Todd McCarthy’s Top Films List – Deadline

This past year couldn’t be expiring soon enough as far as most of the world is concerned, and we can only hope that the next one will at least provide small measures of relief in one regard or another. May this be true for the planet first and foremost, but also for the world of films. I’ve experienced 2021 as the worst year for movies in quite a few decades. Perhaps if I seriously combed through the 1980s I might find some that were worse, but I nonetheless felt seriously unrewarded for all the hours I put in watching films that simply didn’t rise to the occasion, including some that found significant critical favor with others.

There were, perhaps, a couple of dozen films that ventured into excellence, but just four of these came from what we’re accustomed to calling the big studios — the rest were indies or foreign. This is not the moment to dwell on the possible death throes of the major studios as we’ve always known them and motion picture theaters, but these factors certainly added to the gloomy mood hanging over what is still trying to call itself the film industry.

Sometimes, adverse conditions create the stimulus for artistic daring and excitement, and we’re seeing some of that on television. But this is an industry in which great financial investments are required, and with all the company name changes and corporate strategies now being undertaken, it’s impossible to know where things will end up.

As always, talent will out, with new and very different venues for it budding all the time. But there is no business as usual these days, just more eyes looking for something new and fresh. Who could have predicted something like Squid Game even a year ago?

Pete Hammond’s Top 10 Movies Of 2021: ‘Belfast’, ‘Don’t Look Up’, ‘Licorice Pizza’, ‘Spider-Man’ And More

Following are the year’s top 10 films, works that felt some combination of fresh, original, different, stimulating, provocative and, for one reason or another, very much worth seeing.

RED ROCKET
Sean Baker’s funniest, edgiest film yet examines another group of societal fringe-dwellers, Texas oil country down-and-outers the likes of whom you’ve never seen before. Porn world denizen Simon Rex displays all the dissolute but irresistible charm needed to carry this trip on the wild side of a place best visited onscreen rather than in person.

PETITE MAMAN
On the other side of the world from Red Rocket, not just physically but in aesthetics and aspiration, is Celine Sciamma’s short feature that provides a privileged look into a special bond between two eight-year-old French girls. As they walk in the forest while one’s father clears out the country cabin of his late mother, the girls achieve a remarkably mature and deep connection that one feels they will always remember even if they never chance to meet again.

QUO VADIS, AIDA?
The Bosnian Serbs’ genocidal assault on the Muslim town of Srebrenica in July 1995 is devastatingly dramatized in Jamila Zbanic’s black-and-white film. It’s a difficult film to recommend or watch, but the director’s…