It’s been a fast and furious year filled with cinematic marvels – but here are five great films you might just have had no time to dive into…
George White (Screen Co-Editor) - Zola
With what is the first film to be based on a Twitter thread, Janicza Bravo tells the bizarre tale of one stripper’s brush with gangsters in this year’s utterly unique Zola. Those who have read said thread (not to be confused with Right Said Fred) from A'Ziah King will know this is a story that borders on the unbelievable, and Bravo does a fantastic job of bringing the intense drama to the bring screen.
Leading duo Taylour Paige and Riley Keough channel the spirit of their characters with remarkable commitment, and the film is blessed with the beautifully melancholic cinematography that has made A24 so phenomenally popular. It’s not perfect – and, in truth, the original tweets are arguably an even more exhilarating ride – but it definitely deserves more praise than it received. Bravo, indeed.
Available on Prime Video and on Blu-Ray
Jamie Morris (Screen Co-Editor) - The Mitchells vs. The Machines
With an endless cascade of original content arriving on Netflix throughout 2021, you’d be forgiven for overlooking this fantastic animated feature in favour of your Squid Games and Red Notices. Yet, be it with the whole family or simply for your own enjoyment, The Mitchells vs. The Machines’s social media-age apocalyptic antics are well worth making time for.
Sony Pictures Animation has evidenced that 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse was no mere happy accident by borrowing its groundbreaking visual language for this similarly scintillating sci-fi comedy, with director Mike Rianda (an alumni of Disney’s superb Gravity Falls) decorating stylised 3D landscapes with doodle-like 2D finishings. As refreshingly inventive as it is riotously funny, this sits among the best animated movies of the year.
Available on Netflix and on Blu-Ray
Aaron Roe - The Card Counter
Spider-Man this, Ghostbusters that – 2021 has been all about cinematic nostalgia, and after the year we’ve had, surely we deserve to be bundled up in the soothing embrace of simpler times? Paul Schrader disagrees. With The Card Counter, he subjugates us to his own brand of cynical, brooding, man-in-a-room kind of nostalgia that leaves a sour taste in your mouth. Picture Oscar Isaac sat bare-chested, channelling his consciousness onto paper.
Isaac’s understated tour-de-force ensures that we never step off thin ice. He’s William Tell, a man shrouded in mystery, going through the motions as a low-stakes gambler, forced to confront the sins of his past yet again and search for redemption. Schrader harmonises character study and revenge thriller with a menacing power chord of a script, and Isaac gives us a protagonist that feels unsettlingly timely. Who knows, some of us could be one lockdown away from turning into this bloke…
In select cinemas now
Jeremy Arblaster - Drive My Car
Like the long car journeys that make up parts of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the Japanese director’s stunning film is slowly travelling towards the kind of recognition it deserves, with a real chance of winning big at 2022’s Oscars. After discovering his wife’s affair, middle-aged actor Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is denied closure when she suddenly dies from a brain haemorrhage, leaving him with not only the grief of her passing, but of the life he thought they’d led.
Stuck in a painful limbo, Yusuke takes on a job directing a run of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is chauffeured to and from rehearsals by Misaki (Toko Miura). It’s during these drives that, with a tape of Uncle Vanya running in the background, Hamaguchi connects our protagonist with the young driver through their shared pain, the drama woven into the stitches and seams of life. “The serious alternates with the trivial,” as Chekhov once remarked. It’s a remarkable story of connection, sitting perfectly alongside Vanya’s basis for the uniquely devastating type of betrayal that Yusuke feels.
Available to rent on BFI Player and Curzon
Yasmin Turner - Sardar Udham
This epic biopic retells the life of Udham Singh, an awakening figure in the Indian independence movement, hiking across timelines and continents, from Punjab to London. The unhurried recreation of just a part of India’s colonial history focuses on the assassination of former Punjab governor Michael O’Dwyer, who oversaw the horrific 1919 Amritsar Massacre which killed an estimated 300 to perhaps over 1000 people.
The searing intensity of this scene alone is a huge directorial success from Shoojit Sircar, and Vicky Kaushal’s devastatingly touching performance as Singh increases the potency of events, as he painstakingly navigates the crowd of peaceful protestors who were gunned down by the 10-minute prolonged firing from the British army. With non-linear sequences that keep you invested, alongside captivating cinematography, uncovering the pain and pride of India, this is a fierce and emotional discovery into the life of Singh.
Available on Prime Video
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