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Read the full Best of 2021 lists (including newly commissioned writing from a host of critics!) here, including best undistributed films and individual ballots from our invaluable voters. 

It seemed appropriate then that films populated by characters in their preteens, teens, and early twenties predominated this year’s lineup of 300-plus titles, above all in the top-notch 12-film special section entitled “Teenage Angst/Teenage Lust.” And while the festival may not have had any certified discoveries featuring people of any age (many of the best films had already played other major European fests), it made the point that surviving adolescence is now harder than ever, and the days of hormonal teen pics, in which virginity-loss is the driving motivation, seem almost obsolete....

Halter and Beard have made it their mission to break down boundaries between the contemporary art and film scenes. Halter helmed the magpie New York Underground Film Festival from 1996 to 2006 (which has since turned into the Migrating Forms festival), and both now lead the Brooklyn-based venue Light Industry, which presents installations and performances alongside rare screenings by Godard, Straub-Huillet, and other titans of the film avant-garde. For the Biennial, they selected works from all over the artistic spectrum—experimental (Nathaniel Dorsky, Jerome Hiler, Laida Lertxundi), documentary (Laura Poitras, Frederick Wiseman, Thom Andersen), and even (gasp!...

I suppose I could be Berberian Sound Studio’s ideal viewer. As a kid in the Seventies, I had a friend whose father was an art director at Pinewood Studios in southern England and I was a regular visitor to his home. We’d draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and play sound-effects records. Among the 40 or so recordings that the BBC released on Pye Records, there was one disc in particular that we listened to—or tried to listen to—over and over again: Vol....

From Dusk Till Dawn [T]he rediscovery I’m enjoying the most at the moment is Michael Parks, the Sixties “troubled youth” actor who’s been reborn in the Nineties as a bottomlessly odd character man. Tagged with the “next James Dean” label as the star of Wild Seed and the William Inge-scripted (but disowned) Bus Riley’s Back in Town in 1965, Parks seemed never to get out from under the expectations. He played Adam in John Huston’s The Bible (talk about expectations), and the brooding lead role in the TV series “Then Came Bronson,” a guy riding his motorcycle around America....

The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sangsoo, 2022) Starting with 2018’s austere Hotel by the River and culminating with the new The Novelist’s Film, Hong Sangsoo’s recent works are steeped in an awareness of mortality and inclined toward self-reflection. Death casts a looming shadow in these movies, most explicitly in the devastating In Front of Your Face (2021), though it does not weigh them down. The lightness of touch that characterizes Hong’s best work is still evident in these films, but it is counterbalanced by a Beckettian preoccupation with all that might go unsaid in our exchanges with others, and how much of that is worth saying before the proverbial curtain drops....

This year’s Jeonju Film Festival offered up James Benning smelting more Duisburger experience and Argentine Rivette acolyte Matias Pineiro staging Shakespearean flirtations in the latest edition of the Digital Project, alongside retrospectives of Pedro Costa, Romuald Karmakar, Miklós Jancsó, and Korean documentary prime mover Kim Dong Won. Game playing and sensual/tactile cinema were recurring themes in this correspondent’s sampling of the festival’s robust 11th edition—with a frequency that suggested that the universe is neither an accident nor does it make much sense....

Consider the lengths of time between Jean Vigo’s death and the first appearances of Zéro de conduite and L’Atalante in the U.S. (13 years), or between the first screening of Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 and its recent appearances on Blu-Ray (45 years), and it becomes obvious that the popular custom of listing the best films of any given year is unavoidably a mythological undertaking. By the same token, film history in the present should be divided between important filmmakers skilled and successful in hawking their own goods, from Alfred Hitchcock to Spike Lee to Lars von Trier, and those who, for one reason or another, aren’t—a less definitive roll call that includes, among many others, Charles Burnett, Ebrahim Golestan, Luc Moullet, Peter Thompson, Orson Welles, and John Gianvito....

Kyoto, the 17th century: Oharu, daughter of a samurai, is expelled from the imperial court for having secretly loved Katsunosuke, a servant. Sold by her father to a local landlord whose wife rejects her, Oharu falls off the social ladder and is stepped on. Tracing the historical implications of the world’s oldest profession via the misadventures of an unwitting representative, Mizoguchi films the pain of love and the cruel tragedy of those who are impervious to it—a parable of a disheartened and dejected female soul caught in the claws of an unforgiving patriarchal society....

Café Flesh (Stephen Sayadian, 1982) On the third evening of this year’s Berlin Critics’ Week, an autonomous event that runs parallel to the Berlinale, four short films were screened as part of the program “Artistic Differences—Ghosts of a Damned Earth”: Ana Carolina and Paulo Rufino’s Lavra dor (“Plowman,” Brazil, 1968); Aloysio Raulino’s O tigre e a gazela (“The Tiger and the Gazelle,” Brazil, 1977); Rodrigo Ribeiro-Andrade’s The White Death of a Black Wizard (Brazil, 2020); and Rubén Gámez’s The Secret Formula (Mexico, 1965)....

In terms of the Berlinale’s lukewarm record when it comes to opening films, The Grandmaster by this year’s jury president Wong Kar Wai is a significant improvement from previous entries such as Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009) and Wang Quan’an’s Apart Together (2010). To those devotees left disappointed by 2007’s My Blueberry Nights, however, the Hong Kong auteur’s highly anticipated Ip Man biopic will not represent the hoped-for return to form....

There is an act of kindness in Beanpole that is performed by sliding a needle into the neck of a paralyzed soldier named Stepan. The moment is quiet, without music or cinematic flourish; everyone else in the hospital room where the scene takes place is sleeping. Iya (Viktoria Mironshnichenko), a Leningrad nurse who suffered severe brain trauma as a soldier in the war, administers the injection out of frame with steady hands....

Dennis Potter, the author of The Singing Detective, composed his scripts in longhand because writing was as physical and sensual for him as it was aesthetic and cerebral. The opening credits of A Monster Calls, J.A. Bayona’s film version of Patrick Ness’s Young Adult novel, start with the image of a pencil drawing on paper. From that point on, the whole movie is comparable in poetry and impact to Potter’s pop fantasias....

My Life as a Zucchini is a modest marvel based on a novel by Gilles Paris called Autobiography of a Zucchini. Was this change in the title mean to evoke Lasse Hallström’s tough and funny 1985 coming-of-age film, My Life as a Dog? This stop-motion cartoon feature more than stands up to comparison, and not just because the two movies center on orphans. The hero, nicknamed “Zucchini,” is an unintentional matricide who gets sent to a care center that handles hard-luck cases of all kinds....