If someone had told me a year ago that I would never set foot in a movie theater or showroom in 2020 after the first week of March (the impressive The outpost and bad The hunt were the last movies I saw on big screens) but that I would stay healthy and somehow watch new movies, I could not guess what they were talking about. I also could not have imagined that I would experience the Sundance Film Festival in 2021 alone on my home screen without parks or ski boots at the front door. Maybe I’ll dress up a bit for fun while watching some Sundance titles at home next month.
But this is where we are at present, with no sure return in sight. Nevertheless, we experienced a downpour of films, produced by diverse sources and delivered to the public in unprecedented unconventional ways. The break could be the end of the film going as we have always known it, as many theaters will never reopen and traditional studios disintegrate into unrecognizable shells of their former selves.
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The 21 most influential films of the 21st century, so far
One thing that has been confirmed this past year and the recent election of the best films by various critical fraternities is that the ever-slight distinction between film / television, major / Indian and American / foreign productions has been significantly reduced; at this point, a movie is more than ever a movie.
What can be lost with this development – certain distinctive traditions, styles, flavors and approaches to narratives in different film cultures – is compensated by a free, all-going approach that ignores traditional national and stylistic boundaries and embraces new etiquette challenges. approaches. It’s a wonderful thing that a Chinese-born woman made some of the most informative films about America’s displaced people and that a young Korean immigrant could grow up into a very accessible drama about just such a child’s difficult education in a remote Arkansas. farm. I sincerely hope that movie theaters can make a comeback, but how we define what we watch – and under what circumstances we consume it all – is undergoing a significant change, shows the Los Angeles Film Critics Association’s recent praise of Steve McQueen’s multiple Share. Small ax British television anthology, consisting of five completely different narratives of different lengths, as the best ‘film’.
With the world in simultaneous states of disturbing turmoil and painful stasis, my choice is for the best films of the lost year of 2020.
1. Nomadland
After Songs my brothers taught me and The rider, Chloe Zhao completes a trilogy of features about the modern American West and its traveling inhabitants with this hauntingly resonant, women-centered road movie featuring a right-in-right-in Frances McDormand. And Zhao has already finished her next movie, Marvel’s Eternal.
2. The Father
Anthony Hopkins plays a tremendous career with his astonishing turn as an old father with Alzheimer’s in Florian Zeller’s highly nuanced adaptation of his own play. The art direction is subtle and expressive, just like the performances.
3. promising young woman
Another highlight of Sundance 2020 is this eye-catching revenge story that goes all the way and then a few, with Carey Mulligan trying her best to convey Emerald Fenell’s daring audacious first feature.
4. Dick Johnson is dead
In yet another year of many outstanding documentaries (yes, it was at Sundance, too), Kirsten Johnson’s collaborative and often riotous funny tribute to her father with dementia is undeniably unique.
5. Small ax: mangrove
Steve McQueen showed something distinctive and penetrating with his quintet of films about the problems that West Indian immigrants experienced in London in the early 1970s. Each is distinctive in its own right, but Mangrove, aware of the function and achieved through a historical trial, is probably the most powerful and fully realized of the group.
6. The depth in
Sundance also provided the starting point for Emma Sullivan’s simultaneous haunting and gruesome documentary about the murder of a female Swedish journalist by a demented Danish inventor aboard his own handmade submarine.
7. Soul
Pixar once again proves itself to be the gift that just keeps on giving with this daring deviation from the company’s norm. Pete Docter’s distinctive style is composed here by the jazz-accented score in a story that resides in numerous kingdoms, one more pleasant than the previous.
8. The King of Staten Island
Staten Island is the only city in New York where I’ve never been, simply because no one ever said it was even worth watching, but Judd Apatow and Pete Davidson’s film definitely deserves a trip because it brings a completely uncooled community to life with humor and insight.
9. The outpost
Rod Lurie sometimes flirted with real quality during his eclectic career, but eventually he put it all together in this film, a close, concentrated, relentlessly intense rendition of a horrific Alamo-like siege on a Marines outpost during the war in Afghanistan.
10. Devil between the legs
This potential career maker by veteran Mexican director Arturo Ripstein will probably never be released in the United States (I saw it in Toronto 2019), so it would seem that now salutes this bizarre, claustrophobic, amazing director. Last Tango– like a study of sexual obsession of a divorced couple in their 70s. To be sure, there has never been such a thing, although it is difficult to identify the target audience except residents of aged geriatric wards. Call Henry Miller …
Runners-up, 11-20
Minari (Lee Isaac Chung), First cow (Kelley Reichardt), The dissident (Bryan Fogel), Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman), Martin Eden (Piertro Marcello), I’m thinking of ending things (Charlie Kaufman), The painted bird (Vaclav Malhoul), Beanstock (Kantemir Balagov), On the rocks (Sofia Coppola), Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe).
Most too much film
Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho), violent common nonsense