And the 2021 Braddies go to … Peter Bradshaw’s film picks of the year
This was the year that the cinema emerged, blinking, from its enforced hibernation, and the new James Bond film, which was beginning to feel like some sort of commercial or cultural myth, actually came out to tumultuous box office business. International film festivals were once again happening in reality. And some old debates and quarrels have been revived. Cannes artistic director Thierry Frémaux, who has decided against scheduling any films that did not have a big-screen cinema release, pointedly asked his audience at the opening press conference if Netflix has ever nurtured any directors from the beginning of their career.
Answer came there none – although Twitter was lively on the subject afterwards. But maybe 2021 was the time to put this argument to bed. The fact is that Netflix really is supporting major films by major film-makers, including what many believe to be the best of the year: The Power of the Dog, by Jane Campion.
The practice of established directors attacking superhero films, and getting attacked for attacking superhero films, continues. (And renowned arthouse director Chloé Zhao scored a miss with her solemn Marvel movie Eternals.) The increasingly remarkable Ridley Scott – who had two colossal feature films released this year – sounded off defiantly against the heroes in tights and capes. And then, when his period drama The Last Duel performed unconvincingly at the box office, he criticised millennians [sic] and their phone habits. Well, if anyone has earned the right to be grumpy about young people, it’s Scott, and his other film, the outrageously silly and enjoyable true-crime black comedy House of Gucci starring Lady Gaga, was a big hit. True to form, Scott dismissed the Gucci family’s complaints on this subject with magnificent hauteur.
Will the omicron variant bring the shutters back down? We have to hope that it won’t. The cinema defied the premature obituaries this year. Of course, streaming services did well – but so did the movie theatres. Like going to pubs, or nightclubs, or sports arenas, cinemagoing turned out to be a real-world collective thrill that we were longing for.
But it was in this real world that the movies also gave us one of the year’s most shocking and scandalous stories: the accidental fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the western movie Rust, by its star and producer Alec Baldwin. Baldwin has since given an emotional TV interview on the subject to George Stephanopoulos, in which his tears, though perfectly genuine, coexisted with an obvious desire to control the narrative, pre-empt legal jeopardy and finesse the question of his own indirect responsibility as producer.
And what is still staggering, despite all the discussion, is the still unanswered question – how on earth did a live round get into the prop gun? Yet the question naively overlooks the bigger picture. Could it be that people were casual around guns and ammo on this American movie set because people are casual around guns and ammo in the
US generally, where the western film genre has incidentally done much to promote and romanticise gunplay?
The sexual politics of Hollywood, once the hottest of hot-button issues, appear also to have cooled a little since Harvey Weinstein was found guilty in February 2020. In fact, this year we saw glimmerings of what is being called the new “uncancel culture”: a bland new quasi-forgiveness in the air, now that a big wrongdoer has been brought down, precisely the outcome predicted by many at the time. Kevin Spacey (who has no criminal charge against him) has taken a small role in an Italian movie, pointedly playing a cop investigating child abuse. And the continued success of Mel Gibson, whose bigoted, misogynist and antisemitic outbursts are notorious, is one of the film industry’s creepiest phenomena: he is in talks to direct Lethal Weapon 5 and is slated to appear in a John Wick origin-myth TV show.
One talking point that has arisen in 2021 is the debate about abolishing gender categories in acting awards. For some, they have always been an absurdity; after all, we don’t have different awards for male and female directors, or cinematographers, or sound editors. But the division arguably enforces diversity and historically has done its bit to ensure women get their seats at the table.
The Braddies
Rightly or wrongly, I have kept the usual distinction in these Braddies, my personal choices which are distinct from Guardian Film’s best-of-the-year countdown. The nominees are listed in no particular order and readers are invited to vote for their favourites.
Best film
Dune (dir. Denis Villeneuve)
The Green Knight (dir. David Lowery)
Azor (dir. Andreas Fontana)
Limbo (dir. Ben Sharrock)
Petite Maman (dir. Céline Sciamma) No Time to Die (dir. Cary Fukunaga) The Power of the Dog (dir. Jane Campion)
Drive My Car (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
Nomadland (dir. Chloé Zhao)
West Side Story (dir. Steven Spielberg)
Best director
Lee Isaac Cheung for Minari
David Lowery for The Green Knight Andrei Konchalovsky for Dear Comrades!
Jasmila Žbanić for Quo Vadis, Aida? Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog
Emerald Fennell for Promising
Young Woman
Kelly Reichardt for First Cow
Ryu Hamaguchi for Drive My Car Nia DaCosta for Candyman
Alonso Ruizpalacios for A Cop Movie
Best actress
Lady Gaga for House of Gucci Joanna Scanlan for After Love Kristen Stewart for Spencer
Olivia Colman for The Lost Daughter
Rosamund Pike for I Care a Lot Mónica Del Carmen for A Cop Movie
Ruth Negga for Passing
Tessa Thompson for Passing
Rachel Sennott for Shiva Baby
Frances McDormand for Nomadland
Best actor
Amir El-Masry for Limbo
Benedict Cumberbatch for The Power of the Dog
Clayne Crawford for The Killing of Two Lovers
Oscar Isaac for The Card Counter Dev Patel for The Green Knight Adarsh Gourav for The White Tiger Anthony Hopkins for The Father
Riz Ahmed for Sound of Metal
Neil Maskell for Bull
Jean Dujardin for Deerskin
Best cinematographer
Andrew Dunn for The United States vs Billie Holliday
Quyen Tran for Palm Springs
Chung Chung-hoon for Last Night in Soho
Andrew Droz Palermo for The Green Knight
Claire Mathon for Spencer
Caroline Champetier for Annette Gabriel Sandru for Azor
Robbie Ryan for C’mon C’mon Matthew Lewis for Boiling Point Greig Fraser for Dune
Best debut
Identifying Features (dir. Fernanda Valadez)
Rare Beasts (dir. Billie Piper)
Shiva Baby (dir. Emma Seligman) Limbo (dir. Ben Sharrock)
Censor (dir. Prano Bailey-Bond) Sweetheart (dir. Marley Morrison) Souad (dir. Ayten Amin)
Azor (dir. Andreas Fontana)
The Lost Daughter (dir. Maggie
Gyllenhaal)
Lamb (dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson)
Best screenplay
Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe for Drive My Car
Céline Sciamma for Petite Maman J Blakeson for I Care a Lot
Cristi Puiu for Malmkrog
Andy Siara and Max Barbakow for Palm Springs
David Gaitán and Alonso Ruizpalacios for A Cop Movie
Ron Mael and Russell Mael for Annette
Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor for Rose Plays Julie
Paul Schrader for The Card Counter Best documentary
The Velvet Underground (dir. Todd Haynes)
Getting Away With Murder(s) (dir. David Nicholas Wilkinson)
The Story of Looking (dir. Mark Cousins)
Last Man Standing (dir. Nick Broomfield)
The Sparks Brothers (dir. Edgar Wright)
Ultraviolence (dir. Ken Fero)
Janine Jansen: Falling for Stradivari (dir. Gerald Fox)
Summer of Soul (dir. Questlove) Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché (dirs. Celeste Bell, Paul Sng)
Mother (dir. Kristof Bilsen)