Neon has made its mark in just five years with its wide variety of releases coming from all over the world and their calculated campaigning for the Oscars. There’s a reason Parasite made history and cemented the studio’s reputation for buying the domestic rights to films no other American studio would touch. They are the Miramax for the twenty-first century and hopefully, they don’t do anything like Miramax’s runners did to give Neon a bad name. In 2021, they had over a dozen films released from their slate. Here are five of the best films from Neon in the past year.
A Chiara
Writer/director Jonas Carpignano completed his Calabrian trilogy with this poignant story of a teenage girl whose family values are tested when she learns of a terrible connection to her father. With non-professional actors being an actual family, Carpignano achieves the neorealism from Italian cinema’s past but adds in a girl’s confrontation with Calabria’s underworld. Can one stay part of the family who is in bed with the all-powerful ‘Ndrangheta who don’t mind blowing up vehicles as a warning? And can someone so young who did not realize her closeness to danger get away from the heat that always stays around her?
(Grade: A)
The First Wave
Director Matthew Heineman did not hesitate to get himself embedded with a New York hospital, the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, when COVID-19 became a pandemic. It may be hard to revisit this painful time full of uncertainty and fear, but Heineman gives viewers a first-hand account of what doctors and nurses were doing to save infected patients. It is a period where vaccines weren’t being thought of and many were denying it being a serious disease. Only in hindsight can we now understand and feel the struggle everyone in the hospital was grasping with an invisible enemy surrounding them.
(Grade: A-)
Flee
I wrote a review on this film and I don’t mind saying it again: this is one of the most moving documentaries I have ever seen. This incredible journey of an Afghan man from pre-Taliban days all the way to the current time in Denmark can only be seen to be believed because of the use of animation to put the main subject’s words in action. If we can’t imagine it, then it will be drawn up for us and intercut with archive footage and music of the time. This just has to win an Oscar, either in documentary or animated feature, although it should win for both.
(Grade: A+)
Pig
I had no clue what this movie was about and why NicolasCage was getting so much acclaim for it, but when I finally got to see it, I was wowed. While the plot may seem ridiculous at first as to why it’s such an important quest, the main ideas of it ring true to human nature. It is holding on to a distant memory from the past and anything that reminds us of who we were and how far we are willing to go to keep it. Cage, even in his character’s state, makes us believe his passion to find a pig that is precious to him because it’s more than just a pet.
(Grade: A)
Spencer
If you saw Jackie, then you know what kind of work Pablo Lorrain does and what he was going to do in his portrait of a Christmas gathering involving the Royal Family and Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart). It’s a fantastic performance by Stewart, going into Diana’s full range of emotions and picking out her sensibilities of what she may have been feeling that fateful Christmas before splitting up with Prince Charles. Supported by Jonny Greenwood’s haunting score, one of three he did for 2021 (the others being The Power Of The Dog and Licorice Pizza), Spencer is an insight into the mind of one of Britain’s most beloved figures at a crucial period in her life.
(Grade: A-)
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