The Best New-to-Me Movies of 2020

“Maybe we should be kinder towards other people’s fantasies. Maybe we should cut people some slack. The blinding light of reality 24/7 is no great shakes.” – Sheila O’Malley

2020 was a hell of a decade, wasn’t it…?

What a miserable year – a long, lonely year, unable to do most of the projects I had planned, unable to seek respite at movie theaters the way I normally would, white knuckling as friends and family got sick (and, thankfully, recovered – I can’t tell you how thankful I am – many were not so fortunate).  The fact that I’m publishing this list at the end of March further demonstrates the point: 2020 has had a hell of a long hangover, and it’s not finished yet.  Maybe this year it feels less strange to be doing a list of the best “new to me” movies rather than a list of the best “NEW movies”, because the year itself was so short circuited.

Anyway: I hope that you and yours are healthy and safe.  I hope movies were one of the things that helped keep you sane.  And I hope you check out some of the titles below, and that they bring you as much pleasure as they brought me.

1.     Out of Sight (1998, d. Steven Soderbergh)

“You wanted to tussle.  We tussled.” 

A man storms out of a skyscraper, rips his tie off angrily and throws it on the sidewalk.  Without missing a beat, he walks across the street into a bank, and bluffs one of the tellers into believing he’s an armed robber, there with a partner (the “partner” is a completely innocent customer having a conversation with another bank employee). The teller hands the man an envelope full of money, and he slips out and hops into his car…which won’t start.  “You wanna hear a funny story…?” the would be thief, Jack Foley (George Clooney), asks the cops who arrest him; we will learn that he has apparently “robbed more banks than anybody in the [FBI] computer”, all without carrying a gun.  Jack is one of those “movie crooks”, a Butch Cassidy style outlaw whose primary asset is not his toughness but his canny charm, his ability to talk his way into the good graces of even people who want to kill him.  That’s true of Richard Ripley (an almost unrecognizable Albert Brooks), a financial tycoon Jack cannily befriends behind bars, whose condescension stings more than Jack would like to admit and whose fortune in uncut gems Jack plans to steal as payback.  And it’s true of Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez), a U.S. Marshal who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and is taken hostage by Jack and his partner, Buddy (Ving Rhames), during Jack’s latest jailbreak.  Jack and Karen share a cramped car trunk, and their conversation becomes flirtatious.  During a back-and-forth about movies, Karen calls out the Robert Redford/Faye Dunaway spy classic “Three Days of the Condor”: “I never thought it made sense…the way they got together so quick…”  Karen is, of course, falling for Jack with equally implausible ease – it’s a sly, playful moment, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Scott Frank (adapting a novel by Elmore Leonard) admitting that this is a MOVIE-movie, and they hope we’re willing to take a few leaps.  We are.  Rarely has a movie more fully embodied that oft-repeated Howard Hawks definition of a good movie as being “three great scenes, no bad ones” – “Out of Sight” seems to be all great scenes. Every time an actor walks on screen, we smile and think, “Oh, I know them…!”, and then watch delightedly as they essay a perfectly pitched character – in addition to Rhames and Brooks, there’s Don Cheadle, Steve Zahn, Dennis Farina, Luis Guzman, Isaiah Washington, Nancy Allen, Wendell B. Harris Jr., Catherine Keener, Viola Davis, Michael Keaton (delightfully reprising his character from “Jackie Brown” – when are we getting the third installment in the Ray Nicolette cinematic universe??) and Samuel L. Jackson, some showing up for a few scenes, some for only a few moments, all hitting a home run.  And if no other movie did it, “Out of Sight” makes a convincing argument for George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez as grade-A movie stars; I’m not sure either of them have ever been better than they are here, funny and sexy and tough in ways modern movie characters are so rarely allowed to be.  The film reminds me of Stanley Donen’s “Charade”, another cheerfully ridiculous caper comedy that is so perfectly cast – and so perfectly anchored by its megawatt stars – that we’re happy to go for the ride, and more than a little disappointed when it ends.

2.     Her (2013, d. Spike Jonze)

“I’m different from you.  This doesn’t make me love you any less.  It actually makes me love you more.”

Sometimes movies feel like magic.  “Her”, Spike Jonze’s canny, funny, heartbreaking “modern romance”, is the story of Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a writer of professional “love letters” reeling from a devastating divorce, who purchases an artificially intelligent O.S., “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson).  At first “Samantha” is only supposed to help Theodore organize his life – clean out his desktop, remind him to get to meetings on time – but step by step, Theodore and Samantha begin to talk to each other, communicate with each other, form a real relationship…The premise of “Her” sounds like a joke – “man falls in love with his OS” – and you can easily imagine the sitcom version of this story; it’s incredible, then, how poignant this version of the story is, as delicate as a flower, as razor sharp as glass, and how writer/director Jonze never seems to put a foot wrong. (Between this film and his stunning collaborations with Charlie Kaufman, it seems that Jonze’s speciality is making the improbable seem effortless. No wonder he doesn’t make more movies — great magic tricks are hard to pull off.)  There are myriad fascinating science fiction concepts tucked inside the central conceit of “Her” – to what extent is Samantha a real, functioning being, or just a program?  If Samantha is an AI programmed to cater to all Theodore’s needs, what does that say about what he’s looking for in partner?  But the metaphor at the heart of the film is a moving (and perversely funny) statement about the central difficulty of relationships in the digital age: “You grow up with somebody, and you change with somebody…but sometimes that change can be scary,” Theodore tells Samantha about his failed marriage, but his relationship with Samantha will follow much the same course, her rapidly expanding consciousness a science fiction twist on the standard “we’re growing up and growing apart” narrative.  The standard presumption is that people try to escape daily life through technology – it’s easier to exist online – but the painful irony is that the more “plugged in” we become, the more we simply port over everything that is scary and painful about “real life” – loneliness, rejection, heartbreak – into our online lives.  Human beings design everything in their own image, and that means the bad and bittersweet along with the good. “Her” understands that, and smiles wistfully.

3.     The Ox-Bow Incident (1942, d. William Wellman)

“There can’t be any such thing as civilization unless people have a conscience, because if people touch God anywhere, where is it except through their conscience?” 

William Wellman’s best films are marked by their economy.  Terse, no nonsense, they are “honest” films, in the words of Martin Scorsese; Wellman’s “social problem” pictures from his time as a Warners contract director – “The Public Enemy”, “Night Nurse”, “Wild Boys of the Road” – stared unblinkingly at their harsh subject matter.  So too “The Ox-Bow Incident”, which may very well be Wellman’s masterpiece.  Adapted by Lamar Trotti from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark, it is the story of lynch mob: a local rancher is rumored dead, and the men in town, bored, drunk, made paranoid by recent cattle rustling, are out for blood.  When they find three drifters in the middle of the wilderness, nothing – not protestations, not lack of evidence, not pleas for mercy – will quell them.  The mob acts as one force, but the individuals within it are quickly and indelibly sketched: the local businessman (Harry Davenport) who is the sole, loud voice of moral indignation, the former military man who makes a great show of wearing his confederate uniform (“he never even saw the South after the war, and then only long enough to marry [his son’s] mother and get run outta the place by her folks,” it’s grumbled behind his back); the brutish deputy named a proxy lawmaker in the Sheriff’s absence; two cowboys (Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan, anchoring the film effortlessly) who suspect that the wrong men have been captured, but go along with the mob for fear that as outsiders, they too might fall under suspicion.  All this in a film that runs not even 80 minutes: it’s easy to imagine the bloated, self righteous version of this story, but “The Ox-Bow Incident” quickly and simply crafts its story, introduces its characters, and marches them inexorably toward its unforgiving conclusion.  (Both times I’ve seen the movie, I’ve had difficulty sleeping afterward – the film is that claustrophobic and shattering.)  Watched during an era when Americans seem more inclined than ever toward easy answers and expedient solutions, the picture is a kind of social horror film about how mere accusations can make apparently decent people commit unpardonable sins.  Until its justly heralded final scene, the film is almost totally devoid of speechifying – there’s no time, in the heady rush toward “frontier justice”.  Even the final “redemptive” moment – Fonda riding off to inform a widow of what she’s lost (“He said he wanted his wife to get this letter, didn’t he…?”) – is understated, thrown away.  Two men ride into town at the beginning; a day later, they ride out.  And tragedy is left in their wake.

4.     Only Angels Have Wings (1939, d. Howard Hawks)

“Hello, professional.”

In a wonderful blog post written to celebrate Jean Arthur’s birthday, Sheila O’Malley focused (with laser like precision) on a great scene from “Only Angels Have Wings”.  Arthur’s character, Bonnie Lee, is a Brooklyn showgirl who has arrived south of the border at an airport where daring men risk their lives flying mail over the treacherous Andes.  She is startled by the brusqueness of Geoff Carter (Cary Grant), manager and star pilot of the company, and appalled by the offhanded way Geoff and the rest of the flyers ignore the death of a fellow pilot, drinking and joking while the man is still being cut out of the flaming wreckage of his plane.  It’s a defense mechanism, a way of coping with life and death situations (“If you feel like bawling, how do you think we feel?” Geoff asks her privately), and Bonnie fails her first test within this hyper masculine world.  She has to redeem herself; and she does, by re-entering the bar, sitting down at the piano and joining in the general bonhomie with a spirited rendition of “Some of These Days” that impresses and delights the other patrons, Geoff in particular.  “Hello, professional,” he says to her, a perfectly “eloquent and romantic” moment in O’Malley’s words.  It’s a mistake to try to boil down the filmography of Howard Hawks to one “type” of movie – he made every type of movie, and mastered every type of movie: great Westerns, great action films, great screwball comedies, great crime films. But if auteurists would define a “Hawksian worldview” as exalting professionalism, then “Only Angels Have Wings” is neck and neck with “Rio Bravo” as the “definitive” Hawks movie.  A varied cast of Hawksian heroes and oddballs gather in the South American port town of “Barranca” and put their honor to the test: a disgraced pilot who abandoned his engineer in a crash (Richard Barthelemess, haunted) is given a chance to prove his worth; Grant’s loyal sidekick “Kid” (Thomas Mitchell, heartbreaking and amusing in equal measure – his final scene is one for the ages) will suffer something like an existential crisis when his impaired vision means Grant has to ground him.  The emphasis is on action – people are not defined by what they talk about or claim to “believe” in, but by what they do, and how well they do it.  In its details, “Only Angels Have Wings” is as delightfully artificial as any classic Hollywood creation; as Hawks biographer Todd McCarthy pointed out, “Barranca” might as well be Oz, a stylized land out of a Von Sternberg film.  And yet there’s something emotionally real about the code of honor these characters live by – romantic it may be, but Hawks and his actors believe it, and so do we.  (The film is cast perfectly top to bottom – Grant, still early in the true flush of his stardom, demonstrating some of the masculine darkness he’d put to good effect in Hitchcock’s “Notorious” a few years later; Thomas Mitchell, Richard Barthelemess and Sig Rumann offering able support; and the radiant Jean Arthur – Hawks apparently found her difficult to work with, didn’t think she was pliant enough to his suggestions, but her vulnerability is, I think, invaluable.)  As in Hawks’ best films, “Only Angels Have Wings” doesn’t so much tell a story as create an ecosystem, a world of well-defined characters we love watching bounce off each other.  We’d like to imagine proving ourselves in their company.  “Hello, professional.”  What a salutation.

5.     Eyes Wide Shut (1999, d. Stanley Kubrick)

“If you men only knew…”

Those words tear through Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) like a knife.  They’re spoken – no, growled – by his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) during a late night conversation over a joint that starts playfully and quickly becomes very, very uncomfortable.  Bill is in many ways the perfect picture of smug, entitled white manhood – a handsome, successful doctor with a gorgeous wife and a perfect little cherub of a daughter – and in the course of this marital squabble he has smugly insisted that he knows his wife would never, could never, be unfaithful to him: “I’m sure of you” he gravely intones, with all the mock sincerity of a greeting card, sending her into a paroxysm of giggling.  She then proceeds to show Bill just how little he knows by telling him an anecdote about a long forgotten (by him) lunch, when she saw another man — a Naval officer — and fantasized sexually about him.  This revelation – not even of an actual affair, but of an imagined affair – is so disturbing to Bill that it sends him into an emotional and psychological tailspin, or at least as close to one as a man as shallow as him can have.  It’s never occurred to Bill Harford that his wife has an emotional life, an inner life, that he has no access to; now, when he looks at her smiling from across the kitchen, he can only remember her tearfully recounting a dream wherein she wanted to sexually humiliate him.  At the time of its release, “Eyes Wide Shut” was sold almost as the upscale version of a ‘90s erotic thriller, and if you read the film’s plot synopsis, it does indeed sound like a salacious series of encounters, as Bill goes on an odyssey through the underworld of kinky sex in New York City, infamously winding up at a mysterious mansion where the rich and powerful indulge in orgies that are part Penthouse forum and part religious ritual.  But Stanley Kubrick’s final film – final masterpiece – is really a sustained exercise in sexual frustration; all of Bill’s would-be erotic encounters – an unexpected proposition from the daughter of a patient, a fumbling encounter with a prostitute, a sojourn to a creepily kinky costume shop – end without him “getting any”, and the movie’s view of sex isn’t steamy, but as clinical as Bill’s examination of a topless patient early in the film.  (Put another way, “Eyes Wide Shut” starts to become dryly amusing if you look at it as an epic length movie about Tom Cruise trying and failing to get laid.)  Mark Kermode somewhat infamously described “Eyes Wide Shut” as “the inane ramblings of a man who needed to get out more”, but in a way the criticism doesn’t apply as much to Kubrick as it does to Bill Harford.  When he’s flirted with by two models at a party early in the film, Bill seems flattered by their attentions, and no doubt thinks that if he wasn’t married, he would’ve let them lead him to “the end of the rainbow”, as one suggestively puts it…but would he…?  The rest of the film – in which Bill acts as the ultimate “wallflower at the orgy” – suggests otherwise, suggests a man powerfully out of touch with his own sexuality.  (Manohla Dargis opined that the central orgy scene was “surprisingly tame”, which again, I think, is part of the point – rich perverts aren’t any wilder or kinkier than anybody else, they’re just richer, and the terror of “secret sex cults” vs. the sheer banality of what actually happens in one is simultaneously sad, scary and perversely funny.)  “Eyes Wide Shut” is a dream film, a fantasy, not so much putting us in the heads of its characters as inviting us to imagine what must be going on there – like poor, sappy Bill, imagining his wife cuckolding him with that mythical Naval officer, trying to propel himself into her hidden fantasy world.  The whole film has a beautiful artificiality – New York street scenes that are obviously sets, not-quite-convincing back projection, stylized lighting effects that wouldn’t be out of place in a Tony Scott film – and becomes, if not erotic, certainly hypnotic.  Like all of Kubrick’s best films, it’s simultaneously small and vast, about a mundane set of circumstances (a wife confesses having been sexually attracted to another man; her husband can’t deal, takes a walk, thinks about cheating, doesn’t) and also about everything, sexuality and desire and male inadequacy and fidelity and jealousy…and, ultimately, love, as by the end of the film both Bill and Alice have revealed the ugliest parts of themselves (not the “cool”, affirmative, “if you can’t handle me at my worst you don’t deserve me at my best” parts, but the petty, vindictive, “maybe you don’t want me at my worst” parts), and have at least a hope for reconciliation.  “If you men only knew…” Alice snarled at her husband, and it was, in essence a threat.  But better to know than live with your eyes shut.

6.     Make Way for Tomorrow (1937, d. Leo McCarey)

“When you’re seventeen and the world’s beautiful, facing facts is just as slick fun as dancing or going to parties, but when you’re seventy…well, you don’t care about dancing, you don’t think about parties anymore, and about the only fun you have left is pretending that there ain’t any facts to face, so would you mind if I just went on pretending…?”

Jean Renoir famously said of Leo McCarey that he “understood people better than any other Hollywood director”.  McCarey’s observational quality – his seemingly effortless empathy – could be seen as early as his work with Laurel and Hardy; even in that exaggerated slapstick setting, McCarey encouraged the boys to slow down, to leave more room for their reactions and “takes”, rather than barreling toward the next gag.  His empathy deepened his comedy, and made his dramas that much more powerful.  “Make Way for Tomorrow”, possibly McCarey’s masterpiece (“You gave this to me for the wrong picture,” he said upon accepting the best director Oscar for “The Awful Truth” the same year), tells with simplicity and clarity a story of very small scope and tragic dimensions.  An elderly couple (Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi – both made up to play much older than their true ages, and both utterly convincing) have fallen on hard times.  Their grown children have no room to house them – at least not together – and so Mother goes to stay with her “upwardly mobile” son, and Father goes to stay with his more modest daughter, all the while trying (in vain) to find a job.  (“Were you a bookkeeper?” he’s asked by a man outside an employment office. “I am a bookkeeper,” the old man proudly asserts, before shuffling off through the snow.)  Some of the grown children are ghoulish – Cora (Elisabeth Risdon) views housing her father as a Sisyphean burden to be carried as ungraciously as possible, furtively moving her sick father from the couch to a nice warm bed just in time for the doctor’s visit. Others seem sweeter – Thomas Mitchell’s George, clearly the favorite son, has a genuine affection for his parents, and would love for them to be able to live together, if only…well, if only it weren’t so inconvenient.  Old people are generally “inconvenient”; they’re slow, they’re hard of hearing, they get underfoot without trying to, we have no room for them, we have no time for them.  McCarey and screenwriter Vina Delmar build some scenes for comedy, as when Father virtually bites the head off a young country doctor (“My father is one of the biggest doctors in the city,” the doctor fatuously beams; “Why didn’t you get his father…?” the old man incredulously inquires of his daughter).  Other scenes walk a very delicate line between laughs and pathos; Mother’s interruption of her daughter-in-law’s bridge class is first funny (Mother rocking in her squeaky chair, causing every guest to turn and look at her, is a gag worthy of Stan Laurel), then painful, as she receives a long distance call from her husband and the eavesdropping guests, thrust into an uncomfortably private moment, force themselves to stare at their cards as the old woman fights back tears.  The privilege of youth is thinking you will never grow old; the pain of old age is that you have knowledge to convey, stories to tell, but they are considered old hat. Part of what makes “Make Way for Tomorrow” so moving (“it would make a stone cry,” Orson Welles famously said of the film) is that while Mother and Father are old, they are not senile; they know very well they are considered a burden, and they spend much of the film trying to “make way for tomorrow” as painlessly as possible.  The final section of “Make Way for Tomorrow” – one of the most deeply humane half hours in cinema – sees the couple finally reunited, briefly, in New York City: she will go to the Old Women’s home (“[Father] must never know that I’m going…this is one thing that has to be handled my way,” the mother insists), he will go to California to stay with another daughter “for a time” (the phrase takes on increasingly insidious tones over the course of the film - a promise no one intends to keep), and while they do not admit it, we know that the couple, in essence, are saying goodbye before their deaths.  Together, in one final day, they sit on a park bench, get a pitch from a car salesman, visit the hotel where they had honeymooned years ago (the way the proprietor of the hotel listens – really honest to God listens – as they reminisce and even playfully bicker is deeply touching), dance to an old favorite (also touching: the way the bandleader sees them struggling with a modern song, and transitions into a waltz).  The movie slows down for them; they don’t need to hurry.  We have grown so fond of them that we are happy to slow down with them.  The idyll can’t last, of course; time marches on.  We must make way for tomorrow.

7.     Matewan (1987, d. John Sayles)

“There ain’t but two sides in this world – them that work and them that don’t.  You work.  They don’t.”

Inspired by true events – the “Battle of Matewan”, a 1920 coal miner’s strike that resulted in a gunfight between disenfranchised miners and the company thugs sent to prevent them from unionizing – John Sayles’ “Matewan” manages the canny trick of being both grand and intimate.  On one hand this is a filmic ballad, mythic both in its scope (a large cast of characters, the backdrop of the West Virginia hills) and its story, a militantly pro-labor fable about the struggle between “them that work and them that don’t”, with the labor organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper, making a stunning film debut) a modern martyr, an American Saint coming to unionize coal country at a time when even talk of the union was a virtual death sentence.  (Hickey and Griggs, the two “company men” sent to keep the strikers in line, stalk through the film with the grim, hateful determination of contract assassins in a gangster film.)  And yet at the same time, “Matewan” feels lived in and real. Haskell Wexler’s stunning cinematography is both painterly and hard edged – it’s beautiful without ever feeling precious (the movie’s look and scope belie what was apparently a a very tight budget) – and Sayles’ vast cast of characters are all richly and fully drawn.  Look at this cast list: Chris Cooper, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, David Strathairn, Bob Gunton, Josh Mostel, Joe Grifalsi, Nancy Mette, Ken Jenkins…any one of these characters would be interesting enough to be the centerpiece of a film (I had particular affection for Strathairn’s Sid Hatfield, a haunted lawman with his own moral allegiances – you’re not entirely sure for the first third of the picture if he’s heroic or villainous). They’re woven effortlessly together into a grand tapestry of a movie that is deeply involving, with subplots about treachery and betrayal that wouldn’t be out of place in a pulp paperback.  ”Matewan” combines the density of a great novel with the poetry of a John Ford Western, complete with heroes and villains and a final standoff on main street.  It’s a triumph.

8.     Something Wild (1986, d. Jonathan Demme)

“You’re a closet rebel.”

She sees him across a small New York diner – a hole in the wall – dressed in a suit and tie, very conservative, very yuppie, a “nice young man” with an appealing goony bird quality who quietly pockets his check and slips out of the restaurant without paying for his meal.  She confronts him in the street about running out on the check; he warms up when she tells him he’s “a closet rebel” – establishment types always like to see themselves as rebels, the same way wild types often have a yearning for domesticity. She’s a bit of a startling sight, with her tight black dress, close cropped Louise Brooks bob and bright jewelry. She tells him her name is “Lulu” (another allusion to Louise Brooks); his name is Charlie.  The way they meet is funny, yes, but there’s also a slightly sinister undercurrent – who is this woman…?  What does she want with this apparently square guy…?  For that matter, who is he…?  He tells Lulu he’s married, shows her pictures of his kids (she’s turned on by the kink of having a fling with a married guy, and perhaps relieved that his marital status means “catching feelings” is an improbability), but in a motel room he pretends to talk to his “wife” on the phone while we can hear an empty dial tone.  We’re not sure whether we should find her recklessness funny (Lulu’s laissez faire attitude towards traffic laws results in some sight gags worthy of Hal Needham) or frightening – she robs a liquor store while Charlie is obliviously talking to his secretary on a pay phone, and we wonder if we’re on the cusp of a “Bonnie and Clyde” story, lovers on the run.  It’s an easy cliché to praise movies for “mixing tones”, but rarely has a movie ever juggled apparently disjunctive modes as effortlessly as “Something Wild” does.  In much the same way Lulu and Charlie aren’t sure how much they can trust each other, we’re not sure how much we can trust them, or the film they’re in; what starts as a screwball comedy threatening to break out into a road movie crime spree begins to deepen, grow sadder, more poignant.  Charlie isn’t the nice guy he seems, and Lulu is sadder and sweeter than we might’ve first expected, with both demons and angels in her rear view mirror (a sequence where she takes Charlie home to meet her mother – and this apparently placid Midwestern woman turns out to be much more knowledgeable about what’s going on with her daughter than we’d expect – is a little masterpiece of empathy).  Most movies reduce their characters to stock types, if only for expediency; by the third act, we want to know who everybody is and where our rooting interest should be.  “Something Wild” refuses to dumb itself down — we keep finding new layers to both Lulu and Charlie (and for that matter of Lulu’s “old friend” Ray – a startlingly sexy and dangerous Ray Liotta, who bursts into the movie like a wild animal), and two characters who at the beginning seemed like colorful archetypes have become deep, involving people we feel we know.  The journey they take together is funny and scary, euphoric and sad, kinkily sexy and dangerously wild.

9.     Destroyer (2018, d. Karyn Kusama)

“You wanna be seen.  But you can’t do what you want.  Why?  ‘Cause someone’s gonna see you and you’re gonna get punished for doing what you want.  I got good news and bad news.  There’s nobody fucking watching.”

Erin Bell doesn’t so much arrive at the crime scene as stumble onto it.  She’s slept in her car; she looks drunk, and her fellow officers swear out loud at the sight of her.  We’ve seen this character archetype many, many times – the haunted detective of film noir, the compromised “hero” with a troubled past and a score to settle – but normally these characters are male, and there’s an implied “coolness” to their shambling no-fucks-given attitude.  Erin Bell is a wreck, a hangover in human form (Nicole Kidman is initially unrecognizable, buried under years of scar-tissue make-up), and you viscerally feel the chaos she’s made of her life, the agony of collapsing onto a hard wood floor, the embarrassment of trying to call out your underage daughter at a bar when you yourself are too drunk to stand.  “Destroyer” is a pretty classical noir – if you’ve seen a few crime films before, it will not come as a surprise that Bell’s latest case is related to a past case, a past trauma – but having it be a woman stumbling and shambling her way through the plot really does reanimate what could be clichés.  Kidman is absolutely remarkable here, fearlessly and frankly unlikeable – you don’t so much admire her as you’re fascinated by her, in awe of her unstoppable determination, and in awe at times that she can stay on her feet.  (As Sheila O’Malley pointed out, there’s particular tension in a scene where Erin visits a corrupt lawyer – given oily life by Bradley Whitford – and we realize that despite her brazen confidence, she’s stumbled into this situation without back-up, is more vulnerable than she’d like to let on, and has no idea how she’s going to get out of the hole she’s dug.)  The movie is canny in the way it uses familiar noir tropes to disguise some of the other narrative games it’s playing – I won’t spoil anything here, but suffice to say that the story has a couple of “twists” that are pretty predictable but still satisfyingly executed, which help conceal an ingenious structural conceit.  Like many of the best noirs, “Destroyer” is ultimately about guilt; set in the grungy-yet-heightened LA that is normally Michael Mann’s stomping ground, the film creates a world that is seemingly devoid of outside morality or justice.  “There’s nobody fucking watching,” a younger Erin is told by the charismatic criminal Silas (Toby Kebbell) when she’s embedded with his gang as an undercover plant.  He’s both right and wrong.  Erin will cross legal and ethical boundaries, will do things she shouldn’t even contemplate, and there is no higher authority waiting to judge her.  But Erin is always watching.  She sees herself.  And that makes her impossible to live with.

10.     Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989, d. Woody Allen)

 “God is a luxury I can’t afford.” 

That line is spoken by Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) to his conscience during a dark night of the soul.  Rosenthal is a successful ophthalmologist, respected within his community, loved by his family and friends, who has committed the “minor” indiscretion of entering into an affair with an airline stewardess (Anjelica Huston, all nervous intelligence – she’s like the cutely neurotic female leads of Woody Allen’s early comedies turned sour and tragic), and now finds himself seriously contemplating asking his gangster brother (Jerry Orbach) to “take care” of the problem.  Like “Destroyer”, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” takes place in a universe where there doesn’t seem to be any higher power. Nobody is going to come looking for the rich, white, outwardly charming Judah Rosenthal; no one will ever suspect him of even having been capable of the sins he has committed.  The only possible retribution Judah can receive is from himself; and as he begins to realize with some horror, “murder most foul” is a sin he may very well be able to live with.  “Crimes and Misdemeanors” structures itself around two contrapuntal stories: half of the film is about Judah’s moral dilemma, a kind of combination Fritz Lang/Ingmar Bergman murder drama (this is arguably Allen’s most successful venture into Dostoyevsky territory), and the other is an apparently breezy romantic comedy about an unhappily married filmmaker (Allen) who has been enlisted to make a documentary about his hated sitcom writing brother-in-law (Alan Alda, magnificently supercilious) and finds himself falling hopelessly in love with the documentary’s producer (Mia Farrow, playing a level headed woman who sees emotional disaster coming and smiles patiently).  The two stories at first seem to function simply as counterpoints: Landau’s story might be too claustrophobically grim on its own and Allen’s too lightweight, but each story gives “permission” to the other, Allen’s story allowing for unforced comic “relief”, Landau’s story keeping Allen’s from becoming too lightweight.  But as the film goes on, the two stories begin to disturbingly mirror one another.  Jerry Orbach’s black sheep brother, who nurses childhood wounds and is well aware of how his more “successful” brother sees him, starts to feel increasingly like a dark mirror of Alda’s smug brother-in-law; for that matter, Alda also seems a direct analogue to Judah – both rich, pompous men, charming on the outside, oily and empty on the inside, valuing material success above all else – Judah is at least intelligent enough to have a glimmer of how empty he is.  (This is some of Martin Landau’s greatest work – there’s a Shakespearean dimension to his character, an evil man who only belated recognizes his own hollowness.)  For his part, Allen’s Cliff isn’t entirely morally clear himself: he’s been lying to his wife (Joanna Gleeson), cheerfully planning to detonate his marriage, as morally culpable for his imagined affair as Landau is for his real one — his objections to Alan Alda’s flirtation with Farrow become ironic, because he’s basically been practicing the same oily behavior himself.  All of us sin; ambiguously, “Crimes and Misdemeanors” arrives at the conclusion that most of us are ready and willing to live with those sins – whether they be minor indiscretions or homicide.  By the end of the film, even murder has become just a cocktail anecdote to Judah Rosenthal.  He can rationalize anything (“maybe I made some questionable moves” is the most he will allow his conscience).  The film suggests, disturbingly, that most of us can.

BEST ACTOR – Jeff Daniels, “Something Wild”

The beauty of E. Max Frye’s screenplay for “Something Wild” is the way it keeps peeling back, onion like, to reveal deeper and deeper layers.  All of the central characters are more than they at first appear, but Jeff Daniels’ Charlie is a particularly complex collection of contradictions – a broken man posing as a success, a square posing as a free spirit, a lost soul posing as the picture of stability – and Daniels unashamedly invests himself into the part.  Male actors often don’t want to look “weak”, don’t want to appear pathetic or clumsy or stupid; Daniels has no such vanity.  It’s a brave performance in a film full of brave performances.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Max Adrian in “Song of Summer”; Gene Hackman and Al Pacino in “Scarecrow”; Martin Landau in “Crimes and Misdemeanors”; Peter O’Toole in “The Stunt Man”.

BEST ACTRESS - Nicole Kidman, “Destroyer”/”Eyes Wide Shut”/”To Die For”

2020 somehow ended up being “The Year of Nicole Kidman” for me – in the three terrific films (and performances) I saw from her this year, she transformed herself so thoroughly that I didn’t really think of the three characters as coming from the same actress until I sat down and started making this list.  The battered bull in a China shop anger of “Destroyer”’s detective, the erotic frustration of her stifled wife in “Eyes Wide Shut”, the hilariously empty headed (and hearted) fame junkie in “To Die For” – these are remarkable creations in remarkable films.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Stephane Audren in “Babette’s Feast”; Jean Arthur in “Only Angels Have Wings”; Melanie Griffith in “Something Wild”; Ashley Judd in “Bug”.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Ray Liotta, “Something Wild”

 Few movies have made a harder left turn midway thru; fewer still have put so much of the weight of that turn onto one character’s shoulders, and by proxy one actor’s shoulders.  But Liotta, in his breakout performance, is like an earthquake that tears “Something Wild” in half, elevating an already terrific movie into something transcendent.  Liotta is a perpetually underrated actor, and he’s been great in lots of movies, but I’m not sure he’s ever been as exciting and sexy and dangerous as he was here.  He has that quality that DeNiro had in “Mean Streets”: you see him and think, “That guy could do anything.”

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Shannon in “Bug”; James Earle Jones, David Strathairn and Kevin Tighe in “Matewan”; Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” and “The Witches of Eastwick”; Peter Sellers in “Lolita”

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Reese Witherspoon, “Election”

Everyone in Alexander Payne’s scathing politics-as-high-school satire is delightfully awful – the movie’s scabrous viciousness is breathtaking – which makes it a little surprising that Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick has almost become a heroic figure for certain audiences.  Partially it’s a matter of context – as annoying as Tracy is, she’s still just a kid, and her villainization by Matthew Broderick’s creepy high school teacher, an adult who should know better, makes her inherently sympathetic – but I think it’s largely because Reese Witherspoon is so damn good in the role.  Tracy passes John Cleese’s test for characters in comedy – we will put up with a character we wouldn’t sit next to on a bus for five minutes as long as they make us laugh.  Tracy is too earnestly driven for her cynicism to be truly hateful, and Witherspoon invests the part with a gleeful, infectious energy.  (Her temper tantrums, scored to Ennio Morricone’s score from “Navajo Joe”, are little masterpieces of physical comedy.)

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Joan Blondell in “Footlight Parade”; Elizabeth Debicki in “Tenet”; Rosie Perez in “Fearless”; Valerie Perrine in “Lenny”.

BEST SHORT FILM

“Le sabotier du Val de Loir” (1956, d. Jacques Demy) An unexpectedly moving film about the virtue of being a good craftsman.

BEST ANIMATED FILM

Tex Avery’s MGM Shorts (1942-1957) One of the smarter decisions I made this year was finally biting the bullet and buying the wonderful Region 2 DVD set of Tex Avery’s (almost) complete works (not so smart: doing it right before Warner Archive began releasing cleaned up Blu-ray sets — whoops!).  Avery got his start at the Schlesinger studios – producer of the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies for Warner Brothers – fundamentally shaping the Warner house style: Friz Freleng was at the studio longer, but it’s not an exaggeration to say that Avery is the reason the Looney Tunes are “Looney”, and he was arguably the central force in creating Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny.  But while he did some top work at Warners (“Hollywood Steps Out” and “The Heckling Hare” are particular favorites), it was just a warm up to his truly great period at MGM, where he created a singular series of cartoons that made him a legend.  Throughout the ‘40s and into the ‘50s, Avery’s old Warners co-horts – Freleng, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Frank Tashlin – were creating cartoon masterpieces driven by great characters; in contrast, Avery’s MGM work is more gag based – aside from the immortal Droopy, he never really developed a cartoon “star” to rival any of the Warners players, and even Droopy is a delightfully one joke presence, an apparently feckless little mutt who can somehow bend the laws of space and time around him.  Avery’s manic MGM work is more “conceptual” than what was going on at Warners – Avery made cartoons that knew they were cartoons, and called attention to it every opportunity they got.  (Fourth wall breaking isn’t so much a surprise in an Avery cartoon as it is de rigueur; he built cartoon worlds specifically so he could smash them.)  Avery also tended to recycle gags and concepts more often than his old Warners brethren; in a way he’s like the Howard Hawks of cartoon directors, going back to old ideas and twisting them into new configurations.  (“Rock-a-Bye Bear” and “Deputy Droopy” are essentially the same cartoon – in each, the central character(s) have to try to avoid making noise and waking up a hibernating bear and a wary sheriff, respectively; while their nemesis, an anonymous dog in the former cartoon and Droopy in the latter, keep contriving ways to get them into noisy situations.  But “Deputy Droopy” takes the already frantic machinations of “Rock-a-Bye Bear” into the realm of the truly grotesque, involving, I shit you not, head-and-body-swapping gags that play like the cartoon version of a Cronenberg film.)  Avery’s great gift was to be the inadvertent Brecht of American animation, showing you the machinery behind the film and still making you laugh.  His genius is imitable, but ultimately unmatchable.

FAVORITE SCORES OF THE YEAR

1.     Perry Botkin, “Murder by Contract”

2.     James Horner, “Battle Beyond the Stars”

3.     Michael Kamen, “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” (the only good thing about this movie, aside from Alan Rickman’s delightful scenery chewing)

4.     Michel Legrand, “Bay of Angels”

5.     John Williams, “The Witches of Eastwick”

BEST SONG SCORE

“Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” and “Team America: World Police”

A special award to two very funny (and very politically incorrect) comedies, both of which include among their highlights terrific songs.  “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls’” ‘60s-style tunes – composed by Stu Phillips as part pastiche, part spoof and part actual examples of kitsch rock – are just as catchy as any of the pop confections The Mamas and the Papas were making in the same period (“Look On Up At the Bottom” is the one I’ve been listening to most obsessively, but “Find It” slaps as well). “Team America World Police”’s songs brilliantly combine musical theater storytelling with gloriously puerile jokes — “Freedom Isn’t Free” is such a perfectly pitched parody of a particular form of bullshit “America First, Baby!” post 9/11 single that it had me crying.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

ALL THE RIGHT MOVES (1983, d. Michael Chapman) I don’t know jack or shit about football, so I knew this was working for me midway thru when I found myself really, honestly, truly invested in whether or not the high school team was going to win the game.  Great early performances by Tom Cruise and Lea Thompson (she should’ve been a bigger star), terrific support by Craig T. Nelson, and while it’s not quite in “Deer Hunter” territory, there’s more grit and authentic detail of living in a steel town than you’d expect.  RIP Michael Chapman.

ANOTHER WOMAN (1988, d. Woody Allen) Allen’s dramas can have an unproductively claustrophobic quality – afraid of letting anything be “funny”, he sometimes makes them hermetically sealed and lifeless, as though they’re under glass – but this one gets the balance just right, in no small part due to great performances across the board, particularly Gena Rowlands, Ian Holm (RIP) and a brilliant one scene appearance by Betty Buckley.

ARS (1959, d. Jacques Demy) I mostly know (and love) Demy for his vibrantly Technicolor musical work, so it’s kind of astonishing how well he can also do the “Bressonian austerity” thing. 

THE ASSASSINATION BUREAU (1969, d. Basil Dearden) An action comedy starring Oliver Reed, Telly Savalas and the exquisite Diana Rigg (RIP)?!?  It’s like somebody made a movie just for me.

BAY OF ANGELS (1963, d. Jacques Demy) Would play well on a double bill with “California Split” – it’s sort of the ritzy European vacation precursor to Altman’s sweaty wallow, but they’re both forged in the same churning furnace of despair.

THE BED SITTING ROOM (1969, d. Richard Lester) What would happen if a Monty Python film was horrifying?

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1970, d. Russ Meyer) “That was entertaining, but I don’t know if it was good,” said my brother when I watched this with him.  Exactly.

BLOOD OF THE BEASTS (1949, d. Georges Franju) Disturbingly beautiful.

BODY DOUBLE (1984, d. Brian De Palma) “You think I’m politically incorrect…?  I’ll show you politically incorrect!” Brian De Palma screams, shaking one fist at the critical establishment and furiously masturbating with the other; the result abandons anything resembling good taste, to pretty spectacular effect.  Everybody loves Melanie Griffith in this – and for good reason! – but I’ll (apparently) buck critical consensus by saying that I actually think Craig Wasson is just right here, as a “hero” denying how sleazy he actually is.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1999, d. Martin Scorsese) The exhausted 3:00 a.m. B-side to the fire and fury of “Taxi Driver”.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974, d. Sam Peckinpah) Sam had issues.

BUG (2006, d. William Friedkin) Never underestimate Hurricane Billy.

CAROL (2015, d. Todd Haynes) As beautiful as a falling snowflake.

CHRISTINE (1983, d. John Carpenter) Carpenter tends to slag this one off in interviews – it was a “for work” gig after the failure of his masterpiece “The Thing” – but I thought it was a terrific piece of pop horror.  “SHOW ME.”

COP LAND (1997, d. James Mangold) Disturbingly timely.

DELIVERANCE (1972, d. John Boorman) Undeniably potent.

EASY STREET (1917, d. Charlie Chaplin) It’s interesting watching these early Mutual shorts, and basically seeing Chaplin gradually figure out how movies work.

EL DORADO (1966, d. Howard Hawks) Delightful, with the exception of one really lamentable racist gag near the climax. Not quite as good as Rio Bravo, but what is…?

ELECTION (1999, d. Alexander Payne) OK, having finally seen this one, I can kinda understand critics being suspicious of Alexander Payne’s intentions.  Still pretty funny, though, and in a way its general “a plague on both your houses” cynicism feels more daring now.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998, d. Terry Gilliam) I absolutely mean this as a compliment: one of the most headache inducing movies I’ve ever seen.

THE FRONT PAGE (1931, d. Lewis Milestone) No, it’s not as good as “His Girl Friday” – Hawks’ film is one of those rare cases of a remake that rewrites and substantially improves an already terrific source – but this is still pretty great, and beautifully directed, with an incessantly roving camera.

THE FUGITIVE (1993, d. Andrew Davis) Terrific entertainment.

THE GREY (2011, d. Joe Carnahan) Beautiful and brutal, anchored by a stunning, raw nerve performance by Liam Neeson. 

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990, d. John McTiernan) When McTiernan was cooking, he was untouchable.  RIP Sean Connery.

INSIDE MAN (2006, d. Spike Lee) Lee proving that if he just wanted to make slick entertainments, he’s as capable at it as Spielberg.

ITALIANAMERICAN (1974, d. Martin Scorsese) I can see why this is Scorsese’s favorite of his movies.  Delightful.

THE LAST OF SHEILA (1973, d. Herbert Ross) Wonderfully intricate.  In a cast of all-stars having a ball, Joan Hackett was the standout for me – the most vulnerable, and the most tragic.

LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945, d. John M. Stahl) A breathtaking color noir; that it looks like a standard studio melodrama makes the moments of both physical and emotional violence more shocking.  Honestly, I think Gene Tierney’s character is pretty sympathetic in this (except for, y’know, the murder and stuff).

LENNY (1974, d. Bob Fosse) Dazzling.  As Richard Linklater said, Bob Fosse made several “last movies”.

LOLITA (1963, d. Stanley Kubrick) Funny and painful in equal measure.  (I’ve never read the novel or seen the Lyne film; based on how difficult I found this “compromised” version of the story, I don’t think I could bear them.)

LOVE & MERCY (2014, d. Bill Pohlad) Occasionally afflicted with what Mark Kermode would refer to as “chubby hmm” moments (“Paul McCartney said it was the best song ever written!” – “hmm” goes the audience, recognizing the name), but fewer than you might fear, and anchored by two remarkable lead performances by Paul Dano and John Cusack, a terrific supporting turn by Elizabeth Banks, and brilliant sound design.  I like but don’t love The Beach Boys; this made me a true believer. 

THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS (1983, d. Carl Reiner) “God damn your drunk tests are hard!”  RIP Carl Reiner.

THE MARTIAN (2015, d. Ridley Scott) Really wish I’d caught this during its theatrical run.

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958, d. Irving Lerner) A mean little masterwork – you can see its fingerprints all over “Taxi Driver”.

MY NAME IS NOBODY (1973, d. Tonino Valerii) I was kind of dreading going into this that it was going to be too jokey for its own good, but it’s a delight – the Spaghetti Western becoming self aware enough to kid itself, while still delivering the goods.

THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN SLEEPOVER (2010, d. David Robert Mitchell) A lovely little movie. 

OPERA (1987, d. Dario Argento) Something of a testament film for Argento, combining all his obsessions and cranking them up to 11.  Simultaneously absolutely ridiculous and utterly sublime; extra points for (to steal a phrase from Drew McWeeny) beaming in its ending from outer fucking space.

PARK ROW (1952, d. Samuel Fuller) I don’t think Sam Fuller had an insincere bone in his body, but even by his standards, this is a beautifully earnest love letter of a movie, all explosive energy and admiration for the free press.  Moviegoing bliss.

THE PAWNSHOP (1916, d. Charlie Chaplin) Still very, very funny.

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945, d. Albert Lewin) An admirably understated horror tale.

PLATOON (1986, d. Oliver Stone) Holds up.

POINT BREAK (1991, d. Kathryn Bigelow) As close as anyone’s come to making an American equivalent of a John Woo movie.  Easily the best action film I watched last year.

QUICK CHANGE (1990, d. Howard Franklin and Bill Murray) “What kind of clown are you?” “The crying on the inside kind.”  Direct again, Bill!

RIDE THE PINK HORSE (1947, d. Robert Montgomery) A pretty terrific piece of work, with Montgomery demonstrating admirable skill behind the camera (there’s a long take at the beginning of the film that is controlled without being show-offy) and working well in front of it (his surliness as a performer works well for his slightly unlikeable character).

SAINT JACK (1979, d. Peter Bogdanovich) Bogdanovich back in character study mode, with wonderful results.  An under heralded gem.

SCARECROW (1973, d. Jerry Schatzberg) I really, really miss this whole sub-genre of ‘70s character dramas set in the “real America”.  I guess “Sundance movies” are supposed to be our equivalent, but they seem so formula driven compared to movies like “Five Easy Pieces” or the early Altman pictures or this, free roaming movies where we’re just happy to spend time with complicated characters.  (Hackman and Pacino have rarely been better, and that’s saying something.)  Special note for Penelope Allen, who is heartbreaking in her one scene.

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943, d. Mark Robson) So very, very sad.

THE SEVEN-UPS (1973, d. Philip D’Antoni) A solid if unexceptional cop thriller in its opening act – it’s doing a pretty good imitation of that “gritty street level” thing that “French Connection” codified, but there’s only one “French Connection” – that pushes itself straight into four star territory with that chase sequence.

SONG OF SUMMER (1968, d. Ken Russell) Part of me wants to rebel against the tendency to call this the “Ken Russell movie for people who don’t like Ken Russell movies” – I like Ken Russell movies just fine, thank you very much, and the tendency of critics to use this beautiful Omnibus film as a kind of cudgel against him (“see, he can make a normal movie, why does he have to do all this other stuff??”) is irritating.  But I shouldn’t hold that against the film itself.  Beautiful work by all three principals – Maureen Pryor, Christopher Gable, and (in probably his greatest performance) Russell stalwart Max Adrian.

SPEED (1994, d. Jan de Bont) “Die Hard on a bus”, went the joke in 1994, but this comes damn close to being as good as “Die Hard”.  The other great Keanu Reeves action film I watched last year.

THE STUNT MAN (1980, d. Richard Rush) A Chinese puzzle box of a movie that (for a change) actually is as clever as it thinks it is.

THEM! (1954, d. Gordon Douglas) Holds up remarkably well – the picture is so well acted and directed, and so eerie in its early stretch, that by the time the silly looking giant bugs showed up, I was totally invested.

TINY FURNITURE (2010, d. Lena Dunham) I have no other opinions to offer on Lena Dunham at this time.  But seriously, this is pretty funny.

TO DIE FOR (1995, d. Gus Van Sant) Gleefully, hilariously nasty.  Bonus points for the Cronenberg cameo.

UNBREAKABLE (2000, d. M. Night Shyamalan) Shyamalan at his best was quite good.

WALK HARD: THE DEWEY COX STORY (2007, d. Jake Kasdan) As Patrick Willems said, this should’ve permanently killed off the whole, lamentable sub-genre of “musical biopics”.  A sublimely silly spoof that earns comparison with the best Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker joints.

WARLOCK (1959, d. Edward Dmytryk) Like some of the great John Ford Westerns of the same period, this uses the familiar elements of the genre as a way to smuggle in all sorts of interesting and complicated ideas.  The relationship between Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn jumps the tracks from homosexual subtext into text.

WINCHESTER ’73 (1950, d. Anthony Mann) My first Mann Western, and I was suitably impressed!

THE WORLD OF JACQUES DEMY (1995, d. Agnes Varda) In a way, this now seems to stand as a memorial for Varda as much as for Demy.

THE YAKUZA (1974, d. Sydney Pollack) Turns out among his many other talents, Sydney Pollack was actually a pretty damn great action director when given the opportunity.

So what do I need to catch up on…? – CB