Kyle Turner's Best Films Of 2020

It was admittedly hard to express a lot of interest in new films when my brain was just that gif of Dorinda from “Real Housewives of New York” spitting, “I’ll tell you how I’m doing! Not well, bitch!” playing on a loop. Film felt frivolous, with the collapse of many industries, the rise in homelessness, the lack of leadership, the absence of infrastructure to support and protect people, and continued racial injustice waking people up to systems and paradigms of inequity. But, you know, everyone is going to write some self-satisfied, solipsistic sentence of the above sentence (very Liz Lemon saying “What a year, huh?” and Jack replying “Lemon, it’s March”). 

READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2020

But, with little else to do, and as film is one of my ultimate sources of comfort, the films I did watch contained within them a radical empathy, a search for connection amidst disruption and destabilization, and a harnessing of desire to accentuate the power of cinema’s language. Even if film was frivolous, the feelings it can evoke and the worlds and perspectives it can open up for you, those aren’t frivolous. They’re worth cherishing. From con artists to villainesses searching for their own stories, and LGBTQ people finding tenderness and themselves in the midst of struggle, here are some of the best films I watched this year. 

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1. “Kajillionaire”
The Earth shakes beneath the feet of a family of small-time crooks, skimming from the surface of society to both get by and to make a moral point. Capitalism is a scam, so why shouldn’t we partake? Perhaps this is at the detriment of their (Debra Winger and Richard Jenkins) child Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), the name itself from a grift. In baggy tracksuits and a baritone voice that has been content to wade in monotone and monotony, Old Dolio knows and thinks not about care, only about splitting things equally three ways between the family, harboring a complicated devotion to parents who never parented. But a spark is set off inside of them when Old Dolio sees a video of a newborn doing a breast crawl on a job, the question of tenderness and intimacy and what it might be like swirling around in their head like a whirlpool. Old Dolio is confronted with the possibility of that as a reality in Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a new gang member that attracts the kind affection from Old Dolio’s parents that they never received. Encased in the trauma of childhood and the absence of understanding and protection, filmmaker Miranda July, through Old Dolio, articulates an intricate ambivalence towards compassion itself, yet expresses that she wants exactly that for her characters. Few directors care for the well-being of their characters like July, a scholar on finding intimacy in a world of disconnection, disaffection, and chaos; and in “Kajillionaire” she designs a queer romance swept up in a late-capitalist landfill, as sweet as it is absurd, heartbreaking and funny. “Kajillionaire” feels like the embodiment of finding love in a hopeless place.

2. “The Half of It”
Leah Lewis
has quite a face, expressions that are pages, and not paragraphs of feeling. Not unlike Adriano Tardiolo in “Happy as Lazzaro,” her eyes are luminous like the moon seen in a lake, making longing feel like a universe of want. An outsider in her small pacific northwest town, Ellie (Lewis) plays Cyrano for a local, inarticulate football player Paul (Daniel Diemer), writing letters to the object of both of their affections, Aster (Alexxis Lemire). This triangle of identity and desire is wrought deftly with subtlety by director Alice Wu, their relationships moving back and forth through time via the modes of communication, the artifacts they share (movies, music, etc.), and their own sense of place and where (and who) they want to be in the world. It becomes a film that is not only about the potential of who and how to be, but about the authorship of one’s own desire, crafted not for others but for the self. 

3. “Born to Be”
The stories of queer, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people’s stories tend to be bifurcated between a saccharine affirmation and adversity and trauma filled nightmare, with little room to explore the feelings, ideas, and narratives in between. That’s gradually changing, but few works like Tania Cyrpriano’s Wiseman-esque documentary “Born to Be” are as gorgeously realized, elegiac, and mature. Without holding the audience’s hand or unduly codifying is cisgender subjects as saviors, Cyrpriano studies Dr. Jess Ting and the work he and his team have been pioneering at Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City, framing it not reductively as just “groundbreaking,” but as part of a wider network and discourse about healthcare, LGBTQ+ politics, and a rapidly changing city. Patients like Garnet Rubio, Leiomy, and Mahogany are a window not only into trans people’s relationships to their bodies, but of their relationship to time itself. Mahogany walks around Chelsea, noting what was once there and how it’s been replaced by stores and shops, herself being a marker of time and queer history. Cypriano, and Dr. Ting, in conjunction, frame the body and medicine as a concert, parts of an orchestra capable of making new, beautiful work. Like this film. 

4. “Driveways”
Few people make films like Andrew Ahn, capable of probing the depths of our desires and our memories but with the care and gentility of a lepidopterologist studying the wings of a butterfly. Our hearts and our wants are delicate things, yet, like those wings, Ahn recognizes their resilience, whether considering a young Korean American man’s reckoning with his sexual identity or a young boy’s blossoming friendship with a retired veteran. In the former, his lead stares at himself in the mirror, the feeling and awareness of oneself and its implications slowly washing over him like beads of condensation on the sweating glass in the bathroom. In “Driveways,” Ahn’s sophomore feature, Cody (Lucas Jaye) and his mother (Hong Chau) find themselves beneath the detritus of his late aunt, remembrances to be discarded or exhumed. Cody observes, less inclined to be around the kids his age, less in thrall with their aggressiveness, the way they wield their burgeoning sense of masculinity. Instead, he finds comfort in the friendship of Del (Brian Dennehy), a Korean War vet, with no family around him. Del and Cody’s relationship is sculpted with precision and empathy, so gentle and evocative that it feels as if it were cut with a blade of grass and illuminated with the glow of a firefly. As a swan song for Denehy, a tender excavation of Jaye’s masculinity, and as yet another miracle for the growing auteur, “Driveways” is the sweet dew of the morning and the nudging breeze of the evening as cinematic artifact. 

5.“Birds of Prey”
There’s a lot of empty spectacle in contemporary comic book superhero movies: explosions without place, battles without space, fights without tactility, buzziness without political imagination. “Birds of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)” is an action movie ready to break bones, to slip itself under your skin and through your skull, and to put its middle fingers up to both the self-seriousness of its (mostly male) peers and the artificial marketplace feminism focus group bile that feebly attempts to reply to those movies. “Birds of Prey,” and its lead fatale (Margot Robbie), cackle as they push the audience through a deranged narrative timeline, as she tries to negotiate life both post-breakup from the Joker and newly with a price on her head. Exploding with energy, wit, and fury, “Birds of Prey,” roars with rage and a sense of collaboration between Robbie, long passionate about the character, and director Cathy Yan, whose fight scenes entwine beauty and brutality in satisfying and new ways. 

6.“Circle Jerk”
It would not be difficult to replace every hysterical laugh evoked from the live streamed theatrical event “Circle Jerk” with a guttural scream, its Ludlam-esque absurdity so surreal and uncanny precisely because its arrival — in the midst of a social and political spin-out — comes as the world itself, and our understanding of the marginal identities and subcultures, and the power they exist under, careens off the edge of reality. The misinformation scheme that’s concocted by a couple of gay gremlins huddled over a monitor on a cheekily named island spirals out of control, and Brooklyn based theatre and media company Fake Friends expertly balance precision and spontaneity. Placing their crosshairs on gay white supremacy and themselves in a lineage of satirical work that is as exhilarating to experience as it is incisive in its critique and ambitious in its form and aesthetic, “Circle Jerk” is relentless and electric, like sniffing poppers while reading Alexis de Tocqueville and dancing to a remix track of a Tony Kushner monologue.

7. “On a Magical Night”
There is the meta-text of Chiara Mastroianni, the daughter of screen icons Marcello Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, play a lotharia confronted by her past in a lightly Dickensian way. There’s the joke in the film’s original French title, “Chambre 212,” a reference to Article 212 in French law, which concerns marital duties. And there’s director Christophe Honoré’s fixation on the past as the fertile ground from which the ills of current relationships can be possibly salvaged, as seen in his previous work, like “Love Songs” and “Sorry Angel.” The skeletal structure of his latest, “On a Magical Night,” is comedic, the philandering Mastroianni taking time to herself in a hotel room when her husband (Vincent Lacoste) discovers her infidelities, only to bump up against his younger self and the melange of lovers she’s had in the past. But Honoré’s temporal playground is draped in melancholy, so much sadder in its characters’ realizations of how they have changed over time and not necessarily into the people they wanted to be, no longer filled with the same passions they once had, for one another and other things. Barry Manilow’s “Could It Be Magic?” wafts in the air deep into the evening, announcing an end, and a beginning, wrapped up in the uncertain dance of love and time. 

8. “The Surrogate”
Jeremy Hersh’s
debut feature “The Surrogate” simmers until it boils over, the miraculous Jasmine Batchelor plays surrogate not only for her best friend (Chris Perfetti) and his husband (Sullivan Jones), but the anxiousness of idealized friendship, of the archetype of a good person, of the Black body tangled in a network of healthcare and synecdoche, and of a transforming idea of gay men and parenthood. With the news of the fetus having an extra chromosome, the three of them tête-à-tête around uncomfortable decisions and, perhaps scarier, mutated forms of (homo)normativity, calling into question their collective and individual roles in their relationships and in a broader social system that still monstrously dehumanizes the differently-abled. Hersh vacillates between a straightforward realism and a heightened melodrama, entangling the two modes and genres, forcing the characters to examine what they’ve been playing at the whole time, and what gay villainy might mean in the era of Pete Buttigieg.   

9. “Save Yourselves!”
Insular Brooklynite millennial satires are a dime a dozen, especially in a *gag* post-Lena Dunham cultural landscape, and writer/directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson appear to set up “Save Yourselves!” in that vein, tossing John Paul Reynolds and Sunita Mani into the woods so they can self-consciously go “off the grid,” sourdough starters and all. Their aspirations are kind of admirable, a refresh on life, a recentering of what’s important to them, and a longhand written listicle of how exactly to self-care in hand. But Fischer and Wilson unearth, beneath its zany comedy and alien invasion, an unsettling existential horror for the well-off-ish liberal do-gooders. Trading sets of ideals, no matter how well-intentioned, rooted in moral righteousness, and in attempted antithesis to the oppressive norms of yore, in this late capitalist hellhole will create a new set of norms and a new kind of inescapable misery. In this roaringly hilarious dark comedy, “Save Yourselves” asserts that as new standards of being a person are continually capitalized on by advertisers, corporations, startups, media brands, and, god forbid, social media platforms, learning how to be whole, in an echo chamber, no less, means having a part of you sold to the highest bidder. 

10. “Lingua Franca”
In “Lingua Franca,” Isabel Sandoval’s camera carefully trails Alex (Eamon Farren) from behind as his new boss shows him around the slaughterhouse, carcasses that look more rust colored than spritely red in their appearance, hanging wordlessly like his own struggle with responsibility, fresh out of rehab and attempting to care for his grandmother. Sandoval’s subtle, shiver-inducing nod to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’sIn a Year of 13 Moons” feels like a reversal, or an expansion, perhaps. Her focus turns to Olivia (Sandoval), who continues to negotiate the precarity of being an undocumented Filipina trans woman and experiencing her desire and dynamic with Alex bloom in exhilarating ways, controlled with effortlessness by the director. Sandoval drops another Fassbinderian allusion, in a bar where Olivia and Alex dance pretending to be themselves and not themselves, transforming “Lingua Franca” from a character study of otherness in the face of systematic exclusion into an expertly architected inquiry into the performance of identity, the authenticity of performance, the duplicity of images and genres, and the way that the topography of the body is itself cinema.