Museum Hours

  At the end of a year in which we all felt rather at the mercy of things much bigger than ourselves, here is my list of the ten best new films that I saw in 2021 (including some at festivals which have yet to be released in the UK) which provided some comfort that humans at their best (and goodness knows we've seen plenty of humans at their worst particularly in what seems to be an ongoing death spiral for liberal democracy in one of the homes of cinema at the behest of a pathetic narcissist who just can't accept that he lost) can entrance each other with empathetic appreciation and aesthetic wonders. In other words the genius of cinema at its best lies in its recognition of the plurality of experience - the very thing that the know nothing reactionaries and authoritarians around the world want to deny us.  Generally, a very strong year probably at least in part because of titles being held up by the pandemic (or more precisely, and sadly, the early waves of the ongoing pandem

  Take things seriously doesn't mean being serious about them all of the time.  In contrast, considering the entire world to be an exercise in irony reduces everything to the purported laugh, the trolling or the rise.  Its ultimate expression is deeply political: the real is so subordinate to the virtual that a country can be ruled from a phone. Real pain is inflicted entirely gratuitously in the name of  slogans, memes and the most prosaic bigotry.  ' Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian."   Yet the portal (Lockwood's term for the internet) is also the means of growth and development and escape for many. The virtual also has in itself a certain beauty.  No One Is Talking About This  conveys the lapidary