The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
John Beifuss’ Top 20 Movies of 2020
The impact of the novel coronavirus on my annual “Top 10 Movies” list is certainly the least of its devastations.
Even so, it’s emblematic of the pandemic’s assault on all aspects of life that even so minor a ritual as this now requires a major adjustment.
Since 1996 (when my No. 1 film was Jim Jarmusch’s “Dead Man”), I have published an annual Top 10 and Second 10 ranking of my picks for the best films of the year.
Even into the streaming era, I followed an arguably idiosyncratic formula: I restricted my choices to movies that had a public screening in the Memphis area.
My argument for doing this was that all readers, in theory, had the opportunity to see any film that screened here. They didn’t have to travel to another city, or subscribe to a specific streaming service.
More important, the restriction was a way of acknowledging that nobody, even the most dedicated film buff or critics, can claim to be familiar with all the movies released everywhere during any given year. But it was possible to see almost every eligible film that screened in Memphis during the year.
Well, forget that. Throw it out the window. This year, there are no rules, no restrictions.
Chaos reigns. Bedlam holds sway. Dogs and cats are blah blah blah. Because the pandemic has changed movie culture, possibly forever. On a national scale (with Warner Bros. announcing that its 2021 blockbusters will debut on HBO Max the same day they arrive in theaters) and on the local level.
Responding first to government mandates and then to a lack of business, as money-motivated studios withheld their movies and virus-wary movie fans stayed home, Malco closed its theaters, then reopened them, then re-closed some of them.
As I write this story, the Forest Hill, the Majestic, the Bartlett, the Cordova, the Wolfchase and the Olive Branch cinemas are not in operation; and the Studio on the Square is open only on weekends. In other words, six of Malco’s 14 multiplexes are on hiatus. (On a positive note, the Summer Quartet Drive-in has been doing pretty good business, apparently because outdoor moviegoing, like outdoor dining, is a less risky alternative.)
h Meanwhile, Indie Memphis transformed its weekly movie series into an online “Movie Club Virtual Cinema,” and successfully reimagined its annual film festival as a mixture of virtual and outdoor screenings. On a negative note, plans to transform a screen at the Studio on the Square into a year-round “arthouse cinema” operated by Indie Memphis were postponed.
h Devoted to movies with LGBTQ content, the 23year-old Outflix Film Festival, which typically runs for a week, cut back to an Oct. 8 double-feature at the drive-in.
h Film series at the Main Library and at the new Crosstown Theater — which had programmed an outstanding series of silent classics accompanied in live performance by Memphis musicians — came to a halt.
Every year since 1996, I have kept a running tabulation of all the movies that screen for the public in the Memphis area.
In 2019, according to my records, 909 different movies screened here. This year, as of mid-december, the total is 490. Which actually is more than you might expect, considering that theaters were closed from mid-march to mid-june.
Anyway, this year, I’m changing my tune, Top 10wise.
What you will find below is a list of 20 of the best new movies I saw during 2020, whether in a theater; on Netflix, Hulu or some other service; or via Indie Memphis or some other virtual source.
Instead of ranking them by preference, I’m present
ing them as a series of doubles — themed pairs.
You also may notice that many of these movies are obscure, even by highfalutin-critic standards. And one of them has yet to be released: Pixar’s “Soul,” set to debut Dec. 25 on Disney+.
Even this year, my preliminary “best” list encompassed close to 40 titles. Here’s the Top 10, plus a
Second 10. Rank them as you will.
1. “The Assistant” and “The Invisible Man”: Women resist the pernicious influence of unseen malignant men in these dissimilarly scaled responses to the pervasive culture of sexual abuse made public by the #Metoo movement. Writer-director Kitty Green’s ingeniously compact indie stars Julie Garner as a low-level assistant to a creepy Harvey Weinsteinesque movie executive who is represented primarily as a bullying voice on the telephone; meanwhile, Leigh Whannell’s update of the classic H.G. Wells concept stars Elisabeth Moss as the ex-girlfriend of a maverick millionaire inventor turned spectral stalker and high-tech gaslighter whose goal is to erase his victim’s humanity as effectively as he has obscured his own visibility: To make her a person no one ever wants to see or hear from again.
2. “Possessor” and “Color Out of Space”: Brainy and very, very bloody, Brandon (son of David) Cronenberg’s second feature imagines a near future (or alternate present) in which the consciousnesses of hired assassins are implanted into other bodies to carry out their wet work; the destabilizing Francis Baconesque montages and detonations of extreme gore may be as psychically disruptive for the viewer as for Andrea Riseborough’s contract killer. Adapted from the 1927 story by H.P. Lovecraft, “Color” — South African director Richard Stanley’s first fiction feature since 1992 — is another tale of gooey new identity. Nicolas Cage stars as the oddball (what else?) patriarch of an isolated family that, in a parody of self-actualization, undergoes a grotesque cosmic transformation after being irradiated by a prismatic meteorite.
3. “Bacurau” and “The Hunt”: The famous hunter-hunts-humans premise of “The Most Dangerous Game” inspired these politicized thrillers. From Brazil, “Bacurau,” directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, pits the resourceful residents of an isolated village against a troupe of foreigners whose bloodthirsty recreation represents a new form of racist hubris and colonialist exploitation. Directed by Craig Zobel and showcasing an impressive star turn of deadpan athleticism by Betty Gilpin, the briefly controversial, dubiously motivated and arguably tasteless “The Hunt” presents a Q-ready conspiracy scenario in which Maga-hating progressives stalk dim-witted “deplorables.”
4. “Wolfwalkers” and “Born to Be”: With animation that eschews Pixar realism for the stylized beauty of woodblock prints, Medieval tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the latest stunner from Tomm Moore, Ross Stewart and Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon offers a rejuvenating balm for hungry eyes and weary souls as it delivers the story of a bold young villager who discovers her destiny after she befriends a rambunctious wolf-girl. Director Tania Cypriano’s “Born to Be” similarly affirms that physical transformation can be a revelation of inner — true — identity. Compassionate and clarifying, the documentary focuses on New York’s Dr. Jess Ting, an innovator in transgender surgery, and his hopeful, desperate patients.
5. “Dick Johnson Is Dead” and “Soul”: Does life have purpose? What comes after death? These two exuberant movies take very different routes to explore the largest and most unanswerable of questions. Kirsten Johnson’s documentary is a loving portrait of the filmmaker’s father, a psychiatrist who is losing his memory as he nears the end of his life; “Soul” — with Pixar’s first Black protagonist, voiced by Jamie Foxx — is about a jazz musician who meets his death when he falls through an open manhole, then struggles to return to Earth to play a dream gig.
6. “Minari” and “Sorry We Missed You”: With journalistic precision and radical empathy, these dramas dig deep into a subject filmmakers usually ig
nore: the struggle to make an honest living. Director Lee Isaac Chung’s moving “Minari” casts Steven Yeun and Yeri Han as South Koreans who relocate to rural Arkansas to become rice farmers; “Sorry We Missed You,” by Ken Loach, a veteran chronicler of the working class, depicts the increasingly desperate financial straits and domestic crises that beset an English family.
7. “Les Misérables” and “Vitalina Varela”: Cinematic full-body baptisms, these foreign-language films offer total immersion into cultures and environments that U.S. viewers likely otherwise wouldn’t experience. From France, debuting director Ladj Ly’s harrowing thriller (thematically connected to but not adapted from Victor Hugo’s novel) brings the rising tension between an abusive police force and the African-arabic immigrants of a crowded Paris suburb to the breaking point. In contrast, “Vitalina Varela,” by the Portuguese master Pedro Costa, is as soft-spoken and funereally deliberate as it is ecstatically wrought.
8. “Shiva Baby” and “The FortyYear-old Version”: Women writer-directors made confident debuts with this pair of comedies drawn from authentic experience. Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby” borrows from “Fleabag” and classic-era Woody Allen to confront a college student (Rachel Sennott) and her parents with an escalating series of minor crises during a crowded shiva. Meanwhile, the black-and-white “Forty
Year-old” presents its witty creatorstar, Radha Blank, as a “Version” of herself: a too-old-to-still-be-called-”promising” playwright experimenting with redefining herself as a rapper.
9. “The Inheritance” and “Lovers Rock”: These effervescent, encouraging films celebrate community, personal style, artistic expression and cultural identity as modes of resistance against the institutional oppression of what Rastafarians call “Babylon.” Directed by Ephraim Asili, the Philly-based docufiction “The Inheritance” is about a young man who tries to establish a socialist collective in a house gifted by his grandmother, while Steve Mcqueen’s “Lovers Rock” recreates a vivid and specific scene: an early-1980s house party for West London residents of Caribbean origin.
10. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” and “Meu Querido Supermercado(my Darling Supermarket)”: Prochoice, no choice, too much choice. The marketplace of ideas and the literal marketplace overlap in these disparate films, with consequences ranging from cruel inaccessibility (health care) to absurd bounty (food brands). Eliza Hittman‘s “Never Rarely” stars Sidney Flanigan as a teen girl who travels to New York to secure a legal abortion. It’s a fiction film of documentary realism, whereas Tali Yankelevich’s sublime “Supermercado” — an in-depth portrait of a São Paulo supermarket — is a documentary of Pop Art wit and sci-fi grandeur.