Movies are back! Okay, technically they never went anywhere—but theaters are reopened in most places in the U.S., meaning we have a summer of big blockbusters and hopefully some interesting smaller movies to look forward to. Some worthy films were also released prior to our great vaccine summer, or just in time for it. To that end, with half the year done, here are my favorite movies that have been released so far this year. (Note: Some of these films were eligible for, and included in, the 2020 Oscars, but we are counting them as 2021 films because, well, they had their U.S. release in 2021.)
About Endlessness
Swedish avant garde filmmaker and commercial director Roy Andersson’s latest collection of melancholy, wearily comedic vignettes considers the mundanity of life as it bumps up against the profound. Or rather as it echoes the profound, becomes it, outlives it. A woman waiting on a train platform for a late pickup is given as much consideration as a phalanx of Nazi POWs marching toward Siberia, or man tied to a post, about to be executed. Andersson is coy about the film’s deeper meanings, until he isn’t. One student, sitting in a dorm room with a classmate, expounds upon the endlessness of energy—about how our deaths do not create a vacuum, but rather a transference, and then another, and another, into eternity. The characters in About Endlessness tend to shuffle along, hobbled by age or ailment or a broken high heel. But time eventually hastens them into what’s next, same as it pushed them into Andersson’s frame for a brief, compassionate, pathetic glimpse of life in the world. (On demand)
Acasa, My Home
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Another bracingly immersive documentary out of Romania (Collective was one of the most striking films of 2020), Radu Ciorniciuc’s Acasa, My Home chronicles three years in the life of a poor Roma family living in the margins in Bucharest. Gica Enache, his wife Niculina, their nine children, and assorted animals have made a makeshift, off-the-grid home in a huge wildlife preserve splayed out incongruously in the middle of the city. Once meant to be a reservoir, the expanse has since become a thriving, marshy ecosystem, with Gica—vain, impulsive, and certainly a little reckless—and his clan as its unofficial stewards. Civic demand eventually comes to bear on the family, and Ciorniciuc intimately tracks their rocky transition into urban living. Acasa, My Home is an essential document of a nation ever in flux, and of what individual lives are disrupted and cast aside in the churn of progress. (On demand)
Army of the Dead
After Zack Snyder’s turgid and strangely satisfying director’s cut of Justice League, it was nice to see him scale down a bit and return to the zombie genre. Army of the Dead has a clever construction. It’s a heist movie set in Las Vegas—just as Ocean’s Eleven was—that also invents a compelling new mythology for the walking undead. The cast is sharp—including comedian Tig Notaro, who was near-seamlessly digitally grafted into the movie after filming had wrapped, to replace a problematic actor—and the set pieces are gnarly fun. No Snyder film is perfect, but Army of the Dead is thus far the best big-budget popcorn that’s been served to us this year. (Netflix)
I Care a Lot
J Blakeson’s cynical look at government-appointed caretakers exploiting their wards is a nifty, mean little con movie. Sporting a razor sharp blonde bob and wielding a vape pen like a dagger, Rosamund Pike finds, by my count, her second great post-Gone Girl role. (The other was in the woefully under-seen A Private War.) She’s laser focused as cruel grifter Marla Grayson, employing her regal haughtiness to bruising effect. Blakeson may indulge in a few issue-movie clichés, but Pike maintains the film’s cool composure throughout. It’s also a pleasure to watch Dianne Wiest gradually reveal her seemingly hapless character’s flintier side. Fast and taut, I Care a Lot is a welcome surprise, an efficient entertainment about an ongoing real-life crime. (Netflix)
In the Heights
A joyful burst of vibrant cityscapes and catchy songs, Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical is an improvement on the stage show. On film, the story’s celebration of New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood gains real closeness and texture, even as the film leans into its corniest tendencies. Persuasively performed by a host of talented, up-and-coming actors—like Anthony Ramos, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, and Corey Hawkins—In the Heights may be just the right blast of air-conditioning to welcome the wary back to theaters. Or, if they simply must, they can give into the past year’s inertia and just watch it at home. (In theaters and on HBO Max on June 11)
The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
A wistful YA what-if, Ian Samuels’s sweet, soulful teen film handles a newly trendy trope—the Groundhog Day-esque time loop plot seen recently in Palm Springs, Happy Death Day, and Russian Doll—with a disarming grace and understatement. Leads Kyle Allen and Kathryn Newton (whom you should also watch in last year’s terrific body-swap horror-comedy Freaky) enjoy winning chemistry as their two lonely locals repeat the same day together. Lev Grossman’s screenplay, adapted from his own short story, has its kids speaking wittily but believably, while Samuels’s gentle direction allows for moments of true coming-of-age poignance. (Amazon Prime)
Moffie
Reminiscent of Claire Denis’s elusive masterpiece Beau Travail, Oliver Hermanus’s dreamy-dreadful film trades Denis’s almost mystical, danceful meditation for a bleaker grounding in reality. The film is based on Andre Carl van der Merwe’s memoir about his time as a closeted young soldier in the white South African army during apartheid. The army’s horrific enforcement of South Africa’s stringently racist policies commingles terribly with its violent homophobia, as young Moffie (expressive newcomer Kai Luke Brümmer) engages in a tentative flirtation with a fellow draftee. A story of repression forced into the service of an even broader oppression, Moffie is a sorrowful observation of the forces that enable and sustain white supremacy and patriarchy, a damning portrait of a nation’s past and the whole world’s present. (On demand)
The Truffle Hunters
A bunch of lively old men in Northern Italy take their even livelier dogs out into the woods in search of valuable truffles. That is pretty much the gist of Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s simple but transfixing documentary, surveying a micro economy as it goes from bucolic ramble to the fussy order of fine-dining tables. But the film sighs and whispers with other, more ineffable meaning. It’s a consideration of the ongoing conflict between the local and the global, between the traditions of the past and the sweep of modernity. It’s also about nothing more universal than aging and loneliness, and the creatures we cling to—human or canine—as the great dark glides toward us. (Not currently available for rental, sadly)
Quo Vadis, Aida?
Jasmila Žbanić’s devastating but restrained film about the Srebrenica massacre of 1995—in which over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered by Serbian forces—is staged with harrowing immediacy. The film, chilling and measured, unfolds toward inexorable doom as Aida, a translator working with UN, struggles to keep her husband and sons safe. The film doesn’t play out in real time, but it feels like it does. While Serbian forces close in on the makeshift refugee camp set up by understaffed Dutchbat soldiers working on behalf of the UN, every moment of indecision and panic is keenly felt. Lead actor Jasna Đuričić fiercely embodies that desperation, her crisp professionalism gradually giving way to something primal. Quo Vadis, Aida? is a furious, shattering invective against the passive immorality of rigid protocol, the disastrous and inhumane prizing of political neutrality over lives desperately in need of saving. (On demand)
The White Tiger
Ramin Bahrani’s film incisively adapts Aravind Adiga’s prize-winning novel about a young striver, Balram (Adarsh Gourav), making his way up in the world in turn-of-the-millenium India. A dark satire of the gnarled social and financial systems of the subcontinent, The White Tiger is a propulsive bildungsroman that is ever conscious of its harder-to-dramatize grand themes. It’s old-fashioned, in that way, even though Bahrani successfully uses plenty of contemporary film vernacular. Gourav, a rising Bollywood star, deftly maneuvers Balram’s evolution, his ethical framework shifting as he is scrambles his way into a world of wealth and access typically denied of those in his caste. The White Tiger is a thriller, a black comedy, a tragic drama. It’s an epic, really—one told in the relative economy of a two-hour runtime. (Netflix)
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June 10, 2021 at 07:59PM
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The 10 Best Movies of 2021, So Far - Vanity Fair
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