Anthony Hopkins (The Remains of the Day, Amistad) gives the second-best performance of his career (The Silence of the Lambs) in a film that fails to overwhelm, like most of the other best picture nominees. Disguised by the outstanding performances of many of the other movies nominated for Oscar’s most prominent award of the night, The Father (Florian Zeller’s directorial debut) is a very well-made film that we should remember for its story, its performances, its execution, and its all too real haunting reality. I’ll concede to that if these things meet the checklist of a Best Picture-nominated movie. But there was something while watching this highly engaging film that felt like it didn’t deserve to be a movie that was one of the eight best in any year. With that said, 2020 as a whole did not generate many great films. In that regard, The Father merits its acclaim. The counter-argument is that the Academy doesn’t have to nominate up to ten films. Before 2009, only five films were able to receive a nomination. Since then, the fewest number of Best Picture nominated films for a given year has been seven (2018). 2020 would have been a year that warranted the minimum number of selections. However, the top movies, as a whole, were so poor that it would be just as challenging to distinguish five that are that much better than eight.
Category Archives: Top 10 Movie of 2020
Palm Springs (2020)
Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg (NBC’s Brooklyn 99, Saturday Night Live) and Cristin Milioti (The Wolf of Wall Street, It Had to Be You) led comedy, was exactly the movie we needed during the summer of 2020. In a year with very few comedies (Borat Subsequent Movie will likely be the most memorable), this was a fun, unique movie that I’m sure would have broken up a dreadful summer. The problem was that theaters were mostly closed when this movie was released.
Pieces of a Woman (2020)
Pieces of a Woman, Kornél Mundruczó’s (Jupiter’s Moon, White God) venture co-starring Vanessa Kirby (Mission Impossible: Fallout, The World to Come) and Shia LaBeouf (The Peanut Butter Falcon, Honey Boy), has the most excruciating half-hour of a film you’ll see this year. Expertly pieced together by the film’s editing crew is a single, continuous 23-minute scene meant to represent, likely, at least a few hours of a childbirth process. It’s intense, gutwrenching, fascinating, and heartbreaking all at once. As someone who didn’t know a thing about this film going in other than the first twenty seconds of its trailer that cemented my interest level, I thought for the entire 23-minute sequence that this would be the whole movie, likely sprinkled with flashbacks to a happier time.
News of the World (2020)
When I write a review this close to the start of a new year, I usually see most of the movies considered for one of the big six Oscar awards. If I don’t, I will usually await the arrival of those limited releases set for a wide release a couple of weeks later. Regardless, most people would have known of all the big-budget or Oscar-worthy movies by the time of a January 1st post. In 2020, all of the rules had changed, and the cinema has not been an exception. Some big-budget movies slated to come out during the year have been tabled until the pandemic ends and will likely come out in the second half of 2021. However, the Academy has made date modifications, which means that films will be eligible for the end-of-year awards as long as they are released by February 28, 2021. It’s usually around the start of the new year when I start watching the final one or two movies that might receive a Best Picture nomination. 2020 is a different kind of beast, and this review is my first of the year of a film that will receive a nomination for that award.
The Way Back (2020)
How does one make a basketball movie in 2020 that isn’t quickly compared to Hoosiers, Coach Carter, Glory Road, and Hurricane Season, not to mention the many other films centered around a sports team facing some adverse situation? Sometimes, when you see the trailers for the first time of a movie like Gavin O’Connor’s (The Accountant, Warrior) The Way Back, you kind of grain, thinking, “Here we go again. How are we supposed to get something different from this movie?” But he was unequivocably able to do that. Admittedly, this movie could have been better in terms of its script and the conditions of its sequencing. Still, its parts made up for its, sometimes, lack of cohesiveness and left you feeling hopeful in a movie that you expected to find hope, albeit in a much different way.