We went to the movies more this year than we did last, or at least I did. It was incredible to be back in a theater. For me, there are few things as soothing as leaning back in an auditorium seat, wondering if I’ve dropped my cell phone, and elbowing my boyfriend to stay awake one-third of the way through the film that’s playing.
This year experienced numerous releases of last year’s movies, which were held off from theatrical runs due to the COVID-19 outbreak. In 2021, we got a new James Bond movie, a new Matrix movie, the first Dune movie, and possibly twelve (?) Marvel movies (numbers still coming in). We got a new Wes Anderson movie, a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie, two new Ridley Scott movies, like four musicals and a masterpiece called Drive My Car.
Drive My Car and Licorice Pizza and The French Dispatch and The Green Knight are my personal favorites, but there were a TON of worthwhile, compelling films released this year. (Looking at you, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, which everyone tells me I have to see.)
Here are the rules for our selection. As usual, all films considered all had to be full-length feature films, released (in theaters or on streaming services) in the United States during the 2021 calendar year. This list considers international films as well as domestic ones. And, as usual, “crime” is defined rather broadly, to include all illegal activity from theft, to murder, to cons, to gangster shenanigans, to on-the-lam stories. This list is not ranked, as is the case with all our end-of-year content.
Okay, roll’em.
Judas and the Black Messiah
Shaka King‘s Judas and the Black Messiah was in last year’s award cycle, but it’s a 2021 release! And it is more than worth your time. The fantastic LaKeith Stanfield plays informant Bill O’Neal, who is sent by the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers and spy on Chairman Fred Hampton. Daniel Kaluuya won an Oscar for his magnetic portrayal of Hampton in this tenser-than-tense film that plays out like a police sting (dabbling in all sorts of surveillance-movie cliches, including *stakeouts*) until it doesn’t.
The French Dispatch
Thanks to the film’s final chapter, entitled “The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner” (which purports to capture a little-known phenomenon called “Police Cooking”) we can safely call Wes Anderson’s work of New Yorker-fan fiction The French Dispatch a crime movie, and thank goodness we can, because I want to extol it! The movie chronicles the creation of the final issue of a magazine, “The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun,” the France-based arts and culture supplement of a large midwestern-American newspaper which has, for decades, regaled its readers with the world’s most interesting journalism. The film, on the whole, is a reflection on the narrative possibilities of multiple kinds of texts, given unexpected emotional stakes in large part thanks to this chapter’s central story: a hostage-taking that can only be handled effectively by the Police Precinct’s chef. That’s chef, not chief.
Zola
Zola is the first-ever movie based on a story told over a series of viral tweets (composed by A’Ziah “Zola” King). Directed by Janicza Bravo and co-written by Bravo and playwright Jeremy O. Harris, the film succeeds beyond this initial novelty, telling the rollicking, terrifying, revealing story of a Black exotic dancer named Zola (Taylour Paige) who befriends a white dancer named Stefani (Riley Keough) and agrees to take a weekend trip to Florida with her, her dumb boyfriend (Nicholas Braun), and (unbeknownst to Zola) her controlling pimp (the hypnotic Colman Domingo). The weekend spins out of control in unpredictable (and predictable) ways, careening the story into numerous themes of class, race, gender, sex, and capitalism and an explosive con plot that could really only happen in Florida but is emblematic of a lot of things wrong with all of America.
Annette
It’s difficult to describe Leos Carax’s Annette in words, to such a degree that I wish I could address this problem the way the characters in the film address not having the words sufficient to say something—which is to say, I wish I could sing in stream-of-consciousness about it instead. This strange rock-opera, performed mostly by nonprofessional vocalists like Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard, is a tale of passion, murder, madness, music, family, and performance realized with all the uncanniness and wooden-doll-people-substitutes of The Tales of Hoffman (the E.T.A. Hoffman book and, well, the Offenbach opera). You know who would have loved this movie? Freud.
The Last Duel
My Boston-native boss would not forgive me if I neglected to include this gutting Ben-and-Matt collaboration, but there’s no chance of that anyway. Directed by Ridley Scott, The Last Duel is a truly excellent film, rendered via Rashomon-style perspectives, telling the true story of a rape accusation in Medieval France. After Marguerite (Jodie Comer), the wife of Knight Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon), accuses her husband’s friend, the squire Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver), of raping her, de Carrouges challenges Le Gris to a duel to settle the matter. Co-written by Ben and Matt and Nicole Holofcener, it takes the classic Hollywood historical epic to new heights through deep empathy for its suffering female lead. Plus, Ben Affleck is so good as the bored asshole Pierre d’Alençon, it almost hurts.
House of Gucci
So you love Succession but wish it were a bit trashier and full of bonkers Italian accents? Bambini, have I got a movie for you!
Pig
“Derek, who has my pig?” God. As a human who loves animals and who would be overjoyed to care for a pig if it were not a violation of NYC Health code and the rules of my apartment building, I can’t even express to you the effect Pig had on me. Nicolas Cage gives a career-best performance as a truffle hunter who just wants to care for his pig, and when she is stolen from him, goes to the ends of the earth to try to recover her. I can’t. The pathos and pain of this movie. Please excuse me for a moment.
Last Night in Soho
Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho is a time-bending historical crime horror movie about a young London college student named Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) who discovers that, at night, her apartment has the power to transport her into the 1960s. This is ideal, because she has always longed to experience the glamour of this bygone decade; wandering around downtown London, shadowing a glamorous wannabe-starlet named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), she feels that she finally is where she belongs. But things are not as they seem, and as the past and present (and reality and the dream world) start to blur, she finds herself hurtling towards a dangerous and terrifying result: the discovery that maybe the 60s weren’t so amazing after all.
Wrath of Man
Did you see Guy Ritchie’s Wrath of Man? You should. It’s steely and sophisticated, a calibrated heisty thriller with excellent action sequences revolving around the mysterious identity of a man named H (Jason Statham), a security guard for a money-transporting company in Los Angeles with the kind of fighting skills that definitely turn some heads. It’s an excellent thing to put on the night of December 27th, when you’re tired of resting and doing nothing and the exact thing to snap you out of it is eating mac and cheese in your pajamas while watching a high-octane cat-and-mouse car chase through the streets of LA. You know the feeling! Give this to yourself!
The Power of the Dog
Jane Campion’s 1925-set neo-Western (available on Netflix) is a bracing, startling, raw cowboy movie. I’ve been thrown from horses many times, and watching this movie reminded me of the time I got bucked off a galloping horse into a wall. That’s all I’ll say.
Titane
There is nothing, nothing like Titane, Julia Ducournau’s raving French body-horror movie in which a psychopathic woman (who had been injured by a car accident in her youth and now lives with a titanium plate in her head) has sex with a Cadillac and becomes pregnant with its baby and also becomes a serial killer. There are a lot of elements that have to click into place to make this Palm D’Or-winning movie work, but all do their jobs as neatly and deftly as if engineered by Maserati. Titane will slam into you, and you, too, will feel yourself transform. (Or it might be that you are literally throwing up.) (WARNING: do not see this film if you have a weak constitution; it will not throw you a bone.)
No Sudden Move
Not enough people are talking about No Sudden Move for my taste; it’s the most interesting heist movie to come out in a while, the tale of several small-time criminals who are assembled to steal a mysterious document in 1954 Detroit. The cast is a real murderer’s row of talent—Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro, Jon Hamm, David Harbour, Brendan Fraser, Kieran Culkin, Ray Liotta—and the plot is a damn cool story of a theft gone completely apparently wrong, done with such style as to feel completely right.
West Side Story
Listen up, daddio! Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story adaptation is as vibrant and stirring as its predecessor, while managing to stand on its own two feet. This version, endorsed by Stephen Sondheim before his death and written by play-and-screenwriting legend Tony Kushner, places as its central metaphor the bulldozing of the West Side neighborhoods where the film is set to make way for the construction of the Performing Arts Mecca Lincoln Center (one of the foreboding anachronisms attached to the 1961 movie after the fact). That sold me from the get-go. That and the casting of the great Ariana DeBose as Anita. Life CAN be bright in America, whaddya know.
The Card Counter
This year, bet on Paul Schrader‘s revenge thriller The Card Counter. The film is about an ex-military gambler (Oscar Isacc) who attempts to keep a young man—hellbent on vengeance against a man from both their pasts—from undertaking a violent plan. And it’s a straight flush.
Nightmare Alley
The big reason Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation Nightmare Alley is on this list is for its glowing cinematography and art direction, and an incandescent Cate Blanchett as a deliciously evil femme fatale.
