The Best Movies of 2021 So Far

It has a threadbare plot: a pair of loser BFFs (Eric Andre and Lil Rel Howery); a high school crush-turned dream woman who lives many states north (Michaela Conlin); an ill-advised road trip, with an ex-con older sister (Tiffany Haddish) hot on their tail — all of it an excuse to drum up ample hidden-camera fuckery and equally cringe earnestness that probably tanked the stars’ karma but proves worth it for everyone who gets to watch. Hidden camera pranks aren’t everyone’s thing, which is too bad. At their best, they’re proof that it’s the rest of us — not the schooled and chop-sharpened working comedians, but unassuming, candid co-stars, reacting to the utterly ridiculous with disgust, wisecracks, fear, outrage, incredulousness, hilarity — who are truly funny. It’s the unique gift of the comics at the movie’s center to get the best out of us — which often demands hitting new personal lows and, with every plateau, continuing to dig. Andre, Howery, Haddish: I already liked or loved them all, I already knew they could crack me up. But, God, what a mess. Andre breaks out in song, in public, and I want to die of embarrassment; a man gets roped into covering for Haddish after an apparently prison break, and even as it seems to unlikely that it isn’t scripted — it’s just too good to be true — I’m at the edge of my seat. Bad Trip is a fun time, all the more valuable for setting its stars, a couple of whom get too easily hemmed in by more scripted comedy, loose on the rest of us. They of course wreak havoc. One of the best minor details — in a movie that’s all about the minor details and micro-reactions and barely audible “What the fuck?”’s — are all the blurred faces. The people who, even once the prank is revealed and the permission forms doled out, still said, “Nah.” Good for them, but also, good for us. —KAC

Déa Kulumbegashvili’s debut feature, Beginning, opens with a firebombing — an attack on the Kingdom Hall of a Georgian sect of Jehovah’s Witnesses. What follows is only less explosive in the most literal sense: This is a tense, discomfiting, violent film, all the more so for seeming more elliptical, less concrete, than it really is. That owes in large part to the almost punishing, but, more accurately, spacious and inviting spareness of Kulumbegashvili’s style, which is largely told in long, static shots, emphatic with a sense of empty space that only grows more menacing as the film wears on. The story is simple enough. David (Rati Oneli), the leader of that temple, leaves to find less hostile environs for himself and his flock; the attack that opened the film was not the first. He leaves behind his wife Jana (an astonishing Ia Sukhitashvili) and their son Giogi (Saba Gogichaishvili) and — well. It’s a film that’s easier to summarize by way of its most disorienting scenes and images: a mother playing dead and leaning so far into the bit that her son is thrown into a panic; an encounter with a man who claims to be the police officer investigating the firebombing that segues, uncannily, into violence; a daughter’s grief-haunted attempt to disclose an instance of sexual violence to her mother, to say nothing of the scene of violence in itself. With Sukhitashvili as the film’s anchor, Kulumbegashvili’s agonizingly tense film reveals that even in the man’s world of a religious sect — a world in which even a young boy is aware, almost preternaturally, of the power that he holds over his own mother — it is the women, or at least this woman, who becomes the totem of violence both religious and domestic. It is the woman who becomes hatred’s central target and most devastated symbol. — KAC

Making good on the promise of his autopsy-of-a-judicial-system debut Court (2014), filmmaker Chaitanya Tamhane returns with a look at young man (Aditya Modak) dedicated to playing and studying Indian classical music. What starts as a creative pursuit inherited from his father turns into an all-consuming obsession, and as the years pass, the idea that his passion may be greater than his talent starts to tear him up. It’s an intriguing, beautifully composed character study that asks a number of key questions: What happens to an artist’s soul when they are incapable of becoming a master? Can you be a righteous defender of an art form and also a complete asshole? And at what point does protecting a cultural tradition start to cut off its life supply? Netflix slid this on to their streaming service like it was a dirty secret back in April, with a few limited, little-publicized screenings in theaters. It just makes us want to shout that much louder: Attention must be paid. — DF

Here, piggy, piggy! Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky’s portrait on a massive porker named Gunda finally got a proper release this year — and immediately distinguished itself as one of the most profound meditations ever made about our relationship with the “lower” species. Living on a farm in Norway, this four-legged mother goes about the business of tending to her piglets and wallowing around the mud. Occasionally, she and her brood commune with the other animals, notable a one-legged chicken who’s gives you the most memorable portrait of resourceful screen poultry this side of Werner Herzog’s Stroszek. Sow far, sow good (sorry) — and then what you assume to be a black-and-white nature doc of sorts subtly switches gears, and reveals itself to be something far more existential. The last five minutes have lingered with us in ways we still can’t begin to fathom. — DF

Heidi Ewing’s look at the decades-long romance between two Mexican immigrants began as a standard documentary — the end result, however, became a mix of re-creations, portraiture, and poetry that goes far beyond a typical nonfiction tale of enduring hardship and matters of the heart. It touches on everything from our nation’s one-step-forward-10-steps-back attitude toward immigration to cultural homophobia, but her free-form take on the love story of Iván (Armando Espitia), an aspiring chef, and Gerardo (Christian Vazquez), a former teacher, is a perfect example of how to make the political personal — and vice versa. Jumping around in time, utilizing cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez’s dreamy visual palette and mixing dramatizations with fly-on-the-wall footage of the actual couple, it’s a stylized, impressionistic take on a very familiar tale. Yet the fact that Ewing never loses sight of the two people at the center of it all makes a world of difference. — DF

Written, directed, and shot by Pennsylvania-born Ephraim Asili, The Inheritance makes no bones about its subject or intentions or, for that matter, it influences. Students of Jean-Luc Godard might recognize the, in Asili’s movie, a sibling of sorts: Both are about groups of young revolutionaries whose questions of themselves and their world are very much rooted in discourse, argument, conflict, and book-learning that gets massaged into dramatic action by films with deliberate, inventive, knowingly didactic styles. And the West Philadelphia-set Inheritance is, overall, a movie that makes no effort to hide the panoply of references at its core — to black thinkers and artists and aesthetics, above all, with all of it gradually populating the monochrome, colorful walls of the small home which, left to one of the growing collective’s members by his grandmother, serves as the stage for everything that happens here. But focus too much on the references in themselves and you may miss what’s so thrilling about Asili’s cool, collected — collective — style, what makes it such a radical departure from the norms of form.

The Inheritance tells a basic story: a collective of (mostly) young black revolutionaries do what young people in the throes of self-knowledge do: argue, fall in love, shoot the shit, and imbibe the founts of knowledge black history and thought has left to them. But Asili doesn’t merely depict these proceedings. He breaks the film open, mixes non-fiction with stagey, dramatic scenes, lets history waft in by way of the living symbols of the Black Arts Movement and, most movingly of all, the MOVE bombing that rocked Philadelphia in 1985 and haunts the city still. That bombing, an attack on a black revolutionary sect that was perceived to be a threat, but which left an entire black neighborhood flattened to ashes and killed some of the group’s members, necessarily haunts a movie like this. There’s danger, apparently, in black thought. Asili’s movie is peculiar in that way: inside and outside of itself at once, and all the more exciting for it, while also being form-breaking, expansive far beyond its apparent means. It is a model of how to breathe life into ideas — and of how to give young people credit for undertaking the work the collective knowledge, a credit more often than not denied them. It’s also full of great, incisive one-liners. “It’s so funny,” one young woman says, “how hurt white people look when they love a black movie and you say you don’t like it.”

Suffice it to say: whatever movie she has in mind — whichever black intrusions into the mainstream she could possibly have in mind — The Inheritance is not that movie. It’s satisfying and rigorous and thoughtful but also loose, mixed-up, silly, and anti-classical in ways that make the truths these young people are after — the truths we witness when, for example, those living survivors of the MOVE bombing drawn themselves into the film’s center and take it over with their testimony — all the more palpable. — KAC

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a 21st century Homo sapien in possession of good fortune, must be in want of dependable Wi-Fi. Take that away, and chaos reigns. Both a satire of our social dependency on tech and a surprisingly funny, tender take on dysfunctional family dynamics, this animated comedy from writer-directors Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe is not a Luddite manifesto: The internet is where Katie Mitchell (Broad City‘s Abbi Jacobson) puts up the goofy short movies that get her into film school out west. Dad (Danny McBride) suggests turning her college move into one last Mitchell road trip. Unfortunately, that’s the same moment the singularity happens, and few things ruin family traveling more than an unstoppable robot army. The mix of the sensitive and the ridiculous, of love and anarchy spread over the commentary, somehow syncs up to a tee. Remember: There is no “we” in iPhone. — DF

A look back at a wartime tragedy recounted with breaking-news urgency, Jasmila Zbanic’s Oscar-nominated drama drops viewers into the town of Srebrenica, at the exact moment that the Bosnian Serb army’s tanks are rolling down its streets. Our tour guide for this nightmare is Aida (Izudin Bajrovic), a former teacher who now serves as an interpreter for the United Nations’ troops; she’s trying to ensure that her family is among the thousands of Muslim citizens who will be protected by peacekeepers in the safe zone’s shelter. When the U.N.’s officers are told that all residents must be transported a new location, Aida fears the worst. History will prove her instincts are correct. Anchored by an absolutely stunning performance by Bajrovic — few actors have done more with a stressful scowl and a frozen mask of dread — this recreation of a real-life atrocity refuses to gin up a moral or a silver-lining message. It’s pitiless as a procedural yet somehow remarkably compassionate in its storytelling. And the film’s gut-punch of a coda reminds that even when things return to “normal,” time can only heal some wounds — not all. — DF

A born-again Christian named Maud (Morfydd Clark) pines for a mission — and for her sins, she’s given one, in the form of a being a caretaker for a terminally ill choreographer (Jennifer Ehle). The longer she tends to her sick employer, the more she worries about saving this woman’s soul. But is Maud capable of offering salvation to the sick? Is she imagining these conversations with God, or does this pious heroine really have a direct line to divinity? Or perhaps that voice in her head belongs to some other, less heavenly messenger? Director Rose Glass’s feature debut can be savored as a welcome, disquieting new addition to that old time religio-horror canon. (There will be back-bending levitation shots.) Or you can look at it as a portrait of young woman finding a warped sense of empowerment in her madness…which makes this “possession” story twice as unnerving. No matter which way you look at it, the movie is a genuine revelation, and the sort of holy terror that restores your faith in a genre. — DF

Seriously, is there anything more nerve-racking than running into your married sugar daddy at a shiva for a family friend? The answer, per writer-director Emma Seligman’s debut is: Yes, if both your noisy, overbearing parents and your ex-girlfriend are there as well. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) finds herself juggling a number of secrets and lies while stuck at a communal gathering, having to navigate paternal expectations, the ghosts of her past and being publicly outed in regards to how she’s paying her bills. Viewers, meanwhile, may find themselves running out of nails to bite as things continually threaten to fall apart; a colleague referred to this as “Uncut Gems for Gen Z women,” and that description couldn’t feel more apt in terms of the stress levels experienced while watching this. And Seligman’s expert use of both the claustrophobic setting and Jewish cultural rituals to detail how her hero is suffocating under the burden of expectations and traditions is nothing short of genius. — DF

If Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s look back at the series of shows that took place in Harlem’s Mount Morris Park in the summer of ’69 had been nothing but musical performances, the fruits of his labor-of-love would still make for a near-peerless concert film: A 19-year-old Stevie Wonder jumping in front of his keyboard before banging out a manic drum solo. Nina Simone turning “Backlash Blues” into the equivalent of a boxing match. Sly and the Family Stone at their peak, reminding you that funk is both a noun and a verb. Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples together, taking everyone to church. What he gives us instead, however, is far more vital. It’s a contextualized look at a specific moment — in Harlem’s history, in African-American history, in American history — that reminds you just how much the music acted as a salve for state-institutionalized violence, a catalyst for change, and a celebration. The mere fact that it’s taken decades for anyone to see this footage is a crime. Thompson’s film is a step towards righting that wrong. It’s a reclamation in more ways than one. — DF

Shatara Michelle Ford’s fiery, infuriating Test Pattern — a debut feature fighting far beyond its own weight class — begins with a meet-cute that downplays the cute — thankfully, given what follows. Renesha (Brittany S. Hall) and Evan (Will Brill) open the film as strangers and soon become lovers. She’s Black, he’s white; for a brief while, this does not matter. The urgent genius of Ford’s film is the way in which this difference comes to matter — the surprising ways, ably written by Ford and dramatized by their actors, that institutional differences, differences in the ways we conceive of our own power, may prove to be damning, irreparable fractures in our lives. This is, on the surface, a film about sexual violence. Renesha and a friend, also a black woman, go out; they meet a pair of men who take advantage. And they respond to this event in different, telling ways whose implications are worthy of their own, separate movie. Test Pattern’s focus is instead the fate of Renesha and Evan and the halting misadventures undergone to get what should be so simple: a rape kit, and with it, a modicum of justice. How they behave, how they react, what it reveals about them each, becomes the sinewy, difficult, at times horrifying subject and substance of Ford’s film, which in the end proves to be one of the most psychologically astute, galvanizing releases of the year. — KAC

Mohammad Rasoulof, of Iran, was once banned from making films by the Iranian government — and sentenced, alongside countryman and luminary Jafar Panahi, to six years in prison — because of films the men had made. (The sentences were severely reduced, but time was served.) In 2017, Rasoulof faced yet more trouble, the result of which was, in part, to again prevent the director from making more films. Yet here he is, with There Is No Evil, an ambitious moral thriller that wears its critique of Iran’s military state — and the inability of ordinary citizens to cleanse their hands of complicity in that state — on its face. Specifically, it’s a film about executions: death penalties, and the laws that demand them, and the people — ordinary, serving mandatory military duty — forced to carry them out. So: not a subject that would earn director any champions in the government that had attempted to prevent its making. And, in fact, a month after There Is No Evil won the top prize at 2020’s Berlin Film Festival, the director was again charged, by Iranian authorities, with making “propaganda against the system.”

There Is No Evil is certainly not shy about its subject. It is in fact four short films, four lean, dramatically-charged meditations on the problem of execution. And they all, in one way or another, work — sometimes too neatly, sometimes with moral maneuvering that can feel suspect for being so morally straightforward. There is, too, the problem of how Rasoulof structures these stories: all of them building toward revelations, some of them shocking, occasionally at the expense of diving further into the wreck of more interesting ideas. But there remains great power here. The portrait that opens the film — about a family man of as-yet-unspecified profession going about the tasks of errands, bickering with his wife and daughter, caring for his mother and then… The normalcy is the point; the impact of There Is No Evil is its pointedness, drifting, all of a sudden, into different moods where what often prevails is a somber realism. It’s not a perfect work. But it prevails by way of being such a strong statement — a statement which, had he film not been made, as was the law’s demand, only grows more urgent for the fact that the movie exists to begin with. — KAC

What is it that gives the German film Undine its strange power — that allows what feels so janky and unlikely on paper to emerge onscreen unfettered, with a disturbing layer of glossy realism that’s just this side of reality? It’s moments like this: The somehow-beautiful image of a woman being dragged out to the depths of a lake by a giant catfish. The scene in which two lovers-to-be, Undine (Paula Beer) and Christoph (Franz Rogowski) meet, and an aquarium loses its shit, baptizing this fresh and oddly-fated love in a tankful of fish-water. These things on their own, as described, hardly account for what proves so thrilling about writer-director Christian Petzold’s movie. But they’re a start. Like much of his Petzold’s illusively powerful previous work, Undine is disruptive and transformative and — like the mythological undines themselves — fluid, yet always so peculiar for Petzold’s ability to seemingly play it all with a straight face. (I mentioned the giant catfish, yes?) The movie opens with a breakup in which the scorned man is told, in no uncertain terms, that if he leaves Undine, she’ll have to kill him. Suffice it to say, she gets sidetracked — by new love. But Undine isn’t summarizable in plot points, which would have to attend as well to the ways it integrates a precis of Berlin’s geopolitical history into its drama in the slickest of ways (again, a Petzold trademark). The truer truth is in what can’t quite be accounted for in words: the incredible fact that what should feel like so much bullshit manages, somehow, to work its way into our nerves, unmooring us from reality as we watch. — KAC

Portraits of the artist aren’t easy — and that’s all the more true for radical artists whose work could count as both political acts and personal testament, whose approach to form was liberated and new, who, as historical subjects, have drawn as much curiosity as scorn. No one wants a talking-head study of such an artist; it feels incommensurate. And history lessons feel equally insufficient. You want — need — a trace of the artist overseeing the proceedings. A tribute that seems built of the fabric of that art, not merely description or recapitulation. Chris McKim’s Wojnarowicz sets before itself the mighty task of tackling David Wojnarowicz: an icon of the East Village art scene whose work became a totem of the AIDS era, documenting — against the will of the mass public — not only the existence of that disease, of which he died in 1992, but the great fury of queer political life in that era. And doing so in art that was brash, vexing, unable to be appeased. McKim’s documentary is predicated on the fact and fury of Woj’s own voice, finding a visual language — a language rooted in Woj’s own art, but humble enough to know better than to try to outdo or even match that art — to animate that voice. The film is near-spiritual in its devotion to the archive of Woj’s existence, troubling and blurring the boundaries of nonfiction, as a form in itself, in order to capture the spirit of a boundary-breaking artist. It’s a must-see for anyone who wants to feel like they’re getting the story straight from Woj’s mouth — which, in so many ways, they are — but mediated by the love and attention of, not a fan, but a true student of the man’s art: someone who’s internalized it, lived it, rather than merely studied it. — KAC

When Aziah “Zola” King took to Twitter, in 2015, to tell the story of “why me and this bitch here fell out,” her 148-tweet screed hit the viral big leagues before Zola was even done telling her story. Before it was properly a movie, it was cinema in the making: A stripper misadventure, a Backpage okey-doke, a chance encounter from hell, gun violence, a cuckolded boy toy, a suicide attempt, some savory racial tension, an extra helping of terrifying unpredictability — and a cutting sense of humor narrating it all. Janicza Bravo’s Zola, co-written with playwright Jeremy O. Harris, could very well have told the story straight; the material so overwhelms, is so ridiculous, that it’s easy to imagine a writer-director pair kicking back and letting the story do the work. But the movie that emerged, which opens this week, is something far stranger, richer, more provocative than it had any right to be.

This is a movie that takes care to exploit, not the storyteller herself, but the cacophony of ideas at stake in her story. Ideas about about sex work, and crazy white girls, and pimps, and cucks, and men with guns and, most of all, viral storytelling in itself. Zola makes you feel the itchy, uncomfortable gap between a tweet thread and life as Zola lives it for the span of this story. The movie stars a wonderful Taylour Paige as Zola and a wackadoo Riley Keough as “this bitch right here” — a.k.a. Stefani — on this road trip from hell, in which what happens matters far less than how Zola tells us it happens. This is a movie that makes me feel trapped in Zola, who herself comes to feel trapped, and bored, and scared, and over it. Bravo’s cockeyed sense of humor and vividly alienating sense of style make it feel, at all times, like there’s a great distance between Zola and the world happening on all sides. Which is a good thing. Because the world into which she’s pulled by Stefani — a tragicomic nightmare, in one sense, who manages to stir complicated feelings in us as we watch — is one in which, you can tell, Zola does not want to live. A short weekend is enough. And even that much proves overwhelming. It goes without saying that an A-one bench of co-stars — Nicholas Braun, Colman Domingo, Jason Mitchell, among others — are no small part of that. — KAC