I have finally added my top 10 list of 2020 to the archives. It’s been long-gestating and I’m as satisfied by it, until, maybe, the unavoidable rewatch of David Fincher’s “Mank,” and Pietro Marcello’s “Martin Eden.”
There’s also the question of whether some films should qualify as 2020 or 2021 releases (“The Father,” “Truffle Hunters”). Whether an Amazon mini-series anthology should count as cinema (“Small Axe: Lovers Rock”). Ditto a brilliant HBO concert doc (“American Utopia”).
Maybe we should just toss the rulebook out the window and count everything. That’s what I’m doing. Pandemic be damned. Cannes boss Thierry Fremaux said recently of this last miserable year in cinema, “2019 was a great year for films, but 2020 was the most disastrous year in the history of the cinema.” Agreed. But it’s not like 2021 has been any better …
1) Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman)
2) Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)aa
3) First Cow (Kelly Reinhardt)
3) Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV;Turner Ross)
4) Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)
5) The Truffle Hunters (Michael Dweck; Gregory Kershaw)
6) The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)
7) Bad Education (Cory Finley)
8) Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne)
9) The Assistant (Kitty Green)
10) Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho)
This is the adaptation of the nonfiction book by Dan Schilling and Lori Longfritz. It wrapped production in February and has been in post-production ever since. The film test-screened a few months ago.