Top 10 Most Read Film Reviews of 2021
Which films did you care most about as the pandemic rolled on?
By The Screens Staff, 7:00AM, Fri. Dec. 31, 2021
Cinema, the real in-person theatrical experience, was back with a vengeance in 2021, and you were busy online checking out our recommendations and warnings about what was playing near you. Yet it wasn't just big releases: From indie horrors to Yaoi anime, here are the 10 reviews by the Chronicle critics you most wanted to read.
1: No Time to Die
"No Time to Die doesn't take the opportunity to examine Bond in a more stripped-down setting. Instead, it's the standard mix of globetrotting action, just slower and less engaging than ever before. Subplots go nowhere, new characters are dropped in with little payoff (exactly what purpose a side trip to Cuba with Ana de Armas' giddy young CIA rookie serves defies explanation), and much of the dialogue is simply meaningless – particularly every word out of Safin's mouth, which would just be nonsensical if it wasn't also delivered with all the gravitas and malice of a bus timetable. It's ponderous, tedious, and somehow both buried in continuity and determined to drop it all halfway through the story." - Richard Whittaker
Read our full review here.
2: Eternals
"There’s been an urge to excuse the director and blame the studio, arguing that (Chloe) Zhao just didn’t fit into the strictures of the MCU. Yet that doesn’t explain how weak the script she co-wrote is, or why it’s so insufferably long, or why it almost completely fails to tackle its own core conceits of blind loyalty, of the perils of immortality, of rebellion against faith. Thank goodness for Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, who has gleefully spent the last century pretending to be several generations of a Bollywood family, and Barry Keoghan as the mind-controlling Druig, a dour and sardonic presence who saw through the Celestials’ supposed benevolence centuries ago (and, to a lesser degree, Henry, who may be the MCU’s first queer hero, but whose superpower makes him a discount Tony Stark). Without them there would be no light or shade." - RW
Read our full review here.
3: Pig
"Robin is, in many ways, a vintage [Nic Cage] character of the modern era, a taciturn broken warrior living in quiet away from the world. Just him and his pig. Director Michael Sarnoski knows well enough to leave the camera locked off on Cage, whether at a great remove where the entirety of his physicality can be absorbed, or closely, where those eyes that have seen eons can glimpse us and find something bigger than we knew we could contain. Because Pig is a meditation on what distracts us from life: money, pretension, pleasing people, memories, the fear of asking and of showing our true selves. Robin lives in the instant but sees the world in terms of centuries, eras, and epochs, and Pig lets us glimpse through those eyes." - RW
Read our full review here.
4: Old
"It's almost like(M. Night Shyamalan) has been on a vendetta since The Happening, a clunky if fascinating and possibly inadvertent homage to 1950s proto-environmental Z-movies like The Monolith Monsters. It's like calling it the worst film of his career only challenged him to make worse. Old has the odd mean-spiritedness that has plagued his recent films, and while there's nothing as needlessly grim as The Visit's adult diaper gag, there are still some sequences that feel like they're included on a dare rather than to add anything to the film." - RW
Read our full review here.
5: Don't Tell a Soul
"In his first film since the seemingly lost Dogme 95 entry The Sparkle Room, (director Alex McAulay) has crafted a terse, bleak drama. It's reminiscent of the portrait of a corrupt male friendship in Super Dark Times, but with the added pressures of kinship and family. To describe Don't Tell a Soul as a story of toxic masculinity is both accurate but, in a time when every film with a flawed or unpleasant male an/protagonist gets that tag, almost glib. There's something rancid between the boys." - RW
Read our full review here.
6: SAS: Red Notice
"Anyone who spent the Nineties in the Action-Adventure section of their local video store will find a kindred spirit in SAS: Red Notice. There’s more than a little Under Siege or Executive Decision in the film’s DNA, a prolonged, wrong-place-wrong-time gunfight featuring a creature of Western foreign policy’s own making. Much of the film refuses to provide the audience with clean emotional stakes, pitting two sociopaths against each other and dropping a third in the middle." - Matthew Monagle
Read our full review here.
7: The Old Ways
"[Christopher Alender's] gooey horror flick seems like a change of direction after directing several episodes of the recent Muppets Now (he's also responsible for Beaker's rendition of "Ode to Joy"). However, much as Chris Baugh proved with Irish bog monster mash Boys From County Hell, former Muppet directors make great creature feature creators. They're also close kin because both center on characters dealing with their misguided belief that they're beyond ancient traditions (hint: They've survived to become ancient for good reasons)." - RW
Read our full review here.
8: The Last Duel
"As is so often the case in A-lister cinema, each actor also lends their real-life celebrity to their character. It is hard not to see a little of the real-life [Matt Damon] in Jean de Carrouges, a craftsman whose unforced conversational errors impact his standing at court, or to appreciate [Ben Affleck] playing yet another miserable Lothario onscreen. These little sprinklings of metatextuality serve as a bridge between periods, allowing The Last Duel to feel contemporary without coming across as ahistorical." - MM
Read our full review here.
9: Free Guy
"Free Guy deserves to be considered alongside late-Nineties movies like Pleasantville and Dark City, films that deconstructed our reality and asked us to embrace the underlying tenets of our humanity. ... [It's] an earnest exploration of humanity’s responsibility toward its progeny. The world of video game design becomes the perfect playground to ask ourselves what it means to be human – and how far we’d be willing to go to ensure the future of those who follow after us." - MM
Read our full review here.
10: The Stranger by the Shore
"While the flip-flopping emotions in the storyline might be more effectively fleshed out in a longer movie, Stranger by the Shore is gorgeous to look at. The yellow hibiscus, those pink bougainvillea, that blue, blue sky! (Not to mention those two lyrically intertwined felines evoking the film’s central relationship.) And erotic, too, with all that boy-band hair fluttering in the sea breeze. Western audiences unfamiliar with anime stylization may find the characters’ often exaggerated, monosyllabic dialogue weirdly inappropriate at times, but they can’t deny the movie’s heart is in the right place." - Steve Davis
Read our full review here.
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Dec. 23, 2023
