Correcting the movie year’s offenses with unexpectedly good cinema.
After four years of constantly being lied to by the media, let’s finally be honest and principled about the past movie year. This Better-Than List calls out those films and filmmakers who triumphed, defeating those who subjugated moviegoers to fear, bias, and ignorance. Looking past dismal award-season choices, the Better-Than List provides our much-needed reset.
Alonso Ruizpalacios transplants Arnold Wesker’s classic British play about working-class kitchen-employee hopefuls to the contemporary U.S., where replacement politics is actually happening. Ruizpalacios illuminates our broken-borders crisis while Sean Baker angles progressive degradation in a porno-farce about immigrant America, now the land of hooker-hustlers. A Millennial update of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Altmanesque insight vs. Biden-Obama demeaned transformation.
Hard Truths > Nickel Boys
Black Londoners become Mike Leigh’s avatars, outclassing Hollywood’s perpetual race-movie slump by delving into the character of the year — Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) — and the untapped crisis of the Covid psychological lockdown. But RaMell Ross’s artsy first-person treatise on American racism rewinds Jim Crow trauma-porn that never ends.
Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Montaro > Conclave
Marco Bellocchio reimagines the stupefying (but visually stunning) ethnic, spiritual hijacking of a Jewish child by Pope Pius IX in 1850s Italy, while Edward Berger concocts anti-Catholic paranoia in a biased, staid ritualistic procedural for the era of Pope Francis progressivism.
Better Man > A Complete Unknown
Michael Gracey’s great Darwinian showbiz joke portrays singer Robbie Williams as an insecure adolescent ape. It has pizzazz, lots of feeling and insight — unlike James Mangold’s pop hagiography of folk-rock bard Bob Dylan, geared to Boomer nostalgia and cultural authority.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World > The Brutalist
Radu Jude’s Godardian satire reflects today’s Millennial tyranny in Romania’s unresolved history, while Brady Corbet offers a freaky, dismal, never-credible twist on post-Holocaust America. Smartness vs. Smart-ass.
On the Wandering Paths > Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Denis Imbert envisions Jean Dujardin’s writer-conscious return to nature and spiritual awareness. It is the conservative movie of the year — the conversion needed against the clichés of George Miller’s antic dystopia.
Johan Renck remakes Kafka’s Metamorphosis as Adam Sandler’s odyssey about our need for love, a victory over Denis Villeneuve’s drab futurism.
All Your Faces > Sing Sing
Jeanne Herry observes contrition among society’s criminals and their victims, a deeper dive than the incoherent sentimentality of Greg Kwedar’s incarceral black-Latino pity party.
Drive-Away Dolls > The Bikeriders
Ethan Coen wittily lampoons lesbian subculture while Jeff Nichols shows complete ignorance of middle-American class conflict and its homo- and heterosexual subtext. The best recent Coen movie vs. the phoniest Indie Americana.
Perfect Days > Evil Does Not Exist
Cosmopolitan Wim Wenders lends grace to a Tokyo menial worker (Koji Yashuko) through American pop music, a rebuke of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s fashionable gnosticism.
Pablo Berger depicts the value of cross-cultural exchange. His exquisite cartoon tale of expat empathy outstrip Paul Schrader’s smug, dated anti-American political cowardice.
The Goldman Case > Seed of the Sacred Fig
Cédric Kahn’s compelling, true-life accountability trial-drama shames our current lawfare while Mohammad Rasoulof’s Iranian melodrama repines for the totalitarianism it pretends to disdain.
Clint Eastwood’s lawfare nightmare confronts the moral weakness of a citizen and the system, while Yorgos Lanthimos excuses and celebrates personal dishonesty in a three-part omnibus anticipation of The Brutalist.
Red Island > All We Imagine as Light
Robin Campillo challenges the colonialist West’s exoticism while Payal Kapadia sentimentalizes third-world feminism. Beauty vs. Pathos — a near draw.
Dahomey > The Piano Lesson
Mati Diop’s probing doc about African cultural heritage and Benin artifacts being recovered to their continental place outclasses the Denzel Washington clan’s trashy version of August Wilson’s reparation ghost story.
The Substance > Wicked, Emilia Pérez
Coralie Fargeat gives the Me Too movement the outrageous treatment it deserves, while hacks John M. Chu and Jacques Audiard both exploit ethnic and trans feminism in two perfect parallels of stupid ineptitude.