Belated.
There were so many movies I didn’t get to. Every year, that’s true. Last year more than most. So these are, as things stand, largely American, mostly things that opened in at least small theatrical releases. This means that I’ll still be chasing down more obscure, smaller, and foreign pictures from 2020 for years to come. But maybe this list is useful to you for that very reason. It certainly may offer a title or two that you’d not heard of, but it’s composed of things that can be reached within or just slightly without the bounds of ‘generally discussed films’. Here are the ten I got the most out of!
10) Da Five Bloods (Dir. Spike Lee)
Spike Lee has been accused of a number of comebacks. His career has taken a path unlike few others: opening with verve and vigor, rising to early prominence, demonstrating passion; the inheritor to the 70s auteurs. And then…a veering. Doing what he wanted. Rejecting what was expected. Sometimes, that meant enormously powerful work — always with that same energized eye — like He Got Game or 25th Hour. And sometimes it meant releases so shabby and uneven that they hardly registered.
With Da Five Bloods, Lee resumes the bold, wide-eyed cinematic contact that he always promised: a unique, unmistakable original property that lays out the colour, music, tone, and energy of an era, a time, an anger, in the way only Lee can. This film is big and hard-hitting. It’s grand and ambitious. It’s weird and clumsy, even, sometimes.
The story of a set of Black Vietnam vets who return to Hanoi and may or may not be clued into a couple of life-changing secrets from their soldiering eras is some kind of nasty, bloody, entirely engaging blend of I Knew What You Did Last Summer, The Last Detail, and — well, Platoon?
Lee has always championed the cause of skepticism first, and other social issues second, if you’re asking me; and his curmudgeonliness comes through. Make no mistake, though, this loose, overwrought, chatty flick is huge in scope, seen through that cinematic eye. It’s always compelling, brisk, bright, and packed. And Delroy Lindo brings the pain with a home-run-sized turn; the always beautiful actor goes full Lee and proves that when the material matches the maker, there are still wild new treasure hunts to take us on.
9) Possessor (Dir. Brandon Cronenberg)
On the other end of the scale from Lee, who only ever intends to drive a needle of one kind or another right into the pulse of things, we have Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg’s chilly, weird, mesmeric Bad Job flick about a woman who spends her days (and cashes her checks) in other people’s minds. And bodies. Though to what degree she inhabits these victims, shares their space, co-operates it, or is subject to their psychic power is up for debate. When we begin, she is unquestionably an interloper: hired by some unseen, slick organization, looping into the mind and body of a person near someone influential so as to more easily dispatch said high roller. But our protagonist (Andrea Riseborough) hits a glitch. Or does she?
Assigned to a new role (Christopher Abbott), she finds that it’s not so simple to overtake do the bloody deed she must. And then the lines of influence begin to blur.
Riseborough and Abbott are exemplary; a pair of actors as sought after in extreme/freaky cinema as they are in A24-quality indie hits. And for a reason. Here, we see a new take on them: as isolating and expressive as they are for lead actors, they are also soft-lipped, sexually ambiguous cyphers. Finally, a film that wants to not only use them but also properly exploit their violent, skinnish appeal.
This is a wicked, empty-hearted thing. Cold surfaces and people watched across high-rise courtyards through binoculars. Nobody is looked at or seen, only investigated or pre-studied. Cased.
Icy, brutal, and dreamy.
8) Small Axe — Mangrove (Dir. Steve McQueen)
Here is a tough watch, and one whose life, truth, and simplicity take time to settle in the mind. This simple, maddening true story is morally nuanced, bracingly natural, and centred around one of the best performances of the year.
Seen through Steve McQueen’s eyes, there’s gorgeous naturalism here. One forgets, but doesn’t forget, that it’s a period film.
As we follow the plight of Frank Crichlow, real-life owner operator of the Notting Hill Caribbean food-and-drink joint The Mangrove, we are immersed in a stiflingly oppressive 1960’s London where the police — and indeed the judiciary at large — are more than happy to expend endless hours, manpower, and energy trying to quash a space seen as friendly to Black discussion, dissent, and such.
The polemic aspect of this can be easy to over-feel. If it seems like eating your spinach, wait a while and reflect. The thoughtful immediacy, thoroughness, and poetic eye with which this film is rendered are unmissably the work of one of our most talented directors. And they are. Mr. McQueen’s studious look at the era and its events pushes past routine table setting and achieves something extraordinary. It is a wide, textured rendering of a small story, with an Oscar-worthy Shaun Parkes as Crichlow.
7) Sound of Metal (Dir. Darius Marder)
This is a story built around Riz Ahmed’s fragile, wild protagonist Ruben, a drummer and a recovering addict who travels, playing shows with his girlfriend, Lou.
Early in the film, he drags himself into an audiologist after his crashing ability to hear renders him unable to play properly. Ruben may not be using or drinking, but as he’ll be told later in one of the most quietly truthful scenes of the year in film: he’s still behaving like an addict. Driven, single-minded, and clearly holding onto the music, the relationship, the independence as if he’ll lose his grip entirely without them, he’s faced with twin fears: the terror of living in silence, and the terror of being apart from Lou. But the more grounded fellow sober figure Lou puts Ruben on the only path that can help, and the heart of the film is him entering into a Deaf Sober living home.
There, he’s mentored by Paul (Paul Raci), and re-engages, over a slow and frustrated period, with quiet, with stillness, and with being forced to wait when he — like an animal, like a frightened child — wants only to make a move, take a step, look for a solution.
This movie is rich with naturalism, easy light, real behaviour, and a stunning central triple: Cooke’s tender, fierce Lou; Ahmed’s utterly raw Ruben, and Paul Raci’s deeply humane, credible Paul.
I’ve thought a lot, since watching, about how much I appreciate that Ruben’s arc in recovery is no simple path, and that he doesn’t necessarily come out of it the way we imagine. There are later second-act shifts, and a third act, that push us away from the trajectory we’re used to in such a story. They also are truthful to Ruben’s character. To be clear: the film doesn’t punish us; he doesn’t slip back into destruction, but he does still hold on stubbornly to his goals, even as he’s softened and opened up by the community he makes his home with for some months. And the final sequences, when Lou’s character is deepened and complicated in surprising ways really stuck with me. I’ve known these people, I’ve loved these people. Many are drawn to chaos for Ruben’s reasons. Many still, like Lou, are running from or rejecting something else. Either way: the world was never a place where they were comfortable in their skin.
This film renders that story with intelligence, without so much of the sermonizing and audience-brutalizing of a cautionary tale. And it’s one of the strongest renderings of Deaf culture in film.
6) The Dig (Dir. Simon Stone)
This is a very pretty movie. In fact, while it tells a lovely and conventional story and moves through its content without much lingering; it’s probably the best Malick impression of the batch (recent things like Assassination of Jesse James, The Better Angels, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints a touch of it in Minari, and the early David Gordon Greene flicks). It’s certainly the one with the least pretension (the plainspoken, lovely Minari, aside).
Here we center on two figures, real people, and their contrasting approach and warm partnership during an unlikely project: the excavation of what would become known as the Sutton Hoo treasures.
As per the true events, Edith Pretty (Carrie Mulligan), a young widow, plenty secure in her finances, and a landowner, is courted by various figures who would sway her decision on how to approach a part of her land that has revealed itself to be an ancient burial site of likely historic interest. The astonishing extent of what the mound actually holds is yet to be discovered, but still, pressure and influence show up to convince Edith of the path to take.
She, instead, tracks down a through-and-through Suffolker, spit-on-the-ground type, self-styled excavator Basil Brown, who has none of the bona fides, book-learnin’, or such of the museum heads begging to get their hands on the dig. He’s played with powerful smallness by Ralph Fiennes, mumbling and digressing through a gorgeous East Anglian accent.
The film’s mesmerizing cinematography puts the story on rails, and sends it lushly along: taking this potentially been-there-seen-that type of handsomely rendered piece of interesting recent history thing (the worst examples being The Imitation Gameses of the world) and giving it momentum, texture, and a sense of place. Fiennes gives what may be his most moving performance, and his interplay with the perfectly poised Mulligan is a pleasure to behold. An unlikely friendship, rendered with insight and written well, is still one of the most compelling and rewarding tropes in movie storytelling. And here’s one we’ve never quite seen before, set against a marvelously staged recreation of the Sutton Hoo dig, full of historical tidbits, and with a growing cast of helping hands (Johnny Flynn, Lily James, Ben Chaplin) that more or less arrive as if conjured by the magic of the twilight falling on Sutton Hoo each evening. If you told me afterwards that all of their characters were ghosts, it would more or less track. The heart of the story is Basil and Edith, and the incredible thing that they, together, quietly accomplished.
5) Another Round (Dir. Thomas Vintenberg)
What an unlikely story to build an occasionally exuberant dramedy around. Vintenberg, he of the one-time Dogme 95 pack of Scandinavian troublemakers (his pal Lars Von Trier is still living that poke-everything-with-a-stick life) gives us one of the most mature, thoughtful, and direct comedies of the last decade. While stories about aging and middle life crises are usually reserved for either: A) miserable, naturalistic renderings of how grey and loveless it all is, or B) kooky ‘oldtimers out for one last wild ride’ flicks where hearing old people use slang or curse is the punchline — here we get something substantial, beautiful, reckless, and joyous.
Madds Mikkelsen, a frighteningly attractive (attractively frightening?) performer with such natural dark charisma that he’s played not only a Bond villain but Lecter himself, is in his element with familiar director Vintenberg. The closesness, warmth, and pathos brought out in his lead, Martin, is the unmistakable result of a performer who trusts and knows his director/writer, and who rightly suspected that the material was special. Martin enters immediately into the pantheon of film’s most likeable shlubs — the humour of seeing the endlessly sexy Mikkelsen murmur his way through early scenes as a shy teacher, a dull husband, and more or less a walking textbook whose title has rubbed and faded to unreadability is touching and fun.
And then…well — if you’re not familiar with the central premise and didn’t click on the trailer, you’ll be in for quite the surprise.
Essentially, some pop psychology/pseudoscience convinces a pack of lackluster middle aged Danes (schoolteachers, several of them) to inject a rather formally structured bit of free-spiritry into their lives. The results are lively, invigorating, sloppy, and reckless.
The central idea is strong, poignant, and ethical: We propose to the young the rules of life that we say are good because they can one day have what we have. Fair enough, if we’re all leading vibrant, fulfilling lives and retiring to loving beds at day’s end. But if we’re not? What are we selling? Who’s being served? To what end, clear-thinking?
And yes, the final scene is everything you’ve heard it is.
4) I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Dir. Charlie Kaufman)
What a cracked frame. So, it turns out that Kaufman doing fear is Kaufman doing Lynch, surface-wise. The fit is effective. Welcome to disease rendered with neurological precision: where the signs of disorder are when a thing is suddenly half a thing, or double, when the wrong weather falls gently on the right ground, when twinning, paralleling, and perfectly matching things are bad, bad signs. And every diner is a 50s diner. And every dinner is a bad, bad dinner.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things accomplishes more of a horrific fugue than most horror films could dream of. The spell being woven here — as Kaufman does better than any contemporary — is both instantly unfamiliar (the rules of…everything are slightly off) and instantly comprehensible. I’m still not sure how to describe the story.
Without going far into it: a young couple (Jesse Plemmons and Jessie Buckley) is traveling to one of their parents’ homes for a visit, or a holiday, or something.
They’re doing so as they talk, digress, and spiral into their own thoughts. Roundly: this talking, digressing, and thinking, is clearly poisoned.
The fractured, stilted, aimless cycles of interaction play out like the fear-dream of someone who’s observed humans around each other and has been tasked with re-creating it, dramatically, for their supervisors back on Xenulor Beta 8.
Sanity is fragile. Losing it, a kaleidoscopically fearsome prospect. The thing that keeps us locked into understanding what all this human behaviour means is very breakable, Kaufman wants us to know. We impose our lens of rationality over things that are just a nudge away from being very, very strange.
Kaufman presents a series of ordinary enough (at first) scenarios but with every possible tiny dial turned, every possible marker shifted a couple notches to the left or right on the axis, and every possible piece of emotional context rendered anti-real.
It’s pure, it’s a vision, I may never watch it again. It tried to hurt me. It’s trying to hurt everyone.
3) Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Dir. George C. Wolfe)
This is a challenging movie. Not in sense of it requiring any effort, nor to suggest that it doesn’t have the right to righteous anger. It has, and its case for the enraged beating heart at its centre is a pure one. But it aims for and achieves the power of a stage-play — the viewer is not just implicated as a witness, but an accomplice.
George C. Wolfe lays out his case briskly, with rhythm, and colour. The film makes use of its small world and limited locations: what lingers in the mind is how well we know the space we’re in, and the sweat — the endless sweat. Our world is ruled by Ma Rainey (Viola Davis — thunderingly inhabited), and inhabited by her merry players: Cutler (Colman Domingo), Toledo (Glynn Turman), and Levee (Chadwick Boseman).
As the band gathers to rehearse and lay down the music for Ma, we’re presented with three men, three stages of Black manhood in an era where all carry a risk. Three approaches to how one must present oneself to be acceptable. The movie brims with such intelligent awareness of this world, as a viewer, you feel like the paycheck these performers are waiting for exists in a quantum flux state, only becoming real the moment their congenial label boss finally hands it over. And until then, every bit of their behaviour, facade, performance, and more can either knock a few zeros off of it or make it go away entirely.
Toledo is the relevant old-timer, keeping a watchful eye on things, not wanting the boat to shake, handing out wisdom, knowing the ropes. Cutler sees things a bit sharper, and still has the energy to put on a fully charming show — as compliant and savvy as anyone.
And then there’s Levee. Our poor boy Levee. Cheeky, beautiful, scrawny, playful, and furious; he has no interest in growing up into one of these men. These men never helped him in his life. These men couldn’t protect him when he needed it. These men don’t stand up to oppression, they play the respectability game. Or do they? The play and movie are much wiser than laying out one right path or another. None is right. Under oppression, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But the music is allowed. And Ma’s making big money for someone. How she must look in Levee’s eyes: a bull, a tyrant, a woman who has crossed over into such value to the music sellers that she talks to everyone — not just white folks — the way Levee wishes he could.
The tone, the pace, the rise, the rhythm, and the tragedy of this story are vital. They scald their impression; most bracingly through Mr. Boseman, a sweet-natured person off-screen who was by all accounts, sincerely generous. Here, he accesses something so raw and so controlled that one wants to look away. And when the moment comes for him to let loose his real pain, his real resentment: the challenge is sent directly to the throne of heaven. How petty, boring and shallow do most scenes of young male anger seem compared to this? How many filmmakers would rather show us them beating a partner, getting wasted, and such; instead of risking the real thing? Here it is: laid out with eloquence and performed with genius. This is a film unlike just about any I’ve seen.
2) Personal History of David Copperfield (Dir. Armando Iannucci)
Dickens…fun?
One forgets sometimes that readers bought copy after copy of the papers and periodicals that published the great writer’s stories, chapter by chapter, because they enjoyed them and were entertained. Sure, this is the story of, essentially, the world’s least lucky child living in a madhouse where the adults in power around him are — at best- incompetent and grift-minded. And at worst, just flat out love beating children.
So what’s there to celebrate? This fantastically entertaining, colourful, and witty adaptation condenses the masterpiece novel into a fresh, sometimes bizarre, and gorgeous world where Copperfield’s story is one of unending optimism, lovely spirit, and moments of kindness, love, and grace found among any circumstance. And these circumstances are actually dressed for the occasion: how often are Dickens’ spaces rendered drably. The drabness is in the nasty human behaviour, why should the factory floor also depress us? Here it doesn’t. Towers of bottles, scads of urchins working heavy machines, warm, poor little homes where the table is all you need to carve out your own joy for the day. And, here and there, hillside manses where kites trail the bright sun, brimming city streets (better duck and slip to avoid the creditors) with grinning merchants. Best of all: an overturned boat filled with familial love, kindness, and trinkets of every kind.
This is a story of the ports, not the storm. It’s about how every bright, good thing, every sincere action, and every honest person represents something real. The stuff of life. The substance itself.
Dev Patel as our Copperfield is inspired. The cast is name after name of welcome faces (to give just a hint: wait until we arrive at a kooky couple played by Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton). And it’s all adapted and directed by Armando Iannucci, turning his razor-sharp wit to this world.
- Zombi Child (Dir. Bertrand Bonello)
Bertrand Bonello is a filmmaker who consistently finds ways to widen, broaden, and complicate stories that would seem to be straightforward in the telling. His control of composition, light, and movement are superb. As is his use of quiet, of empty space, and of young characters.
Zombi Child is, curiously, far less punishing than his recent masterpiece Nocturama (2016). Narrower than his waltz of a take on St. Laurent — his best reviewed film, a biography from 2014. It actually reminds me of nothing so much as, in some ways, how Claire Denis might make the film of this story. Bonello is certainly on her turf in pursuing a thoughtful, ghostly interrogation of the spaces, the loves, and the ghosts left by colonialism and its long shadow.
In this case, we observe three timelines. One, in Haiti, 1962, is nearly wordless. This is somber, sprawling, with natural light, loping movements, and a mesmeric feel to it. Evoking the long tradition of European masters painting fieldhands, it gives us a new “The Gleaners”, locating Millet’s premise among the zombies of plantation labour. How literal this might turn out to be, you will have to wait to see.
In the present-day timeline, a French-Haitian teenager is befriended by a white French classmate, and inducted into her friend group, a lazily counter-current (rebellious? they might be if they did anything much at all) clique that is both fascinated and worried by their new friend and the hints of her vooodoo heritage.
Woven throughout is one of these girls’ love letters as she awaits the boy she met over the summer, with whom she shared a secret romance, and who she now waits for, full of desire, unease, and secret bliss.
This is a stately film full of ideas worth considering. I fell into its patient pace, its naturalistic but formally conducted direction, its perfectly-performed young actors, and its ultimate fever. Every part works. The control here is key. What happens is, in the end, more and less than we might expect. Bigger and freakier, but also smaller and simpler. Bonello’s goals are witchy and romantic and wide. His methods are quiet and questioning.
In the end, everything is set up so well that the mere re-telling of key things — stories passed down over time — is enough to satisfy all the things we’ve wondered. At the center of it all is Melissa, who carries what she carries with such ease that I’m still wondering how much of the decades’ curse, and how much of their blessing, is on her. Either way, she’s not like most protagonists. Her inheritance is those fields, those temples, those stalks, those pounding drums.
