The Big Picture - The Best Movies of 2020 … So Far

Episode Date: July 2, 2020

Movie theaters have been closed for more than half the year, but we’ve still gotten our fair share of great films. Adam Nayman joins Sean and Amanda to share their top five movies so far this year. Hosts: Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins Guest: Adam Nayman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Sean Fennessy. I'm Amanda Dobbins. And this is The Big Picture, a conversation show about the best movies of the year so far. To help us, let's welcome in Adam Naiman, ringer, contributor, and a brilliant critic. Hi, Adam. Hey, guys. Adam, you and I collaborated on a list of the 25 best movies of the year, perhaps perverse to name 25 films released in this strange time. Amanda and I have been seeking content to discuss on this show for months and months.

We've been doing our best. We picked 25 and you opened the piece, I thought, very interestingly. You talked, in fact, about a film that we talked about just this week on the show, The Player. And you talked about a key image from that movie. Why did you use that image as an entree into our discussion about movies? Well, that image is in the opening scene, that long camera prowl through the studio back lot that Altman uses to set up his Hollywood microcosm. You see written on the back of the studio tower, it says says movies now more than ever.

It's just really funny. I mean, it was funny in 1992 because I think as I wrote, I think even in 92, it was sort of like a warning that there's more movies than have ever been made before. And they're coming from more angles and there's home video and they're straight to VHS and it's a global market. But there's also the sort of like platitudinous side of it, like the more than ever part. What's the line on succession? We here for you. You know, just that meaningless arrangement of words that's meant to seem really urgent

and important, but doesn't mean anything. And I thought about it because, I mean, I just think about the player a lot anyway, as do you guys. And also, it's not like we don't have movies to choose from in this moment. There's a lot of fraught context around it and a lot of anxiety about theatrical and streaming and when is stuff actually going to come out? And is Tenet going to be a super spreader of the pandemic and all of this stuff? But the access to movies and the release of movies hasn't stopped. I mean, I think we had a lot of movies to choose from this year.

And so that question of really what is changing in film culture, or is it just narrowing in the direction it was going to go anyway? With more things online, fewer things being watched in theaters, and maybe not a lack of content, but a of cohesion so that's that's why i thought about it quite predictably as soon as we posted that list of 25 and i should say we'll be sharing our top fives here on this show uh but when i we posted that list people were just like how dare you leave off movie x and i'm like there's no you can never win because you're right movies now more than ever. Amanda, I wanted to cite that I have seen, astonishingly to me, 155 movies this year that are just 2020 releases. Now, admittedly, I'm home a lot more and I'm a diseased person, but I've been watching a lot. Only a handful of

those, I think, rise to the level of discussion. But I think you've been watching... Is it possible that you're watching more movies now than you were when we were pursuing this, say 12 months ago? I think it is. Yes. But just a little bit because of how we have structured the show, um, in the absence of the grand theatrical release of the week, you and I have been doing a lot of top five lists and hall of fames and retrospectives and movies where suddenly we're talking about five to 10 to 15 movies on any given episode. And I, unlike Sean, don't watch six movies in a day. I can't sit still for that long and I can't keep a spreadsheet. I don't actually know how many movies I've watched this year, but I do orient a lot of my viewing around

this podcast and the way that we have been talking about films and that's the way that I have been watching films this year, I think does reflect what Adam is saying of there are, there is a lot, we have access to a vast library of new and older films and are putting it together in different ways. But it does. Yeah, it is. There are more than ever for me personally right now. Adam, all the time on the show, we're always talking about what's the best way to watch something. So a lot of the films that we've seen this year have been released to Netflix or Hulu

or HBO Max or the Criterion Channel, all of these services that are essentially premiering things at home. You wrote about, I think it was Cane River in the long list that we wrote about, which I think you can really only see on the Criterion Channel, a film made in the early 1980s. It was essentially thought to be lost. And that's a great way to see that movie because it's the only way to see it. But when it comes to new films, what's your relationship to that? Do you like the idea of checking out Eurovision at home by yourself? I think the best way to watch any film is from the bottom of a pit of deep anxiety about the future of everything that all of us are doing in our personal and professional lives.

Ideally, you know, at four in the morning. No, I mean, I'm probably like you guys in that as someone with a certain amount of access, like professional and privileged access. You like to see things theatrically and you like to see them early, right? Whether to like lead a discourse or be part of a discourse or not kind of feel left behind. And as you guys have talked about on the show,

as people are talking about in all kinds of places, those priorities are getting reoriented, right? But I don't think they've disappeared. And I think somewhere in all of us who are lucky enough to get to watch and write about movies for a living professionally, semi-professionally, that still exists. So something like The King of Staten Island, which I wrote about for the site and which you put on our list and which is an interesting movie to talk about, there's nothing cinematically about that movie that's like, God, I need the

big screen for that. And there's no narrative surprise in it where it's like boy if i don't see that first weekend i'm gonna find out what tenant means you know it's not that kind of movie but i am still wired in such a way that when it became available i'm like i should probably see this on opening weekend because i'm just used to it that has not uh gotten out of my system yet yeah i meant i assume you're the same way there There's still that impulse, that desire to be like, I need to be, if not ahead, at least on time with this conversation. King of Staten Island is a great example because I felt that I was late to seeing King of Staten Island because I watched it on the Sunday afternoon of the opening weekend because that

was the only time that I could carve out the eight hours to watch the Judd Apatow movie. And had, you know, seen conversations online and also kind of in my like, you know, Zoom social distancing life had been a part of where I was like, well, you know, I haven all clinging to any sense of connection or, you know, collective experience. And like a release date is that to an extent. So it does feel like the conversations are still timely, but, you know, maybe they're smaller and slightly more fragmented, which again, is I think a reflection of how we were going to be watching most movies anyway, as Adam referenced earlier in a lot of ways where we've just been catching up to the future. But yeah, I still, if I don't see something immediately, I feel behind because I probably have missed a decent part of the conversation. Amanda, by the Sunday, has anyone spoiled the part where the fuck up learns he should get a job?

Believe it or not, I saw that one coming anyway. You know, the thing about the Apatow movie though, and I may have said this when we talked about it a couple of weeks ago, Amanda, is, you know, that movie just kind of feels like TV. And so that's part of the reason why it worked so well at home for me. And maybe if I went to the theater and sat there for two and a half hours, I might've felt like, gosh, I'm not sure that that's the best way to experience this exact kind of storytelling. But at my house, I was like, this is just crashing season four. And I was fine with it. You know, I liked crashing and I liked the King of Staten Island, the ongoing television series about Pete Davidson's fuck up life. So I think it just depends on the thing that we're getting and the thing that we're talking

about too. I think that the thing that I miss the most that is perhaps ill-considered, but I can't get away from is the sort of like, not even necessarily serious, but important seeming studio release. You know, I really like maybe in one version it's Tenet, maybe in another version it's Top Gun Maverick, maybe in another version it's whatever Manc is going to turn out to be um but something that doesn't just have the power of like well you have to see it on the big screen because of the way that the images are drawn and the power of the sound but more specifically like the event of it you know i'm still susceptible to that in a pretty serious way and there i maybe with the rare exception of the Spike Lee film, I don't really feel like we've had an event all year. And that is, something has been lost.

Now, maybe that's just because I was raised in an environment where like, Premier Magazine seemed to be important. But I don't know. Sean, I did not sit through Trolls World Tour for you to tell me it wasn't an event, okay? I just, I did it. I'm kidding.

It was an event in the way that like a bowel movement is an event, you know, like these are just, they're just not, they're not, it's not the same and it's painful, but I know what you're saying. And, and I think this is a little bit of consequence of both our, our, our jobs and also our weird brains. But there are movies where I've had the release date memorized without having to look at a calendar because it's, it's a little bit how I orient my work life, which then is how I orient my home life and, you know, vacation and all that stuff. But there haven't been a lot of movies, you know, with the obvious exception of tenant, which keeps shifting where I'm like,

June 12th, baby, like Top Gun or, you know, whatever is coming out. And that there is a sense of just of the timing of an event that's completely lost. Can I propose a non-event event that's interesting? I think it's fascinating was when Cannes announced the films they weren't going to show, but kind of would show if the festival existed, but it doesn't. And it was amazing. I mean, I watched this live stream dub. They're talking in French and they're like, well, this is what we'd show, but we're not having a festival.

And it's also not exactly what we'd show because there's a lot of films holding out for next year and we're not going to tell you what those are yet. But to Sean's point, without festivals in a weird way to curate at the upper end, I'm not just talking about foreign language or arthouse stuff, but a movie like A Manc or First Cow or Always Rarely, Sometimes Never, which were Sundance films. There's an interesting hierarchy that kind of doesn't exist, I think, to lead or shape critics' opinion, which is like,

if a festival movie shows in the woods, is it a festival movie? Or if it streams online, is it a festival movie? We come to believe these narratives that because something premieres at Sundance or Cannes or TIFF, it's worthy because there's curation there. And that bleeds into Hollywood stuff too. I don't know what's going to happen with the New York Film Festival, for instance. And I'm sure that Mank, which for anyone who's listening doesn't know what it is, although with The Ringer, that's probably impossible. The David Fincher movie, that probably doesn't need the New York Film festival to make it what

Sean is talking about, like an important studio release. But I think there's some other movies that without that fall release date or that festival Laurel, it's maybe harder to tell. And maybe critics have to work a little harder instead of having just the fact that it played at a festival, do their interpretive work for them.

That's something I've been thinking about a lot. Let me ask you very quickly about this before we start getting into our list then amanda and i have talked about this a little bit thus far and i'm curious for your opinion about it when it comes to awards so i know awards is not really your beat but you're mindful of it and you keep an eye on it and there's some speculation that perhaps the awards conversation this year could become something closer to, if not an accurate representation of a meritocracy, because there isn't as much of that brand building going on around some of these releases. So films, maybe this is completely foolish, but maybe the cream can rise to the top because there isn't so much of that. Like, well, this did this at Telluride and thus it is important.

Do you, do you sense that greater films can rise to the surface and get more attention or is it more likely to just be increasingly stratified? Yeah, it's, it's, I've, I've thought about it because I'm a big,

as someone who votes in a couple of critics group awards, whatever those are worth, you know, the recency effect is very real and people really buy the idea where it's like well it was screened for me on december 11th it's really good and it's so rare i mean you guys are students of oscar history like silence of the lambs the only film with a fe a February release date to win best picture like ever or in the last 30 years? So with the calendar thrown out of whack like this and release dates kind of de-emphasized and people spending a whole year playing catch up, I mean, that's very possible.

On the other hand, I still think that even if these films are released virtually or in a small way, studios and distributors are still going to backload their year with those kind of important movies. So, you know, I can't imagine what an Oscar prediction show is going to sound like in February, but the word Manc will probably come up more likely than some of the other movies on our list, whether or not Manc is actually better than them. Maybe this should just be the Manc pod going forward. I feel like that's what it is. Like it won't be. It will be. mank pod going forward. I feel like that's what it is. Like it won't be.

It will be. It almost certainly will be. Let's go to our list because I think talking about these movies will lead us through some more conversations about these things, where these movies premiered, how we saw them,

what worked and what did not work about them. So let's take a quick break before we go to our list, okay? Okay. I'm so excited to introduce the Bukhari Sellers podcast in partnership with the Ringer. We're tackling the issues of the day through interviews with high profile guests and conversations with a rotating panel of the country's best and leading thinkers, influencers, and writers. You know, I'm not only an attorney and a former elected official. Sometimes you see me on CNN and I'm a new author of a New York Times

bestselling book, My Vanishing Country. But now we're introducing the Bukhari Sellers podcast, and we're going to cover everything from the 2020 election to sports and culture to the larger movement for racial equality in the United States. We're going to have some of your favorite quarterbacks, some of your favorite politicians, some of your favorite athletes, writers, singers, actors, actresses. The Bakari Sellers podcast will debut on Monday, June 29th. Listen free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Adam, why don't you start us off with your number five? For my number five, I picked a movie that's really germane to this idea of how you see something, which is Pedro Costa's Vidalina Varela, which I saw at the Toronto Film Festival last year in a cinema where you could hear a pin drop.

And that was because the film compels that kind of fascination. It's very quiet, minimal music, if any, natural sound, incredible realism, though a kind of stylized realism. And because it's got a very worshipful audience. Pedro Costa is this Portuguese filmmaker who, for a lot of people, is the absolute apex of slow cinema filmmaking. He casts non-professionals who play versions of themselves. This is a story about a widow returning to her hometown and picking up the pieces of her life. It's an incredibly quiet screening because it's a quiet movie. It's a rapt audience.

And I can't imagine watching it at home. I would like everyone listening to this to try watching it at home because it's available. And I'm glad that I got to put it on my list. And I think it's an extraordinary work of art. But it's an extraordinary work of art that benefits from the size of the movie screen and the concentration of sitting in a movie theater. I haven't tried watching it at home. It would be the same movie at home, but I think the experience would be, I don't want to say diminished, but different. And I mean, it's a hardcore art film and it's

amazing. I hope curious listeners will give it a look. But more than any movie on my list, it's the one that makes me miss normal moviegoing, even if it's not a normie movie, if that makes sense. Adam, let me tell you something. I saw this movie at home, and I would not recommend it. Not that I wouldn't recommend the film, but having seen Costa's movies in theaters, and I saw Colossal Youth in a theater a couple years ago. Great film. having seen costas movies in theaters and i saw colossal youth in a theater a couple years ago great film um it does not have the same power nor does the the blacks in this movie the black the color black is and shadow is such a huge part of what he does in the story and and the movie opens essentially like draped in black and frankly on my tv just, you just can't get the depth at all. Like it just does not work. I watched the movie very late at night with the expectation. Cause I know how his movies tend to look. And even still, I was like, it's not, it wasn't a tough

sit. It's just like, I know I'm not getting the best possible version of the film, which is frustrating. And then it makes it very difficult to even these lists are all bullshit anyway, but it makes it even difficult to like evaluate whether or not this was one of his great works or not. Cause I'm just not seeing it in the way that I want to, but it's a good pick and he's a great filmmaker and has made some really interesting films. Um, Amanda, what is your number five? I'm going in the opposite direction, except that I think this choice is also, um, informed by how I watched it. And I kind of think my whole list and really this conversation about movies in 2020 and the podcast that we've been having is shaped by how are we watching stuff because it is so different than it was a year ago.

But mine is a Netflix film and it is The Half of It, which was written and directed by Alice Wu and which we talked a little bit about on our, I think, best of the movies so far. And this is, it's a teen, not quite rom-com, it's a modern adaptation, a modern queer adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac. And Netflix is obviously kind of speaking to the teen market. It's speaking to a lot of markets,

but these rom-commy romantic movies aimed at a younger audience that Netflix desperately wants to develop have I was a 15 year old once and it was really tough, but I don't want to live like that anymore or consume movies in that way. And I thought the half and half of it is proof that movies like this, you know, can be smart and well-made and sentimental and, and funny and that it, they don't have to be the lowest common denominator version. That this is a vision of what a great Netflix teen movie can be.

And we need those too because we're going to get a lot more Netflix teen movies. Yeah, that's a good pick. And Alice Wu made a film 15 years ago called Saving Face and then nothing in between then. So it's an interesting comeback for her. And I feel like that movie has gotten a lot of love. I'm looking at my list here and i realized that not one of the movies that i picked i saw for the first time during quarantine and i that may have just told on myself a little bit here but my number five pick is a movie called the invisible man which is a mainstream horror reboot from Blumhouse directed by Lee Whannell, conceived by Lee Whannell. This is a reboot

after the disastrous attempt to reboot the Dark Universe. Amanda, you were a big Dark Universe person as I recall. I did go see The Mummy, the Tom Cruise Mummy. That was the part of the Dark Universe, right? That's one of the few movies that I've actually just straight up walked out of. I went to see an hour and then I left. Very poor film. I would not recommend it. So I'm grateful that Blumhouse is taking back whatever that old school universal horror properties are. I thought The Invisible Man is mostly just worth recommending for Elizabeth Moss, who is absolutely incredible, and for Lee Whannell's sense of staging action sequences,

which I just think is a little bit different than everyone like him. And he's pretty crafty and he knows how to do things on a budget. And this is the last movie that I can recall having a physical reaction to in a theater. I was nervous, excited, laughing. I tend to laugh at very scary sequences,

impressed by what I saw. And I long for that. And the invisible man is not going to end up on my 10 best of the year list. I, I pray to God it won't, but it, it was a, it was a good time at the movies and I long for that.

So that's my number five. Adam, you want to give us your number four? Yeah. My number four is a movie. I know that you like to, I don't know Amanda, if you saw it, uh, which is Baccarau by Kleber Mandelka Filho, the Brazilian director who's three for three as far as I'm concerned with that Aquarius and neighboring sounds.

And this is a film that can really fool you because it seems at first like a somewhat naturalistic sort of village portrait. The kind of film that travels, it has one kind of transnational quality, which is like, oh, here's a slice of life. But its other transnational quality that would get it to play around the world is that it's just like an action movie. And not just that, it's one made under the sign of John Carpenter. This is his version of Assault on Precinct 13, with a little bit of They Live, with this

sort of odd flying saucer drone that you see. And it's essentially about a small town whose inhabitants are being hunted for sport by wealthy interlopers. And there's a political allegory in there, and there's a cultural metaphor in there, and there's an amazing blend of, I think, realism and poetry and genre cinema excitement. And for me, I guess it's one of the two movies on my list that, like Sean says, with Invisible Man are just really well-staged, well-directed genre films. I'm just very impressed by the direction, maybe more than I'm engaged with them emotionally, or at least in the case of Backrow, I think it's a little bit of a cooler technical exercise in the movie, but really, really well made. And again, something that I saw at the Toronto Film Festival with a whooping audience, which helped a lot.

Yeah, I regret not being able to see it with a big group of people. I think Amanda and I both really liked this movie. We've talked about it a couple of times and I didn't get a chance to see this in theaters, unfortunately. And I really would have enjoyed that. It also points out to me that there are no movies on our lists that all three of us agree on. But this one would be pretty near the top of mine.

So I feel like there could be a universe in which number six for Amanda and I is both Baccarat. Yeah, this is certainly on the honorable mention for me. And I will also say I watched both Baccarat and Invisible Man at home. And I found Baccarat to be, the tension was communicated. And what's going on here,

it was engrossing in a way that I would have liked to see it on a big screen, but it does work at home, which it says something in 2020. Very effective, very cool movie. I would recommend it to anybody who likes movies, but especially the John Carpenter shout is, is important because that's a big influence. Amanda, what's number four for you? I did a, I rearranged my list at the last minute. So I don't know if you guys checked the, uh, the doc before we recorded. Anyway, because no one else did it because I thought

this needed to be on our list, I put The Five Bloods on the list, which is obviously Spike Lee's film that debuted on Netflix and that we devoted a podcast to and that has gotten a lot of conversation. And I think in terms of what the future of movies looks like and how we're going to see big event movies and what they can encompass, it's obviously the movie of 2020. There is obviously also, maybe it's representative of a moment in America right now in a reckoning, even though it's speaking to a larger American experience. And I maybe it's representative of a moment in America right now in a reckoning, even though it's speaking to, you know, a larger American experience. And I think it's also just the performance of the year from Delroy Lindo. And it's extraordinary. And I have been thinking

a lot about the, again, the way in which I, which I watched Five Bloods and the way in which I revisited Five Bloods, because that's something I can do because it lives on Netflix. And so there are certain scenes that I did revisit and there are, you can, please don't do this. Please watch the whole movie, but you can go back and kind of watch that last climactic Delroy Lindo speech in the woods, the jungle, there are lots of trees. And I have done that and it'll really stay with you. So it is powerful as scenes and also obviously just a real achievement

as a full movie. That's something we've talked about a lot, Adam, recently is the Netflix movie that works effectively in bits and pieces. Neither of us put the movie Extraction on our list, the Netflix movie that works effectively in bits and pieces. You know, neither of us put the movie extraction on our list, but if this was the top five action sequences of the year so far, there would be a couple of sequences from extraction that would have made my

list to five bloods. I think is like a fascinating achievement. Probably needed to be edited a bit more candidly um has a lot of kind of stray storylines but i completely agree about lindo i know you do too because you wrote about him so well what do you what is your what can you share a little bit more about what you thought about the five bloods i was amazed at how fully it commits to just being a performance showcase for him in the home stretch because you've got this idea of an ensemble encoded even into the title right where depending on how you look at the movie there's five bloods four bloods six bloods you know um i think that they all the characters all have the same names

as the temptations right like there's a whole idea of this on of these on you know musical ensemble and then just through like sheer right of acting prowess it's like lindo just takes the movie over you know and he he the movie it's not like he wanders away it's like he wanders away and the movie just follows him and when it goes back to everyone else it's like it's dying to get back to him again then it goes back to everyone else it's like no let's go to delroy lindo again and i think that lee recognizes he has a great actor in a really powerful role like the role is powerful even without dialogue like just on a semiotic level like this giant guy in a red cap you know with all this pent up everything he's just so compelling to just see and also because lindo isn't always given star vehicles he's

instantly recognizable and you know exactly who he is as an actor. But how often has he been given a lead, especially in the last 10 or 15 years of his career? So that aspect of the film is really novel. I'm like Sean in that I think it's flawed. I don't even know if I think that it's too long. I think that on some level it's too much. There's a lot of everything. But I think Spike is a maximalist filmmaker.

So I can't complain. The next subtle Spike Lee movie will be the first one. That's in 35 years. Can I ask either of you, when someone says it's a really subtle movie, are you excited? Are you just like running to the screen being like, I can't wait for two hours of subtlety? Yes. Okay. Well, then Adam, that is where you and I disagree.

And you know, the world and this podcast can contain multitudes. I think that the definition of subtle is really the challenge. Like there are things about the Five Bloods that are subtle. And there are a lot of things about it that are not subtle at all. To me, it's not a question of things about it that are not subtle at all um to me it's not a question of style i think spike has developed perhaps the most singularly identifiable style of an american filmmaker in the last 30 years like the the way that he shoots camera the way that he cuts archival into i mean very few that maybe oliver stone i mean there's a very short list of people who do the kind of weird formal things in mainstream movies that he does. But I often find that there's just one plot strand too many in a lot of his movies. And that's his right as an artist,

if he wants to make movies that way. This was one where as blown away as I was by Lindo, as blown away as I was by just the big idea of the movie and the way that the Chadwick Boseman character is positioned in the movie and all the stuff I like about it. It's just, it's imperfect, which is fine. Nothing is perfect. My number four, speaking of imperfect,

I'm not sure if I could credibly make the case that this is a better movie than Defy Bloods, but I want to talk about it, so I'm going to talk about it. The movie is called The Way Back. It's a really old school star vehicle. It stars a guy named Ben Affleck, one of the patron saints of the big picture. And this feels like a movie from another time. And I think some of us wish we were living in another time in which there was not a pandemic and it was also one of the last films that i saw before we all went into our homes

for a long stretch of time and i like it just specifically well i like the the movies of gavin o'connor who directed this movie who makes the kind of he's a master of the male weepy usually with a sports bent um i like just affleck taking on roles like this that are active commentary on the self. And Affleck has had a very strange past five years, both personally and professionally. Um, he was Batman for a period of time,

which I'll never get over and was incredibly strange. Um, and those, those films are just weird and pretty bad. Um, and he's very, very, even, even then he was very sincere about the idea of taking on the role of batman he's very sincere about taking on the role of the coach in this movie this is about a sort of washed out alcoholic ex-college basketball phenom who is called to his

alma mater to coach the ragtag basketball team and um I think I wrote, I think Bad News Bears meets The Lost Weekend. And that is kind of a oversimplified reduction of the story. But this movie is kind of an oversimplified reduction of a lot of themes we've seen before. I just really liked it for Ben Affleck and what Ben Affleck was doing in it. And I liked him committing to this very sad, burly, defeated man.

And if we're talking about dying white masculinity in 2020, and we are a lot, this is an adequate representation of the insufficient power of white masculinity. This is a person basically degrading himself and saying, it's my fault. I have a lot of flaws in public. That's uncommon amongst movie stars now. It's maybe not uncommon on their Twitter feeds, but it is uncommon in the actual work that they do in Hollywood. So I'm a fan of The Way Back, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Crickets from the rest of you.

Number three, Adam. No, I wrote about it for the site, and I kind of like it too. I'll say this. Amanda, did you for the site and I kind of like it too. I'll say this. Amanda, did you see the movie? I did. And Ben Affleck is very important to me as well. And I think sincerity is the right word. And I just am unnerved by this level of sincerity at anything.

So I was just uncomfortable. Well, I was going to ask if you're a basketball fan, because the best part of the movie is when affleck is just being told about all the kids he's inheriting these are completely fictional movie kids but the assistant coach is like this guy's got a good first step but he doesn't really play defense and then someone else is like guy sets a good screen i'm like i watch this for five hours i want scouting reports on all these teenage high school basketball players i just want to have like looking at them being like i can work with that no i mean it's sort of a movie about like motion offense seriously as a basketball movie i loved it i think it's pretty good it's pretty it seems to be i don't know if accurate is the right word, but it's making an effort to reflect the game in a way that isn't terribly corny or overreaching.

And it's an honorable contender in the last shot connoting personal growth for Ben Affleck genre. Oh yeah. You know, I won't spoil the last shot, but the last shot of the way back is pretty good. It can't compete with the town where he grows a beard to show that he's changed which is the best ending of any movie ever but the last shot of the way back is pretty good isn't doesn't live by night similarly have a shot where he's like sitting on a porch standing on a porch observing the sunset and we see that he has been sunsetted as a man nobody sits and thinks about what they've done like Ben Affleck. He's the best.

I love him very much. Okay, Adam, what's your number three? What is my number three? I think my number three is a movie that I think we all like and is an answer to Amanda's question of whether I'm excited by Subtlety, which is First Cow by Kelly Reichardt, the queen of subtlety. And that's not sarcastic. I mean, she is the most congenitally understated of the great American filmmakers to me. She's not a formalist. She doesn't push her personality all over her work. And yet you she's had since River of Grass and the way that she keeps variations on the idea of what it is to be American, to live in America, and here she takes it right back to the primal scene of the country being founded, basically. And that entrepreneurial spirit, that's part of it,

in the form of these two guys trying to, without spoiling the movie, the title's not a metaphor. There is a first cow, and these two guys trying to, without spoiling the movie, you know, the title's not a metaphor. There is a first cow and these two guys are trying to figure out how to best use it. I think it's exquisite and, you know, it's not a movie that's lacked for good reviews or for coverage on Ringer or anywhere else. So I don't want to belabor the point, but we don't really get movies this good that often. And to Sean's point of what this could do in a year or two awards, wouldn't it be amazing if after being completely ignored

by everybody outside the Independent Spirit Awards for this incredible 15-year run that she's had, maybe Kelly Reichardt got the kind of exposure that Oscar nominations could bring? Even if the nominations aren't worth anything, the exposure would mean a lot. I completely agree. This is also my number three. And that specifically is the movie that I was thinking of when I was positing that to you before we started sharing our lists. I was like, wouldn't it be wonderful if Kelly Riker got to taste a little bit of this conversation

because that would help lead to people discovering more of her films. You know, I don't know if First Cow is necessarily my favorite of her movies, but it is very much one of her movies. It is distinguished very clearly in terms of the way that it's paced, in terms of the way that it's written, the kind of story that it's about. It's a very sort of like ecologically-minded friendship movie, and she makes a lot of those.

And she's really, really good on relationships, and you pointed out in your review how good Orion Lee is in the movie. And John Magaro, too. The two leads are incredible. Their chemistry is incredible. The portrait of their friendship is amazing. This is a really pretty special movie. I'm a huge fan.

So I'm glad to see it on your list, too. Amanda, what's your number three? My number three is a movie that you have covered on the podcast, Sean, but that we didn't get a chance to talk about. And it is on the record. The documentary by Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, which debuted on HBO Max after some events around its release. And it is a documentary about the allegations of sexual assault made against Russell Simmons. And it, you know, it follows and features many survivors and activists and journalists and academics, but it features primarily on a woman named Drew Dixon, who's a

former A&R executive at Def Jam. And it's about Drew Dixon deciding whether she wants to share her story. And the way the film came about is that Drew Dixon eventually did participate in a New York Times piece about allegations against Russell Simmons. But the filmmakers are with her as she's deciding whether to participate in that story. And they are kind of following that process. And, you know, this is a Captain Obvious statement since it's literally in the title on the record, but I think I realized how rarely we see the process of that decision making and that, you know, we all intellectually understand the courage that it takes for a survivor to share their story, but you don't actually see that in real time. And I thought it was a pretty extraordinary document of that decision and that process and also specifically what that decision means for Drew Dixon as a black woman. And there is a sequence or about 15 minutes in the documentary when she is

explaining the decision that she's making in the context of being a black woman. And so are many of the journalists and academics. And, you know, it's extraordinary. And I've thought about that sequence a lot. And it talks a lot about what it would mean, you know, just because of the way black women have been failed by America, but also the way that the Me Too movement, which, you know, was technically was founded by a black woman, Tarana Burke, but white women have been the face of it's so essential. And I've talked a lot about how much I enjoyed the book, She Said, which was written by Jodi Kantor and Megan Tewi. And it's about the Weinstein story and how they put that together. And that's one side of how these stories and these movements come together. But I think On the Record shows such an essential other side, the side of the survivors. And I have continued to think about it probably

more than any other movie I've seen this year. I wonder if the conversation around this movie, which I would say has not been as fervent as I thought it would be, would be different if it didn't debut the day that HBO Max came out when all of that stuff just showed up, if they had just waited two or three or four weeks. Because I feel like I've personally had more conversations about Oprah pulling out of her producerial role in the movie than I have about the actual movie. And everything you just said is something that you and I have not even talked about on this show. And I did talk to Kirby and Amy about the making of the movie and some of the controversies around it, But it's a very good film. It's a very necessary film.

I have just a little bit of experience working in rap journalism and being around some of the folks that are featured in that movie and having interviewed a couple of the folks that are featured in that movie. And it's a story that's pretty untold. The way that the music industry operated between 1985 and 2010, basically, is worthy of attention. So it's a great pick. Adam, I believe you and I have the same number two, because you and I had the same number three. I had First Cow, and I think we both have The Vast of Night at number two. Is that correct?

Yeah, we do. So why don't you start on The Vast of Night, which we have spoken about on this show zero times. And even though it's probably, I've now seen this movie three times this year, which is the most of any movie I've watched this year. So why don't you tell me why you think it's an important movie? I mean, I think as critics, we should never pretend that we're talking directly to filmmakers. Even when we're interviewing filmmakers, sometimes we're part of an apparatus, right, of promotion. You know, your job is interpretive. You don't tell filmmakers what to do. That said, Andrew Patterson, if you're listening, I've not met you, I don't know you, and I haven't written about your film at length.

I hope whatever you do next, it's not too expensive. because there is such economy of skill in this movie. And it is in an expansive, often expensive genre, which is science fiction, but it doesn't need it, you know? And I'm reminded, and I'm,

if it sounds like I'm dancing around saying the plot of this movie, it's because if you guys haven't talked about it and it's on prime, I don't want to spoil it, but it's a science fiction movie. You can't help, but call it Spielbergian to some extent, but what it reminds me of, not the plot or even the style, but its existence, it reminds me of why people loved Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson. And to some extent, the very first Christopher Nolan movie following where it's like, this guy just knows how to make

a movie. And it's not about stars and it's not about budgets and it's not about franchise and being scouted out of you know whatever to become colin trevorrow and make jurassic park 11 it's just like this guy's making the movie he wants to make and his means are so skillful he is doing less with more and i feel like we don't really have a situation where young genre filmmakers get to do less with more for very long. It's like you show that you can do less with more once and then people throw more at you. I cannot think of a movie that would make me think someone is being hired to make something big like this in a long time. This is like hire this guy, but I hope not. I just hope that he gets to make a couple of more movies that show this kind

of necessity is the mother of invention brains because man is this movie well made for what it is i agree i think the thing is it's not a trick shot either i don't know just mean the way that it's filmed it's it's it's the way that it's certainly the way that it's conceived and the kind of story and the kind of fealty it has to The Twilight Zone and some things that come before it. But also the writing is exceptional. There are two long monologues in this movie that are absolutely riveting. The performances are great. It also does one other thing that I really love and I love when you see a first-time filmmaker who's not too worried about making you feel comfortable in his story.

He doesn't over-explain himself at the outset. We just dive headlong into this story and we meet these characters and they are off and they are on whatever their small adventure inside this very small world is. And I agree. I mean, he's like amazingly confident as a director. He's a great writer. He obviously has a great eye. He was kind of handpicked. I believe it was at Slamdance of 2019 when this movie first premiered by Soderbergh. Soderbergh saw this movie at that festival and said, this guy, this guy's going to do great stuff. And then I think that's how the film ended up with Amazon Prime is that it was recommended

to a handful of people. But I'm with you though. I hope it doesn't, I hope he's not, you you know shortly taking over like bumblebee 2 rise of the bees or whatever like i i want to see him make something that costs like 22 million dollars and not 122 million dollars because that is how we've seen some of our favorite directors who go on to bigger things grow like i thought well i mean you can't help but think of spielberg because we're conditioned anytime there's a flashy debut to be like well that's the apex of what this might be but the spielberg that i thought of is not the obvious one i mean you can't think of close of the movie without thinking of close encounters a bit

but i just thought of sugarland express where it's like that movie had nothing but the fact that spielberg was such a gifted director going for it and the sugarland express's entire appeal is just that choreography of roads and cars and bodies. And as you say, just plunges right into the story. It doesn't have a track record behind it. And it's amazing to watch a movie like Vast of Night, which is small and modest. You could argue it's not about very much. It's not an allegory of anything, though it's very smart about the period and reminded me a little bit of the iron giant in that way but where you are just like as you're saying two seconds in

you're like i am in such good hands these actors are good and it feels like they're in real place and it just flew by it's a delight i gotta talk to andrew patterson i gotta get him on the show i'm so i don't know why we skipped over this. In fact, David Koepp, when he was on the show last week, a person who knows from Spielberg, was like, if you haven't seen this movie, go see it. That was his big recommendation. And I feel similarly.

So I'm glad we got a chance to talk about it. Amanda, number two, I believe, is also an important movie on Adam's list. So I'll let you both talk about it. What is number two? Well, my number two is Adam's number one. So I'll announce it and then let him speak to the people. It is The Assistant, written and directed by Kitty Green. I mean, yeah. What a piece of direction, right? It's another answer to Amanda's question about

is subtlety exciting? It's like, it sure is like, this is a really minimalist movie and you can, it's almost like for the first 15 minutes, it's like an abstract film about like what it is to be the first person into the office, opening drawers and turning on lights and laying stuff out. And the way that that expands into just this portrait of subordination and complicity is, I think, astonishing. Yeah, I would agree with that.

You know, ever since you were talking about subtlety in First Cow, I was reminded that you're a great film critic and also that film criticism helps us understand ourselves. And I actually really did enjoy First Cow, but there's a reason that it was on both of your lists and it's not on mine. And I guess I think of The Assistant as subtle. It is certainly like slow building tension. There are one or two and really just one showy scenes. And it's really more of a showy performance by Matthew McFadden, who we know as Tom from Succession or the Mr. Darcy from the 2005 Pride and Prejudice, which I think he is unfairly maligned for. I think it's very good, Mr. Darcy.

But anyway, he is the person who gives voice to a lot of the unspoken fears and assumptions and complicity and powerlessness of the, the Julia Garner character. And it is, it's not, he's not doing Tom from succession, but it, there is like, um, it's very memorable and a very upsetting performance that kind of just grabs your, that scene is when the movie grabs you and it's like, this is what's happening. And it only has to do it in that one scene for you to understand everything that's going on. But I, I have also thought about this movie a lot. I guess it's a movie where quote,

nothing happens, but it also like an entire world happens within the span of that one office. And it's, that's very difficult to pull off. Well, that's what I mean. When you say a world, we think about world building in terms of these extended cinematic universes and all these parallel lateral storytelling platforms. And you gotta watch the end credit scene on Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.

to get whatever's happening in the movie. And I mean, the assistant is a fully realized universe. The posters for the not quite real Miramax movies that are in the background, the way Patrick Wilson is just in the elevator because it's like, well, Patrick Wilson, that's who he is. It's a fully realized universe in like just this little sliver. And that's what I love about it is it, it insinuates so much about what's just beyond what we can see. Right. And really, really expressive filmmaking,

I think. And again, would love to see her get some real end of year acclaim for it instead of what would have happened in a normal year, which is it's a good movie that plays at Sundance and then everyone's talking about fall movies. Yeah. I wandered into this movie at Telluride last year and with no plan and no expectation and didn't really know what it was about. And I knew Kitty Green only from, I think casting JonBenet was her previous film, which is a sort of like doc hybrid that was on Netflix about Jean Benet Ramsey and did not expect to see what I saw really liked it. It feels like I've been living with it for a long time.

It's like an odd movie to say I liked it. It's a, it's a very harrowing, very intimate portrait of a person who is, you know, you use the word subordination, Adam, and like being at, at the beck and call of a monster is a, you know, you use the word subordination, Adam, and like being at the beck

and call of a monster is a big part of this story. And it's a pairing with On the Record in a lot of ways, you know, a lot of what her character sees in this film and the way that she experiences the workplace feels really in concert with those movies. So it's a great pick for both of you guys. Amanda and I happen to share number one. So let's talk about that right now. It's nice. The lists all come together at the end. It's very sweet. We didn't plan it. Well, didn't we though? Did we not coordinate? Was there not some forethought? I don't know. I don't really think that I changed my number one or number two based on your choices. And I don't want to speak for Adam. Adam, did you adjust?

I just can't believe you both picked Eurovision. Ah, no, no, no. You got ahead of me. I was going to make the Guy Ritchie's The Gentleman joke and you really, you lapped me on that one. Okay, we could go all day on this. Amanda, what's number one? Tell me.

Yeah, it's none of those funny movies. It's another very sobering and effective and possibly subtle movie called Never Rarely, Sometimes Always, which was directed by Eliza Hittman. And Sean, you and I have talked about this movie on the podcast before. And I think it was also one of the last films that I saw in theaters or at a screening before quarantine. And it is about a young woman who lives in Pennsylvania and she, um, travels to, um, New York to get an abortion and, and that's it. That's the movie. And it is, it's almost like a procedural, but in the sense of you are,

you are following the process of that happening, not in the sense of you are you are following the process of that happening not in the sense of it's like csi um you know pennsylvania or whatever and it is just brutal and effective and part of what's effective about it is that it is very much about this young woman and her experience but it also is about illustrating a system and the consequences of a system and of choices and what that means for individuals in this case, you know, in terms of abortion laws in this country. And I just found it extraordinary for a number of reasons. You know, movies like this don't get made anymore. Like movies like this don't get made. I was going to say anymore, but I mean, I, you know, it's, it is not how you would expect an abortion movie made in Hollywood, um, to be told. And I think it's pretty extraordinary.

Hitman is a really interesting filmmaker. Her last movie is Beach Rats. It's a film we may have talked about on this show at some point. She makes a very, an increasingly rare kind of independent cinema. This movie is, you know, funded by Focus Features, which is owned by Universal, which is owned by Comcast. So it's not as though

she raised the money for this film on Patreon, but, you know, Focus in a sort of independent arm of a mainstream company, um, even by their circum, you know, even by their, uh,

their standards, this is unusual. It's issue driven, but it's not preachy. It's empathetic, but it's not sentimental. It's completely riveting, even though it does not conform to the standards of sort of like narrative filmmaking

that makes people feel comfortable. Um, it is a slow burn movie that is entirely focused on this woman who's played by Sydney Flanagan, incredible performance by her. And Eliza Hitman knows that you kind of, you shouldn't turn the camera off during the moments when you might otherwise turn the camera off. Um, so, you know, to Adam's theme of subtlety throughout this conversation, there are certainly moments where, you know, the titular moment in the movie when she sits down and has a conversation with a counselor before she has the abortion, we hear those words in the title. That's a very clear, purposeful scene that is a part of the narrative storytelling. But there are a lot of scenes in which the camera is just sort of gazing at her as she is evaluating what's going on in her mind and the decisions that she's making.

And it's not easy to do things like that and to make that compelling. And Hitman has a, she has a profound way of showing the internal struggle of young people. Like that's something that has, has come through in all three of her movies. So it's a pretty special movie. Adam, you also, you wrote about this, I believe for the site. I wrote about it for the site and I like it a lot. And even if it's not in this version of a top five, I think it's going to end up being a film of the year. You know,

there's a review by a really smart colleague of mine. That's not out yet. My friend, Courtney Duckworth, who's reviewing it for the new issue of CinemaScope, which is a positive review, but it's also steeped in a tiny bit of ambivalence that flips around Hitman's subtlety, which is the fact that in some

ways you don't really get to observe some aspects of just life and personality in this movie because that's so stripped away that in not being an issue movie, it also just is very single-mindedly an issue movie. And it's not meant as a criticism of the movie. It's just something I hadn't noticed a lot of the reviews talk about before, which is sometimes what's lost by how much gets stripped away in terms of spontaneous, spontaneous behavior or anything that's not related directly to the process or theme that the movie is about,

but great performance, great casting, incredible sense of realism and naturalism, which she has in her other movies. And in its way, it's a very political film, right? Just by being about impediment and about how difficult it is, even when you supposedly can make the choice, to follow through on that choice. So I respect the hell out of it. And she's a really good director you get a lot of people get compared to claire denis which is like you know the highest

praise i think you could give a filmmaker and five times out of six you're like that's misapplied makes sense with her if there's an american filmmaker working who has some of what claire denis has i think it's eliza hitman i look back at the list that we made, and these are meaningful films, thoughtful. They're all well-made. We would recommend all of them to everybody listening. There's not a lot of fun movies on this list, guys. There's not a lot of romps. There's not a lot of comedy.

There's not a lot of feel-good. And that's probably representative of the moment and perhaps our own personal states of mind. And also maybe just the movies that we got this year so far. But is there any other reason why you think we've been in the depths of pain, struggle, and oppression through this conversation? This conversation in particular? Because I've had a great time. I think more of the subject matter, not the not the time spent well because we don't have a summer movie season yeah the romps are not that christopher christopher nolan has never made a romp and i think if he were to use the word romp he would break out in hives but you know we don't

really have summer movies uh i mean that silly season has been compromised, right? So that's one reason why. I don't know if there's maybe something else not somehow, I mean, it's your list, sure, but it did not include the Netflix film Extraction, which I almost put it on in the sense of it's a movie that mostly works, and it's a movie that was released on streaming, and it's an action. People were excited about it. A lot of people watched it and it wasn't like falling apart at the seams like so many other Netflix action movies. At the end of the day, like I was in the kitchen for half of the time that Extraction was on

and listening to my husband be like, yes! So I didn't put it on my list because I too, you know, have autonomy. But that was really the only example even of like a classic, classic blockbuster-ish movie that I could think of. Can I put the 20 minutes of Den of Thieves that I put on the other day onto my top five list? Just put on 20 minutes of Den of Thieves in honor of Chris Ryan and was like, this is great. Movie of the year.

Frankly, Den of Thieves is very over covered here at the ringer and i don't think we need to spend any more time on it i'm trying to think if there there have been maybe a handful of other there have been some movies that have given me joy you know i wrote briefly about the trip to greece which i think is not like an important film by any means but was a movie that made me happy until it ended very sadly um and then the other thing too is just the last dance, which I think all three of us have talked about and had fun with and compromise as it may be.

That was, that seemed like such a special time in our history when we were all convening to, to dissect this Michael Jordan documentary. Didn't it? Yeah. Can we say that the comedic cut of the year is the cut from Gary Payton talking to Jordan, watching Payton on the iPad. That of the year is the cut from gary payton talking to jordan watching payton

on the ipad that's the first is that the first ipad i think it's i think it's the second ipad gag but it's the one that i just found the funniest because payton who i love is just going on about how he would have guarded jordan then just the cut to jordan watching made me laugh made me laugh out loud it was like like a Looney Tunes caliber cut. Michael Jordan on the tour bus honking the horn at the entire team because he has a tea time. While I do not play golf, I have never felt more understood or like seen, seen a version of myself on screen before. So I agree with you. I mean, I don't think it can be on our list because technically it was a TV show.

I mean, I'm sorry to impose definitions and boundaries on people, but it ruled. I loved it. And I don't think it's competing for an Oscar. Neither is Extraction, but you had the temerity to mention it. So I think I'm going to pitch a movie to you guys.

It's called The Way Back To Glove Up and it stars Gary Payton returning to his alma mater after being publicly humiliated by Michael Jordan and attempting to rebuild

his life and the lives of some young people. Are you guys in? Yes. Sure. Fully. This is probably a good place to stop, guys.

These were good lists. I appreciate you both bringing it despite not being able to be in a movie theater for more than three months. Hopefully, we'll be able to circle back six months from now and have a couple of cheerier entries. But in the meantime, thanks for everything you provided here. And I hope you'll check out all these movies that we talked about next week on The Big Picture. Amanda, what are we doing next week? Do we even know, are we talking about Hamilton? I did. There was something on this spreadsheet about Hamilton.

So the, the, the, the, the, the great stage musical Hamilton, which I'm sure people have not heard of and is quite obscure is, is coming to Disney plus and they filmed it and we're going to watch it.

And we're going to talk about it here on the big picture. So hope you'll tune in then and have a happy July 4th weekend in the meantime. you