Honorable Mentions:
- “The Vast of Night” — Andrew Patterson
- “Greyhound” — Aaron Schneider
- “Onward” — Dan Scanlon
- “Tenet” — Christopher Nolan
- “Save Yourselves” — Alex Huston Fischer, Eleanor Wilson
- “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm” — Jason Woliner
- “Alone” — John Hyams
- “Host” — Rob Savage
Bonus Slide: “Hamilton”
Don’t let anyone tell you differently: The streaming event of the year was the Disney+ premiere of the smash Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
Sadly, it’s also the hardest production to categorize for year-end best lists. Was it a documentary? A TV special? A stand-alone film? It’s a little bit of all three, so it belongs on its own special bonus slide.
10. “The Invisible Man”
Director: Leigh Whannell
One of my biggest gripes is seeing year-end best lists that include only Oscar bait from late December that most folks haven’t seen yet. Instead, let’s kick off my Top 10 by reaching all the way back to February for a horror remake that actually rivaled the original.
Written and directed by “Saw” creator Leigh Whannell, “The Invisible Man” featured a powerful performance by Elisabeth Moss, who believes her abusive boyfriend is stalking her as an invisible man. Is she just going crazy? Or is something supernatural actually at play? Boasting #MeToo themes and juicy plot twists, it was one of the few actual blockbusters that we had this year.
9. “Palm Springs”
Director: Max Barbakow
Imagine a screenwriter entering a room to pitch “Groundhog Day” meets “Wedding Crashers.” That’s the basic premise of “Palm Springs,” which wowed the Sundance Film Festival before streaming on Hulu.
Set in Palm Springs, California, this rom-com fantasy follows a carefree wedding guest (Andy Samberg) and a reluctant maid of honor (Cristin Milioti), who meet at her sister’s wedding. Thanks to a magical force in the desert, they can’t escape the venue and are forced to relive the chaotic wedding day over and over again.
Equally heartwarming and hilarious, it’s an inventive take on a gimmick that you thought was played out.
8. “Bad Education”
Director: Cory Finley
Produced by HBO Films, “Bad Education” should be competing for the Oscars this year instead submitting for the Emmys in the “TV Movie” category. Quarantine has shown us that such labels are outdated, as “Bad Education” isn’t episodic content but rather a stand-alone film that should compete against other streamers.
Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney are in top form as Long Island Superintendent Frank Tassone and Assistant Superintendent Pamela Gluckin, who carried out the largest public school embezzlement scandal in American history from 1992 to 2004. In a year where Hollywood stars went to prison for the college admissions scandal, “Bad Education” is as much a zeitgeist flick as any movie made this year.
7. “Mank”
Director: David Fincher
Is there a film whose merits have been argued about more this award season than “Mank?” David Fincher’s nostalgic biopic to “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) is not for casual moviegoers, but rather a black-and-white love note to cinephiles who appreciate the significance of Orson Welles’ masterpiece — not only to cinema history, but for its commentary on egomaniacal media moguls.
“Mank” is not really a “making of” film at all; it’s a collection of puzzle pieces in the life of a man on the ground floor of a booming industry who sabotaged his own career with booze and shame for his creative vocation.
6. “Da 5 Bloods”
Director: Spike Lee
Tied for the No. 6 slot are a pair of movies featuring the final roles of the late Chadwick Boseman.
First is Spike Lee’s war joint “Da 5 Bloods,” the much anticipated follow-up to his long overdue Academy Award win for “BlacKkKlansman” (2018). The June release starred Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis as Vietnam vets searching for the remains of their fallen officer, played in flashbacks by Boseman.
Little did we know that he would pass away just months later, making his role eerily prescient as he returns from the dead in rays of angelic light to say, “I forgive you. God is love. Love is God. I died for you, blood.”
6. “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”
Director: George C. Wolfe
Also tied for our No. 6 slot is Chadwick Boseman’s posthumous Netflix release, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”
Based on the second of 10 plays in August Wilson’s renowned Century Cycle, the story is set on a hot day in 1920s Chicago, where the “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey records her newest album.
Viola Davis is a tour de force as the impossible diva demanding Coca Cola, while showing empathy toward her stuttering nephew. Still, it’s Boseman who steals the show as brash trumpeter Levee, who carries a chip on his emaciated shoulders. It’s hard to watch this beloved man dying before our eyes, lending a transcendent power to monologues challenging God as if shouting, “Why me?” on death’s door.
Just as Troy’s baseball dreams were stolen in “Fences” (2018), Levee’s hopes are dashed here, but Boseman’s greatness is forever frozen in time on screen in a final performance that deserves to win a posthumous Oscar.
5. “The Trial of the Chicago 7”
Director: Aaron Sorkin
In perhaps Netflix’s best shot at winning Best Picture, writer/director Aaron Sorkin combines his mastery of politics (“The West Wing”) and courtroom drama (“A Few Good Men”) to tell the true story of seven men arrested during an uprising outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The deep cast boasts Frank Langella as the iron-fist judge, Mark Rylance as the gutsy defense attorney and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead prosecutor, but the real standouts are Eddie Redmayne as academic Tom Hayden and Sacha Baron Cohen as activist Abbie Hoffman, who dropped f-bombs in an American-flag shirt in “Forrest Gump” (1994).
Their clash of ideals explodes as Redmayne confronts Cohen: “My problem is that, for the next 50 years, when people think of progressive politics, they’re gonna think of you and your idiot followers passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon. They’re not gonna think of equality or justice, they’re not gonna think of education or poverty or progress, they’re gonna think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers, so we’ll lose elections.”
Cohen gets the last laugh as he takes the stand for Gordon-Levitt to ask, “Do you have contempt for your government?” Cohen bravely replies, “I think the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things that are right now populated by some terrible people.”
4. “Sound of Metal”
Director: Darius Marder
“Sound of Metal” was my favorite film that I streamed at the virtual Middleburg Film Festival. The film follows a heavy metal drummer and his lead singer girlfriend, who drive from town to town in their mobile home to perform. However, when he begins losing his hearing, they must decide their future as a band and as a couple.
Riz Ahmed brilliantly express emotion with his face, Olivia Cooke is believably torn as his girlfriend, and Paul Raci is Oscar-worthy as the wise operator of a remote home for deaf folks, teaching sign language through tough love and total immersion.
The filmmaker similarly immerses the audience with his masterful use of sound design from ringing ears to distorted voices. The final shot is perfection, reminding us to block out the noise and enjoy the silence, knowing that true peace is the ability to sit with one’s self.
3. “One Night in Miami”
Director: Regina King
It doesn’t arrive until Christmas Day, but “One Night in Miami” has all the makings of a strong Best Picture contender. While it takes place almost entirely inside the confines of a Miami hotel room, Kemp Powers’ screenplay is surprisingly engaging as it imagines the conversation between Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) in their real-life meeting in 1964.
As the four very different men discuss the civil rights movement, their personalities shine and clash as they rib each other, question themselves and break down the heated state of race relations in America from various perspectives.
Regina King is on fire after an Oscar for “If Beale Street Could Talk” (2018) and an Emmy for “Watchmen” (2020), so it should be no surprise that her directorial debut is dynamite, symbolically foreshadowing characters’ deaths by filming them behind wooden bars. King cuts to black as Malcolm X closes his eyes to hear Cooke sing “A Change is Gonna Come” on national television as his first public political statement in his music. The song swells with the same smooth voice that Odom brought to “Hamilton,” proving once again in this intimate Miami hotel, it’s thrilling to be in the room where it happened.
2. “Nomadland”
Director: Chloe Zhao
In 2017, Chloé Zhao showed indie promise with her poetic rodeo film “The Rider.” Now, she returns to the modern American West in “Nomadland,” winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival — the only film ever to win both.
The film follows Fern, a widow who becomes a van-dwelling nomad after losing her husband, her job and her identity when her Nevada factory closed during the 2008 Great Recession. Frances McDormand is the closest thing I’ve seen to Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas” (1984) and will compete for her third Oscar after “Fargo” (1996) and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017).
As for Zhao, she deserves Best Director for painting the plight of so many Americans displaced by technology and globalization, capturing the zeitgeist of Fern working an assembly line at Amazon and stocking shelves at Walmart. It all builds to a trio of silent scenes at an empty Thanksgiving table, an abandoned factory office and a foreclosed home, giving viewers credit to decipher Fern’s thoughts: letting go of her grief.
1. “First Cow”
Director: Kelly Reichardt
It’s no coincidence that my top three movies are helmed by female filmmakers whose patient insights offer wise lessons in humanity. Kelly Reichardt’s “First Cow” competed for the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival and was one of the last films released theatrically in March before the pandemic. The rest of us got to stream it after its release on-demand in July, discovering a poetic work of art.
Reichardt’s pacing is blissfully patient as her camera holds for painterly compositions where the natural world exists before and after the humans enter the frame. She opens with the framing device of present day, where a hiker discovers the skeletons of two men side by side in the wilderness, then she proceeds to show us how they got there in 1820s Oregon. It’s a tale of frontier friendship between a fur-trapping chef (John Magaro) and a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee), who plot to steal milk from the region’s first cow to make delicious baked goods sold at a high price in early capitalism.
Will the cow’s owner discover their scheme once he tastes the food? Their fate is sealed from the very beginning, but the men’s bond endures throughout eternity. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a good Western, but it’s a simple story beautifully told. I surprise even myself that it was my favorite of the year.
WTOP's Jason Fraley salutes the year's best movies (Part 2)
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