Top ten - 2020

This is probably going to be the most extensively prepared top 10 I'll ever do - this is the last year where I'll need to watch a film or two a week for radio commitments as my 2XX gig has wrapped up, and I don't have a film-centred gig lined up to replace it at the moment. For better or worse, I'm applying the same rules I have previously, so films are included in 2020 if they've had a general release in Australian cinemas (i.e. outside of festivals or one-off screenings) - and despite cinemas being closed in Canberra for three months, I still got in over 100 films. For full listings of everything I saw (old, new, streaming, cinema, festivals, whatever) you can look at my letterboxd account at  https://letterboxd.com/simbot/ - which is usually updated quicker than this website - you can use that if you're wondering "why didn't you consider XYZ" 

Baby Teeth - A great tale of adolescence, teenage indulgence, and making the best of a limited time - I'd seen the theatre version of this almost a decade ago but this betrays none of its theatrical origins - it's up close and lively and has a great cast telling an emotionally rich story 

A Beautiful Day in the Neigbourhood - Once upon a time I had an aversion to Tom Hanks in any role that wasn't a CGI cowboy. That time has past, partially due to roles like this -where the sincerity isn't overdone, the breakthroughs are earned and the ensemble are all given their spaces to shine. Made my grinchy heart grow three times bigger

David Byrne's American Utopia - This is a damn beautiful recording of a stunning broadway concert, making a virtue of simple stylish design and choices - David Byrne with the assistance of Spike Lee delivers visual and sonic joy in a gorgeous package that plays classic songs in a here-and-now context that gives it even more life.

The Invisible Man - Leigh Whannel follows up his sublime "Upgrade" with an even better horror thriller - taking HG Welles classic novel concept and bringing it absolutely up to date through switching the protagonist and doubling down on empathy. It's startlingly smart, great at exploiting screen space and it goes delightfully over the top in all the right places

The Lighthouse - A tight story for two actors, Willem Dafoe and Robert Patterson, alone in a lighthouse with only some menacing seagulls and something mysterious to accompany them - this is a simple story of how men drive one another nuts, given gorgeous treatment as the isolation leads to the men turning on each other and themselves in ways both brutal and amusing and ultimately terrifyingly surprising. 

 Little Women - I admit I've never seen any earlier versions of this nor read the books, but  this one grabbed my attention, using four great actresses as the March sisters dealing with the challenges of civil-war-era Massachusetts and their hopes, expectations and eventual choices, judging none of them and simultaneously telling the story and critiquing its assumptions in a finale that made this a film that'll be on my rewatch queue shortly. 

Nomadland - An examination of a life after everything falls away, Frances McDormand provides a great central performance as a woman who's left behind after her husband's death and her town collapses after the death of its key industry, and her attempt to survive with minimal ties around her - how she gets support from those around her, through small jobs living paycheque to paycheque through the kindness of strangers, always keeping a slight reserve to avoid emotional entanglement as much as she can. It's a film very much of the moment, real and true and heartbreaking and engaging.

Promising Young Woman - A spectacular film with a great central performance and cleverly cast support, looking at the way women do and don't survive after male violence - it's basically a rape-revenge movie without any of the exploitative elements and with wit, intelligence, incisiveness, gorgeously shot, performed and scripted. It uses every weapon in its arsenal to point out the price of casual dismissiveness of women's mistreatment, and never lets the audience off the hook. 

Ride your wave - An anime delight, a romance between a firefighter and a surfing oceonographer which becomes far stranger and more delightful as the plot develops, with a complete earworm of a song in it that delighted me completely. 

Shaun The Sheep - Farmageddon - a ridiculous almost-silent comedy about a farmer, a dog, several sheep and the cute alien that disrupts their community in several delightful ways. Goofy and spoofy and Aardman at their best, this gave me big grins from ear to ear.  

Near misses - First Love, Freaky, Monos, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Possessor. 

Woulda been under consideration if I'd included streaming - Da 5 Bloods, Disclosure, Palm Springs, Soul 

Nomadland

 This is an expertly observed deep study of a single character epitomizing an entire culture and lifestyle - long-established actors like McDormand and Strathairn fit in perfectly with the supporting cast largely of non-professionals who have indeed been living the rootless lifestyle of modern-day American Nomads, living in their vehicle and travelling where there's work available after their long-term plans have gone up in smoke. There's a cumulative effect as various interactions show how McDormand is deliberately isolating herself, and why, while still being generous with her time and resources. There's heart and soul in this one in abundance and Zhao captures a landscape and people and emotional soul that is rare and astounding.

Shock Wave 2

A fun twisty turntable lotsa explosions film - never mind the 2, this is more a thematic sequel as it also stars Andy Lau in a film about bomb disposal but doesn't carry over any plot - this does have a fair bit of its own plot to carry and a lot of melodrama, dubious cgi and Andy Lau alternatively being stoic and hyperemotional. I was kept engaged throughout

The Midnight Sky

 This is a film that could be better if it were dumber - there's some decent action moments in here, combined with some unsteady and vague world building and emotional moments - it splits between two stories, one starring Clooney as a radio technician left behind on a desolate earth, one set on a ship returning from a colony scouting mission returning to that same desolate earth. They both take their turns at being in focus, and both have their moments, but ultimately neither utterly satisfies, and the final twist in the tale is awfully forced and awkward.

Wonder Woman 1984

 There's a certain kind of monkey's paw situation when you agree to direct a big blockbuster film - you get all the resources and publicity and eyeballs, but in exchange subtle themes and careful plot points go out the window. Instead it's all loudness and blatantly stating your themes like thesis statements and grand gestures for the lowest common denominator. Wonder Woman 84 has a couple of requirements it's decided to meet - introduce a new female nemesis for Wonder Woman, have a world-engulfing evil plot and reintroduce her deceased love interest Steve Trevor. The first and last of these works reasonably well, the middle is where everything turns to sludge. Pedro Pascal's tied to this and struggles mightily to carry a dud of a storyline, but Gal Gadot also gets sabotaged with a long ambling speech that is meant to resolve it but ends up being a parade of banal platitudes. There's some decent action sequences (although a climactic CGI-and-darkly lit fight brings back the bad memories of the messy resolution of the original film), some reasonable comedy and nostalgic tie-ins from the period, but it's all a bit of a messy sludge.

The Dry

 This suffers a bit from genre-requirements intruding on a story that could be intriguing in completely other ways - the story of a policeman who finds himself returning to his old country town home when an old friend apparently commits suicide, kilning his wife and children - suffers because ultimately it doesn't believe in playing through the self-evident solution and prefers to play a who-dunnit, rather than settling with the implications that an apparent "good guy" was capable of this kind of cruelty. It does have a lot of the familiar tricks of town-with-many-secrets, together with a packed cast of interested supporting cast characters to be possible suspects, witnesses and red-herrings. The flash-back-and-back-to-present structure also means we get two stories at slightly longer paces than they should be, rather than one well-paced one. Robert Connolly was an interesting director earlier in his career, but alas he's just delivering jorneyman solid work here, alongside Bana, equally solid but with nothing much deeper.

Promising Young Woman

 A delightfully provocative film looking at a delicate topic - it's basically a rape revenge movie without any of the prurient showing of the rape, and with wit and incisiveness and clever twists and turns of plotting. Mulligan stuns as the lead, the various supporting characters are spot on and it all comes to a highly satisfactory conclusion.

Caught in Time

 A solid Chinese cops-and-robbers story with the usual Chinese elements - slathers of melodrama, a touch more violence than you'd normally see, and a gratuitous bit of Chinese government propaganda (this time it's about how Chinese policing has successfully reduced gun crime). It's still very good at hitting the familiar beats, with some twists and turns along the ways as police chief chases down a gang of thieves. This print does have a couple of light issues - it tends to only translate dialogue, not on-screen text, which is unfortunate as the film does use a fair amount of onscreen text to tell the narrative - but it still worked pretty well for me

Oliver Sacks: His Own Life

 A pretty solid doco on the neurologist and literary figure, talking about his life and work fairly comprehensively. It's very much a meat-and-potatoes documentary covering his major work and the things he's known for, but the subject is so incredibly fascinating that it's absolutely worth watching just to learn more about a central figure in modern cognitive theory.

Bee Gees: How do you mend a broken heart

 A solid documentary history of the Bee Gees - yes, it's authorised which means we don't get all the dirty details, but the interviews provided are pretty honest about how the brothers Gibb survived the mix of fame and family over multiple decades and at least three career wipeouts. If I never quite get a sense that I know them as people rather than as music professionals at the end of the film, that's partially because the film does respect their privacy and their personal space enough to allow them their dignity. And their career slides across most of the major cultural movements of the late 60s and late 70s, which means it's also quite the cultural history. Combining all of that with interesting choices of side interviews (Noel Gallagher and Nick Jonas on maintaining a career with your siblings, Chris Martin on dealing with backlash) means it's a fascinating doco to enjoy

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone

  This is still mostly The Godfather III, with minor variations here and there, and still suffers from the fact that the story of Michael Corleone was pretty wrapped up in Godfather II - the main plot of this one is largely him planning a business merger with the Vatican, which sees him being largely outsmarted by an accountant and some priests. The plot technically does give him a mafia nemesis played by Eli Wallach, but the nemesis never really gets enough attention to ever be anything particularly important on screen. Andy Garcia's Vincent has a much more active plot but keeps on being overshadowed by Michael's non-moving plot, and the film pretty much comes to a dead halt during the long Sicily sequence before the Opera House climax brings things back to life. Still, it's a beautiful looking film with a couple of great moments here and there, even while you're wishing that some of the loose ends were made more of than they are (Bridget Fonda's journalist in particular gets fairly short shrift, and Talia Shire's turn for the Borgia only really gets a few moments to play with). There's also something weird about Pacino playing this almost-retired character when he was age 50 - he mostly sustains it but it still feels like he's checking out on doing anything active way sooner than he should be. This is probably an improved version of the film everybody has in the back of their Godfather boxed set, and it's worth watching, but it's probably still going to be your third favourite godfather film