The best movies of the 2020s, so far: IN A VIOLENT NATURE

  Art stirs me and writing about it helps straighten me out. That said, I'm at a loss when it comes to my keyboard purge this time. I haven't posted anything about In A Violent Nature yet, despite wanting to, because it's just too dense. I've tried, multiple times, to dredge my feelings from my turbulent brain but they clamor, bottleneck, and die in my frontal lobe. So many specific verbs, adverbs and adjectives this movie conjures clog me the fuck up. For a while I worried that if I gave my cascading thoughts any momentum they'd snowball and I wouldn't be able to stop the avalanche. But the truth is that no linguistic arrangement is satisfying enough because this movie exists on such a specific wavelength as it's predicated on our histories with other movies but also fiercely original.

  

  For what it is—from the perspective its director, Chris Nash, gives us—there's so much to unpack from so many different angles. By doing something so minimalist, observant and ambient, it's given me the complete opposite reaction: maximalist analysis. It's so subtly clever in how it bucks tradition while also not changing things that I'm not just watching and analyzing the movie itself but how it fits into the slasher subgenre and picking apart what it does, what it doesn't do, and the WHYs therein.

  While I don't share their enthusiasm for this movie, this must be how some people felt when they first saw SCREAM: an exuberant awe at someone doing something so different.

  Since this is, like, Part 6 or 7 of some slasher franchise outside of time there's no shortage of off-kilter dialog and acting but, impressively enough, it doesn't try to wink about how bad it all is: it embraces it head-on. There's no snarky postmodern meta analyses, ala Scream, nor any genre gentrification for 'elevation'. Realistically, this is exactly how the characters in one of these movies would sound. Sometimes we'll hear cliche conversations happening in the distance or in the periphery of our killer Johnny's orbit; warnings, lore, and other exposition relegated to the margins. The Friday The 13th-meets-Terrence Malick clash speaks loudly enough without insecure, pseudo-clever snootiness masking artistic self-harm; its nose remains because there's no spite in its heart. If Nash were to try and clean this movie up, he'd out himself as a poser.

  More intimately, there's a great scene where Johnny takes a rest by a tree to play with a toy car because, like Michael, Jason, and Leatherface, Johnny is a giant kid. It's such a tranquil moment that functions successfully because of the established authenticity of the rest of this world's absurdity.

  Thus the only thing Nash changes is the perspective while retaining the good stuff: creative kills with buckets of blood and creepy sound design. He also mines a fuckton of tension from this angle.

  The way Golden Rules and Genre Expectations are married here is fucking sublime, especially the ending. We all know that the less we see of the killer, the scarier it is. And we all know the killer is never really gone, it's predictable that he/it will come back at some point at the end. OR: that anyone who helps our final girl isn't to be trusted, they're pretending to help to deliver her back to our antagonist. Nash knows what we know and we know he knows what we know, so he works from there. We don't see the killer, Johnny, but because of genre conventions we're waiting for him to pop back up. Shockingly, he never does. Nash suspends us in air, bound by our expectations, and leaves us to die. This immensely tense sequence just goes on and on for an agonizing 15 minutes (and I know 15 minutes doesn't sound that long but time moves differently when you're being dragged blindfolded).

  Truly one of the best endings to a horror movie this decade. It hinges upon a truly inspired concept, great comic timing, and a deconstructionist spirit that doesn't treat its dismembered parts like trash.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: THE ZONE OF INTEREST

  This is a Holocaust movie

but it's impossible to see.

  Jonathan Glazer didn't want to make a Holocaust movie because there's no accurate way to depict such horror without falling into a moral quandary; it's either going to be too sanitized or too unbearable — both are irresponsible.

  Even more than that: cinematic language as we know it, for the most part, was pioneered in fascist propaganda films, so Glazer abandons every cinematic rule possible. This isn't a movie that's meant to be watched, necessarily.

  He 'depicts' the Holocaust solely with audio and, visually, we're locked in with the Nazi family who live next door to Auschwitz. Just as a wall separates profound suffering from idyllic family life, Glazer creates an audio-visual bifurcation; the movie you're watching and the movie you're hearing are polar opposites. Even the subtitles are sometimes obscured by some of the natural light because what's being said is irrelevant; we're not meant to be invested. No matter how pretty you think a flower looks or how breathtaking the sunset is on the vista: there's the billowing smoke from the crematorium or the steam from a train arriving with more victims somewhere in the frame.

  It never tells you what's going on, it just plays on what you already know and brought with you. There are scenes of mundanity at breakfast, tranquility in their garden, love in their bed, and fun in their pool...but the soundtrack is the most horrific shit you've ever heard, courtesy of Johnnie Burn's sound design; gunshots, dogs growling, babies crying, gathered screams, Nazis laughing, and ghoulish gargling. The most prevalent noise (and I mean it's fucking CONSTANT) is the rumbling of the ovens. That hum never goes away, even when you shut the movie off.

  There is a reprieve but, like the rest of the movie, it's denied any cinematic varnish. A series of vignettes are strung through as we check in on a polish girl hiding apples around the camp every night. Since Glazer doesn't want to use artificial light, thus compromising his intention, he shot these scenes with a thermal camera. It's such an ingenious innovation but it's also like Glazer himself 'hid' this from the main narrative; her warmth is quite literally glowing for us to see.

  And when we finally see her outside of such obfuscation, she's playing a song she found in the mud; Joseph Wulf's 'Sunbeams,' written while he was in Auschwitz. In Yiddish we're told what it is and the lyrics appear, without being sung:

  “Sunbeams, radiant and warm/Human bodies, young and old; And who are imprisoned here, Our hearts are yet not cold.”

  It's such an astonishing moment because we finally have something of an expression by a Jew but we can't see or hear them. Even just typing about it right now feels diminutive of the existential enormity. Of course it's brief as there's inevitably a cut back to the lives of the Nazis for the rest of the movie.

  Of all the movies from 2023 about evil, complicity, and ignorance (Oppenheimer, Killers Of The Flower Moon, May December), none of them came close to what The Zone Of Interest accomplished.

  At the 2024 Oscars, after winning for Best International Feature, Jonathan Glazer said this as his voice trembled, his hands shook and protestors stood outside the building chanting about the genocide in Gaza:

  “All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present. Not to say ‘look what they did then’ — rather, ‘look what we do now.’ Our film shows where dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present. Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza — all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?”

  And just like Oppenheimer, Zone Of Interest ends looking at the future. But, unlike Oppenheimer, Zone's future is our present and the look is a 4th wall break that rhetorically asks us which side of the wall we live on.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: OPPENHEIMER

  It's almost the go-to critic cliche that a movie had them "on the edge of [their] seat," or the millennial evolution of it, "that movie had me levitating." Oppenheimer damn near had my ass hovering for 3 hours. It was so intense and I was so invested in it that I just couldn't sit anymore, like the movie was a culling song pulling me toward it. During the last act, though, the opposite happened: it became a courtroom drama and I felt like the gravity had been pumped up because I had sunk into my seat. It was so engrossing, especially when Emily Blunt's momentous speech happened, that I would have continued to watch it if the theater was on fire. I'll burn, I don't give a fuck, I need to see this play out.

  BarbenHeimer made this seem more 'accessible' than it is; Nolan does some of his most ambitious filmmaking here, getting weird with arthouse sensibilities the likes of which I haven't seen from him since Memento and some I haven't seen from him ever. Not to mention he let his editor go nuts too. As a Russian nesting-doll of montages within a montage moving at a breakneck pace with non-linear cross-cutting it's wild how it's structured and paced. And outside of that are Nolan's narrative stylings where one is purely objective (shot in black and white) while the other is purely subjective (shot in color). It's a queasy, exhilarating, disturbing, paranoid, borderline psychosexual nightmare that belies the typical historical biopic.

  Oppenheimer is shockingly straightforward in its indictment of the U.S. government and its history of violent posturing on the world stage. Nolan doesn't just demythologize American exceptionalism here, he shows the horrors of American imperialism. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are, thankfully, not depicted as Nolan wisely avoids the pornography of suffering (much to James Cameron's chagrin). What he does show us, in scenes with Boris Pash, Henry Stimson, and especially in Oppenheimer's meeting with Harry Truman, is creepy enough and act as drops of paint-remover for any glorifying Rockwellian brushstrokes that otherwise might bleed through.

  He also heavily alludes to the government [allegedly] having Jean Tatlock [allegedly] murdered.

  Oppenheimer doesn't just look at the damage done in the past but it looks forward, past us, at what damage will eventually be done. The older I get the more sturdy I am with Horror movies but the depiction of environmental catastrophes completely rattle my foundation. It's no wonder why Paul Schrader loves this as much as he does considering the ending is a more explicit depiction of First Reformed's dire warnings. Nolan leaving us on that note couldn't be more perfect because the only way this could end is in flames.

  This is a rapturous movie that just keeps hurtling you around for 3 hours until it reaches a sublime and devastating crescendo: this is an American tragedy.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH

   Puss In Boots: The Last Wish is a modern animated classic. I've seen it countless times and it hasn't lost a bit of its magic. From the opening seconds of Antonio Banderas reciting "Star light, star bright" I'm never not captivated by it, even if I throw it on for background noise.

  One of the first to adopt the Spider-Verse blend of traditional 3D animation with hand-painted textures and 2D backgrounds, every character, landscape, and surface have brushstroke blemishes and deliberate imperfections eschewing the rubbery smoothness that Pixar and Illumination perpetuate. The noticably sketched action is low frame-rate, high personality with bold staging and choreography that almost seems to be in service of a breathless self-one-upmanship complex. Every prevailing set-piece is more ambitious than the last until it truly outdoes itself with one Hell of a climax that's also just as rich thematically.

  The stacked cast match this with lively performances as this isn't a barrage of celebrity names to slap on a poster, they're actually doing some fucking Voice Acting. As much as I enjoy John Mulaney, his name initially worried me because his other animated outings sound exactly like they are: checks cashed over the phone. But here, with Jack Horner, he creates a truly despicable villain who's also the funniest character in the movie - for once, he's perfectly cast.

"You're not gonna shoot a puppy, are ya Jack?"

"Yeah. In the face. Why?"

  Horner bucks the modern trend of sympathetic villains whose malice is undercut by a trAgiC baCkSToRy. He is truly just a loathesome maggot designed for pure hatred and the worse he gets the funnier it is. What makes it better is he's paired up with the most moral character in the movie, Jiminy Cricket, so we get a punchy and potent Odd Couple dynamic.

  That said, Last Wish actually has a whole spectrum of villains so anytime one (or four) do soften up, it's not a letdown. Goldilocks and the Three Bears are set up as outright antagonists but evolve into a charming unit who parallel nicely with our main trio as they're all equally flawed outcasts (save for Perrito). Their characterization isn't undercut by their development, quite the opposite. This keeps the scales from tipping because of Jack Horner's plentiful evil but also because of Death itself.

  Wagner Moura sinks his teeth into this role and, with the animators (and sound designers), they carve out one of the best villains in the medium, so much so that Ryan Coogler took inspiration for the look of his vampires in Sinners. Along with an icy whistle that acts as both a warning and mockery, Moura's menacingly lyrical line deliveries sound more like a Salamanca relative than a cartoon wolf in a kids movie.

Lalo? No: Lobo

  In both the writing and character design, Death is handled with balance; it isn't too scary for kids but it also doesn't treat them like they're too precious to face it either. I admire how condescending this isn't as movies tend to over-explain themselves, especially kids movies. Kids aren't exactly receptive to subtlety but they're not entirely out of touch either. The Last Wish trusts its main audience and that maturity toward immaturity is in short supply.

  There's a scene where Death cuts Puss and the whole screen is abruptly stylized with bright red lighting. It then cuts to a super tight close-up of Puss as blood drips between his eyes, his heart starts pounding, and his fur stands on end like fuzzy needles. As he's on the last of his 9 lives and faces actual demise, it legitimately scared me. I can't remember the last time I saw blood utilized like that in a PG-rated animated movie.

  Puss' vulnerability is set up with a montage of how he lost (see: wasted) his other 8 lives and essentially eroded his plot armor. It's funny as each death is a different kind of silly perishing, from elaborate and ridiculous to blunt and dry. But after seeing his eventual brush with this movie's literal grim reaper, that montage truly sinks in as a record of careless self-destruction. That continues at the end of the second act as Puss faces his dead selves in a cave, until he hears that hair-raising whistle. Death re-appears and brutally destroys all 8 of them again. Wisely, this doesn't end with Puss defeating Death, just staking a claim to his current life. Death will prevail, no matter what, but it has to be respected; being fearless is dangerous, being afraid is a necessity.

  I haven't seen something this profound or challenging in a kids' movie in a good while. The way it depicts a panic attack/PTSD, confronts mortality, loneliness, narcissism and depicts consequential violence with the actual threat of death is seriously impressive.

  It disproves that notion that kids' movies should be seen as lesser-than, disposable, or get a pass for phoning it in. This is a consistently captivating, highly entertaining, emotionally affecting sequel to a Shrek spinoff.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH

   This is the logical culmination of one of the many things that the Coen Brothers have excelled at: dialects.

  We heard it all throughout Fargo, Hudsucker, Miller's Crossing, O'Brother, Ladykillers, a fun bit in Hail Caeser, and most pronounced in their westerns, True Grit and Buster Scruggs. And even after all that: The Tragedy Of Macbeth is the most daring example. Half-a-Coen's script is so committed to the source material's authenticity that it's beyond just an If-It-Ain't-Broke-Don't-Fix-It approach, but more impressive in how linguistically ambitious it is.

  And with someone like Denzel Washington at the forefront of the play/character, there's no room to go wrong. He's such a great actor that he could play anything. Even in Macbeth his fucking undeniable New York drawl punches through ("cross" and "thought" bare it the most) and I don't just buy it, I cherish it. It's anachronistic as fuck but that's just a testament to how good he is. He could play Crocodile Dundee and I don't doubt I'd be like "Denzel is radiant in this."

  As Allison Wilmore lays it out, "Washington manages the near impossible feat of delivering his lines as though he's putting them together in the moment, speaking some of the most famous sentences in the English language as though they're actually being dredged up out of Macbeth's roiling consciousness." For so long I've been annoyed by stage-acting austerity in these kinds of movies. The kind of one-note haughty line deliveries that sound regurgitated rather than given natural cadence or personality (the flat tone most of the walk-and-talk dialog has in Game Of Thrones). As redundant as it sounds, these performances come across performative - not an issue for Denzel Washington. It's also significant how old this Macbeth is: 66 year-old Denzel imbues the role with world-weary, coming-of-old-age resentment and bleakness. This Macbeth is such a cynical, exhausted, paranoid, delusional, cocky, insecure wreck and he nails every utterance of a man clinging to anything to take with him down the drain. Circling the widening gyre with him is Frances McDormand, giving her best performance in years, as the two share an uneasy chemistry. She's desperate and conspiratorial, cultivating her husband's deteriorating mental acuity.

  This is matched by the milky, dreamy photography. There's a great sense of alienation as Coen's sound stages operate as a paradox of world-building: the more of the world we see, the more desolate it feels, like the threatening unease in Part 18 of The Return when 'Richard' and 'Carrie' set off for Twin Peaks. So, for every composition or lighting choice that inspires eye-bugging adoration, there's a tension, a pressure behind the eyes that makes it impossible to be comfortable because the mind is always looking for something hiding in the fog. This is the closest either Coen has gotten to the horror genre and it's clear at least one of them should get even closer. It has the tension of No Country but it's not flirting with something supernatural, it's fully communing with it.

  And this is as good a time as any to summon Kathryn Hunter's moniker to the conversation because, holy shit, does she establish herself here. This is arguably the role that required the most of any of its actors and she's not just chewing the scenery but binge-eating it like a buffet, just plate-after-plate snarfing the shit down. She's a scarier witch than any double-V Eggers creation* as this being genuinely feels otherworldly and unpredictable. She's a tormenting presence that lights mist on fire. The whole cast bring their A-game but Hunter and Washington are beyond enchanting.

   Every story beat had me rapt and the tumbling final act is a clinic on editing as, unsurprisingly, this thing is immaculately paced. All of this can be said for the story itself: well-tread text that Coen tricks us into peering into for the first time. Astonishing what he has pulled off here.

  *Excluding The Lighthouse, Eggers has been hopelessly chasing this kind of movie his whole career, especially with Nosferatu, to no avail.

  I love this movie so much. It's so good that it makes me want to reassess other movies' grades.

  Speaking of unfairly judging movies on the basis of other movies, I'm gonna open my Honorable Mention trophy case and sneak one out that I'd hidden cuz I can't not mention That Other Coen Movie: I adore Henry James' Drive-Away Dolls Dykes or, my personal title: Sapphic Lebowski.

  Rejected upon release as being too zany, too weird, too kooky—especially compared to the diametrically opposed austerity of Macbeth—it's finding its audience as a potential cult classic. Of course I get the impulse to compare these two but I'm just thankful we have them at all. Like any child of divorce: I'm sad they split up but now we get two Christmases! So I'm not gonna venn-diagram 'em — that's been done to death.

  This has remained as funny on my 201st watch as it was on my 1st. Even the filmmaking is funny in itself as Tricia Cooke and Ethan Coen's transitions ebb from acid-dipped psychedelia to confrontationally stupid. So many wipes/flips/spins had me begging their unbelievable pardon; cackling with my eyes rolling, befuddled, or genuinely impressed by how cool they were (sometimes a delicious swirl of everything).

  Margaret Qualley's performance, which she based on Nic Cage and Tommy Lee Jones, crackles on the same eccentric wavelength of this movie, oscillating from genius to foolish to absolutely baffling - but always entertaining. So is every Dutch angle, snap zoom, and flat medium shot, as they're all executed for optimal comedy.

  Because of the Looney Tunes tone this establishes, I was surprised at how tender and sincere it managed to be while somehow never fumbling these tones. As it ventures into perpetually earnest flashbacks and present day breakthroughs about sexual awakening, the movie reveals itself to be more thoughtful than just some whacky crime caper. But there are also these odd moments where we're subjected to quaint juxtapositions between characters that I'm still scratching my head over (complimentary).

  What's funniest of all is Macbeth doesn't leave me with my head cocked to the side like this, it's confidently straightforward. Yet this is the 'dumb' one. The best thing about a Coen movie is how enjoyable it can be on the surface but also how confounding it is underneath that - every new watch is rewarding for one reason or another. They're literary dudes and even if ½ of them is making an abrasively goofy "low-brow“ movie about lesbians and dildos with his gay Wife, it's not without artful integrity.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: FURIOSA

   

  Speaking in the abstract, as an Agnostic, movies are my scripture and the theater is my Church. When I see a really good one, it's the closest I get to having a religious experience; I can ignore shitty A/C, rowdy kids, and dawdling old people walking around because I'm in another world. FURIOSA was that cinematic oasis. I sat through the credits then sauntered down the stairs in an actual daze, wanting to turn right back around and watch it again. Credits are never long enough for me to process my feelings and wax nostalgic about the past 2+ hours or so. Not to mention, like, I hate making the AMC employees feel like they can't come sweep up popcorn and candy because I'm sitting there sobbing.

  Narratively and temperamentally FURIOSA is more in line with George Miller's 3000 Years Of Longing than Fury Road - though it shares plenty of genetics with the latter. I love Fury Road as a propulsive road movie but I didn't want the same thing again. Wisely, George Miller doesn't hold a lightning rod in the same scorched crater, he conjures a new storm from up on high in the Australian dunes. It's almost a shiny-and-chrome Trojan Horse situation; come for the cool action choreography and stunt work, stay for the mythmaking, disciplined pacing and a sharp tire-burning swerve on the final lap. The action is as thrilling as ever but it's much more character-driven than plotty.

  Right off top George Miller differentiates from Fury Road by taking his time with everything. There are more than a few extended takes as he lets every scene...breathe...and even exhale...before letting the battle cries ring out. Even the overall structure is mostly set-up as Miller carefully places every piece on the board for nearly 2 hours. And after all the build-up he takes us all for fools by the time he brings it all to a close. And he's right.

  The climax, alone, was so unexpectedly cathartic and admonishing in ways that really knocked me out. I, quite literally, could not believe what I was seeing. He takes one of the most well-worn tropes of a vengeance plot and forces us to truly reckon with it, rather than committing a cliche copout. It's challenging and bold and I'm forever impressed by it.

  Chris Hemsworth and Anya Taylor-Joy are both fantastic but Hemsworth, particularly, gives probably the best work of his career as Dementus is a single showcase of his range. He's as funny and despicable as he is scary and pitiable. The ending works as well as it does because he brings so much to it. His pained, trembling intensity when he delivers "To feel alive we seek sensation, any sensation to drown out the cranky black sorrow" stung my heart all three times I got to hear it in Dolby.

  It still hits at home but nothing like it did in the theater. Some movies in this era never have a life on physical media, they're confined to the wasteland of streaming while others never even have a life in Theaters, for that matter. So I don't think it would be unreasonable for some movies to just stay in theaters indefinitely. In a perfect world, Furiosa is still playing.

The best movies of the 2020s, so far: RED ROOMS

"The tragedy of Laura Palmer was that she was murdered. The tragedy for Audrey Horne is that she wasn't murdered."

Matt Murray

  This is a corrosive character study of Kelly-Ann, a crypto-femcel hacker who moonlights as a model, and her slow dissolve in the belly of a gruesome murder trial she willfully crawled into. Along with a groupie, Clementine, they dwell on a broad spectrum of True Crime fandom, from the annoying to the extreme. Unlike Clementine, Kelly-Ann isn't just a groupie of the alleged child killer, but also an amateur sleuth.

  She has devoted herself to digitally foraging for snuff films, hustling online poker games, and cyber-stalking the Mother of one of the three young victims. The wheels of justice turn slowly and she's intent on greasing the machine from the shadows no matter how much of her soul wilts in the process. One especially thrilling sequence is the most intense auction scene since Uncut Gems' opal bidding war and it functions as the most naked glimpse into what makes this woman tick. So many close-ups steep us in her dysphoria and, during night scenes where her stalking goes beyond the Internet, the light becomes diffused like we're peering at her through foggy hazmat goggles.

  Thankfully, she's not fully detached and apathetic—which has become a cliche with movies about the terminally online—but her emotions are definitely packed in ice. There are two key emotional breakthroughs but there are so many ways to interpret what she's feeling and why; is she driven by concern, attention, hubris, or morbid curiosity? It's never entirely clear what she gets out of it, what—or if—she has an end goal in mind, or what's even real by the end of it, but the voyage is nonetheless sickening.

  I've seen [more than enough] people make the case that she's cruel and has nothing but ill intentions but I don't just disagree with them: I have irrefutable evidence to the contrary. There are so many formal and narrative choices that point to something else, something much more layered and sad. One particularly shocking scene is the crux of the entire movie and people consistently miss the point of it.

  Annoyingly, David Fincher's GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO never got a sequel, but RED ROOMS is a phantom limb to scratch that elusive itch...the trade-off is that it leaves the rest of your skin crawling.