---

I watched a lot of movies last year — 723, according to my Letterboxd account. Here are some of my favorite discoveries that were not released in 2021, in no particular order.

My Brilliant Career (1979), dir. Gillian Armstrong 

A moving ode to self-respect, Armstrong’s debut film features Judy Davis doing startling work as a headstrong young woman who refuses to settle for anything less in turn-of-the-century Australia. (The Criterion Channel) 

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), dir. Paul Schrader 

This hyper-sensory, boldly idiosyncratic biopic about the infamous, influential writer Yukio Mishima is the rare biographical drama that makes you really feel like you’re inside its subject’s head. (The Criterion Channel) 

The Stunt Man (1980), dir. Richard Rush

Rush’s methodically exasperating black comedy about a fugitive who inadvertently becomes a skilled Hollywood stuntman electrically captures the thrills and despair inextricable from the filmmaking process. (Tubi)

The Barefoot Contessa (1954), dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz 

Mankiewicz’s stellar Hollywood melodrama is not as much interested in celebrating the projected image as it is in the concealed complications that sit underneath its creation and dissemination. (Tubi)

Tampopo (1985), dir. Juzo Itami

As one might hope for in a so-called “food movie,” Tampopo is a ravishing feast for the eyes. It also makes you want to have a ravishing feast afterward. (The Criterion Channel) 

The Straight Story (1999), dir. David Lynch 

The title of The Straight Story works two-fold: as the name of the most “straight” movie the surreal- and scary-leaning David Lynch has ever made; as the name of a film that does indeed tell a story about a man named Straight. It’s a quiet but powerful drama that has such an unaffected sweetness, and so consistently finds profundity in the ordinary, that it’s almost surprising that it’s based on a true story. (Disney+)

The Stranger (1991), dir. Satyajit Ray 

The Stranger, a drama with the lift of a thriller, was the swan song of the legendary Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray, who died, at 70, a month before the movie’s American premiere. Based on one of Ray’s own short stories, The Stranger is a no-frills, and subversively optimistic, coda to a storied career. (The Criterion Channel) 

Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), dir. Chantal Akerman

Akerman’s nearly three-and-a-half-hour-long epic about a lonely, single stay-at-home mom who works from time to time as a sex worker (played beautifully by the great Delphine Seyrig) takes a formal approach that sounds tedious on paper: it mostly comprises long takes of its title character completing menial tasks, with the camera resting at table level. But in practice, Akerman’s methods help create a riveting portrait that takes seriously the effect everyday monotony and patriarchal expectation can have on women in a similar position. (The Criterion Channel) 

Daisies (1966), dir. Věra Chytilová

Chytilová’s lovably unruly buddy comedy may initially seem purely like a spectacle about two id-directed best friends and all the trouble they cause. But as the film unfurls their eagerness to rebel takes on increasing, unforgettable political significance. (HBO Max)

Memories of Murder (2003), dir. Bong Joon-ho

As evidenced by its hauntingly ambiguous ending, Bong isn’t a filmmaker who presumptuously claims to have answers. What makes him consistently great is that he knows how to make movies that are escapist but rigorous, stylish but grounded — as intent on entertaining as they are insistent that their audiences look at the world with a more discerning eye than they might have before. Memories of Murder sets a new high bar for the police procedural. (Hulu)

The Long Good Friday (1980), dir. John Mackenzie 

Mackenzie’s slowly asphyxiating thriller about a gangster boss’ incremental loss of power features sensational performances from Bob Hoskins and Helen Mirren. (HBO Max)

Pickup on South Street (1953), dir. Samuel Fuller 

In this sweaty, fatalistic film noir, Fuller subversively manages to use his leads’ plights to make a discerning anti-capitalist argument despite its pandering McCarthyist bent. It’s a sore-to-the-touch Trojan horse of a movie. (YouTube) 

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), dir. Jim Jarmusch 

The lure of Ghost Dog — a sleepy character study about a mafia hitman played by Forest Whitaker — is its hypnotic languorousness. You’re more interested in watching its title character move about life than you are where the narrative takes you. I liked simply being inside its world. (The Criterion Channel) 

Truck Turner (1974), dir. Jonathan Kaplan 

With soul singer and sometime-actor Isaac Hayes at its front, Truck Turner becomes one of the most irresistible — and singular — action movies of the period. (Pluto TV)

La Otra (1946), dir. Roberto Gavaldón

Dolores Del Rio is terrific in this sumptuously shot soap opera wherein a poor manicurist (Del Rio) kills her wealthy identical-twin sister (also played by Del Rio) and schemes to take her place. (YouTube)

The Reflecting Skin (1990), dir. Philip Ridley 

Ridley’s creepy coming-of-age movie finds its little-kid protagonist accidentally wreaking a kind of havoc whose ramifications will only fully be understood by his older self. It’s a chilling story about sealing your fate without having the maturity to realize it. (Tubi)

Crossing Delancey (1988), dir. Joan Micklin Silver 

Crossing Delancey suggests what might happen if the narrative of a romantic-comedy movie were grafted onto life — a place where the genre’s big emotions, plot contrivances, and sudden appearances of soulmates would likely feel more than anything a little overwhelming at first. (HBO Max) 

Two-Lane Backdrop (1971), dir. Monte Hellman 

Most other road movies prefer to capture the potential excitement one can uncover traveling for long enough. The evocative Two-Lane Blacktop is more interested in the road’s dreamy monotony and the spell it can put you under. It finds its own kind of power in that. (Facebook Live)

Pulse (2001), dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

Pulse isn’t necessarily smarter, even that much more thoughtful, than the majority of other internet-concerned movies trifling with the over-addressed (but never not true) idea that the web alienates us from each other more than it meaningfully connects us. What sets it apart is how artfully Kurosawa realizes visually and sonically paralyzing encroaching doom, and how well he understands that, in the horror genre especially, it’s more important to worry about getting under a viewer’s skin than straining for explanations of and rationalizations for one’s fears. (Hulu)

The Company of Wolves (1984), dir. Neil Jordan 

This adaptation of a fraction of Angela Carter’s short-story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979) can sometimes be ponderous, but its visual remixes of classic fairy-tale imagery is unforgettable, and brings the worlds conjured by Carter’s flooring prose to vivid life. (Tubi)

Black Lizard (1962), dir. Umetsugu Inoue

This caper film, lesser known but far better than the 1968 adaptation of its source material, cleverly pokes fun at cat-and-mouse-thriller expectations while eschewing formal steadiness with an infectious confidence. (The Criterion Channel)

Even the Wind is Afraid (1968), dir. Carlos Enrique Taboada

Taboada’s Gothic horror movie, set at an all-girls school that may or may not be haunted, so immaculately builds speculative dread that it’s almost an inevitable disappointment when secrets start being revealed. (Tubi) 

Hollywood Boulevard (1976), dir. Joe Dante and Allan Arkush 

This playful satire of the B-filmmaking world of the 1970s often radiates the energy you’d expect coming from a film made by a group of people who considered themselves friends. (Tubi) 

The Locket (1946), dir. John Brahm 

Who is Nancy? The answer is eagerly sought but only obliquely resolved in the course of the hypnotic, flashback-heavy melodrama The Locket. (BFlix) 

The Paper (1994), dir. Ron Howard

Newspaper comedy The Paper’s ending is like reading the conclusions of a week’s worth of front-page stories all at once. It’s too much. But I finished the movie feeling the same way I often do after digesting a day’s paper: while not everything in it was essential, I’m still pretty happy to have had it at my disposal. (Google Play) 

The movies above are favorites I reviewed; I also loved, but didn’t write about:

Working Girls (1986), Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), The Green Fog (2017), Torch Song Trilogy (1988), Zero Effect (1998), The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love (1995), WNUF Halloween Special (2013), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Ronin (1998), Bad Genius (2017), The Gorgon (1964), Paprika (2006), Prince of Darkness (1988), Sleepwalk (1986), and Midnight Run (1988).