Keith Simanton's Top 20 Movies of 2020

#20 We need to talk about MANK.

The longer I’ve sat with it, and watched it again, the more MANK has rankled me. Yes, it’s gorgeous with impeccable cinematography by Erik Messerschmidt and production design by Donald Graham Burt. Yes, it will provide any cinephile with enough back-scratches to get hind legs moving. Yes, it’s a deep cut of Hollywood about the title character, Herman Mankiewicz, the screenwriter of the greatest film of all time, CITIZEN KANE, with the lead wonderfully played with world-weariness by Gary Oldman. But director David Fincher’s new film, from a script by his late father Larry, reminded me very much of Warren Beatty/Barry Levinson’s BUGSY, a collection of vignettes and anecdotes that are particularly smart and fitting on their own, but their edges are so worn from being picked up and set back down over the years that they can’t connect with the other pieces. For instance, people talk like they talk in the movies in MANK, a conscious choice of the Finchers, not because they’re saying natural things to say but because that’s the way the witty line reads. It’s so Hollywood pedantic it can’t be meant for a general audience; there’s a joke about Toto, from THE WIZARD OF OZ, for example. But it’s inverted so it can only be enjoyed by the in-the-know crowd or on a second viewing. But that’s not the film’s most grievous fault. First, the other characters LOVE Mank! They’re fascinated by him. If he walks into a room he’s immediately embraced for his rapier wit and skewering of the prim and powerful. Except…we never convincingly see him be endearing or brilliant. It mostly just keeps getting repeated to us that he by-God is. Then there are two particular dead ends that seem to have fascinated the Finchers and are the prime reason why the film remains hide-bound to its jigsaw script: 1) the 1934 gubernatorial race between Upton Sinclair and Frank Merriam (PS: The Finchers also expect their audience to know the difference between Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair….good luck with that) which melds politics and the media with Depression-era union busting and California labor laws. This served only to remind me, to its detriment, of the inert, stagey Billy Ray series, THE LAST TYCOON. I kept waiting for Barton Fink to show up with his typewriter to write a scorcher of a play for the working man! Are they aware that this very storyline has been the very-apt butt of jokes for the last 40 years? 2) the whereabouts of the flyboy husband of Mank’s secretary, the runs-on-moxie Rita Alexander, played by the perpetually-miscast Lily Collins (who also starred in THE LAST TYCOON…hmmmm). And guess what?? We DO discover what happened to him! And who cares?!?!?! Why was that in here? There’s a lot of that in MANK, pieces that don’t fit, pieces that are missing and seemed to have dropped to the floor, and pile of pieces stacked in the middle, many of them still upside down. But, OOOH, they signal a reel-change as the car drove off! and GOSH, that was an homage to THE LOST WEEKEND. The worst scene of the year? Amanda Seyfried (who is, inexplicably being touted as a Best Supporting Actress) yelling: “Nobody makes a monkey out of William Randolph Hearst!” My gorge still rises.

#19 - What SOUL lacks in an emotional payoff (some will say it lacks its very own title) it more than makes up for me in the Pixar inventiveness we now take for granted as we do working stoplights and potable water. In the pantheon it will be well below INSIDE OUT, COCO, and UP but above all of the sequels (save the TOY STORYs).

#18 - In any other year this might have been a sleeper hit. The first 12 or so minutes are some of the funniest moments of the year. Much like SOUND OF METAL this is a bit of cheat as I saw it in 2019 but it came out this year.

#17 - A very weird, very entertaining sci-fi/comedy/horror flick that also playfully and endearingly sends-up Millennials and the Apocalypse, is the hoot called SAVE YOURSELVES. A young, struggling couple desperate to get off the grid go to Upstate New York to spend time isolated in the country without their electronics. And then the murderous aliens (which look like STAR TREK's Tribbles) arrive. The film ends strangely (even for what came before) but I'm even starting to warm up to that now.

#16 - I watched Denzel Washington's adaptation of August Wilson's FENCES four times. And each time I admired it more and more (it was my #2 film of 2016). I have a sneaking suspicion I won't ever revisit MA RAINEY again, except, perhaps to watch the brilliant performance of Chadwick Boseman, who will win Best Actor posthumously, and Viola Davis, who inhabits the pain, the ego, and the brilliance of Ma Rainey. But the film, unlike ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI, also based on a play, never gets out of its scripted origins. But I am very sure I would go to a theatrical performance of it, when we can finally return to the theater.

#15 - MINARI won (and deserved to win) both the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance before Covid. That double-bill-win has been a bit suspect of late (ME, EARL, AND THE DYING GIRL anyone?) but this film proves to be well-worthy of the accolades. Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung brings us a slice of Americana as rich and as deep as THE GREAT SANTINI and AVALON, though it’s shades darker and more somber. It’s Chung’s view of the immigrant experience as a Korean family in Arkansas, inspired by his memory as the youngest child of bickering parents trying to carve out a life. The American dream is hard-fought and elusive which brings the real fractures for the family out in a way that is universal and painful. An outstanding cast includes Steven Yeun, as the idealistic father, Yeri Han, as a wife so beleaguered you want to move out with her, and Youn Yuh-Jung as the inappropriate grandmother who comes to live with them. A gem of a film that tells its story simply and ably, avoiding clichés and easy emotional payoffs.

#14 There is something soothing and deeply satisfying, even holy, about SOUND OF METAL and Riz Ahmed’s tortured, soulful performance in it. Ahmed plays Ruben, a punk/thrash drummer who suddenly loses all his hearing. He can’t stay on tour with his girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke) so he goes to a facility for the deaf in the country to confront his anger and isolation. Director Darius Marder (writing with his brother Abraham) have crafted a wholly original film that asks Ruben, and the audience, to re-calibrate our ideas about our internal drives and desires. In a just world Paul Raci, who plays Joe, the leader of the deaf facility, would be in the awards season conversation.

#13 - If one were to abandon the brilliant Armando Iannucci‘s THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD within the first forty minutes it could come across as inventive and light, but also quite manic and a bit twee. But stay with it and you end up with one of the best films of this year (though it premiered last year at festivals), a combination of a Dickens biography & an appreciation of the man’s work, adorned with a murder of actors including Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Peter Capaldi, Benedict Wong, and Ben Whishaw. Iannucci (IN THE LOOP, “VEEP,” THE DEATH OF STALIN) needs to be recognized as one of our best political and cultural satirists, under-appreciated to our generation’s detriment.”

#12 - I'm always chastened when movies come up and prove to me, time and time again, how much I do not know. This memorable doc is about a summer camp for the disabled that, in all likelihood, changed our world. In its cabins it housed many of the future leaders of the ADA act but it was bringing these young men and women together, where they saw and felt for the first time that they were not alone, that lit unquenchable fuses. It’s a story I didn’t know & am ever-so-glad I do now.

#11 - Sometimes movies step outside of the screen and punch you in your solar plexus. As I watch my mother and father slip away, now both housed in separate memory care facilities unable to see each other because of COVID, I'm susceptible to emotional movies on the topic. But I found the documentary DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD (also about end of life matters) to be cloying, unfunny, unreal, uninteresting and self-absorbed to the point of shame. THE FATHER, however, which I saw the same weekend as JOHNSON, left me shattered. Coming so much closer to my reality than I had ever seen before on the topic it moved me beyond measure. And it was all of it. First off, playwright/director Florian Zeller makes universal what I thought to be utterly personal. Anthony Hopkins redefines himself yet again in what may be his greatest performance. And the stealthy production design and supporting performances are all colluding to hit you (or at least me) in a spot of truth, which includes pain, and recognition of our shared frailty and humanity.

#10 - Writer/director Leigh Whannell proves that, not only could he upgrade z-grade horror w/SAW & B-movie sci-fi (I mean that in a complimentary, TERMINATOR & ROBOCOP way) with UPGRADE, he saved the Universal horror franchise by truly rebooting THE INVISIBLE MAN. Elisabeth Moss continues a recent record of amazing female performances in the horror genre (Toni Collette in HEREDITARY, Florence Pugh in MIDSOMMAR) as a woman who is in an abusive relationship with an ocular genius. But whether her ex can really make himself invisible is secondary to what he’s done to her mind, her self-esteem, and her relationships with others. But then there’s all the gasp-worthy invisible stuff. There’s, pardon the pun, more to this film than meets the eye.

#9 - I can't wait to watch this movie again. For many of the films ON MY OWN LIST! it's unlikely that I'll ever carve out the time, or have the opportunity, to watch them again. I'll actively find a way to watch this one. As with SHADOW IN THE CLOUD, it's best to go in cold. But the cast is superb. Andy Samberg, whom I've always enjoyed, proves a fitting leading man. Who knew? And J.K. Simmons gets one of the "Best Unexpected Appearance" awards.

#8 - Why do we drink? Is it rebellion? Is it escape? Is it a deficiency in character? A lot of us seem to do it, so there has to be a reason. And what happens if we lose ourselves to it? ANOTHER ROUND doesn't purport to answer any of these questions definitively. But what writer/director Thomas Vinterberg does give us is a sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, exceedingly empathetic story that approaches answers. Mikkelsen is once again both alluring and repulsive in a way that few actors can be. The tragic backstory to the making of the film (which you should look up after you watch it) just provides extra gravitas to this deeply-felt film.

#7 - With 2017's THE RIDER director Chloe Zhao showed us all what was lacking in recent filmmaking, with a rare, untethered, pragmatic, unsentimental story of a life in the heart of the U.S., in what should have presaged an American Nouvelle Vague, if anyone else had joined her in making films like hers. With NOMADLAND Zhao continues to find stories of the displaced, the marginalized, the authentic, the original, and the independent. Francis McDormand has to empathize with Fern, the character she plays, as she embodies a soul who is not lost, but who has set herself adrift. I'm not looking forward to Zhao's next film, THE ETERNALS, as (no matter how good it will probably end up being and even though she actively sought it out) it's a waste of her time.

#6 Director Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks, who made CAPTAIN PHILLIPS together team up again for the Western, NEWS OF THE WORLD, based on the best-selling novel by Paulette Jiles. Not a conventional genre piece, more in the vein of UNFORGIVEN and OPEN RANGE, Hanks plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd. It’s five years after the end of the Civil War, before the railroad and the telegraph, and Kidd makes his itinerant living reading the papers to Texas townfolk. As he travels he finds Johanna, a twice-orphaned 10-year-old girl, memorably played by Helena Zengel. Kidd takes up the duty of trying to get the girl to her nearest of kin, across a dangerous landscape. While the setting is foreboding and many of the events tragic, NEWS OF THE WORLD comes from a place of hope and decency, the kind of news you choose to tell, even in the face of insurmountable odds.

#5 Best to go into this one completely cold. I did. I left excited. When is director Roseanne Liang's next movie coming out??

#4 The town that fossil hunter Mary Anning lives in is called Lyme, in Wales. The sea walls, the houses, the fences, are all cemented together using limestone, tiny bits of fossils, millions of years old, fused together by time and gravity. And Kate Winslet and writer/director Francis Lee create a woman so crushed by loss, by her own existence in the wrong place at the wrong time, that she is, essentially, a moving piece of limestone. That she unearths other examples of this kind of legacy, in this case, dinosaurs, is but one of the many ironies in this beautiful, cautious film. Saoirse Ronan, as Charlotte Murchison, is the water that both frees and unmakes Mary. And of course Ronan brings something else, an element of much-needed levity and joy, that appears to be her natural companion. One of my favorites endings in a film this year.

#3 - I suppose this is cheating as it's the filming of a Broadway musical but, it's my list, so there. Already so firmly entrenched in our zeitgeist that lesser lights make fun of it (looking at you, Rian Johnson) this work performs the unasked for task of attempting to stitch America back together and address many of the realities of the founding of the country. Long after most of the films and shows in any top 2020 list have faded into obscurity, this capturing of one of the greatest works in the last 20 years will live on.

#2 - The only movie I've seen in a theater (we were cleared at our level to watch, masked-up) since the pandemic started it was likely the only film that HAD to be seen in a theater. Nolan moves back in time to his MEMENTO days to present a head-scratcher of a film, which, knowing him, is close to water-tight in the structure. But it's all overwhelmed by its scope. We may be at the end of the era where movies like this get made. Enjoy it while you can.

#1 - The best film of the year, ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI explores that most American of traditions, disagreement and discourse, anchored by four titanic performances: Kingsley Ben-Adir just checked off one of the Best Actor boxes as the militant, passionate, complex Malcolm X; Eli Goree masterfully captures the humor (finally!), humanity, and hubris of Cassius Clay (not yet Muhammad Ali); Aldis Hodge is the pragmatic, driven, towering football legend Jim Brown; and Leslie Odom Jr. captures the artistry, ingenuity, showmanship, and business acumen of singer/entrepreneur Sam Cooke. In the evening after the fight where Clay shattered the world with his first defeat of favored boxer Sonny Liston the four men improbably gather in Malcolm X’s rundown motel to celebrate. Director Regina King has just the right feel to establish our main characters then manages to keep the film moving, which is not an easy task, as MIAMI’s screenplay, by Kemp Powers, is based on his stage play and it does have some of the “why doesn’t he just get up and leave?” issues that movies-based-on-plays have. King’s setups let Powers’s soaring, fair, searing strings of dialogue more than make up for that quibble. There is much for America here. There is anger here. Confusion. Nuance. Pride. Charisma. Power. Solemnity. Hope