deepest into humanity, both Japanese and universal.
Hand of God Paolo Sorrentino’s specifically Neapolitan reminiscence was good-hearted and colorful, producing smile after smile.
I’m Your Man A German thesis movie in which the recognizable and gripping human dimensions made one forget the “sci-fi” setting.
The Lost Daughter Elena Ferrante’s world of psychological quandaries, albeit in Greece, not Italy, intensely conveyed by Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman.
Parallel Mothers Pedro Almodovar and Penelope Cruz–what could go wrong?–and some Spanish history, routine but masterful.
The Power of the Dog For plot, bravura acting, serious (New Zealand) scenery, this was the one to think about, talk about and debate.
The Worst Person in the World A clever scrapbook of an immensely appealing Renate Reinsve’s relationships in an everyday Oslo.

Best Documentaries
In the Same Breath A literally breath-taking account of Covid in Wuhan and a depressing coda of Covid in America.
Velvet Underground Todd Haynes’s direction created a visual counterpart to the music, mixing archival footage and reminiscent interviews.
Lost Leonardo Documented all sides in the Salvador Mundi saga, letting the viewer come to their own conclusion.

Honorable Mention
Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
CODA
Munich: The Edge of War
Tragedy of Macbeth
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

The Worst Person in the World – 8

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Fortunately, the “worst person in the world” is not Renate Reinsve, who is the most approachably beautiful movie heroine of the year, including Penelope Cruz and Caitriona Balfe. But more than her Julie, this is a film about relationships: how they start, how they develop, and how they end. Director Joachim Trier tells the story in 14 discrete chapters, most, but not all, about Julie’s search for self-understanding while touching, sneakily, on serious subjects like art and death. It’s all very European, even Proustian.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn – 7.5

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A thrillingly different Eastern European film, this one from Romania with lots of blah shots of Bucharest and other social commentary. In Part 1 we meet the teacher, whose porn selfie with her husband has gotten loose on the Internet, as she wanders the streets, like Leopold Bloom in Ulysses. Part 2 I didn’t get, archival footage illustrating random words and phrases, very Romanian. Part 3 is the best Covid film I’ve seen, as masked and socially distanced parents debate the teacher’s job status, with polarization, misinformation, facts and prejudices in one wild cacophony. Seemingly filmed on an iPhone, the movie kept me wonderfully off-balance all the way.

Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom – 6

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A sweet, rather predictable tale of a cynical and lazy city teacher who is assigned to “the most remote school in the world” and discovers teaching, and himself. It was lovely to see the ghos and the landscapes of Bhutan, and it brought back memories of my year in Libya with the Peace Corps; but it is hard to see this standing in the company of the other Oscar foreign film nominees.

Dune – 4

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Eight thousand years from now, with all the technological advances, they still fight like the Norman Conquest, or maybe the siege of Troy? Absurdity piles on absurdity, so much that we might as well be watching a comic book. If the .0001 per cent of the population that hasn’t been reduced to drone ant level were at least interesting, we might go along for the ride, but Timothee Chalamet appears to have been beamed in from another millenium and missed all his acting classes. The worst thing about sitting through this movie is finding out at the end that we have only seen Part 1.

House of Gucci – 7.5

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An unabashedly over-the-top depiction of the Gucci family saga, with megawatt performances by Lady Gaga, Jared Leto, Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons–the whole family except Adam Driver, a hole in the middle, who acted mainly by changing his hairstyle. There’s no point in quibbling over the plot, because it was a true story. If you could overlook all the cigarette smoke, you could revel in the fantastic set designs and fashions and enjoy the ride, as the actors seemed to be doing.
[Interestingly, a credit at the end said that no consideration had been paid for the use of tobacco products. Someone knew I had become suspicious!]

The Velvet Underground – 8

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Directorially brilliant, Todd Haynes’s portrait of the seminal punk rock group packs the wallop of the Velvets’ best music. He mixes archival footage from the era with wonderful modern interviews, all the while explaining how their songs came to be and, best of all, how they sounded. Like many, I knew three or four of their songs and was vaguely aware of their Warhol connection; so this was an education about a time and place–a scene–similar to the world of Patti Smith’s Just Kids. The movie pounded just as hard, fast and wild as a show at Max’s Kansas City.

Parallel Mothers – 7.8

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Not a major Almodovar, but any story he chooses to tell is worth watching, and every minute spent with Penelope Cruz is a pleasure. The story of the two mothers and their babies is gripping, seemingly enough in itself for a film. The story of Franco’s victims is also moving, but what does one story have to do with the other? Almodovar is a master craftsman, and it’s another pleasure to watch how he ignores narrative and cuts from scenes in ways that I doubt would be approved in film school.