Cinema Club: The Top 12 of 2020

The COVID pandemic might have driven the cinematic experience to the brink, with cineplexes shuttering (some, perhaps, for good), film festivals and tentpole releases shifting in whole or in part to streaming services, and the iconic experience of the drive-in making an unexpected return. But the movies themselves thrived this year – perhaps because we, the audience, were more ready and willing than ever to surrender to them, to see our dreams unleashed and our anxieties given cinematic form in order to be seen, cheered, jeered, and vanquished.

As in every year, there were just too many good films to list in one (reasonable sized) article; compelling family drama like "The Nest," boasting talents like Carrie Coon and Jude Law, end up overlooked, as do hallucinogenic adventures like "Wander Darkly" and Brandon Cronenberg's "Possessor" (a film that proves David Cronenberg's son has not fallen far from the proverbial tree). Meantime, movies that actually made it to the big screen – like "Tenet" – ended up being obscured by the rising tide of small-screen delights as moviegoers increasingly didn't actually have to go anywhere but their own living rooms.

And, as is the case every year, a multitude of Best Of lists will have a few films in common... but many more that they do not, with each compendium reflecting the tastes, biases, and moods of whoever compiled it. (Not to mention the sheer opportunity: I am hardly alone in never being able to see everything, let alone everything I should have or wanted to see.)

1. "Mank"

Screenwriter Jack Fincher may not have steeled the debate of who rightfully gets more credit for "Citizen Kane" - Orson Welles or Herman J. Mankiewicz - but he makes a compelling case for the latter. His son, the celebrated director David Fincher, realizes his father's long-unproduced script as a valentine to old Hollywood. "Mank" brims with old-school movie glamor, from Erik Messerschmidt's sumptuous black and white cinematography and a score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (one of two great scores this year, the other being for the Pixar animated film "Soul") to an absolutely stellar cast that surrounds Gary Oldman, in the title role, with the likes of Charles Dance (as William Randolph Hearst, the
Rupert Murdoch of his day) and Amanda Seyfried (playing Hearst's girlfriend, film star Marion Davies).

2. "Nomadland"

It's a rare actress who will let herself be captured on film looking worn and weary, let alone sitting on the can and experiencing a sudden bout of intestinal distress... "can," in this case, being literal, since the film's main character lives in a van. Frances McDormand, however, is not only willing to go there - she positively revels in the role of a contemporary American worker who's lost all financial stability, seen her home town go under in a post-Great Recession economy that marginalizes many, and chosen to find freedom in the loss of what a more prosperous nation once called security. Chlo� Zhao's film, based on the book by Jessica Bruder, is part documentary, folding many real-life people into its narrative, which centers around McDormand's Fern and Dave, her late-in-life suitor played by David Strathairn.

3. "Never Rarely Sometimes Always"

Writer-director Eliza Hittman doesn't flinch from presenting the hard realities of reproductive choice in today's America. When Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a teenager in rural Pennsylvania's coal country, realizes that she's pregnant, it takes everything she's got, and more, to brave the roadblocks that have been placed in her way by a half-century of opposition to women's autonomy over their own bodies. With supportive cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) at her side, Autumn heads to New York City for an abortion, but even then she may not have the resources she needs to follow through on her decision. Hittman doesn't need to push too hard on the polemics surrounding the issue to reach the emotinal core where its many aspects intersect: A scene in which Autumn is asked if her sexual partner (and the father of her child) "never, rarely, sometimes, or always" threatens and makes her fearful. Autumn's tearful inability to answer in words is a testimony of its own.

4. "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

It's not so unusual for a film to follow a character through a psychological labyrinth of nightmares while he or she contends with memories, regrets, and other hallucinations, and some movies ("Jacob's Ladder," "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind") have achieved classic status by doing just that. What Charlie Kaufman accomplishes here, though, is to flip that script so that we're following characters who, themselves, are memories and hallucinations through a shifting dreamscape until they meet the man who's having them. Only Kaufman could have adapted Ian Reid's novel for the screen with such precision and panache.

5. "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom"

The second play from August Wilson's "Pittsburgh Cycle" to be made into a movie - following 2016's "Fences" - "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" focuses on the titular character and her band on a hot summer day in 1927. Viola Davis plays Ma Rainey with absolute conviction, her ambition and drive tinged with bitterness, and Chadwick Boseman - in his final role - matches that conviction in one of his finest performances as Levee, a talented musician with an eye to the future.

6. "Palm Springs"

This isn't the first time you'll likely have seen a movie about a repeating day. Indeed, the genre - like its conceit - just keeps showing up. But this time is different, as Nyles (Andy Samberg), a man caught in a time loop, accidentally traps Sarah (Cristin Milioti) in the same perpetually-resetting day where he's been trapped for thousands of repetitions. Part "Groundhog Day," part "Passengers," the film follows the unlikely pair as they quarrel, reconcile, take hallucinogens in the desert, and wrestle with the mother of all existential crises - and do so with a depth and poignancy unique to the genre. J.K. Simmons provides touches of pitch-dark comic relief as a fellow traveler so angry about the predicament they're all in that he's made it his mission to punish Nyles for all eternity.

7. "First Cow"

Director Kelly Reichardt ("Old Joy," "Meek's Cutoff," "Certain Women") is back with another visually ravishing and emotionally resonant film that treads quietly but speaks authoritatively. Reichardt revisits the theme of male love she explored in "Old Joy," and the territory of the Old Northwest that she explored in "Meek's Cutoff," telling the tale of Cookie (John Magaro) and King-Lu (Orion Lee), two misfits in an unforgiving world who grasp at their dreams boldly - but with tragic consequences.

8. "Ammonite"

"God's Own Country" writer-director Francis Lee places two historic figures at the heart of this movie about women loving women in mid-19th century England. Pioneering paleontologist Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) struggles to scrape by, putting her unparalleled expertise at finding and preparing fossils to use but getting little money (and no credit) for even her most extraordinary finds. Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan) is the wife of a prosperous man who cossets and limits her. When the two cross paths, an unexpected friendship blossoms... and so do they. Lee's photography and direction makes a point of how difficult life was back then, especially for LGBTQ people, but his naturalistic pacing also allows embers of rare happiness to build up into an affirming glow. Winslet and Ronan have been, to some extent, critiqued for being two straight actors who are playing gay, but their exquisite performances are hard to argue with - as is the fact that Lee, who is openly gay, saw fit to cast them.

9. "Promising Young Woman"

Carey Mulligan is great in everything she does (even sketchy fare like 2010's quickly-forgotten "Never Let Me Go" and her other film from this year, the serviceable but overstuffed and diagrammatic "The Dig"). It's her talent that this razor-wire-sharp movie relies on as it tells the story of Cassandra (Mulligan), the aptly-named titular character whose life and prospects were derailed by an act of male sexual violence - an act not perpetrated against Cassandra directly, and yet that victimized her as traumatically as it did her best friend. Once a medical student headed for a bright career, Casandra is now a barista who lives with her increasingly perplexed parents and, by night, lures men into a trap set by their own base and misogynistic tendencies. When she falls for a man and starts to consider moving into a different (perhaps healthier) emotional space, though, Cassandra enters into a new and more dangerous phase of her vendetta - one with unpredictable consequences. Very much a #MeToo era movie, but rooted in much more than a social media meme, "Promising Young Woman" is a blend of cautionary tale, ice-cold satire, and feminist giallo.

10. "News of the World"

Paul Greengrass leaves the world of Jason Bourne and 9/11 behind for an excursion into the Wild West that stars Tom Hanks. All of that may sound like a string of non-sequiturs, and yet the film works well: Hanks plays Captain Kidd, formerly of the Confederate Army, a man who earns his living by traveling around Texas and reading aloud from a selection of newspapers. His showmanship is balanced with editorial care; Kidd reads enough of the day's political news to keep his audiences informed, but in an era of extreme resentment and polarization he adds enough calming commentary and human interest features into his act to keep things from boiling over. When he encounters an orphaned girl named Johanna (Helena Zengel) on the road - the survivor of a Kiowa Indian raid that killed her family, a genocidal attack by U.S. troops that wiped out her adoptive tribe, and then, after all that, a racist attack that left a man dead who was tasked with taking her to her surviving relatives - Kidd reluctantly makes it his own mission to get her safely to her new home. It won't be an easy journey, emotionally or otherwise, but in Greengrass' hands the film is both an effective genre piece and a moving drama.

11. "Between the World and Me"

Ta-Nehisi Coates' 2015 book - an essay that takes the form of a letter to his teenaged son - may not seem the likeliest candidate for a film adaptation, and yet it's exactly the movie we need to see in this post-George Floyd world. Adapted first as a stage work and then brought to HBO as a film, Coates' words are narrated by a number Black actors - including are Oprah Winfrey, Mahershala Ali, Joe Morton, Janet Mock, Phylicia Rashad, Angela Davis, Wendell Pierce, MJ Rodriguez, Angela Bassett - as well as Coates himself. Bracing, powerful, and deeply unsettling in its sense that racism (and its deadly consequences) is not a stain that humanity has the capacity to overcome, "Between the World and Me" is nevertheless a necessary call to courage... and to action.

12. "Bacurau"

This Brazilian import, by directors Juliano Dornelles, Kleber Mendon�a Filho, seems to waver, at first, between surrealist fantasy and updated Western before settling on all-too-current revenge drama. Strange happenings begin to trouble a remote village that's already struggling with bureaucratic corruption and the theft of its water supply; the town vanishes from online maps, small UFOs buzz the locals, and sinister killings start up. But the villagers, who are smart, pragmatic people, see through the kinds of superficial strangeness that would have Americans posting wild conspiracy theories to social media and tuning in to Newsmax. Not that there isn't a conspiracy afoot, mind you: There is, and it involves a group of bloodthirsty Americans with an impenetrable sense of entitlement an eagerness to seek catharsis through homicide. Things get really interesting when the villagers prove to the invaders that their unearned assumptions of racial and national superiority are not only hollow, but lethally naive.

Near Misses and Honorable Mentions

"Driveways"

This sweet film about a financially struggling single mother (Hong Chau) who must clear out the house of her late sister - a hoarder - and her young son (Lucas Jaye ) is a quiet rumination on the power of connection to bridge ethnicity, class, age, politics, and other divides. It's also the swan song of stage and film actor Brian Dennehy, who plays the next-door neighbor, an elderly widower whose helpfulness and plain-spoken decency feels like a swiftly vanishing remnant of another time.

"Saint Frances"

The year's other great film about reproductive choice centers on Bridget (Kelly O'Sullivan), an under-achieving nanny who is awkwardly integrated into the home life of a stressed-out lesbian couple. Bridget has her hands full keeping track of six-year-old Frances (Ramona Edith-Williams) while trying to chart out a course for her own stalled life. Not so much a slacker as a young person in need of a little time, and a little safe space, to figure things out, Bridget's nanny is an imperfect fit for the family... and yet, also, exactly what they need.

"The Midnight Sky"

George Clooney's ventures as an actor into science fiction have often been difficult, and only intermittently rewarding. (To benefit from the 2002 American version of "Solaris" you just have to will yourself into a state of perpetually suspended disbelief; his character arc in the dazzling, but mixed, bag that was Alfonso Cuaron's 2013 opus "Gravity" was one of the film's more obvious shortfalls; and let's not even get into his stint as Batman in the 1997 disaster that was "Batman & Robin.") As a director, Clooney has impressed with socially conscious projects like "Good Night and Good Luck." So how would he do if directing a sci-fi movie" The answer can be found in "The Midnight Sky," an often impressive but, in many ways, disjointed film that left critics divided. (I liked it, but at the same time it didn't work for me on a number of levels.) Clooney basically directs two films that are joined at a narratively unstable pivot point, one that ends up being trite and unworthy. In one story thread, a scientist - played by Clooney himself - must brave the normally hazardous conditions of the Arctic even as the entire planet Earth is succumbing to some sort of man-made, apocalyptic catastrophe (we never know just what it is, but it's bad). In the other, the crew of a spaceship is coming home from having located another habitable world right within our own solar system (as loopy an idea as that might be, given how well probes and telescopes have charted our cosmic back yard), but the difficulties they survive along the way are only a warm-up for the crisis that awaits at the end of their journey. Tonally, the two are very different; each is a well-made movie in its own right, but they don't fit together. Still, each part is so striking (despite some obvious flaws) that the film has found its way to year's bests lists like this one, and for good reason.

Now that the closing credits have rolled on 2020 (a year that redefined movie going, for better and for worse), we're back in the front row, popcorn in hand, waiting for the curtain to rise on 2021's slate of blockbusters, remakes, and as-yet hidden gems.