*A quick note: without going to movie theaters in 2020, I found it hard to stream movies. I love and missed going to the theater. Because of this, there is there is no top ten list for 2020. That being said, there were a couple of movies that I watched during this hiatus that I really loved. A short top 3 off the top of my head: (3) Palm Springs (2020) - lighthearted and moving (2) Cabaret (1972) - perfect movie for the Trump Era (1) The Last Picture Show (1971) - what an incredible movie. Anyways, to my three readers: please enjoy.
10 - Nightmare Alley - I haven’t really enjoyed a ton of Guillermo Del Toro movies. Even though the Shape of Water and won an Oscar for Best Picture, I have to say I much preferred this movie. I know that this is a remake of a 1947 movie, and it feels like it in many ways it’s a movie of a different time. Nightmare Alley is less about immediate jump scares or contrived thrills; rather, like any noir at its best, it builds a mood. To highlight one particular aspect of the visual language of Nightmare Alley, the use of Chiaroscuro lighting—the contrast of light and darkness in each scene—creates this sense of dread. These people live in a world of shadow where almost any source of light seems unwelcome. Whether it's lightning in the night sky, a man blocking the sun with his hands as its rays fight through the clouds to illuminate the world, or the glow of a carnival at night, Del Toro stages scenes so we are aware of where the light is and where it isn’t. Del Toro suggests the natural state of this world is blackness, nothingness. These characters seem more comfortable inhabiting that darkness. They are carnies who live in a world in which it is better to hide in the shadows, so they can create the illusion of the metaphysical among a superstitious citizenry yearning for some kind of comfort in the darkness of a spiritually empty world. Is this movie a little too long? Perhaps, but it really worked for me. I was riveted by this movie which simultaneously builds this sense of motion and destiny, or perhaps natural law, while asserting that there is simply more nothingness behind the darkness that we see.
9 - Belfast - I have spent a lot of time writing these reviews at this point and, sadly, this is a passion not a job. I am going to shorten these reviews just so I can actually finish making this list. Belfast takes place in Northern Ireland during The Troubles in 1969. It’s filmed in black and white and seems visually inspired by one of my favorite movies of 2018, “Roma”. Writer and director Kenneth Branagh based this movie on his own childhood and you can feel the love he has for these people and that place during a troubling period in Ireland’s national history. When I was taking my education classes in college, I remember writing a research paper and reading a book about raising children in war torn countries around the world. Ultimately one of the conclusions of this study was that children persevere in all conditions but one commonality makes it more likely: the caring and love of a parent. This movie embodies that philosophy. Bragnagh, like many great actors who tap into their experiences to find truth, repeats this process as a director. His story and the exceptional work of his actors make you fall in love with Buddy and his family. This is a beautiful, tenderly crafted film with great performances.
8 - CODA - I was happy when CODA one best picture. Was it my favorite movie of the year? Probably not. But I thought I really enjoyed it. Initially it seemed be painfully cliché at times: the high school bullies, the teacher who sees something special in his student, etc. I do understand those criticisms, but what the critics of this film leave out is how specific this story and film was. This is a story about a child of deaf adults (C.O.D.A) who has a gifted singing voice, yet is tied down to family fishing business in Gloucester, Massachusetts. For all the people that say that this movie is cliché, find me a story as specific as that. I will grant though that there are cliché moments, but who cares when they work so well? I was moved watching this movie. I think one fun part of this year’s movies is that they all excel in such uniquely different film techniques from one another. The use of sound and silence in this movie is particularly moving. Troy Kotsur, the best supporting actor winner, won his award in these silent film moments. His expressions tell us what we need to know about the journey of this family. I haven’t known many deaf people in my life, and not deeply for that matter, and there were many “huh” moments where I learned about what someone’s else’s life might be like other than my own. Not to go too deeply into American politics, but there was a moment earlier this year where Vice President Harris was mocked and criticized for describing what she was wearing during her introduction to supporters of the Americans with Disabilities Act. How can you possibly mock the Vice President for this inclusivity after you’ve seen this movie? I digress, but that’s the power of movies like CODA. I’m obviously not the first to say this, but they are both universal stories — a child trying to find their place in the world outside the family home — and extremely specific. I dare you to watch this movie and not be moved by the end.
7- Dune - Dune is a visual masterpiece. I was elated that I was able to see it on IMAX and not on my TV. After a year of sitting home and feeling uninspired to watch movies on my couch, I loved getting to the theater and watching this one. I haven’t read Dune but watching it was reminiscent of opening up Harry Potter for the first time. It’s a world I wanted to stay in and understand. Not only were we introduced to the rules of this universe but also its worlds. From the lush greens and blues of Caladan to the sandy monochromatic grimness of Arrakeen, Denis Villeneuve world builds in a concise way, which I haven’t seen since Interstellar. Months later there are still images that flash into my mind as I write this: Zendaya’s eyes in a Sergio Leone-like close-up; Oscar Isaac’s character, Leto, and his dying breath; a mosquito sized assassination device. But it’s the surprise aerial raid of Arrakeen that I remember most vividly. As a young person, I remember watching on television the United States’ bombardment of Iraq and Afghanistan. I hadn’t really ever known my country to be at war in a foreign nation until I watched flares of light captured across a dark sky over an illuminated city. When I watched Dune, my mind called back to what had been forgotten images. I am curious and excited to see what this series can pull off. I’m in. Please don’t blow it Denis.
6 - Worst Person in the World - I loved Worst Person in the World. It has so much humanity in it. Having lived in Boston for much of my twenties and early thirties before abandoning that life for a move to the suburbs, I felt this movie in my core. Unlike a lot of movies coming out of Hollywood, director Joachim Trier creates such a realistic world that I felt like I was neighbors with Julie in Oslo, Norway as she grew into adulthood. This was a world I innately understood, and a time in one’s life I just finished living. Julie, played beautifully by Renate Reinsve, embodied the contradictions and uncertainties of figuring out what kind of person you want to strive to be once on your own. She was wonderfully indecisive and decisive; profoundly moral and immoral; romantic and logical; stable but a mess. There are some exceptional scenes. Personal favorites include: Julie running through the streets of Oslo, her first night with Eivind, her reintroduction to Aksel. She was such a powerfully sculpted character that it was hard not to be charmed by this story of a person trying to find her way in the world.
5 - The Suicide Squad - After years of entertainment, I am reaching critical mass with superhero fatigue. Most of the work released — mostly on Disney Plus — appears to be hastily made and too formulaic. Yet, there are still a few very good movies a year, like Spiderman: No Way Home and The Batman. Then there are movies that use genre and say something deeper about the human condition. It sounds absurd to say this about a movie like The Suicide Squad, but it does just that.
If I were to rank my favorite superhero movies, this would easily be within my top 3, perhaps #2 right behind Logan (a mostly beloved movie that is still vastly under appreciated. Has there been a better criticism of America’s immigration policies on film this decade?).
So why the love for The Suicide Squad? Sure it has Director James Gunn’s now trademark irreverent humor. And It works well here. As he did with Guardians, the action and emotional moments of the movie are integrated with songs from popular and some lesser known artists in ways that uplift and stir emotional responses. There are visual flourishes like the fight seen through the eyes of Harley Quinn; what would have been a blood fest becomes what amounts to a choreographed dance among flowers.
While I love all the above elements of the movie, because if they didn’t work the movie itself wouldn’t work, it’s what James Gunn is trying to say about American society that elevates this movie from a good genre movie to a great movie. Ultimately, this is a movie that levels harsh criticism against American foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In a universe where Superman exists, the central plot of this movie is to have antihero mercenaries cover up the crimes of American imperialism in a Latin American country. We haven’t quite seen a setting like this in superhero movies. Over the course of the movie, we find out the United States has been covertly supporting the Corto Maltese dictatorship against the will of the people. Geeking out as a history teacher here: I think most Americans would be shocked by the actions of their government in Central or Latin American countries, like in Panama, Guatemala, or Chile just to name a few. Having read some of the CIA declassified documents with my U.S. History classes, it is quite grim. As the Suicide Squad brings these kinds of developments to light — the kinds of developments ignored by popular American memory — there are few key moments that stand out to me in this film, which moved me.
There is one moment when the Suicide Squad is in a van, as Jessie Reyez’s “Sola” plays on the radio. Gunn’s team uses slow motion to show the Suicide Squad observing the local population enjoying nightlife on the Corto Maltese streets. This moment is key because the audience adopts the eye of the Suicide Squad as we see the humanity in a foreign country that many Americans would deem “third world” or “shithole countries” as President Trump was known to say. The script deftly punctuates this point when hordes of rats destroy Starro the Conqueror and we are reminded: “Rats are the lowliest and most despised of all creatures, my love. But they have purpose. So do we all.” I know this is ultimately is a trite philosophy, but one I still find meaningful, as its applied to the Suicide Squad but moreso to the nations in the shadow of American Empire.
Even take Starro the Conqueror. In conversation I’ve heard a lot of people scoff at the idea of a kaiju as the big bad in a superhero movie, but take a moment to consider Starro’s primary form of treachery. It’s a monster of cultural hegemony. Starro, the creation of the American military establishment, generally doesn’t destroy the bodies of its victims, rather Starro releases little starfish that ultimately hold the P.O.V. of the monster itself. At its core Starro’s purpose is that of neocolonialism, the same kind held by American foreign policy hawks who want the United States to spread its values to foreign nations in its quest for power. Ultimately, the hero turn for the Suicide Squad is when they fight back against their nation’s covert military establishment and their own self interest in order to destroy America’s interventionist position in Court Maltese. In contrast to so many superhero movies that have deliberately lean away from questions like “what about civilian casualties” through various plot devices, like fighting on airport tarmacs, or in abandoned neighborhoods, or simply using special robots to lift up a whole city toward safety, the Suicide Squad, the American military establishment, and domestic forces within Corto Maltese leave behind a trail of destruction, for which the local population will have to deal with as the eye of empire and “the heroes” move on. Peacemaker, one of the movie's “heroes”, tells the squad, “I cherish peace with all my heart. I don’t care how many men, women, and children I need to kill to get it.” Yet we find out it's not peace that’s desired. It’s unfettered power. Ultimately though, all these messages would be meaningless if this movie wasn’t fun, and it is. I highly recommend it if you missed it in theaters.
4 - The Last Duel - My top 10 for 2021 has to be one of my favorite lists in a while. Or perhaps my memory is skewed since I really didn’t have a 2020 in theaters (the last movie I saw was Birds of Prey, the Harley Quinn movie). While I am generally tired of historic movies being filmed in sepia tones — was there no color in the past? — I loved the Last Duel. In their first collaboration since Good Will Hunting, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon wrote a brilliant script, along with co-writer Nicole Holofcener. This story takes place in 14th century France focusing on mainly three characters played by Matt Damon, Adam Driver, and Jodie Comer. At the center of this story is the rape of Marguerite de Carrouges. Like Kurosawa’s Rashomon, the audience is told three different points of view of the same events.
This structure atunes us to the smallest details of each scene. I haven’t had the chance to re-watch this movie but I would be curious to see how many of these small details are the same and how many are different. During each telling the audience questions what they are seeing. What does that smile mean? Is it different than the one we saw earlier in the film? Is the scar of Jean de Carrouges face changing in each telling? (Brilliantly, yes it is).
By the movie’s end, we are left questioning whether or not we should actually even be asking these types of questions. Deftly, Affleck, Damon, and Holofcener leave us with the rawest, most brutal answer to a court case that captured the attention of 14th century France.
Another strength of this script is that I was really impressed how faithful it was to the past being the past. While this movie undoubtedly has modern day themes in a post #metoo world, I really enjoyed how the script highlighted how we are fundamentally the same people but our world’s were vastly different. For about two and a half hours we were living in a world based around historic French customs, values, and legal statues. While this may not sound appealing to some people, I personally found land disputes and legal avenues in 1386 France fascinating.
By the time we reach the movie’s end, also the movie’s beginning — perhaps a nod to history not being linear but rather circular — we are rooting for certain characters whose interests do not align with our own, yet we both want the same thing. The momentum building toward the movie’s ending is downright brilliant in its intensity. Simply, what a movie.
3 - Red Rocket - I love this movie. Sean Baker is on the shortlist for my must-watch-directors. Unlike Nomadland, a movie where poverty feels like a Hollywood term paper, Baker’s camera finds parts of America that the rest of the population ignores, or rather places we didn’t even expect existed. Instead of a big name like Frances McDormand, Red Rocket stars a down and out MTV celebrity, Simon Rex. You may get it by now: I don’t like the 2020 Best Picture winner Nomadland. But this isn’t simply a vehicle to say that. Rather I think these choices highlight what makes Sean Baker one of my favorite filmmakers. He finds magic in the deserts, in the swamps, and in the forgotten while not sacrificing the melancholy around those locations. Realism today is so valued that other filmmakers willingly choose to mute our world of its natural color. Like Walt Disney, in some ways a subject of his last movie, The Florida Project, Bakers finds, perhaps conjures up, beauty in places where there outwardly seems to be none.
His camera captures a rich palette of color in the foreground of the industrial oil fields of Texas, an otherwise monochromatic world. There’s an absurdity to the visuals. It’s a bright yellow and pink donut shop in an environment that seems to suck whatever color is left out of the ground like its fracking overlords. Or it might be a man sitting in a dark room against a black table rolling American flag colored joints in the glow of a TV displaying the bright red MAGA hat of a billionaire who knows or cares little for these peoples’ struggles.
Red Rocket is defined by these contrasts. I don't know any of these actors or if they were even actors in the first place (my guess is it’s a mix) but there’s a shared visual language in these casting choices too. Bree Elrod (Lexi), Ethan Darbone (Lonnie), Brenda Deiss (Lil) all outwardly wear the dejectedness and abuse they have experienced in life; yet, by the movie’s end we recognize and appreciate their strength. While Simon Rex’s Mikey is this sympathetic, kinetic force of nature hoping to break out of this little town, we turn against him. In the film’s starkest and most inspired moment, the incredible Suzanna Son (Strawberry) plays the piano and sings NSync's “Bye, Bye, Bye”, and we realize the tragedy unfolding: in Mikey’s singular quest to go back to Los Angeles, he fails to appreciate what we have come to learn. Mikey’s greatest sin is that he doesn’t have the eye that we have. We see the beauty around Mikey — of Strawberry, of his wife, her family, and their support network — because Baker’s lens has trained us to do so. Without this gift, Mikey unknowingly endangers everyone around him in his monomaniacal quest to escape.
2 - Cyrano - The second time I watched Cyrano I was on an airplane flying to London. I thought to myself surely I will not enjoy it as much as I did on the big screen. To the film’s credit, I was equally moved by the movie’s end on both viewings. Similar to CODA, Belfast, Worst Person in the World, I was greatly moved by what essentially amounts to a deeply personal character study. Because of Steve Martin’s film, I vaguely knew the contours of Cyrano’s story before walking into it, but, man, this really delivered.
This movie stands on the shoulders of Peter Dinklage. I know I am at the point where I should no longer use the Oscars as a measuring stick of greatness, but I really do not understand how the magnum opus of his wonderful career wasn’t more appreciated. He sang, he danced, he fought, he made us feel his unrequited love for Roxanne. Peter Dinklage’s wife, Erica Schmidt, was so brilliant in writing this role for Dinklage. In the traditional telling of this story, Cyrano de Bergerac loves Roxanne but his love remains unrequited because of his giant nose. Yet in this version, rather than being a degreed removed from the story knowing that an actor can take off a prosthetic nose, we know Dinklage and Schmidt live this reality. It is a truth that echoes in every scene. It’s an incredibly moving story, and I understand now why it's been so popular since the end of the nineteenth century.
The second star of this movie is director Joe Wright. I perhaps loved Darkest Hour more than most people, but man I feel like Wright is a vastly underrated director. I’d love to see him get a Villeneuve budget, for example. First, Sicily was a great setting for this movie. It was a beautiful backdrop to every scene enhanced by the brightness of Massimo Cantini Parrini and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. I like that Wright was faithful to the past while also having a certain indifference to it too. Rather than being tied down to typical mostly white leads in historic movies, this was a diverse cast with some great supporting performances. Because of this choice to not be tied down to the source material, we got some great performances from Black actors, namely Bashir Salahuddin and Kelvin Harrison Jr. Both of these actors were among my favorites in the film behind Dinklage. Lastly, man, Joe Wright can move a camera and set up shots for himself with each cut. I rank the tracking shot in Atonement at Dunkirk and the use of the god-eye’s view of a bombed battlefield in Darkest Hour, which was edited into a dead human eye, among my personal favorites. Both are examples of brilliant flourishes in otherwise grounded movies. Within the structure of a musical like Cyrano though, here Wright places and then moves the camera with confidence and purpose. It enabled him to swing big on a talent that had mostly been restrained in some of his more well known movies. When the camera is still and when it moves, we are able to equally view the depth of these characters and the vastness of the romantic world in which they live (here’s one example for your viewing enjoyment: “I’d Give Anything”).
The third and last star of this movie is Aaron and Bryce Dessner of the National, who composed the music for Cyrano. I loved the music of this movie. “Wherever I Fall” has to be one of the great movie songs of the year. It was an incredibly powerful song whose themes transcend the movie. Since I last watched Cyrano, it has been a joy to listen to the music without Wright’s visuals.
2021 was the year of the musical for me, as two rank among my favorite films of the year.
1 - In the Heights - I’m really disappointed this movie didn’t do better at the box office. I’m not sure if this is the first movie I saw back in theaters since they shut down in 2020, but, man, this movie recaptured that magical feeling that seeing a movie in theaters creates. In the Heights declares from its “Once Upon a Time” opening that this is a fairy tale, and it lives up to those ambitions. There is an energy and brightness to this movie that is uplifting compared to so many of its darker contemporaries. The music has a kinetic energy that is grounded in the community of Washington Heights, a neighborhood in New York City. The songs are seamlessly built with the sounds of the city, whether its cutting to a spraying hose or the ring of a cash register, there is a beautiful medley of noise enriching this community. The music is so damn alive.
At its core, this movie is about the dreams of immigrants and the sacrifices they made or will make to build a home in the United States. Abuela Claudia, the heart of this Latin American community, says at one point in the movie that there are “little details that tell the world we are not invisible,” which is in many embodies of this script and the direction of John Chu. As we are introduced to each character and their personal journeys, like any great movie hometown, we grow to see the magic of Washington Heights through the little details.
This movie in some ways is a distant spiritual cousin of Gangs of New York, showing the tides that shape New York City. I have a very unscientific test that involves race and identity in movies. The test is this: will this movie teach a boomer something about racism in our country that they do not already know? I think there’s a shocking amount of movies that do not pass this test. For In the Heights, the answer is definitively yes. While this movie has so much to say about immigration and xenophobia in the United States, these messages land particularly hard because we care so much about our lead characters. All the performances were exceptional, but it’s worth noting that I was really in awe of the two leads Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera, who give so much heart to their characters Usnavi and Vanessa. In one of my favorite scenes, Usnavi and Vanessa communicate with each other between the door of a convenience store refrigerator, and it's near impossible not to root for those two to be together. It’s a wonderful scene among many great ones.
As the story progresses, there is a palpable heat that builds, reminiscent of Do the Right Thing. This eventually climaxes with the power going out in the city. From this point on, the heart of the movie comes to the center of the film. Following the incredible song “Paciencia y Fe” where 65-year-old Olga Merediz leads us through different train cars representative of Abuela Claudia’s immigrant journey from Cuba, we see how much foreign born people have overcome to improve the American body. There are so many efforts made to deprive this country of the very people that make it better. While the city roasts in 100 degree weather, most poignantly in the song “Esa Bandera” there is an obviously metaphorical refrain among some of the characters “we are powerless” that ultimately gets overpowered by the collective strength of the community. I challenge moviegoers to find a 2021 movie that was as uplifting as this one. I will fondly look back at this film experience as the one that recreated that pre-pandemic glory of seeing a movie: it’s stylistic, the music is great, and it's joyous.
