Guillermo del Toro and Jane Campion Talk ‘The Power of the Dog,’ ‘Nightmare Alley’ and Learning to Love Netflix

In a year where Chloe Zhao won the Best Director Oscar for “Nomadland” and went on to release one of the biggest box office successes of 2021 with Marvel Studios’ “Eternals,” it appears the year, as a whole, was fairly disappointing when it comes to the gender gap in filmmaking. After 2020 saw reasonable gains in parity amongst female and male filmmakers, 2021 has taken a step back, according to a new survey.

Despite the continuing challenges of the pandemic, it was a year of highlights from film festivals around the world.

Over the past year, The Playlist has covered hundreds of prestige films and TV series. We’ve even gone ahead and broke them down and ranked them in our various Best of 2021 lists.

The Palm Springs International Film Festival gala awards show set for Thursday January 6 has been cancelled due to Covid surge concerns.

Best Film: “Drive My Car”Runner-up: “The Power of the Dog”Best Director: Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog”Runner-up: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car”Best Actor: Simon Rex, “Red Rocket”Runner-up: Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Power of the Dog”Best Actress: Penelope Cruz, “Parallel Mothers”Runner-up: Renate Reinsve, “The Worst Person in the World”Best Supporting Actor: (tie) Vincent Lindon, “Titane,” and Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Power of the Dog”Best Supporting Actress: Ariana DeBose, “West Side

The New York Film Critics Circle anointed “Drive My Car” as the Best Film of 2021 and now the West Coast critics have had their say. After almost six hours of overall deliberations, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association also selected “Drive My Car” as their Best Film of the year with “The Power of the Dog” as runner-up.

latest film — about a small-time carnival worker (Bradley Cooper) who grifts his way into high society by claiming to read minds and commune with the dead — has all the trappings of the genre: drunk degenerates and femme fatales; dimly lit streets and stalking shadows; greed, lust, murder, hubris and a creeping existential dread.

After the release of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Leonardo DiCaprio was reportedly offered quite a few films. Obviously.

New Zealander and Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jane Campion (“The Piano”) is one of the greatest filmmakers working today and so it’s perhaps no surprise that her latest film, Netflix‘s “The Power Of The Dog” is one of the best films of 2021, atop many critics list and seems bound for Oscar-accolades (it is right at the top of our Best Films of 2021 list too, and our review described it as “cinematic poetry“).

Guillermo Del Toro is not as prolific as some of his peers when it comes to feature films, but it’s still somewhat surprising it’s taken this long for him to work with Cate Blanchett. They both had their breakthrough moments in the mid-to-late-1990s and Blanchett could have easily stepped into the worlds of any “Hellboy” movie, “The Shape of Water,” or “Crimson Peak” without a second glance.

The Shape of Water,” he won the Best Picture Oscar.His latest, “Nightmare Alley,” probably won’t, but it is nonetheless a far more entertaining and satisfying film than its overrated science-fiction predecessor. The sinister carnival sideshow look is alluring, a perfect match for subversive del Toro.

K.J.

Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” is a front-runner in this year’s awards season. It’s also a Netflix film, which brings some added baggage to the discussion.

Every Tuesday, discriminating viewers are confronted with a flurry of choices: new releases on disc and on-demand, vintage and original movies on any number of streaming platforms, catalog titles making a splash on Blu-ray or 4K. This biweekly column sifts through all of those choices to pluck out the movies most worth your time, no matter how you’re watching.

Gregg Goldstein What do Pedro Almodóvar, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Kenneth Branagh and Jane Campion have in common? They’ve helmed acclaimed films for decades, earned Academy Award nominations and done some of their best work this year … yet they’ve never won a director Oscar.In exclusive new interviews with Campion, Branagh, Almodóvar and Wes Anderson — plus some unpublished thoughts from Paul Thomas Anderson — this reporter discovered how they built on their distinctive histories

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorWhen Robert Mackenzie, supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer on Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” first read the script, he felt the story not only held a mirror up to life but challenged his thinking.Mackenzie worked to capture the sounds of Montana in this story featuring Benedict Cumberbatch as Phil Burbank, an intimidating presence who looms over a sprawling Montana ranch.

The 2021 AFI Awards top 10 list is out, and it’s top heavy with films from big-name directors.

Clayton Davis Films from Paul Thomas Anderson, Jane Campion, Joel Coen, Guillermo del Toro, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Denis Villeneuve are recipients of the 2021 AFI Awards.The honors give a nice boost for the films’ awards campaigns leading up to the holiday break, especially as ballots are in the hands of Critics Choice and SAG voters.

As the awards-season buzz builds for Netflix’s The Power of the Dog, the western starring Benedict Cumberbatch led all films on the streamer this past week.

Maggie Gyllenhaal makes a speech on stage while being honored at the 2021 SFFILM Awards Night at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on Monday night (December 6) in San Francisco, Calif.