2021 CATCH UP: PT I

Happy holiday season! After a busy six months or so, I'm visiting family in Maine for a month or so and I have a lot of time to catch up on some 2021 releases. Here are a few that I've seen recently that I find notable for some reason or another. My count for the year is up to 211 films released in 2021, and 323 films in total for the year. My biggest year of movie-watching yet!

WOLF (2021), a surprisingly brutal "mental illness" film that problematically acts as a sort of allegory for conversion therapy. In Wolf, the characters believe themselves to be animals and enter a rehab facility of sorts in order to rid themselves of this delusion. George Mackay and Lily Rose-Depp give two excellent performances (one might even say masterclasses) in performance physicality, but the film's script (penned by Nathalie Biancheri) is painfully underwhelming -- devoid of any semblance of intrigue, nuance, or catharsis. It's a difficult film, as the technical craftsmanship on display is often quite impressive and the performances are marvelous, but they're all in service of what has to be one of the worst screenplays of the year. Wolf is currently playing in theaters.

THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021), a transfixing psychodrama presenting itself as a classical western when it couldn't be less so. The cast is uniformly miraculous: Benedict Cumberbatch as the miserable personification of toxic masculinity, Kirsten Dunst as the long-suffering, gentle widow, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Dunst's strange, sensitive son. Like most of the film, there's an undercurrent of something tremendously sinister, especially in Smit-McPhee's marvelous performance. Ari Wegner's cinematography is an achievement in and of itself, veering completely to the left off the A24 brand of clinical static cinematography that haunts most of indie cinema at the moment. There's a delicate balance between period-specific rigid social constraints on character and a gorgeous expressiveness in the film's technical elements. This film will easily make my top ten list for the year. The Power of the Dog is currently streaming on Netflix and playing in select theaters.

THE NOVICE (2021), Lauren Hadaway's directorial debut. We're presented with a jittery, chaotic portrait of Alex Dall, college freshman and obsessive overachiever. When she decides to join her school's rowing team, she pushes herself to the limits in order to outperform those around her and, quite possibly, what she's humanly capable of. Isabelle Fuhrman lends a stellar performance to the character of Dall, but the film around her is less impressive. As a mental illness drama, The Novice is startlingly shallow. It's easy to understand that the stakes are high for Alex Dall, but it's never explained why. There's a disconnect between the audience and the character, occasionally bridged by Fuhrman's fierce performance. But there's only so much Fuhrman can do. Like everyone else, we just want to tell Alex to relax. It's not that serious. And we have no reason to believe that it should be that serious. The Novice is currently streaming on VOD and playing in select theaters.

WEST SIDE STORY (2021), a faithful adaptation of the classic story, Steven Spielberg's new iteration of West Side Story is an emotional, bombastic explosion of color, dance, and feeling. Rachel Zegler particularly stuns as Maria. The musical numbers don't necessarily steal the show, considering they are the show, but they're all-around fantastic to watch. There's also no doubt that Steven Spielberg directs his first musical (I believe) as if he's been directing musicals his entire career. It's altogether an achievement, even if it does run a bit long. West Side Story is currently playing in theaters.