National Board of Review Names ‘Da 5 Bloods’ Best Film of 2020

The National Board of Review (NBR) is often the first group to announce its picks for the best films and performances of the year, but these are not normal times and awards season 2021 is a unique beast. At this point, we’re headed towards one of the more unpredictable Oscar races for Best Picture. Every major critics group has chosen a different Best Film winner; New York went for “First Cow,” Los Angeles went for “Small Axe,” Boston went for “Nomadland,” and now, NBR has decided that Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” was the best film of the past year.

NBR is made up of a group of film enthusiasts, industry professionals, academics, and filmmakers. Last year, the National Board of Review gave its top honors to Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman.” The gangster masterpiece went on to nab 10 Oscar nominations. Lee’s film may not get that many, but a Best Picture nomination is almost sealed. Nearly every NBR winner for Best Film this decade has earned an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, including “The Post,” “Manchester by the Sea,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road,” and “Green Book.” So, bank on it.

George Clooney’s abhorrent “The Midnight Sky,” a big-budgeted stinker from Netflix, managed to get named as one of the ten best movies by NBR. It’s just one of those years. Also, having Radha Jones’ “The Forty-Year-Old Version” included as part of the list is a joke, right? Come to think of it, I didn’t even review the film at Sundance, nor did I even bother to write something about it when it started streaming on Netflix. Whatever buzz it garnered at Sundance last January, completely evaporated later in the year, even during a pandemic-stricken movie year where critics had to rely heavily on Sundance movies for their awards.

The NBR top 10 is as follows:

First Cow
The Forty-Year-Old Version
Judas and the Black Messiah
The Midnight Sky
Minari
News of the World
Nomadland
Promising Young Woman
Soul
Sound of Metal

I have a little history with Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods,” which I HATED upon first viewing, but had a complete 180% reversal when I saw it again a few months ago. This kind of cataclysmic reversal in opinion hasn’t happened to me in years over a movie. Here’s what I had to say when I saw it again in December:

“I’m still kicking myself for writing a negative review of Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods” back in June. The film’s release, incredibly well-timed, came post-mortem after the U.S. went through close to two weeks of protests and riots due to the murder of George Floyd. The timing, you might say, couldn’t be more appropriate; after all, Lee, always the political firecracker, infused his latest film with snap-a-minute political undertones. The contrarian went into the film ready to shoot it down (Lee has been on a bit of a rough streak these last 20 years). Rewatching it this past week has given form for a total reevaluation of Lee’s 24th feature-film. Instead of pointing out the flaws, I embraced them, just like I did with many of his great movies in the ’80s and ’90s. With Lee, you have to accept that any of his films won’t be perfect — there’s a messy passion that comes in all of them, including this one. In ‘Bloods,’ which clocks in at an epic 2 hours and 40 minutes, he splatters the screen with ambition as four emotionally damaged African-American vets return to Vietnam to recover the body of their fallen brother and to dig up the gold bars they buried during combat back in the day. Delroy Lindo is superb here as the MAGA-hat wearing ‘Blood,’ who seems to be partly-inspired and partly-hommaged by Humphrey Bogart’s Dobbs in “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”