Ryan Coogler’s horror movie is more about music than it is about vampires. (Photo: Supplied / Warner Bros. Pictures) 
The cinema of the 21st century has seen an encouraging and explosive expansion. Not only have movies sprung up from every place imaginable under the hotter-than-ever sun, but movies overall seem to have become wonderfully weirder. The dispersion of viewing centres, across theatre chains, independent houses, personalised streaming profiles, and niche corners of the internet, mean that no movie has to live up to the expectation of pleasing everyone, and each movie gets the chance to be seen on its own terms.
Getting your work produced is no easier than before, but those who succeed find freedom in cinema’s distinctive power, as an art form of both immediate emotional impact and enduring philosophical might.
Emerging new artists, like Vera Drew, show the possibilities that arise with new generations, while those with long careers to their credit, like Spike Lee, bring a wealth of experience that can illuminate the path forward for the art form’s future.
Turning to this list: at their best, end-of-year roundups draw attention to films you might otherwise have missed or overlooked. Many of these were released in cinemas this year, sometimes only briefly, while others are already available to stream. A few will require some determined online searching for South African movie lovers to track down.
Highest 2 Lowest (Spike Lee)
Spike Lee’s movies have long been among the most beautiful of our time, with an exuberant and distinctive artistry that reflects an incisive worldview. Here, his story of a crime that tears at the life of a rich and powerful man is made all the more impactful because of its passionately personal view of wide-world culture and its politics. Lee films with a soulful swing and visual music that cannot be matched.
Highest 2 Lowest is streaming on Apple TV+.
Sinners (Ryan Coogler)
Ryan Coogler’s horror movie is more about music than it is about vampires, but the two prove surprisingly connected. His love of the blues and its origins shows an art form born out of pained and impassioned lives. He stunningly depicts a thread connecting blues to the music of the past and the future, that goes beyond the academic into the spiritual.
Sinners was released in theatres. Read Kervyn Cloete’s review of Sinners.
The Phoenician Scheme (Wes Anderson)
Wes Anderson’s movies have realised ever higher levels of artifice and fantasy, while touching on stronger truths of emotional and political realities. This father-and-daughter drama is as stylishly adorned as any previous Anderson creation, and that style comes to embody the historical and political forces that the story confronts, including imperialist opportunism and the rebellion to which it gives rise.
The Phoenician Scheme was released in theatres.
Blitz (Steve McQueen)
History itself can be a horror movie, without any vampires added. Steve McQueen strips the varnish off the stoic portraits of Britain during the Blitz in World War II, revealing both the terror of living under wartime bombardment as well as the critical fractures in British society that remain urgent decades later.
Blitz is streaming on Apple TV+.
The People’s Joker (Vera Drew)
Vera Drew presents not just a micro-budget triumph of scrappiness, but a thrilling vision of uninhibited artistic independence. She lovingly mines the ultimate in corporate-controlled IP – a comic book superhero canon – for a personal and intimate work all her own.
The People’s Joker was screened by Joburg Underground. Read our review of The People’s Joker.
Between the Temples (Nathan Silver)
This haphazard romantic comedy is marked with grief, and its beauty arises from the sharpness of that pain. Nathan Silver films his story of finding religious freedom in a suburban Jewish community with a coarse-grained curiosity, and Jason Schwarzmann and Carol Kane embody two unmoored individuals with exuberant sadness.
Between the temples is available on Apple TV.
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (Mary Bronstein)
In this family horror-comedy, kinetic energy is made visible in the tense, febrile images wrought by Mary Bronstein, and is incarnated in the mercurial onscreen figure of Rose Byrne. Small moments become volatile emotional battlegrounds, and close-ups of faces turn into snapshots of a shuddering soul.
Presence (Steven Soderbergh)
Steven Soderbergh not only had a good idea of how to film a story; his idea grew and matured in the act of filming. There’s very little that’s scary about this horror movie, but the simple device with which Soderbergh brings it to life (which is too good to spoil) infuses it with an eerie chill, and lends it an uneasy gratification.
Presence was released in theatres.
I Saw the TV Glow (Jane Schoenbrun)
This strange and unique drama of adolescence follows two characters from high school to adulthood, and depicts their dysphoria with highly original and evocative images. Their unease is not specifically around gender identities, but with their lives at large, though the effect is an unsettling and ultimately moving portrayal of trans experience.
I Saw the TV Glow is streaming on Netflix.
Blue Moon (Richard Linklater)
Richard Linklater’s biopic of the lyricist Lorenz Hart is both impassioned and graceful. He shows Hart on an agonised night of combined professional and romantic failure, and takes a surprisingly personal perspective of the artist’s relationship to his most enduring creation: his own life. Ethan Hawke embodies the flighty wordsmith with a heartbreaking fragility.
Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood)
This courtroom drama looks beyond the confines of the court to the scene of the crime outside, as well as at a politically contrived society at large. The legal system is perpetually vulnerable to deception and abuse, and what a group may decide on as reasonable may end up being far from what is true.
Juror #2 is streaming on Showmax.
Caught Stealing (Darren Aronofsky)
In this roiling neo-noir nightmare, Darren Aronofsky deftly joins together an absurdist irony with deeply felt moments of tragedy. Visual and sonic details accumulate into a thrilling depiction of New York City in the late 90s, and Austin Butler’s performance as an aspiring athlete whose dreams are destroyed by disaster turns the endurance of emotional pain into a physical feat.
Caught Stealing was released in theatres.
On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni)
As in her memorable first feature, I Am Not a Witch, Rungano Nyoni films a story of the systemic abuse of women with a sharp eye for evocative images. Here, she confronts sexual predation and patriarchal power in the suburbs of Lusaka, where a code of shame and silence suffocates everyone.
The Disappearance of Shere Hite (Nicole Newnham)
This documentary takes a conventional form, but tells an engrossing story of a feminist scholar and activist, showing how quickly histories of political progress can be erased if they are not safeguarded. Shere Hite makes a small but crucial point in her work: the understanding of our bodies and our sexuality is essential for a more humane society.
Winner (Susanna Fogel)
This biopic of convicted NSA leaker Reality Winner (yes, that’s her real name) is both refreshingly expansive – showing the upbringing and background that foreshadowed her actions – and pointedly critical of the injustices in modern politics, law and media. DM