Top 10 Films of 2020 (that aren't from 2020)

All right-we will be this week (likely on Tuesday if my plans are correct) unveiling my Top 10 of 2020.  However, in every year but this year especially, I see a lot of movies, and not just ones from the 2020 calendar.  In 2020 I saw 288 movies, some repeat viewings but many classics (or not so much) that I had never seen before, and I don't want to let something like chronology get in the way of celebrating great cinema.  As a result, I've included below my Top 10 films of 2020 that I saw for the first time (that didn't come out in 2020).  Enjoy (titles are listed alphabetically)!

Anatomy of a Murder (1959)

dir. Otto Preminger

A complicated look at sexual assault (and a surprisingly modern take considering its Classical Hollywood roots), this is a 3-hour film that never feels long, and has amazing work from Jimmy Stewart & Lee Remick.

Cabin in the Sky (1943)

dir. Vincente Minnelli

Ethel Waters steals the show in Vincente Minnelli's first musical, a landmark musical featuring an all-Black cast, and a picture that proves that "happiness is just a thing called Joe."

Honeyland (2019)

dir. Tamara Kotevska & Ljubomir Stefanov

A hands-off documentary that is so rich you almost feel it's a narrative feature; it's a challenging look at poverty, loss, & our ill treatment of the planet.

if... (1968)

dir. Lindsay Anderson

Malcolm McDowell shows early shadows of Alex DeLarge in this boarding school drama, a movie that even 50 years later is shocking in its frankness about sex & violence.

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948)

dir. Max Ophuls

Impossibly romantic, Joan Fontaine & Louis Jourdan are iconic as two lovers who alternate between passion & indifference in this forgotten masterwork.

The Misfits (1961)

dir. John Huston

A more avant-garde western than you'd expect given the stars, The Misfits is a look at the faded west & its fight against modernity.  Career-best work from Marilyn Monroe & (dare I say it?) Clark Gable.

Paper Moon (1973)

dir. Peter Bogdonavich

A gemlike father-and-daughter buddy film (on screen & off), that gives both of the O'Neal's their best work.  Proof that A+ chemistry, writing, & cinematography can always sell a picture.

Paths of Glory (1957)

dir. Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick gives us one of the best "war is hell" examples brought to cinema, with a look at the cruel politics of battle (and the finest performance from Kirk Douglas I've ever seen).

The Red Shoes (1948)

dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

One of those films that is spoken about in near reverent tones by cinephiles, Powell & Pressburger's magnum opus lives up to the hype: a modern, gorgeous tale of tragedy.

The Wind (1928)

dir. Victor Sjostrom

One of the greatest silent films I've ever seen, Lillian Gish gives the performance of a lifetime as a woman driven near mad by the harsh winds of the prairie.

Paths of Glory (1957)

Film: Paths of Glory (1957)
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Wayne Morris
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Oscar History: Despite a BAFTA Best Picture nomination and universal praise for the film (then and now), the film received no Oscar nominations, likely due to the controversial nature of the movie's depiction of the military.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

One of the realities of the quarantine for all of us has been that we're staying at home constantly (and if we're not, we should be-social distancing is more important now than ever).  And with that, you can either sit around, be lazy, watching the same TV show over-and-over again (no judgment, this has been part of my "mental decompression" process over the past few months, especially with Bob's Burgers, and I support any form that social distancing takes place if it's medically sound), or you can start to cross off certain things from your To Do lists, and for me, that's been seeing a lot of movies.  Even without access to a movie theater, I'll likely hit the same number of movies I saw in 2019 by Columbus Day, perhaps even Labor Day, at the current rate I'm going.  And with that, I've seen an enormous number of quality, 5-star films.  I normally don't throw out 5-star ratings very often (indeed, I try to save them for only the most hallowed of cinematic experiences), but this week you're going to get two of them-one today, one on Tuesday.  And that's because I'm going to be watching two major classics of 1950's cinema, the first of which is arguably the most important English-language film I'd never seen until this past Friday: Paths of Glory.

(Spoilers Ahead) Paths of Glory is short, particularly considering director Stanley Kubrick would not be brief in later landmark pictures in his filmography (it's only 88 minutes long).  The movie is about a French battalion in World War I whose General Mireau (Macready) is given an order to try to take a well-defended German position called the "Anthill."  Mireau knows this is impossible-the task is not something that his troops will be able to execute successfully, and will surely end with countless lost lives, but is informed that if he does this, he may well be in-line for a promotion.  Mireau greedily gives the orders, and his men die in the battle, with his B Company refusing to continue the fruitless attack (at one point Mireau even orders that his own men are fired upon, but his captain refuses).  When word breaks, Mireau wants to sentence 100 of the men for cowardice, but is persuaded to randomly choose three men, all of whom are chosen for the personal gains of their commanding officers.  The film then shifts into a slow death march, with Colonel Dax (Douglas), the one man in this military who sees this trial for the sham that it is, trying to persuade the commanding officers to come to their senses and not kill these men, but to no avail.  The film ends with the three men shot for cowardice, and the remaining troops having a moment of lonely song in a bar before being sent back into battle.

Paths of Glory at the time invited an incredible amount of criticism from military and government leaders, especially in France, Germany, and Spain at the time (always the contrarian, Winston Churchill loved the movie).  There's a reason for that-Paths of Glory is an obvious entry in the "war is hell" canon, but more so it is deeply critical of the concept of military command, and the greed that it involves.  The film shows Macready and Menjou (both excellent in their roles), playing ambitious, shallow generals who move around men's lives less like they are trying to win a war and more like they're planning a place setting at a dinner party.  Kubrick, ever a stickler for detail, smartly shoots certain sequences in long or wide shots to counter the ugly, war-torn trenches with the gaudy opulence of the general's palaces & residents.  It shows how oftentimes the generals and politicians are making decisions based on their own personal greed and wish to advance more than what is best for the troops and winning the war.  This concept is commonplace in film (and in coverage of military & political figures) now, but in 1957 this was unthinkable & quite shocking.

Kubrick, more than any other director though, had a way of finding what was shocking in its time and making it age well.  Paths of Glory like Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A Clockwork Orange after it, has such a specific motif that it still feels fresh sixty years later, even as it clearly has influenced countless military films since then.  His cinematography is gorgeous, moving, and precise, as is his direction.  The film's message of how war can rob the soul of a man is timeless, and he smartly makes every scene count (there's no fat in this movie).  The performances are also quite strong.  As I mentioned Macready & Menjou both play their parts beautifully, and I have to admit this is best I've ever seen Kirk Douglas.  If you follow this blog, you'll know that I am hit-or-miss with Douglas so this might reek of a backhanded compliment, but don't take it that way-it is a crime, even in a year as stacked as 1957, that Douglas didn't get an Oscar nomination for his work here.  Paths of Glory is a true achievement, a fresh, modern look at a tale as old as humanity, and one that has somehow remained unstained in the decades since.

The Killing (1956)

Film: The Killing (1956)
Stars: Sterling Hayden, Coleen Gray, Vince Edwards, Jay C. Flippen, Elisha Cook, Jr., Marie Windsor
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the Month of June, as a birthday present to myself, we'll be profiling 15 famous film noir movies I've never seen (my favorite film genre).  Look at the bottom of this review for some of the other movies we've profiled.

Some of the films in this series are on here because they were massive hits in their era, quickly becoming classics in their genre.  The Killing, on the other hand, was decidedly not a hit in its era-it barely even got released.  A low-budget film of the mid-1950's, it was paired as the second feature to Bandido!, a forgettable Robert Mitchum western from United Artists.  One could argue that only Hayden & Gray are even remotely known today on the cast list, and even then only for supporting parts in classic films, not as leads (Gray is John Wayne's love interest in Red River, Hayden was the corrupt police officer in The Godfather).  But the movie had an enormous impact after the film was made, and you can probably guess that considering who is listed above not as a star of the film, but as its director-this was one of the first movies that Stanley Kubrick, one of the cinema's greatest masters, ever made.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is really interesting in the way that it's set up, so the plot is going to sound a bit more mundane than it actually is.  The film is about a heist at a horse track, where a group of men led by Johnny Clay (Hayden) are pulling off an intricate robbery that will happen when one of the horses in the race is shot, and then another man breaks out into a fight to distract the guards long enough for Johnny to steal all of the money that has been bet on the races that day.  The plan goes awry when one of the men's (George, played by Cook) wife Sherry (Windsor) tells her lover Val (Edwards) about the robbery, and tries to pull a double cross on George and the other men by stealing the money after it's stolen.  This ends with all of the men dead save for Johnny and George, and George is gravely injured, going back to his home to kill Sherry, who thinks she's about to be rich with her handsome boyfriend (and potentially with a dead husband to boot).  Johnny and his girlfriend Fay (Gray) try to flee, but their airline won't let them carry on the bag that has all of the cash (it's too large), so they check it, and then watch as a loose dog distracts the luggage carrier's driver, causing the suitcase to fall on the runway and let the entire $2 million get sucked up in a whirl.  Johnny & Fay begin to run, but a despondent Johnny basically gives himself up to the police, proclaiming "what's the difference?" in the process.

The most striking thing about the picture is that it's told out-of-sequence.  While the final moments with Johnny are truly the last moments chronologically in the film, we continually see certain scenes from different angles.  For example, the death of the horse is told through the lens of Johnny, as well as the person who shoots the horse, as well as the man who starts the robbery, with the track announcer serving as a reminder of where we are at during the heist.  This works spectacularly well, and might be the first time I can remember seeing such a narrative device in a Hollywood picture.  It then gives us explanations as to why something odd might be happening in one scene (for example, why is meticulous Johnny running late and not in the room when Val & George shoot up the hideaway?), and for a movie that is focused entirely on a heist itself, it shows all of the ways the crime can go right (and ultimately wrong) despite the best intentions of those involved.  The movie has been stated as an inspiration for Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, but honestly it's hard not to see Pulp Fiction in the way that the movie unfolds as well.  The film was little seen at the time, but one of the people that did see it was Dore Schary, who hired Kubrick to direct Paths of Glory, which led to Spartacus, which led to Kubrick being a household name.

The movie's acting is quite interesting.  The movie uses a large cast, many of the actors bit players from other noir films (Cook, for example, has a small part in The Maltese Falcon and Gray was in Nightmare Alley which we investigated earlier this month).  One could argue that no one is giving a standout performance (Cook & Windsor get the best parts, though), but all of the work feels very much in service to the director, frequently giving standard, boilerplate roles more meaning in the small ways that the characters skew from our standard understanding of noir.  Look at the way that Gray, whose character is a saint, is ultimately the person who is trying to keep Johnny on the run in the final moments of the film, making you wonder for a second just how they ended up together, and exactly how innocent her character is.  These slight deviations in what could (and likely would have been without this particular director) have been a forgettable noir give a nod to what eventually would be auteur theory in Hollywood movies, something that Kubrick more than almost anyone else would exemplify.  Of course, this was strangely the last film that Kubrick ever filmed entirely in the United States, but that's a story for another day.

Previous Films in the Series: The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, Gun Crazy, Night and the City, In a Lonely Place, They Live By Night, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, The Killers, The Woman in the Window, The Big Sleep

OVP: Spartacus (1960)

Film: Spartacus (1960)
Stars: Kirk Douglas, Laurence Olivier, Jean Simmons, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, Tony Curtis, John Gavin, John Dall
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Oscar History: 6 nominations/4 wins (Best Supporting Actor-Peter Ustinov*, Costume*, Art Direction*, Cinematography*, Film Editing, Score)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Over the past month, I finally finished a longtime goal of mine, one that has been sitting on my Bucket List for years just waiting to be completed: seeing all of the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Films.  Yes, I managed to see all of the movies (on a 19-year-old list-don't judge, I had other stuff going on, and how many have you finished it?), and as a result I got a teensy bit behind on the reviews for the films because I saw a few in rapid succession.  This week we'll get reviews for the final three movies I saw from the list, one of which is Spartacus, the gladiator epic starring Kirk Douglas that somehow won a mountain of Oscars without a Best Picture citation.  Hopefully this will inspire you to complete a film or two off of the list yourself, as even the worst of the bunch are still iconic parts of American cinema.

(Spoilers Ahead) Spartacus came at arguably the height of the biblical or time-of-Christ epics, and like many of those films it is VERY long.  Clocking in at just over three hours, it's the sort of film you need a Saturday night and a bucket full of popcorn to complete, but thankfully that was the route I went as I really enjoyed the picture.  Telling the tale of Spartacus (Douglas), a slave who can no longer stand his station, he is sentenced to fight as a gladiator, but succeeds in killing his master and then escaping to form a slave army, causing a rebellion that makes its way all the way to Rome, where political maneuverings between Crassus (Olivier), Gracchus (Laughton), and an emerging Julius Caesar (Gavin) result in Spartacus' gaining great fame and eventually causing his doom, but not before hundreds of men die in a senseless act of violence that seals Spartacus' fate as a legend.  The film ends with Kirk Douglas hanging from a cross, seeing his son (who is now free) and having the comfort that he did not die in vain.

I am a self-professed fan of historical epics of this era (I loved Ben-Hur as you may recall), which may surprise some but I'm always a sucker for a gigantic story if it's done well, and this is true of Spartacus. The script, written in secret by Dalton Trumbo (it was essentially the film that ended the blacklist, as you'll recall from the recent biopic about the writer, and a lot of that had to do with Kirk Douglas demanding Trumbo get credit-Douglas was too big of a star for Hollywood to ignore, and the box office for this film was gargantuan so the blacklist suddenly had no purpose).  The movie's core is centered around a man largely devoid of fault, which made director Stanley Kubrick (isn't it weird to think that this is a Kubrick film since it's so alien to the rest of his pictures?), but in reality Spartacus is a man of deep pride who doesn't really know how to play his own game.  There are moments in the film where doing exactly what is right costs him dearly, and so he might be a man without blemish on his character, but tactically he's not always brilliant, so I didn't get the "saint" factor that sometimes plagues films of this nature.  He's essentially Ned Stark, for those of you who watch Game of Thrones, and they meet similar ends.

The film is of course noted for its iconic "I am Spartacus" scene and with good reason.  I'd seen this film in clip shows at least a hundred times before, but positioned in the final third of the movie, it is still a gut punch, and one that will leave you in tears.  Watching hundreds of men sacrifice themselves for a cause, particularly considering the way that this clearly was a metaphor for the Red Scare and what was happening to Dalton Trumbo himself during this era, is deeply moving.  History repeats itself, and Trumbo's script knows that that's the case, and finds ways to make sure the audience can see past the gladiator wear and into their own present.

The film is famed for the homosexual overtones between Crassus and Antoninus (Curtis), and the scenes between them are truly provocative (famously, as Olivier was dead, Anthony Hopkins did the dubbing for this scene which was re-introduced to the picture after being cut by censors in the 1960's when it was added back into the movie in the 1990's).  The scene is rather shocking as there's little subtlety or even hints that Crassus could be talking about something other than having sex with Antoninus, and while it's problematic that we have the "predatory gay" scene here (not to mention the absolute disgust from Antoninus over the entire situation), it's still pretty progressive in terms of simply acknowledging the clear homosexual overtones of a film where only Jean Simmons appears as a major female character.  Plus, any film with John Gavin is at least gay in my mind, so there's that.

The film won six Academy Award nominations, though oddly enough not one for Best Picture, with the Academy perhaps worn out of gladiator epics so soon after Ben-Hur won eleven trophies.  Still, it managed a stronghold on the tech categories, and rightfully so.  The cinematography is breathtaking, a wonderful Technicolor concoction, is one of the most beautiful of the era, and we see gigantic plains of actors, extras, and magnificent settings that feel fully-detailed.  Russell Metty was only nominated for an Oscar once in his career, but thankfully it was for the right picture here.  The Art Direction and Costume are full of great touches, and in the case of the Art Direction in particular the scenery feels (while clearly part of a movie set) relatively-detailed and manages to be both best AND most, which is something that we don't oftentimes see in this category.  The score by Alex North is instantly iconic, and rumbles throughout the picture but never in a way that feels like bombast (or at least when it does, it's tonally appropriate bombast as this is a sword-and-sandals film).  One of the few weak points in the nominations, though, would be the editing.  Occasionally the film's political scenes feel too talky and though I don't quibble with the movie being 184 minutes long, there are scenes that probably could have used some trimming to keep the focus a bit tighter.

My biggest complaint, and why this film doesn't hit five stars (and flirted dangerously with three), is that the acting isn't particularly good.  Kirk Douglas nails his lead role, but it's not a challenging one which is probably good as nuance was never Douglas' forte.  The rest of the cast, though, runs the line between hammy and hammier.  Casting Olivier, Laughton, and Ustinov in your movie is basically begging for Royal Shakespeare Company style acting, but it also means that they are all trying to one-up each other in scenery-chewing.  I am kind of flabbergasted that it was Ustinov over the showier Laughton and Olivier who managed the supporting nomination (perhaps their egos made it impossible for them to compete for anything other than lead?), but Ustinov's morally corrupt, but still with a slight heart of gold, mid-level official is hardly worth noticing except that Ustinov is always fun to watch in a camp sort of way.  The role and most of the other characters feel like cartoons more than anything else, and while Trumbo's script and Douglas' gravitas keep the movie grounded, the side scenes with these characters, except for when the occasional catty aside comes out are nearing the level of bad acting.

Those are my thoughts on this gargantuan movie.  I suspect (considering its status in American cinema) that most of you have seen this-if you have, please share your comments below.  Are you as shocked as I that this is a Stanley Kubrick film?  Are you with me that the film is great, but the acting a massive disappointment?  And considering Ustinov's competition, who were you cheering for in the Supporting Actor race of 1960?  See you in the comments!