Many of my favorites from 2020 are not mentioned here, either becuase I already discussed them elsewhere or because someone else had already better said anything I could say. Not that I'm so original, but there are specific things I like to call out. The movies I appreciate the most tend to be ones that do something I haven't seen before, ones that spend time on characters demonstrating some kind of practical knowledge, or ones in which the scope starts to expand if you pay attention to small, tangential details. In any case, while not all the movies here are among the absolute best ones I watched in 2020, some of them certainly are, and I recommend all of them.
The Bank Dick (1940)
For W.C. Fields’s pharmacists, dentists, and bank dicks, there’s no place worse than the home. At home, his family despises him. I would add he despises them too, but he behaves antisocially no matter where he is, though he's easily distracted from whatever's bothering him. In light of his short films, it’s a little surprising how much the ending of The Bank Dick lets the tensions cool with his family, even if it's mostly superficial.
But when one of his characters is in public, people listen to him, maybe even respect him. In The Bank Dick, he gets to be a film director, a screenwriter, an aristocrat, and a local hero twice-over by virtue of nothing but coincidence and general rules of politeness. And all he’s actually trying to do while he shambles around town is drink and smoke.
Consider Charlie Chaplin: in his films, people get mocked and kicked in the pants for what they (sometimes deliberately) ignore. In The Bank Dick, it’s what they trust and pay attention to that makes them look ridiculous and gets them in trouble. This turns out to be a much more caustic kind of humor than Chaplin’s, even if you put aside the hostility of Fields’s own character.
Barravento (1962)
This film pieces together scenes of people at work, dances for both ritual and recreation (plus fights set to music), and drama fomented by Firmino, a “subversive element” returning to his hometown. It takes place by the sea under swaying palm trees, but there’s little time to find natural beauty when we know how the characters struggle. It’s the fishermen’s workplace first, and one where they’re exposed to many problems.
Firmino admonishes them for allowing superstition to stop them from fighting back against exploitation, and does all kinds of things to try to prod them to action. But his actions are mainly harmful to the people he says he’s trying to help, sometimes to shocking extremes. It would look like bad faith if not for Firmino’s belief that someone other than himself will prove to bring about the greatest change: Aruan, a fisherman who supposedly enjoys divine favor.
The drive to change things may hurt before it does anything else, much as dance can resemble combat, seaside beauty can represent poverty, or inspiration can sound like egotism. The film keeps us suspended in the midst of these ambiguities. The Barravento, the “Turning Wind,” is defined in an intertitle as the “violent moment when earth and sea are transformed, when sudden changes occur in life, love, and society.” Firmino both respects and abhors Aruan’s connections to earth, sea, life, love, and society. They represent the tendencies Firmino most wants to overcome. If they can be severed, it's going to be painful. But they're also where the greatest potential for change exists.
Black Christmas (1974)
Even when you know something is most likely a red herring in this film, it's hard not to go along with it. It's more than just a bit of misleading information. It's that you feel in your gut that you should be afraid. There are scary things in Black Christmas besides the one serial killer. At one point we witness a search party for the victim of a murder which is most likely unrelated to the ones driving the film's plot. Some characters behave in threatening ways, sometimes vaguely and sometimes blatantly. And in the aftermath of the first killing, we get several moments that leave the victim's father sitting with his own imagination about what might have happened to her.
You can see the gears turning in the characters' heads, but it doesn't matter. None of the sorority sisters in Black Christmas stumbles into her demise, nor do the killings appear to be punishing them for something. The violence is allocated in a more random fashion than in many later films that followed Black Christmas's model. In this movie, there's just too much noise as to what a person in this world should be scared of, meaning moments of terrible vulnerability are unavoidable.
Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna (2020)
OK, hear me out. If you know me, you're not surprised this is here. But if anyone is, I'll defend myself. If you haven't seen Digimon, it's mostly what you probably think it is. But in the late 90s and early 2000s it had stand-out entries. The people behind them unloaded ideas that tested the limits of what the show could sustain. The results were inconsistent. Sometimes it doesn't follow through or takes things too far, but sometimes it was great, especially when it involved distinctive artists like Mamoru Hosoda and Chiaki Konaka. Last Evolution resembles these more than anything else.
It introduces the idea that a child paired with a Digimon must be separated from them once they’ve grown past a certain point. Kids have “potential,” which the Digimon attach to, and their potential diminishes as they grow up. “Growing up” in this movie doesn’t mean “aging,” and “potential” doesn’t mean “having future possibilities.” One child learns this the hard way after becoming independent at a very young age. Rather, to lose “potential” in this movie is to gain responsibilities. One becomes attached to certain purposes, not because they can't pursue other ones but because they choose not to.
This should be a good thing, but the movie puts a heavy cost on it. It helps hammer home the characters' commitment, and how much you are giving up when you finally decide what you think is important. At the same time, other aspects of the movie build on the best entry from the older series, the film Digimon Adventure: Our War Game. Our War Game is a technological period piece for the late 90s. It shows the characters struggling to figure out bulky, unwieldy computers while the film as a whole revels in how interconnected the world is becoming, finding it both thrilling and disquieting. In Last Evolution, over a decade later, the story’s main threat takes advantage of the ubiquity and ease of use of modern technology. It captures a completely different world and experience of technology from the late 90s depiction.
The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
The Hitch-Hiker is a suspenseful film of course, but there’s also another, harder-to-describe feeling it evokes. This is a film about two men whose mundane fishing vacation plans were completely derailed by an unpredictable threat to their lives. The frustration, the burning question of how things could have gone so wrong, is etched on the main characters’ faces. And it stays there throughout the film, long after their tormentor’s initial intervention.
Myers,
the murderer who conscripts them at gunpoint to drive him to Mexico,
mocks them for failing to take the chances they could to stand up to him. They were planning to enjoy a break from their routines,
but it’s clear they weren’t prepared for the level of separation from
their livelihoods they suffer as he drags them into the desert. They
carry something with them Myers doesn’t, and it affects what an
excursion away from urban society looks like to them.
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
Jonathan Rosenbaum pointed out that The Manchurian Candidate takes place in a kind of alternate universe where paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories about secret Soviet technology and espionage are true. But the villains' politics, and the film's own, are muddled by the end. One of the antagonists is Senator Iselin, an obvious Joseph McCarthy stand-in. We later learn Iselin was working with the Communist agent sent to control Raymond, the Manchurian candidate, but we never learn whether this was part of the agent’s original plan, or if it was because of their later-revealed intent to betray the Communists.
This film repeatedly uses shots with one character's face in the foreground, looking at nothing or something offscreen, while whatever we see in the background feeds their discomfort. Their discomfort, for us, is something we know well, but which they keep to themselves. We understand that long before Raymond was brainwashed, he was manipulated by his mother, and his domestic situation becomes increasingly horrific over the course of the film. This film's evocation of this miserable relationship alongside the conspiracy theories raises the question: with a family life like this, who needs enemies?
The film delivers exposition in nested stories, depicted with abrupt switches between inconsistent subjective and objective perspectives. TV screens draw your eye in this film with their unsightly glow, broadcasting charlatanism trying to worm its way into your brain. Secret laboratories lie behind the facades of ordinary New York buildings. Frank Sinatra finds that he could be attacked by anyone, anywhere. And the ending suggests that we can, in the end, refuse to be controlled if we really want to—but you'd better really want to, because it might kill you.
Michael Clayton (2007)
The other characters speak of Michael Clayton in hushed tones, call him a “miracle worker,” incredulously ask “who IS this guy?” At around the midpoint of the film, something becomes clear: before you can believe what people are saying about Michael Clayton, you need to know who those people are. Is it really so great to be seen as a special person when everyone in your world is a corporate lawyer?
Dan Sallitt believes that the structure of this film, starting at the chronological end and flashing back, affects our understanding of the title character. He says that because of this, Clayton’s cynicism about his line of work comes across not as a lesson learned—which Sallitt suggests would have made for a less plausible, more moralistic story—but as a foundational aspect of his character. The gap between how Clayton experiences his position and how people talk about him is one of the things introduced in those early scenes before the flashback.
This
is also part of the film’s moral outlook, which relies very little on
the morality of any given character. While the plot of the film centers
on a corporate conspiracy, the details are limited and nothing is
portrayed as shocking. Everything plays out like business-as-usual.
Everyone knows about the malfeasance going on, and the
movie acts like the audience does as well. The story is more of inertia
than conflict. Clayton’s changing course is an examination of what
it takes to overcome inertia, and it's largely for reasons other than morality—again, everyone already knows the truth, so if that were enough, the film would be over before it started.
The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973)
This film was introduced to me as a direct film portrayal of revolution and guerilla warfare, and maybe even an instructive one. That it is. Even when some of the tactics the characters use are played off as a joke, the underlying principles of what tactics are called for and what factors bear on their success are also addressed.
Moreover, it draws out a variety of emotions in the course of the characters’ revolutionary actions. The characters have compelling friendships that develop with the film as it follows their anger, their victories, and their humor. The Spook Who Sat by the Door is not only one of the most uncompromising films about revolution, but one of the most alive, in which you can get a sense not just for the characters’ commitment, but the shifting emotions that attend that commitment over time as they stick with their comrades.
To the Ends of the Earth (2019)
To the Ends of the Earth follows a Japanese TV crew shooting a documentary special on Uzbekistan. The main character, Yoko, is the star of the program, the one who plays the role of tourist and reviews her experiences on camera. The first stretch of the film lets us take in Yoko's demeanor and the way she finds her way around an unfamiliar setting. We see how she pays for food when she doesn't speak the local language, and we see how she withdraws from contact with strangers. She's rarely happy, but she puts on a cheerful face for the camera. Funnily enough, she never totally lies about her experiences, she just finds a spin that sounds nicer than she means. The film makes many of the characters' actions ambiguous: we see them do something without knowing why or even exactly what they're doing, and we're left to speculate for a second until we learn the reason after-the-fact.
After an hour or so of observing her loneliness and experiencing difficulties of interpretation, we see the above shot. It's a simple moment, just appreciating this building. But by this point, the film hasn't taken the time to do this with anything else. It's major to see Yoko connect with something enough for the camera to appreciate it like this. She enters the building, and as she walks further inside, she passes through differently colored rooms. The film cuts from each room to the next, and she walks continuously across shots. It pulls you into an ever more dreamlike place, until the film finally gives us a first, fantastical glimpse of what Yoko really wants.
Her loneliness is partly due to her being somewhere she's not used to yet, but Atsuko Maeda's performance lets on that it also arises from feelings of apprehension and restriction that have roots elsewhere in her life. The film gives us an episode of Yoko's life in which these feelings intensify and she tries to calm them, but we understand that even if she should succeed, it likely won't be forever. The experience the film ultimately offers of feeling out a lifestyle is a curiously satisfying one, but one that Yoko must go through with others, not just on her own.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
When you have a conversation partner you don’t already know very well, you may find yourself monitoring their behavior as well as your own, trying to discover and establish boundaries. Cassavetes is able to capture this feeling, nowhere better than in the early scene in this film where all of Nick’s coworkers eat the meal prepared for them by Mabel. Their faces and hands moving about the table let you know what to pay attention to in this movie.
Then Rowlands’s performance turns it on its head. She doesn’t play out the conversational dynamic in a frictionless, “normal” way, but won’t back down from trying to make connections. The intensity grows as new characters enter and exit the Longhetti household, and as Nick tries to balance his desire for the idiosyncrasies of his domestic world with his desires about his relationships outside.
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