My Top 25 Movies of 2021
It has most certainly been a ‘funny old year’ with the “traditional release strategy/format” all but kicked to pieces due to the global pandemic, but keeping things ‘ongoing and normal’ it is time… or at least tradition… for me to dust off the cobwebs from my Tumblr account and post my Top 25 movies of the year. This time for 2021.
Years 2008 through to present are available in the archive.
Frequent visitors know that I’ll throw out a few special mentions to all the films that I wish I could’ve included but couldn’t make them fit yet believe they deserve a shout out regardless and then I get stuck in to what I think are the 25 best films of the year.
As always, films listed are based on their UK release date whether that’s in the cinema or on DVD, VOD etc. Anyway, without further ado, here’s the ‘also-rans’ and ‘near-misses’ separated per genre that very nearly made the final list:
Documentaries that I enjoyed this year included Class Action Park, Tina, Assassins and Val. And animated movies I liked that deserve mention are Away, Luca and Raya & The Last Dragon.
Within the realms of big action blockbuster and b-movie fare, the likes of Space Sweepers, Without Remorse, Black Widow, No Time To Die, Boss Level, Force of Nature, Copshop, Love & Monsters, Beckett, Gunpowder Milkshake, The Paper Tigers, The Ice Road, Below Zero and Those Who Wish Me Dead all deserve a shout-out.
Comedy-wise, I liked Free Guy, The Climb, Werewolves Within and 8-Bit Christmas all proved likeable. And in terms of horror movies I very much enjoyed Run, Boys From County Hell, Come Play, The Boy Behind The Door, Halloween Kills, The Forever Purge, Freaky and The Djinn.
And in terms of dramas the likes of No Sudden Move, The Dry, Hunter Hunter, Enforcement, Finch, The Power of the Dog, News of the World, Promising Young Woman and Sound of Metal are all worth seeking out.
And finally, I don’t know what on earth you’d categorise Prisoners of the Ghostland as, but I know that I very much enjoyed it.
Anyway, with all that out of the way, here’s my Top 25 favourite films of 2021:
25. Coming Home In The Dark.
I was legitimately caught unaware by the sneak attack this film bestows upon you. The atypical psycho/cat-and-mouse horror you’re expecting in the vein of say THE HITCHER or WOLF CREEK from this story of a school teacher being forced to confront his past when a pair of drifters take him and his family on a road-trip actually gives way to something darker and more meditative.
It settles under your skin somewhere between BLUE RUIN and RED HILL. It’s clever and unsettling with brilliant performances. Both Daniel Gillies and Matthias Luafutu are outstanding, bringing texture to “villain” roles you’ve possibly never considered in movies of this ilk. James Ashcroft, in his debut as director, shoots this thing with an eye to capturing New Zealand’s inherent natural beauty whilst framing and lighting his film in ways this type of white-knuckle survivalist ride has not been presented before.
This is not a film languishing in the stalk-and-slash tropes of the genre. It’s a film that uses the form to present a more quite type of study on abuse, complacency, culpability and the empty futility of vengeance - and not necessarily drawing the conclusion you’d expect from it all!
24. Four Hours In The Capitol
I got the same feeling watching this as I did watching Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s 9/11 documentary - the level of access and resultant immersion is equal parts awe-inspiring and distressing.
You’re not just seeing footage from within the riot that is so much the ‘eye of the storm’ that in one harrowing moment you, as a viewer, are inches away and unobstructed in viewing a woman die. You’re also being presented with interviews with the very insurrectionists who attacked Congress. It’s the fucking true crime documentary that actually has the criminals rock up to brag about their crimes. It’s not only shocking how brazen and unapologetic these talking head insurrectionists are, it’s jaw-dropping how casual and self-reasoning they are about their actions. There’s no regret or remorse on show here.
And that’s what’s possibly most terrifying - based on how the documentary lays it up there’s no reason for these scumbags to reflect on their actions and think differently because, for a large contingent of Americans, January 6 was just the beginning of a very dark time ahead for the country.
23. A Quite Place: Part II
I was really, really impressed by this if I’m honest. I’m a massive fan of the first movie but the reverence with which it left John Krasinski being spoken of as a filmmaker had me worried the dude would fall into ’the hype machine’ and end up overcooking any sequel.
And whilst it takes the tradition of getting more money (a $61 million budget this time round versus the first movie’s $22 million, which is the reward you get when you spin that $22 million into $350.3 million!) to go bigger and bolder, it manages to keep the “big” and the “bold” in perspective: It’s an equally nerve-wracking continuation even with its more spectacular set-pieces (the “Day One” prelude sequence at the start of the movie is •sensational•!) without ever losing sight of its 'heart’; this is about one family’s plight… not a mass international military fight back!
It’s a really effective and engrossing follow-up to the out-of-nowhere “little movie that could”. It’s all for this franchise to fuck itself up now with spin-offs, side-movies and continuations that lose sight of what really works.
22. Don’t Look Up
I really think the vast majority of reviews are doing a disservice to this; Adam McKay’s satirical allegory to climate change and the government, media and our own indifference towards it for the crisis it is. To McKay’s credit he absolutely spotlights the apathy, incompetence and financial self-interest of the people in power in the face of such a crisis. He may well be symbolically using an “asteroid” for his narrative but the most interesting/barbed/shocking moments are when he has his characters saying things that actual government figures, lobbyists, TV anchors, etc have actually said about climate change but utilised in a different context here. It suddenly feels less funny. And he’s assembled a truly stupendous cast too - eclectic doesn’t quite cover it really; Jennifer Lawrence, Cate Blanchett, Rob Morgan, Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Himesh Patel, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Tyler Perry, Melanie Lynskey, Ron Perlman, Mark Rylance, Michael Chiklis and Paul Guilfoyle!
The film’s biggest issue lies in the fact that it has not one ounce of self discipline. It’s wildly self-indulgent and insanely overlong. There’s a legitimate darkly comedic satirical comedy masterpiece hiding instead this near 2½ hour monster. One in which McKay drives home the points he’s making again and again… and again. For example, are we really getting anything more out of Blanchett and Perry’s vapid TV anchors in their fourth 'bit’ that we didn’t get out of their first? Could Lawrence and Chalamet’s “romance” have felt less rushed if we’d had just maybe one less go-around with Jonah Hill’s 'diminishing returns’ Trump Jr shtick? It’s all well and good having an audacious ending like this one has. But not when you’ve got a viewer rolling their eyes / checking their watches by the time it arrives.
If the 'Extended / Unrated / Wild Director’s Cut’ of the DVD boom of the noughties could be reversed, I would like to see the 100 minute version of this. Because THAT could honestly be a real modern comedic great. And, look, whilst I’m defending the shit out of this here let me be perfectly clear: THAT end credits scene? That’s as painfully unamusing as everyone is saying. I will go with you on that.
21. Pig
I can’t quite think of another example whereby a particular actor’s professional decline would serve to both accentuate for some and damage for others their newest (and best in a long time) endeavour. You look at the straight-to-VOD schlocky action shite Nicolas Cage has been making these last 10 years and then you look at the logline for this (a truffle hunter who lives alone in the Oregonian wilderness must return to his past in Portland in search of his beloved foraging pig after she is kidnapped) and you think you know *exactly* what you’re getting; an off-kilter black comedy of sorts about a man and his pig mixed in with a rip-roaring exploitation flick with Cage carving his way through a load of disposable goons to rescue his pet pig, where his wife / girlfriend has stood in other movies. And this thing just steps right over your expectations, for a start. Absent of any bombast or octane whatsoever, it’s actually anti-revenge and anti-violence in its standpoint.
But what it is REALLY about is loss - the pain it generates in all of us yet also how each of us choose to deal with it in different ways. Sure, it’s also about the rejection of materialism and capitalism too. Really though, it’s about loss and grief; how we process it and how we fill the void created by it. You weren’t expecting THAT with this, were you?
Cage is magnificent here. If he weren’t an industry 'outlier’ and moviemaking 'figure of fun’ nowadays, we’d be hyping this up as the Best Actor Oscar performance to beat. In one particular scene, with 3 little words (“I love her!”) when talking about his missing pig he manages to talk about so much more - all without saying another single word!
20. Palm Springs
It’s so good that not even Andy Samberg’s creepy yellow milk teeth can turn you off (… seriously though dude, you’ve got all that BROOKLYN 99 'bank’, pay to get them sorted for Christ’s sake!).
19. The Beta Test
I’ve drank from the “Kool-Aid” and I’m a full blown acolyte at the altar of ’The Church of Jim Cummings’, who’s proven enough by now that his interesting 'point of view’ in cinema is definitely worth following. THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW was one of my favourite films of last year. Whilst that film took the idea of a “horror comedy”, as you THINK you know it, and infused it with Cummings’ own very specific sense of humour to give us something that was very much delightfully off-kilter this time round he’s gone bolder but also so *incredibly* idiosyncratic:
This is Cummings’ (and co-writer/co-director PJ McCabe) “ode” to shitty low-rent late night Showtime/HBO soft porn erotic thrillers by way of an updated insider-industry take on Stanley Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT, told in a decidedly up-to-the-minute post Harvey Weinstein landscape. You never know where this thing is going and you’re delightfully captivated to find out. But like many a sexual-thriller of the 1990s, which this openly homages, the end point is not as satisfying as the journey there.
Reveals and revelations feel rushed, cluttered and in a lot of ways anticlimactic. Maybe in hindsight that’s because we’re so used to thinking lazily and conventionally (It’s his assistant! It’s his wife-to-be! It’s a massive inter-celebrity conspiracy to wipe out agents!) that we’re not recognising the filmmakers’ purposeful intent to always keep things off centre? It’s enthralling. It’s sexy. It’s dryly funny. And its got a good handful of those tremendous ’Jim Cummings losing his shit’ moments that we all secretly love coming to his films for.
18. Spider-Man: No Way Home
I had a whole heap of fun with this - despite myself, really. It’s quite churlish of me to complain about this ~now~ as a [waning] MCU obsessive but, as the teaser trailer for DR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS finished up I found myself fondly recalling a time when this whole “MCU” thing was a two-times a year blockbuster 'event’ you could look forward to. Now it’s so unwieldy I came away realising that it’s starting to feel too much like homework - with the 23 main movies, 2 alleged 'side’ movies, 4 Disney+ shows, 5 - 6 Netflix shows and 5 additionally added films all subsequently now considered “part of the narrative”.
It’s possibly TOO extravagant in some ways and decidedly messy as a result - as messy as you’d expect for a film that ostensibly has 3 protagonists, 5 antagonists and expects you to walk into this with knowledge of not just the last two SPIDER-MAN movies in this franchise but also the other 21 main movies, the 2 VENOM movies that no one can seem to decide on whether they’re narratively “in” or not, all 4 of the current Disney+ shows, 1 of the Netflix shows and films of this 'ilk’ from 17 years and 9 years ago respectively.
Anyone at this point wanting to throw out this particular film as being “Fan Service: The Movie” has absolutely lost sight of ALL of them being nothing BUT 'fan service’ through and through from the minute THE AVENGERS premiered. Everything is thrown up on screen here, sometimes coherence be damned. And as detrimental as that is in some regards, in other ways it means that when one element flounders something else comes along that excels fairly quickly. It’s enormously entertaining and enjoyable as a blockbuster 'event’ but as a film it’s a decidedly weird beast whereby it wants you to invest emotionally in the seriously SERIOUS drama (its ending is profoundly sad when you think about it) whilst putting it up alongside some incredibly, incredibly stupid and silly hokum.
17. The Last Duel
I’ve absolutely no time for y'all trying to pin this film down under the weight of its dreadful (and rocket-fast, gun-it-and-done-it) cinema run where it only pulled in an ’embarrassing’ $29 million return against a budget of $100 million - and drew an admittedly disastrous $4.8 million opening weekend. If motherfuckers aren’t going to show for an absolute master craftsman like Sir Ridley Scott tackling the themes of today resultant from the ’Me Too’ movement within the wheelhouse of his historic epics, whilst reuniting my beloved “Matt & Ben” both on the screen and on the page then… you know what? Fuck 'em. It’s their loss. (Rather interestingly, in the same year where Scott - 84 years of age and still killing it professionally - made double impact with both this and House of Gucci no one is saying SHIT that the latter is currently at the time of writing sitting on a paltry $37.6 million worldwide return on a $75 million budget. No, they’re too busy wittering about Lady Gaga. Whereas this film’s underperformance is the focal point of every piece currently.)
And it’s infuriating that the box office returns are the lead here because this is really frickin good, man. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Not all of the 'chapters’ are equal to each other in effectiveness. The last part for example, which hands the narrative over to Marguerite de Thibouville is intriguing and well-meaning but very overcooked. It would be hurtful to the film overall were it not for the fact its the lead in for the magnificently staged 'duel’ we’re ultimately here for.
Overall though, it’s a very well-acted and thought-provoking drama. Damon and Driver are both excellent. Affleck is having a complete blast with this. And whilst Jodie Comer teeters dangerously close to going OTT with the ’face-actoring’, overall she manages to hold her own with her most high profile role to date. The whole thing barrels along with the epic visual grandeur you’ve come to expect from Ridley Scott. It doesn’t feel like a 155 minute movie at all, and that’s saying a lot for a film that essentially reboots/repeats itself every 40 - 50 minutes.
16. The Suicide Squad
There’s a great time to be had here. Yeah, it’s overindulgent - the film has natural end point opportunities at the 95, 100 and 110 minute marks - but sometimes it’s okay to have too much of a good thing… and this is a very good thing! And very, very good is ALL it is. And that’s enough. Not that James Gunn would’ve had you believe this… for the last exhausting 18 months! And in turn the Internet’s ~thirst~to treat this movie as the “rebirth of the whole of all of cinema” along with James Gunn as “the second coming of Christ” (something Gunn himself actively endorses and seeks to propagate) does the ACTUAL FILM a total and utter disservice.
Taken as a big, broad piece of coarse action extravagance it is immensely enjoyable. It’s a really good ensemble of people. Idris Elba finally delivers something akin to the promise that he’s a ’movie star“ and not just a ”television actor“ here, but what’s most interesting is that all of the 'tier one’ hires (Elba, Cena, Robbie, etc) can even get close to Daniela Melchior and David Dastmalchian who steal the whole movie effortlessly.
The gratuitous violence and cavalcade of profanity work a treat. It’s frequently funny (the whole ”Who the fuck is Milton?“ bit is very well played with a great secondary punchline later) and the action set-pieces are clean and well executed. It just isn’t the "visionary” experience from a “visionary” director that we’ve been relentlessly and ridiculous forced to chew on for a year plus. And maybe its poisonous box office numbers had little to do with its tandem HBO Max debut and more to do with everyone was pig fucking sick of it before it had even landed?
15. The Empty Man
I had read all the 'blah’ on this - last film to ever have the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start, lost amidst the Fox/Disney merger, abandoned onto screens with a misleading ad campaign, better than its reputation suggests, etc. etc. To be honest, I only watched it because I’m an enormous supporter of James Badge Dale’s work.
And I was really, really impressed by it. This is not at all the movie you’ll think your getting. It’s a messy, shaggy, unruly fucking movie at 130+ minutes and it doesn’t land the execution of everything it’s trying to pull off. But, by God, when it lands its borderline brilliant. Seriously. There’s a couple of genuinely terrific scares tucked away in there and James Badge Dale, as always, is fully committed which really lends the film some extra gravitas.
The marketing leads you to believe you’re getting a throwaway Dimension-esque release circa 2003 or something. Instead it’s a early Cronenberg type of Lovecraftian PI procedural. Though maybe that is even saying too much? Seek it out for yourself. It’s a bit of gem.
14. I Care A Lot
I absolutely adore Rosamund Pike and think she’s the finest actress of my generation that this country has produced. I’d heard great things about this too and was excited to give it a go. But by the time it hit the 30 minute mark I was worried whether I could stick with it because it was just SO unrelentingly nasty and gleefully so. It just felt borderline perverse in projecting sociopaths winning out for the most horrendous cruelty…
… and then in a RED ROCK WEST style spin it sort of becomes a whole other thing. It’s kind of hard to describe because it does admittedly get VERY silly and hokey but just when you think it’s a jet black, bleak satire on the realities of the US guardianship system it becomes a modern femme fatale driven noir, a twisted Coen Brothers esque crime caper, and a one-upmanship comedy thriller.
Pike is truly exceptional. If there’s any justice whatsoever then the Oscars this year will be a righting of the GONE GIRL wrongs by giving her and Ben Affleck (for THE WAY BACK) the acting Oscars they inarguably deserve. It’s also enormously pleasing to see the wondrous Dianne Wiest be given a meaty enough platform to shine again these days too.
13. Time To Hunt
I was really impressed by this. It made me kinda miss my days of putting on 'thematic triple-bills’ for a select few - because this sandwiched between KILLING THEM SOFTLY and NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN would •really• be something.
It could be considerably tighter. That’s seemingly a common trait in Korean cinema nowadays though, with most films tapping out at 135 minutes as 'standard’ regardless of whether they ~need~ to be that length or not. The only thing actually working against this film is its own length. There’s a LOT of padding going on within. It neither needs as much lay-up as it takes nor requires as much repetition of sorts once the “hunt” begins.
But the general execution of it all outside of its length is solid, putting forward a near-dystopic OCEAN’S 11 then mixing it up with some (and here’s a hard geek deep cut for you) NIGHT OF THE RUNNING MAN vibes. It’s one of the strongest thrillers of the year.
12. Nobody
Many, many years ago screenwriting-cancer-in-human-form, Ehren Kruger, once apparently pitched a movie to Jack Black that would’ve been a parody of the [then] massively popular BOURNE movies - with Black getting a knock on the head and coming to assume he’s an undercover spy on a secret mission, when really he’s a buffoon who no one gives a shit about. Apparently that project died when Black rightly pointed out Kruger was just walking in THE WRONG GUY’s shadow. I thought about that (thankfully) lost project whilst watching this for the second time. The easy and totally disposable version of this would’ve been the one that leant right in on Bob Odenkirk’s comedy background to parody the new age of everyone trying to ape 87Eleven’s JOHN WICKian approach to action - have Odenkirk as a useless fuck-up who goes on a rip-roaring but thoroughly incompetent campaign of violence.
That it didn’t… That it went all in instead in this direction? With Bob Odenkirk in the lead? That’s ballsy as fuck, man. I can’t think of another film who’s pre-release attitude from people was actually beneficial to how the film itself ended up being received. We treated this as a bit of joke when it was first announced, underestimated what it could actually be and jibed away with the “JOHN WICK’s Dad” and “BETTER CALL SAUL An Ambulance” zingers… and then it lands in front of us and shows itself to be a •legitimate• action movie about an underestimated bit of a joke who’s actually better and more of a threat than he’s given credit for.
Odenkirk is fantastic here. The whole thing lives and dies by his performance. Forget the aforementioned slapstick comedy version of this. There’s the poe-faced Liam Neeson version of this that would’ve been stale before the opening credits finished. Then there’s ~this~ version: It may well walk the JOHN WICK line a little TOO closely but its such an easily forgivable act of semi-laziness from that team to have lifted all the best component parts of that movie and dropped them into… *checks notes* … suburbia.
It’s forgivable because it’s bullet-fast, lean as hell, violent bit of pulp that holds tight to the precariously balanced tone it’s executing, managing to be darkly funny as fuck and thrilling. It’s huge amounts of fun in a snack-sized package. I thoroughly enjoyed this even more a second time.
11. The Rescue
I was equal parts impressed and enthralled by this recounting of the 2018 mission that saved a kids football team from an underwater cave in Thailand. More so because as a claustrophobic, this played like the most effective horror movie ever made to me.
Born from a complicated production process whereby filmmaker Kevin Macdonald signed on with National Geographic Documentary Films a year after the events to make a documentary feature only to flee once 'rights issues’ became “difficult”. And that’s saying something: National Geographic could secure the rights to the *British divers’* story but the Thai government were wanting to do their own piece about their Navy SEALS. And Netflix had acquired the life rights to the soccer team which prevented their story from being covered in any film that wasn’t streaming there. Eventually in February 2021 Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin (the team behind FREE SOLO) replaced Macdonald as director and delivered this; a documentary no less powerful or potent for the restrictions applied to it.
In fact, with the restricted focus, Vasarhelyi and Chin deliver a lean feature that has a truly unique angle other films on this subject will only be able to ape - that this monumental achievement was executed not by the greatest combined military might but actually a handful of nerdy, 'weekend hobbyist’, middle-aged Brits!
10. The Mitchells Vs. The Machines
Maybe I’m going through the 'manopause’ or something but this resonated much deeper / harder. Growing up in an abusive household where my passion for creativity was stemmed with a smack, the initial scenes of “Do you expect to make a living from stuff like this?” parental whine resonated effectively. This thing is ~layered~ man. It’s got your high energy blockbustery blast of enjoyably bonkers mayhem. And then it’s got your big dollops of heart and sweet messaging.
You can resist against this as much as you like but it’s going to 💯% beat you into submission and cuddle the shit out of you until you come round to loving it. It’s a joyous, relentlessly inventive, wonderfully visualised, very very funny little film that’s going to sneak right up on you with that aforementioned emotional core hidden away amongst the hilarity and knock you for six a little.
It’s a lovely, warm delight of a family film that - I must state this again - is frickin hilarious. All those people “outraged” at the notion “queer representation” has been 'trojan-horsed’ really don’t seem to understand the covert nature of 'trojan-horsing’. There’s a difference between natural representation and beating you over the head with “LGBTQ wokeness”. If there’s any flaw the film should be called out for its in staking a belief in Chrissy Teigen and John Legend being able to scrape by as supporting comedy actors… they can’t!
9. The Harder They Fall
I had a fabulous amount of fun with this. Five minutes in you’re concerned that this is going to be one of those wanky, over-stylised “the directing is the star” Edgar Wright type ultimately empty endeavors. Five minutes later your concerns are abated as you realise the style is tied to the tone - and you’re in for a grand old time.
Key here is that as much as this is absolutely an irreverent, revisionist, left-of-standard genre entry, it’s made by Jeymes Samuel with as much an honour to the traditions of these movies as a thirst to ’jazz up’ the tropes. Samuel clearly is someone who intricately knows and unashamedly loves Westerns. He’s not making an off-kilter Western. He’s making his own legitimate version. What’s rather brilliant is that with not a white person in sight and an African-American principal cast (all characters are based on real 19th-century lawmen and outlaws), their “blackness” is never once used as a 'beat’ or as characterisation. DJANGO UNCHAINED this is not.
And what a cast: Jonathan Majors, my beloved Zazie Beetz, Regina King, the mighty Delroy Lindo, Lakeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Danielle Deadwyler, Edi Gathegi, Deon Cole and Idris Elba - who, by sharing scenes with Majors and King, is really forced to step up his game and stop lazily phoning it in like he normally does. The template it all plays out within may be well-worn but it still manages to inject proceedings with very much its own style, energy and a fabulous soundtrack.
8. Another Round
I genuinely adored this, even more so on learning how it was born from being recalibrated out of the filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg’s own personal tragedy: This is a deeply tragic and moving ode from Vinterberg to his daughter Ida, who the film is dedicated to - she pushed her father to adapt a play of his and helped him update it by telling him stories of the drinking culture within her friendship group and together they developed the intended film into “a celebration of alcohol based on the thesis that world history would have been different without alcohol”. Vinterberg rewarded her by casting her as Mads Mikkelsen’s daughter. Four days into filming, Ida was killed in a car accident. Vinterberg paused filming before channelling his grief back into this film, reworking it away from being a broader comedy and into something deeper.
“It should not just be about drinking. It has to be about being awakened to life” said Vinterberg of the newer version of this, which ended up being partially filmed in Ida’s classroom with her classmates and friends as Mikkelsen’s students. The end result is exactly that; a celebration of one’s awakening from the stupor of a life in stagnation, a hangover from complacency and a lack of appreciation for what we have… life! The alcohol element is the “tool”. It’s symbolic, don’t you see?
Mikkelsen is atypically tremendous. But he’s at the forefront of a uniformly brilliant cast. It’s funny - until it doesn’t need to be. It’s deeply and profoundly moving - because its earned the right to be. That final “dance” works both ways because of what we’ve cathartically gone through with Vinterberg and his characters.
7. Sheep Without A Shepherd
Li Weijie is a movie obsessed family man desperate to protect his family from the dark side of the law represented by the corrupt career-obsessed Laoorn, after his loved ones commit an unexpected crime. Laoorn believes her expertise in policing will bring about justice on her terms. Li Weijie believes his knowledge of movies and story structure will save him and his family. Let the battle commence.
This was probably one of the most enthralling, witty and genuinely well-constructed thrillers I’ve seen this year. It seems to delight in managing to deliver first-rate drama in its own right, whilst expertly playing off the tropes and conventions of these ’type’ of investigatory procedurals - building out constantly in directions that are always a surprise.
6. Riders of Justice
I knew I was going to like this. I could tell from the trailer. I didn’t know just how much I was going to love it though - so much so it’s taken a hammer to the draft list of my end of year Top 10, which has felt fairly formalised for the last 4 months.
Mads Mikkelsen, a man incapable of giving anything less than an excellent performance, affirms his place once more as one of the great working actors here. As great as he is though, it’s the script and its execution that is the major selling point. Taking the tired notion of a “Liam Neeson esque aged star slumming it in some mid-budget Euro-actioner”, the film spins itself from a revenge movie into a darkly comedic treaty on coincidence, chance, statistical anomalies, friendship, family and the correct pixilation of a computer monitor.
It is quite simply a thoroughly enjoyable right angle swerve of a film - you go in thinking it’s a Louis Leterrier or Pierre Morel action movie and you come away realising you’ve just watched the equivalent of Joel and Ethan Coen make a TAKEN movie.
5. The Eight Hundred
This is an unashamedly sprawling film (the opening title isn’t raised until 20 minutes in) and doesn’t stay focused on any one character long enough for you to get emotionally attached to anyone but it doesn’t hurt the overall impact one jot.
I absolutely adored this. It’s a massive, unwieldy epic of a film full of big, grand, tremendously captured action set-pieces filmed on IMAX cameras by a director who rarely keeps the camera still; sweeping and gliding the camera in amongst the brutal war sequences.
It’s a genuinely fascinating and enthralling piece of history conveyed brilliantly, displaying the relentless determination to survive and endure in the face of completely insurmountable opposition.
4. Greenland
I was genuinely taken aback by how bloody great this was. When the director and star of ANGEL HAS FALLEN reunite for this sort of movie you kind of assume it’s going to be a certain ’type’ of action movie pish. But it isn’t that. It leans away from “Gerard Butler saves the world” bollocks and into a societal breakdown movie that’s played completely straight, with the film itself constantly ramping up the more the craziness does.
The casting masterstroke is in someone FINALLY looking back to what made Butler so wondrous in DEAR FRANKIE and moving away from trying to push him into the “great actor” or “action hero” mould with accompanying ill-fitting accent, and instead have him play the 'everyman’ in the way Sean Connery would’ve done in such a role. He’s really, really good here playing to his abilities for once.
The film keeps itself so grounded that you remain wholly invested and the tension soaks into you. It’s such a surprise how incredibly effective it is in this regard. It earns such goodwill by being so legitimately great that by the time it sort of slides towards convenient silliness in its final 10 minutes or so you’re way more forgiving.
3. Barb & Star Go To Vista Del Mar
2. The Kid Detective
I got my arse well and truly handed to me by what a terrific, dark thriller this turned out to be. I went in thinking it was going to be a broad comedy leaning heavily on a one-note concept - and it’s certainly not that at all.
It’s a legitimate and effective PI investigatory procedural on one hand, an acerbic black comedy on another and somewhere in between a surprisingly deep study on self-worth and depression; knowing you’re better than the joke you’re made out to be by those around you but 'lost at sea’ emotionally in knowing how to prove it. To say it resonated haaaaaard with me personally right now is an understatement.
Adam Brody - long held as the guy to turn up and knock a zinger out the park in projects vastly beneath his level of talent - finally gets the right project to show what he’s truly capable of and, by Christ, he kills it. That final dining room table conversation is phenomenally well-played. And that last scene as the credits roll? Heartbreaking.
1. Let Him Go
There’s a film here on the face of it - a modern-of-sorts western that’s two parts family drama struggling to stay in control to keep the third part (a violent, spiralling eye-for-an-eye confrontation) unsuccessfully at bay. And then there’s the film… or even a THOUSAND films… that exist in the silent glances and tender spaces between Costner and Lane’s characters.
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