Original-Cin Year In Review: 2021’s Best and Worst Movies

By Original-Cin Staff

What a difference a year makes. Or not, thanks to the pandemic’s vicious little variant pal Omicron, which has ensured that any sense of normalcy the world might have hoped for going into 2022 has been circumscribed. At least for now.

Still, we got to watch another year’s worth of movies, both streaming and occasionally in theatres. Original-Cin was again omnipresent, its writers tallying the good and the bad, covering multiple festivals, interviewing filmmakers and performers, previewing and reviewing, all with the aim of helping our esteemed readers maximize their discretionary viewing time. And because it’s often (though not always) super-fun to do.

One key difference between O-C’s 2020 year-end roundup and its list for 2021: last year, titles such as David Byrne’s American Utopia, Sound of Metal, and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom emerged as top picks for several writers while director Chloé Zhao's Nomandland was singled out for praise by every one of us.

This year, only two films were mentioned twice: The Eyes of Tammy Faye (thumbs down) and The Power of the Dog (thumbs up). Which means seven writers writing to five categories deemed 33 separate titles (is that math correct?) worthy of mention… though not always deserving of applause. Whether that points to a lack of consistency or an abundance of gems is debatable, but it sure makes for interesting reading, and gives all of us lots of stuff to catch up on as deepest winter descends on the Northern Hemisphere.

As we look back on 2021 while moving forward into another year of features, documentaries, and shorts, Original-Cin would like to sincerely thank you, our readers, for checking us out and offering comments, feedback, and support on our site and in our social media orbit. It means a lot.

Jim Slotek

Favourite Film of 2021: Pig. Nicolas Cage plays an Oregon hermit — and ex-celebrity restaurateur — whose sole modest source of income is selling truffles unearthed by his porcine pet, who is violently kidnapped. Given that it’s Cage, we expect a rampage of revenge. Instead, we get a journey that morphs into a social critique of hipsterism and empty values. A thoughtful movie, with not a hint of hamminess.

Runner-up: The Card Counter. Oscar Isaac’s title character carries a world of pain behind his poker face. He’s served time for his part in the Abu Ghraib torture of Iraqi detainees and supports his under-the-radar post-prison lifestyle as a card sharp working casinos across the country. And then he meets a young man whose pain dovetails with his own and sees a chance for redemption. Paul Schrader tells this simmering tale masterfully with spare, powerful dialogue.

The Card Counter

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: Above Suspicion. We tend to think British actors can do American accents with ease. But Emelia Clarke — a.k.a. Game of Thrones’ Mother of Dragons — is in over her head trying to play a Kentucky trailer-park drug addict. A lot more is wrong with this tale, based on an actual 1989 case of an FBI agent (Jack Huston) who has an affair with an informant and then kills her. Director Phillip Noyce’s bar was set by films like Rabbit-Proof Fence and The Bone Collector. This may be his low bar.

Best Discovery of the Year: I’m Your Man. Consider it “discovered” now (it’s on the short list for an International Oscar as Germany’s submission). But I knew nothing about it during TIFF when I watched it on a whim. Who knew Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens spoke (British accented) German? Maren Eggert plays a researcher who’s coerced by her superiors to beta test an android “partner” (Stevens) who’s programmed to respond to her needs. His growing self-awareness complicates the experiment and makes us question the very definition of “relationship.” A lovely film about being human.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: Nope. Yep, that’s the name of Jordan Peele’s next horror film, due in July. He hasn’t let me down yet, though the studio is being extremely coy with the premise (all that’s been released is a poster showing a dark, scary-looking cloud). The film stars Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yuen. Shut up and take my money.

Linda Barnard

Favourite Film of 2021: The Lost Daughter. Olivia Colman does stellar work in this twisting psychological drama as Leda, a midlife academic on a working holiday in Greece whose beach interactions with a Greek-American family spark torment over decisions she made as a young mother. Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a strong debut behind the camera, while Colman conveys Leda’s every emotion with boldness and nuance in a performance that’s a wonder to behold. Jessie Buckley plays the younger Leda and Dakota Johnson is the struggling young mother who holds up a mirror to Leda’s life in this powerful film about motherhood and memory.

Flee

Runner-up: The Power of the Dog. Director Jane Campion’s first film in 12 years is a visually powerful, brooding drama that has echoes of her 1993 Palme d’Or-winner The Piano with sweeping landscapes, repressed desire — and yes, a piano. True to Campion’s style, the story (she also wrote the screenplay) unfolds slowly and deliberately, never telegraphing intent as tension builds and compounds in this contemporary Western about ranching brothers Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch in arguably his best work) and his gentlemanly sibling George (Jesse Plemons). George’s emotionally fragile wife, Rose (Kirsten Dunst) feels the harshness of Phil’s bullying but fears what his cruelty might mean to her tender-hearted son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Bold eyeliner and a weak plot, Jessica Chastain is all-in for her portrayal of televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker and her marriage to grasping TV preacher Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield). I had high hopes for this film, but it tumbles into biopic tropes and never digs deep enough into the messy areas of the Bakker’s relationship.

Best Discovery of the Year: Flee. The movie that touched me most deeply through its deeply felt human story about the heartbreaking trials of a refugee child was told using animation. Writer/director Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s true story — which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance — centres on his high school friend Amin, who slowly reveals all he has kept secret for years since making it out of Afghanistan. Powerful and tragic, there is still optimism and joy here.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: Avatar 2. I admit it, I’m a nerd. James Cameron’s Avatar 2 is finally being released next December after three years of shooting and I’m ready to ride my ikran into the unknown.

Thom Ernst

Favourite Film of 2021: Director Jane Campion wins big with The Power of the Dog, a revisionist Western that grinds out a template that could (and does) veer in all directions. Campion’s film plays like a three-act orchestral piece building towards the booming conclusion of a fired cannon. There is no guessing where Campion will take us; an East of Eden scenario infused with the revisionism of McCabe and Mrs. Miller, the lure of Brokeback Mountain, and a twist of sadistic manipulation that feels like justice.

The Power of the Dog

Runner-up: Dune. Saw it twice. Both times in a theatre. (At the time of compiling this list, I have not seen West Side Story nor Licorice Pizza. So, list subject to change).

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: Halloween Kills. In 2018, director David Gordon Green reinvented the slash-by-numbers Halloween franchise into something bordering on contemplative and artful. But Halloween Kills, the second in Green’s reboot trilogy, veers so far outside traditional boundaries of the genre that its faceless killer is in constant competition to be noticed. There are still some good scenes which makes the overall failed outcome all the more disappointing.

Best Discovery of the Year: Director Mickey Reece, whose film, Agnes is one of the most audacious yet understated pictures of the year. Previously, I’ve been taken by Reece’s Climate of the Hunter, a weird, unexpected comedy about vampires and overdressed cottagers. Reece has made over 30 films. I’ve seen two. Therefore: I discovered him.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: The Black Phone. Children in jeopardy are often cheap tricks, but this one promises all sorts of thrills, including Ethan Hawke as a nasty, scary dude.

Karen Gordon

Favourite Film of 2021: Licorice Pizza. The most exuberant movie of the year. Paul Thomas Anderson’s story about two oddly matched misfits in the San Fernando Valley in 1973 was everything I’ve come to expect from Anderson and his particular storytelling style. It's complicated and charismatic with some of my favourite performances of the year. After a tough year, it was tonic.

Licorice Pizza

Runner-up: The Worst Person in The World. This will make it sound cliché, but Norwegian writer/director Joachim Trier’s movie is essentially about a woman in her 30s trying to find herself. Trier is a sophisticated storyteller, and has made something that’s smart, funny, with depth that’s both joyful and melancholy. Actors Renate Reinsve — who won best actress at Cannes for her role here — and Anders Danielsen Lie lead a cast of characters who stayed with me long after I’d left theatre.

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: Being the Ricardos. Flat and yet manic, surprisingly lifeless, and arguably miscast, the movie never takes off, and didn’t once make me think of the Ricardos. It did make me think of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote and directed it. He has a particular writing style, and in this case, it overshadowed the subjects.

Best Discovery of the Year: Maria Chapdelaine. Quebec director Sebastien Pilote’s adaptation of the 1913 novel about a teen of marrying age living with her family in a spare farmhouse in Quebec is visually gorgeous, and perfectly cast. It’s long and quiet but Pilote’s patient storytelling is worth every minute.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: The Northman. Writer/director Robert Eggers makes meticulously plotted and wildly unusual movies that are crazy-fun. The Northman is a Viking revenge movie, starring Alexander Skarsgärd (and, as you can see in the trailer, his ridiculously cut abs), Claes Bang, and Björk, alongside some of Eggers returning favourites like Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe. I’m already counting the sleeps till I get to see it.

Kim Hughes

Favourite Film of 2021: Encanto. It’s not shifting cinema’s tectonic plates. But the dazzling 60th animated film from Walt Disney Animation Studios was the one that most transported me to another time and place. The filmmakers’ remarkable attention to detail, assembling a group of experts to advise on the “anthropology, costume design, botany, music, language and architecture,” of Colombia where the story is set, ensured that Encanto was both immersive and enchanting. Eight original songs by golden-touch composer Lin-Manuel Miranda buoying a lovely story about family were icing on the cake.

Encanto

Runner-up: The Sparks Brothers. Even those unfamiliar with the legendary musical Mael Brothers were powerless against the outsize charms of director’s Edgar Wright’s hilarious, exhilarating, bizarre, beguiling, and brilliantly told documentary which was elevated by an insane list of commentators and contemporaries and, crucially by Ron and Russell Mael themselves, whose tack-sharp recollections fire the surreal, stranger-than-fiction narrative.

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: The Matrix Resurrections. A consummate waste of time, money, and talent.

Best Discovery of the Year: Not exactly a discovery in a world containing Guillermo del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, but Mexican cinema continues to captivate and impress. Multiple titles released in 2021, including but not limited to Identifying Features, New Order, A Cop Movie and Prayers for the Stolen, thoughtfully explored so many aspects of human life while pointing up the brutal inequities and systemic injustices plaguing an otherwise extraordinary country.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: Don’t Worry Darling. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, was fabulous, and her follow-up sounds appropriately weird and thrilling. In Don’t Worry Darling, a 1950s-era couple, played by the great Florence Pugh and musician-cum-actor Harry Styles, reside in an experimental utopian community that is about to go sideways in what promises to be an electrifying mix of horror and humour.

Liam Lacey

Favourite Film of 2021: Judas and the Black Messiah. Shaka King’s film resurrects the story of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), a 22-year-old Chicago community organizer and political firebrand who was assassinated by the Chicago police, with the help of the FBI, in 1969. The masterstroke here is the point-of-view of a second tragic figure, his betrayer, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) as a man in bondage to his shameful complicity.

Runner-up: Drive My Car. There’s a lingering afterglow to Ryûsuke Hamaguchi study of the intersection of art and life about a repressed middle-aged theatre actor and director who shares his grief for his late, serially unfaithful wife with a taciturn young woman driver. Though the script is based on a Haruki Murakami story, there’s so much dialogue from the play Uncle Vanya that Anton Chekhov deserves a co-writing credit.

Black Conflux

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: The Eyes of Tammy Faye. An inane biopic from director Michael Showalter (The Big Sick) that misses the bigger questions of American right-wing celebrity cultism and celebrates televangelist Tammy Faye Baker (Jessica Chastain, under sedimentary layers of makeup) because she was plucky and not homophobic like her husband and his religious huckster pals.

Best Discovery of the Year: Black Conflux. Canadian filmmaker Nicole Dorsey’s debut feature film meshes two genres: the predatory male loner as protagonist (Psycho, Peeping Tom, Taxi Driver) and the young woman’s coming-of-age story. In an area of popular film studies over-burdened by commentary, Dorsey’s ending brings the strands together in a stirring grace note.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: Killers of the Flower Moon. Martin Scorsese directs Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Jesse Plemons and Lily Gladstone in this Western, an adaptation of David Grann’s non-fiction bestseller about the founding of the FBI, connected to the mysterious death of Osage Native Americans in Oklahoma, who had recently become wealthy from oil strikes on their land. Tantoo Cardinal, Brendan Fraser, and John Lithgow are in the cast, Robbie Robertson supplies the music and the peerless Thelma Schoonmaker edits. The budget is reportedly around $200 million.

Bonnie Laufer

Favourite Film of 2021: I’m declaring a tie. First, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast absolutely blew me away. I was swept up in the black and white epic about a sense of belonging and family loyalty. Stunning direction from Branagh and the performances of the entire cast, top notch.

I also can’t stop talking and thinking about tick, tick… BOOM! Directorial debut from theater god Lin-Manuel Miranda, I’ve watched this movie three times and will likely watch it again. Andrew Garfield is brilliant as playwright-genius Jonathan Larson AND he can sing! Not always uplifting but hopeful, tick, tick… BOOM! brought this theater loving gal a lot of joy.

Belfast

Runner-up: This one surprised me! I was transfixed by The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Directed by Joel Coen, it is the first film directed by a Coen without his brother's involvement. This version of Macbeth was absolutely brilliant, and I only wish I had seen it while I was in high school. I might have had a better appreciation for Shakespeare!

Biggest Disappointment of 2021: Space Jam: A New Legacy was so awful I wouldn’t even recommend it to parents who need to put their kids in a time-out! NBA star LeBron James teams with the Looney Tunes gang in this animation-meets-live action movie and what a mess of a stinker. I think LeBron should just stick to playing ball.

Best Discovery of the Year: Nineteen-year-old British actor Emilia Jones (Locke & Key) and her spectacular performance in CODA was unforgettable. The film, which centres around a hearing child of deaf parents and a deaf brother, had me in ugly tears. Jones not only learned American Sign Language for the role but also took singing lessons to present one of the most moving scenes on film I’ve seen in a long time.

Most Looking Forward to in 2022: I’m going to make it a Tom Cruise double bill! With so many delayed openings I am in the mood for some speed and good old-fashioned action. Can’t wait to finally see Top Gun: Maverick and Mission Impossible 7!