With awards season coming up fast for the movie industry, writer and filmmaker John Waters has started the conversation with his much-anticipated list of Best Films of 2021.
In the December issue of Artforum magazine, out today, Waters names what he considers the top films for the year. They are:
- Annette, directed by Leos Carax: Waters writes that the “best movie of the year” is a “nutcase masterpiece” rock musical about an “angry macho performance artist, his opera-diva girlfriend, and their daughter, who is somehow born a puppet.” Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard star, and Ron and Russell Mael, who form the pop duo Sparks, provide the score.
- Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. This concert film was edited from footage shot during the Harlem Cultural Festival from June 29 to August 24, 1969 — the same summer as the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. Called “Black Woodstock,” the six-week event featured performers such as Mahalia Jackson; Stevie Wonder; B. B. King; The 5th Dimension and Gladys Knight & The Pips. Waters singles out for praise the “great gospel voice” of Clara Ward and the passion of Nina Simone – “never angrier!”
- Vortex, directed by Gaspar Noe. The “feel-bad drama about death,” filmed in split-screen Duo-Vision during the COVID pandemic, revolves around the struggles of an elderly couple in declining health, with the wife succumbing to dementia, and their son. Waters says it’s “the director’s most humane and unironic” movie yet but also “scarily claustrophobic” and “disturbing.”
- France, directed by Bruno Dumont. A psychological study of a fictitious celebrity TV journalist who faces unwanted attention after she has a car accident in Paris. Waters calls it “a searing critique of both the tedium and the emotional risk of living in the public eye.”
- The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. A “harrowing documentary” about Bjorn Andresen, the young actor who appeared in director Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice, and the “perils of teen stardom” he faced after the film came out.
- Mandibles, directed by Quentin Dupieux. A comedy about two hapless friends who find a giant fly in the trunk of a car and decide to train it in hopes of making money. Waters calls it “the stupidest art film of the year” but also “one of the funniest and most charming.”
- Red Rocket, directed by Sean Baker. Texas is the setting where a “washed-up hetero male porn star,” played by Simon Rex, clashes with his “meth-head ex-wife and mother-in-law” after returning to his hometown.
- The Tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Coen, with Denzel Washington as Macbeth; Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth and Kathryn Hunter playing all three witches. Release date: December 25, 2021. “If Ingmar Bergman came back from beyond the grave today to direct Shakespeare on film,” Waters muses, “this is what it would look like.”
- Saint-Narcisse, directed by Bruce LaBruce. LaBruce’s comedy-drama about a young man’s search for his mother, who he thinks is dead, is the director’s “most successfully realized movie, elegantly shot and seamlessly put together,” Waters says. “Catholic, sexy and oh so deviantly devout.”
- The Onania Club, directed by Tom Six. A feature about rich Los Angeles women who form a secret masturbation club of kindred spirits who get aroused by the misery of others. Waters says it’s “loathsome” and “often wrongheaded” but also sometimes “laugh-out-loud funny.” He notes that the film has been rejected by film distributors worldwide. which means that most people will probably never be able to see it and “maybe that’s a good thing.” Waters says that he went “out on a limb” and selected The Onania Club in place of Pedro Almodovar’s Parallel Mothers, “a film everybody should love.”
