#TheNineWorthies - 9 Best Films of 2021
https://rateyourmusic.com/list/johnd...ovies-of-2021/
1.Shoplifters of the World (Stephen Kijak): The soundtrack of songs by The Smiths—the greatest band of all time—both expresses a day of revelations for its characters returning home from freshman-year at college—a primal experience—while the narrative analyzes the music of The Smiths (and all pop-music enthusiasm), so that the band’s sub-cult subversion and compassion revitalizes hetero rom-com ritual and creates definitive Myths of young adult self-discovery
2.Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Zack Snyder) / Army of the Dead (Zack Snyder) / Army of Thieves (Matthias Schweighöfer): Zack Snyder’s Autumn Cycle confronts private grief (the primal familial scene of impotence in Army of the Dead) but expresses it as a universal longing repressed within the culture (the burial of the safe-maker in Army of Thieves)—and then fulfills those films’ primers on Wagner’s Ring Cycle and their redemptive sacrifices through the awesome spiritual spectacle (Good and Evil, Power and Love personified) of Zack Snyder’s Justice League—the very existence of which is a modern-day miracle
3.Summer of 85 (Francois Ozon): Ozon deconstructs narrative and p.o.v. while simultaneously achieving high melodrama and ravishing romanticism—a real tear-jerker—by so completely intertwining transgression-and-sentiment that the year’s most cathartic scene (see the title of the film’s source material) leads to gay reckoning with mortality and earns existential hope—Ozon finally synthesizing the influences of Hitchcock and Rohmer to create his best film (so far)
4.Asphalt Goddess (Julian Hernandez): MVP Alejandro Cantu’s soaring camera and graphically striking compositions affords operatic largesse to Hernandez’s gay empathy and the majesty of Tragedy to the economically and sexually oppressed female barrio gang members whose unfulfilled longings twist the value of loyalty and their own feminine instincts into murderous betrayal
5.Saint-Narcisse (Bruce LaBruce): Philology 101(a) - LaBruce piles on sexy taboo (twin-cest) on top of kinky taboo (lesbian-cest) and pop history (from The Rolling Stones’ Stick Fingers to De Palma’s Obsession and Carrie) to interrogate Western culture’s central myths—classical-Greek and Catholic—and uncover its kernel of truth (and cinema’s essence in montage)—destructive narcissism replaced by the social imagination of gratuitous Love
6.White as Snow (Anne Fontaine): Philology 101(b) - Fontaine’s naughty conceit in which a drop-dead-gorgeous woman draws out the affection and goodness of her seven admirers and the fatal jealousy of her mother-figure nemesis reworks fairy tale tropes and symbolism to unexpectedly discern a Catholic (Marian) essence—so fun and beautiful it’s worthy as an addendum to Neil Jordan’s masterpieces A Company of Wolves and Byzantium
7.Sublet (Eytan Fox): At his best, Fox expresses questions of Jewish identity (the search for home and longing for the Other in God) through gay desire and surprising catharsis, which here manifests itself in a tourism journalist and his younger air-bnb host exposing first their deep wounds and needs and then healing them through intimacy
8.About Endlessness (Roy Andersson): The artifice of Andersson’s aesthetic creates hilarious vignettes out of spiritual realities, by which the indignities of daily life take on the gravity of cosmic persecution, amounting to a deconstruction of the most mysterious of icons—the Cross—from the vantage of the film’s opening apocalypse (like a sequel to his You the Living) and the book-ending infinite horizon
9.Annette (Leos Carax): In a year of 30 pretty terrific films, Carax’s enervating and cinematically astounding musical film anchors this best-of list because its climax achieves a jaw-dropping aesthetic coup that pulls together all of Carax’s gambits to express a profoundly moral denunciation that identifies the limits of love and forgiveness for a nihilistic era desperately in need of miracles and compassion
Runners-up (alphabetical): Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude); Casanova, Last Love (Benoit Jacques); Cliff Walkers (Zhang Yimou); Coming 2 America (Craig Brewer); A Cop Movie (Alonso Ruizpalacios); Cry Macho (Clint Eastwood); Dear Comrades (Andrei Konchalovsky); France (Bruno Dumont); French Exit (Azazel Jacobs); Georgetown (Christoph Waltz); Keep an Eye Out (Quentin Dupieux); Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson); Love Is Love Is Love (Eleanor Coppola); Mandibles (Quentin Dupieux); Pig (Michael Sarnoski); Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (Johannes Roberts); Sin (Andrei Konchalovsky); Sin Hijos (Roberto Fiesco); Sophie Jones (Jessie Barr); Together (Stephen Daldry)