After tomorrow, 2021 will be in the books. Despite starting off with an attempted coup and ending with a new superinfectious mutant virus, the past twelve months were actually a little better than 2020—and that shows you where we’re at. As long as we’re in the end times, with plagues and insurrections and heat waves at Christmastime and half of Facebook praying that a secret cabal is really directing all this chaos, we might as well enjoy a few weird movies along the way—even if they’re increasingly starting to look like documentaries.

Actually, for the purposes of weird movie accounting, we put 2021 to bed last month. Our annual movie calendar ends on the last day of November, to allow 366 Weird Movies Yearbooks to go out in December. We’re not missing out on much; usually, December releases are limited to extended universe entries and Oscar bait dramas.

As always, there were hard cuts at the bottom of the list. The Alan Moore penned surrealist noir The Show, in particular, caught us off guard with a late November Blu-ray drop. The conspiracy horror The Empty Man scored well with some of our staff, but came up empty in the end. The elegiac, absurdist sketches of Roy Andersson‘s About Endlessness were weighty and weird, but fell victim to more-of-the-same syndrome. Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s eerily noisy Memoria certainly would have made this list, but it didn’t make it’s official debut until December. And of course, a couple of festival favorites bearing 2021 copyright dates—the whimsical dream auditing romance Strawberry Mansion and Phil Tippett‘s decades-in-the-making Boschian stop-motion hellscape Mad God—haven’t been distributed yet and will have to wait until a future year for consideration.

I personally finalize this list. The staff here has input, but I set the voting rules, create the universe of candidates, and break all ties. Therefore, if you feel that it’s a crime that Titane comes in at a lousy #4 instead of the #1 any idiot can see it so obviously deserves, I am the idiot to blame. When ranking, I use a secret proprietary formula that accounts for cinematic craftsmanship, the degree of surrealism/weirdness, and the perceived prestige in the weird movie community based on buzz and reader feedback, then I shuffle them into whatever arbitrary order I momentarily feel like without regard to any of that.

So, on to the official Weirdest Movies of 2021 List! As always, films are listed in random order—the weirdest of orders.

9. Undergods – Two corpse collectors link tales—sometimes via Continue reading TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2021 →

Here is my obligatory/traditional annual top 10 list of movies, ranked according to mainstream standards. In other words, weird movies are allowed on this list, but I attempt to rank the 2021 releases according to their general cinematic merit, intended for people who don’t specialize in the surrealer genres. Something like Quentin Dupieux‘s surrealist policier Keep an Eye Out can (and did!) make this list, but they will not automatically be catapulted to the top. Don’t worry, weird movies fared fine in this general list, as you’ll soon see—but stay tuned for the top 10 weird movies of 2021 tomorrow, where, when adjusted for weirdness, some of the same movies may show up in a different order.

I’ve been prioritizing the smaller/rarer/weirder movies in my screenings, so there are a fair number of contenders that might have made this list but for the fact that I didn’t have time to get to them in 2021:  Belfast, Cyrano, Dune, Encanto, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, Power of the Dog, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and West Side Story, among others. I expect to see all or most of these before awards voting season concludes.

Before the official top ten starts, here are 2021’s honorable mentions: About Endlessness, The Alpinist, Annette, The Beta Test, Cruella, Drive My Car, In the Earth, In the Heights, Last Night in Soho, The Nowhere Inn, Pig, Saint Maud, The Suicide Squad, and The Summit of the Gods.

10. Raya and the Last Dragon: Set in a mythical kingdom loosely based on Chinese mythology, this brightly animated Disney tale follows a girl on a quest to collect five pieces of a shattered gem to bring back dragons and stop a plague. The latest stop on modern Disney’s multicultural, female-empowered tour proves the formula still works, and the art direction is superlative as always. Raya seems likely to be overshadowed by Disney’s other big 2021 release, howver, Encanto (which I have yet to see).

9. Keep an Eye Out [Au Poste!]: Read our review. A long interrogation of an innocent man accused of murder is complicated by another accidental death. Beginning with the arrest of a man for conducting a symphony orchestra in his underwear, this strange and funny, dialogue heavy 75-minute surrealist goof with absurd deaths and time-travel paradoxes inside of flashbacks is Quentin Dupieux‘s most Buñuelian movie to date. This technically came out in 2018 in France but was not theatrically distributed in the U.S. until this year, so we’re counting it now.

8. Agnes: Read our festival review. A demon possesses a sister at a conservative Carmelite nunnery, causing a crisis of faith for one of the nuns. Well-made on a low budget and totally unexpected; it begins as a black exorcist comedy and satire of the Catholic Church, then lurches into melodrama and ends on a surprisingly sincere note. The whiplash tone change will alienate many, but it is justified by faith. It has its share of critical defenders, but you won’t see it on many other year-end lists.

Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2021: MAINSTREAM EDITION →

In just a few more hours, 2020 will be in the books—and we’re guessing you’re not going to miss it. Actually, for the purposes of weird movie accounting, we put 2020 to bed last month. Our annual movie calendar ends on the last day of November, to allow 366 Weird Movies Yearbooks to go out in December. We’re not missing out on much; usually, December releases are limited to DC extended universe flops and Oscar bait dramas.

As always, there were hard cuts at the bottom of the top 10 list. Giles Edwards, in particular, fought tooth and claw for the inclusion of Cats; we had to give him a warm saucer of milk to calm him down. Lake Michigan Monster, the low, low-budget absurdist lakefaring comedy which arrived on Blu-ray in November, was endearing, but suffered from lack of exposure. The domestic horror satire Vivarium proved popular with our in-house voters, but just missed the cut. And of course, a couple of festival favorites bearing 2020 copyright dates—Labyrinth of Cinema, Nobuhiko Obayashi‘s epic final film, and #Shakespeare’s Shistorm, which may wind up being Lloyd Kaufman‘s gross-out swan song—haven’t been distributed yet and will have to wait until a future year for consideration.

I personally finalize this list. The staff here has input, but I set the voting rules, create the universe of candidates, and break all ties. Therefore, if you feel that it’s a crime that In Fabric comes in at a lousy #10 instead of the #7 any idiot can see it so obviously deserves, I am the idiot to blame. When ranking, I use a secret proprietary formula that accounts for cinematic craftsmanship, the degree of surrealism/weirdness, and the perceived prestige in the weird movie community based on buzz and reader feedback, then I shuffle them into whatever arbitrary order I momentarily feel like without regard to any of that.  As always, films are listed in random order—the weirdest of orders.

So, on to the official Weirdest Movies of 2020 List! May each successive year grow stranger and more challenging than the next… except in regard to deadly, super-infectious viruses. Screw those guys.

3. Deerskin: A middle-aged man (Jean Dujardin) becomes obsessed with his new deerskin jacket while posing as an independent filmmaker. Quentin Dupieux returns after a four-year hiatus with a new movie about movies (and jackets). Considering the manic maximalism of his last major outing—2014’s Reality, which seemed like it had about fifteen interweaving subplots in a dreams-inside-of-dreams structure—Deerskin is relatively restrained, focused on only two major characters and a single absurd conceit. Perhaps he’s calming down as he himself reaches middle age? At any rate, the mad Frenchman is already at it again, with his giant fly comedy Mandibles already making the rounds and Incroyable mais vrai [Incredible but True] currently filming.

8. She Dies Tomorrow: Amy ( Kate Lyn Sheil) is convinced that she will Continue reading TOP 10 WEIRD MOVIES OF 2020 →

Here is my obligatory/traditional annual top 10 list of movies, ranked according to mainstream standards. In other words, weird movies are allowed in this list, but I attempt to rank the 2020 releases according to their general merit, intended for people who don’t specialize in the surrealer genres. Provocative cults film like  Jesus Shows You the Way to the Highway can (and did!) make this list, but they will not automatically be catapulted to the top. (This year, a much higher percentage of weird films made the overall list. This was based more on my pandemic-mandated change in viewing habits than on the quality of the year’s weird cinema. I took far fewer trips to the theater, which meant more time watching screeners and online rentals, which skewed my views towards the outre rather than the ordinary).  Stay tuned for the top 10 weird movies of 2020 tomorrow.

2020 honorable mentions (in alphabetical order): 76 Days, Bacurau, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Color out of Space, The Gentlemen, Kajillionaire, Lake Michigan Monster, La Llorona, Onward, Palm Springs, The Platform, Shirley, A Trip to Greece, VHYes, Vivarium, and Why Don’t You Just Die? (The omission of Cats, Capone and Jiu Jitsu from this category is not an oversight).

There were many contenders I couldn’t (well, didn’t) fit in screenings of before this article’s deadline, including Nomadland, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Mank, The Father, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Promising Young Woman, The Sound of Metal, Da 5 Bloods, Soul, Wolfriders, and many others.

And so read on for my subjective and incomplete ranking of the best cinema the strangest year in memory had to offer…

10. Black Bear: Two stories involving a love triangle, set in the same remote cabin: which one (if either) is true? An experiment in narrative ambiguity that features a rare but remarkable dramatic performance from Aubrey Plaza in dual (?) roles. Plaza shouldn’t be overlooked come Oscar time—but almost certainly will be. Less commercially oriented awards-givers should take note, however.

9. Beasts Clawing at Straws: A crime boss, a ruthless madam, a corrupt customs official, and a struggling sauna clerk all scheme to possess a bag stuffed with cash. An exquisitely plotted neo-noir deftly handled by first-time Korean director Kim Yong-Hoon. This twisty, out-of-sequence crime thriller is just another example of how South Korean cinema is killing it right now. With better distribution, this could have been a bigger hit stateside (pandemic theater closures certainly didn’t do it any favors).

8. Possessor: Read our review. In the near future, elite assassins carry out their work by possessing the bodies of innocent parties through a neural implant; Taysa, a top Possessor, has trouble on her latest assignment when the subject proves capable of sporadically suppressing her control and asserting his own free will. This is one dark and brutal movie that squeezes the breath out of you in its sociopathic grasp. Brandon Cronenberg really needs to pick up the pace and Continue reading TOP 10 MOVIES OF 2020: MAINSTREAM EDITION →