Film Feature: Carrie’s Top 10 Films of 2020

 

Thinking back on the year in movies, “unusual” and “complicated” might be 2020’s most fitting descriptors. Yes, we’ve had plenty of content to watch, thanks to streaming services, and plenty of time at home to view it all, but COVID-19 cancelled the multiplex experience. Watching movies at home, without the excitement of the big screen and a crowd of fellow film-lovers nearby, just wasn’t as satisfying, which is why the number of films I reviewed this year dwindled sharply. That said, I did watch enough to pull together my annual Top 10 Best Films of the Year. And a unique year requires a unique Top 10 list: hence my first ever Haiku Top 10! I hope each of these 17 syllable snippets (and their trailers!) will steer you toward checking out these films, each of which moved, inspired, and stuck with me this year. Here’s to a return to in-person cinema in 2021! (And if you’re curious about what was on my list last year, you can check that out here.)

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Film Review: The Way Back

Affleck is true champ in worthwhile basketball drama

High school basketball coach Jack (Ben Affleck) tries to motivate his team. 

Remember the “Sad Ben Affleck” meme that was circulating a few years ago? Maybe you thought to yourself, “Hmmm… that would make a great film. Especially if it were combined with an underdog high school basketball movie like Hoosiers.” Well, sorry to say, but director Gavin O’Connor has beat you to it in his new Affleck-helmed picture The Way Back. But you know what? All kidding aside, despite a few flaws, the movie actually works, and Affleck delivers what’s easily a career best performance. 

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Film Review: The Accountant

Convoluted, violent story doesn’t add up to a picture worth seeing   

Accountants Dana (Anna Kendrick) and Chris (Ben Affleck) are puzzled by some discrepancies they discover on the books at a robotics firm.

Ben Affleck has always had a sort of a cold, distant quality; showcasing warmth and deep emotion isn’t his strong suit. Such chilliness is what made him both a decent Batman and so good in a role like the one he had in Gone Girl, in which he played such a standoffish husband that he easily seemed capable of murdering his wife. So it’s not surprising that director Gavin O’Connor (best known for the 2011 cult hit Warrior) would cast Affleck in his new film The Accountant, an action thriller in which Affleck plays Christian “Chris” Wolff, an imperturbable accountant and assassin with a high-functioning form of autism who connects better with numbers than with people. The problem, though, is that O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque (The Judge) play much of Chris’s condition for laughs, and the Rain Man-as-Jason Bourne premise doesn’t succeed nearly as well as the filmmakers probably hoped it would.
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Film Review: “Warrior”

Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte in WARRIOR

starring: Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Morrison, Kevin Dunn

written by: Gavin O’Connor, Anthony Tambakis & Cliff Dorfman

directed by: Gavin O’Connor

MPAA: Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense mixed martial arts fighting, some language and thematic material

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