As Kirsten Johnson watched as her beloved father’s mind slip away, she decided to grapple with the welling sorrow in the way that felt most natural and apt to her. She did it through her art. After years shooting documentaries, … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number One
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
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
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
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
There isn’t much dispute about which showbiz bigwig inspired the largely unseen and unheard boss that hangs like a black cloud over writer-director Kitty Green’s The Assistant. It’s a credit to Green’s film that spotting the parallels to salacious, anger-inducing … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Nine
Spike Lee had a template to work from when he agreed to direct a film version of David Byrne’s Broadway sensation, American Utopia. Even if there’s arguably too much theatrical staging to the more recent work to call a screen … Continue reading Top Ten Movies of 2020 — Number Ten
