Best Films of 2020

In a year of unparalleled weirdness and chaos, at least we had movies. I find that films are the best kind of distraction and while I didn’t get to see many films in the Cinema I did still get to watch a few new releases thanks to services like Mubi, BFI Player and of course Netflix. So here are my top films of 2020.

My Top 5 Films of 2020

Parasite directed by Bong Joon-ho

Yes, I am fully aware that this film came out in 2019 for most people, but here in the UK, we got Parasite in cinemas at the beginning of 2020 before the world went to shit. And it’s literally a masterpiece. Hilariously dark and with a biting social commentary Parasite is Bong at his best. If you haven’t seen this film yet you most definitely should, it broke records and has made people think twice about subtitle prejudice finally! Look out for a full review on here soon.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire directed by Céline Sciamma

Portrait of a Lady on Fire may be the most beautiful and heartfelt love story I have seen in ages, I was sobbing throughout the last 20 or so minutes, and I can’t stop thinking about it. I even wrote a gushing review earlier this year because I loved it so much. Read the full review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire Review

Emma. directed by Autumn de Wilde

Stylish, aesthetic and thoroughly good fun Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. is a delight to behold. I found myself just utterly enamoured by this whole film, and I think a rewatch may be on the horizon as it’s buoyancy and frivolity would be the most welcome distraction from lockdown 3.0.

The Woman Who Ran directed by Hong Sang-soo

Hong Sang-soo's latest film is a smart and witty look at female relationships and troublesome men. The thing I absolutely love about Hong’s films is that they always feel like the lives on display exist in reality, that if the camera weren’t rolling, everything would happen that way regardless. Read the full film review: The Woman Who Ran Review.

DNA directed by Maïwenn

DNA explores the void left by losing a loved one and how grief can bring out the worst in you or bring you back in touch with your roots. Neige clings to her grandfather through the things he left behind and her connection to Algeria through him. Filled with drama and some necessary injection of humour, this is a compelling film that will leave you questioning the fabric of your own familial bonds.

Honourable mentions: Swallow, Little Joe, The Lighthouse.

Films I should have watched but didn’t (for some unknown reason)

Small Axe Anthology directed by Steve McQueen

I love Steve McQueen’s work, but his films are emotionally brutal. Small Axe is an anthology series that focuses on Black lives in moments in modern British history and looks to be some of his most powerful work yet. I will be watching these important films imminently.

The Wild Goose Lake directed by Diao Yinan

I missed this film at the 2019 London East Asian Film Festival to my annoyance, and then the film became available on MUBI, and I missed it again. I really should have watched it when I had the chance.

Les Misérables directed by Ladj Ly

I am learning French, love social realism films, and films loosely inspired by literary works…don’t even get me started! As to why I haven’t watched this film yet, I don’t know the answer. I keep going to put it on, and then I decide to watch something else, I think it’s because there is just too much choice. Also, on some platforms like Mubi or All4, you only have a limited time to watch certain movies, whereas Netflix seems to keep titles in its library for much longer. But as I am trying to get fluent in French by the end of 2020, I will most definitely be watching this one ASAP!

Most disappointing film of 2020

Tenet directed by Christopher Nolan

I was so excited about this film, the trailers looked great, the cast is phenomenal, and normally, Nolan delivers a smart and intelligent blockbuster. But with Tenet I think Nolan tried to be clever for the sake of being clever. If you strip away all the time stuff then it’s a just another spy movie, complete with a bad caricature villain and the usual underdeveloped female character. But what made this film the most infuriating to watch was the sound engineering! I like to hear what characters say, especially in a film when 90% of the dialogue is exposition! For anyone in a non-English speaking country, they undoubtedly benefited from the inclusion of subtitles so perhaps after a re-watch (with subtitles) I might go a little easier on this film. But then again probably not.

My favourite Christmas movies (And a TV show for added festive fun)

Everyone loves Christmas movies; they are the perfect antidote to the cold dark days of Winter, and more so than ever this year they are great for lifting the mood.

In my Festive Favourites of Film & TV, I will also be answering some heavy-hitting questions such as is Love Actually actually good? Is Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut a Christmas film? And, of course, the much-debated Nightmare Before Christmas conundrum, is it a Halloween film or a Christmas movie?

So without further ado, let’s say cheers to the season and have a look at my Festive Faves

Home Alone - Stream on Disney+

A classic that I have watched over and over again since I was a child. Back in the day, my sister and I would watch it on VHS tape probably every year, and we were utterly obsessed with Angels with Filthy Souls the fake black and white gangster movie that Kevin watches and would re-enact the scene over and over again (we still do sometimes). I also think the idea of being left home alone over Christmas spoke to my introverted soul, and I felt that I would totally enjoy it. But I guess every kid felt the same and as you grow up you realise half the joy of Christmas is the communal experience (RIP Christmas 2020).

The Nightmare Before Christmas - Stream on Disney+

I have so much love for this stop-motion masterpiece and while some may argue that it is a Halloween movie I most ardently think that it is a Christmas film and one of the best at that. I think it captures the wonder and awe of Christmas in a very unique and charming way. I watch The Nightmare Before Christmas every year and will probably be watching it on Christmas Eve this year or maybe tonight who knows.

The Holiday - Stream on Netflix

I am a sucker for a Rom-Com and The Holiday is my festive film of choice within that genre, I was umming and ahhing as to whether I should choose Love Actually instead, but I’m not so sure about that film anymore.

I feel like modern dissections make me realise that it’s somewhat problematic, but I still find some of it funny, like the scene with Rowan Atkinson pretentiously wrapping a gift.

But anyway, back to The Holiday, and while it’s not without its issues, I would be inclined to say that it has aged better than Love Actually. It’s light-hearted fluff, and tbh I would totally spend Christmas at Iris’s cute country cottage.

Carol - Stream on Amazon Prime

Carol is gorgeously shot, and the performances by Cate Blancett and Rooney Mara are stunning. I love the moment Carol and Therese meet at the department store.

Also, Therese reminds me of how I used to behave working in retail over Christmas, nervous and quoting product specifications because I read all the material on the items I had to sell. I also wrote a film review of Carol a few years back on my old blog that I copied over to this one (wow, 5 years, to be precise!).

Hjem til Jul (Home for Christmas) - Netflix Original TV Series

This Norwegian language TV series is a concoction of romantic comedy genre tropes in one delightfully festive package, and I can’t get enough!

Joanne is a single 30-year-old nurse who is quite ok with her relationship status until the festive season rolls around. At the first advent dinner, her family criticise her for not having a boyfriend and sit her next to her brother’s noisy twins. Hell on earth, essentially.

So in true rom-com heroine style, instead of resigning herself to a repeat come Christmas Day, Joanne announces that she has a boyfriend without thinking. Thus a mad 24-day hunt ensues as she tries to find the perfect man to bring home for Christmas.

Eyes Wide Shut - Available to rent on BFI Player & other platforms

Am I clutching at straws to include this film in a Festive Favourites list? After all what says Christmas more than a secret high society sex cult?

Well, nothing other than the fact that Eyes Wide Shut takes place over the festive season, and I love Stanley Kubrick, so you can’t stop me from including it!

While it’s not your usual Christmas movie brimming with festive cheer or romance, it’s almost like a shot of reality, or perhaps it could even be called an Anti-Christmas film.

Film Critic Lee Seigel wrote:

“There is the fantasy of absolute gratification, cynically projected from every corner of the culture, and there is the reality of the cookie and the child and the homework and the companion you have chosen, and for whom, despite everything, you sit at home waiting. Compared with the everyday reality of sex and emotion, our fantasies of gratification are, yes, pompous and solemn in the extreme. That is why the film’s recurrent motif is of the Christmas tree. For desire is like Christmas: it always promises more than it delivers.”

This analysis really hits the nail on the head. When you delve deeper into the film, its themes of sexuality, ego, desire, and sexism really are complemented by the fantastic metaphor of Christmas. And, of course, it goes without saying that all those lights make for great cinematography.

Let me know in the comments what your Favourite Festive Film and TV picks are.

Thanatophobia + The Seventh Seal

The other night I had a panic attack. Again. I laid down in bed, switched the light off and hoped my brain would follow suit. It didn’t. Instead of the usual barrage of ideas for stories or random philosophical musings that often keep me up at night, a much more sinister thought settled in my mind. Death. You see death and the process of dying (and therefore ceasing to exist) always sets me off, I just can’t get my head around it and it freaks me out so much to the point that I have full-blown panic attacks about it.

One time at the doctors when I was younger and having an injection, I fainted for the first time. It was a slow blurring of the senses and an encroaching vignette of darkness. Naturally, I thought I was dying. I was completely terrified and I can remember struggling to breathe and shouting ‘I don’t want to die’ a few times before losing consciousness. Not my finest moment. After that episode, the fear of death went away for a few years, came back and retreated again like the tide. It had been quite a while since the last panic attack about death, but I guess with the whole pandemic situation and hearing and seeing death counts every single day the anxiety around it has understandably returned.

Sometimes I ask myself how does everyone function, why is the world not in a blind panic? People running around screaming and crying because of their guaranteed oblivion. Evolution. That’s why. Religion helps too. When I was a teenager I would read the New Testament desperate to believe in God so that I wouldn’t be so scared of death, but I never could quite convince myself. I’ve also tried Zen Buddhism too, that worked much better and for quite a long time I was at peace with the transience of life. In fact, I started looking at death as the final act in a play. Your prologue takes place while you're in the womb, the first act is…well who am I kidding Shakespeare has already covered this ground and he did it far better than I ever could.

I recently watched Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to try and see another point of view on death, and perhaps because of the rather morbid connection it, a film about The Black Death has with the present pandemic. And I found it to be one of the best films I have ever seen. I mean, duh, it’s Bergman, but it really touched me in unexpected ways, and dare I say I actually felt soothed at the end when they danced over the hill with Death.

Moreover, in an earlier scene, Max von Sydow’s Knight shares strawberries and milk with two travelling actors, their young child and his squire. He tells them that he will cherish the purity of the moment as if it were a bowl of freshly milked milk. I found it to be a beautiful moment in a rather heavy film. It also made me think about how most of us spend our lives overlooking the small stuff and stressing over what has been and what will be rather than being present. Quite the Zen sentiment, and one I had forgotten to practise recently.

I dare to say this will be me when the time comes…

It is clear to me (and anyone who reads this) that my fear of death is getting in the way of me living my life. I touched on the idea of Fear, in general, having such an impact on me in the 27 Things I Have Learned in 27 Years post that I wrote recently, and I am trying to find ways to mitigate its effects on me. No easy feat really, it’s hard to unlearn habits that have driven your life for as long as you can remember.

If you're struggling with everyday things, anxiety and/or suicidal thoughts and need to talk to someone then get in contact with Samaritans (UK). They are there to help.

Korean Cinema: 도망친 여자 (The Woman Who Ran) Review

It’s safe to say that if a Hong Sang-soo film becomes available to watch in the UK I will jump at the chance to see it. Thankfully the London Korea Film Festival went digital this year as I was seriously weighing up whether it was worth risking a trip to the cinema to see his latest film.

The Woman Who Ran stars Hong’s long time muse Kim Min-hee who once again gives a fantastically understated performance as Gam-hee a woman we follow through three encounters with three different friends. Something I absolutely love about Hong’s films is that they always feel like the lives on display exist in reality, that if the camera wasn’t rolling everything would happen that way regardless.

In the first segment, Gam-hee visits a friend at their semi-rural apartment complex. Here the characters discuss a variety of topics which randomly involve animals, from the prettiness of cow’s eyes that cause the two women to consider becoming vegetarian briefly (while eating meat) to the aggressive dominance a Cockerel has over the neighbour’s chickens and another neighbour who ardently wants the apartments stray cat community to be cut off from being fed, dubbing them ‘robber cats’.

What struck me with these conversations is that there is always more to them than what meets the eye, especially with the conversation about the Cockerel, which could easily be a metaphor for sexual harassment and abuse women face when a man aggressively expresses his dominance.

The Cat Man, on the other hand, can be seen as a symbol of the human ego; he declares that the people of the apartment complex are more important than the stray cats, while Young-soon’s roommate insists that the cats have every right to survive. Is Hong weaving a conversation on the climate crisis into the film? Perhaps, that’s the impression I got anyway.

‘People in love should always stick to each other’

It soon becomes apparent that conversations with men are shot from behind; why does Hong make the men mainly faceless? Exposing them just for a few mere moments as they arrive or depart the destination of the conversation.

Another thing to consider is that each man is causing problems for the women they are conversing with. Cat Man tells Gam-hee’s hosts that they need to stop feeding stray cats, a young poet stalks Gam-hee’s second friend after a drunken one-night stand and Gam-hee herself is confronted by her self-important ex.

Gam-hee’s husband is mentioned several times and is actually faceless as he never appears in the film, but his view that ‘people in love should always stick to each other’ dominates Gam-hee’s life (as she is only now away from him after five years of marriage).

In this way, it feels like Hong is showcasing women’s lives with a very obvious #metoo sentiment; he is revealing how some men behave towards women and how things are made far more complicated for them because of the men they encounter.

This is all done with an obvious sense of humour, the women are all smart and engage in varied conversations whereas the men all come off rather foolish. And of course, this wouldn’t be a Hong Sang-soo film if he didn’t manage to weave in his usual musings of art and artists which is always a pleasure to watch.

Korean Cinema: 버티고 (Vertigo) Review

Directed by Jeon Gye-soo, Vertigo explores Seo-young’s life in corporate Korea. It’s a dizzying world of uncertainty where simply being seen wearing a hearing aid could lose her a contract renewal. Seo-young’s secret affair with her handsome and popular boss is also another risk. Soon her life begins to spiral out of control when her inner ear problem causes her to start experiencing Vertigo in her high-rise office.

 I watched this film as part of the London Korean Film Festival, which went digital this year as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a kind of stroke of luck for me as I have wanted to see Vertigo for quite a while, and I wouldn’t have been able to see it at its originally planned screening in London.

Narratively the central focus of the film is on Seo-young, but Vertigo also explores two men and their connection to her. Seo-young is very much in love with her boss Lee Jin-soo (Teo Yoo from the fantastic Russian film Leto!), which is displayed through her looking at him longingly while he religiously works and how she seeks physical contact with him.

His distance and unavailability are perhaps part of the draw, but it is clear she craves something more from the relationship. Kwon-Woo a window cleaner, is a point of fascination for Seo-young, he is literally and metaphorically on the outside looking in. He cleans windows suspended from a rope and can observe corporate meetings and lunchtime rituals, but he is also poor and of different social standing, and his interest in the melancholy Seo-young becomes a focal point in his life.

There is one moment where he writes Cheer Up on the windows in soap suds, which causes Seo-young to cry (and I must admit I did too!). However, one must also note that while Kwon-woo had the best of intentions his behaviour throughout the film was questionable and actually stalking.

Beautifully shot with a minimalistic colour palette Vertigo really stands out when audio and visuals vividly collide to bring Set-young’s vertigo to life. Visually we experience the disorientation, the panic and the off-kilter feeling through the use of a SnorriCam (essentially, the camera is mounted onto the actor, so it appears that they don’t move while everything around them does). The sound engineering in these moments mimics tinnitus with the high pitch ringing and the muffling of voices which I found to be really powerful, and as I have tinnitus myself rather realistic too.

While Vertigo starts off strong towards the end the film becomes rather over the top and a bit too melodramatic for my liking (though it does make for a spectacular cinematographic moment), but overall it was a beautiful film to watch and an interesting portrait of a woman on the brink. There were also some important moments throughout the film that highlighted social issues like sexual harassment and prejudices within the workplace.