Films of the Year 2021

1. Promising Young Woman
2. Dune Part One
3. The Matrix Resurrections
4. No Time To Die
5. A Quiet Place Part II

6. The Courier
7. Kate
8. The Suicide Squad
9. Gunpowder Milkshake
10. Contagion
11. Eternals
12. Fear Street Part One: 1994

13. The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf
14. Fear Street Part Two: 1978
15. Anna
16. Fear Street Part Three: 1666
17. Cruella
18. Ride or Die

19. The Unforgivable
20. Black Widow
21. Mulan

22. The Prom

A somewhat longer list of films this year than last as, like many others, I shifted to watching online, although six of my films were seen at the cinema and a number were seen on the iPad with friends streamed through discord. In fact, 21 films is almost back to my normal sorts of numbers in pre-pandemic years in total (25-30 was the norm), although in those years typically all or all but one would have been seen at the cinema.

We have, as usual, a number of groups here, from the excellent, through the very good, to the good, the ok, the bad and the execrable. I nearly split the top group into two. Promising Young Woman, Dune and The Matrix Resurrections are a step ahead of No Time To Die and A Quiet Place II for me but those two still deserve to be up there in the top place. It’s worth noting that only three of these five, and not all of the top three, are films I saw at the cinema. These are all films I would happily see again, and in the case of three of them, I have seen again in fact. Promising Young Woman never gets to be a particularly easy watch, but it’s still so good that I will watch it willingly (if not precisely happily) again in the future.

The next group of films I enjoyed, however they all came with a but. That might be “… but I don’t feel the need to see it again.” Or “… but I think part of the reason they’re so high is the people I saw it with.” In the case of Contagion it’s “… but it’s got a boost because of Covid making it work so much better.” Don’t get me wrong, some of these films would have been up there anyway, but they they all have that slight issue. They’re in the “no real effort to watch again but probably wouldn’t turn over to avoid” territory.

In the next category are films I don’t regret watching but I probably would try and avoid rewatching. I know there’s going to be a sequel to Cruella and I’ll probably watch that, and I’ll probably watch another The Witcher movie but I’m certainly not going to make any effort to watch these again. They were fun but not good enough to watch more than once and I would try to avoid rewatching them.

Then we get into bad, and terrible. I was torn here, too. Was Mulan bad enough to join The Prom… almost. Was it bad enough to deserve another category between Black Widow and The Prom not quite, in the end.

Looking at how the tests I apply do, we have 90.9% pass the Bechdel test, that’s way up on last year and the highest I’ve ever seen. 65.0% passed the Ko test, and the rest didn’t have WOC for the most part for various reasons. Two were null, an anime where the colour of skin presented is not necessarily indicative of the colour of the actor’s skin (if it were, who do you cast as the grey-skinned monster, or the bark-skinned leshy?) and the other was a Japanese language film. Again this is way up on last year but may reflect the more international nature of Netflix films. I didn’t score last year’s Koeze-Dottle test as pass/fails (I counted total male:female ratio) but this year 22.7% passed and it’s hard to imagine they’d do better. Looking back to previous years, this is around the same sort of number as I was seeing there though. 50.0% passed the Russo test, which is almost double last year’s total and higher than typical, which is around 25-30%. I think it’s absolutely possible to lay that at the feet of Netflix. With the exception of No Time To Die, one of only three films to pass all three of the film tests and the only really big box-office one (Promising Young Woman and The Prom were the other two) anything that you might consider big budget Hollywood that I saw certainly failed the Russo test and almost certainly failed the Koeze-Dottle test. The Ko test was a bit more of a coin toss.

I just want to say that passing these tests is not the ultimate arbiter of a good film, although it’s noticeable that my top two passed all four (so did my worst film of the year though). I really enjoyed The Courier and placed it sixth on my list. At various times the top tier had six entries with dividing line between The Courier and Kate, it was that close to being there. And The Courier is the only film this year that failed all four of the tests. It’s an exceptional case: based on a true story, early 1960’s spy story and most of the people involved were white guys - a British guy on the board of trade, his Russian counterpart, a few MI6 spooks and so on. I understand why it failed all the tests and it was a good enough story to stand up anyway but those are rare.

Before I leave the tests, I am going to be dropping the Koeze-Dottle from next year. It’s not that I think the situation has improved for representation of women in films, certainly not to the point of equality, it is that I don’t think this test is representative. There are films, several within this year, where I’ve marked it as a fail but noted that if you extend the count from 10 to 20 that changes. In many cases I’ve done that because the fact the film failed was contrary to my viewing experience. Extras are often listed in order of appearance and if you have a group of men first for some reason, you get a cluster of men, then a cluster of women (the opposite is also true), sorting by other methods can lead to other forms of clustering. I could count them all, but sometimes that’s fewer than ten, sometimes it’s hundreds. Life it too short to count all the extras in Black Widow! If I can think of a better way to analyse it, I will, but at the moment I think the test misrepresents the situation which is not good.

I know with Omicron the immediate future of going to the cinema is in the balance but I wonder too, if the change I’ve seen in my viewing habits will stick. I know it’s not just mine, this is a global thing, but in all honesty of the films I saw at the cinema I think only two (Dune and The Matrix Resurrections) really required it. Maybe Eternals. I can foresee a situation where I’m more selective about the hassle of travelling to the cinema and seeing things on the big screen, saving it up for the films that really need that spectacle and, for the rest, I’ll wait and catch them at home.

As with my TV, 18/22 films are films I have no regrets watching - the top three categories separate more on how much I want to rewatch them than anything else. A bit on how deeply they affected me and/or made me think. Good selection or something else? There are definitely fewer films I’ve gone to see “just because” this year and I think that’s going to continue.