Smashcut 365: A Film a Day — Year 3, Week 23 — The Smashcut Top Ten 2020
A Cinephile’s Guide to Streaming
Introducing the Smashcut Top Ten of 2020 — which, being a dire year in every respect, left us with fewer options than usual (good and bad), but also assures that the films are already available for streaming. Agree or disagree, our list (assessed and assembled in a rather unilateral fashion by longtime critic and high-handed Smashcut Editorial Director Michael Atkinson) can at the very least be a hierarchal guide for the winter months ahead, when all we can do is stream.
155/365: (#1) I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)
Kaufmaniacs, rejoice — America’s most original screenwriter-turned-bizarro-filmmaker adapts a lean psychocomedy novel for Netflix, and turns it into another signature airburst of pure enigmatic Kaufmania. Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons are the young, fraught couple heading to his parents’ house for a wintery visit; from there, in a movie-movie universe somehow haunted by the musical Oklahoma!, time stretches and snaps, and the difference between reality, “reality,” and movie-ness vanishes in a daze. Nobody keeps as many balls in the air as Kaufman, and nobody is quite as funny. (Netflix)
156/365: (#2) Nomadland (Chloe Zhao, 2020)
Zhao and star Frances McDormand entered into and camped out in a very real, desperate American subculture: aging widows and retirees forced to live in their vans and roam the west for temp work. McDormand, as a stubborn widow watching the shards of her life slowly disappear into the desert, is one of very few pro actors; everyone else is actually one of these modern nomads, and the film’s documentary vibe is indelible. (In virtual cinemas)
157/365: (#3) Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky, 2020)
Famously, a stark, quiet, black-&-white documentary about a Norwegian farm and, in particular, a vast sow and her dozen or so new piglets. Unspeakably beautiful and fascinating, the film also retains our knowledge of the meat industry as a secret weapon, with the prospect of tragedy hanging over every adorable little curly tail. When it comes, it wipes you out, without a human glimpsed or a word spoken. You may not go vegan, but the empathic bond laid out for us is unarguably powerful. (In virtual cinemas)
158/365: (#4) The Wolf House (Joaquin Cocina & Cristobal Leon, 2018)
The case is made for this animate-everything Chilean film on a previous 365 entry, found here.
159/365: (#5) Ham on Rye (Tyler Taormina, 2019)
Maybe the year’s most original debut, this dreamy teen… dramedy?… follows a town’s 16-year-olds to what promises to be an over-dressed prom-like ritual, but is something altogether different — which in its weirdness is eloquent and gorgeous, and which also demarcates society’s inherent caste divisions and outcast rulings. Then the film spirals out into an amorphous portrait of the same town at night, when hope and promise and the flush of youth suddenly seem out of reach. Eccentric and startling, the movie has a personality all its own. (Amazon Prime)
160/365: (#6) The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson, 2019)
A spirited piece of genre-film time travel, this delightfully yacky debut plunges through a 1950s New Mexico town — a place we get to know very well — as a young beatnik disc jockey (Jake Horowitz) and a peppy high schooler-slash-switchboard operator (Sierra McCormick) discover a mysterious audio frequency that could be extraterrestrial in origin. The story is so packed with familiar UFO mystery there’s hardly anyhere new for it to go, but the textures Patterson got here, with characters that talk so quickly and smartly you’ll need subtitles, are dazzling, as are the nighttime camerawork and the lead actors. (Netflix)
161/365: (#7) Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov, 2019)
Balagov’s second film, and a haunting crusher, exploring the relationship between two women in a Leningrad soldiers’ hospital at the end of WWII: Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), a gangly misfit subject to PTSD seizures, and Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), her childhood friend. Before Masha returns from the front, we meet Iya and her precious toddler; in an excruciating early scene, she accidentally smothers the child during a seizure. When Masha returns, we find out it was her baby, a crisis that the traumatized Masha attempts to mediate by getting pregnant again — or, failing that, arranging to have the hapless Iya impregnated. The story is deftly constructed out of wounded psyches, and the visual palette is hypnotic. Multiple awards at Cannes. (Vudu, Amazon Prime, YouTube)
#8: Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho & Juliano Dornelles, 2019)
This Brazilian banquet of wackiness, by the filmmaking pair responsible for 2012’s Neighboring Sounds, is a Surrealist Western in which a fictional town, as a magical result of its 95-year-old matriarch dying, is beset by mysterious forces and omens and, eventually, a band of sport-hunting Europeans (led by Udo Kier) murderously descending in a manhunting competition. Filho and Dornelles load the landscape with vivid invention, and somehow it all coalesces into a salient slice of post-colonial social commentary. The legacy of “Third Cinema” lives on. (YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime)
#9: First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, 2019)
Now that our American indie landscape is fairly cluttered with woman filmmakers, Reichardt is something like the matriarch, and this gentle Western, her seventh film, invites us into another of her insular mini-worlds, this time trailing through the Midwestern wilderness after a meek cook who dreams of opening a restaurant (John Magaro) and the fugitive Chinese man he befriends (Orion Lee), and how together they court disaster by selling biscuits made with milk stolen from the region’s only cow. Reichardt doesn’t believe in visual showmanship or effect; she’s only concerned with her characters, whom she observes with tireless generosity and patience. (Hulu, Sling, Fubo, YouTube, Amazon Prime)
#10: Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson, 2020)
Johnson’s previous film, the sublime memoir-doc Cameraperson, opened the door for this non-fiction romp, a project she and her dad agreed upon once he began showing signs of dementia, and had to move into her small New York apartment. The man’s impending decline and death haunted both of them, so they decided to exorcise the reality by fake-staging his demise over and over again, in increasingly comic ways; the reigning emotional temperature is not fear or grief, though, it’s love, and the film itself is a thing of unlikely joy. (Netflix)
Runners-up (in order!):
Donbass (Sergei Loznitsa, 2018)
Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020)
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan, 2019)
The Nest (Sean Durkin, 2020)
VHYes (Jack Henry Robbins, 2019)
Vivarium (Lorcan Finnegan, 2019)
New Order (Michel Franco, 2020)
The Other Lamb (Malgorzata Szumowska, 2019)
Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe, 2019)
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz, 2020)
Koko-Di Koko-Da (Johannes Nyholm, 2019)
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, 2020)
The Assistant (Kitty Green, 2019)
Tesla (Michael Almereyda, 2020)
Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019)
Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee, 2020)
Bad Education (Cory Finley, 2019)
Night of the Kings (Philippe Lacote, 2020)
Host (Rob Savage, 2020)
Babyteeth (Shannon Murphy, 2019)
Year Three Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22
Year Two Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
Year One Archive: Week 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
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