20 Best Movies Of 2021 (So Far)
3. Quo Vadis, Aida?
Perhaps the most purely under-appreciated film of 2021, Quo Vadis, Aida? would've won itself two Oscars in a just world - one for Best International Feature Film (sorry, Another Round), and a Best Actress Oscar for lead Jasna Đuričić, who wasn't even nominated.
Jasmila Žbanić's devastating war drama depicts the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, which resulted in the systematic genocide of more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys during the Bosnian war at the hands of the Serbian Army.
Free of melodrama while tightly focused on a UN translator, Aida (Žbanić), as she desperately tries to get her husband and sons to safety, this is a gripplingly tense quasi-thriller which pulls no punches whatsoever with its harrowing account of the horrors war inflicts upon people simply trying to live.
It sure isn't pleasant viewing, but an absorbing, expertly assembled slice of under-reported history all the same.