Anton's Top Movie and TV Experiences of 2021

Well, it’s now February, and with the Oscar nominations announcement this week, I figure it is now or never to make some comments about this past year’s movies and television. Instead of waiting to catch up with a few more recommended or critically-praised works, I’m going to go ahead and briefly give my impressions of 2021 on screen. 

For me, the year in moving pictures, whether experienced in the cinema or watched streaming on the television at home, was defined by two sprawling documentaries, neither exactly about 2021, but nonetheless special and speaking deeply to the moment, both for us as a society and for me personally:

Can’t Get You Out of My Head (dir. Adam Curtis) and The Beatles: Get Back (dir. Peter Jackson)

Can’t Get You Out of My Head provides a conceptual framework to help us understand our strange moment of perpetual crisis, illusion, and confusion. The Beatles: Get Back shoots a blast-from-the-past of creative joy into the doldrums of current forever-pandemic life. The former explores, with a wide and roaming view, root intellectual and emotional phenomena of our age. The latter zooms in on four band members in the midst of the artistic and creative process, charting the interpersonal dynamics behind a cultural phenomenon of a past era. 

Both works could be defined as either a TV mini series or a documentary film in chapters (take your pick), which means that their very narrative structures exemplify the nebulous divide between movies and television today. Both are essentially archival remixes, works involving the mining and manipulation of previously existing images, footage, and recordings by later filmmakers, demonstrating how the dominant and often lame approach of going back to the well in terms of cultural production can, if handled with finesse, thought, and new insight, create something original. Together, they showcase the power of documentary filmmaking as creative formation out of inchoate celluloid and digital information. 

These two absorbing docs helped me understand the world and myself a little better, and that’s something in a world of competing signals and information overload.

The Card Counter (dir. Paul Schrader) is the most impactful character drama I saw this year and, months later, remains a haunting cinematic experience. It also features the best cinematic transition of the year—a truly surprising and daring narrative turn—exploding out of the still focus on the behaviours of the film’s protagonist (played by Oscar Isaac) onto a horrific memory of national scandal.

Dune (dir. Denis Villeneuve) is the best visual and aural experience in the cinema. It is such a pleasure to see and hear on IMAX—it’s truly stunning. Welcome back to the theatres!

The best blockbuster is Zack Snyder’s Justice League (dir. Zack Snyder), which I continue to affirm as the best superhero team epic, and the last I need to see for a while. (At some point, I’ll catch up with Spider-Man: No Way Home, but I’m still fatigued.) The film’s release also provided a heart-warming cultural moment back in March 2021, when a big studio actually gave its customers something they had specifically asked for. But the result was more than fan service. We should also applaud when a studio allows an artist to remake what the studio themselves messed up. Wonderful.

Belfast (dir. Kenneth Branagh), is the best family movie of the year, and the film you are most likely to recommend to your parents (as I did). The movie draws kind portraits of human souls and human society in the midst of civil fracturing. Here are decent people trying to do the right thing in difficult times, which is just lovely to witness right now. 

My biggest surprise and (possibly perverse) pleasure on streaming television was Squid Game (created by Hwang Dong-hyuk) for even if everyone was watching it, it really worked great, perhaps providing a late-pandemic TV counterpoint to the sensation of the first months, Tiger King. But unlike Tiger King, I think Squid Game will merit revisiting in the coming years.

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