2020 was a weird year for many things, and especially movies. As the pandemic hit, studios delayed many of their films into 2021. It would appear to make it a pretty catastrophic movie year. But guess what? Taking the big blockbuster boats out of the bathtub allows for the smaller ones to actually be seen. We collectively leaned a little harder on streaming services to fill in the blanks, allowing for a wider spectrum of cinematic voices to make their way through. This may be the most deeply empathetic list I’ve been together in all the years I’ve done this. No year taught me more, film after film, about experiences not my own while giving me universalities to connect with.

Before we get started: some awards! 

The 91% Alcohol Swab Award: Tenet

At one point this past Christmas, I had to hunt down 91% alcohol for a project. I’m still not sure which evaporates faster: a dab of 91% alcohol or Christopher Nolan’s latest, Tenet. To be fair, there’s much to admire about this movie. There’s the typical, still very cool Nolan commitment to using as many practical effects as possible. There’s some nifty editing here and there. There are some camera tricks that, bolstered by a giant studio budget, look pretty dang cool. But that’s about it. All of it in service of a story almost entirely explained between characters and yet still not quite adding up.

While 91% alcohol is about as distilled a solution you can find in stores, Tenet is the most distilled solution of Nolan yet. Everything you love about him – the big real-world effects, the mind-bending thoughts, the suits that look suspiciously like the ones he wears to set every day – is here. But everything you hate about him – the lone, thinly written female character, the use of characters as ciphers for barely-workshopped ideas, the screaming of dialogue over loud noises because of his commitment to live sound recording – is also here, distilled in its purest, most frustrating form. I wanted so badly to figure this movie out until my disinterest increased disproportionately with the amount of time left in the movie.

There’s an inkling of a cool movie there. It’s just a 70% solution of Nolan would have worked better – a little less of his obsession, a little more water poured on the growth of his characters – and made this the event movie he truly wanted it to be. 

Best Power Flex: Black is King 

If you look up just what this film is, the common (and rather boring) description is that it’s a visual companion to The Lion King: The Gift album Beyonce curated as part of Disney’s 2019 remake. And while this is accurate, it does absolutely nothing to give you a sense of what you’re in for. Working with directors, artists, and collaborators from all over the world, Beyonce used her clout to get Disney to invest in something they maybe didn’t fully understand. They did their best to make it an event, but the best they could do was place it on Disney+ with a few advertisements. If it weren’t for the pandemic, this would be in theaters and, rightfully, an event unto itself. 

Beyonce and her team go to great (and joyous) pains to portray Blackness as a spectrum and to reclaim Black heritage with style. They shot in Nigeria, South Africa, and Ghana and they worked closely with local artists and musicians from each of these areas. It is an 85-minute testament to the diversity of Africa – something many Americans could use more exposure to. After all, many of us here in the US still think of Africa as a country and not a continent of 54 countries with their own unique cultures. 

What I found quite astounding about this film is how it captured all the basic elements of The Lion King without ever explicitly stating them. The narrative arc and the emotional colors it brings are all here – but traced over the greater story of Africa. It would have been easy for Beyonce and her team to lean on the Disney money and make something they’re minimally involved in, using CGI backgrounds and sets. Instead, they took the opportunity to truly stretch themselves and shine a luminous light on culture so often left in American shadows. 

Best Groundhog Day Diversions: Palm Springs and The Old Guard 

It’s fitting that both of these films came out the same day in July, as we sheltered from the summer heat and the pandemic. Perhaps Hulu and Netflix executives wanted to place a little behind-the-scenes bet on which could be a more perfect fit for Our Time of Quarantine. Palm Springs is a romantic comedy about two people stuck in a weird time loop and The Old Guard is a leaner action film about just how exhausting and devastating immortality can be. In both films, our main characters are struggling to find meaning in their predicament. In essence, they’re the perfect kind of escapist-with-a-side-of-emotion works for 2020.

Not only did both films come out on the same day, but both have Andy’s (Springs‘ Sandberg and Charlize Theron’s character) that need to learn something from those they bring up to speed so they can find their own strength to go forward. One Andy has resigned himself to a life of repeats. Another Andy is exhausted from the accumulation. They both need to believe there’s something more. 

In a way, these Andy’s represent our zeitgeist. They are who we imagine ourselves as: people exhausted by this pandemic yet needing something to have hope in. We need to believe there’s a future worth living in, just as much as need to believe real change has occurred so the same nightmares won’t be repeated. In the end; it’s in our hands far more than we realize. It’s our mission should we choose to accept it. 

Going To See Your Favorite Person’s Play Award: The Lovebirds

I love Issa Rae and her Insecure TV show. I love Kumail Nanjiani. I love Michael Showalter (Hello My Name Is Doris, The Big Sick) as a director. What makes this movie work is the comedic chemistry between the leads. Both Rae and Nanjiani are excellent actors in their own right, but you can see them struggling against the mechanisms of the story. Where it feels more effortless and deeply entertaining is when their legit comedic chemistry sparks to a smolder, either through comic timing or ad-libbed lines. They lean into the absurdity of each situation, still always trying to find the emotional truth behind the lines. It makes for a great Friday night escape flick, worth some chuckles and the joy of seeing two of your favorite comedic presences find new ways to bounce off each other. 

An additional fun bonus with this film: trying to figure out where Kumail was on his Marvel’s The Eternals training schedule while filming this. When I saw how director Bong Joon-ho kept hiding a too-buff-to-be-poor Captain America Chris Evans in a long trenchcoat in Snowpiercer, I realized how much fun was to be had with seeing Marvel actors and their directors try to hide all the cinematic muscle. After his Men’s Health cover came out in April 2020, which showed the word a Kumail absolutely ripped in a way we never knew possible, Slate did the investigative work for everyone.

Best Original Power Ballad: Frozen II 

I have no problem admitting it: I was one of those moviegoers genuinely shocked by how good the first Frozen movie turned out to be and considered myself a fan. I didn’t think it was begging to be a franchise, but billions of dollars worth of merchandise will sway a studio like Disney. Nearly seven years after the original (not a good sign), Frozen II arrived on Disney+ and…I was not a fan. For many reasons. But! It made it that much easier to spot my one true highlight from that film: Kristoff’s 80’s power ballad, “Lost in the Woods”. The song along is a true banger. But the song with the lip-synching reindeer and dramatic lighting? 100% fried gold. Lock it away in the Smithsonian. This is the best thing Disney will ever do for the next fifty years.

Best Polar Express Replacement: Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey 

Watching Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express on a large TV screen with a thundering sound system this past Christmas reminded me of its original selling point in 2004: a CGI extravaganza rendered in 3D (hence the objects randomly thrown towards the screen). Sixteen years later, the animation holds up better in some places than others, but there’s a dark, rather creepy core to the whole thing. Maybe it’s having a homeless man giggling on top of a moving train. Maybe it’s the way every adult’s face just sets up camp in the Uncanny Valley and looks increasingly grotesque as the story goes on. All of it works together to create something rather exhausting and discomforting, buoyed by some show-stopping action pieces that remind us of just how great Zemeckis was at live-action directing before he built a second living inside the computer. 

David E. Talbert’s Jingle Jangle, on the other hand, accomplishes quite a few things in a delightful package bursting with color and imagination: it introduces a much better, more empowering idea of belief, and it does it with great actors, imaginative sets, and some genuinely catchy songs. It’s a smart cotton candy delight of a Christmas classic for the whole family and with none of the creepiness or Uncanny Valley treks found in Polar Express.

Most Unlikely Reminder That Octopus Are Dope: My Octopus Teacher

There are some unmistakable truths in life. Coke is better than Pepsi. Showerheads are cheese graters for water. Everything is improved with an Oreo in it. And octopuses are one of the most incredible, baffling, and inspiring animals on this entire planet. You know they’re special when Pixar, well known for making animals talk and bringing otherwise inanimate objects to life, spent an insane amount of time on research and development with Finding Dory because octopus arms were constantly breaking their animating brains. Or when they allow them to make World Cup soccer predictions.

There are so many ways this documentary could have sunk to the cinematic floor. The idea of a man obsessively following an octopus for a year? In this economy? But it’s a testament to Ehlrich and Reed that they sculpt such a genuine heart at the center of diver and filmmaker Craig Foster’s cephalopod friendship. The footage they’ve pulled together is astonishing in its own right, as intimate a look as we’ve ever seen at our eight-leg friends of the sea. But what makes this special is how Foster, exhausted and adrift and barely floating above a mid-life crisis, delicately explains the way this sea friend has revitalized his life. It buoys a rather sad ending, lining it with a golden hue of hope, not unlike the sunlight that snuck deep into the kelp forest Foster spent so much time in.

Best Superhero Film: Birds of Prey

Another example of how great a superhero movie can be when you put the women in charge, Birds of Prey skillfully adopted Deadpool‘s unreliable narrator structure and ran with it, complete in stylish heels and an egg sandwich. Bonus points to Yan and Hodson for putting their newly-formed team together in a funhouse, creating one of the liveliest, most creative third act action scenes in recent memory.

Best Reminder the Human Body is 70% Water: Onward

By the time the final emotional notes hit from this film, I was reminded our bodies are just sponges holding in all the tears Onward had yet to squeeze out of us.

Onward is a testament to how much grace you can buy from an audience when you nail the key emotional moments of your story. Not everything about this movie really works. There’s a fantasy element that doesn’t feel completely thought through, a rare miss for Pixar. There are jokes that don’t quite swish the net, awkwardly rattling around the rim. But none of this quite mattered because goddamn, did Scanlon and his team nail down their emotional tracking. No movie in 2020 reduced me to a tear-stained mess quite like this one. There was an ache in my chest all the way through, a feeling I haven’t really had since 2015’s Creed and Inside Out. Keep the kleenexes close by as Chris Pratt and Tom Holland make you believe in brothers who need each other more than they even realize.

20. Boys State – directed by Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss

This documentary is likely to leave you with two deeply conflicting feelings: hope in the future of American politics and utter despair at the white supremacy coursing underneath it. You’ll absolutely root for Steven Garza and his utterly genuine demeanor and for René Otero and his uphill climb to respect he rightfully deserves, and you’ll absolutely steam at just how close their experiences are to being toppled by the most rudimentary, yet insidious forms of racism and their teenage perpetrators. A fascinating thin slice of how America often plays out on the bigger stages.

19. Underwater – directed by William Eubank, written by Brian Duffield and Adam Cozad

For all the attention (and taxes) we pay to space exploration, I’ve often felt we’d be better off using our resources towards exploring the 80% of the planet’s oceans that remain a complete unmapped, unobserved mystery. Even further, it’s been estimated we haven’t discovered more than 90% of the ocean’s species. What Underwater does so well is tap into two things at once: the unexplored ocean and the mysteries of the dark, deep Mariana Trench. And then it uses the insane water pressure of the deep in conjunction with the imploding pressure of not knowing just what the hell is going on around you. And it does it all while allowing an extremely game cast to wear some weighty, utterly cool exploration suits.

18. Get Duked! – directed and written by Ninian Doff 

17. Extra Ordinary – directed and written by Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman

Extra Ordinary comes from Ireland. Get Duked! comes from Scotland. They are both similar in their structure, stringing along quiet, unique characters as they go through increasingly baffling circumstances before breaking open into highly memorable, highly hilarious final acts.

Extra Ordinary is a bit like low-budget Ghostbusters in a small Irish town, with spit-out ectoplasm, unusual ghosts, and a deranged Will Forte as a fading one-hit-wonder. Get Duked! mixes hip-hop sensibilities with the Scottish Highlands – a brew I’d never imagine dreaming up – to delightful results. Just be sure to keep on the subtitles to decipher those thick, wonderful accents.

16. Beastie Boys Story – directed by Spike Jonze, written by Jonze, Adam Horovitz, and Mike D 

I’ve got a lot of cultural blindspots – everyone does – and a big one I’ve always wanted to somehow remedy is the Beastie Boys. I never grew up around their music. But I knew that I loved every crazy, quirky video they made, especially the ones they did with Spike Jonze, a director I dearly love. So when I heard they collaborated for this filmed special/documentary? I was so there.

It’s hard to talk about your own band for and hour and a half without it sounding a bit masturbatory, but Michael (Mike D) Diamond, Adam (Ad-Rock) Horovitz, and Jonze make it absolutely work. There is an utter genuineness from the opening minutes, a tone of celebration mixed in with the humbling that comes with failure, reflection, and untimely death. I grew to appreciate just how wild it was these guys made it big in the first place, how they great to hate their own image, and then how they burnt it down and build it all back up in a way they could be proud of. The music is always a reflection of where they’re at in their lives, allowing them to let the art speak for itself. And Mike D and Ad-Rock are disarmingly charming, owning up to their mistakes (like the party atmosphere and casual misogyny of the past) and expressing their deep gratitude for Adam Yauch’s impact on their lives.

If you’re a fan, this is a welcome parkour dash down memory lane. If you’re like me, curious but never quite getting their deal, this is as good a shot to your musical veins as you’ll get. Come for the dope beats and the hilarious side stories about Mike D’s failed film career; stay for the heartfelt themes of ownership, gratitude, and fighting for the right to your own party.

Also, the best dancing robot video out there on the interwebs.

15. I’m Thinking of Ending Things – written and directed by Charlie Kaufman 

Audiences love it when you give them 2 and 2 and then let them add it up to 4 on their own (and not just because they may be insecure about their own math skills). But I swear the math equations Charlie Kaufman gives us are time-released, meant only to be solved as soon as the credits roll. And they usually involve the Quadratic Formula or Calculus or something quite complex.

What I’m saying is that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is maybe the most Kaufmanesque movie yet in that it withholds its true meaning through your entire first viewing so that it’s lodged in your brain for weeks after. Both my wife and I found ourselves liking the film more and more with each passing day, our brains finally solving rudimentary parts of the Kaufman Equation, sending out tiny shots of endorphins. The true genius of Kaufman’s work here is the way you still are entranced and drawn into a movie you don’t fully understand. You can feel your way around it, like your tongue searching for that stubborn piece of candy at the back of your teeth. For a while, I wasn’t sure if Kaufman himself even understood his own movie. But the meandering, as witty and heartbreaking as it is, is the point. It’s an ode to memory, to a life regretfully lived, that won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

14. Uncorked – written and directed by Prentice Penny

Another Netflix movie that got buried beneath the layers of content and the initial shock of the pandemic, Prentice Penny’s debut film is much like the wines it nerds out so deeply about: sweet, rich, and full of flavor. What’s so special about this film is how Penny takes a very universal theme – fathers and sons who struggle to understand and respect their differences – and makes it something fresh and alive with the details that surround it. Just as we salivate at the Memphis BBQ joint the father (Courtney B. Vance) runs and wants to hand off to his son (Mamoudou Athie), we marvel at all the rapid-fire, priorly-unknown details of such a foreign wine world. By the time you see Athie studying late into the night about all the different wine regions around the world, you know there’s more to wine than just your friend’s Target purchase. 

13. Soul – written and directed by Pete Docter and Kemp Powers

I have grown to rely on Pixar emotionally devastating me. Like clockwork, I can count on one of their movies just knocking every possible tear out of me, dumping out my inner water ducts so they can get whatever blockage they have out of their system. Soul had all the ingredients to do the trick. With Pete Docter – the emotional terrorist responsible for my biggest tearjerkers outside of Coco – at the helm, I figured I should keep a tissue box handy. But the movie was over before any waterworks began. I felt a little deprived. I wanted to cry, dammit. I expected it. 

But what I appreciate about Soul is the idea that sometimes there’s the things we want to see and hear, and then there’s what we need to see and hear. There’s enough to cry about these days. We can look at the news or grieve about the family time and experiences we’ve lost to the pandemic. But I needed to hear what Soul had to say. I needed to be reminded that single-minded pursuits of things I enjoyed were very much in danger of being a path of regret. It made me think about all the illustrators, so in love with drawing, who work backbreaking 16 hour days to finish work they get severely underpaid for. Or the screenwriters who spend years writing scripts that never get made, barely getting by. More than all of this, Docter and co-writer Kemp Powers are showing us that the wider river is the one that moves at just the right pace. We gotta expand our peripheral vision. We gotta see the detail off the to side we often overlook. And we gotta remember the people around us that hold it all together. 

I could rave about so many things about this movie. The exceedingly clever and perfectly-designed score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The typically-gorgeous Pixar animation now showing off its fancy natural lighting ability. The way this movie, as with so many Pixar films, just absolutely bursts at the seams with creativity and innovation. It’s all there. It’s a Pete Docter movie, after all. You know you’re gonna get something wacky and undeniably special. But what I will take away from this most is the deeply mature and wise message at the heart of it all: to remember why any soul would be jealous of our time on this crazy planet. 

12. Dick Johnson Is Dead – directed by Kirsten Johnson, written by Johnson & Nels Bangerter

The premise sounds like a joke gone too far: documentarian Kristen Johnson helps her father prepare for death by moving him across the country and filming all the possible ways he could die. What keeps this from reeling off-track is the utter sincerity of everyone involved. They want to give Dick a safe end of his life. But they also recognize that as soon as his memory starts slipping, he’s not the same person and never will be. Johnson’s ending is one of the deepest arguments I’ve seen about losing people and what it means to say goodbye.

Johnson’s interactions with her father are colorful and hilarious, the repartee developed between two deeply good humans, and yet she never shies away from reality. As a longtime documentarian, it may be her most difficult subject yet. And by the time you hear a priest’s final, heartbroken blowing of the trumpet, you’ll realize just how much Dick Johnson means to those around him and how everyone has to let go in their own way.

11. Possessor – written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

The premise is the definition of sci-fi high concept: an agent uses brain implant technology to inhabit others, driving them to assassinations at the request of high-paying clients. In essence: it’s the perfect crime. That is, unless you’re the person inhabited.

What makes this such a vital, nasty piece of film is the artful way Cronenberg imbues reality into everything. Perfect crimes never work out because the messiest possible conduits are at the helm: human beings themselves. We can see it in the way Tasya (Andrea Riseborough) frequently goes off-book for a more impulsive, far bloodier method of execution. And the film spreads its thematic wings when Colin (Christopher Abbott) realizes he’s being inhabited by Tasya and decides to fight back, a body truly at war with itself and the consciousness that keeps it alive.

Rather unexpectedly, Possessor reminded me a lot of 2014’s Wild, the way director Jean-Marc Vallée and writer Nick Hornby worked together to create a true audiovisual examination of the ever-intrusive presence of Cheryl Strayed’s memory. While Wild layered music and flashbacks over the narrative in exciting, accentuating ways, Cronenberg uses Possessor‘s visuals like he’s developing the film in his own dark magic lab, dipping and combining shots in all manners of material. The result is a phantasmagorical experience that feels as real and honest as anything that came out of 2020.

10. Da 5 Bloods – directed by Spike Lee; written by Lee & Kevin Willmott

Hollywood has produced a great deal of Vietnam movies over the years. Many of them are quite good. But there’s a piece of it that’s been missing for 50 years: the experience and contribution of Black veterans. This is a movie that started out as a script written by white writers called The Last Tour, following white veterans who head back to Vietnam in search of a former squad leader they left behind. When the project stalled out and Spike Lee and his co-writer Kevin Willmott got their hands on it, they not only made the veterans Black, but they saw an opportunity to weave in the history Americans had long ignored. 

This is a film with so much to say. Lee packs the frame with archival footage, differing aspect ratios, and plays with elements of magical realism and memory. He has a group of great actors bringing their characters to life, Black men in various stages of life who are determined to find gold they buried in Vietnam and bring back the bones of their fallen comrade, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman). While it was initially a decision decided by budget, Lee keeps the same actors in flashbacks with Boseman, a decision that only pays off as the film goes on. We can see how much their love is bone-deep for Norman and how much their loss has affected them. We also get to see how complex war really is, when Norman and the other four Bloods gun down Vietnamese soldiers having a simple conversation and only making the mistake of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

There is a lot to process and absorb throughout this film’s 156-minute run time (though any complaining about it too much should wonder why we didn’t say the same with similarly long-running times from the likes of our highly-regarded white directors) but what Lee and Willmott so effectively illustrate is how these men are a part of the one long war of systemic racism. While they’re fighting in Vietnam, they’re already marginalized and have to listen on the radio to the protests that take place for their own rights in America. When they come back from the War, they’re still marginalized in a number of ways. That’s why the buried gold has so much promise to them. It’s a chance to tip the balances in their favor for once. To get ahead and reshape the narrative of their own lives and the generations ahead of them. And while infighting takes place over who gets what throughout the movie, it’s absolutely no mistake that the one man who threatens to blow this whole plan apart wears a wardrobe very reminiscent of our current president. 

In a film packed with great performances, Delroy Lindo’s Paul towers over them all. It’s a character we haven’t seen before – a Black Trump supporter who’s tired of always being ignored and overlooked. The further they get into the Vietnamese jungle, the more he loses his grip on reality. It’s terrifying and enthralling at once. Lindo is the angry, confused soul at the core of the film while an outstanding Jonathan Majors as Paul’s son provides the heart, trying to keep his father tethered to some kind of reality and help him find some kind of peace.

Near the end, there’s a scene where Black Lives Matter protestors and advocates gather together at a rally. Many wondered how Lee could film something and inject it in his film so quickly. But the revelation that it was filmed more than a year before doesn’t prove Lee to be prescient – instead it proves he knows all too well that the war the 5 Bloods fought is the one still being fought today. 

9. I’m Your Woman – directed by Julia Hart; written by Hart & Jordan Horowitz

In a pretty bleak year for humanity, this film gave me a shot of optimism. It’s a rather simple story about a housewife suddenly tasked with taking care of a baby in the middle of an unfolding criminal situation, suddenly have to fend for herself as she holds onto a new child and a bagful of ever-expanding questions. Hart and Horowitz blew me away last year with Fast Color, another movie in which we watch to see if the stronger, kinder human instincts will overcome the darker, more aggressive ones. This film leans just as much into the emotional muscle, in the quiet moments in which characters share some of their deeper fears in front of a cup of midnight coffee. From first frames to last, it’s quite the journey for Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) in which she can only watch and run for so long before she’s gotta fight back at the life being taken from her. A deceptively simple candle of a movie that burns long after its final notes. 

8. His House – written and directed by Remi Weekes

Horror is an incredibly elastic genre. It can make room for any number of ideas and issues. It can use jump-scares or psychological terror. It can be a mad dash of jump scares or a slow-burn barnburner. In his debut film, Weekes takes two seemingly disparate issues – the trauma of the past and the desire to own one’s one home – and weaves them together in an unforgettable fashion.

When refugees Bol (Sope Dirisu) and Rial (Wunmi Mosaku) escape their warring South Sudan community, they are granted probationary asylum in a house on the edge of London. It seems like their dreams have come true. They finally get to have a home! But then they arrive, and the reality sets in: it’s the definition of delipidated. Walls are torn and ridden with cracks. Weird sounds are everywhere. Nothing really works. And the neighborhood lady and her cat won’t avert their gaze.

But there’s something far more sinister bubbling within the walls of the house, and it’s here where the elasticity of horror and Weekes’ vision crackle to life as Bol and Rial’s trauma – which they’ve tried so hard to suppress – becomes impossible to ignore.

I still think about the final moments of the film, when Bol is trying to convince British officials that he and his wife finally have their house under control. “Your ghosts follow you,” he says, “they never leave. They live with you.” And it’s the next line he delivers – which I won’t spoil here – that struck me as one of the most profound bits of wisdom I’d heard all year, wholly a piece with the terrific movie that came before it.

7. Spontaneous –  written and directed by Brian Duffield, based on the novel by Aaron Starmer

Another deeply confident debut film, Duffield knows exactly what he wants to do with this story about high school seniors who, suddenly and without explanation, start combusting in horrifying, bloody splatters. You could say this movie is about a lot of things – about the senior year fears of the future, about the COVID pandemic, about the short-sighted view of the world we have in light of climate change and all number of other imminent disasters – but Duffield knows it only works if he gets you to believe in the characters. 

6. Sound of Metal – directed by Darius Marder; written by Darius and Abraham Marder

About ten years ago, I looked for community. I wanted to meet other Deaf/HH in Spokane and stumbled into a monthly coffeeshop gathering in which ASL students and Deaf intermingled. It was never a particularly complementary fit, with cliques forming as soon as they entered the shop, branching off into dimly-lit corners. And while I did make some friends, what I remember the most is the friend I bailed on: a woman in her mid-to-late 50’s who had just lost her hearing. She arrived and explained to everyone her situation in slow and erratic sign – the kind you would expect from such a late, panicked learner – and was quickly dismissed. The hearing crowd could never really understand her beyond offering pity. The Deaf crowd’s impatience grew in staggered lines. She became a puzzle piece no one quite had the empathy to offer a connection with.

I thought about this woman a lot during Sound of Metal, a rather astonishing debut film from Marder. When I’ve talked with my Deaf friends about it, I go straight to the cochlear implant activation scene and how nothing sounds like we imagined, and a flicker of recognition and being seen streaks across their faces. When I tell my hearing friends and family about it, it’s an opportunity to see the other side. To let the incredible sound design build their empathy of what it may be like in Ruben’s shoes.

Sound of Metal is one of the more powerful empathy machines I’ve seen built. It forces me as a Deaf viewer to consider my own bias – both physically and culturally – towards someone like Ruben. It forces the hearing audience to sit with how a transformation would affect them. But what will last about this film the most, I hope, is Marder’s message of stillness. That no matter how much noise – external or internal – we have around us, striving to find peace and stillness within us is the most empowering pursuit of them all.

5. One Night in Miami – directed by Regina King, written by Kemp Powers a

All I could think about after Regina King’s stunning debut is the Lester Bangs quote from Almost Famous: “The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.” Writer Kemp Powers skillfully adapts his own award-winning play for the screen – never leaning into the temptation to artificially inflate the possibilities of film – and King leads and guides each actor into his own astonishing performance. This is about four very public and very popular Black men who realize what they’re up against. Powers quickly sketches for us just where each man is at the beginning of the film, and it’s beautiful the way he shows how vulnerable each of their positions are. Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge) is as popular as any NFL player and yet is still not allowed past a favorite coach’s front porch. Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) is playing for white audiences who can’t catch onto what he’s capable of. Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) is still too wide-eyed and naive to really understand what’s working against him. And Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir) ties it all together as the man with perhaps the very most to lose. 

As desperate as some of these men were to leave the quaint hotel room and party, they couldn’t help but find themselves coming back to each other. They need each other more than they realize. The way Powers and King continue to find new layers in each combination – especially between Malcolm X and Sam Cooke – is as sumptuous a cinematic feast as this Oscar year has to offer. I keep thinking about how Denzel Washington won an Oscar for his portrayal of Malcolm X and how Ben-Adir still somehow finds a completely different take on it that feels just as essential and lived-in and perfect. 

By the time the last Sam Cooke song plays, it hits you just how far these men came in one night of conversation. One night to take measure of their responsibility to themselves and their own community. One night to think about roads untraveled. One night to show us as an audience just how beautiful friendship can be between four Black men at the height of their powers. 

4. Promising Young Woman – written and directed by Emerald Fennell

From the first frame to the last, Fennel knows exactly what she’s trying to accomplish. Not only does Promising Young Woman boast a powerful, incisive central performance from Carrie Mulligan, but Fennel makes the brilliant choice to surround her with all our favorite Nice Guy actors – Sam Richardson, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Adam Brody, Max Greenfield, Chris Lowell, and a revelatory Bo Burnham – to challenge us the most as an audience. There are no false notes. No filler. Just one show-stopping scene after another, adding up to an ending I’m still thinking about today. 

3. In and Of Itself – written by Derek DelGaudio, directed by Frank Oz

When I think about magic shows – either on-stage or in the middle of Austin’s 6th Street during South by Southwest – I think about the look of astonishment on the audience’s faces. It doesn’t matter if they’ve seen something like it before. There is just something about seeing it live that sends endorphins straight up the most hardened of brains. But one thing I have not seen is a magic show that’s reduced people to utter, moppable tears.

Derek DelGaudio reminds me a lot of Mike Birbiglia. Both are pasty white guys with sincere motivations in their storytelling. While Mike uses comedy to color his storytelling, Derek uses magic to bolster his. They are remixing two genres to bring their individual flavors out even more.

In the final half of In and Of Itself, I can confidently say there may not be a more powerful 30 minutes I’ve seen all year. I don’t want to give anything away, but all I could think about are the roles we use to define ourselves with – both helpful and unhelpful – and how every, EVERY person has at least one emotionally-devastating and exceedingly cathartic letter yet to be written to them. Maybe you should be the author of it. Maybe you’re waiting to be written to. Both scenarios help us define who we are. It’s an incredibly insightful conceptual trick DelGuadio pulls, one that will stick with me for the rest of my life. 

This is both the perfect film for 2020 and wins the year’s All the Feels Award. It’s hilarious and full of great lines. It’s got confident, swooping cinematography. It’s got attitude and wit. It’s got some understandably and effectively awful explosion sounds that just hang in that negative sound space, waiting for you to be comfortable before unexpectedly exploding again. It’s got a gooey sweet, yet incredibly endearing love story at the center of it. It’s a full ride that’ll give all your emotions a good workout and close it all up with a message on living we all absolutely need to hear. 

2. The Forty-Year-Old Version – written and directed by Radha Blank 

There’s an inevitable period in every artists’ life – and it happens more than once – when it feels like time has passed you by. The moments moved on. There’s not much chance for you to hitch the train back to relevance. But the damning thing about all of it is how often it’s about perspective. When I’ve read pieces I’ve written ten years ago, I’m often a bit surprised that it’s better than I expected and yet, I look at it as if the skill disappeared out a window and didn’t leave a note. But the skill is still there. Maybe rusty, but it’s still absolutely, 100% there and colored deeply by the wisdom and experiences that have come since. 

What makes Blank’s extraordinary debut film so captivating is how it charts the embarrassment, frustrating, and imposter syndrome of feeling like a has-been while also dealing with the white gatekeeping of the artistic community she wants to break into. She’s got all these great ideas. But they have ideas for her – and they’re frequently accented with unconscious, distasteful racism. The way that Blank lays bare the constant overreach of well-meaning white people is as incisive as it’s heartbreakingly hilarious. 

But what beats at the center of all of this is the budding hip-hop career Blank stumbles into as an outlet for all her frustrations, and the producer she befriends. They start off as such an odd match. Then you see what he sees in her and what she’s too disbelieving in herself to see in him and you can see their bruised hearts slowly circling each other. 

This isn’t just a movie about aging or putting on a play when you feel you’re past your prime. It’s about navigating that hard part after your early, exciting 20’s when everyone goes every which way and the possibilities of life are both wide-open and terrifyingly narrow. It’s about taking a chance on something wild and weird while everyone else stands aghast. It’s about believing in the message more than the clout. It’s about fighting your way through whatever your Best Self might be to see who the Honest Self is, even as you have no idea what either actually look or feel like. It’s swimming through mud. It’s waltzing, misstep after misstep, through a burning room.  The only way out, as you learn, is through. 

Blank’s choice of black and white gives everything an intimate feel throughout, as if we’re documentarians alongside her as she explores just what’s truly tripping up this life she imagines herself someday having. And when it all turns to color at the very end? It’s one of the most joyful images 2020 had to offer.

1. The Half of It – written and directed by Alice Wu 
Alice Wu could have kept things simple. She could have made her movie a teenage version of Cyrano de Bergerac (or Roxanne, if you’re a diehard Steve Martin fan) and just left it at that. She could have coasted on the charm of her cast, collected her Netflix money, and chilled for a few years. But that would involve acting like Wu didn’t write the line that stuck like a popcorn kernel in the teeth of my brain for nearly a year: that the difference between a good painting and a great painting is just five simple strokes.

I could write quite a bit about what I think those five strokes in this movie might be, but it’s more fun to let viewers find their own. For me, I keep replaying the thermal pool scene between Ellie (Leah Lewis) and Aster (Alexxis Lemire), or the quiet, heartbreaking conversations between Ellie and her father, or the stubborn, uncomplicated puppy dog energy of Paul (Daniel Diemer), or the hilarious friction between Ellie’s spirited verbosity and Paul’s limited utterances, or even the time Paul challenges Ellie’s father about how he sees his own daughter and he responds with a heartbreaking story entirely in Mandarin, of which Paul somehow picks up nonverbally enough to understand the heart of a father’s pained message. The final stroke Wu imprints on this film may be the most daring of them all, withholding the ending we think we want for the ending that truly loves its characters and the potential of their lives. There is no film I thought about or recommended more than The Half of It. Even looking back through this movie to spot some key details, I’m stunned at how alluring it remains. This one will stick with me – and hopefully a larger audience – long after the final ticks and sputters of Netflix’s algorithm break down and whatever new form of cinematic viewing surfaces.

Life during this pandemic has challenged us in many ways. It’s forced us to slow down their lives and remain in one place, which, for some of us, may be a welcome adjustment. For others, it’s forced us to confront the trivialities of our lives, the constant, whirring fluff we surround ourselves with. The emails we decided we had to answer and couldn’t wait. The extra trips to the store we had to make because we were too distracted the first time. The money we had to spend on subscriptions we forgot about. But being in lockdown challenges us to think about how we are now and how much we like the person we’re suddenly spending a lot of time with: ourselves. There aren’t as many distractions to hide behind. The true self is there, naked and out in the open.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal launches us into Ruben’s normal, as the drummer of a fictional two-piece band, Blackgammon. It’s loud and aggressive and very quickly things start to go awry. The tinnitus and ringing surfaces. Before long, Ruben’s lost 80% of his hearing. His entire creative life has been cratered in a way he cannot even begin to figure out how to climb out of. His pursuit of answers leads him to Joe (Paul Raci), who leads a recovery house for Deaf addicts. And it’s a struggle for Ruben from the very beginning because he’s so convinced – or at least he’s determined to convince himself – that he’ll return to something approaching normal. He’s decided he just needs to get these two cochlear implants and everything will be fine. Just an expensive, invasive ticket back to his Earth. 

In an interview with the Observer, director and co-writer Darius Marder nailed just why his movie is perfect for 2020: we are, like Ruben (Riz Ahmad), desperate to return to a normal that may no longer exist.  We keep dreaming of all the things we’ll do when life is the way it was before. But before may never come, at least not the way we remember it.  We have to accept and adapt or risk being left behind, tumbling into a cycle of frustration and regret. 

The Crack of Dishonesty

There’s a moment late in the film when Ruben (Riz Ahmad) has done the deed: he’s had the surgery for his cochlear implant yet hides his head. He’s conscious of the scars. He’s even more conscious of what the scars mean in his new home. But it’s not the surgery itself that’s truly the problem. There are many Deaf out there with the same implants and their own Deaf identity strong and intact. The line of demarcation, in this case, is not about choosing to gain some form of hearing. It’s about the dishonesty of it all. Ruben makes deals on the side and in the shadows, selling his RV and his recording equipment and anything he can get money for. The brilliance of the way Marder portrays this is we don’t quite know at first what Ruben is going to do with the money. He looks just as much like an addict desperate for another hit as he does a man desperate to return to his old normal as a hearing man.

When he returns, Joe is ready for him. Ruben knows he did this the dishonest way. He’s wearing a hood over his stitches the entire time. All his needs, he contends, is just to stay there three more weeks until his implants activate. That’s all. Just three weeks. 

But Paul’s seen this before. The nervous energy. The shame. The pleading. The dealmaking. 

Prior to the surgery, Joe had tasked Ruben with sitting in an empty room each morning with nothing but some paper, a pen, and a cup of coffee. He wanted Ruben to get it out. To write everything that came to mind. To give himself a chance to see his own thoughts and patterns and be more conscious. He wanted Ruben to come close to, if not touch, the feeling of stillness. For some of us, the idea of an empty, quiet room to write sounds wonderful. To feel unbound by time and responsibility and to have the freedom to just sit with ourselves? That can be pretty great. But for Ruben, there’s too much clawing at him from the inside out. For someone desperate to leave and return to normal, that empty room might as well be a prison cell. It’s as suffocating as it is bare. 

“I wonder all these mornings you’ve been sitting in my study, sitting,” Joe says, “have you…had any…moments of …stillness? Because you’re right, Ruben. The world does keep moving and it can be a damn cruel place. But for me…those moments of stillness, that place, that’s the kingdom of God. And that place will never abandon you.”

What comes next physically pains Joe. Someone who once showed great promise has escaped his grasp. Stillness won’t be found with the walls of his program.

“As you know,” Joe continues, “everybody here shares in the belief that being deaf is not a handicap.“Not something to fix. It’s pretty important around here. All these kids…all of us, need to be reminded of it every day. And my house is a house built on that belief and built on that trust. And when that trust is violated, things happen. And I can’t have that.”

While some will (understandably) read this as Joe kicking out Ruben solely because he got a cochlear implant, I don’t think that’s the trust that’s broken. The trust is one of honesty. It’s something central to a recovering addict. It’s also central to building an identity. It’s not just the surgery for Ruben. It’s sneaking into Joe’s office to use his internet. It’s roping in fellow housemates to make deals for him. It’s spinning a web of deceit in which the central conflict is the inability to ever truly confront oneself. And in that avoidance, stillness is impossible. The internal noise is too much, too invasive and disruptive. 

Building the Empathy Machine 

Marder and his co-writing brother Abraham tie their main character and central predicament together like a taut, unforgiving rope. Ruben relies on his hearing entirely to do his job well. But Marder isn’t just interested in sound – he’s just as interested in finding peace. What makes Ruben the perfect character for this predicament is his status as a recovering addict. I would never claim to know the life of an addict, but I do know that stillness is something they constantly seek and struggle to find. There is always something gnawing at them, calling them and guiding them towards relief in the form of another drink or another dose. In the silence, you can hear all your demons. 

There is a point where it looks like Ruben is on his way to a happy story. He’s finally learning to sign. He’s making connections with the Deaf members in the house and taken to showing off a bit to the Deaf teacher he’s worked alongside. We can see where he can truly find some kind of new identity. But that wouldn’t be honest to Ruben’s core. At least not yet. 

When Ruben gets his cochlear implants activated, I recognized that look of fear. That look that says it can’t possibly be the thing you’ve dreamed for and expected. It just can’t. It sounds too weird and a few thousand miles too far away from what you once knew sound to be like. I remember getting my digital hearing aid for the first time. I could feel fear and anger and all kinds of things bubbling up within me. I wasn’t sure who to direct it at. So I just crumbled inward. I wasn’t going to be more hearing, like I was promised. The world was not going to make more sense, at least not initially. It wasn’t the hearing aid that was going to adjust, they told me – it was going to have to be me. 

As someone who’s heard the cochlear implant debate for so long, and who’s grown exasperated at all the delusions the hundreds of activation videos online show, I deeply appreciate the way Marder and his sound designers show the reality. He doesn’t tell us what happens, but instead uses the film’s two biggest empathy machines in its sound design and in Riz Ahmed’s incredible, deeply-felt performance. We can just see it in his eyes. We see the panic set in. The dream he has so nervously reached for has now arrived and it’s absolutely nothing like he imagined. Even worse: for him, there’s no clear way out. He can’t just smash a coffee cup and storm out of an empty room. He can’t just reverse the surgery and get his money back. The door to the life before his loss has shut behind him and locked itself. He can only look behind through the window, but he’ll never return to normal. The only way is forward into the unknown. 

Chasing Stillness 

There’s a handful of subtle things this film does so well and with such intention – especially with the way it presents sound as it gets disrupted, pushed around, drowned, and laid out to dry. One of my favorites is the way the subtitles don’t kick on with the ASL onscreen until Ruben himself uses it. He doesn’t get to fully access the new world around him until he stops fighting it and just tries. Soon enough, he’s become a favorite, with his infectious personality and his deep-rooted energy. But we can tell by the way Joe offers him opportunities of stillness and he responds by smashing donuts and screaming into empty rooms. This isn’t a solution that’s going to last. 

When people ask me what I appreciate the most about being Deaf, they often assume it’s the silence. “You can just take your hearing aid out,” they say, as I talk about the things around me that are loud and that shriek in ways that warp my brain. But it’s taken me over 30 years to realize it’s not silence I’m chasing: it’s stillness. When I can walk around the neighborhood without my hearing aid in the morning, there’s a stillness present in me that allows me to think about whatever comes to mind. The noise of the world has, if only temporarily, been removed. Deafness has taught me stillness. It’s made it a muscle I exercise. It’s how I can sit in a coffee shop full of people and focus on the writing at hand; it’s also how I can become so severely disrupted by just the slight tinkering of a person in the kitchen as I try to work. Silence isn’t always in stillness, and stillness is not in every moment of silence. Like the digital hearing aid or the cochlear implant, silence is a tool that pushes you towards the stillness you really crave. That’s when you, like Ruben at the end of the movie, can finally take a deep, unburdened breath. 

In the early months of the pandemic, my wife and I had a bit more time to work with. While my Top 20 of 2020 list is coming, these are some of the older films we watched and enjoyed throughout the year.

Moonstruck (Amazon)

You may expect to hear this from someone who was born the year before this movie came out, but: what a weird, utterly delightful movie. The whole thing feels heightened, as if characters are dealing with life and death when they’re really struggling with love and what it means to them. And maybe that’s the point: love, at its most aching and enthralling, feels like a rollercoaster through peaks of life and euphoria and valleys of death and heartache. It’s so confident in its style and cadence that you can’t help but admire and love it. 

The final scene incorporates almost every character we’ve come to know and takes place around an increasingly-crowded kitchen table. It’s beautiful in its construction, the way Olympia empathetically tells her husband to end his affair and he grows quiet and teary at the grace of how she ties her forgiveness up in her demand; the way the doorbell keeps ringing and we think, “Oh God, another person! But to sit where?!”’; the way you keep thinking it’s going to be the most explosive, ugly conversation ever, that there’s no way this can possibly work out, and yet, when it’s all said and done, it’s gorgeous and freeing and they all take a rather heartwarmingly bizarre family picture together. 

Leave No Trace (Amazon Prime)

Director Debbie Kopnik arrived as a documentary filmmaker, and that careful, objective eye is evident. No one is ever judged. There are no villains. There is an awful lot of conflict, however, and it’s beautifully, patiently etched. We see it with the daughter slowly recognizing that what her father thinks is best for them may not actually be. That there’s worth in trusting a system he’s so deeply opposed to. That the world and community he fights and runs away from may be the one she actually wants to be in. The final exchange, wordless and heartbreaking, is one of the more gorgeous things I’ve seen all year, and not just because of the lush forest it takes place in. It’s a silent protest that flows into an acknowledgment and, finally, bittersweet acceptance. 

Juliet, Naked (Hulu)

A spark is a dangerous thing. It makes pistons pump and cars run. It gives life to barbecues and satisfying grilled foods. It lights warm candles in the still darkness. But it also leads to fires, from the minor and quickly stomped out to the wild and disastrously destructive. I know this because I’ve been on both sides. I’ve seen the sparks in my life that have led me astray into crazy situations involving regrettable screenshots and multiple lapses of mental and emotional logic. I’ve also been a part of sparks that not just gave me life, but the kind of life I’ve often longed for. 

Juliet, Naked is about these sparks. For Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke), there are a great many sparks, short and attractive, that have led to a life of multiple kids with multiple mothers. They’ve led to a life tinged with regret and the desperation for one more invigorating spark, and yet the quiet resignation that it’s not only something he won’t experience, but that he probably doesn’t deserve. For Annie (Rose Byrne), the spark is something sorely needed, but one she worries is a good ten years too late. She’s as terrified of it as she is drawn to it. It could go either way. 

Based off Nick Hornby’s novel, there’s a beautiful collision of what happens when a person who’s lived too much meets a person who’s lived too little. They’re both struggling with their own accumulation. Tucker Crowe’s got more kids than he can keep track of, all with different mothers. Rose is plagued daily with the thought she’s wasted the last 15 years of her life, in a cycle of comfort and never, ever doing anything outside her comfort zone. What this movie shows more than anything is that it’s never, ever too late to connect.

I think a lot about a short scene in the middle of the movie. Tucker has just hosted one of his daughters – who’s very young and very pregnant, repeating a cycle he’s been unable to break in his own life – for the weekend. Except it’s not even his house. It’s his ex-wife’s house. While he lives in a shack out in the backyard. There’s nowhere else for him to go and no other way to entertain her. So he does the best he can, which he knows is not nearly enough. As he drops her off on the bus, he calls her name. “Hey,” he says. “Thank you for coming to visit.” You can feel through Hawke’s great performance the full weight of the words. He’s genuinely grateful. He knows he doesn’t deserve the opportunity. And then: “Wish it was more fun.” Not for him. For her. That it was more worthwhile. That it would leave her feeling hopeful about her birth father and not slightly bemused or embarrassed or resentful. There’s a parallel universe he imagines in that moment in which he’s the supportive, loving father she wants him to be, and they’re having a great, laugh-filled weekend together. The pain in his words at the bus stop is the sound of knowing that universe isn’t the one you’re currently living in.

 I deeply admire the way Jesse Peretz keeps this wild story from giving the too-safe, unrealistic ending. Both characters have to acknowledge the trickiness of the future. The best romances we see onscreen may always feel like time is running out; but the ones that give us hope are the ones that show us that it is never too late to hold something worth fighting for. 

Valley Girl (Amazon)

Clearly a product of its time, it’s a fairly formulaic story about the girl who falls in love with the guy from the other side of the tracks. What elevates it to something special is the absolutely electric chemistry between newcomers Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. Seriously, find someone in your life who looks at you the way Foreman looks at Cage. Even your most loving animals cannot compete with her infectious smile. 

Broadcast News (Amazon)

It’s always fun to revisit a movie you haven’t seen in ten years (a fun thing about memory is when you can’t even remember how long ago it was and don’t want to confront the fact that maybe it was even just a few years ago). I remembered the love triangle. I remembered Albert Brooks being the brainiac, talented friend and William Hurt the smooth dullard. I empathized deeply with Albert Brooks’ character. I knew the feeling of being that guy in love with a woman who just couldn’t quite cross the friendship line with you. Of representing everything they like and still somehow not being enough. But I also recognized the insecurity of just simply wanting to be recognized for the skills I had. 

What I didn’t expect this time around is how much William Hurt’s character would resonate with me. I could feel it in my chest. That imposter syndrome where you know how to be honest about the skills you lack but can’t quite get people to believe just how real and deep those feelings are. Some of this comes from the masterful writing, but a big chunk of this comes from Hurt’s performance. There’s pain and longing in his eyes. He’s so desperate for approval by people he respects, but he’s so unsure of his ability to even pull it off. He wants to be a peer, but he’s terrified of the criticism that could come with taking a risk. He’s moved up through the ranks as the handsome, smooth guy not just because he can, but because being a good-looking face is easier to deal with than the crippling lack of self-worth. 

Which makes his turn at the end even more excruciating. In a weird way, I wanted Holly and Tom to work together so bad. I wanted them to go on vacation. To somehow make it work. To maybe not be their intellectual match for each other but perhaps an emotional one. 

I understood better Albert being so mean to Holly because when you don’t want to confront someone you love not sharing your feelings, you want to push it away as much as possible. And because you inevitably change your minds – because you are human after all – sometimes the only effective way to do this is to be truly mean. Because you can be mean in a way very few people can. You know where the deepest pains are to be found. (Read this excellent Bright Wall/Dark Room essay that gets into it further)

What I also took away from this is just amazing a character Holly is. It’s such a beautiful mixture of Brooks’ writing and Hunter’s performance. When a producer comes by and tells Holly, “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” and she responds with, “No. It’s awful.”? It absolutely kills me. It says so much about her as a character but it also says so much about women all over the world who regularly have to deal with mediocre white men making all the decisions or those some mediocre white men listening to their great ideas and brushing them off with a bit of mansplaining. It’s a lonely, depressing state to be in. And Holly Hunter makes you feel every inch of it. 

How Do You Know (Amazon)

While Broadcast News is a testament to just how great a movie can be when James L. Brooks is firing on all cylinders with a great cast, his 2009 film How Do You Know shows just how quickly the train can get derailed. I remembered this film more for the headlines it created – the excessive bafflement at just how a simple movie with no action scenes or expensive CGI could cost $100 million to produce. I also remember how it seemed to fall off a cultural cliff despite starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd (before he became the Fountain of Youth), Owen Wilson, Jack Nicholson, and (the lone bright spot) Kathryn Hahn. I figured this was just a movie where famous, well-regarded people got paid a lot of money to just throw out something, anything. 

But the bizarre thing about this movie – and what may help explain how inert it is – is how hard Brooks worked at it. He spent over 300 hours interviewing professional and amateur softball players to learn about them. What makes them tick. How they deal with disappointment. How they move on from a historically short career. It all seems pretty cool until you realize just how little softball plays in the life of Witherspoon’s character. 

And then it just gets weirder from there. You can see Nicholson straining to make a character out of his lines and, uh, not quite getting there. You can see Rudd and Witherspoon trying their best to spark the movie to life and also not quite getting there. You can see the outlines of the story Brooks wants to really tell and the themes of disappointment he really wants to work with while his movie title is a question about how you know if the person is the person. When it comes down to it: the movie title itself shows how confused this movie is. It sounds like a question. But there’s no question mark. So what is it? 

But the thing about watching something by a titan like Brooks is that even while sifting through the trash, you’re gonna find something pretty neat. There’s a late scene in which a very pregnant Kathryn Hahn gives birth and her husband, as supportive as he can be throughout, decides to propose to her. What elevates this whole scenario is the way the husband asks Rudd to film the whole thing and everyone gets so swept up in the damn emotion of what’s happening that Rudd doesn’t even realize the camera is not recording. And then after some griping, they do something unexpected: they do it all over again. And it’s still pretty moving. To me, this is what Brooks does exceedingly well as a writer: finding the emotional heartbeat of comedic scenarios.

Ishtar (Prime)

I came to this movie out of sheer fascination. I had been reading about writer, actress, and director Elaine May and how she hadn’t directed a film since 1987’s Ishtar. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for female directors to be thrown in Director Jail for long periods of time for perceived misfires while their male counterparts can cost a studio hundreds of millions of dollars of debt and still get another big-budget job as if nothing happened. Adding further to the intrigue is how Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman both agreed to star in this almost as a favor to May, who had done a great deal of movie-saving, uncredited script work to some of their bigger hits (Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait, Hoffman’s Tootsie).

So what do you get when you combine all these elements with a blue-eyed camel, a Morocco film location, and the premise of two terrible lounge singers getting mistakenly drawn into an international crisis they’re only barely aware of? Well, you get Ishtar. It’s such a singular, bizarre mix of elements – both behind-the-scenes and in front of the camera – that enjoying it is an exercise in abandoning expectations and appreciating what happens when people try something new and original. It’s especially fun to see Hoffman and Beatty try to be deliberately bad at their lounge singing jobs, as it is to see a young Charles Grodin nearly run away with the whole movie.  

Tiptoes (Prime)

I…uh…I have no words for this movie. You ever see something so bizarre, so tasteless, so completely stacked of baffling decisions that you are far more interested in just how something like this got made than the actual movie itself? That is Tiptoes. 

So I will link you to an article that gives some explanation for your bafflement. Whew.

Crawl (Hulu) 

The only thing more terrifying to me than being in close proximity to alligators is being trapped in close proximity to alligators.  Director Alexandre Aja and writers Michael and Shawn Rasmussen do a beautiful job in building on this foundation of fear.

This film follows a simple but effective structure. 

1. Give us a spunky, stubborn protagonist with a unique skill (swimming – which comes in handy)

2. Strand her stubborn father in a flooding house in the middle of a Category 5 hurricane. 

3. Lean into both of their stubborn natures so they’re both trapped in the house. 

4. Throw in alligators. Lots of them. 

Aja really milks all the tension out of this premise, with blind spots, subtle movements, and a jump scare so bad I gave my wife a secondary scare from my reaction alone. Just when you think they’re almost about to escape, another wrinkle is thrown in. It all adds up to a pulse-pounding, highly-entertaining ride worth checking out on a dark, stormy night. 

Harold and Maude (Amazon Prime) 

I had no idea what to expect going into this 1971 classic. I especially had no idea what to expect after its first scene, in which an apparent suicide attempt is treated with mild indifference. Ninety minutes later, I couldn’t get the smile off my face. What an unexpected, absolutely delightful film. 

Colin Higgins’ script has a young, rich man obsessed with death (hence the playful suicide attempts) and deeply struggling with any point to his life until he runs into a wild old lady, Maude, who steals random cards and also attends the funerals of people she doesn’t know. To say any more would rob you of the discovery that comes with watching something so touchingly original and unorthodox. What makes it all work is the incredible direction of Hal Ashby. I don’t know how to describe it as any other way than treating his subjects with dignity and warmth. The slow, deliberate camera movement. The staging. The use of depth and space. It all ties Higgins’ script together in a warm, memorable blanket. 

Straight Up (Netflix)  

I’m really thankful my wife and I had seen 1939’s Her Girl Friday only a month before. Why? Because otherwise I would have said, “Wow, I haven’t seen a romantic comedy like this before.” And I’m well aware of just how annoying that genre of writing is where people watch old movies without context as if they’ve just stumbled upon new, alarming insight.  

Straight Up is a hugely entertaining callback to the screwball comedies of the ’30s and ’40s, in which female characters often dominate the relationship and challenge the masculinity of the male. This is exactly what happens with James Sweeney’s Straight Up. Sweeney plays Todd, a guy who’s not even totally sure he’s gay due to his extreme aversion to gay sex and, really, sex in general. He meets Rory (Kate Findlay), who not only connects with him but doesn’t seem to mind the lack of sex in their early relationship. It’s a fascinating dynamic that plays out over the course of the film, with its own ebbs and flows, and overlaid with that festive, rapid-fire dialogue of the screwball classics it honors. Sweeney and Findlay play their characters beautifully, equally hilarious and moving. This is a highly underrated movie lost in Netflix’s algorithm. It straight up deserves more. 

Total Recall (Netflix) 

We look back at TOTAL RECALL as a good movie and perhaps even the better Phillip K. Dick adaptation. But when seeing it in 2020, I’m struck by the sheer creative willpower it took to pull it off. The filming in Mexico City. The futuristic cars were made out of the local Mexican transportation. The impressive prosthetic effects, some of which took 15 puppeteers to pull off. This is not a movie you make when you want it done simply and easily. This is a movie you make because you believe in it. Because you want to do something wildly different. 

It’s also startlingly relevant today. To see a governing head willingly cut off the air supply of its population to maintain power? It’s not a far line to draw between that and the Trump Administration’s unwillingness to provide ANY kind of federal response or support to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. If you don’t believe that our government would willingly steal and hide a life-changing discovery from another race, well…maybe you need to read your history books a little more closely. It’s as American as apple pie, warts and all. 

Zardoz (Hulu) 

When my wife and I watched ZARDOZ, we had a perpetually stunned reaction throughout. Just what 100 minutes of fresh hell had we exposed ourselves to? But in the time since, where a quick Google search has greatly increased my understanding of the story, it’s grown on me. More importantly, it’s made me realize how much more I need to appreciate movies that go for broke in trying something new. They may be unsuccessful in their execution, but hundreds if not thousands of people gave it their all.  It distinctly feels like a movie that was written by someone who read the book, but greatly overestimated how many other readers were out there. Even writer and director John Boorman, more well known for films such as Deliverance and Excalibur, admitted he didn’t understand parts of what they were making. Should you endeavor to watch this film without the assistance of edibles or copious amounts of alcohol (this is not an endorsement), I will say Boorman shows off some impressive in-camera tricks at the end with reflections and light. You just have to get through the rest of the movie first. 

Easy Rider (Prime)

Somehow I saw this movie as a kid and only remembered Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper riding motorcycles on the open road. I thought it was pretty much just a road trip movie, apolitical and full of long, sweeping shots of Americana. I thought it’d feel like a relic of the past. 

Holy smokes. 

Somehow this film feels as timely as ever. There’s a lot going on in America that’s exposed the consequences of steep capitalism and systemic racism, where it can feel like you can never quite catch up to where you want to be. Sometimes it’s paying off a loan early and having your credit score dinged. Sometimes it’s watching the richest man in the world run away with his wealth, likely hiding in his secret lair in Mount Rainier, giving his bald head another shine as he pumps out a few more biceps curls. Quarantine has done a thing to our brains where we are more available than ever to see what’s going on in the world, scrolling through our social media feeds and looking for answers just as we step into new questions. But that availability has been matched with an unprecedented level of chaos, when a pandemic rips through a country not entirely convinced of it. As a result, there’s a half-hearted sentimentality of just wanting to get away from “it all”. To chase a freedom in which we can bet on ourselves and not be beholden to systems we violently disagree with. 

The premise of Easy Rider is simple in that Fonda and Hopper get enough money from their latest cocaine deal to take a long, leisurely ride through the Southwest and Deep South. They roll into communes. They camp out under the stars and smoke lots of weed. And then they run into people like George, an ACLU lawyer played by Jack Nicholson, in an insanely magnetic performance that actually awarded him his very first Oscar nomination. 

Towards the end of the film, after a great deal has happened, Fonda demises, “We blew it.” It’s never quite clear exactly what “it” is and Fonda in the fifty years since refuses to tell. But I could feel it in my bones. Here were two guys determined to be free, only to realize they were widely rejected in swaths of the country and that, one day, they were going to run out of money and have to get a job just so they could have a home to safely sleep in. They were gonna have to reinsert themselves somehow back into the system they had tried so hard to reject. 

Turner and Hooch (Disney+)

There was a time when McDonald’s sold VHS tapes in their restaurants. One of those tapes my family bought was Turner and Hooch. Seeing it again many years later, I’m struck by how well-designed the premise is. You got a cop who’s a neat freak and soon to retire. And then you throw at him a particularly complicated, sneaky case that involves the dirtiest, nastiest, drool-heavy dog you can possibly find at the tightest button of them all. It’s a classic setup of conflict – organized order meets chaotic mess – that’s elevated immensely by Tom Hanks’ performance and his hilarious, adorable energy with Hooch. There’s a reason this movie is looked back at fondly by many, and it has nothing to do with the crime that drives the plot. I still think about near the end (spoiler alert!) when Hooch is laying on the vet’s table, clearly not going to make it, and Hanks, reminiscent of his turn in Captain Phillips, pulls off that same stunned, emotionally-broken performance that inevitably drains my face of all its tears. 

Three Men and a Baby (Disney +) 

After a particularly gnarly episode of Hannibal, my wife and I were looking for something fun and light to rinse out our brains with. Lo and behold: 1987’s Three Men and a Baby, directed by Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy (no joke). This is one of those movies I’d seen so many times as a kid that watching it felt like a memory test. Even further: my wife and I, now expecting, wanted to see what baby tips we could glean from this filmic venture.  

The setup is clear: the film paints all three popular 80’s actors – Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, and Steve Guttenberg – as the ultimate, responsible-free bachelors. They all live together in a giant NYC designed by Selleck. And, of course, all three main characters have jobs – architect, comic strip artist, and actor – that, while demanding, usually have pretty flexible hours. Handy! And then after a particularly packed birthday party, in which all at least two of the men have to gently turn down women who just cannot be more than six feet away from them, they are presented with a gift at their doorstop: an abandoned baby. 

I had completely forgotten that Ted Danson disappears and doesn’t show up until over halfway through the movie (actors!). I had also completely forgotten about a very irresponsible drug bust that takes place in the middle. But what I do remember was only cemented further: this is a film with three highly-likable, charming leads with innate goodness. We want them to figure it out. We laugh at their mistakes and their deep misunderstanding of anything related to childcare and yet: it’s no less touching when we see at the end just how much little Mary has made an impact on their lives. They don’t care about the lack of sleep or the bizarre work hours. They just want that little girl to be safe and with a happy, supportive family. And that’s the most important lesson of all.  

One thing (of many) I appreciate about a Jim Jamursch movie is that it always moves with an unexpected rhythm and in an unexpected direction. Some of this is due to marketing. The Dead Don’t Die looked like some kind of delightful horror-comedy in the realm of Shaun of the Dead when it’s actually something far weirder and deliberate. 

What I didn’t expect with Paterson is to be held up to a mirror. 

Ever since my wife and I found out we’d be welcoming a daughter into this crazy world, a soft, gentle ticking began in the back of my head. I wasn’t worried about the loss of freedom or time or money. In fact, I look forward to sinking into those moments where night and day blur, and your only concern is to keep a child as restful and safe as possible. But the ticking came from a creative place. What was once a mild pull to figure out a system I could fall to (instead of a goal to rise to) became more urgent. I recognized that I had to shake out all my story and writing ideas from all their various trees and somehow organize them into a room I could walk into whenever the opportunity presented itself. In other words, I needed to get my shit together. 

So the first thing I notice about Paterson, of course, is that he leads a life of simplicity I almost envy. He carries with him one single notebook, in which he writes poetry in the spare moments before his job begins and in the time he has for lunch. He uses his walks to and from work each day to let his mind wander and stumble into words and phrases. And he truly seems to have no pressing interest in sharing his work with the world. 

Yet the most telling moment in the entire movie comes near the very end. His wife comes home so delighted with the success of her cupcake bake sale that she wants to treat them to a dinner and movie. Nothing about this is particularly exceptional except what Paterson leaves behind: his secret poetry journal, resting atop the couch. That Jamursch gives us a shot of Marvin, the adorable, ever-huffing bulldog is all the numbers we need to do painful math with: that journal is a goner. 

Sure enough, as Paterson and his wife arrive home, they walk into a floor covered with bits and pieces of his work torn apart. It’s confetti made from his very soul. But what’s most telling about this scene is how Paterson responds. His wife is angrier with Marvin than he appears to be. He doesn’t even respond at first, taking it in for a few moments before heading downstairs. He’s not even particularly interested in punishing the dog, managing a somewhat playful “I’m not very happy with you, Marvin” the next day as they sit across from each other in the living room. The kicker to all of this is that for the entire week we’ve been following Paterson, his wife has been asking him to make copies of his poems. She knows that the joy of keeping everything in one place has a mirror devil in how easy it is to lose everything all at once. Each day of the week, she insists. And each day he relents, saying it will happen. 

But it doesn’t happen. And it doesn’t happen for a very clear, painfully relatable reason: Paterson doesn’t think his poems are good enough. 

Remember when I said Jarmusch’s films always seem to zig when you expect it to zag? Life for Paterson in Paterson (yes, it’s the name of the character and the town) seems like any small town, with its sweet personalities and own personal dramas. But there’s one key exception: twins. Everywhere Paterson walks or drives, he daily seems to run across a set of twins. And they come in all shapes and sizes, no one particular race or gender or type. It’s almost as if there’s a town lottery in which someone is chosen each year to be duplicated. And if you’re hoping that at some point Jarmusch will give you a hint of just what the hell is up with all these twins, I can assure you he most definitely does not. No hand is tipped. No clues are given. 

But it’s pretty clear to me what these twins represent: imposter syndrome. Jarmusch only gives us Paterson’s perspective throughout the film, so we have no way of knowing if the rest of the town sees double as he does. But we do see how Paterson always notices the twins. He looks at them often enough that the balance tips from “Oh look, another set” to something far deeper. Imposter syndrome – in which one doubts their own accomplishments and is convinced they will one day be seen as a fraud – is a very, very real thing for creatives and especially writers. I imagine so much of this is due to the internal nature of our work. I can tell my wife nearly every day that I did some writing and it’s an accurate statement. But unless she searches through my computer – or my brain when I’m on a walk – there’s very little direct proof. It’s a leap of faith only rewarded by the occasional finished piece. I also think about how often I stumble across a piece I wrote – sometimes only weeks before, sometimes years – and marvel at how it’s much better than I remember. For the longest time, I accepted it with a private admonishment. I would tell myself that I could still write that well if I just kept at it, that I was just rusty and needed some extra practice. What I realize now, thanks to Paterson, is a private admonishment as such is just Imposter Syndrome with its hooks deep in me. I looked at my skill and craft through a rearview mirror without realizing it was just a plain old mirror showing my reflection. 

But to Paterson, these Imposter Syndrome twins only make sense when you compare him with his wife. As he works his way through the week – walking to and from work, writing poetry on his breaks – we see glimpses of all the projects his wife is working on. There’s the guitar she wants to buy so she can become a singer-songwriter. There are the many, many home and fashion projects that involve black and white in various arrangements. I kept waiting for Jarmusch to show something – anything – with her that clued us into why he spent so much time on her. At first, she seems to be what brings out Paterson’s kind, supportive core. But it was only long after watching the movie that it hit me: she shows her work. Sure, her work, by its very nature, is more visual. It is meant to be seen. But every day she is doing something that is wearable, edible, or liveable. It is meant to be shared with others. 

For each set of twins in Paterson, there’s a set of conflicting questions: will you show your work or will you keep it to yourself? Will you create or will you remain passive? And then the most important of all: will you consider yourself good enough or are you convinced you’re a fraud? Twins have shown us, time and time again throughout history, the many ways they can look the same and yet turn out so wildly different. It’s not the genes that usually decides this. It’s the choices. And Paterson shows us how the choices we make say an awful lot about how we view ourselves. 

Even at the very end, Paterson sits near the same waterfall he does every lunch break. He doesn’t have his journal, which currently sits at home in confetti form. But he also isn’t sure if he’s going to start another book. At least not yet. When a Japanese man comes over to talk poetry with him, Paterson refers to himself as a bus driver first. He’s imagined him and his twin and chosen the bill-paying profession over the creative identity. It doesn’t matter that Paterson knows all the poets the man is talking about or that he can even give him some extra bit of hometown trivia. It doesn’t matter how obviously in love with poetry Paterson is. He still does not believe he’s good enough. 

I didn’t fully appreciate Jarmusch’s last film, The Dead Don’t Die, until long after seeing it. Only in the back of my mind did I realize how much it had to say about climate change and our apathy towards life-threatening issues. Maybe it’s the shot of a bespectacled Adam Driver crammed into a little smart car that fools you into thinking it’s just gonna be a fluffy comedy. And you could be swayed by an adorable bulldog like Marvin and the many affable characters in Paterson. But it’s going to catch up to you. One day you’re gonna look in the mirror and you’re gonna have to decide which twin you’re gonna be.