This year, I really missed the best fifteen seconds of any day, the moment when the lights go down, the conversation and phones stop and some beautiful production logos appear. People often talk about this experience being out of body or out of time, but this year has made me feel like it’s the reverse: I was desperate for the defined block of time that the cinema provides. A before, during and after of an event that contains its own beginning, middle and end. Beyond the 6PM drink and the occasional walk, there was little else to distract and define the vast expanses of time. A few of the below were properly excited and anticipated; a few became major moments only after they’d passed. But none of them were offered a hallowed space of ‘an event’, something you could truly look back at and remember ‘doing’. Nevertheless, I’ve picked five standouts and many times more that I held dear from new films this year. (Next week I’ll be posting my best ‘new to me’ films of the year and the following week a few other things that brightened up my time).
Small Axe
Small Axe reminded me that it’s not necessarily period dramas as a genre that cools my blood, but the periods they focus on. With every second of screen time dripping with expense, the false imperative of the lowest common denominator impinges all the more in the mind of the executive. The last decade – from Darkest Hour to Downton Abbey – has sought to buttress familiar and accepted narratives. So Small Axe is doing two things at once for period dramas, both of which aren’t the stock in trade of our cottage industry: sharing new stories (ones that have shockingly little cultural currency) and also questioning established histories. Steve McQueen’s work would have been radical just by the space it takes up and the size of canvas he has fought to paint on. While occasionally falling into the genre’s pitfalls (some of the ‘did you get that at the back?’ dialogue belies McQueen’s economical and shockingly direct visual storytelling), Small Axe manages to do two contradictory things at once: create a continuum and legacy of Black lives in Britain – a new wholeness – while also hacking at the lazy idea of a monolith of ‘the Black community’, presenting individuals rather than types. It also expands the ways that history happens: both in dramatic, watershed moments (like the acquittal of the Mangrove Nine), experiences that feel world-shaping to the person involved (Education’s consignment to the rubbish heap of the school system), periods of time that can never be reclaimed (Alex Wheatle’s reunion with his ne’er-do-well buddy puts a capper on his bildungsroman) and moments that feel commonplace as they happen but crystallise in the rear view (Lovers Rock). In a year where we had so many reasons to think less of what Britons do and have done, this stood apart.
First Cow
In darker moments, I wish for Woody Allen’s work ethic and (more importantly) access to funding to be displaced to other filmmakers. I’d happily see Nicole Holofcener crank out a film a year, even if only one in three slipped beneath the ribs as well as Enough Said. Then there’s someone like Kelly Reichardt. Although her pace has become more regular (and is unlikely to involve another world-rebuilding twelve year gap, as between her first and second features), each of her Reichardt’s films is an event to me. Even while concentrating on a small number of themes – the bonds between duos, the fragility of humans in nature, animals and their existence beyond anthropomorphic projection – there is always more to be wrung out of small lives in the Pacific Northwest. It’s good to see A24 turning their clout and taste-making to something so meme-resistant and hopefully see her worked appreciated on a wider platform. My appreciation was heightened for a story about people desperate for comfort in challenging times. The arrival of a cow in the West was like a hug from a friend I hadn’t seen all year. Toby Jones’s request for ‘a blueberry clafoutis’ became a long-running joke in our house in moments of need.
First Cow is available on US VOD sites and has yet to be announced for UK distribution
Lingua Franca
Lingua Franca is about Olga, an ageing Russian-Jewish immigrant with dementia, her recovering alcoholic grandson Alex and Olga’s Filipino nurse Olivia, a trans woman desperate to get her green card. Written, directed, produced and starring director Isabel Sandoval, this is an intensely sensitive and honest film about what it costs to care, with no simple answers about the way that money complicates our relationship to those connections. It gives no easy answers to the three protagonists’ situations, granting them the autonomy and sympathy that the rest of society denies them. While never soft on its characters, it is a film that is full of quiet resistance and lushness. Not unrelatedly, it’s a deeply sexy film, aflame with a newly-found comfort in the body. It makes me sad that – despite increasing ground for trans filmmakers – a film about more than becoming didn’t make it to the UK in 2020.
Lingua Franca is available via US Netflix and has yet to be announced for UK distribution
My First Film
Since I entered the film industry, I’ve become one of those people I used to scorn in the pages of Sight & Sound, who wrote joyfully about films that were – at best – many, many moons away from UK distribution. Now I am one of those (awful) people who blinks at 2020 lists featuring Portrait of a Lady on Fire, obnoxiously adrift from the strictures of release schedules.
So it’s even worse that I’m picking a film not only not widely available, but also one that you had to set a Twitter alert to be a chance of being the few people to see in 2020. Zia Anger’s performance piece/artist film is a pyre on which to burn old failures, getting high on the fumes for new inspiration. As she tells the story of the making and failure of her debut Always All Ways, Anne Marie (a film that IMDB lists as ‘abandoned’ but simply failed to find a festival berth), she also finds space for a new honesty about what it takes to do anything creatively. Involving sending text messages to strangers, the audience destroying their own failed projects and managing to make watching someone type up a Word document a deeply thrilling process, My First Film gave that rarest of feelings this year: ‘You had to be there’.
Follow Zia Anger on Twitter for news of any upcoming My First Film performances.
The Assistant
One of my 2020 resolutions was to rid myself of one of my small pieces of daily self-harm: reading the comments. With all the time in the world open to me and a surfeit of truly awful takes, I roundly failed at kicking the habit. One of the ongoing delights of internet discourse are the rebuttals that follow any new revelation of sexual abuse by a prominent figure. The galaxy brains protest ‘But why didn’t these women say no?’ or ‘They were fine with it for years, why say something now?’. If they had such capacities, these people could have their sympathetic imaginations reshaped by watching Kitty Greene’s day-in-the-life drama, The Assistant. Following Jane – one of a cadre of assistants being fed into the gaping maw of a Weinstein-alike film producer – we get a crushing sense of why people continue to work in abusive situations (especially when they are not the direct target of the abuse). Tiny details stab upon the senses – a box cutter running along a package might as well be human flesh, the stillness of a pre-dawn office feels like a crypt, and Matthew McFayden scraping a metal clad tissue box hits like a sledgehammer – making a beige office a building on fire. Despite being accumulated from such small parts, it nonetheless creates a gigantic crushing picture of the many days that will precede it, and those, sadly that will follow.
The Assistant is streaming on NOWTV and on VOD in a load of different places.
19 more I loved this year and where you can see them
Time (on Amazon Prime🤮) : Garrett Bradley brings the same revelatory eye for Black lives found in her languid experiments to the hard realities of the prison-industrial complex.
Dick Johnson is Dead (Netflix): Kirsten Johnson’s moving and original living tribute to her father.
Swallow (disappeared from VOD??): This was a rare surprise. Seductive visuals, a premise that lands both literally and metaphorically and a cracking performance by Halley Bennet (delivering on that Music and Lyrics promise).
Wolfwalkers (Apple TV+): Cartoon Saloon return to Irish history for this lycanthropic lovely. So much animation per square inch and a reminder of what the medium can do when it departs from literal representation.
Kajillionaire (UK VOD next year): Those allergic to Miranda July’s whims won’t be turned by this story of low stakes grifters, but all the more cracked earnestness for the rest of us.
La Llorona (Shudder): How do those who commit atrocities continue to live with themselves? This magical realist answer burns with the rage of the disappeared.
Shadow in the Cloud (coming to the UK via Signature in 2021): There’s one moment so utterly go-for-broke silly in this that it would justify its place on the list alone, but this very enjoyable B-movie featuring a Gremlin on the side of a WWII bomber has other charms.
Cuties (Netflix): Astonished I could hear anything else this year over the whooshing over people’s heads of the point of this well-observed, ambivalent drama.
His House (Netflix): Some stunning choreography of small spaces in this visually impressive homegrown horror.
Synonyms (no UK distribution; Criterion Channel in the US): No film left me with more unresolved feelings this year.
Host (streaming on Shudder and VOD many other places): Nothing is more horrifying than a long Zoom call.
Breakwater (MUBI): The lovely lesbian holiday I was denied this year (not you Happiest Season). A wonderful short about a utopian space.
Make Up (streaming on iPlayer and VOD many other places): The first film I saw in the cinema post-lockdown, and grateful I didn’t let this one’s big screen ambitions play out in diminished circumstances. British social realism with some of Claire Denis’s attention to the sensuous and everyday.
Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution (Netflix): Heavy, full tears tumbled out of my face watching this one. A healthy reminder that if you’ve tasted freedom once, you’ll do anything to fight to get it again. We need more spaces like this one.
Balloon (coming to the UK via Day for Night in 2021): Full of cultural specificity, this was this year’s So Long, My Son (though much softer on the kids). If you liked The Cave of the Yellow Dog, the gentle drama will be an absolute treat.
Spontaneous (available on VOD): Would this story of your friends suddenly spontaneously combusting have hit so close to home in any other year?
Vitalina Varela (coming to UK home ent via Second Run in 2021): Another one I’m glad I got to see pre-lockdown, because the none more black textures wouldn’t have worked anywhere else.
You Will Die at Twenty (coming to the UK via New Wave in 2021): Full of astonishing images, this piece of post-revolution Sudanese cinema is ripe with the grief of a generation born without hope.
A Response to Your Message (streaming free here): A brilliant debut short from Somalia Nonyé Seaton, managing to capture the moment – what happens when you’re deluged by well-meaning white friends’ messages? – but also speak to timeless concerns.