By Jen Johans
An Introduction:
For me, it really starts in November. That's when I begin to draft my first tentative, incomplete list of the best films I've seen all year and it's also when more screeners land in my inbox and door. No longer covering festivals and instead, spending most of my year revisiting older titles to prepare for my podcast Watch With Jen, November is also when I survey my friends and colleagues to figure out which films I should prioritize, and how much I still need to watch to not only vote in three different critics organizations but create this list overall.
Boring bookkeeping aside, however, it's also when I do what I most love as a film buff, which is to go beyond frequently listed favorites to search for buried treasure to share with others. Every year, it seems, there are films that a majority of critics loved that, for whatever reason, just don't register with me nearly as much as others I feel a personal connection to that are either overlooked or under-praised by the traditional press. Of course, in this pursuit, I'm also limited by which films were available to be safely screened for me by my deadline. (For example, you won't read about “West Side Story” or “Parallel Mothers” in this article because I haven't seen them yet.)
Still, featuring everything from big studio franchise fare to the smallest indies, docs, or foreign titles, this compilation of 2021 favorites is much more diverse than the list I created a year ago. Another difference I've noticed is the sheer number of recurring themes that seem to exist within these films, regardless of who made them, where, and how.
From “American Graffiti” to “Three Colors: Red,” fittingly for the movies, which is a medium that Roger Ebert famously described as “a machine that generates empathy,” one of my main screen obsessions has always been tales of unexpected human connection or stories where characters you would never expect to cross paths and connect suddenly do. Whether it's in “Drive My Car” or “Language Lessons,” such films show up multiple times in this list and doubtlessly, have taken on more poignancy during the global pandemic, as did my interest in films and characters who are all grappling with the past.
From unearthed footage captured in the tumultuous 1960s that's been edited together in music documentaries like “The Beatles: Get Back” to tales of flawed individuals utterly haunted by their pasts, as we move forward yet stand still in life in the time of Covid, we increasingly find ourselves needing to look back.
Rather than rank my favorites in arbitrary numerical order, I thought that it would make much more sense to write about them naturally by theme and focus on the ways that (for me, at least) so many of these films relate to and/or interact with one another. More than just rattling off these titles as options for a quick watch, while I know you probably won't love them all, I hope you'll find some new favorites from among this list to eagerly look back on as a snapshot of how art tried to make sense of life in 2021.
The films you'll read about here (in order of how they're dissected) include: “The Power of the Dog,” “Old Henry,” “The Harder They Fall,” “The Dry,” “Wrath of Man,” “The Many Saints of Newark,” “No Time To Die,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Mass,” “Test Pattern,” “Flee,” “The Velvet Underground,” “The Beatles: Get Back,” “Summer of Soul (...or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” “Drive My Car,” “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” “The Worst Person in the World,” “Licorice Pizza,” “Cyrano,” “Language Lessons,” “Luca,” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines.”
(Read the rest of Jen’s essay on Film Intution here: https://reviews.filmintuition.com/2022/01/FavoriteFilmsOf2021.html)
