Best of 2020

Possessor

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  • Title: Possessor
  • IMDb: link

Possessor Blu-ray reviewWriter/director Brandon Cronenberg‘s Possessor is a gory techno-thriller set in a world not unlike our own where a company has devised a method to enter a person’s mind and take control of their body. Rather than use the technology for good, it sells it for profit by making assassins out of anyone they can get their hands on. Andrea Riseborough stars as agent Tasya Vos, although mostly we see other actors playing the bodies she has been given control. As the film opens we can already begin to see the effect of the body swapping on Tasya both in detachment to her real life and during her job which foreshadows larger problems to come.

Possessor is at times a brutal film, and Cronenberg never shies away from gore (even going so far to hold scenes longer than necessary to illicit a response from his audience). Jennifer Jason Leigh also stars as Tasya’s handler, whose team scrambles when something goes wrong with the latest assignment leaving her agent trapped in another body.

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Promising Young Woman

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  • Title: Promising Young Woman
  • IMDb: link

Promising Young Woman movie reviewReferring to Promising Young Woman as revenge porn may be apt, but it’s also doing writer/director Emerald Fennell‘s devilish film a disservice. Mixing revenge, genuine dramatic underpinnings, and a dark sense of humor, the story twists and turns to squealish delight. Once promising medical student Cassie (Carey Mulligan) now lives with her parents and serves coffee at a small café. And in her spare time she targets men who take advantage of women in compromising positions.

Fennell is careful early on not to show us too much of Cassie’s tactics after she’s sprung her trap, allowing our imaginations to fill in the blanks about what this woman is up to as well about the reasons driving her behavior. The later is hinted at as the script drops breadcrumbs before confirming the events which led to Cassie leaving school. Cassie’s more general attacks become focused as she targets those connected to medical school (Adam Brody, Alison Brie, Connie Britton, and Alfred Molina). However, her plans are complicated by her first relationship in years and a boyfriend (Bo Burnham) who causes her to question the dark turns her life has taken.

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Sound of Metal

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  • Title: Sound of Metal
  • IMDb: link

Sound of Metal movie reviewRiz Ahmed stars as one-half of a heavy metal band whose life is turned upside down when the drummer starts to lose his hearing. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben (Ahmed) agrees to go to an insular community for deaf recovering addicts to appease girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) while still refusing to come to terms with what has happened to him.

The film from co-writer/director Darius Marder is one on personal struggle, loss, acceptance, and transformation as Ruben struggles both in finding a new life and his refusal to let go of what he had prior to his hearing loss. Even discounting the imparement, Ruben practices selective hearing in what doctors and others tell him both about the state of his hearing and about the limited help he might receive from expensive cochlear implants.

Although much of it takes place with a couple of montages, we do witness Ruben’s role from outsider to productive member of the deaf community over the course of the film. But despite the help Joe (Paul Raci) and others give to Ruben, the drummer can’t let go of returning to life on the road with Lou.

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News of the World

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  • Title: News of the World
  • IMDb: link

News of the World movie reviewThe idea of a man travelling from town to town to read newspapers may seem quaint in today’s information age, but the collaboration between Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks offers a classic low-key western that is the dramatic equal to their previous collaboration, Captain Phillips. It may not be The Searchers, but Greengrass offers a wide-open canvas for Hanks to provide one of his better performances in recent years.

Traveling from town to town, reading his collection of recent newspapers, Captain Kidd (Hanks) comes across a lynched soldier and a young girl (Helena Zengel) who, as one character succulently put it, has been orphaned twice. Raised by the Kiowa people who killed her family, only to see the tribe wiped out by Union soldiers, Johanna’s only living relatives live far south towards the home Captain Kidd has avoided since the end of the Civil War.

The set-up is fairly simple, the reluctant Kidd decides to deliver the wild girl no one else seems to be able to control, home. On the road, the pair encounter various obstacles while learning a bit about each other, themselves, and where they belong.

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Memories of Murder

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  • Title: Memories of Murder
  • IMDb: link

Memories of Murder movie review17 years after its initial release, Memories of Murder finally earns worldwide exposure. The film only received a token release in the United States a couple of years later. Given both the critical praise of writer/director Bong Joon Ho‘s Parasite and new revelations on the real-life events Memories of Murder draws from, 2020 becomes the perfect time to revisit the film (or, for so many, to get a first look at what some praise as the best Korean film of the century).

Bong Joon Ho’s tale examines the search for an elaborate South Korean serial killer targeting young women in the rural city of Hwaseong in Gyeonggi Province. The film’s two main characters are the local detective in charge of the case (Song Kang-Ho) and an investigator from Seoul (Kim Sang-kyung) who don’t think much of each other’s methods.

The film weaves the pair’s antagonist odd couple dynamic into an old school detective story that ratchets up the tension with each new victim who is found. It also coyly uses misdirection and more than one red herring to keep the audience guessing about what will happen next.

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