Tag Archives: 2020 top ten movies

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Song of the Day #4,648: ‘Drifting Away I Go’ – Cat Clifford

Best Films of 2020
#1 – Nomadland

It usually takes a second viewing for me to really know how I really feel about a film. In the case of writer/director Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, my revisit found me welling up with tears throughout. That doesn’t happen to me very often, and I didn’t expect it to happen here. That response left little doubt in my mind that this beautiful work is my favorite film of the year.

Based on a non-fiction book by Jessica Bruder that chronicled the lives of “vandwellers” left behind by a crumbling economy, Nomadland frames its story around the fictional Fern (Frances McDormand), a widow who takes to the road after losing her company housing to the recession.

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Song of the Day #4,647: ‘Green’ – Abraham Marder

Best Films of 2020
#2 – Sound of Metal

Director and co-writer Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal is another film that hit harder due to the pandemic. This story of a heavy metal drummer who has to find himself after losing his hearing wound up having deeper thematic resonance due to a crisis the filmmaker’s didn’t see coming.

Consider that the film’s main character, Ruben (played brilliantly by Riz Ahmed), is facing a sudden and foreign new reality, and struggles mightily to regain some semblance of his previous life. How many of us can relate, forced inside and into masks, away from loved ones, jobs and pastimes? How have we strained to find our old lives buried in this new existence?

We were lucky if we could find some grace in the solitude, some comfort in the silence.

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Song of the Day #4,646: ‘Rain Song’ – Emile Mosseri and Han Ye-ri

Best Films of 2020
#3 – Minari

When I watched writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, knowing nothing about its origins, my immediate thought was that it had to be based on real-life events. The details were too precise, and the emotions too full-hearted, for it to be anything but a collection of memories committed to film.

Sure enough, I soon learned that Chung based the film on his own Korean immigrant family’s experiences starting a farm in rural Arkansas. Every interaction feels so true to life because he lived it.

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Song of the Day #4,645: ‘Speak Now’ – Leslie Odom Jr.

Best Films of 2020
#4 – One Night in Miami…

In a year of strong ensemble casts, none impressed me more than the quartet at the center of Regina King’s One Night in Miami….

King directs a script by Kemp Powers, based on his own play, about an encounter between four legendary Black icons: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.). The four men alternately clash and harmonize about their roles and responsibilities in a society that worships them but would never invite them in for dinner.

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Song of the Day #4,644: ‘It’s Raining Men’ – DeathByRomy

Best Films of 2020
#5 – Promising Young Woman

Writer/director Emerald Fennell’s polarizing Promising Young Woman is one of the most self-assured and stylish debuts I’ve ever seen. Whether you find it exhilarating or nauseating (or both), you can’t deny its potency.

Part rape revenge thriller, part romantic comedy, part exploration of PTSD, this movie manages its twists and turns so deftly and somehow emerges as a cohesive vision. Fennell, an English actress best known for roles on Call the Midwife and The Crown, has crafted a singular concoction, a candy-coated poison pill.

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