Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2021, I am now going to look at the best technical achievements of 2021. I will be looking at the best screenplays of the years, the best camera and set work, the best music, and other technical categories. Like Best of the Genres, each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as…
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Continuing my look back at the best movies of 2021, I am now going to look at the best movies from each genre. I will be looking at the best foreign-language film, best comedy, and best action movie, along with other genres. Each category will have five “nominees” (a.k.a my personal top five) with my “winner” (my favorite) in bold, followed by short reasoning as to why I picked it the best. Here are my…
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Comic book movies dominate the cinematic landscape today. It feels like every year more franchises and comic book characters are being brought to the big screen. Though 2020 was a very strange cinematic year, we still got a handful of comic book movies. Pandemic or not, comic book movies are here to stay. 2021 offered up eight comic book movies, which is close to the same number we got in 2019 and 2018 (we had…
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Nightmare Alley marks director Guillermo del Toro’s first film following his Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water, a beautiful, twisted romance that looked at the love between a mute woman and an amphibian fish person. del Toro netted himself a Best Director Oscar along with Best Picture and the film also went on to win Best Original Score and Best Production Design, along with being nominated for a total of thirteen awards. I’m…
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Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza is a hang-out movie. It is a movie that rides the same vibe as movies like Dazed and Confused and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. A basically plotless odyssey through a time and place where things happen, but nothing super significant. This isn’t about what happens as much as it is about who it happens to. It is one of the very best movies of the year. It…
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Following a comedic directorial run of Anchorman, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys, arguably the greatest comedy run by a director this century, director Adam McKay shifted his focus to more dramatic, political fare that has garnered him tons of awards and nominations. With 2015’s The Big Short, McKay went after big banks and the 2008 recession in a film that garnered five Academy Award nominations,…
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The Matrix Resurrections marks our return to the Matrix in nearly two decades. The last time we entered the Matrix, we saw Neo (Keanu Reeves) defeat Mr. Smith (Hugo Weaving) and sacrifice his life to reboot the Matrix and save the city of Zion. It appeared that the story of Neo, Morpheus, Trinity, and the journey to save Zion and defeat Mr. Smith had come to a perfect close. Never in my wildest…
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It’s the Christmas season and with that comes Christmas movies. Of all the holidays, it feels like Christmas has the most movies and the most popular movies. Everyone has a favorite Christmas movie, whether you’re a traditionalist and like It’s a Wonderful Life or White Christmas, or you prefer a modern hit like Elf, or prefer to go for something different like Die Hard or Black Christmas, you have one that you love and that…
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Spider-Man: No Way Home is the cinematic event of the year. Thanks to internet speculation, leaks, and the trailer of the film, we know that Spider-Man (once again played by Tom Holland) is being visited by villains of movies past in Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Dr. Ock (Alfred Molina), and Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) from Sam Raimi’s original trilogy and Lizard (Rhys Ifans) and Electro (Jamie Foxx) from Marc Webb’s Andrew Garfield-led…
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Watching The Power of the Dog, the latest film from Oscar-winner Jane Campion, I was in complete awe of everything I was seeing. Campion, who hasn’t made a movie since 2009’s Bright Star, comes back from her twelve-year hiatus to make a detailed, layered, chilling western that is not only one of the best films of her career and one of the best films of 2021. The Power of the Dog takes place…
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