For all the hoopla lately about how movies are on death’s door, 2021 was a gazillion times better than 2020. There were four Marvel films …
For all the hoopla lately about how movies are on death’s door,2021 was a gazillion times better than 2020. There were four Marvel films in theaters ( “Spider-Man: No Way Home” bulldozed past the $1 billion mark) and in-person film festivals ( Toronto, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, New York) resumed. We got a Spielberg, a Pixar, big-budget sequels, indie darlings and Bradley Cooper x 2. Other than “Spidey,” barely anything made a buck, but they were defiantly there. Like the old man who was mistakenly plopped on a pile of corpses in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” the movies said, “I’m not dead!” These are the best films of 2021. The most shaken up I was at the movies this year came after I saw Paul Thomas Anderson’s blissful, hysterical, romantic, youthful, nostalgic “Licorice Pizza” and realized that the unknown lead, Cooper Hoffman, is the late Philip Seymour Hoffman’s son. Wow. Like his dad, Cooper is a brilliant actor, and at only 18. This 1973-set comedy will rub some people the wrong way — it’s about a flirtation between a magnetic 15-year-old actor and a down-on-her-luck 25-year-old woman (Alana Haim, a revelation) — but there was simply no better-written or -performed movie in 2021. In theaters This sci-fi epic could’ve been the Coke 2 of movies — an overhyped disaster. Frank Herbert’s novel is infamously dense and tricky to boil down into a “Star Wars”-like space opera, as poor David Lynch discovered with his unwatchable 1984 version that made Kyle MacLachlan look like a Mountie on Mars. Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, however, wisely divided the tale into two films (Part 2 is due in 2023) and brought the titanic visuals and transportive storytelling that made “Blade Runner 2049” and “Arrival” so jaw-dropping.
