Bestmovies of 2020

This year has been a cinematic year like no other. Covid-19 brought Hollywood to a halt in March, shuttering movie theatres across the globe (including in New Zealand for two months).

Blockbusters were essentially abandoned for the year, leaving distributors and producers scrambling to rethink their release strategies, while audiences in lockdown discovered new ways to get their filmic fix.

That means that the best flicks we’ve seen have come from a range of platforms.

If you haven’t seen any of these yet, the next few weeks are the perfect time to check them out.

Babyteeth (iTunes, GooglePlay)

An adaptation of screenwriter Rita Kalnejais’ 2012 stage play of the same name.

Feature debutant director Shannon Murphy has crafted a brilliantly executed coming-of-age drama, a blackly comedic look at a family in crisis and one of the best contemporary tales from across the Tasman since 2010’s Animal Kingdom.

Delivering a raw, utterly convincing turn (she even apparently shaved her own head for the role) as a youngwoman trying to make the most of what’s left of her life, Eliza Scanlen is a mesmerising centre around which this, sometimes stunning, film revolves.

DarkWaters

(Neon, iTunes, GooglePlay)

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.

Director Todd Haynes ( Carol, Far From Heaven) has delivered a stunning and rage-inducing reallife environmental courtroom drama. This Erin Brockovichmeets- John-Grisham-esque drama will make you look at your Teflon cookware in a whole new, chilling, light.

Playing it with the same understated compellingness he brought to 2015 Oscar winner Spotlight, Mark Ruffalo is outstanding as aman willing to risk his career and life to expose the truth about perfluorooctanoic acids and the effects they can have on livestock and human health.

Get Duked! (Amazon Prime Video)

Writer-director Ninian Doff’s feature debut is an anarchic, pitch black, generation-gap horror comedy that’s also one of the funniest films in a year wherewe were desperately in need of a laugh.

Fans of The Young Ones, The Inbetweeners and the films of Ben Wheatley (the brilliant Sightseers in particular) will get a kick out of the antics of four feckless teens as they battle the elements and members of the landed gentry hellbent on their destruction.

The Vast of Night

It’s a movie full of memorable lines, brilliantly conceived setpieces and crazy characters.

The Girl on the Bridge (GooglePlay)

‘‘Why is it easier to get pizza delivered than to access a crisis worker when you’re about to kill yourself?’’

That’s one of the many questions posed by youngNew Zealand global mental health campaigner and Voices of Hope co-founder Jazz Thornton in Leanne Pooley’s heart-wrenching, thought-provoking documentary.

While concerned with the national issue of our horrific suicide statistics and what can be done to reduce them, this is very much a sometimes painfully intimate, personal look at Thornton’s struggle and quest to create a web series about the friend she could not save.

Certainly not an easy watch, but it’s a sensitive, important, vital and compelling one.

The Half of It (Netflix)

Right from its endearing opening animated sequence, this is a movie guaranteed to charm its way into your heart. A high school teen comedy that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Easy A, Booksmart, The Edge of Seventeen and Juno. A film that feels both timeless and timely, it is filled with compelling complicated characters, smart, erudite dialogue and universal struggles that viewers of all ages and walks of life can relate to.

At its heart, writer-director AliceWu’s (2004’s Saving Face) 1917

Get Duked!

Cyrano de Bergerac- infused tale is the story of expert introvert Ellie Chu (winningly portrayed by Leah Lewis).

Little Women

(Neon, iTunes, GooglePlay)

This eighth cinematic adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s muchloved 1868 novel might initially come as something of shock to purists, but the result is a bold, bubbly and bravura retelling that makes this classic tale timely as well as thrilling.

Writer-director Greta Gerwig manages to seamlessly splice contemporary concerns while still evoking the sights and sounds of late-1860s America.

However, her real ace is her cast. Eliza Scanlen, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh and Saoirse Ronan (ironically an Australian, two Brits and an Irishwoman) really are a magnificent quartet.

Mank (Netflix)

David Fincher’s first movie in six yearswas well worth the wait.

Having previously come up trumps with detailed and grippingly dramatic looks at San Francisco serial killer Zodiac and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg ( The Social Network), the now 58-year-old film-maker may have topped them both with this audaciously told look at 1930s Hollywood’s ‘‘court jester’’ Herman J ‘‘Mank’’ Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) and his role in creating a cinematic classic, Citizen Kane. Shot completely in lustrous, crisp monochrome, it features a terrific ensemble cast

Babyteeth

The Half of It

Little Women that also includes Amanda Seyfried, Lily Collins, Charles Dance and Tuppence Middleton.

‘‘You cannot capture aman’s entire life in two hours. All you can hope is to leave the impression of one,’’ Mank says of biopics. Well, this one leaves one hell of amark.

1917

(Neon, iTunes, GooglePlay)

Like Sir Peter Jackson’s superb documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, this is inspired by the exploits of the film-maker’s grandfather in ‘‘The Great War’’.

Sir Sam Mendes says the story (co-written with Penny Dreadful’s Krysty Wilson-Cairns) was based on a ‘‘fragment’’ Alfred Mendes told to him.

But while the story itself is engrossing, Mendes elevates it to another level by making it seem to play out in real time and via a single, continuous shot.

The breathless action, excellent sound design and Thomas Newman’s urgent, driving score ensure it is very much a cinematic spectacle.

Time

(Amazon Prime Video)

On June 15, 1999, Robert Richardson was sentenced to 60 years ‘‘without probation, parole or suspension of sentence’’ for his part in robbing Louisiana’s Grambling Credit Union.

As Garrett Bradley’s sobering and heartwrenching documentary’s artful, sometimes haunting, montages of black-andwhite home videos, recorded public appearances and intimate interviews show, his wife Sibil has been trying ever since to secure an earlier release.

With its ethereal mix of Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam Guebrou’s 1960s compositions and contemporarymusic by Jamieson Shaw and Edwin Montgomery, combining with juxtaposed digital footage from recent times and Sibil’s low-res 90s recordings, Time’s overall tone and message is one of melancholy and loss.

Totally Under Control

Made under the radar and completed in early October, the day before the 45th President of the United States tweeted he had tested positive for Covid-19, Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger’s documentary is a rage-inducing, excoriating deep dive into the reasons why the US response to the pandemic has proved to be so ineffective.

For Kiwi viewers, it offers a nightmarish vision of what could have been and a validation of our own country’s approach (and relative simplicity of governance).

Through socially distanced interviews with frontlinemedical staff, health officials, White House journalists and infectious disease experts, as well as key moments from the wall-to-wall news coverage, it constructs a timeline beginning with the first warning from Wuhan in the early days of 2020. The result is a breathtaking tale of how politics got in the way of science and how personality Trumped public health.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)

Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed this impressive courtroom drama, which revolves around the reallife, late 1960s prosecution of eight Democratic Convention protest ‘‘leaders’’ for conspiracy to cross state lines for the purpose of inciting violence. The terrific ensemble cast includes Jeremy Strong, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella and Sacha Baron-Cohen.

Pandemic aside, it’s hard not to feel that the events depicted here could be contemporary, rather than from more than 50 years ago, and this Trial will leave you both troubled and hopeful for America’s future (which was surely Sorkin’s intention all along).

As Baron-Cohen’s Abbie Hoffman so eloquently puts it, ‘‘the institutions of government are wonderful things, but right now are populated by some terrible people’’.

The Vast of Night (Amazon Prime Video)

Magnificently framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone- style anthology television series, this is a beautifully rendered homage to the science-fictionmovies and television shows of the 1950s.

Andrew Patterson’s directorial debut has aWes Anderson-like feel to it, aworld full of quirky characters spouting memorable dialogue, brought vividly to life via unhurried pacing and a production design that offers a real sense of space and place.

Patterson cleverly keeps his camera close to his protagonists, drawing the audience into the lives of Cayuga, New Mexico’s residents Everett and Fay, as we hang on their everyword.