20. West Side Story, B = this movie is directed brilliantly and it is great to look at. However, I couldn’t wait to get out of the theater. I felt the themes of the movie were dated and I just couldn’t get into it. I’ve already seen the original West Side Story and know the songs and story. The remake bored me.

21. Nightmare Alley, grade D+ = Style over substance. Great art direction but lousy story and plot. Huge disappointment. The most overrated movie of the year. The movie is about Carnival workers but somehow managed to be boring. Skip this one. It’s only getting some good reviews because the director won an Oscar.

22. Ghostbuster Afterlife, grade B = This movie was a lot better than expected. It reminded me of Poltergeist and The Frighteners from 1980s. It has a genuine 1980s feel about it and the movie just works. It's very nostalgic and the special effects are decent. The problem with the movie is that everything is pretty good but nothing is great. The original Ghostbusters do make an appearance.

#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)

Forget the #Oscars!
Here’s… the 2021 #JohnnieAwards

BEST PICTURE: SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD (Stephen Kijak)

BEST DIRECTOR: Zack Snyder (ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE)

BEST ACTOR: Félix Lefebvre (SUMMER OF 85)

BEST ACTRESS: Helena Howard (SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Nick Krause (SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Elena Kampouris (SHOPLIFTERS OF THE WORLD)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: SAINT-NARCISSE (Martin Girard, Bruce LaBruce)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: WHITE AS SNOW (Claire Barre, Pascal Bonitzer, Anne Fontaine)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: ANNETTE (Caroline Champetier)

BEST FILM EDITING: ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE (David Brenner)

MOST ARTISTIC AND UNIQUE PRODUCTION DESIGN AND VISUAL EFFECTS: ABOUT ENDLESSNESS

BEST MUSIC SCORE: ARMY OF THIEVES (Hans Zimmer, Steve Mazzaro)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: ASPHALT GODDESS (Julian Hernandez)

BEST GAY FILM: SUMMER OF 85 (Francois Ozon)

Saw "Reminscence" (2021). Visually pleasing but everything else was weak and cringe. Should have been called "Exposition."

Fascinating to hear that its screenplay had been on the Black List of top unproduced screenplays. They probably needed to further 'adapt' the screenplay into a movie.

32.Firestarter (Keith Thomas); grade: C+
33.Memory (Martin Campbell); grade: C
34.Montana Story (Scott McGehee, David Siegel); grade: F

Two B-movies and an American Indie film deal in different ways with child abuse. None do so sufficiently, even as they tap into subterranean political fears. From best to worst (essentially in order of cinematically satisfying catharsis): 1) Firestarter streamlines typically overpacked Stephen King material. A secret government agency tortures two young adults in experiments that transform them into psychic human weapons. They parent a messianic child with nuclear-potential powers. Zac Efron’s perfect physique makes him an impressive Daddy and a Zaddy. When he unleashes his and his daughter’s rage—in refreshingly low-fi practical effects—it conveys something resonant about parental authority compared to all-too-believable government treachery (Gloria Reuben resonates as the villain). 2) Meanwhile, Campbell’s overlong Memory is the best directed of the 3. It emphasizes the determinism of trauma in Liam Neeson’s amorality as a hitman who finds his moral center: “I don’t hurt children.” His quest to destroy those that do takes him to the realm of the rich and powerful, those above the law and moral law. “My son was weak. You are not my son,” threatens Monica Bellucci. 3) Finally, McGehee-Siegel tie child abuse to abuse of the environment in an aesthetically constipated film. Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague play estranged activist sister and gay brother with clenched expressions. They replace family obligation and forgiveness with murder, justified by their respective self-righteousness and guilt. The movie’s final shot could have given release after the dour resolution, but the directors euthanize the cinematic potential.

35.Downton Abbey: A New Era (Simon Curtis); grade: F

Downton Abbey is anti-cinema. The latest installment in the franchise is directed by the abominable Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn, The Woman in Gold), but Julian Fellowes is the real show-runner here. Fellowes learned nothing from working with master auteur Robert Altman on the surprise hit Godford Park that made Downton Abbey possible—and unacceptable. As in Gosford Park, the invasion into an Upstairs-Downstairs world by movie celebrities rings Fellowes’ bells. In Gosford, Altman explored the sources of devastating fantasy while Fellowes now indulges it (but without offending his audience of aristocracy queens). A filmmaker cites Abel Gance’s titanic (now hard-to-find) Napoleon as the impetus for filming a silent movie on location at Downton abbey. Then, Fellowes ripping off Singin’ in the Rain, the filmmaker ludicrously makes the transition to sound without filming in a studio. Like the MCU, the Downton Abbey franchise is television that makes no room for artists or narrative fulfillment. There’s not an expressive edit or shot in the film (two characters exclaim over a French Riviera beach view, and Curtis cuts to a reverse shot in which the actors’ heads are in focus but the view is not). Like serialized TV, it’s all anti-climaxes (Will Mary cheat on her husband? Does Cora have cancer? Is Robert illegitimate? Will Thomas get laid? No, no, no, and who knows?). It completes the transformation from movie fantasy to TV’s total commodification.