We don't write about a lot of films here at io9 but we do like to cover Blood on Satan's Claw, and we think that the achievement of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a great one. The documentary was written and directed by genre expert Kier-La Janisse. You will want to watch carefully edited film clips and interviews with filmmakers, scholars, historians, and more in order to understand a vast but specific genre that preys on our fears of, and fascination with, ancient rituals, pagan relics.
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With days left to go, we are done with big movie releases. We can look back and decide what the real highs and lows of a very peculiar year for movies were. io9's favorite and least favorite films of the year.
The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse are two of the best animated films in recent memory, so we are saying that the latest animated film from the team behind them is actually good. What a shock! The Mitchells vs. The Machines is very good. It is a story about technology taking over the world and being funny and family-friendly. As the unique family story and rising crisis begin to intersect, it all becomes a hugely epic story of heroism with jaw-dropping visuals and chill-inducing needle-drop. The Mitchells vs. The Machines is one of the best films of the year and you will laugh, cry, and cheer.
Black Widow and Eternals were not worth the time, but the focus of the year was on the Ten Rings. It was the highest-grossing film of the year domestically, and it was also the best film of the year. Go figure. The movie had enough depth, emotion, and stakes to carry it through the standard MCU, thanks to some incredibly creative martial arts fights (the scaffolding!), the genius of Awkwafina, and most importantly a typically incredible performance by Hong Kong superstar Tony Leung.
If there was a film that signaled the return of movie theaters to the post-pandemic world, it was Disney's Cruella. The idea of making a sympathetic prequel about one of the House of Mouse's most reprehensible characters, and the fact that Emma Stone was hired as the young de Ville, seemed bad on paper. While not everyone loved it, we thought it was fun, fierce, and flamboyant, and the sort of classic movie-going experience we had been missing over the previous year. It is not a sequel to 101 Dalmatians, but a movie about an anti-hero in the making.
A quirky small town filled with quirky characters and tons of snow. Werewolves Within is a comedy that is so fun to watch that we couldn't resist including it here. Sam Richardson is appealing as a park ranger who is too late to realize that his new posting carries with it some serious supernatural dangers, and he leads an ensemble cast that includes What We Do in the Shadows' Harvey Guillén. It is campy, gory, suspenseful, and never takes itself too seriously, and it is always entertaining. The perfect film? It was pretty darn close.
We were hoping that Warner Bros.'s second attempt at getting one of DC Comics' best teams right would have a different title, but it was so good we no longer cared about that. For a different group of new and familiar faces, James Gunn used his magic again. The cannon fodder made us laugh a ton, but it wasn't the only thing that made us laugh. The man is polka-Dot. The man is polka-Dot. Even though the giant villain was revealed in the trailers, that didn't diminish the awe of seeing Starro brought to life as one tremendous foe. The only crime of the film is that the wrong character is getting a spinoff. The King Shark is forever.
The final entry in the franchise had a lot to live up to, tying up not just the four-part saga but the entire franchise as we know it. It somehow managed to pull off providing a satisfying and emotionally sincere conclusion to its characters and themes with a blockbuster finale that was both wild action and beautiful. Even though Eva fans were expecting a disaster in Thrice Upon a Time, they weren't expecting it to be as good as it was. It seemed like it could provide a peaceful sense of closure to one of the most popular and beloved series of all time.
Maybe you missed this one because your mileage may vary. It is one of the most frightening films to date. There is a beach that makes you age rapidly, but nothing can prepare you for how that actually works in practice. The story was based on a graphic novel called Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, and there is no real twist to be had here, just discoveries as you remain riveted as to how or why this is all happening. You are never sure what horror awaits the main family of this story or the other unfortunate souls on that horrible beach, you just know it will be bad. That is what makes it great.
The Fear Street trilogy of films shows that the studio is capable of pulling off live-action versions of beloved stories when the circumstances are right. Even though they initially seemed as if their scares would be less frightening for younger viewers, they were all horrifying in a way that didn't feel pandering.
Imagine if the drama, excitement, emotion, and violence of the eight seasons of Game of Throne were animated and made into a 90-minute movie. The Spine of Night is a sumptuous, entertaining, shocking piece of fantasy animation that spans generations and is filled with heroes, villains, epic battles, and ancient prophecy. The film is a dense, propulsive story with lots of famous voices and it ends up being one of the rare films that pushes a medium to new heights.
One of the most intriguing animated films of the year was the adaptation of one of the most famous novel series by Gundam. It is gorgeously rendered, its explorations of that timely themes that the franchise has explored for nearly 50 years, as well as the setup for a compelling examination of the world its heroes live in.
Will, a former human who now spends his afterlife deciding which souls get to become human, is played by Black Panther'sWinston Duke. He puts them through various tests and eventually picks one to rise to Earth. This grand idea could have been told on a larger scale, but Nine days isn't that. It is a small, intimate, provocative film. Will's methods challenge the viewer as well. Will finds himself a changed being as he slowly tries to widdle down his selections. It is a beautiful movie that will stay with you long after the credits roll.
The latest from director Ben Wheatley takes place amidst a deadly pandemic, and though its characters spend their time roaming through the deep woods, the dreadful sense of living through doomsday is pervasive in every frame. When a Ranger and a researcher head out in search of a scientist who went off the grid, they discover a nightmare beneath the trees. In the Earth is a film that feels both timeless and very, very 2021, it explores the human body and mind, and it shows the awe-inspiring power of nature.
We don't write about a lot of films here at io9 but we do like to cover Blood on Satan's Claw, and we think that the achievement of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched is a great one. The documentary was written and directed by genre expert Kier-La Janisse. You will want to watch carefully edited film clips and interviews with filmmakers, scholars, historians, and more in order to understand a vast but specific genre that preys on our fears of, and fascination with, ancient rituals, pagan relics.
She did it. Lana Wachowski did it. Wachwoski and her sister never came back to The Matrix franchise, but the film lived up to the expectations. The sequel to the original Matrix films, as well as a meta-reboot, and a dissection of sequel culture, are all part of the movie. There is nostalgia, there is nuisance, there is excellent visual effects, and enough intrigue that makes us want to go back and watch it again and again.
This one will be divisive. You can either love or hate Malignant. If the marketing for James Wan's latest horror entry intimated the campy tone of the film it would have been more successful. This easily telegraphed tale starring a woman with horrors in her past and present didn't land. There is one good scene in the entire film and it is not the style of the film. The police team of George Young and Michole Briana White are bright spots in the movie that treated adoption as a foreign concept. How did the villain get these powers? You will not care, promise. Also? Ze Bell has been used for complete waste and misuse. For shame.
It is almost impressive how generic Infinite is. It is a science fiction movie that doesn't have a single original idea, whether you are talking about the plot or the movie's action scenes. Evan McCauley is a man who discovers he is one of the few beings who can continually get reincarnated and retain his memories. Whether he discovers he knows how to forge a perfect Japanese katana or that the bad guy has bullets that can download people, he is completely unaffected by all the crazy events surrounding him. The movie doesn't deserve us bothering to look one up, it's dumb, dull, and another negative word that begins with D.
The fact that Chaos Walking is so bad is an impressive achievement. It should have been a winner because it was directed by Edge of Tomorrow's Doug Liman and starred two of the last decade's hottest young actors in Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland. The film was so bad that it was forced to be re-shot. Chaos Walking is an appropriately chaotic mess of unrelated scenes, one-dimensional villains, and way too much walking. The most unique aspect of the story is that it takes place on a planet where males' thoughts take visual form, and somehow gets pushed to the side for more dull action. Everyone involved in Chaos Walking should have left.
The King of all Kaiju goes toe-to-toe with ape. The big, dumb spectacle of lizard v. simian smackdown should have been easy to hit. We got something big and dumb. Not even the joyful moments of giant monster action could distract from the boring and dumb-witted cast of characters we saw on the big screen this year. We definitely lost as movie goers when the fight between Kong and Godzilla ended in a stalemate.
The Tomorrow War was a movie that left you feeling as if Amazon wanted to make changes to the final product before releasing it online, because of its iffy concept of time travel, predictable plot points, and shoddy sense of internal logic. The Tomorrow War borrowed a lot of its ideas from Edge of Tomorrow and Independence Day, but instead of trying to improve on those films, it just used the general tones of those classics.
Space Jam: A New Legacy was not thought of as good. Few could have imagined how bad it was. The film consists of two hours of pop culture references flashing in front of your eyeballs with no real rhyme or reason, plus basketball games with no rules or consistency, all wrapped around a family story that struggles to evoke a small amount of emotion. It looks great, you admire the ambition, but it's just bad.
The Army of the Dead was toobogged down in its own ideas to be an impressive zombie film. Because the genre is so well-trodden at this point, zombie movies live and die by their ability to imagine heroes battling the undead who don't frustrate you to the point that you don't want to watch them. The movie Army of the Dead was at its best when it was about competent mercenaries for hire working together against a new breed of zombie. Army of the Dead had a lot of things going for it, but it was cut off at its knees by the love of homing in on overwrought scenes of humanity that was meant to make you empathise with people in the middle of the apocalypse.
The G.I. Joe franchise was always going to be risky. You would think that focusing on one of the franchise's most popular characters, Snake Eyes, would have been cool. The film was barely an origin story for the character. Snake Eyes was a good attempt at breathing life into a big-name franchise, but it ended up being a flatline.
One of the year's most disappointing superhero movies stars McCarthy and Spencer, and that's saying something. Two women are trying to figure out a way to play the field in a world where the bad guys only have powers. The film is filled with extraneous exposition, telegraphed reveals, bland humor, and a lot of familiar fodder. Everyone in the film is wasted.
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