Ending 2020

When I first considered what I might write in the introduction to my 2020 films ranked best to worst -- the introduction you are currently reading -- I thought there were two very simple ways to go about it. 

One would be to acknowledge the year we've had, which I've already done a couple times on this blog, and which would highlight COVID and the political strife of the past year.

The other would be to talk about how this is the first time I have ever released this list on a morning other than when the Oscar nominations are announced, which is the deadline I have always set myself for completing this project. That's not happening until March this year, and I just can't wait that long.

But in the last few days I realized that something else about this list was at the risk of getting lost in the shuffle: It's the 25th one I've ever done. 

That's right, I first got the idea to rank my movies from worst to first in 1996, back when my complete list was a mere 43 titles long. A quarter of a century later, I regularly watch at least 100 more new releases than that per year. 

Times have changed, but I haven't. I still find this an incredibly personally satisfying way of taking snapshots of my current perspective on film. I doubt I will ever stop. And even if I'm no longer writing a blog when I'm a decrepit old man -- God help me, I hope I'm not, that would be sort of pathetic -- I'm sure I'll still be keeping such a list for my own private consumption.

I've been sharing this list with you on my blog for 13 years now, starting with the 2008 list less than a month after I started the blog in January of 2009. I hope you've enjoyed them, or at least enjoyed laughing at the eccentric obsessiveness of it all.

I'm going to have some controversial choices this year, especially my #1 choice, but that's probably 2020 for you in a nutshell.

So without any further ado, my top ten counted down, followed by my five worst, and then the list of all 149 films:

10. The Platform - I didn't figure that the first thematically appropriate movie I watched after the pandemic started, which was also the first of about 40 Netflix movies I reviewed for ReelGood, would endure in my top ten long enough to finish the year there. But 2020 was full of unexpected things, including this Spanish horror, which follows a similar template to other geometrically named, tight little horrors I've enjoyed over the years, particularly Cube and Circle. (Triangle is a bit more expansive in scope.) In an unforgettable metaphor for what we were already going through, when people were fighting each other for the last roll of toilet paper, Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia's film considers inmates stuck in a towering concrete prison, two per floor, who feed once a day on a banquet lowered on a platform though the shaft at the center of each floor. The lower the floor, the less remnants of food and drink there are on which to sustain yourself. You can imagine the possible permutations of that idea, and they all get explored in grisly detail. High-concept horror is my favorite when it is done this well, and the fact that it commented on our have's vs. have not's world, where we either live or die by our willingness to cooperate with each other, was just a bonus. 

9. Onward - How does Pixar do it? Onward starts out like mid-range Pixar, even meanders in the middle, before ultimately landing in the same spot emotionally as the other great tear-jerkers the studio has produced. But I might not have fully recognized the power of the story of two elf brothers in a land where magic has grown stale from disuse, trying to complete a spell that will resuscitate their father for one day, if it hadn't absolutely wrecked my older son. He'd kill me for writing this -- though I already did in this post, when he was less likely to be so embarrassed (he's growing up quickly) -- but the very end of Dan Scanlon's film left him absolutely bawling. Like, so uncontrollably, his younger brother started asking my wife all sorts of questions about what was happening to him. What was happening to him was that he was having his first real cinematic experience of the fragility and bitter sweetness of life, the very thing Pixar perfectly delivers more than half its times out. Remembering some of those slow spots in the middle, I was going to watch Onward again before finalizing this list, but missed out on an available time slot last weekend. So instead I just went with my gut, which stated that instead of being mid-tier Pixar, this was one of the best films of the year -- which still might make it mid-tier Pixar, given how good Pixar is. 

8. Time - Documentaries about people trying to get their loved ones out of prison should be a dime a dozen, right? Or so I would have felt going into Time if I hadn't heard the praise that preceded it. For starters, Rob Richardson was not wrongly accused -- he did rob that bank -- but he was wrongly sentenced, earning 60 years behind bars when his wife, who pled guilty, served only a couple. Sybil Richardson, also known as Fox Rich, is the tireless crusader here, but her story is told in a way most of us have never seen. The lion's share of this footage is collected videos of her family over the course of 20 years, as she works indefatigably on her husband's behalf, and as their infant children grow into impressive young men. That only hints at the ways things turned out differently than you might expect for a family unwittingly abandoned by its patriarch when he was sent to prison. It's a spine-tingling portrait of a family rising from the ashes into something glorious, but a family that nonetheless does not feel complete until that father joins them on the outside. There are rousing montages of Sybil as she speaks to other people in similar circumstances, and moments of great frustration as the bureaucracy spins her in circles. But Garrett Bradley's film closes with a jaw-dopping consideration of the titular concept, presented in a manner that transcends the form into something truly profound. 

7. Sound of Metal - A few days into January I wrote a post "despairing" about the number of recent new contenders for my top ten, and those still yet to come. Sure enough, I watched Sound of Metal a few days after that. I think I am unduly affected by films that attempt to simulate another person's experience of the world; it goes back to Roger Ebert's definition of film as an "empathy machine" that promotes mutual understanding. Sound of Metal takes an extremely intimate and immersive approach to that by showing us what it's like for a person going deaf, in this case, Riz Ahmed's heavy metal drummer, who first loses about 80 percent of his hearing, and then the rest of it. The sound design of Darius Marder's film ranges from the somewhat familiar portrayal of tinnitus we may have seen previously, to the "underwater" quality of the indistinct sounds of near deafness, to total deafness, to the harsh distortion of the cochlear implants that mimic sound for the brain. If any of that is a spoiler, you should know going in that Sound of Metal is not the type of film where a person miraculously recovers his hearing at the end. Life is not like that. Life is, however, like Ruben Stone's desperate attempt to maintain normalcy in an existence that is finally going as he wants it after years of addiction. He's fixed his drug problems, but there may be no fix for this, and Ruben's road to acceptance of that notion is one of the most powerful cinematic journeys of the year. 

6. Feels Good Man - How can something that feels so good feel so bad? Pepe the Frog felt good, when he peed with his pants down around his ankles (the origin of the film's title) as a stoner twentysomething character in a comic book that focused on him and his animal housemates. But most of us know Pepe as an alt-right symbol of hatred, which is how the internet transformed the character through memes, to the anger and total befuddlement of its creator. Director Arthur Jones interviews artist Matt Furie and countless others about the scary phenomenon that is this unwitting little green dude, who has since been dressed in Nazi general outfits and made to look like Donald Trump. Furie is trying to reclaim his happy beginnings, without much success, but the film has an earnest hope that Furie might succeed in the long term. The film is a jaw-dropping document about how the internet works as a social paradigm, and how it can change something innocuous into something malevolent when that thing falls into the wrong hands. Feels Good Man inspires both anger and hope, and its one of the most thoroughly researched documentaries I saw this year. Possibly exceeded only by ... 

5. Disclosure - When so many documentaries you see these days are a variation on another documentary you've seen, or just completely frivolous in nature, Sam Feder's Disclosure felt like a revelation to me. It's the absolutely exhaustive -- please don't confuse that term with "exhausting" -- collection of instances where transgender characters have been depicted on film throughout cinema history, and interviews with the people most affected by those depictions. The latter group is comprised of trans actors, both male and female, as well as writers, directors, producers and so forth. (Lilly Wachowski makes an appearance.) While the stories of what these people have dealt with, both in their regular lives and in the entertainment industry, are moving as hell, Disclosure should not be confused for some kind of strident political harangue about our ignorant past. That's not what Feder or any of these interviewees is on about. In fact, on a number of occasions, the actor in question (I'll use the gender neutral term for the profession) follows up their comments by saying "But I really liked that movie." Disclosure understands these are complicated issues, which we are only just beginning to understand in the clear light of day -- the clear light of how casually hurtful we may have been in the past, and how we can do much better going forward. With films like Disclosure, we will. 

4. Soul - Yes, you read that correctly -- that's two Pixar movies in my top ten. The last time Pixar released two movies in the same calendar year, one of them was The Good Dinosaur, which might not have even made my top 100. (Not even close, actually -- it was my #121 of 2015.) Not only did we get a wealth of Pixar in 2020, but both this and Onward were original creations, reminding us of the Pixar of old that regularly introduced us to brand new worlds each time out. The world of Soul reminds us perhaps a little too much of the other Pixar 2015 film, Inside Out, which was my #1 of that year, especially as it is also directed by Pete Docter. But when reminders are as well-made and absolutely breathtaking as Soul, we needn't quibble about similarities. I was so swept up in this story of a jazz musician fighting to return to his body so he can live out his dreams, I spent a good deal of it with chills, and I don't think that was just because we projected it on the wall of our hotel room for my son's seventh birthday. It's a chill-inducing combination of the Great Before, the environment where souls are nourished, and a lovingly created, jazz-inflected New York populated by memorable characters, scored in equal measure by Jon Batiste and my own favorite musician of all time, Trent Reznor. And yes, cue the hankies at least twice. I was so enthralled that for a moment, I thought it might be my #2 of the year. It ends up almost that high at #4. 

3. The Killing of Two Lovers - I purchased tickets to The Killing of Two Lovers at this year's virtual MIFF with a bit of a wince -- knowing I was interested from the title, but worried that something unpleasant and emotionally scarring might be about to unfold before me. Well without giving too much away, let's just say there are multiple interpretations to that title, and this film had me thinking about the good sides to humanity in this awful year of 2020, rather than the bad ones. The film is set in Utah and concerns a husband and wife (Clane Crawford and Sepideh Moafi) who are also the parents of three children, but are in the midst of a trial separation. She begins dating someone else, and he ... well, he reacts in ways that are both predictable and unpredictable. You should be worried for these two but you should not lose hope, and that's as good a 2020 message as I can think of. Director Robert Machoian films the movie in a square aspect ratio, capturing both wide landscape shots where characters are little more than a speck, and also extremely intimate shots in which their faces fill the whole frame. Life is a combination of the remote and the intimate, isn't it? Like my last year's #3 film, the 2019 MIFF film Vivarium, The Killing of Two Lovers won't reach most audiences until February, but then it is well worth you finding, and hopefully, loving. 

2. The King of Staten Island - Judd Apatow? In my top five? It's happened before. The 40-Year-Old Virgin reached not quite these heights 15 years ago, landing at #3 of 2005, and The Cable Guy, which he produced, was my #4 of 1996. Not since 2005 have I so wholeheartedly embraced one of Apatow's films, and from the evidence of Trainwreck in 2015, I wasn't sure I even liked them anymore. This movie made matters worse with its poster of a shirtless, tattoeed Pete Davidson standing on a car with his arms outstretched in the universal gesture for "Are you not entertained?" I carried all sorts of baggage in with me and yet I was entertained -- and moved, and prompted into hearty bouts of laughter, and overall, more impressed than I ever could have imagined. Apatow meanders no less than usual here, but he finds more purpose in his meandering than I've ever seen, and that is, unveiling the complexities of the life of a 24-year-old kid who has no direction and whose mother is dating a firefighter -- the very same job his father died doing. Scott Carlin just has to figure this shit out, with help from his good-natured slacker buddies, his sort-of girlfriend (the terrific Bel Powley), his mother (the equally terrific Marisa Tomei) and even his mother's new boyfriend (Bill Burr, who has also done fantastic work in The Mandalorian). It's a lovely dose of humanism that left me with an exquisite sense of its improbable perfection. 

1. I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Charlie Kaufman can now be pronounced king of my year-end rankings. This is the third film Kaufman has written that's topped my list after Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but since he directed neither of those, he keeps alive my streak of anointing 25 different directors in the 25 years I've been doing this. Given the largely negative reaction to this movie by audiences, particularly large numbers of my friends, I had to watch I'm Thinking of Ending Things again to make sure I was not just in an unusually receptive mood that night. If so, I was in that same receptive mood three months later, as I quivered with exhilaration throughout my second viewing. The critics, who have been largely supportive of the movie, have gotten it right on this one, the most Charlie Kaufman of Charlie Kaufman movies, even if the idea originated in a novel written by someone else. This is not even the place for me to try to tackle this plot, or to figure out if the movie even has a plot, but what I loved so much about this film was the kaleidoscope of possible interpretations I mentioned in my review, each of which has enough evidence to support a full journey down that particular rabbit hole. It's like the mother! of 2020. The movie was such a success with me that I've named it my favorite of the year despite scratching my head for its final five minutes, and not in the good way the rest of the movie made me scratch my head. Kaufman didn't need to stick the landing when he's sticking the rest of the movie so completely. As a final note about it, it marks my first #1 movie of all time that debuted on a streaming service, Netflix specifically -- and my first #1 I originally watched on a TV rather than a movie screen since Ruby Sparks in 2012. 

And now the five worst. These do not get pictures. Be better movies if you want pictures.

5. Dolittle - Sometimes the first movie you see in a year is the worst. Or, in this case, the fifth worst, though for a while I didn't know how I would see something less good. But then I saw the next three on this list in the space of a week, at which point, Robert Downey Jr.'s massive misfire got to go into hiding, like a frightened gorilla.

4. The Grudge - How many remakes/sequels/reboots of The Grudge have there been? I can't keep track. But I don't know how any of the previous ones could have been worse than this. It's all over the place in terms of time periods, storylines and acting styles, with the one constant of the now exceedingly boring horror iconography that hasn't probably been truly scary since the original Japanese film 20 years ago.

3. The Jesus Rolls - Oh no he doesn't. The Jesus sits there like an inert bump on a log. That this man was a bowler first and foremost in The Big Lebowski is essentially forgotten here. And unfortunately, beyond bowling, this guy ain't got much. Someone -- maybe John Turturro -- should have taken a good long look at this movie and realized how pointless it was. 

2. Fatal Affair - If the title of this movie doesn't set off warning flags for you, everything else about it will. This is what an erotic thriller would look like if it were stripped of every single hint of personality, quirkiness or character. It is Character A doing things to Character B, strung together by the most functional and expository dialogue possible. Omar Epps and Nia Long can do much, much better. 

1. Hubie Halloween - Adam Sandler said he was going to make the worst movie ever as revenge on Hollywood if the Oscars snubbed him for Uncut Gems. Which they did. Hubie Halloween had already been shot at the time he made this statement. Which only means that Adam Sandler has mastered time travel and has not yet shared this discovery with the rest of us. 

And all 149, the exact same number I watched in 2017:

1. I'm Thinking of Ending Things

2. The King of Staten Island

3. The Killing of Two Lovers

4. Soul

5. Disclosure

6. Feels Good Man

7. Sound of Metal

8. Time

9. Onward

10. The Platform

11. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga

12. My Octopus Teacher

13. True History of the Kelly Gang

14. Nocturne

15. Another Round

16. La Llorona

17. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

18. The Vast of Night

19. Bill & Ted Face the Music

20. The Forty-Year-Old Version

21. The Furnace

22. The Nest

23. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm

24. Antebellum

25. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

26. The Hater

27. The Rental

28. Palm Springs

29. Becky

30. Love in Dangerous Times

31. Emma

32. Les Miserables

33. Dick Johnson is Dead

34. Rams

35. The Assistant

36. Swallow

37. Sonic the Hedgehog

38. Blow the Man Down

39. Mank

40. Promising Young Woman

41. Tigertail

42. #Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump

43. Kajillionaire

44. Boys State

45. The Invisible Man

46. A New York Christmas Wedding

47. Just 6.5

48. Bacurau

49. The Prom

50. Marona's Fantastic Tale

51. Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics

52. Becoming

53. John Lewis: Good Trouble

54. Circus of Books

55. Da 5 Bloods

56. Selah and the Spades

57. Shiva Baby

58. The War With Grandpa

59. Black Bear

60. Uncle Frank

61. Evil Eye

62. Irresistible

63. The Old Guard

64. Yes, God, Yes

65. Horse Girl

66. Uncorked

67. Spenser Confidential

68. Possessor

69. The Trip to Greece

70. Tesla

71. Black Box

72. Cuties

73. Enola Holmes

74. Roald Dahl's The Witches

75. Arkansas

76. Sputnik

77. Valley Girl

78. Hearts and Bones

79. The Personal History of David Copperfield

80. Prayer for a Lost Mitten

81. Tenet

82. Nomadland

83. Ema

84. First Cow

85. 23 Walks

86. Miss Juneteenth

87. Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)

88. The Midnight Sky

89. Desperados

90. Totally Under Control

91. Downhill

92. Color Out of Space

93. Wonder Woman 1984

94. Rebecca

95. She Dies Tomorrow

96. Saint Frances

97. Love Wedding Repeat

98. Shirley

99. The Trial of the Chicago 7

100. Project Power

101. Mulan

102. Wolfwalkers

103. The Social Dilemma

104. Hillbilly Elegy

105. The Truth

106. Burden

107. A Fall From Grace

108. Dreambuilders

109. The Burnt Orange Heresy

110. Greyhound

111. Kala Azar

112. Spree

113. Gretel & Hansel

114. Fantasy Island

115. The Secrets We Keep

116. Dogs Don't Wear Pants

117. Resistance

118. Crip Camp

119. The Willoughbys

120. All Day and a Night

121. Trolls World Tour

122. Extraction

123. Buffaloed

124. The Last Days of American Crime

125. My Summer as a Goth

126. All Together Now

127. The Trouble With Being Born

128. On the Rocks

129. Superintelligence

130. Wendy

131. The Lie

132. The Lovebirds

133. Wasp Network

134. Relic

135. A Christmas Gift from Bob

136. The Kissing Booth 2

137. Capone

138. Endings, Beginnings

139. How to Build a Girl

140. Coffee & Kareem

141. Impractical Jokers: The Movie

142. The Devil All the Time

143. Fatman

144. The Wrong Missy

145. Dolittle

146. The Grudge

147. The Jesus Rolls

148. Fatal Affair

149. Hubie Halloween

Five movies I chose not to see

In a weird year like this, the weirdest thing is that I had access to pretty much every film I might have wanted to see. There was nothing getting released at the end of the year in the U.S. in time for awards consideration that wasn't coming out in Australia until February or March. So here are five films that I chose not to see, for one reason or another (including not choosing to pay for the streaming service that carried them), which is why you don't see them in the list above:

1. Small Axe (Lovers Rock, Mangrove, Red White & Blue, Alex Wheedle, Education) - As you recall from this post, I determined that a category error for Steve McQueen's five "films" shot for the BBC prevented me from watching them in time to include them for this list, either individually or collectively. I'll worry about whether I consider them TV or movies when I watch them a few weeks from now. (The fact that Lovers Rock was the #1 film for all four of the year-end roundtable podcasters on Filmspotting -- with the technicality that one of them chose to honor all five films together in that slot -- makes me understand that I have missed out on something truly special.)

2. American Utopia - I was originally blocked from watching Spike Lee's filmed version of a David Byrne concert by the fact that it was available on HBOMax, a streaming service I do not have. However, it did play theatrically in Australia, including in the small town of Castlemaine, where I spent part of my last week before this list closed. I decided just to skip it despite its massive critical acclaim, in part because concert movies also bring up a little category ambiguity for me (but far less than Small Axe). 

3. Never Rarely Sometimes Always - Again from a rant in one of my posts (this post), you will recall that the slippery availability of this movie as a rental ultimately annoyed me too much to go out of my way to watch it. (I can't be forced into buying a movie to watch it.) This makes the third of three movies mentioned so far that factored into the top ten of the Filmspotting roundtable. But that's often the case with this roundtable, just for other reasons (like a few years ago when I couldn't watch If Beale Street Could Talk, a #1 film for one of the roundtable, because it didn't release in Australia in time, but it ultimately became my #16 film of the decade). 

4. Let Them All Talk - The only HBOMax-only movie I sort of regretted missing, as another critic I respect had it in her top ten. (I can live without An American Pickle.) I usually try to see everything Steven Soderbergh releases in time to rank it; in fact, not since 2006 have I missed ranking one of his features (The Good German) in the year of its release. (I did miss, and still have not seen, two "category error" movies of his, Behind the Candelabra and the Che movies, the latter of which are legitimate theatrical movies I suppose, but their double release in the same year gave me fits that I apparently have never recovered from.)

5. Vitalina Varela - This is just one of a handful of acclaimed films that I only started really hearing about at top ten time of the year, and you just can't see them all. I had one time slot left last night after returning from a couple nearly week-long trips out of town, in which I knew I was going to watch something I rented on iTunes to finish off this year's list, and I ended up going with Bacurau. That meant that some others like Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets and Beanpole also got left out in the cold.

And finally, five films that I thought required further explanation at the spot where they landed:

24. Antebellum - The average of my initial surprised enthrallment over the movie, the fact that I entirely stopped thinking about it a few days later, and my understanding that some people really loathe it.

40. Promising Young Woman - Shouldn't have seen such a challenging movie so close to the end. Could go either up or way down the longer I think about it.

81. Tenet - Spectacle without purpose can be pretty empty. 

99. The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Yes, it is possible for Aaron Sorkin to completely wear out his welcome.

128. On the Rocks - Sofia Coppola's latest has been given a pass by a lot of people. It does not deserve one. 

That brings us to the end. But it is just the beginning! Please comment and tell me what I got right, what I got wrong, and the 72% of these titles you have never heard of because you were spending your quarantine learning to bake or writing the great American novel.