One of the primary reasons that I watch so many movies is to see something that I haven’t seen before.
Some 2021 films have imaginatively tweaked the very forms and parameters of cinema itself and its genres:
- Summertime: I can’t remember hearing so much poetry in a movie. This ever vibrant film is about giving voice, the voice of mostly young Los Angelenos, expressing themselves, mostly through poetry.
- 499: In this critique of contemporary Mexico, director Rodrigo Reyes has invented the medium of “docu-fable”. It is all as real as real can be (the documentary), except for the fictional, 500-year-old conquistador (the fable).
- The Velvet Underground: I’ ve never seen a doc which so completely immerses the audience into a time and place.
- Lamb: This dark, cautionary fable of karma is somewhat misdescribed as a horror film because it plays with the concept of “monster”.
Then there are the movies that take us to the unknown, the underrepresented and the new:
- Lune: The Must See in this year’s Cinequest is this astonishingly authentic exploration of bipolar disorder. Played by writer and co-director Aviva Armour-Ostroff, the most singular movie character I’ve seen recently is based on Armour-Ostroff’s father.
- I’m Fine (Thanks for Asking): Filmmaker/star Kelley Kali shows us a hard-worker trying to stay afloat the gig economy – and explicitly in a pandemic.
- Socks on Fire: Bo McGuire uses old home movies and re-enactments in this unconventional documentary about his family’s unlikely inheritance battle. Socks on Fire swings between funny and operatic, and there’s a sweet remembrance of a grandmother in here, too.
- Ma Belle My Beauty: Marion Hill’s simmering exploration of the post-breakup dynamics of polyamorous queer women. This is a beautiful, absorbing movie with the unexpected appearance of a strap-on.
- Strawberry Mansion: Filmmaker/star Kentucker Audley’s very trippy and ultimately sweet fable is set in an utterly surreal, imagined future. It’s also a sharp and funny critique of insidious commercialism.
- Slow Machine: In their enigmatic dive into paranoia, filmmakers Joe Denardo and Paul Felten somehow made a film that is at once engrossing and impenetrable.
And finally, there is the category of “aiming low and hitting it”:
- The actual human shitting in Casanova, Last Love.
- and, of course, the sacrilegious dildo in Benedetta.
