NMW's Salute to 2021: Movies Seen for the First Time

Every year we have a fun ranking of the films that I saw for the first time this year. Inevitably I usually include movies seen that came out that year, as if we were making a pure list of films that according to my reality, I saw for the first time. I decided to go a different route, and disinclude ANY 2021 films here.

So consider this a way of catching up on recent films and getting a lead on older films that are great.

Life Stinks (1991)

I had always known about his latter Mel Brooks movie, but never watched it because it wasn't a parody film and never had the cultural cache of other films. It's amazing how many deep Mel Brooks cuts there are out there, but unlike say, The Twelve Chairs (1970) or Silent Movie (1976), this really doesn't attempt at all to be comedic, despite a classic 80s / early 90s comedic premise. Mel Brooks as a greedy CEO must spend 30 days as a homeless person to win a bet. Easy enough. But this film is loaded with so much empathy, character, and nuance that I feel like to reject it is to reject the premise of the film itself - that homeless folk aren't bums or stock characters, but human beings. It's pretty good, but decidedly not a laugh riot, which held it back at the time, but worth a revisit now.

A Star is Born (2018)

Hot damn, A Star is Born hit me. This movie hit me hard. I wanted to catch up on it because it was such a big deal a few years ago (maybe "Shallow" more than the movie itself), and it's genuinely a great watch. The tale is old at this point, but Brad Cooper throws in great subtleties and a character progression that you really buy despite well-worn territory. There's also alcoholism, selling out creative endeavors, and of course, "Shallow" is pretty good. This made me really emotional! It's good!

Dead Alive (1992)

This has been on my list forever as a desire to see all of Peter Jackson's pre-Lord of the Rings affairs. This doesn't disappoint. First of all, it's assuredly bonkers, playing with zombies, but not quite our typical zombie affair - it has way more in common with The Evil Dead (1981) than Romero. It is famed as one of the more grotesque horror films of all time, and I suppose that is true. The gore effects are wild and the creativity of the dead and crawling body parts is fantastic. The premise is racist I guess, but this was a really fun Halloween watch.

Hell Comes to Frogtown (1987)

I forget how this got on my list. But I watched it and was entranced. This is the kind of movie that needs to be remade with star power and an actual budget. Oh wait - they did! It's almost the exact same movie as Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). It was created as a total Mad Max rip-off, which I'm sure fell into the cracks at the time amongst dozens of similar films, but it stands out today when viewed without context under its own merit. It's surprisingly feminist, has giant snake penises and amphibian sex, and stars Rowdy Roddy Piper. I know what you're thinking - why aren't I watching this right now?

Hustlers (2019)

This movie came out a while ago and was a big deal upon release, peaked with some awards buzz that it didn't get, and then fizzled out. But this movie is fantastic! It's totally Scorsese-esque but with strippers, but that's all you need. J. Lo is a fiery dominating presence in this film and it fits into a great blend of current recession films that focus more on well, our need to hustle rather than to make an honest living as the only way of getting by. They're not wrong. This is a trip and a fantastic epic journey. It's also not nearly as voyeuristic as you might think. J. Lo does look good tho.

After Hours (1985)

Just like deep dives into Brooks and Jackson, I made a stark realization that despite me just using Scorsese as an adjective, I haven't really seen many of his non-obvious films. After Hours is one of those, perhaps his least-Scorsese-like (and perhaps his funniest). It depicts a night that gets out of control in SoHo, but never in a violent or chaotic way. Okay, some folks do die, but it feels more restrained than a current comedy would do with the same premise. It's fun to watch in part just to think that none of this would happen with today's technology, and to see how the parents from Home Alone (1990) got together.

Chi-Raq (2015)

This is another movie that always seemed to have good buzz, but got no awards, and no one talked about after its release. Thank Spike Lee as I wanted to expand my understanding of his filmography as well, and Chi-Raq delivers with a Greek narrative, rhyming, rapping, and singing its way to a tremendous second act and conclusion. The only difficult thing about this movie is believing that Nick Cannon can be a hard thug who won't nut with Teyonah Parris. It's a film that is incredibly ambitious in scope and thoroughly pulls it all off.

Nomadland (2020)

Our first of two 2020 films to crack the top, Nomadland obviously found a sweet spot with praise last year, earning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress honors. It's also again such a product of our time, the transient lifestyle driven by capitalism yet reviled by it. There's a bit of edge here, too, when Frances McDormand has the opportunity to leave her life as a van-dweller, but refuses. It finds a contrast between the natural beauty of this great land of ours and the truly terrible way we treat our people. It's a great, deserving film.

The Holy Mountain (1973)

Yes, I got my Alejandro Jodoworsky share this year. This film is full of surreal allegory, but also hits hard today against the sins of the world as much as it did fifty years ago. It's surely up there as one of the weirdest films you can find, but also one of the richest. It's coated in symbolism, and I mean, literally, that's all there is here. There's hardly a word of dialogue in the first hour or so, but then it hits on everything about life, religion, and well, pretty much anything else you could want to know about the big questions. It's assuredly experimental and pulls off everything it wants to be.

Promising Young Woman (2020)


Speaking of a movie for our times, jeez, this one. It's obviously a #MeToo driven film, but one that thoroughly explores the actual fallout of a drunken rape instead of stats and catchphrases. It hammers the emotional damage that explodes upon friends and family, particularly one friend, whose life becomes a complete wreck in the wake of her friends' rape and subsequent suicide. The ending is unflinching and uncompromising that would feel refreshing if not for its brutality. There is so much explored here, from the nice guy bystanders to weary family ready to give up and move on. When should we give up? Should we move on? What is the best way to move forward out of trauma? This movie's also a comedy.

That's it! My favourite film watched this year is my new best film of 2020. Check out these other oddities, admittedly some of these are more interesting or forgotten bits of cinema you should check out. Bring on 2022!

**Special Commendation added 01/03/22:

Alright, egg on my face whatever. I forgot to include this movie, but I really wanted to talk about it. I saw Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990) for the first time this year! Not only is this sketch 100% accurate, but it is suprisingly a movie fit for our times. See, we had all these meta movies like this and Last Action Hero (1993) back in the day that demonstrated how sick and canny we were of movie tropes and corporate meddling. Gremlins 2 pulls off everything it wants to be, breaks the fourth wall, is a biography of Donald Trump, and has so much damn fun with itself. It's amazing and everyone needs to see it. #1 film of the year.

NMW Salutes While It looks Back on What Might Have Been Cool

So, every year we try to forecast what's going to be cool, and the cool thing about 2021 is that we actually saw a lot of these! First, that means that we have full write-ups on nearly all of these films. But let's do a quick rundown on if these were cool or not.

Godzilla vs. Kong

My number one anticipated film. It was definitely good, maybe a little less than Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), but still delivered on its promise of being an outrageous, wacky affair. The fight(s) was thrilling, as was the special guest star. Like all of these Legendary movies, the human characters are proving to be somehow worse than the Toho films, but this was solid, appropriately hyped!

DUNE

I liked DUNE a lot. I suppose I got out of it what I was excited for going into it. It was suitably epic, but ended up not being quite as big or awesome as I had hoped. That's probably just because I never been a huge DUNE fan. I'm not anti-DUNE or anything, but as a fan on the sidelines this was appropriate.

The Suicide Squad

Cautiously optimistic, and I'm going to say that this exceeded my expectations. It was really well-written, well-shot, and had lasting fun characters that assuredly eclipsed the original. Expectations exceeded.

The Tomorrow War

Is it Chris Pratt movies or original sci-fi movies, or just Amazon movies that are the problem? This was not that good, such a juicy premise that went nowhere and didn't make any sense. This could have been really cool but was instead really safe and uninteresting. Expectations deceeded.

Venom: Let There be Carnage

Why did I hype this? I guess it was about where you'd expect it to be. I'm not sure why I drank the comic book movie sequel Kool-Aid on this one. Ultimately I have to say it came up short of expectations, just because I thought they could really turn this around in a fun and darkly goofy way, but the end result instead looked cluttered, cheap, rushed, and incoherent. Maybe I should have expected as much because this film never tried to be anything different.

No Time to Die

What a great time at the cinema! The last Dan Craig Bond was fitting for the insanely protracted character arc and this was a pretty fulfilling movie that ranked high amongst the Craig Bonds as well as any Bond of the last fifty years. I might even go so far as to say it was better than the modest hype surrounding it.

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar

Spectacular! Well, that's a little strong. It was funny and surprising, and delivered well for a movie I knew next to nothing about. Pray for Edgar, I'd say this blew my expectations away and exists as a positive unicorn in the current landscape of comedy films.

The Last Duel

This is the only film on this list I ended up not seeing. No, Ridley Scott, it wasn't because it didn't have men in capes fighting each other, or because of the pandemic, or anything with millennials. Well, maybe the last part was true, because it did just feel like a dinosaur of a film with archaic notions towards its women, plot, and premise. That may not be true, I don't know what this movie is about, but that was the vibe I got. My life could go on without it and it did just perfectly.

Army of the Dead

Saw this piece of shit! Again, such a cool premise and a dream cast that absolutely floundered. It just didn't use its premise in any creative way. It should be remembered for Tig Notaro and...well, that's probably about it. It probably falls the most short of expectations of any film here, Zach Snyder should just be a cooler director and this wasn't that cool.

The Green Knight

I'm very proud of myself or selecting The Green Knight. I would say this actually exceeded expectations and became a movie I really enjoyed unpacking, decoding, and thinking about in the weeks after I watched it. I need to find more movies like this but I feel like it's hard to get hyped on some of these far out indies without much more than titles, if even that right now. Who am I kidding, I listed The Suicide Squad in my Top 10 this year.

What does 2022 have in store?! We'll soon find out! Stay tuned when we countdown our cherriest of all hype movies after the New Year!

NMW's Salute to 2021: MOVIES!

Well folks, it's finally that magical time of year - ranking time! We're going to look back and reflect on everything that happened this year. Somehow the movie landscape felt even more fractured than in 2020. Maybe that's just because 2020 still had a lot of fun movies to burn off. In 2021 we really felt the impact. And super self-admittedly, I did not see all the 2021 movies I wanted to. Some years I just kind of make it up, but this year I wanted to really stick with just those that I actually laid my eyes on. I barely saw more than ten passable films, so maybe wait until next year for a more proper ranking?

Speaking of which...

2020 Re-rank

Trial of the Chicago 7

Extra Ordinary

Palm Springs

Da 5 Bloods

Buffaloed

Another Round

I'm Thinking of Ending Things

Color Out of Space

Nomadland

Promising Young Woman

Great example! Six films actually remain from last year, but my #1 fell to #6. Oh well. I actually still like Mank more than I thought I would a year from last year, but not enough to crack my Top 10. Nomandland and Promising Young Woman feel like the kind of towering films that will be high for a long time.

Okay, ready for 2021?

#10: Raya and the Last Dragon

For some reason, it seems like no one cares about Raya and the Last Dragon. No one's talking about, I even ready a weary take that bemoaned a supposed inevitable Oscar win for its studio and Chinese pandering. This film was great. Awkwafina was miscast, just because she sounds too much like Awkwafina, but this was the most OCD-plugging film of all time. It's the kind of movie that can really inspire a little kid, and I pictured a younger self going crazy unpacking the different kingdoms, cultures, and ramifications of personal choices. It was a lot of fun, a compelling adventure, and one that I honestly think folks avoid because it's Disney, Chinese, and starring women. Oh well.

#9: The Sparks Brothers

I really just wanted to talk about how I somehow have this big Sparks gap. How had I not heard of this band? They are so up my alley and when I saw the trailer I started listening to their music constantly for six months and developed a genuine love for their ever-changing sound. I just missed them for so long. But it's never too late to become a Sparks fan. You may think The Beatles: Get Back was the best piece of media to explore the evolution of creative process this year, but give up some credit to The Sparks Brothers, which dives deep into band and song formation more than getting bogged down in the personal drama and drug use like many other musician biopics. The documentary format helps, as does the fact that they've never done drugs and made 25 albums.

#8: The Suicide Squad

Listen, all your lists will include Drive My Car or Shiva Baby but I want to talk about how much I loved The Suicide Squad. It is a positively wacky film with a huge budget, and the greatest, most expensive course correction in franchise blockbuster history. It's a simultaneous sequel and remake and I loved everything about it. The off-beat but three-dimensional characters, the comic book zaniness, and the well-paced and choreographed action scenes that also advance character growth are all high points for other superhero films to shoot for, especially with smaller bullets.

#7: The Power of the Dog

I think this was good. It was definitely boring, but rewards folks who pay attention. Also, the ending is not that ridiculous, he had an open wound with bad cow hide, that's that. It's a strange film with no actual protagonist, though. Maybe it's Benedict, but he's kept at such a distance that you never get into his head. Maybe it's Kirsten Dunst, but she also fades late in the film. We never really get into Jesse Plemons, and Kodi just pops in so later and with such foggy intentions that it's hard to get into his head, too. These are slights in the hands of a lesser filmmaker, but Jane Campion presents this as a puzzle to unlock without ever sacrificing compellingness. Okay, it definitely gets boring when she's just trying to learn piano.

#6: Barb and Star Go To Vista del Mar

This sneaky little bastard of a movie. It has flaws for sure, the tired villainous albino trope being at the top, but from the get go it's hard to understand what movie I actually clicked on in Hulu. But it settles into his wackiness, presents cringe, then backs off, pays off, and slays off like no film this year. Jamie Dornan and Annie Mumolo are fantastic, Kristen Wiig surprisingly less so, but it really is a film like no one else is making. And it got totally buried, so go watch it. Pray like Edgar, my favourite movie song of the year.

#5: The Harder They Fall

I'd consider this an average movie experience, until a huge twist at the end, but since it also stars all Black Cowboys it instantly becomes unique. That should certifiably be understood as a dreary take on the industry, considering how much black folk shaped the west (and are both comparatively underrepresented and...the reason they're called cowboys). I don't know why I need to know who Bass Reeves is from HBO's Watchmen. Anyway, it's directed with engaging panache by Jeymes Samuel, who hopefully had more in the tank like this. It's equal parts fun and serious from start to finish and presents its blackness as natural rather than particular. Hope for us all.

#4: Don't Look Up

AKA the late 2010s: the movie. Jeez, this film. Since parting with Ferrell, Adam McKay has been really terribly scattershot. I like The Big Short (2015) and Vice (2018), but this is somehow his most complete and traditional narrative. It's also bonkers, but really not that bonkers. In fact I hesitate to think that people in real life would be this rational. It's like a disaster movie without leadership being a given and the ending is really fulfilling. Our decisions have consequences, folks! This could be about climate change, or COVID-19, or anything else. We have some deep problems embedded in our culture, and unfortunately, I agree with the media moguls here that Leo and Jenn screaming at us isn't going to move the needle.

#3: No Sudden Move

Remember No Sudden Move? The fisheye Soderbergh movie that dropped on HBOMax over the summer? Everyone seemed to love it but then immediately forget. It's just that kind of culture, I guess. I still liked it. Definitely boring for stretches, and as soon as you realize that Don Cheadle and Benicio del Toro don't actually have any influence on the plot (and that the plot is also about a real-life auto industry conspiracy to suppress the catalytic-converter), it becomes far more watchable. It's subtle, fueled by stellar acting, an impressive cast, and ultimately significant stakes. I'd like to watch it again.

#2: The Green Knight

It was tough between these last two. In many ways, these were the only two movies I truly liked this year, and in my annual review of top films seen for the first time regardless of release year, these were the only two that really stood out. The Green Knight is layered in symbolism to unpack, fueled by unorthodox casting choices that enhance the core message, and updates an ancient tale to a modern audience while avoiding the flash of easy commercial filmmaking. The ending is righteous, ambiguous, and takes its cake while eating it too. Make no mistake, this film delivers on all the promises it makes. It's also ridiculously beautiful, finding breahtaking vistas in muddy rainy England, from forest to cliff to scrungy city. It's a film firing on all possible cylinders.

#1: PIG

That's right. Nic Cage. Haggard. Trying to find his pig. This premise could so easily become ridiculous. Like a John Wick (2014) parody, or...well, like any Nic Cage film. But the film treats its subject matter seriously, and slowly unravels what this guy's deal is. It also delivers on its promises, and never backs down from the stated fact that this truffle-hunter was the real deal chef, but he understands life perhaps better than any cinema character ever. I said it. I watched this on a plane. It's so good.

Films I saw that barely missed this list:

Bo Burnham: INSIDE

Plan B

Bad Trip

DUNE

Films I did not see that could be here next year:

The Tragedy of MacBeth

Licorice Pizza

French Dispatch

Last Night in SOHO

House of Gucci

That's it. I feel more regretful than usual, mostly because some of these picks are just terribly commercial, but I dug what I dig and that's it, baby. We'll see if any befallen 2021 film can creep back in my re-rank next year, but for now - that's it! Hello 2022!