With a level of patience and care that’s become her clear trademark, writer-director Kelly Reichardt crafts a warm, shrewd cinematic story that explores a distant American past to offer pertinent, strangely moving commentary on the present. Set in the first … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Two
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Jason Wollner, 2020). Notably stronger than its predecessor from fourteen years earlier, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm returns the title Kazakh journalist (Sacha Baron Cohen) to the good ol’ Land of the Free. Borat’s stated mission is to put … Continue reading Then Playing — Borat Subsequent Moviefilm; Another Round; Hillbilly Elegy
The cold calculation of capitalism is all but guaranteed to cast multitudes of people aside. Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland embeds with some of those discards, both in the empathy of its fictionalized narrative and in offering several of them a chance … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Three
Promising Young Woman holds fury in its bones. The feature directorial debut of Emerald Fennell has the structure of a revenge thriller and the spirit of a black comedy. Embedding with Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) as she exacts elaborate schemes … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Four
The Day I Will Never Forget (Kim Longinotto, 2002). I don’t think I’ve encountered a documentary as uncompromisingly grueling as The Day I Will Never Forget. Director Kim Longinotto favors plain, direct reportage, which makes the film’s most harrowing moments … Continue reading Then Playing — The Day I Will Never Forget; Örökbefogadás; The Nest
In Sound of Metal, Riz Ahmed melts into the lead role with an intensity that’s almost unnerving. Ahmed plays Ruben Stone, the drummer in a blistering hard rock band called Blackgammon. Night after night, he sits behind his kit, slapping … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Five
In this upside-down movie year that sprawled beyond the boundaries actually set by the calendar, it makes sense that the Oscar nominations would bring their own unique set of surprises. What makes the morning especially discombobulating for this long-time Oscar … Continue reading Promising Young Directors — Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations
Garrett Bradley’s documentary Time is awash in the uncommon power that comes from a moral outrage expressed with tough simplicity. The film spends most of its time with Sibil Fox Richardson, who carries her family through the reverberating pain of … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Six
I think it’s beautifully fitting that the year’s most poignant, insightful film about living in the U.S. is largely in a language other than English. Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung draws on his own history for Minari, the story of a … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Seven
When siblings Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross rolled their camera inside the dive bar The Roaring 20s, the story was fiction and the drinks were real. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets was introduced to film festival attendees as a documentary, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Eight
Coffee for Two 