By Jon Kissel

​Rumors of the death of movies were greatly exaggerated in 2021, at least from a quality standpoint. While box office receipts stayed down after 2020's total turtle-shelling, theaters remain open and there's no shortage of new films for them to show. AMC was saved by stonks, Regal has partnered with Matt Damon to bully customers into buying cryptocurrency, and streaming services continue to blast out content from a high-pressure hose. No major delays as of yet have put a damper on 2022, and while this coming year might be the one that sees cinema return to a profitable normal, it will be very difficult for it top 2021's creative output. Helped out by plenty of delayed films that otherwise would've belonged to 2020, 2021 has emerged as at least as great a movie year as 2018, possibly even competing with 2016. While I'm no enemy of depressive, contemplative fare, the theme of the year kept coming back to joy. It marked the best moments of French Dispatch and revereberated throughout wistful works like Licorice Pizza, Luca, and The Hand of God. Big hearted comedies like Bad Trip and Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar reveled in it, musicals like West Side Story and Summer of Soul generated it, and even gonzo French extremities like Titane and Benedetta reached for it between transgression and blasphemy. Who knows what the future will look like as commercial trends get uglier? For now, movies continue to be great!

​With Morgan Neville’s previous documentary on the life of Fred Rogers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor, I hadn’t been watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood on and off over the previous months, so all the clips of the show Neville used in his film didn’t seem repetitive or overdone.  There aren’t small children in my home who need the comfort of factory tours and Daniel Tiger that I’m overhearing in the background.  Thanks to the pandemic and a never-ending need for more content, that’s not the case with Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, currently available in its entirety on HBO Max.  This was a series I was actively revisiting in the wake of Neville’s newest documentary, Roadrunner, a biopic about Bourdain’s life that used many of the same clips from episodes I had just watched at home.  This is the most personal and happenstance of all the flaws in Neville’s film, his first miss since winning an Oscar for 20 Feet From Stardom.  Roadrunner provides little insight into Bourdain that he didn’t freely offer up himself, while also serving as an offensive hit piece and a speculative attempt into Bourdain’s suicide.  It seems impossible that a subject of such introspection could be dissected in this thin of a manner, but that’s what Roadrunner serves up to its audience.

Lin-Manuel Miranda went the semi-autobiographical route for his theater debut In the Heights, a musical set in the working class Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.  Though Miranda’s professional family lived in the adjacent neighborhood, he had the good sense to notice that the better stories were with the nurses than the doctors, the storefront owner than the chain owner.  After In the Heights’ success on Broadway and the greater success of Miranda’s Hamilton, the inevitable film version of In the Heights arrived during the thwarted hot vax summer, a time when the brief window of normalcy between COVID variants could be celebrated onscreen with a crowded production of singing stars and hundreds of dancing extras.  Jon Chu’s adaptation didn’t receive the commercial reception it was aiming for, but it is nevertheless a joyous explosion for the musical-skeptic that overpowers the corniness baked into the genre with Latin verve and charisma.