I took forever to get around to this post, because 2020 is the one year that I DO NOT want to spend time recollecting, and COVID wasn't the half of it. It was a year full of upheavals and loss, personal and professional. I started the year with one parent in nursing home hospice care and the other at home with round-the-clock caregivers, sinking further and further into dementia on an almost daily basis. By mid-June, I had lost them both. Less than 36 hours after my father's funeral, I started a completely new position at the company where I worked - without having been able to attend the previous two weeks of training and orientation while I'd been keeping vigil at Dad's bedside. At the end of the year, I retired - happily, but this came with a whole new level of adjusting and adapting.
I think this list reflects my fractured state of mind, and that's why I continue to call it "NOT the best films of the year." Because they may not be - they're just my favorites and you can draw your own conclusions.
I watched 240 movies last year; just over a third of them were 2020 releases. At some point, fatigue set in and I lost my usual year-end fervor to catch up on major new releases. I have yet to see any of the following generally acclaimed 2020 films (and feel no urgency to watch them anytime soon): Collective, Dick Johnson is Dead, Babyteeth, Time, Vitalina Verela, Soul, Da 5 Bloods, Corpus Christi, The Vast of Night or any of the Small Axe films.
Then there were the acclaimed films that I actually did see, but didn't particularly care for. Unlike other 'best of 2020' lists you'll find all over the internet, mine does not contain Mank, Shirley, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Martin Eden or Bacarau. Maybe if I'd watched them in some other year, I might have appreciated them more. But in 2020, I couldn't get my mind around why they were supposed to be so great.
So... this list is, as ever, highly personal and occasionally idiosyncratic. I'd rather refer you to offbeat or overlooked films that I found interesting, than crank out a predictable list that passes muster with every other film blogger on the internet. If you watch one or more of my selections and find you like them, then I have achieved my goal - and I have included "where to stream' information to make that easier for you.
A final caveat: to be eligible for this list, the film must have been released in the Chicago area for the first time between January 1, 2020 and December 31, 2020, inclusive. This means that some 2019 films (most notably Portrait of a Lady on Fire) were considered for the 2020 list, while many 2020 films (among them Promising Young Woman, Minari, News of the World, Nomadland, Pieces of a Woman, Undine and Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time) will be considered for the 2021. And I know it's still only January, but I can just about guarantee that at least of couple of those will make next year's list.
Here, finally, are my 13 favorite films of 2020, in reverse order of preference:
12. (TIED) Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy (dir. John O'Rourke)
The Ghost of Peter Sellers (dir. Peter Medak)
The quirk factor in Miranda July's film work tends to be uncomfortably high; her celebrated 2005 feature debut, Me You and Everyone We Know, felt like it was written by high school sophomore with very little life experience but lots of eccentric imagination. There's a pretty high level of quirkiness here, too, but it's nicely balanced by Evan Rachel Wood's performance - one which I would not hesitate to call miraculous. She plays the daughter of two small-time grifters (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) who have dropped out of society and rejected the life of 'false fakey people' to eke out a meager living with low-paying scams and mail theft. Wood inadvertently gets a glimpse of what normal families and parental affection look like and comes to realize what her parents' choices have cost her. Her performance is strange and off-putting at first - she affects an unnaturally husky voice that sounds oddly like Mira Sorvino's in the Romy and Michelle movie. But her performance has a touching feral quality, and her awkward but deliberate grasping towards normalcy is at once heartbreaking and exhilarating to watch. Jenkins and Winger are no slouches, of course, but this is Wood's film to steal.
If, like me, you are old enough to have read National Lampoon in its heyday or watched the very first season of SNL, this documentary profile of John Belushi will be like a trip down memory lane with old friends. It's loaded with classic sketches from SNL and the Lampoon stage shows, Blues Brothers performances and film clips, plus remembrances from Belushi's friends and co-stars. And to re-experience those belly laughs again is a joy, indeed.
Our first cue that Jude Law's character isn't getting enough challenge or satisfaction in his career is his ridiculously over-the-top gloating after beating his young son in a backyard soccer game. That comes early on and The Nest continues to deliver odd, gut-punch cues to his toxic ambition and the toll it takes on his wife and children. Law takes a potentially high-earning position with a London brokerage firm and uproots his American family, moving them to a once-grand, now empty and creepy manor house he can ill afford. Things fall apart from there. The Nest has the unsettling vibe of a good horror film. Which, in a sense, it actually is - if you can consider rampant greed and materialism to be a kind of menacing monster. (Not a stretch for me, I'll admit). Carrie Coon is especially good as Law's down-to-earth wife, although with her blond locks and occasionally icy gaze, I more than once forgot I wasn't watching Cate Blanchett. The resemblance is eerie.
Just the latest testament to the first-rate "bad ass-ery" of Elizabeth Moss. (I think I just invented a word!) The film opens, thrillingly, with her escape from her controlling, abusive tech billionaire husband. Every time you think Moss has finally escaped his grasp, he shows up to sabotage her plans. Or rather, doesn't show up, as this tech genius has found a way to make himself invisible and uses that power to wreak all kinds of havoc. There are moments here which could easily have devolved into unintentional comedy, but Moss is so fully committed in every harrowing moment that they tend to work like gangbusters.
If you've forgotten how good an actor Hugh Jackman is, Bad Education is a highly entertaining reminder. Like other films before (To Die For and The Laundromat spring to mind), it filters a true crime story through a darkly comedic lens. Jackman and the always wonderful Allison Janney play administrators at an elite Long Island high school who may be funneling school funds into their own personal bank accounts. Jackman's performance evolves like a set of nesting dolls, with ever stranger levels of subterfuge and twisted good intentions revealing themselves, and he is mesmerizing in every minute of it. The direction and writing are first-rate, with a sharp cast that also includes Ray Romano and a fine young actress, Geraldine Viswanathan, as the student reporter who stumbles onto the evidence.
Riz Ahmed plays a rock drummer who realizes he is going deaf and who comes to terms with that loss in unexpected, unpredictable fits and starts. Ahmed's performance is unspectacular but all the more affecting for that. The sound design is particularly well-conceived, allowing the viewer to experience what Ahmed's character does as his hearing deteriorates - or is ineffectively improved with cochlear implants. I like that the film doesn't tell you what to feel or think about Ahmed's situation, but lets you take the emotional journey along with him. It's a small, unprepossessing film that winds up being immensely rewarding.
This is a drama about about a small-town teenage girl's grueling trip to New York City for an abortion. It is not polemical, it does not take sides. It is observational and restrained, but even so, it demolishes the notion that young women become sexually active because abortions are convenient.
No one ever says the name "Harvey Weinstein" in The Assistant, but he's an almost ghostly presence in the story, lingering around the edges, informing the drama. We never see the film executive for whom Julia Garner plays the long-suffering assistant, but we see her cleaning up after one of his trysts, returning lost earrings to the women he trifles with, lying to his wife about his whereabouts. Turns out what we don't actually see is creepier and more disturbing than if we'd witnessed it all.
This movie is many things - a love story, a feminist fable, a story about painters and their subjects and the fraught relationship between them. It has the grand sweep of an epic period piece, yet feels entirely contemporary. If it's the most ambitious film of the year, it's also the film that most perfectly achieves its lofty ambitions.
These are my most personal choices on this list. My late father worshipped Peter Sellers to the point where it sometimes felt like Sellers was a member of our extended family. Every new Sellers film was a celebrated event, with a trip to the movie theater immediately preceded by a family dinner out, usually an all-you-could-eat Friday night fish fry. It was a tradition we kept up fairly consistently from about the time of Casino Royale till his dreadful final film, The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu.
One of my life's greatest regrets is that I showed my father the 2005 HBO biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, in which Geoffrey Rush portrayed the late, great comic actor as a relentlessly mean, narcissistic son of a bitch. I still feel sad when I recall Dad's crestfallen expression at the film's end. It was worse than if I'd told a five-year-old that there was no Santa Claus. I'd effectively dethroned his most adored idol.
I kind of wish Dad had lived to see one or both of these documentaries. Neither shies away from Seller's dark and difficult sides, but, taken together, they're significantly more generous and nuanced in their assessment of him.
A State of Comic Ecstasy is a distinctly British take on Sellers: a BBC documentary in which Dr. Strangelove is the only of Sellers' American films to be discussed in any meaningful way. (His entire body of work with director Blake Edwards is summed up by a three-second clip from The Pink Panther and a cursory voice-over comment; Being There is crammed into the last 30 seconds as an obvious afterthought.) But copious clips from Sellers' vast collection of home movies - plus interviews with his wives, children, co-stars and personal secretaries - yield a portrait of a gifted but painfully insecure man with a few addiction issues, a sometimes tenuous grip on reality, and an inability to cope with the demands (both external and self-generated) of his own genius.
The Ghost of Peter Sellers, by contrast, specifically focuses on Sellers' inadvertent sabotage of the never-released pirate comedy Ghost in the Noonday Sun. Driven by his intolerance of mediocrity (and often aided and abetted by his good friend and frequent collaborator, Spike Milligan), Sellers turned the shoot into a nightmare for director Peter Medak - who never fully recovered, professionally or emotionally. This film is Medak's attempt to come to grips with the experience. You feel his pain and frustration in every frame, but you'll also see that Medak was ill equipped to shape the nearly incoherent script into a decently funny film, let alone handle the fragile ego of his star. (The many clips shown from Ghost... are, without exception, god-awful.) Blessedly it all ends on a note of forgiveness and acceptance, with Medak unreservedly acknowledging Sellers' brilliance.
(Peter Sellers: A State of Comic Ecstasy is available to watch in its entirety on You Tube. The Ghost of Peter Sellers is available to stream on Amazon Prime or the Criterion Channel with a subscription - or can be rented on ITunes or Vudu.)
11. Waiting for the Barbarians (dir. Ciro Guerra)
This harrowing adaptation of J. M. Coetzee's novel is not without its flaws, but Mark Rylance is so damn good in it that you overlook the occasional missteps. Rylance plays the magistrate in an unidentified colonial outpost of a similarly unnamed empire. He fancies himself a fair and kind magistrate, but his infatuation with a native woman and his attempts to help her heal after a brutal attack soon bring to light his own complicity in the sins of his countrymen. Rylance is such a thoughtful and nuanced actor; the slightest flickers of emotion on his face are endlessly fascinating to watch. Johnny Depp makes a couple of brief appearances as a sadistic colonel who orders brutal tortures of locals on the flimsiest of charges (leading to several scenes that are very difficult to watch) and Robert Pattinson has a cameo role late in the film. But it's Rylance's show all the way, and it's a provocative examination of his character's naivete and delusions about his own good intentions. The final scene is heart-stopping.
(Waiting for the Barbarians is available to stream on Amazon Prime or Hulu with a subscription, or to rent on ITunes or Vudu.)
10. Kajillionaire (dir. Miranda July)
The quirk factor in Miranda July's film work tends to be uncomfortably high; her celebrated 2005 feature debut, Me You and Everyone We Know, felt like it was written by high school sophomore with very little life experience but lots of eccentric imagination. There's a pretty high level of quirkiness here, too, but it's nicely balanced by Evan Rachel Wood's performance - one which I would not hesitate to call miraculous. She plays the daughter of two small-time grifters (Richard Jenkins and Debra Winger) who have dropped out of society and rejected the life of 'false fakey people' to eke out a meager living with low-paying scams and mail theft. Wood inadvertently gets a glimpse of what normal families and parental affection look like and comes to realize what her parents' choices have cost her. Her performance is strange and off-putting at first - she affects an unnaturally husky voice that sounds oddly like Mira Sorvino's in the Romy and Michelle movie. But her performance has a touching feral quality, and her awkward but deliberate grasping towards normalcy is at once heartbreaking and exhilarating to watch. Jenkins and Winger are no slouches, of course, but this is Wood's film to steal.
(Kajillionaire is available to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play and Vudu.)
9. Belushi (dir. R. J. Cutler)
But of course, there's more to it than nostalgia. Director R. J. Cutler worked closely with Belushi's widow, Judith Belushi Pisano, to get at the demons and self-destructive excess that led to Belushi's tragic death from a drug overdose at 33. The clues to the actor's inner torment are found in his letters to Judith, a number of which are read here (by Bill Hader) as voice-overs to home movie footage or imaginatively animated sequences. For all his apparent brash confidence as a comic performer, Belushi was fraught with insecurity and self-doubt, forever struggling to be good when all he wanted to do was party away his fears. None of this is particularly shocking - it's difficult to name any truly great comic actor who wasn't a bit mentally unbalanced (see the Peter Sellers references above, just for starters.) But this film is equally a great reminder of just how damn funny the man was in his prime.
(Belushi is currently available to stream only on Showtime platforms or Direct TV, with a subscription)
8. The Nest (dir. Sean Durkin)
Our first cue that Jude Law's character isn't getting enough challenge or satisfaction in his career is his ridiculously over-the-top gloating after beating his young son in a backyard soccer game. That comes early on and The Nest continues to deliver odd, gut-punch cues to his toxic ambition and the toll it takes on his wife and children. Law takes a potentially high-earning position with a London brokerage firm and uproots his American family, moving them to a once-grand, now empty and creepy manor house he can ill afford. Things fall apart from there. The Nest has the unsettling vibe of a good horror film. Which, in a sense, it actually is - if you can consider rampant greed and materialism to be a kind of menacing monster. (Not a stretch for me, I'll admit). Carrie Coon is especially good as Law's down-to-earth wife, although with her blond locks and occasionally icy gaze, I more than once forgot I wasn't watching Cate Blanchett. The resemblance is eerie.
(The Nest is available to rent on Amazon, Vudu or Google Play.)
7. The Invisible Man
Just the latest testament to the first-rate "bad ass-ery" of Elizabeth Moss. (I think I just invented a word!) The film opens, thrillingly, with her escape from her controlling, abusive tech billionaire husband. Every time you think Moss has finally escaped his grasp, he shows up to sabotage her plans. Or rather, doesn't show up, as this tech genius has found a way to make himself invisible and uses that power to wreak all kinds of havoc. There are moments here which could easily have devolved into unintentional comedy, but Moss is so fully committed in every harrowing moment that they tend to work like gangbusters.
(The Invisible Man is currently only available on HBO platforms, with a subscription)
6. Bad Education (dir. Cory Finley)
(Bad Education is available to stream on all HBO platforms, with a subscription - or to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)
5. Sound of Metal (dir. Darius Marder)
Riz Ahmed plays a rock drummer who realizes he is going deaf and who comes to terms with that loss in unexpected, unpredictable fits and starts. Ahmed's performance is unspectacular but all the more affecting for that. The sound design is particularly well-conceived, allowing the viewer to experience what Ahmed's character does as his hearing deteriorates - or is ineffectively improved with cochlear implants. I like that the film doesn't tell you what to feel or think about Ahmed's situation, but lets you take the emotional journey along with him. It's a small, unprepossessing film that winds up being immensely rewarding.
(Sound of Metal is currently available to stream only on Amazon Prime with a subscription.)
4. First Cow (dir. Kelly Reichardt)
Now and then, I like a film that takes its time to build a sense of atmosphere and place rather than just jumping into a narrative. First Cow is a slow starter in the best tradition, immersing itself at the outset in an introduction to the natural landscape in which its story unfolds. It gives us ample time to acquaint ourselves with Otis "Cookie" Figowitz (John Magaro), the cook traveling with a fur trapping expedition, and his developing friendship with a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lu). The 'first cow' of the title refers to, literally, the first milk cow to be brought to the Oregon territory; that bovine character plays a critical role in the development of Cookie's burgeoning home-baked biscuit business. And that's all I'm giving you - it's best to go into this film fresh, open minded, and willing to go along with where it takes you.
(First Cow is available to stream on Showtime platforms or Direct TV with a subscription, or to rent on Amazon, ITunes or Google Play.)
3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (dir. Eliza Hittman)
This is a drama about about a small-town teenage girl's grueling trip to New York City for an abortion. It is not polemical, it does not take sides. It is observational and restrained, but even so, it demolishes the notion that young women become sexually active because abortions are convenient.
Sidney Flanigan, who plays the pregnant teen, keeps her emotional cards close to her chest, only occasionally letting us see the cracks in her stoic façade. It's strongly suggested that she was bullied or coerced into sex by an abusive sometime boyfriend, but Flanigan guards even this information with care. It's an amazingly skillful and nuanced performance from such a young actress - restrained but transparent at the same time.
Eliza Hittman directs the film like a detached procedural, but that only heightens the tension and urgency. The legal and bureaucratic hurdles depicted here are exhausting and unnerving to witness. Even at the end, you never really let out a breath of relief. To embrace this film is not a matter of being pro-choice or pro-life - it's more specific than that. It asks us to consider one young woman's heartbreaking situation and allows us to draw our own conclusions.
(Never Rarely Sometimes Always is available to stream on HBO platforms with a subscription or to rent on Amazon, ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)
2. The Assistant
No one ever says the name "Harvey Weinstein" in The Assistant, but he's an almost ghostly presence in the story, lingering around the edges, informing the drama. We never see the film executive for whom Julia Garner plays the long-suffering assistant, but we see her cleaning up after one of his trysts, returning lost earrings to the women he trifles with, lying to his wife about his whereabouts. Turns out what we don't actually see is creepier and more disturbing than if we'd witnessed it all.
The Assistant relies heavily on mood and atmosphere and requires an attention to tossed-off details. It seems to mainly take place in shadows and half-darkness. Garner's work day begins before dawn as she arrives at the office well ahead of everyone else to stock up the water bottles in the fridge, start the coffee and distribute the faxes. By the time she leaves, it's hours past sunset. The tension and compromises of her work are everywhere apparent in her tense posture and tightly concealed reactions, and the multitude of small humiliations she suffers in a single day lend an ever-increasing weight to the story as it moves along.
Every detail of Garner's day is revelatory - from the abbreviated, half-finished meals she occasionally gets to gulp down in the breakroom to the apology emails she is forced to send her boss with wording dictated to her in detail by male co-workers. Along with the name Harvey Weinstein, the other never-heard words in this drama are "MeToo," "sexual harassment" and "discrimination" - not even in an electrifying scene between Garner and Matthew McFayden as the firm's way-too-smooth HR director.
But by the film's end, however, we know the toll these unaddressed grievances are taking on the overworked, underpaid assistant. Garner, who may be best known to audiences from the Netflix series Ozark, is brilliant in a difficult role. Whenever we finally get around to having the Oscars, I'll be outraged if she isn't on the list of Best Actress nominees.
(The Assistant is available to stream on Hulu or Kanopy with a subscription, or to rent on Amazon, Google Play and Vudu.)
1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Celine Sciamma)
This movie is many things - a love story, a feminist fable, a story about painters and their subjects and the fraught relationship between them. It has the grand sweep of an epic period piece, yet feels entirely contemporary. If it's the most ambitious film of the year, it's also the film that most perfectly achieves its lofty ambitions.
As a meditation on the process of artistic creation, it is, itself, gorgeous to look at; every shot is composed in a painterly fashion with meticulous attention to lighting and composition.
From a feminist point of view, it depicts a rare, blessed window of time when no men are present in the household of a 19th century aristocratic French family and shows women bonding and taking care of one another in ways that men cannot. You can sense the relaxation in all the female characters during this chapter.
And as a love story between two women, it is undeniably romantic, in spite of the fact that the relationship must ultimately give way to the demands of practicality and propriety.
Marianne (Noemi Merlant) is a painter who is summoned to an estate on an island in Brittany to paint a portrait of an about-to-be-married young noblewoman, Heloise (Adele Haenel). The catch: she is not to let Heloise know she is painting her. The two women take long walks together near the shore, while Marianne works on a portrait in secret in the night. They gradually develop a friendship that ultimately becomes more. I won't give away what happens from that point, but can assure you that the film's final scene ties the story up in a realistic but still emotionally satisfying way.
(Portrait of a Lady on Fire is available to stream on Hulu with a subscription or to rent on ITunes, Google Play or Vudu.)
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