The Best to Worst Films of 2021 (According to Tom)

Written by Tom

As 2021 gets consigned to the “Least Worst Year of a Worldwide Pandemic” bin, it’s time to look back on everything I watched over the past year and rank them from best to worst. My list is about half the size as normal and nowhere near comprehensive. It’s amazing! It’s stupendous! It’s short!

(My usual criteria for inclusion on this list applies: films must either have been released to the cinemas in the UK or direct to a UK streaming site in 2021. That said, this criteria will be applied more loosely than usual this year and films from as far back as 2019 are going to feature. The UK always gets films later than everyone else, particularly in the indie circuit, and the pandemic has hit movie distribution in a lot of weird ways, meaning that films which were massive in 2019 and that would’ve came to England in 2020 have only now just got their UK premieres on various streaming sites. When films like Promising Young Woman and Kajillionaire start appearing, please trust me, these were actually first released to the British general public in 2021. Mad, isn’t it?)

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1. Promising Young Woman
A woman whose life was derailed when her best friend’s rape got covered up by an university goes for revenge, putting those in charge of the cover-up into positions where they’re mistrusted, humiliated and ignored. The film provides a razor sharp reinvention of rape revenge films through the novel idea of actually getting a woman to write/direct it, resulting in a savvy text which specifically focusses on microaggressions and builds up to a surprisingly cathartic ending that must mean a lot to many people. Out of all the films in 2021, this is the only one I can see proving important and influential.

2. Zack Snyder’s Justice League
Even as a vocal fan of Snyder’s DC work (like the internet needs another of those), I’m still genuinely surprised by how straightforwardly good this film is. Aware that Justice League features one superstar, three big hitters and two relatively obscure characters, Snyder gives all the plot stuff and emotional arcs to the obscure ones. This means that no one character overshadows the others while giving the film a concise emotional focus that no other Snyder film really has. The extended runtime also allows the film to properly establish its characters and stakes while giving Snyder room to apply his trademark style to everything. The result is easily the best film of Snyder’s DC trilogy. WB should’ve just released this four years ago and saved themselves a lot of bother.

3. I Care A Lot
Marla (a con artist who finds forgotten old people, shadily becomes their legal guardian, throws them in an old folks’ home, and asset strips their lives) gets in trouble when her latest target turns out to be the mother of a Russian mob boss. Marla is a neoliberal monster – a businesswoman who uses faux-feminist rhetoric to justify genuine moral depravity. By putting her against the mafia, the point isn’t to create sympathy for her but to present them as equals – being an exploitative capitalist and being a violent gangster are direct equivalents here. The result is an interesting, sharp and funny satire grounded by some excellent performances – highly recommended.

Tom’s 120 Film Challenge 2021 (P3: March)

Written by Tom

I’m watching at least ten films a month and uploading small reviews of them to this blog. Here’s my thoughts on everything I watched this March.

[Previously: Jan | Feb]

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21. Babyteeth (2019, Dir. Shannon Murphy)

A terminally ill teenager falls in love with a drug addict. Slow and deliberate, it’s a bit more ragged and cynical than your usual “teen with cancer love story” and thus feels more emotionally honest, leading to a gut-wrenching final half hour.

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22. She Dies Tomorrow (2020, Dir. Amy Seimetz)

A young woman’s belief that she’s going to die tomorrow spreads through her social group like a disease, everyone becoming convinced that they’re about to snuff it. Leaving the exact mechanics of what’s going on deliberately vague, the film seeks to capture what it’s like to live under inexplicable dread, a laudable goal given our current existences under an increasingly fractured capitalist state beset by an all-encompassing pandemic. The filmmaking used to capture this feeling is in turn striking and hallucinatory in all the right ways. That said, I wonder if it has much to say about late capitalism’s death drive or if it is purely that death drive put on screen.

The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World: The Story So Far

Written by Tom

‘The DC Cinematic Universe vs. the World’ is my series of posts looking at the DC Cinematic Universe, how it’s developed itself over time, and what its aesthetics are trying to do. We’re about to start looking at our third block of films (running from ‘Shazam!’ to ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’). Given that the series is a bit long now and was last seen about two years ago, maybe a quick recap is in order…

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Zack Snyder made a one-off deconstruction of Superman called Man of Steel. At the same time as this, DC were looking to fast track the creation of a cinematic universe to rival Marvel’s. Man of Steel, being the financially successful reboot of their most iconic character, seemed like the perfect place to start and so retroactively became the DCEU’s first film with Snyder becoming the mastermind of the universe going forwards. This gave Synder a massive problem though: his first film was about deconstructing heroism, something that would be unsustainable in a continuous superhero franchise. How do you create something which would move the franchise away from deconstruction while maintaining stylistic consistency with a film dedicated to it?

His answer was to deconstruct his deconstruction in Batman vs. Superman, setting up his usual grimdark aesthetic but using it to house a story that’s fundamentally about how grimdark aesthetics can be dull. Once filtered through Synder’s bombastic directorial style (a style which can’t do anything quietly), the result was a film that basically screamed at the audience about how non-functional it was. This set the DCEU up as a cracked mirror of the Marvel Cinematic Universe – it wasn’t interested in doing standard superhero movies as much as it was interested in exploring “superhero movies gone wrong”. As an artistic statement, this is fascinating and has been able to maintain a strong cult fanbase to this day. Many mainstream viewers and critics found Batman vs. Superman to be too messy and weird though, many of the film’s more contentious moments becoming widely parodied memes. The DCEU was already beginning to show cracks.

Cue Suicide Squad and Justice League, the films that would bust those cracks wide open. Both of them tried to capitalise on the DCEU’s “superheroes gone wrong” aesthetic – Suicide Squad by literally putting villains in the superhero role and Justice League by wrapping up Synder’s deconstructionist aesthetic with a story about the DC superheroes finally becoming the icons they should’ve been two movies ago. The issue is that they were both production disasters.

The Best to Worst Films of 2017 – According to Tom

So 2017 is over, which means it’s time to rank everything, leaving us a clean slate leading into the new year. As such, here is a ranked list of everything I’ve watched this year, organised from best to worst:

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The Top Ten

1. My Life as a Courgette (French Version with Subtitles)
A French stop-motion film in which a child accidentally kills his alcoholic mother and is sent to a children’s home, wherein he gets into fights, makes friends, falls in love and mourns deeply. It’s a small, melancholic, wistful thing, and is truly, deeply beautiful. Not only the best cartoon of 2017, it’s the best film of 2017.

2. My Life as a Courgette (English Dub)
I loved the original language version of My Life is a Courgette so much, I ended up going to the same art house cinema the next day to watch the English version. The big bonus it has over the original is Nick Offerman who gives a more multifaceted performance than his French counterpart does. It does censor some of the riskier jokes though, somewhat lessening the raw honesty of the original script. That said, you can’t really go wrong with either version: both are masterpieces.

3. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
This is just balls-to-the-wall fun. A hedonistic space opera about the need to combine masculinity with emotion, told through racoons, baby trees, David Hasselhoff, ELO… It’s Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who done as a two-hour spectacle using more money than the BBC spends in a year. The best Marvel movie I’ve ever seen, and (with the exception of Thor: Ragnarok) quite frankly the only good one.

4. mother!
The love-it-or-hate-it film of the year, mostly because it’s an art film that got sold as a horror film, resulting in a certain amount of understandable buyer’s remorse from certain sections of the audience. Taken for what it is though, it’s a fascinating, unique and clever piece of work. I don’t wish to spoil anything about it; just know that it was great and you should give it a go with as open a mind as you can.

5. Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Visually stunning, cleverly directed, character-driven drama with some surprisingly cutting political bits in the second act. You know it’s doing something right because the alt-right and the fanboys are furious about it.

Zack Snyder vs. the World – Justice League

Written by Tom
The third of a trilogy of posts, arguing that Zac Snyder’s DC films are genuinely interesting pieces of work which are in no way designed for their primary audiences.

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At this point, talking about the issues with Justice League feels like kicking a dog while it’s down. It had a tortured production and wears the scars of it quite blatantly. The producers seemed to finally lose faith in Snyder’s direction after the response to Batman vs. Superman and started requesting changes to make the film into something it wasn’t (the same methodology that gave us the beloved smash hit Suicide Squad). Personal problems meant that Snyder couldn’t finish the edits, leaving the film in the hands of Joss Whedon who would’ve had even less control over the edit and was being asked to do too much stuff with too little time. The result is exactly the type of mess you would expect: scenes feel compromised, everything’s too rushed, nothing is focused on providing any one single effect, and, as a result, everything falls flat. What else did we think we’d get?

But then again, the question of these Snyder blogs has never been whether Zack Snyder’s DC films are good or not; instead we’ve been interested in if they work internally as singlular texts. I contend that both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman do work as texts because both give themselves a job and largely succeed at doing it. Man of Steel tasked itself with deconstructing Superman and does it. Batman vs. Superman tasked itself with turning the DC cinematic universe into one which could house the Justice League and does that. Whether you like the films, or whether you think those tasks are ones which should’ve been done in the first place, are ultimately different concerns and you can find other people’s opinions about them everywhere else on the internet. Here, for just three posts, we’re interested in the texts themselves.

So let’s turn our lens to the internet’s current punching bag: what is Justice League doing as a film and how does it relate to the previous Snyder films on a thematic/narrative level?