Year in Review: Best Onscreen Chemistry of 2021

by Team Experience

Screen chemistry is the great intangible of movies. It can happen behind the camera among teams on the same or complimentary wavelengths. Director/Muse relationships often become the stuff of legend. But the most commonly celebrated electricity is the spark between actors that you can see onscreen. Sensational chemistry between them can elevate any genre, even the ones that aren't intrinsically built on interpersonal dynamics. A thrilling duet, romantic or otherwise, can rescue a film from mediocrity and elevate a very good picture to a beloved one. Old Hollywood understood this, reteaming co-stars that clicked over and over again. Modern Hollywood has a much rougher go of this kind of repetition (given that everyone is a freelancer) so we treasure great chemistry whenever it crops up in its too fleeting way.

We polled the team on 2021's greatest examples of screen chemistry and here were their top 16 choices...

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Jean-Marc Vallée (1963-2021)

by Nathaniel R

We are shocked and saddened to report that Oscar-nominated and Emmy winning director Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Big Little Lies), who was only 58, died yesterday at his cabin outside Quebec City. No cause of death has been revealed. 

The Quebecois filmmaker began making movies in the 1990s but first came to international fame wih the queer coming of age drama C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005) which was submitted to represent Canada at the Oscars that year...

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Year in Review: Best Movie Posters

by Nathaniel R

Movie posters may be an endangered artform since movies are seldom chosen from lobby posters or slapped on DVD covers anymore. Most people see only those interchangeable rectangles of movie star faces deployed by Netflix or Hulu in scroll bars. Nevertheless we still love the way posters at their best can brand or encapsulate a movie, become iconic pieces of art in their own right (rare), or cleverly tease or suggest the kind of experience you'll be having when you watch the movie.

Movie posters are often lazy so we want to cheer the good ones. Some titles that missed the following list but remain noteworthy are:  Benedetta which arranged the text in an invisible crucifix frame, Annette, which memorably placed its romantics underneath a tidal wave, the teasers for The Matrix Resurrection and Black Widow  which went minimalist and flat but impactful, Swan Song and The Eyes of Tammy Faye for the way they presented the main character's face while also obscuring it emotionally, and the graphic whatsthis? boldness of both Titane and Tragedy of Macbeth.

The best movie posters of the year after after the jump...

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Tweet the Season

Tweet of the Year incoming!

time to check twitter pic.twitter.com/DEljkvkb9R

— what are you ᑐᑌᑎᑕ (@clumsyghost_) December 20, 2021

Hahahaha. But seriously Twitter is good for somethings. Unexpected moments of frivolity, silly memes, amusing notes about movies and television, mutual lust appreciation societies for celebrities, tweet threads that can become great movies (like Zola) and so on. So, anywhere, here are some tweets we enjoyed this holiday week...

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25th Anniversary: "The Portrait of a Lady"

by Nick Taylor

Happy Holidays! We are celebrating a very dear, tumultuous season - awards season - and the current wave of critics prizes has left us with some very exciting developments. It’s perhaps not the biggest shock that Jane Campion’s austere, sensual Western The Power of the Dog has become such a critical darling. It’s the first time in nearly two decades that one of Campion’s phone is in serious consideration but the film’s remarkable showing with awards bodies and the sheer number of Best Director wins she’s accrued are both tremendously deserved and, given the overall trajectory of her career, something of a surprise. 

Releasing her first film since 2009’s Bright Star (and after showrunning the acclaimed series Top of the Lake for two seasons), Campion’s favor with the Academy and critics at large has shifted wildly over the years. As rapturously as The Piano was received, her 1996 bold, purposefully hard-edged adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady scuttered a lot of that goodwill, and as abrasive as that film is, I can’t for the life of me understand why this torpedoed her prestige reputation so badly...

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