The best movie trailers of 2021

Our list of the year's best movie advertising campaigns includes Licorice Pizza, Last Night In Soho, and Titane

PublishedDecember 8, 2021

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Thomasin McKenzie in Last Night In Soho — Thomasin McKenzie in *Last Night In Soho*

Like an old projector dragged out of storage, movie theaters flickered uneasily back to life in 2021. It can’t be overstated, how rejuvenating it was to see films in an auditorium again, even if that excitement was laced with some lingering anxiety. Oh how we missed the theatrical experience! The Dolby rumble. The smell of fresh popcorn. The thrill of a shared laugh or shudder with strangers on the same wavelength. And, yes, the old, familiar dopamine hit provoked by that grand promise of something new further on the horizon, a prophecy in green and white: “The following preview has been approved for appropriate audiences by the Motion Pictures Association Of America.”

Trailers didn’t disappear last year. But it wasn’t quite the same, watching them on our little screens in our little homes, as they popped into our Twitter feeds or grabbed some real estate on our websites of choice. Like the movies they’re designed to tell us about, trailers play best on the biggest screen possible. The 10 that follow were expert sizzle reels and supercuts that transcended their mercenary function: However effective they proved to be in getting audiences back to those recently reopened venues, these fleeting “coming attractions”—as they were called in an older moviegoing world—could be admired as standalone works of art. Even if you missed them at their largest, they still looked large, like the extravagant shadows cast by the movies they teased.

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10. Some Kind Of Heaven

Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about the biggest retirement community in Florida finds something sobering behind the eccentricities of The Villages: a portrait of older Americans struggling to live the dream promised by this geriatric paradise. Heaven’s canny theatrical trailer doesn’t entirely communicate its melancholy, instead emphasizing the slightly unsettling kitsch of the setting and moments of unscripted comedy, like a talking head interrupted by a horny dog. Still, one of the best (and most underrated) nonfiction films of the year deserves a trailer this hypnotically intriguing. And there’s a hint of the reality its subjects grapple with in the structure of the spot, which uses gushing sound bytes and brochure-worthy images to parrot the sales pitch of the community, before introducing some conflict—plus, you know, that humping pooch—to pop the fantasy bubble.

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9. The Worst Person In The World

Sometimes it’s just about identifying an emotional through line. This brisk, bouncy trailer for Joachim Trier’s new portrait of thirtysomething confusion, which quietly hit a couple theaters this fall but opens properly in February, funnels its flow of gorgeous imagery into the legible shape of a love triangle. The match-cutting is peerless, deploying the drifting gaze of the film’s heroine, played by Renate Reinsve, as a dramatic catalyst. While plenty of ads for foreign-language fare opt (perhaps smartly) to play coy about subtitles, Neon evidently recognizes how often the appeal of this film rests on its dialogue; the two conversations excerpted—one breezy, the other anguished—provide a strong impression of the warring impulses driving the plot. Great song choice, too; you can’t really go wrong with Harry Nilsson.

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4 / 12

8. Shiva Baby

How do you make a film set almost entirely in a single drab suburban home during a shiva look exciting? By embracing the claustrophobia of the scenario as a selling point, instead of trying to disguise it. The trailer for Shiva Baby isn’t much more than a compressed version of the movie itself, but it has an exacting curatorial savviness, mashing a bunch of split-second clips of cringe comedy and venomous interaction into a seasick highlight reel while efficiently highlighting the balls of social/farcical awkwardness its protagonist must juggle. The skitter of strings contributes to the queasy vibe; making a comedy as stressful as any thriller is an accomplishment worth trumpeting. No wonder the film was a sleeper success in New York theaters this past spring, before people were even going to the theater again in droves.

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7. Licorice Pizza

Every new Paul Thomas Anderson movie is an event. Generally speaking, so are the trailers advertising them. Licorice Pizza joins Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Inherent Vice on the list of Anderson projects that have announced their arrival with montages at once tantalizing and independently satisfying. Which is to say, the whirlwind 1970s story of Gary Valentine and Alana Kane plays as delightfully at two-and-a-half minutes as it does at two-and-a-half hours, scored to a classic Bowie banger and unencumbered by the need to cohere into anything more than a collection of great images organized around an apparently screwball romance. In trailer form, Licorice Pizza is as perfect as a moment imperfectly remembered: a nostalgic blur of big emotions, bygone fashions, and lots of meaningful sprinting.

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6. Memoria

It’s a special victory, to draw audiences into a capital-A art movie without being misleading about the nature of that capital-A art movie. The trailer for Memoria does cherry-pick a few of the more ominous moments from the latest beguiling mood piece by Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul; a discussion about a skull with a hole drilled into it to release bad spirits and a shot of the lights suddenly shorting out while star Tilda Swinton wanders a museum perhaps imply a more conventionally… spooky movie than Joe has made. All the same, this elegantly minimalist spot does a superb job of foregrounding the essential qualities of the film: its striking stillness, its unsettling aural mystery, and especially the paramount importance of sound design to the whole production. The last few seconds are uncommonly hushed, encouraging the viewer to lean in close and listen closely—exactly as the movie itself does.

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7 / 12

5. C’mon C’mon

We’re tempted to deduct points for “Clair De Lune,” a classical needle drop nearly as played out as movie-advertising perennial “Walking On Sunshine.” But damn if the twinkly, familiar tune doesn’t work like gangbusters here, paired with Joaquin Phoenix reading a pertinent bedtime passage from Claire Nivola’s “The Star Child” and an achingly elegant selection of postcard-pretty black-and-white footage from the movie. The trailer privileges emotional logic over narrative exposition, correctly reasoning that the draw of Mike Mills’ latest familial drama is not the plot mechanics but the relationship between the characters, which it beautifully, economically expresses in miniature. Points restored for the sweet-amusing note on which it ends, promising some lightly combative humor to go with all that wistfulness.

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4. Last Night In Soho

4. Last Night In Soho (teaser)

The mixed reactions to Edgar Wright’s genre mishmash Last Night In Soho have centered largely on its narrative choices, not its formal ones; however one feels about the story, it’s hard to quibble with the director’s typically sharp craftsmanship, his eye for a memorable image or the snappy precision of his editing. To that end, the teaser for Soho almost plays like some purified, ideal version of the movie: Wordless, save for the crooned lyrics of Petula Clark’s timeless “Downtown,” it offers all the pleasures of Wright’s film—the glamorous evocation of 1960s London, the literal and figurative mirroring of its heroines, the giallo flashes of eyes and blades—with none of that pesky plot business. Even the feature-length tonal tilt from dream to nightmare is proportionally represented, culminating in a perfect, trailer-ending freeze frame that cracks like glass. In its mesmerizing simplicity, it’s more satisfying than the full trailer … and maybe than the full movie, too.

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9 / 12

3. Judas And The Black Messiah

3. Judas And The Black Messiah (second trailer)

Sweeping and intimate, mythic and urgent: The final trailer for Shaka King’s Judas And The Black Messiah makes the 1960s biodrama and Best Picture nominee look like all these things and more. What it also captures is the dueling voices and perspectives that the film itself adopts, as the written words of Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) collide with the orders of J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen), which are eventually answered by the rousing rhetoric of a young Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). Caught in the middle of all this is Bill O’Neal, whose impossible position the trailer communicates largely through LaKeith Stanfield’s deceptive, subtly guilt-stricken silence, given room to breathe in the spot’s superb final beat. It’s the rare Hollywood trailer that’s as poetic (in multiple senses of the word) as it is slickly enticing.

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10 / 12

2. Titane

Restraint is an odd word to apply to anything in the general vicinity of Julia Ducournau’s apocalyptically batshit Cannes winner. Yet how else could you categorize a trailer that implies, without coming close to revealing, the hookiest transgressions of the provocation it’s selling? Over a few propulsive, dazzlingly violent minutes, we get the major themes and motifs of the movie (cars, fire, murder, madness, love) but no real sense of how they coalesce into a plot. It’s a sound strategy for a film whose power often lies in the way it piles shocks on top of each other, until you’re tensely bracing for the next one. The coup de grâce is the unexpected emergence of “She’s Not There,” cued by Vincent Lindon’s haunted reaction to… something, which reframes the sleek terrors on display through a stranger emotional lens, one comparable to Ducournau’s own. That it makes Titane look like the wildest movie of the year without more than gently hinting at the wildest element humming under its hood… well, folks, wheel this one out onto the showfloor.

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11 / 12

1. West Side Story

1. West Side Story (teaser)

20th Century Studios didn’t need to present much more than a title and a byline to get people excited for Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. All the same, the exhilarating magic of the film’s first teaser—adjacent to and perhaps inextricable from what Spielberg has pulled off with the movie itself—is how it teases out recognition of the Broadway show’s legendary pleasures while also giving them an exciting new shape. The full trailer is pretty delightful, too, but it lacks the crescendoing grandeur of that 90-second first look above: Resurrecting West Side Story from the collective imagination one whistle and evocative establishing shot at a time, it builds to the remarkably symbolic image of two sets of shadows creeping into each other, before Rita Moreno’s delicate version of “Somewhere” ushers in a flood of spectacular moments yanked from this faithful new adaptation. You don’t need a familiarity with the original show (or its earlier big-screen iteration) to get a few chills from this incredibly assembled teaser. Working eyes and ears should be enough.

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