If you have known me at literally any point in my life, it won’t surprise you to hear that I watched a lot of movies in 2020. More than any other year, I think. The pandemic prompted me to return to many comforting old favorites, but I was even more entertained and moved by films that I hadn’t seen before this year. I journeyed into silent cinema, did a fantastic Spike Lee deep dive, cozied up with numerous romantic comedies, and filled in a ton of embarrassing classic film blindspots.
In reflecting on a year of so many new movie discoveries –– the year that “every movie ever made became new again,” as beautifully put by Mike Ryan –– I decided to pick 50 of my favorite first-watches. Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times usually groups his favorites into pairs on his year-end lists, so I’ve decided to do the same. I’m also not including any 2020 releases –– those will be in a separate piece. The pairs are linked by a genre, a thematic similarity, an actor, or a filmmaker, and might make an intriguing double feature. Ranking them would be impossible, so I’m not even going to try, and I’ll be posting the full piece in segments over the next few days.
Malcolm X/25th Hour
My greatest cinematic discovery of 2020 was Spike Lee’s filmography –– while I’d previously adored Do the Right Thing and enjoyed Inside Man and BlacKkKlansman, I hadn’t experienced the rest of his work. From what I’ve seen, all of Lee’s projects range from enjoyable to absolutely essential, and he’s quickly become one of my favorite filmmakers due to his masterful handle on so many genres, from coming-of-age (Crooklyn) to crime (Clockers) to quasi-musicals (School Daze, Chi-Raq).
Excluding Do the Right Thing, Lee’s two best movies are Malcolm X and 25th Hour. In the former, Denzel Washington gives a career-best performance as the titular activist, as Lee brilliantly captures Malcolm’s life in a sprawling three-hour epic. We don’t just get a typical greatest-hits approach to his life, but instead a full portrait of his history and personality. He’s not just a hero or just a leader or just a martyr, as the limitations of biased history textbooks suggest –– instead, we share his triumphs and his losses, and track his philosophy and worldview as they develop with each new chapter of life. It’s a rare biopic that feels entirely true to the spirit of the subject and the voice of the storyteller. It’s Lee’s most fully-realized character study. Read more here.
25th Hour, on the other hand, is Lee’s quintessential New York movie. Lee and writer David Benioff probe the city’s breadth and its particularities at every opportunity. The characters come from all over the city and from every walk of life — we have a privileged Jewish schoolteacher from Manhattan, an Irish firefighter from the Bronx, an Afro-Latina twentysomething, a ton of Russian mobsters, and two Brooklynites who make a splashes on Wall Street and dealing drugs. Yet they’re united by a common place and a shared sadness — the impending doom of one man’s forthcoming prison stint. And 9/11’s shadow provides a poignant, sobering sense of reality, further enhancing the film’s thesis: that one moment can change everything. Read more here.
Malcolm X and 25th Hour are available for rental at any digital retailer.
The Circus/Sherlock Jr.
I dove into the world of silent film at the end of the year, and quickly fell in love with several films from the era. The most immediately accessible movies came from the era’s two most prominent entertainers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The beloved comedy stars also wrote and directed most of their most beloved projects, including The Circus and Sherlock Jr., which I think are the stars at their respective bests*.
In The Circus, Chaplin’s iconic Tramp stumbles into big-top success, and I personally think it’s the director’s most personal movie. This is a bittersweet tale about an average guy who unwittingly becomes a comedy star, giving the masses entertainment that feels authentic amidst a sea of artificial trickery. Even when he succeeds, he’s not respected by his peers or superiors, which embitters him and prompts him to overextend himself. There are at least four fantastic silent comedy sequences here, and it ends on a magnificently somber note. Read more here.
Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. is one of the first major films to prominently feature a movie within a movie, and thrives on the interplay between reality and fiction, as Keaton’s protagonist bounces between an on-screen stint as a detective and a real-life projectionist career. The surreal conceit allows the filmmaker to explore the relationships between films, their viewers, and reality itself. It’s one of Keaton’s sweetest and one of his most profound, and has some of the craziest stunts you’ll ever see in a movie. Read more here.
*I haven’t seen City Lights or Modern Times yet, and I expect one or both of them to usurp The Circus as my favorite Chaplin.
The Circus is available on HBO Max. Sherlock Jr. is available on YouTube.
Moonstruck/Sleepless in Seattle
The unceasing tragedies of 2020 called for countless comfort viewings, which led me to tons of fun romantic comedies. Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck was easily one of my favorites, primarily because of its bizarre Italian-American warmth. Cher and Nicolas Cage star as the central couple, and they’re both genuinely hilarious and endlessly charming; better still are their aggressive relatives, including Olympia Dukakis and Vincent Gardenia, who bring a harsh sweetness to the table. Even though it’s set in wintertime New York City, it’s one of the warmest movies I can think of, thanks to its equal focus on romance and family.
Nora Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle also deserves recognition as one of the great romantic comedies. The filmmaker’s snappy dialogue and charmingly complex characters made her the undisputed queen of the genre at the end of the century (see also: When Harry Met Sally, You’ve Got Mail), and Sleepless is another stellar example of her talents. The two leads barely interact, but Ephron effortlessly convinces the audience that they’re perfect for each other, somehow creating chemistry and magnetism out of thin air. Of course, it helps when those two leads are America’s sweetheart and America’s dad, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. I actually think this movie is one of the most important of the latter’s career, which I wrote a little more about here and might explore even further in the future (who knows). I actually watched this twice: my initial review can be found here, and my second is linked above.
Moonstruck and Sleepless in Seattle are available for rental at any digital retailer.
High Noon/For a Few Dollars More
I usually have difficulty connecting with Westerns. I can appreciate the craft and spectacle of movies like Unforgiven or Shane, but the genre doesn’t frequently compel me to seek out more of it. Fortunately, two atypical Westerns that I watched this year are helping me warm to the genre. The first, 1952’s High Noon, stars Gary Cooper as Marshal Will Kane, a stand-up guy who discovers the cold cruelty of individualist society when the going gets tough. In a swift 85 minutes, Kane and his town must grapple with the ethics of violence, the failure of politics, and the challenges of collective action, all while building to an iconic finale that both fulfills and subverts expectations. It’s super accessible for Western-agnostics like me because it challenges the phony American mythologizing that the genre so frequently upholds. The film takes place in real time, and costars Grace Kelly as the newlywed Mrs. Kane. Read more here.
Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More takes almost the exact opposite approach to the Western –– it embraces everything great about the genre without the elements that make it tough to swallow for some viewers. It’s got frequent action, amazing music, incredibly cool characters, and, above all, an exhilarating sense of danger, and doesn’t get weighed down by an overly complicated story or unnecessary scenes. Ennio Morricone’s vibrant score and Massimo Dallamano’s camerawork elevate the bare-bones story to its maximum potential, injecting every scene with beauty and excitement. The film’s greatest asset, though, is its pair of leading men. Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef (who also briefly appears in High Noon) make an exceptional duo — they shoot more than they speak and could betray each other at any moment. I don’t think we’d have the original Star Wars without Leone. Read more here.
For a Few Dollars More is available on Amazon Prime Video. High Noon is available for rental at any digital retailer.
Say Anything/Jerry Maguire
Cameron Crowe is one of the most optimistic mainstream American filmmakers in recent memory. His movies are unabashedly romantic, and almost always feature winsome performances from immensely charming actors. Case in point: Say Anything…, his directorial debut, is a straightforward high school romantic dramedy that hinges on unceasingly likable performances from Ione Skye and John Cusack (more on him later). The two leads, along with every supporting character, are compelling and unique because they don’t fit into any preconceived high school stereotypes –– instead, they seem like quirky, sweet kids you could have gone to school with. It’s a remarkably warm and uplifting movie, but rooted in enough realism that you don’t feel manipulated by dishonest Hollywood cliches. Read more here.
My girlfriend and I watched a ton of movies starring Toms Hanks and Cruise, and our favorite from the latter was Crowe’s Jerry Maguire. The director makes perfect use of the superstar, who, as the titular sports agent, gets to be charming, unhinged, overly sentimental, and emotionally distant, often simultaneously. The overall film is a great example of Crowe’s distinct blend of over-the-top sensibilities and instinct for intimate human drama. It contains a lot of larger-than-life elements — cheeky narration, multimillion-dollar sports contracts, and Cuba Gooding Jr., to name a few — but ultimately feels more like an honest, down–to–earth character study than a typical Hollywood rom-com. Read more here.
Say Anything… and Jerry Maguire are available for rental at any digital retailer.
Zodiac/Velvet Buzzsaw
Jake Gyllenhaal has one of the best track records of any American actor. He consistently picks high-quality projects that challenge him as an actor, which usually translates into incredibly entertaining movies. David Fincher’s Zodiac, which chronicles the paranoia surrounding the titular Californian serial killer, is one of Gyllenhaal’s best movies, and boasts one of his finest performances. As Robert Graysmith, the actor embodies obsession while still maintaining the audience’s sympathy, and gets to bounce off of future Avengers Mark Ruffalo and Robert Downey Jr. Snappy editing, gorgeous lighting, and elegantly claustrophobic photography work together to make the film a tense visual feast. Plus, the conclusion strikes a perfect balance of satisfying closure and chilling ambiguity, and David Fincher finds one of his most powerful thematic through-lines in his fixation on fixation itself. Read more here.
Velvet Buzzsaw allows Gyllenhaal to shine in a decidedly different light –– he begins the film as an unfathomably elitist art critic and devolves into delightfully unhinged madness by its conclusion. It’s a joyfully weird movie that uses goofy horror tropes to identify the revolting elements of the art world and exploits them for laughs. Everything about it — the campy story, the exaggerated performances, the pretentious noir-adjacent dialogue, the grotesque death sequences — is fittingly over-the-top for the industry that the film takes aim at. Read more here.
Zodiac is available on Amazon Prime Video. Velvet Buzzsaw is available on Netflix.
Little Shop of Horrors/Phantom of the Paradise
I try to watch almost exclusively spooky movies in October, and while I saw several great horror movies this Halloween season (David Cronenberg’s The Fly and Wes Craven’s Scream among the best of them), my favorite finds were both campy horror musicals. Little Shop of Horrors should be the gold standard for Broadway musical adaptations. Director Frank Oz (best known as the voice behind Miss Piggy and Yoda) takes every possible opportunity to make this movie seem like a stage play — long takes, extravagant sets, and incredible puppetry all lend to the film’s lovable theatricality. The movie also features excellent songs from future Disney legends Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The only major problem is that it has two endings –– the theatrical release opted for a laughably low-key conclusion, while the director’s cut goes absolutely bananas. Read more here.
The smooth frenzy of Brian De Palma’s visuals combine with Paul William’s whimsical songwriting to make Phantom of the Paradise a beautifully chaotic spectacle of color and sound. Phantom brilliantly weaves Faustian deals into a modernized Phantom of the Opera narrative, resulting in a scathing indictment of showbusiness and the corrosive nature of art’s commercialization. I’m not sure if we’d have Tim Burton or Baz Luhrmann without this movie. Read more here.
Little Shop of Horrors and Phantom of the Paradise are available for rental at any digital retailer.
Hard Eight/Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
Even though he’s usually limited to supporting roles, John C. Reilly never fails to leave a lasting impression on a film. Despite limited screen time, he’s unquestionably the best part of Kong: Skull Island, arguably the best part of Chicago, and definitely in the running for the best part of Boogie Nights and Magnolia. It makes sense, then, that two of the actor’s best movies are those that give him more substantial roles. In Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut Hard Eight, Reilly essentially plays the second lead: a young Nevadan gambler taken under the wing of Sydney (Phillip Baker Hall). At first, the film seems like a slick Vegas story in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven, but quickly devolves into a more sinister tale about guilt and dishonesty. The tender relationship between Hall and Reilly provides the cold story with some much-needed warmth. Read more here.
Reilly’s most famous comedic turns are almost all supporting roles in Will Ferrell vehicles, but he gets the titular part in his funniest movie to date –– Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. The film skewers music biopics like Walk the Line and Ray by hyperbolically parodying every trope in the book, resulting in one of the most hilarious studio comedies of the 21st century. Reilly’s comedic sensibilities are absolutely flawless, as he nails the movie’s over-the-top tone without going overboard, and maintains insane comedic chemistry with every one of his costars, from Jenna Fischer to Jack White. And his singing voice is good enough to believe that he’d have some musical success, but not quite strong enough to propel him to superstardom, which makes Cox’s career trajectory even more hilarious.
Hard Eight is available on Amazon Prime Video. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story is available for rental at any digital retailer.
