Given the way film release schedules have been disrupted over the last year, it feels strange to read an article about Upcoming Must-See Movies in 2021 and contemplate just when and where these might show up.
For what it's worth, out of that selection I'm looking forward to…
- Malcolm and Marie General rule of thumb: putting two ridiculously sexy actors together on screen is a decent starting point. It may not be enough, but the trailer suggests that it might. (Also, John David Washington deserves a break after being in Tenet.)
- Godzilla vs. Kong Look, Godzilla: King of the Monsters was surprisingly good and Kong: Skull Island was tolerable, so it's not impossible this will be both very silly and yet worth a look. In any fair match-up Godzilla wipes the floor with Kong, but if we could somehow arrange for this to be a crossover with the Pacific Rim franchise this could be one for the ages.
- Last Night in Soho Edgar Wright hasn't let me down yet.
- Candyman I remember the first take on this story being excellent and I'm an optimist, what can I say?
- Dune Villeneuve has the chops to make this work, and I'm pretty sure it'll be memorable even if it turns out not to be so good.
- The Matrix 4 I know it's not going to have the impact the first film did, but I just have a feeling about this one. Also, I loved Sense8 and Jupiter Ascending and Cloud Atlas, so you now know that I'm a Wachowski fanboy and can calibrate your assessment of my standards accordingly.
- The French Dispatch The pleasures of watching that cast in a Wes Anderson film just can't be underestimated.
Granted that's a very nostalgic (and, some might add, very optimistic) list, but worst case scenario is that for every one of the above films that disappoints there'll be something else that unexpectedly that turns out to be better than them.
It remains to be seen whether we'll get to see them all on a big screen or a small screen, or whether by the end of 2021 the inevitable Disney-Apple-Amazon-Sony-Facebook-Tesla-BBC-Netflix-Microsoft merger will have brought all audiovisual digital entertainment under a single streaming service to which we'll each pay a tithe for the rest of our days, but apart from that What could go wrong?