Lin Manuel Miranda is having himself a year. Now, that statement would be true in almost any year since he burst onto Broadway with In the Heights back in 2008, but it is especially so now. Just in 2021 alone Miranda has: produced a big screen adaptation of In the Heights, starred as a musically inclined kinkajou in Vivo, written original music for Disney’s Encanto and, most impressively of all, released one of the best movies of the year with tick... tick… BOOM, his directorial debut.

Expectations are always high for a well regarded auteur, but they were especially lofty for Celine Sciamma following her revelatory 2019 film Portrait of a Lady on Fire. From Water Lillies to Girlhood, the French director has always had a piercing vision, but Portrait brought her the largest audience and most fervent acclaim of her illustrious career. So how did she choose to follow it up? With Petite Maman, a 72 minute fable about a young girl meeting her mother as a child, of course.

For decades film has told the stories of young people finding their way in the world to dazzling effect. There is something so universally relatable about those late teenage years where you feel like you’ve figured it all out and seeing it with the gift hindsight you realize that those answers wouldn’t come until much later. The hard truth is that coming of age doesn’t happen all at once and that next phase of life brings with it doubts, big decisions and so much more uncertainty. This is the phase of life examined in Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World.

A tale as old as time, how much can true love transcend? Is it simply an intertwining of attractions or is love something more, something so inherent to our very being that we’ll find our way back to it under even the most dire of circumstances? These are questions Georgian filmmaker Alexandre Koberidze poses, if never really answering, in What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?

The swinging sixties, it’s a decade we look back on for its neon glow, over the top style and cultural influences. In film, we remember it as a decade in which Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman were at the peak of their powers, when the French New Wave was taking over. Gather together what box office information you can from the time and what got people out to the theaters was still Disney musicals (The Jungle Book), Eastwood’s spaghetti western trilogy and a handful of James Bond Movies.
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​The past is never just the parts we choose to remember from it. The best stuff survives and the rest gets swept under the rug. Today, in an era of film dominated by big franchise features, Edgar Wright — set aside that brief flirtation with directing Ant Man — is one of the handful of directors bucking the IP trend and taking swings on mid budgets and original ideas. He takes influence from the music, atmosphere and genre storytelling of the past to make something totally new.

​“Faces from my past return” croons Billie Eilish over the opening credits of No Time to Die in her signature haunting tone. Both lyric and singer feel wholly appropriate for a Bond (Daniel Craig) himself haunted by his past misadventures. Portraits of Judy Dench’s M overlook MI6, Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) continues to color the decisions of 007 and even Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) reappears for one final mission. No Time to Die spends so much time unpacking the history of our longest tenured Bond, yet the film’s lasting legacy may be what it portends for the future of the franchise.

When it won the Palme d’Or back in 2019, on the way to total awards season domination, Parasite began the process of dismantling popular perception of what an awards film could be. Decidedly genre yet nearly unclassifiable as a whole, Bong Joon-ho’s thrilling masterpiece was a far cry from the period drama or stuffy biopic that often garners attention late in the year. If the 2019 Palme d’Or winner blurred the once rigid lines of how we contextual i each film, the 2021 winner completely blew them up.

**TW Suicide is referenced in Dear Evan Hansen and in this review as well**

Humans are social creatures and will go to great lengths to connect with one another. For some that process is easy and natural, but for others connection is a bit tougher. For others still, like the titular lead of Dear Evan Hansen, true human connection can only be forged by gaslighting the family of a deceased classmate.