Best films of 2021: Irish critics name their favourites
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Loading... - Heather Craven
- 23 Dec 2021
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Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog has dominated the Dublin Film Critics Circle (DFCC) awards for 2021. The powerful neo-western won best film, best director, best screenplay and, for Benedict Cumberbatch, best actor at the yearly poll.
Such domination is uncommon with these awards. Based on a novel by Thomas Savage, the film concerns a bitter Montana rancher who confronts supressed desires when his gentler brother marries a local widow.
Frances McDormand took the best actress award jointly for two performances: as a spirited boomer travelling the plains in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland and as the psychotically ambitious Lady Macbeth in Joel Coen’s upcoming The Tragedy of Macbeth. McDormand won the 2020 best actress Oscar for the first film, but Nomadland counts as a 2021 release in these territories.
Best Irish film went to Tom Sullivan’s Arracht, an Irish-language drama set during the Famine, which has been steadily gathering praise since its premiere at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in late 2019.
Like so many other films, Arracht’s theatrical release was than delayed by the pandemic. “I think it has taken this long for the famine to become a talking point because we tumbled from the famine into the power of the Catholic Church,” Sullivan told The Irish Times in October.
It was a competitive year for domestic cinema. Runners-up for that prize included Tadhg O’Sullivan’s experimental documentary To The Moon, Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s off-beat thriller Rose Plays Julie, Phyllida Lloyd’s social drama Herself and Cathy Brady’s disturbing borderland saga Wildfire.
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s rollicking, inspiring Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could not Be Televised), a celebration of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, won best documentary from the DFCC. Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, The Staple Singers and many other stars of the era appear in concert that has long been overshadowed by the chaotic near-contemporaneous Woodstock in a more remote part of New York State. Read More...
