The 10 best queer movies of 2021

Queeries is a weekly column by CBC Arts producer Peter Knegt that queries LGBTQ art, culture and/or identity through a personal lens.

LGBTQ-themed filmmaking was all over the place in 2021 — and I mean that as a considerable compliment. Whether it was in a family-oriented animated film or in an anti-Western Oscar frontrunner or in... an unhinged body horror film about a queer woman who gets impregnated by her car, there was nothing expected or boring about queer cinema this year. It just wasn't always clear what was queer cinema this year.

Unlike this column's list of the best queer TV from earlier in the month, where the content was a lot more obviously queer (in terms the stories they told and the people who told them), some of the films on this list are directed by straight-identifying folks or tell stories that some might argue aren't queer at all. And that's fine — a "queer narrative" is a subjective notion. (I've heard many argue that three films I adore — Spencer, Zola and Together, Together — qualify as queer cinema; personally I don't agree so I decided to leave them off this list, but please do see them anyway.) Really, I'm just aiming to shed a little spotlight on what represented the year's best queer cinema to me, hopefully sending a few extra viewers their way who maybe hadn't had them on their radar. So with that in mind, here are my top 10 queer films of 2021.

10. Benedetta

Leave it to Paul Verhoeven — the 83-year-old Dutch filmmaker who has given us everything from Basic Instinct to Showgirls to Starship Troopers — to offer up a wildly unsubtle, hilariously camp erotic drama about... two horny nuns in 17th century Italy (oh, how I wish he'd directed House of Gucci). Based on a true story (although to a small degree, I'd suspect) of a Renaissance era nun and mystic, the Catholic Church protested its New York Film Festival screening, calling it a "blasphemous lesbian nun movie." They're basically right (there might be a huge plot centred around a homemade Virgin Mary dildo), but all the more reason to see it!

9. Shiva Baby

Canadian filmmaker Emma Seligman made quite the mark this year with her directorial debut Shiva Baby, released in largely virtual theatres last spring (landing Seligman an HBO deal in the process). A comedy suggestively set in an era that now feels pretty much like a period piece (2019), the film follows bisexual Jewish 20-something Danielle (Rachel Sennott) as she spends an afternoon at a secret-exposing shiva. Various extremely uncomfortable revelations unfold, sending us on a self-assured, well-acted and very funny ride. It also runs a brisk 77 minutes — perfect for all our attention spans that have been whittled down by the pandemic.

8. The Mitchells vs. the Machines

While Pixar's lovely Luca got a lot of attention this year for being an allegory for the LGBTQ experience (even though the filmmaker has stated that was not intentional), not enough seemed to be offered to Netflix's The Mitchells vs. the Machines for explicitly offering a queer character at the centre of a family-oriented animated film. What's more, The Mitchells is also simply one of the year's best films — so deeply heartfelt and extraordinarily more funny than it needs to be. Featuring wonderful voicework by Abbi Jacbson (as Katie, a queer teenager who's about to move away to college until... a robot war breaks out across the planet), Maya Rudolph, Olivia Colman and Fred Armisen, don't sit on this even if you've ignored it on your Netflix queue because you think it's just for kids. (Also, if you do have kids: watch this with them!)

7. Swan Song

Not to be confused with the Mahershala Ali-starring film by the same name that was just released on Apple Plus, 2021 weirdly offered two films named Swan Song. But the one I'm referencing here is directed by Todd Stephens and stars the legendary German actor Udo Kier in a career-high performance that should have received more attention (although it did just land him an Independent Spirit Award nomination). Kier plays Pat Pitsenbarger, an aging former hairdresser who escapes his nursing home to embark on an odyssey across a small town in order to style a dead woman's hair for her funeral. Ultimately a poignant celebration of queer life, Swan Song was definitely one of 2021's most underappreciated gems. 

6. No Ordinary Man

You may have heard of revered jazz musician Billy Tipton, who rose to fame in the 1940s and '50s, but it's unlikely you know the whole story behind him. Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt's documentary No Ordinary Man thoughtfully aims to change that for viewers by reimagining Tipton's narrative through a diverse group of contemporary trans performers and experts. Artfully blending recordings, archival and present-day interviews, and the performers' interpretations, the film provides a necessary dialogue about transmasculinity — something even the recent surge in trans representation and storytelling hasn't done nearly enough of. 

5. Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar

Are Barb and Star bisexual? It's a little ambiguous, though they definitely enjoyed one another during a threesome and had no regrets about. Is Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, the film starring and written by Kirsten Wiig and Annie Mumolo (who wrote Bridesmaids together) and centred on the pair, one of the most absurd and delightful gonzo comedies ever made? Absolutely, and it was a true beacon of queer joy in the middle of our pandemic winter hellscapes. From Jamie Dornan's go-for-broke performance as Barb and Star's mutual love interest (give him an Oscar nomination for this instead of Belfast) to Reba McEntire's cameo of the year as instant icon Trish, this is one of the few things from 2021 I will revisit annually for whatever time we have left. 

4. Passing

In 1929, Nella Larsen wrote Passing, a book centred on the reunion of two Black childhood friends, Irene and Clare. One "passes" as white (even to her husband); the other lives her life as a Black woman. Since its release, scholars have widely identified a lesbian subtext which could not have been made explicit by Larson as an author at the time, or by the characters she depicts. But over 90 years later, Rebecca Hall (known to most an actress in films like Vicky Cristina Barcelona) has adapted the book for the first time into a stunning debut as a writer and director. With Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga delivering award-worthy performances as Irene and Clare, the film stays true to the time (and Larsen's words) by never showing the characters act on their queerness — and yet it offers one of the year's most profound depictions of what it means to be queer nonetheless. 

3. Flee

Danish filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Flee is a singular, visceral achievement. The documentary weaves together beautiful animation with archival footage to tell the true story of Amin (a pseudonym), a 36-year-old academic hiding a painful past he has kept secret for 20 years — even from his soon-to-be-husband. As he finally tells his story to the film's director (who is a longtime friend), we learn of his harrowing journey to Denmark as a child refugee from Afghanistan. The film makes for an animated cinematic catharsis, one that has landed Flee in the conversation to become the first film to ever be nominated for the Oscars for best documentary, best animated feature and best international film all in the same year. It would be such a deserving feat. 

2. Titane

One of my favourite things about 2021 was that Spike Lee's jury at the Cannes Film Festival decided to award Julia Ducournau's brilliantly batshit body horror film Titane their coveted Palme D'Or, making Ducournau the second woman in the festival's history to win the prize (they also did so in an accidentally unprecedented manner). It elevated a film that might have otherwise gone unnoticed internationally into the global cultural conversation. It's an intensely provocative film that, when reduced to a most basic sentence, can really only be described as "the insane movie where a serial killer becomes impregnated by her car" — and yet there is so, so much more to it in the way it explores queerness, plays with gender and depicts trauma. Ducournau has done something extraordinary with the form here, and I do hope we all get a chance to see it in a proper cinema someday. 

1. The Power of the Dog

Before Titane, the only female-directed film to win the Palme d'Or was Jane Campion's The Piano back in 1993. So how fitting that a few months after Titane joined it, Campion herself would confirm herself as one of her generation's greatest filmmakers with her first film in over a decade: the very queer, anti-Western masterpiece The Power of the Dog. Beautiful and challenging in a way that begs repeat viewings, the film is set in 1925 Montana and follows Phil, a volatile, deeply closeted rancher (Benedict Cumberbatch, leading a staggeringly talented cast). Phil's life is upended when his brother (Jesse Plemons) marries a poor widow (Kirsten Dunst), who brings along her effeminate teenage son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) — who Phil takes under his wing. The result is a film that delves deeply into the queer male psyche, with Campion guiding us on a quietly erotic cinematic journey that says so much by saying so little. May it win all the Oscars, which it currently seems exactly poised to do.