December 31, 2020–In one of the most unusual years for film ever, most of the best (and worst) films of the year have been seen from the privacy of one’s own home via Video on Demand, rather than involving a trek to the theater (indeed, I only managed to see two films theatrically from my top 10 as of publication). The experience has changed, affecting the market, in these days of COVID-19, but the quality of the cinema is as strong as ever. These (mostly) long months of January through December have yielded the following impressive result. These are the best films of 2020, as chosen by the critic, including all films and series given 5-4 stars by Eric Robert Wilkinson.
Note: There are still some qualifying titles I’ve yet to see, which should they still qualify after I’ve seen them may be added to the following list…Some of the films listed below weren't seen till they were made widely available in 2021 and have been moved from the previous version of the Best Films of 2021 list to this one...
Note: There are still some qualifying titles I’ve yet to see, which should they still qualify after I’ve seen them may be added to the following list…Some of the films listed below weren't seen till they were made widely available in 2021 and have been moved from the previous version of the Best Films of 2021 list to this one...
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The Top 10: |
3. Promising Young Woman / Nomadland (tie) |
My two favorite films of the year may not, on paper, appear to qualify for this list as they both saw limited awards-consideration release in the the tail end of a pandemic-afflicted 2020 (in fact, I saw both in early 2021*). Indeed, at first glance, they appear to have not much if anything at all in common. One is a loud, abrasive, candy-colored, vulgar, violent (albeit feminist-bent) revenge thriller which meanders its way to a nearly foregone conclusion. The other is a quiet, steely, slow yet methodical ramble through the American Southwest – a road movie where the purpose is found in the journey, not the destination. Yet look closer and one will see numerous parallels between Promising Young Woman and Nomadland. They respectively star two of our finest working actresses: one a young virtuoso still awaiting a career of worthy roles, which are few and far between; the other, a veteran dynamo with two Oscars (one in the past 3 years alone) for Best Actress under her belt. They were both written and directed by a couple of up-and-coming females, one a still young TV producer making her feature debut, the other with a couple features under her belt, with this being her big indie-financed, studio/Hulu-released breakthrough. One recurring motif they share is that of a roving camera which laterally tracks a main character who frequently walks in a straight line toward a seemingly inexorable (if somewhat open-ended) conclusion, occasionally switching to an almost stalking glide directly behind them, as if following them into anything from an uncertain future to the gates of Hell itself. Even more importantly, in their respectively highly stylized (even garishly-so) and, contrastly, ultra-neo-realist approaches to narrative, the choices we might make in the face of overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable grief, and the deep dives their stars do to create three-dimensional, lived-in and horrifically relatable characters (perhaps – certainly in the latter’s case – literally?), these two films both struck me in startlingly similar ways.
Killing Eve producer Emerald Fennell’s debut film features British actress extraordinaire Carey Mulligan like you’ve never seen her before, fulfilling finally the promise made implicit by Lone Scherfig’s An Education (2009), when she was merely a fresh-faced Audrey Hepburn for a new generation, and swings the pendulum 180 degress the opposite direction in her embodiment of Cassy, a former medical student who flamed out quietly and all-but-for reasons passing understanding (except to the clueless people of her past, and despite her parents’ patience and sheer incomprehension and frustration) when her best friend was gang raped at a college party and committed suicide shortly after an investigation lead nowhere. Now, Mulligan’s walking raw nerve in a petite blonde, pig-tailed frame works indifferently in a coffee shop by day, trolling the local bar scene for toxic male predators by night (her “conquests” include everyone from Superbad’s Christopher Mintz-Plasse and The OC’s Adam Brody to YouTube sensation/Eighth Grade writer-director Bo Burnham, Max Greenfield, and even Chris Lowell of TV’s GLOW), feigning drunk helplessness to lure them in, then calling them out on their vile behavior’s unacceptability in the 21st century. Chickens come home to roost, a Confucius quote about revenge takes on virtually literal connotations, and the film strikes a final, blood-curdling note of smirking, ink-black comedic perfection. Writer-director-editor Chloe Zhao, on the other hand, makes her long-awaited Oscar-winning follow-up to 2018’s The Rider (she has since made to leap to the ultra-mainstream with her Marvel epic Eternals, released in early November 2021), with her quietly powerful, attention-soaked, exquisitely-detailed exploration of the American dream via Frances McDormand’s Fern (it’s implied her last name may also involve the term “McD”), a short crop-haired widow who lost her husband after the Nevada sheetrock company he worked for shutdown and evicted dozens of the company town’s employees/on-site residents. When he passed, we gather, she decided to take up a nomadic existence in an ever-moving van (which she nicknames “Vanguard” – like she’s the captain of her own ship), touring the American Southwest as a way of life. Seasonally, she works in a seemingly paradoxical fashion as an Amazon packaging plant employee, one among many like so many sardines in a can, making ends meet to stave off the dreaded notion of early retirement. But her heart belongs not just to the open road but to the out of doors and the community of lone wolves to which she seemingly belongs, including a tentative flirtation with David Straitharn as a kindly, smitten grandfather-to-be (Zhao frequently films Fern from above, talking to “fellow” nomads playing versions of themselves as they relate their personal stories). Like Mulligan’s Cassy, McDormand’s Fern is so bullheaded, so resolutely herself, yet Zhao’s attention to detail is so filled with warm, human feeling in the face of a cold, cruel and sometimes indifferent universe, that a gorgeous kind of balance is achieved. What these two films achieve both together and individually is something approaching a modern cinematic miracle. |
2. Da 5 Bloods / David Byrne's American Utopia |
My next two favorite films of the year were made by the same veteran writer-director, an icon of American independent cinema and the persistence of vision and spirit that entails.
First up: Spike Lee’s film is one of the very best of the year, an astonishing mixture of war film, heist dramedy and political commentary ostensibly concerning a group of black Vietnam vets returning to the country to recover both the bones of their fallen leader (the late Chadwick Boseman) and some long-lost gold bars which they intend to return to their community, but actually about the black experience in unjust American wars and taking back something of what they’ve lost and what they’ve earned in the process. Delroy Lindo leads the brilliant cast (Clarke Peters and Isaiah Whitlock, Jr. provide ample support) as a Trump-supporting vet with PTSD and a drive to get “what’s his” (his son, played by The Last Black Man in San Francisco’s Jonathan Majors, tags along) and a Trumpian zeal for shrinking the world down to a kind of paranoid, schizoid tunnel vision in which everyone else is to blame for his problems and nobody can achieve his goals but himself. The final sequences boil this worldview down to a hypnotic and disturbing soliloquy utterly obliterating the fourth wall, which illustrates with perfect clarity the destructive nature of such a vision. Lee’s typical technical mastery is here, mixing a gorgeous widescreen with saturated colors, grainy 16mm flashbacks featuring the titular unit’s leader, super-8 home movie style footage, and a jittery, often-handheld camera along with slick Steadicam and crane shots. The plot is one part The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Three Kings mixed with Lee’s own Get on the Bus for its sheer focus on a particular generation of black Americans “on a mission,” finding in Lindo’s descent into madness a kind of Apocalypse Now from the perspective of Colonel Kurtz if he was also the Martin Sheen character traveling into the heart of darkness (that film’s influence is further underlined by an early sojurn to a Vietnamese bar utilizing Coppola’s famous film logo for its sign). This is Lee’s own second black war effort after 2008’s less successful Miracle at St. Anna, which blended a look at the black experience in World War II with homages to Italian Neo-realism. Here, he succeeds enormously. Spike Lee’s other effort, which came late in the year to HBO, is one of a trend of 2020 films – that of the filmed musical performance. Like Lee’s own 2009 film Passing Strange (my favorite of that year), this film seems content to stage and record an astonishing theatrical event for a larger audience. The film finds the former Talking Heads front man with an international and eclectic band of instrumentalists and back-up dancers performing a mixture of classic songs (This Must Be the Place, Don’t Worry About the Government, Slippery People, Toe Jam) with songs which highlight the inter-connectedness that the man, who only in 2012 wrote in a book about being diagnosed with “borderline-Aspergers” (on the Autistic spectrum), feels in songs like “Everybody’s Coming to My House,” a Janelle Monae jam called “Hell You Tal’m ‘Bout” (featuring the names of black victims of police brutality and murder), and the opening show-stopper “Here” (featuring Byrne holding and pointing to a model of a human brain as he describes its functions and forms). In the hands of two legendary performers, Lee and Byrne, this becomes a rousing, powerful and often movingly spirited film to rival Jonathan Demme’s classic 1984 Talking Heads concert document-cum-exercise video, Stop Making Sense. |
3. Hamilton |
Lin-Manuel Miranda is a brilliant lyricist and rap performer/actor and finally his full potential can be seen transitioning from the Broadway stage to the screens of Disney+ subscribers with this rousing, powerful, funny and moving portrait of the life of Alexander Hamilton, orphaned immigrant and political muckraker in the machine of founding fathers Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison and rival (and eventual assassin) Vice President Aaron Burr. Leslie Odom Jr. is the Salieri to Hamilton’s Mozart as Burr, a bitter, frustrated man who kept his cards close to his vest while barely able to conceal his contempt behind a smiling veneer of vapid charm. That he is also the film’s sometime narrator and main perspective gives the film a fascinating light. A brilliant cast including Miranda, Daveed Diggs (in the dual roles of Marquis de Lafayette and Jefferson), Anthony Ramos (as both Hamilton’s right-hand man and, later, his own ill-fated son), Phllippa Soo as long-suffering wife and legacy-builder Elizabeth, and many others bring the astounding density of Miranda’s lyrics, director Thomas Kail’s elaborate and fluid staging, and the sheer entertainment of this “alternative” view of American history to stunning life.
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4. The Climb |
Michael Angelo Covino’s cinematically-stunning and fluid miniature-epic masterpiece of awkwardness, buddy comedy and bitter truths is an adrenaline shot right from the beginning straight into the heart of its characters and audience. With elaborate long-takes, nearly invisible editing, and Altman-esque sound and staging, co-star/co-writer/director Covino tells the story of two long-time ride-or-die friends who, beginning in the opening scene (the film is expanded from a 2017 short film), find themselves opening a fissure which launches them into an ever-deepening chasm as Covino admits to sleeping with co-writer/co-star Kyle Marvin’s fiancee. Despite this, Covino is always there for Marvin (albeit often with his own interests seemingly at heart), and the film chronicles years in their lives as Marvin prepares to marry another ill-suited woman (Gayle Rankin of TV’s GLOW and Perry Mason) much to his former bestie’s chagrin. The results are hilarious and heartfelt, and startlingly thought-provoking.
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5. I'm Thinking of Ending Things |
Awkwardness also abounds in the mind (and reality-) bending dramedy from writer-director Charlie Kaufman (Synecdoche, New York, Being John Malkovich, Anomalisa), adapting Iain Reid’s novel about a red-haired young woman (Jessie Buckley; has any actress had a better – albeit outta-nowhere – couple of years than her?) going on a long snowy car-ride to meet the parents (an appropriately awkward and oddball coupling of David Thewlis and Toni Collette) of her soon-to-be-ex boyfriend (Jesse Plemmons). You see, the young woman (whose name, occupation and course of studies shifts throughout the film), is “thinking of ending things.” What exactly that entails and, ultimately, means is very much up to the viewer to discover as Kaufman follows his characters and their personalities, with no clear line of logic or action, from beginning to end. The results are funny and disturbing in almost equal but never-endingly fascinating measure.
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6. Mank |
David Fincher resurrected an over-twenty-year-old screenplay by his deceased journalist father Jack for this first feature since 2014’s Gone Girl, a black-and-white Netflix-backed epic seeming to tell the tale of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman in a witty, frequently charming performance, albeit of an off-putting alcoholic), the screenwriter whose contentious relationship with director Orson Welles nevertheless gave us the classic film Citizen Kane (1941). However, it is more often than not through the eyes of Mankiewicz and young underrated actress Marion Davies (played, appropriately enough, by an often mis-cast Amanda Seyfried, rising to the occasion here) that we get a glimpse rather of the political landscape of 30s and 40s Hollywood and the writer’s troubled relationships with studio head Louis B Mayer (Arliss Howard) and, of course, with William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), the business magnate who inspired Welles’ portrayal of the titular classic character Charles Foster Kane.
Some fascinating contemporary parallels abound here, including a media campaign against gubernatorial candidate and author Upton Sinclair (look close for that Bill Nye cameo!) which may ring a few bells. Fincher is at the top of his craft here, working with his Mindhunter cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt, in a creamy, silky-smooth black and white to rival Welles, with razor-sharp editing, a period-authentic mono-soundtrack sound design, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s astonishingly old-school (and typically wonderful) score. The results are surprisingly entertaining. |
7. The Nest |
Sean Durkin is the writer-director of the polarizing Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), a tale of cult-deprogramming and re-acclimation into “normal” society. In some ways, his belated sophomore effort is also about the blinders coming off a woman in thrall to a powerful man – in this case involving the disintegration of a marriage between a would-be Wall Street big-shot (Jude Law) who, circa the 1980s, transplants his ill-contented horseback rider wife (Carrie Coon) and two children to a British country estate which might be at home in an atmospheric horror film. As Law’s wannabe Master of the Universe flails about, attempting to achieve the success in his native England he failed at in America, the flashes of anger and hurt on the face of his American wife become a small masterpiece in which we can see the fissures caused by crumbling respect and love before our very eyes. That Coon must begin to take care of herself and learn how to live in this potentially hothouse atmosphere is a given; that it should be so affecting and fascinating to watch is a stunning and welcome surprise.
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8. Ordinary Love |
Another disintegration of a marriage, this time despite the love and devotion of a husband (Liam Neeson, taking a temporary reprieve from his typical late-career action-hero persona with award-caliber work here) for his wife (Lesley Manville; miles away from her quasi-Western matriarchal villainess in Kevin Costner’s Let Him Go, yet also award-worthy). When the married duo’s almost ritualistic routines are disrupted by a breast cancer diagnosis for the wife, the delicate little gestures of affection and needling (albeit playful) exchanges they have with one another begin to take on new and quasi-tragic meanings. This film, from directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn, written by Irish playwright Owen McCafferty, finds a great abundance of humor and a moving sense of grace and humanity in the lives and love of this couple.
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9. Rent-A-Pal |
There were plenty of horror films in 2020 (and no, not simply in the news and the political discourse) and some were better than others, but none was as profoundly affecting and creepy and disturbing and, ultimately, moving to me as writer-director-editor Jon Stevenson’s portrait of a lonely and aging man (Brian Landis Folkins, striking notes of Philip Seymour Hoffman in Happiness here) who takes care of his dementia-ridden and aging mother while living in her basement, and fails at having any success with a video dating service he subscribes to. After browsing the bargain bin at the place he receives his videos from, he finds the titular cassette tape featuring an almost Mr. Rogers-esque character (Wil Wheaton of Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation) addressing the camera and offering to be a “friend.” As loneliness and depression beset our man on all sides, he finds himself becoming more and more obsessed with the man on the other side of the screen. That this can’t possibly end well is almost a given; that it should be so very sad and, yes, touching, is genuinely startling. The film becomes reminiscent in certain ways of May and Chuck & Buck with the former lending its empathetic portrait of a lonely person’s descent into madness and the latter lending the feeling of having bugs under one’s skin while watching it unfold.
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10. Tommaso |
Abel Ferrara’s ultra-personal portrait of an artist in exile, haunted by demons and addictions whilst attempting to claw his way out of the hole of toxicity he’s enveloped himself in is one of the most painfully honest films of this or any year. Willem Dafoe plays a Ferrara surrogate as the titular filmmaker, married to a beautiful Italian (played by Ferrara’s own wife) and father to a young daughter (played by Ferrara’s own daughter), living in a claustrophobic yet expansive Roman apartment (Ferrara’s own). By day, the artist attempts to teach (and flirt) with young acting students through dance and breathing exercises. Once virtually every night, the artist descends into a lonely, somber little room to sit in a circle and share his experience as a recovering addict, husband and father with others in comparable pain. With its blood red walls, flickering low lighting and emaciated company, this den of confession and humane fellowship begins to resemble a waiting room for Hell. Like no other film the bad-boy New York filmmaker has ever made, so does the film itself.
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Eleventh Place |
Here is a single film that would’ve, in a lesser year, made my top 10, so call it Eleventh Place: |
Runners-up |
There were many very good to great films in 2020 seen by me both theatrically and via streaming/Virtual Cinemas and here are the rest of my current top films: |