Category: 2020 years

Top 10 of the Year

Best Film – Oppenheimer

After briefly faltering in 2020 with Tenet, Christopher Nolan delivers another masterpiece in a similar vein to Dunkirk, intensively studying two alternate sides of World War II with magnificent pacing. If Dunkirk constructed a pure exercise in visual storytelling by stripping back dialogue and applying an intensive focus to a pivotal point of history, Oppenheimer conducts a dense character study of substantial psychological weight across multiple decades, interrogating the guilt of a scientist whose intelligence and ambition destroyed the lives of millions. The formal structure is an intricate as ever, intertwining two distinct perspectives that bounce back and forth between the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer’s 1954 security hearing, and Lewis Strauss’ 1959 Senate hearing confirmation, and yet a sense of dramatic urgency persists throughout. Nolan’s usual mastery over establishing shots is present, but for the first time in his career, close-ups are also used with a shallow focus to reveal the haunted terror in Cillian Murphy’s glassy blue eyes. The 2020s have had few true masterpieces so far, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that a Nolan film belongs among them.

Most Underrated – Beau is Afraid

Neither this nor John Wick: Chapter 4 appeared on the TSPDT top 50 films of 2023 list, but at least Chad Stahelski’s film was enthusiastically greeted by the critics and is justly recognised as the best in the series. On the other hand, Beau is Afraid polarised audiences and critics alike with a 63 on Metacritic, and is widely considered a disappointing follow-up to Ari Aster’s tremendous one-two punch of Hereditary and Midsommar. The reason for its divisiveness is clear, given that its lengthy odyssey into one man’s Freudian shame keeps its audience at an inscrutable distance. With some hindsight though, a re-evaluation will be inevitable. Aster’s swerve away from straight horror and into psychological comedy-drama will seem less jarring, and more like an extension of his storytelling interests – isolated protagonists trapped in absurd worlds that follow their own bizarre set of rules.

Most Overrated – Anatomy of a Fall

Justine Triet’s courtroom drama is the #5 film of 2023 according to TSPDT and won the Palme d’Or, but falls outside my top 10. The strength of its screenplay and acting is undeniable, conducting a chilling autopsy of a broken marriage after the husband was discovered dead outside his French chalet. There is not so much to admire here from a formal standpoint though. Anatomy of a Fall joins the list of Palme d’Or winners more praised for their engaging intellectual substance than their cinematic craft.

Best Directorial Debut – Reptile

For the record, I’m not counting any of the directors who worked on Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as it is the rare film to crack a year’s top 10 that isn’t particularly director-driven. Meanwhile, Grant Singer displays a great deal of potential in his crime thriller Reptile, following in the footsteps of David Fincher on both a visual and narrative level. He is methodical in his editing, unfolding a lethal conspiracy stretching across the real estate industry and police force with careful, deliberate pacing, and sinking us into an unsettling atmosphere with beautiful golden lighting.

Gem to Spotlight – The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More

In a year that saw Wes Anderson come out with the extraordinarily self-aware Asteroid City, it is easy to miss the anthology of short films he released on Netflix, each adapting short stories from Roald Dahl. They all work in magnificent formal harmony together, using a rotating troupe of actors to narrate and play multiple roles as if reading tales from a storybook. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is the longest and the best of the four, but The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison are also excellent treatises on outsiders being driven from society, strengthened by the classic Anderson style of pastels and dioramas.

Best Male Performance – Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Cillian Murphy gives one of the best performances of the decade in Oppenheimer, earning Christopher Nolan’s close-ups that stare right into his glassy blue eyes stretched wide open with the guilt of knowing what he has done, and what he is about to do. His performance is incredibly studied, adopting the physicist’s deep voice and clipped intonations in his speech, and ageing from an idealistic student into a middle-aged man stalked by regret. Murphy has been acting in Nolan films since Batman Begins in 2005, but mainly in supporting roles, so it is about time he is given a role substantial enough to show off his incredible talent.

After Murphy, Robert Downey Jr. is the Salieri to Oppenheimer’s Mozart, revealing a petty man torn apart by contempt and envy. In an ensemble loaded with big names and completely dominated by Murphy, Downey Jr. remarkably makes a significant impact, becoming the vessel upon which much of the narrative hinges.

Joaquin Phoenix packs on a great deal of weight in Beau is Afraid, but the way he carries it is feeble and lethargic. He is anxiety and self-loathing distilled in human form, desperately desiring the approval of his mother yet constantly falling short. His performances makes for a fascinating contrast to the next best performance of the year too – Michael Fassbender in The Killer. Both characters are caught up in chaotic circumstances far beyond their control, and yet Fassbender hides his concern behind a cool, stoic façade, trying to convince himself that everything is under control. It is a welcome return to more arthouse fare after a four-year hiatus and an extended diversion to mainstream movies.

Much like Murphy, Barry Keoghan is another talent whose time spent in supporting roles has prepared him to lead an entire film. His acting in Saltburn goes beyond those shocking scenes that were passed around on social media. He conceals Oliver Quick’s true nature behind cold enigmatic eyes, and makes for an unfathomably unreliable narrator. Thanks to his impeccable comic timing, buoyant slapstick, and purposefully overwrought line deliveries, Mark Ruffalo also gives one of the best performances of the year as rakish cad Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things, while Robert de Niro rounds up the list with an incredible return to form playing William Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon.

Best Female Performance – Emma Stone in Poor Things

Standing at the top of the women’s category this year is a huge performance from Emma Stone in Poor Things that quite easily ranks among her very best. While she has explored Yorgos Lanthimos’ eccentric black wit before in The Favourite, her evolution from incoherent infancy to young adulthood as Bella Baxter is an entirely different beast, awkwardly spinning in uncoordinated motions and later dealing out eloquent dismissals of high society. The slapstick is a new addition to repertoire as well, embodying a being of pure impulse who pursues whatever momentary sensory pleasures come her way.

Lily Gladstone has put together a solid resume in her collaborations with Kelly Reichhardt, and so it is very satisfying to see her reach another level as the unfalteringly resilient Mollie Kyle in Killers of the Flower Moon, beating out acting titans Robert de Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio with the best performance of the film. She is softly spoken, resilient, and intellectual, but also trusting to a fault.

Between the two big films that Sandra Hüller was in this year, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, the former features the showier, more talkative role, while the latter poses a trickier challenge in its quiet, subdued nuances. Hedwig Höss will go down as one of the great cinema villains of this decade for everything she represents – vanity, apathy, spoiled privilege, and a soullessness that bears absolutely no guilt over the source of her wealth.

Asteroid City features a number of solid performances in its enormous ensemble, but it is Scarlett Johansson who stands out in the most substantial role of Midge Campbell — or Mercedes Ford depending on which way you look at her character. Lastly, Natalie Portman slides in for her psychologically rich performance in May December, playing a method actor who loses herself in the identity of the manipulative predator she is researching, while revealing the absolute artifice of her own apparent empathy.

Best Cinematography – Poor Things

Best Editing – Oppenheimer

Best Screenplay – Oppenheimer

Best Original Music Score – Oppenheimer

Year Breakdown

Even with the Actors and Directors Guild strikes pushing some big films into the following year, 2023 saw a giant comeback for cinema, with two full masterpieces sitting at the top and one huge cultural event defining the summer season of moviegoing. Barbenheimer emerged as an unlikely pairing of two big blockbusters with the only thing in common being their release date – July 21^st. Audiences flocked to theatres and records were broken, seeing Barbie become the highest grossing film of the year and Oppenheimer claiming third place (the less said about The Super Mario Bros. Movie in second the better).

Both films met at the intersection of critical and audience acclaim, affirming the two directors as a pair of unstoppable, dominant forces in the film industry – even if Christopher Nolan’s cinematic achievement far outweighs Greta Gerwig’s. Oppenheimer swept awards season and rightfully walked away with Best Picture at the Oscars, giving Nolan a fantastic comeback after Tenet. A little further down the box office list, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse were also notable financial successes, keeping comic book movies afloat next to some pretty major flops.

Speaking of which, the quality of animations this year can’t go ignored either. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is a surprisingly avant-garde experiment in visual style from Sony Pictures, while Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem followed in its creative footsteps, and Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement (again) to direct The Boy and the Heron – all films worthy of the year’s top 10, or at the very least its fringe.

Along with Nolan and Miyazaki, the old guard of directors came out in full force this year. Scorsese doesn’t show signs of slowing down in his old age, and though he is much younger, neither does Wes Anderson who released two major projects in 2023. Asteroid City is the greater success, but his anthology of Roald Dahl short films marks a strange curiosity in this era of streaming, making the most of Netflix’s flexible business model by experimenting with the very format of cinema itself. It is difficult to classify this as either a movie or a miniseries, but it is undoubtedly a collective work of cinematic art. David Fincher meanwhile not only released a marvellous hitman film, but also indirectly proved his continued influence in films like Boston Strangler and Reptile that emulate his ambient atmospheres, and others like BlackBerry and Oppenheimer that follow in the footsteps of The Social Network.

2023 also bore witness to the continued ascension of a younger filmmaking generation, featuring the talents of Ari Aster, Emerald Fennell, and Chad Stahelski who brought the John Wick series to soaring new heights in Chapter 4. With Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos has officially graduated this class and taken his place next to the modern masters of the artform, now laying claim to two masterpieces under his belt and a solid depth to his filmography.

Over at Cannes Film Festival, an impressive array of films made the debut including Killers of the Flower Moon, The Zone of Interest, Fallen Leaves, May December, and Asteroid City, so Anatomy of a Fall clinching the Palme d’Or this year is a little disappointing. Justine Triet’s screenplay is extremely admirable, and her direction even stands out in parts, but as a visual and formal artist her work does not warrant a great deal of praise.

Film Archives

Top 10 of the Year

Best Film – The French Dispatch

Some call it Wes Anderson’s most ‘Wes Anderson’ film, as if that were a negative thing. It’s not – Anderson is one of the greatest working directors, unrelenting with his cinematic vision and frequently rubbing up against accusations that his style is too stilted and unnatural. The French Dispatch isn’t going to convince anyone otherwise, though it would be tough to argue that he has anything less than a thorough understanding of film’s full potential. This is his tribute to storytellers, or more specifically those journalists who pick up on odd stories in small towns, and with his anthological structure he constructs a dazzling formal cinematic statement, alternating between black-and-white and colour much like the magazine his characters produce. With a keen comedic sensibility and astounding visual flair, The French Dispatch will go down as one of Anderson’s finest works.

Most Underrated – The Tragedy of Macbeth

As one of the greatest displays of mise-en-scène in a year full of beautiful films, it is clear this is a huge miss on behalf of the critical consensus, sitting outside 2021’s top 25 films on the TSPDT 21^st century list. It is a bold new direction for Joel Coen who has already spanned so many genres – neo-noirs, westerns, comedies, crime films, and yet this is the first to dig so deeply into the influences of older European directors like Fritz Lang and Ingmar Bergman. The deftness and intelligence of the script goes without saying, though obviously the credit for this must go more to Shakespeare than Coen. It is in the visual direction where he takes this classical narrative to transcendent heights, creating a claustrophobic world of shadows, fog, and barren landscapes that reflect the same decrepit darkness residing within Lord and Lady Macbeth.

Most Overrated – Drive My Car

Ryusuke Hamaguchi draws on a Haruki Murakami short story to craft a three-hour epic drama based in Japan’s contemporary theatre industry, additionally using the works of playwrights Chekhov and Beckett as springboards into examinations of grief and companionship. This is currently sitting at #1 of 2021 on the TSPDT list, and I might be closer to #30. It is a very fine film, slow and meditative in its pacing and backed up by a strong script, but from a direction standpoint there is far less going on here than a number of other films that I have ahead of it. Hamaguchi is evidently a good filmmaker, but Drive My Car doesn’t push its cinematic style or form enough to earn its #1 spot.

Best Directorial Debut – Passing

Rebecca Hall makes the leap from acting to directing with a complex examination of racial prejudice and identities in 1920s New York. She carries a bit of Paweł Pawlikowski’s style in her blocking of actors on the edges of her frames and her choice to shoot in black-and-white, but it is especially in her use of shallow focus to obscure our perception of this hazy world that she dedicates the film to a specific aesthetic and follows through on it to the end.

Gem to Spotlight – The Hand of God

Paolo Sorrentino made one of the best films of the year in 2013 with The Great Beauty which feels very much like a Federico Fellini tribute, and he draws the connection even closer with this semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story set in 80s Italy. There is a theological sense of destiny woven through its narrative parallels of Italian folklore, sporting legends, and cinema culture, and he binds it all together some exquisite visual artistry.

Best Male Performance – Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter

Oscar Isaac is one of the most consistently excellent actors currently working, but the performance he gives in The Card Counter is an achievement that is only second to his career-best work in Inside Llewyn Davis. He is morose and austere, gazing out at the world from beneath heavy lids with an unblinking focus, making him perfectly suited to Paul Schrader’s deeply self-reflective character study of regret, self-discipline, and atonement.

Timothée Chalamet proves he can lead blockbusters as much as he can indie dramas with Dune, and he carries the archetypal character of Paul Atreides with great emotional weight. So too does Dev Patel accomplish something similar in The Green Knight with his grand medieval quest, subverting conventions of the hero’s quest facing up to the consequences of his own rashness.

Denzel Washington is also here for his deft tackling of Shakespeare in The Tragedy of Macbeth, turning the titular King into an aged, jealous tyrant seeking to preserve his own legacy. If Joaquin Phoenix‘s contorted performance in Joker was expressionism, then his role as the awkward uncle Johnny in C’mon C’mon is pure realism – a very purposeful shift on his part that shows off his range, proving he can play sweet and wholesome just as well as he does dark and intense.

Bradley Cooper is the perfect showman and con artist in Nightmare Alley as Stanton Carlisle, but he also knows when to turn it down, making for a particularly haunting delivery of his final line. Benedict Cumberbatch claims a mention for The Power of the Dog, playing against type as gruff, menacing rancher Phil, and then gradually peeling back the layers to his vulnerability. Lastly, Joel Edgerton is given the role of the villainous slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway in The Underground Railroad, and still finds a surprising nuance in his backstory.

Best Female Performance – Kristen Stewart in Spencer

Kristen Stewart takes the number one spot of the year, and it isn’t terribly close. Before Spencer it was a common misconception that she is a poor actress, but she proves all the doubters wrong in her portrayal of Princess Diana, playing the doomed royal not as how history has recorded her, but as a subjective rendering of her own unstable psychology. I previously underrated Rebecca Ferguson in Dune, but a recent re-watch proved that she rivals Timothee Chalamet with the best performance of the film. She is there every step of the way as Lady Jessica, carrying the burden of her son’s arc as the unsung hero.

Frances McDormand wields a skilful control over the weighty and loquacious material of The Tragedy of Macbeth, returning to her theatrical roots and proving Lady Macbeth to be an incredibly natural fit for her. Last of all, Thuso Mbedu pulls off a great feat of endurance in carrying Barry Jenkins’ epic series The Underground Railroad, carrying its heavy emotional stakes through its most punishing moments.

Best Cinematography – The French Dispatch

Best Editing – Dune

Best Screenplay – The Card Counter

Best Original Music Score – Dune

Year Breakdown

After a disappointing down year, the film industry came roaring back in 2021 with many postponed films finally getting their release. The French Dispatch is notable among these – had it been released according to its original schedule, 2020 might have been able to lay claim to at least a single masterpiece. No Time to Die also made headlines as the first major film to have its release date pushed back, going for the complete opposite strategy as Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, and it was clearly the smarter decision in terms of profitmaking.

Spider-Man: No Way Home tops the box office, grossing a staggering $1.8 billion and bringing a jolt of life back to cinemas during the COVID-19 pandemic. No Time to Die, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and Eternals are also deservedly up there, but Dune is the defining blockbuster of the year where artistic quality and popularity collide. It is Denis Villeneuve’s highest grossing film yet, and further sets him up as an auteur for a generation.

Julia Ducournau becomes the second female director after Jane Campion to win the Palme d’Or, disturbing audiences at Cannes Film Festival with her vehicular body horror Titane, while over at the Academy some truly strange choices are made awarding Best Picture to CODA – easily the weakest winner in a long time. It was clearly the sentimental pick and has solid representation of the deaf community, but there is absolutely no visual artistry behind it and much of the writing is as flat as anything you would find on the Hallmark channel.

Streaming services were the saving grace of 2020, and they remain strong here. The Tragedy of Macbeth is the first time Apple TV Plus has produced a film of this quality, and Amazon Prime Video has continued to get behind bold visionary auteurs with The Green Knight and The Underground Railroad. Netflix is also in the game, picking up Rebecca Hall’s stunning debut Passing and bringing back Jane Campion after her 12-year break with The Power of the Dog. Adam McKay also concludes his freak-out trilogy (The Big Short, Vice) on Netflix with Don’t Look Up – the weakest of the three but still worthy of praise for its editing and performances.

During this early period of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, a trend emerged of films calling back to theatrical and musical roots. We have three great classical auteurs working in the realm of Shakespearean tragedy (The Tragedy of Macbeth, West Side Story, House of Gucci), and the works of playwrights Anton Chekhov and Samuel Beckett play significant roles in Drive My Car. When it comes to musicals, we have West Side Story, Cyrano, Annette, and Tick, Tick… Boom!. This trend is largely led by familiar auteurs like Steven Spielberg, Joe Wright, and Leos Carax dipping their toe in the genre, and Lin-Manuel Miranda joins them with his directorial debut.

Lastly, black-and-white cinematography has had a resurgence of late, but with The Tragedy of Macbeth, C’mon C’mon, Passing, sections of The French Dispatch, and Belfast, 2021 proves to be a particularly significant year here. I would hesitate to put the influence solely down to Roma from 2018, but its impact is certainly at least felt in the rise of memory pieces based on directors’ childhoods, with both Belfast and The Hand of God explicitly crediting Alfonso Cuaron’s recent masterpiece.

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