Collective.

Collective has repeated the feat of 2019’s Honeyland by earning nominations in the Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature categories at the Oscars, and if I had a vote, I’d at least give it a nod in the first one. It’s an amazing story that became bigger and more impressive well after the filmmakers had already chosen their subjects, as a small group of investigative reporters helped bring down an entire government, only to have the same party voted back into power less than a year later.

Collective (Colectiv) was a nightclub in Bucharest, Romania, that was the site of a deadly fire caused by the use of pyrotechnics at an indoor concert, which ignited the soundproofing in the venue – the same cause of the Station fire in Providence, Rhode Island, about 12 years earlier. Where the Collective fire differed, however, was the lower death toll at the site; 26 people died at the scene, but 38 more died later in hospitals, with 146 people injured. An journalist at a daily sports newspaper, The Sports Gazette, saw the number of deaths in hospitals as worthy of further investigation, and the work he and his colleagues did uncovered a massive corruption scandal that included a supplier of disinfectants to hospitals diluting the solution ten times, rendering it ineffective, and the refusal to send some patients abroad to burn units for fear it would reflect badly on the ruling party. The technocrat who takes over the Ministry of Health after the government collapses discovers that the state-run health system is rotten to the core, and there is no straightforward way to fix it or root out corruption. In the end, therefore, little really changes, and we are left to think that the corruption will resume with the restoration of the Social Democrats to power and the government’s failure to replace incompetent hospital managers. In parallel, we see parts of the journey of one of the survivors, Tedy Ursuleanu, who was very badly burned, losing parts of both hands and suffering burns all over her body, as she tries to reclaim something of her life, creating an art installation that provides the movie with some of its most central imagery.

Collective works as a documentary more than anything else because the story is so incredible and so vast in scope. What must have seemed at first to be just a film that followed some investigative reporters looking into irregularities around a major tragedy turned out to be a scandal that reached the top levels of the Romanian national government – something the documentary makers couldn’t have anticipated. They also received what appears to be unfettered access to meetings held by the technocrat Minister, who comes across as a would-be reformer who wants to be as transparent as possible with the press and public, but whose hands are tied by existing regulations and contracts and realizes he can’t do anything he’d want to do to try to fix the system. Meanwhile, the reporters keep uncovering new angles to the scandal, enough that you would think Romanian voters would have had no interest in voting for the same party that oversaw the erosion of the state hospital network, but they did so, the one event in the film that probably could have used some more explanation. It means the film ends on something of a hopeless note, which I suppose was unavoidable – documentary makers can’t choose their endings – but it’s a gut punch to watch all of the survivors and victims’ family members for nearly two hours, only to see that the state and the voters just don’t care enough to act on it.

I’ve seen all five nominated documentaries, and Collective would be my choice for the award, with Crip Camp second. This film does what I think great documentaries need to do – it stays out of the way of the story it’s telling. That’s not always possible, depending on the circumstances of the film’s subject, but in this case the filmmakers’ access to the reporters, press briefings, and eventually the Ministry’s internal meetings obviated any need for narration or other structure. It can be very hard to watch in the early going, because the camera doesn’t shy away from the details – we have footage from inside the concert venue, and we see plenty of burn victims, including one stomach-churning shot of a victim in the hospital whose wounds contain live maggots – but this film, more than any of the other nominated ones, has the power to force changes, if not in Romania, then perhaps elsewhere in the world. We need more documentaries like this, and more reporters like those who broke the story, and Collective should be an inspiration to anyone who tells stories for a living.

The Oracle Year.

I’m not sure how I first heard about The Oracle Year, the first prose novel from graphic novelist Charles Soule, but I believe it was a positive review rather than a reader recommendation. It sat unpurchased on my wishlist for some time before I gave up and bought it myself, and then tore through the novel’s 400 pages in less than four days. It’s weird and improbable and incredibly compelling, with so much velocity to it that I could forgive its faults, and never could put the book down for long.

Will Dando is a more or less unemployed bassist who wakes up one morning with 108 oddly specific predictions about the future in his head, and when he writes them down, he realizes that the first few were accurate, so with the help of his friend Hamza, he dubs himself the Oracle, sets up a site (called the Site) to publish certain predictions, and sells a few others for a massive profit. This endeavor leads to substantial and largely foreseeable consequences, not the least of which is that he’s attracted the attention of the FBI, religious leaders, and a few other folks who would like to know his secret or just generally shut him down. For reasons that even he doesn’t fully understand, however, Will can’t just stop being the Oracle, even when it’s clear that doing so is his best shot to save himself, Hamza, and Hamza’s pregnant wife Miko, both of whom become deeply involved in the Oracle’s undertakings. Eventually, those predictions lead to real-world violence and many preventable deaths, sending Will into an existential crisis and opening up questions of free will, the inevitability of history, and just who sent Will those predictions in the first place.

The Oracle Year is nuts, and I mean that in a very good way. The pace never lets up, and Soule has managed to populate the book with interesting and strange characters – not many with depth, but at least with enough complexity to make them seem real on the page. There’s the Protestant televangelist Hosiah Branson, who fulminates against the Oracle from his pulpit, only to find that one of the 108 predictions is about him. There are two feds who clearly loathe each other but who have to work together to find the Oracle, because their boss says so. There’s the fixer named the Coach, the most intriguing and wonderful character outside of Dando – I’d read an entire book about the Coach, but I won’t spoil any details about them here. There are also a lot of people here who completely lose sight of their own humanity in trying to figure out who the Oracle is or what he’s doing or how to profit from his predictions, including, I’d argue, Hamza, even though much of what he plans as Will’s “business partner” turns out to be prudent. And then there’s Leigh Shore, the frustrated gossip reporter who latches on to the Oracle as a story and ends up (unsurprisingly) directly involved in the plot, a character who has one dimension, her ambition to get the story that will make her career, but it’s a good dimension for a character who ends up proving somewhat critical to the resolution of the story.

Where the plot goes is both extremely clever, reminiscent of good time-travel fiction like that of Connie Willis, and a little bit too easy. Soule has a very strong grasp of a storyline that could easily spin out of control, and brings back earlier elements to help close the story in a way that feels tightly plotted. He also has Dando and some of the other characters talk their way out of trouble that might not play out quite so easily in the real world – it’s not completely implausible, but at the least, Soule rushes through some of the dialogue where Dando (or someone else) argues a point and his antagonist concedes too quickly despite having the upper hand. It’s a small complaint for a novel that so engrossed me that I had to slow myself down to make sure I wasn’t skipping whole sentences, but I definitely got a sense near the end that I knew how this was all going to work out, and that it probably wouldn’t be wholly satisfying. But man did this thing hum along in a way few novels do, and Soule is obviously quite intelligent and tech-savvy enough to make some of the ways in which Hamza and Dando protect the Oracle’s identity credible.

Next up: Gilbert King’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always is such a small, wonderful film that might have found its audience had it had a normal theatrical run last year, but Focus purchased it out of Sundance and sent it to streaming after three days in theaters right at the start of the pandemic, so it seems to have escaped a lot of notice. It’s a gem of a movie that takes an unsparing look at abortion and just how difficult the United States makes it for women to exercise this most basic form of autonomy over their own bodies. (You can watch it on HBO Max or via HBO on amazon.)

Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old living in a rural town in northern Pennsylvania who suspects she might be pregnant, so she goes to a ‘pregnancy crisis center,’ one of those fake clinics where they try to prevent pregnant women from making rational choices, often by lying to them. Autumn decides she wants to get an abortion, so her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) steals some money from the grocery store where they work – for a truly creepy manager – and they hop a bus to New York City, where parental consent isn’t required as it is in the backwater where they live. Once they arrive, however, they realize that the procedure won’t be as quick or simple as they’d been led to believe, and they have to make some unpleasant choices to stay in the city and let Autumn get a proper abortion.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always does so much right with this story, but foremost among them is how granular it gets throughout the process. There’s an attention to detail here that puts you deeply into the story in a way that tries to express the difficulty, stress, and sheer exasperation that Autumn faces, even though she’s sure about her decision. The scenes at the pregnancy crisis center, or her intake interview at Planned Parenthood in New York, or as she and Skylar end up trying to pass the night at the Port Authority and riding the subways all give more time to the minutiae of the moment, passing in something more like real time, giving it a documentary/cinema verité feel.

There are also some small but clearly conscious choices on the part of director/screenwriter Eliza Hittman that drive home Autumn’s anguish and isolation. The intake interview – the best scene in the film, and the scene that gives the movie its title – has the camera focused exclusively on Autumn, even when the kind woman interviewing her is doing most of the talking. Autumn and Skylar are together for long periods where they don’t speak as the camera follows them around Manhattan, or just shows us the two of them trying to sleep in the station, emphasizing that Autumn can simultaneously be alone and with her cousin. If Hittman used any artificial lighting, it wasn’t evident; the whole film has a tinge of grey to it, and the indoor scenes all look like they’re lit solely by the cold fluorescent lights ubiquitous in offices and other public spaces. The script is clearly on the side of a woman’s right to choose, and expresses that view through an intensely realistic look at the process from positive test to the abortion itself, undermining any argument that this is something women do cavalierly while showing just how many obstacles our supposedly free country throws in their way.

Flanigan made their film debut in NRSA, and earned a slew of honors for their performance here, winning Best Actress from Boston and New York critics circles. The film depends so much on Flanigan that you can’t understate the importance of her work, which is superb – she’s entirely believable and disappears into this role, owning that scene in the PP intake interview that, for me, defined this film. It can’t work without a knockout performance, but they deliver one, and you can add Flanigan to the list of actresses who I think deserved an Oscar nomination over Andra Day (who did her best with a badly written role) this year. I’d also put this movie in my top ten for 2020 right now, with maybe a half-dozen possible contenders for that still on my to-watch list, including Minari, The Father, and First Cow. It’s great, and manages to educate without becoming didactic, while telling an important, compelling story.

Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon.

I wouldn’t normally write up a movie like Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, now on Netflix, one of the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, because it’s ostensibly a kids’ movie – and I say that as someone who has long loved Shaun the Sheep and Aardman stuff in general. The first StS season came out when my daughter was maybe 3 or 4, and she and I would watch them together and laugh, and her giggle would just make me laugh some more. The episode in season 1 where the sheep are visited by a couple of mischievous aliens helped my daughter come to the conclusion that “aliens have one eye, monsters have two eyes.” (It’s still one of my favorites.)

The first Shaun the Sheep movie was also nominated for an Oscar, and it was funny, but frivolous. That was a great movie for kids, one that you could enjoy as an adult, but not something that had a second layer for the older parts of the audience like most Pixar movies do. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, a stand-alone sequel, goes way beyond the first movie, though. It is absolutely packed with references and callbacks to classic science fiction, from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who to 2001 to The X-Files to E.T., over 50 Easter eggs that I saw myself (I watched it twice to try to spot more) and that I read about online after watching. And it’s still really funny, with great sight gags (there is no dialogue in any Shaun the Sheep films or episodes … they are sheep, after all) and a plot that winks at conventions of sci-fi in general and the hoary alien-visitation gag in particular.

Shaun is the ringleader of the sheep at Mossy Bottom Farm where, as with the titular animals in Chicken Run, the sheep are organized, and often try to outwit The Farmer (not that hard) and his dog/foreman Bitzer (a bit harder) to try to get more food, have more fun, or annoy the asshole pigs who live next door. (The pigs are, sadly, not in Farmageddon enough.) This time around, though, they have a visitor – an alien child named Lu-La who crashes their spaceship nearby and ends up in the Farmer’s barn, unbeknownst to the Farmer, who sees a news report about the old man who said he saw the spaceship and decides to capitalize by building a ramshackle attraction he calls Farmageddon. What that really means, of course, is that he makes Bitzer and the sheep build it, while Shaun and Lu-La try to hide from everyone around – including the very Scully-like Agent who is determined to find the spaceship and capture Lu-La.

Hijinks ensue, as they always do when Shaun is involved, but the great surprise of this movie is that it is absolutely packed with allusions, references, callbacks, in-jokes, and more. One Doctor Who bit my daughter and I caught just slayed us, and apparently there’s another one we missed around the Fourth Doctor that was somewhere in the background. There’s a symbol in a pizza box right when Shaun and Lu-La first meet that I didn’t catch the first time around, but it was one of at least two references to that particular movie – and I got the second one. There’s a mechanic’s shop called H.G. Wheels. The Agent’s code to access a locked room is a reference. There are just so many things to catch in this movie that there are still more I haven’t, and I don’t even think the few lists I’ve seen of Easter eggs and trivia are close to complete.

I recognize that in-jokes and allusions don’t make a movie great, but everything Shaun the Sheep is at least good enough, and this sequel has a more entertaining plot than the original. I know Soul is the favorite for the Oscar, but, man, I’d watch this for a third or fourth time before I watched that a second time.

Promising Young Woman.

I still can’t believe Camilla Parker-Bowles is now a two-time Oscar nominee, but she absolutely deserves it.

Emerald Fennell, previously best known for portraying Prince Charles’ affair partner on seasons 3 and 4 of The Crown, now has nominations to her credit for writing the screenplay for and directing Promising Young Woman, a brilliant, shocking, and powerful revenge story that feels incredibly well-timed. Featuring a tremendous lead performance from Carey Mulligan, the film earned five nominations – two for Fennell, one for Mulligan, one for Editing, and, perhaps the big surprise of the five, one for Best Picture. (It’s available to rent on amazon and other streaming services.)

Mulligan plays Cassie, who, as the film opens, is in a bar, alone, and so drunk she can barely sit up straight. A guy in the bar offers to help her get home, but then takes her to his place, where he tries to sexually assault her, at which point Mulligan looks right up at the camera to reveal that she’s stone sober – and she confronts the creep before leaving. This is a regular weekend act for her, and we learn that she dropped out of medical school when her classmate, Nina Fisher, was raped by a classmate at a party, and the school did nothing about it. She’s working in a hipster coffee shop when another classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham), walks in, and the two start gradually start to have a meet-cute – just at the same time that Cassie gets wind that Nina’s rapist is about to get married, at which point she launches a more elaborate plan to take revenge on everyone involved in the rape and abortive investigation.

Fennell leaves all kinds of clues in the film to indicate that Cassie’s calm exterior demeanor hides the fact that she’s not quite right. Over the course of the story, we learn how Cassie’s life seems to have just stopped after the assault and immediate aftermath. She lives with her parents, who say she has no friends and hasn’t had a boyfriend in years. She’s still wearing a childlike pattern of pastel colors on her nails. Her wardrobe, which seems rather extensive, often veers towards clothing maybe ten years too young for her. She’s supposed to be 30, but alternates between looking 25 and 40 throughout the film. She’s our heroine, and there’s a distinct pleasure in watching her dish it out to various awful men across the film, but there’s also something amiss here, from how and why she left medical school on to just how deranged her plans for the rapist and his enablers are, and Fennell does a spectacular job of balancing those elements so that the conclusion can still work.

The ending is shocking and the subject of many thinkpieces already – this Variety piece has spoilers and does an excellent job breaking it down, and the video with Fennell and Mulligan is well worth the time – and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we watched the movie. Listening to Fennell in that video, in addition to getting a window on to her brilliance as a writer, changed how I interpreted the ending, and that in turn changed some of my thoughts on what came before. Cassie’s life just stopped after Nina was assaulted and everyone – the school administrators, most of their classmates, even one of Nina and Cassie’s best friends – chose to look the other way, and as the film progresses it becomes clearer that the revenge fantasy is at least mixed with the story of Cassie’s unraveling, a satirical condemnation of a system stacked against victims but also a tragedy of a woman whose promise – who was, at least, on her way to living the life her parents wanted for her – is gone. The fact that Cassie would take the risks she ultimately takes without any regard for the effect her injury or death might have on her parents, for example, is a mostly unspoken indicator that Fennell didn’t write Cassie as a flawless heroine.

I’ve seen four of the five Best Actress nominees so far, and Mulligan would be my pick for the award, although the one I haven’t seen is Andra Day, who won the Golden Globe in this category, and the other three nominees are all outstanding – this might be the most loaded category of the season. I’ve also seen four of the five Best Original Screenplay nominees (I’m waiting on Minari), and would choose this over Sound of Metal, Judas and the Black Messiah, or the extra-Sorkiny The Trial of the Chicago 7. I wouldn’t put it over Nomadland for Best Picture, but it might be my #2, with Minari and The Father still on my list to see. I’ll be pulling for this to take home those two honors, though, as it’s tremendous even when there are minor plot points I wish had unfurled differently.

(My wife and I discuss every movie we watch at length, so her opinions always appear somewhere in these reviews, but here she deserves particular credit for shaping my interpretation of this film. As a man, there are issues here I’ve just never had to face in the world, and her perspective was invaluable.)

Wolfwalkers.

Wolfwalkers is the latest film from the Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon, the 2-D specialists who have received Academy Award nominations for all three of their previous full-length films, Song of the Sea, The Secret of Kells, and The Breadwinner. Based on an original story by Will Collins, writer of Song of the Sea, this film – available only on Apple TV+ right now – is Cartoon Saloon’s best yet, with its most cohesive story and stunning hand-drawn animation, enough that it should win the studio their first Oscar, even though that won’t likely come to pass.

The story takes place in the 1600s in Kilkenny, a town in southern Ireland, where Robyn and her father Bill Goodfellowe have just arrived. The town is threatened by wolves in the nearby forest, which the town’s Lord Protector wishes to clear-cut, which would kill off the wolves or force them to move to another stand. Bill is a soldier, and wants Robyn to stay at home, for her own protection and other reasons that will become apparent, while Robyn is every young person in every animated movie ever – she wants to go out, explore, be a warrior, and so on. She gets into trouble multiple times, and ends up in the forest herself, where she discovers a Wolfwalker, a young girl named Mebh who can project herself into a corporeal wolf, leaving her human body in repose. The two become friends, and Robyn realizes that her father and her town will destroy Mebh’s entire pack – and kill Mebh’s mother, who left in her wolf form some weeks before and has yet to return.

The themes here are pretty straightforward – mankind’s inability to find balance with nature or respect other sentient species, and the dangerous combination of superstition and ignorance – and the Lord Protector character is fairly one-note, although he’s less overtly evil than the typical villain in animated fare. The relationship between the two girls is the real heart of the story, and the best sequences are when the two are together in human or wolf form, from their initial bickering to a very real argument that starts because Robyn tries to protect Mebh without respecting the latter’s agency. The relationship between Robyn and her father could have been more fleshed out early in the film, although it’s authentic enough as it is.

What sets Wolfwalkers apart from other animated films, and even Cartoon Saloon’s prior work, is the animation style. Cartoon Saloon’s animated people have a certain look to them, which is no different here, but the world around the characters explodes off the screen in color and texture – and that includes Mebh’s hair, which you’ve seen if you’ve seen any promotional materials for the film. The Breadwinner‘s setting required a grim color palette and harsh backgrounds, but Wolfwalkers is set on the Emerald Isle and the animators make sure you never forget it. It’s a visual feast, and even the occasional shot within the town walls, where colors are muted and you can almost feel the dust and soot in the air, can still be a marvel of layering and imagination.

You can guess most of the story’s ending by its midpoint, although the way our heroines defeat the Lord Protector has at least one surprise in it, so the development of Robyn’s character, and her relationship with Mebh, end up carrying the weight in the plot. It’s fortunate that the script is up to that task, and the two young women who voice those lead characters, Honor Kneafsey and Eva Whittaker respectively, are so good, with an on-screen relationship reminiscent of the one the Fanning sisters showed in My Neighbor Totoro. There’s a little violence here that would make this inappropriate for the youngest viewers, but less than you’d find in a typical super-hero movie (including Into the Spider-Verse). I haven’t seen all of the possible nominees yet, but I’m high enough on Wolfwalkers to say it’s going to be the best animated film of 2020.

Wolfwalkers was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film, but lost out to Pixar’s Soul, which seems likely to recur at the Oscars, where Onward (meh) and Over the Moon will probably get two of the other three nominations but have no chance to win. I don’t think there’s any comparison here; Soul is the more technically impressive film, and funnier, but has a far less interesting story, worse character development, and isn’t as visually appealing.It’s just very hard for other studios to beat Pixar/Disney; those studios have taken 13 of the 19 Oscars in this category, and 7 of the last 8. They often deserve the wins, but have also won several for no apparent reason other than commercial popularity – Frozen over both The Wind Rises and Ernest & Celestine comes to mind, as does Brave over, well, anything decent – so the odds seem to be stacked against any competing studio. Wolfwalkers is clearly the better film, however, and if you are one of the 18 people in the United States who has Apple TV+, add this to your queue.

Judas and the Black Messiah.

Daniel Kaluuya’s Golden Globes win might bring some more attention to the superb Judas and the Black Messiah, available now on HBO Max, a biopic that focuses on the final months of Fred Hampton’s life by focusing equally on the man who betrayed him. It’s a different angle than a more typical biography, and I can see an argument that it gives Hampton short shrift, but the two lead performances absolutely drive this movie.

Fred Hampton (Kaluuya) was the head of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party when Edgar Hoover’s FBI decided he was a threat to the nation and, with the help of the members of the Chicago Police Department who weren’t busy assaulting protesters, executed him in his bed while his pregnant girlfriend listened from the next room. The FBI was able to do this because one of Hampton’s lieutenants, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), was an FBI informant who ratted out Hampton to avoid a felony charge of car theft. O’Neal not only provided information to his FBI handler, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), but slipped a sedative into Hampton’s drink the night of the execution so he’d be unable to flee or fight back.

Judas and the Black Messiah follows O’Neal’s story from his arrest to Hampton’s murder, bookending the film with footage from Eyes on the Prize II, in which O’Neal gave his only public comment on his involvement in Hampton’s assassination. The narrative focus shifts away from O’Neal to Hampton as needed, giving more time for Hampton’s character to develop, and more time for Kaluuya to show how a magnetic speaker like Hampton could develop such a strong following in such a short period of time – he first became active in social justice movements at 18, and the FBI had him executed when he was 21. (Kaluuya and Stanfield are both much older than the men they portray.)

Stanfield is the lead actor here, at least by how the film’s producers have submitted the pair’s names for awards, but most of the film’s strongest moments belong to Kaluuya. It’s unsurprising, given his superb performances in Get Out and Widows, but he is an unbelievably compelling Hampton whenever he’s speaking to any sort of crowd, friendly or hostile. Kaluuya was positively creepy in Widows as a remorseless, vindictive killer, and here he channels that same implacable calm in any situation, such as when Hampton speaks to a group of Appalachian whites, transplants in Chicago, who rallied under the Confederate flag but also shared some progressive views with the Panthers (a meeting, and subsequent alliance, that occurred in real life).

Meanwhile, despite a strong performance by Stanfield, the script doesn’t give us enough insight into why O’Neal was willing to betray Hampton, to work with the FBI and against his own community, even when he gets clear evidence that the Panthers were creating positive change. His initial willingness to sign up as an informant, avoiding what the film says would have been six years in prison, is easy to grasp, but as the demands on him grow, and he’s more entrenched within the Panther organization, why wouldn’t he balk? Where’s the hesitation beyond what the script gives us in a phone call or two where he threatens to walk away and then changes his mind when reminded of the charges hanging over his head. Stanfield is very good at portraying anguish, speaking through clenched jaws with his head slightly bowed, but there’s something lacking in the character’s portrayal here – although even the actual interview O’Neal gave shortly before his death (the same day that Eyes on the Prize II aired) fails to provide a satisfactory explanation, as he seems unwilling to confront the consequences of his own actions. It’s at least plausible that director Shaka King and writers Keith and Kenneth Lucas made an active choice to leave O’Neal’s character vague because of the paucity of information on his motivations and feelings after the fact.

Between this film and the contemporaneous The Trial of the Chicago 7, it’s a strong year for ACAB in movies (or perhaps ACCAB, since both films involve gross misconduct by Chicago police), which speaks to much of the present mood in large portions of the country even though both events took place over 50 years ago. The idea of our own government executing a 21-year-old citizen in his sleep, where the police fired 90 shots and the Panthers in the apartment fired just one, should still shock and horrify us, and Judas and the Black Messiah doesn’t shy away from the corruption and police-state authoritarianism that allowed these events to take place – and the men behind them to walk away unscathed. It’s infuriating without feeling manipulative, unlike Sorkin’s film, because Judas’ script hews far more closely to the true story. It’s a film-world crime that The Trial of the Chicago 7 got a Best Picture – Drama nomination at the Globes, and a screenplay win, when Judas received neither, something I hope is remedied when the Oscars come out with their own slate of nominees in two weeks, with Kaluuya also deserving of a nod. Judas is an imperfect film in a few ways – I could have done without some of the inside-the-FBI stuff too – but between Kaluuya’s performance and the sheer power of the story behind it, it’s one of the year’s best.

The Nest.

Writer-director Sean Durkin’s first feature film, 2011’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, was a marvelous, gripping story with a star turn from a then-unknown Elizabeth Olsen – or, if she was known, it was for being a younger sister – that seemed to herald great things for Durkin once he had more resources available for another project. He finally returned to the screen in 2020 with The Nest, another extremely taut, well-acted, psychological thriller, returning again to themes of emotional manipulation and broken people, this time in a nuclear family where the couple are frantically trying to ignore the cracks in their marriage’s foundation.

Set in the 1980s, which is evident from the music to the clothes to the hairstyles, The Nest follows Roy (Jude Law) and Allison (Carrie Coon) as they relocate from New York City to the English countryside, where Roy believes he’ll find new business opportunities with a previous employer. They move into a giant Victorian house in Surrey that’s far too big for them and their two children, but it becomes evident that it is another symptom of Roy’s penchant for magical thinking and aspiration. The move isn’t for new opportunities, but because he’s broke, as Allison learns when construction on the stables for her horse-training business comes to an abrupt halt, and the lucrative deal he thinks he’s going to strike with his old firm turns out to be another pipe dream. The illusory world Roy has built around himself begins to crumble, while Allison tires of pretending everything is fine and becomes increasingly contemptuous of him, while her teenaged daughter, adrift and also recognizing an opportunity as teenagers do, rebels against them and the changes they’ve forced upon her.

The Nest is a movie of privilege, not about its exercise, but about its mere existence. Roy and Allison worry about things like status and appearances because they can – somehow, even with his chicanery and extravagance, they still have enough money to support themselves, and send the kids to private school, and, in Allison’s case, to keep a cash box hidden in the house because she knows full well that Roy is unreliable when it comes to money. The wounds here are self-inflicted, and we do get some brief glimpses of why as we learn a little of Roy’s and Allison’s histories, so this film is concerned with the suffering we create for ourselves rather than that the world imposes on us – more so if we are poor, or nonwhite, or just outside the circles in which these two people travel.

Coon is a treasure, as always – she was the best part of the one season of The Leftovers I watched – and she gives Allison all of the texture that this three-dimensional character requires. She becomes openly derisive of Roy, but also reckless in her own way, and runs the gauntlet of emotions and moods over the course of the film, notably in her growing unease in this house that they can’t afford and that could hold them and all their possessions many times over. She also takes a small step that emphasizes her independence, or at least her refusal to be dependent on such an unreliable man, that also has the side benefit of embarrassing her husband when it comes to light. My cousin Jude is also quite good as Roy, and certainly convincing as that sort of suave confidence man who is just plausible enough that you can see what Allison may have seen in him, but Coon is the absolute star of this movie, and it’s a shame she’s received so little attention on the awards circuit for it, with just a few nominations from local film critics’ circles.

The Nest, like Durkin’s first film, is a slow burn, and the tension lies mostly beneath the movie’s surface, although there’s more of an overt climax in this story than there was in Martha Marcy May Marlene, and also a less ambiguous conclusion. It’s a more polished work, with stronger characterization and a better story arc, although the first film’s ending played better into the idea of a sort of existential terror that this film evokes but doesn’t entirely drive home. They’re both quiet, simple films, however, in a way that might make them hard to sell to a larger audience, but that draw you in because they have the immodesty of reality, and all the pain and suffering it can bring.

Nomadland.

Nomadland has been the front-runner for Best Picture for several months now, taking home the Golden Lion at Venice, winning Best Film or Best Picture from multiple cities’ film critics associations (Boston, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Houston, DC, Dallas, Seattle, and London), and landing four nominations at the upcoming Golden Globes. It’s a very different sort of film than anything I’ve seen, layering a traditional, fictional narrative on top of a work of cinema verité, based on an acclaimed non-fiction book but with Frances McDormand delivering what might be her third Oscar-winning performance. The movie is now streaming exclusively on Hulu.

Nomadland is about vandwellers, people who have chosen, or been forced to choose, to live itinerant lives in their vans or RVs, traveling around the country and taking on seasonal or other short-term work, but avoiding the fixed lifestyle and long-term obligations of home ownership. The book, by Jessica Bruder, was non-fiction, and explored this subculture of outcasts, misfits, and nonconformists, and the movie brings in many of the same people who appeared in Bruder’s book as the backdrop for the fictional story of Fern (McDormand), who is forced into this life when her job and the company town where she lived all go away in the span of a few months in 2011. (She’s not a real character, but the town, Empire, Nevada, became a ghost town, and the factory shown in the movie is still shuttered, although the gypsum mine has since re-opened and there are about two dozen people living in Empire.)

Fran is widowed and has nothing to tether her to Empire, including, it would appear, no real ties to friends nearby, so she buys a van, refits it for nomad life, and hits the road, starting out by working at an Amazon warehouse for her first seasonal job, then connecting with a group of nomads who teach her a little about the lifestyle and offer some tips. Many of these wanderers are real vandwellers from the book – Swankie, Linda, and the evangelist of the vandwelling lifestyle, Bob Wells, whose history of failing to pay child support is not mentioned in the story. One who isn’t is David, played by David Strathairn, whose voice would give him away even if you didn’t recognize him through his unkempt hair and white beard. He’s smitten with Fern, and the two run into each other multiple times, with David trying to convince Fern to come along with him and, eventually, to join him when he decides to give up van life and settle down with his son’s family.

Director Chloe Zhao’s previous feature, The Rider, also used non-actors in most of its roles, with its protagonist playing himself, so she’s mining some familiar ground here, but it is hard to imagine this movie without McDormand in it. She is utterly essential to this film, not her story specifically but the way she inhabits this niche in our world and makes it entirely plausible that she is, in fact, Fern, a woman abandoned by fortune who is trying to avoid going over the cliff. Her portrayal of an anguished, grieving person looks so effortless and so delicate that it reminds me of when extremely athletic players (often players of color) are accused of showing too little effort when the truth is that they’re just that talented.

Zhao also films this in a way that empathizes with the vandwellers without patronizing or mocking them. This could easily be misery porn, or a screed about our broken economic system (especially around health care), or a sort of weird cautionary tale about how people end up living out of their cars. Instead, Zhao presents this world without judgment, giving us the people in it as they are, so that their humanity is at the heart of the film, not their choices, and not their misfortune.

Nomadland is also frequently gorgeous as Zhao gives us soaring landscapes across the American West and some close shots of forests or other natural vistas, including the view from what I presume was supposed to be Fern’s old house, now abandoned but still intact. The film doesn’t romanticize the vandwelling life, but there’s a certain romance in the idea of getting in a van or an RV and just driving across these great unpopulated swaths of land, without so much as a destination in mind, although I find it hard to fathom doing that alone – and that’s without the added concerns that a woman would have making the same sort of journeys by herself.

Right now, Nomadland is my #1 movie from 2020, and my wife’s as well. I’ll go out on the shortest of limbs to say it’s going to take at least four nominations at the Oscars – Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Cinematography – and I can at least see why it’s the favorite to win the first one, because it’s a great movie and, in a roundabout way, speaks to the economic uncertainty of modern American life. It also gives Zhao an excellent chance to become the second woman and the first woman of color to win Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow won in 2010 for The Hurt Locker). We should see two women nominated in that category in the same year, with at least one of Regina King (One Night in Miami) and Emerald Fennell (Promising Young Woman) joining Zhao, which would be a first, although knowing the Academy’s history I wouldn’t be shocked to see them screw this up too and give one nod to, say, Aaron Sorkin instead.

Calico.

Calico is a deceptively cute game, ostensibly a simple game about cats and quilts but in fact a much deeper strategic experience that asks you to plan every tile and think about every move. It would have made my top 10 last year had I seen and played the game in time to write it. It’s between printings right now, but its amazon page is still active.

Calico is a tile-laying game where each player gets a board that has a frame around it showing pieces of hexagonal quilt tiles, and three scoring hex tiles placed on the three designated spots on their boards, each showing a specific scoring method associated with it, such as AA-BB-CC (three pairs) or AAA-BB-C (a triple, a pair, and a singleton). Over the course of the game, players will draw tiles from the supply and place them on their boards to try to surround those scoring hexes with six quilt tiles of different colors and patterns to meet those scoring tiles’ requirements. The tiles come in six colors and six patterns. If you meet the scoring tiles’ rules in just color or pattern, you score the lower number, but if you meet it in color and pattern, you score more.

There are also cats in this game, three each time you play, who are looking around to lay on your quilt, but only if it matches the patterns they like in specific alignments of tiles. That can mean something as simple as three tiles in a row, or something more complicated like five tiles in two rows (a row of two and a row of three, forming a sort of trapezoid), or a chain of seven contiguous tiles in any shape. Cats only score based on tile patterns, not colors – the latter are immaterial – and in each game, you’ll get one easy cat to score, one moderate one, and one difficult one, with multiple options for each at the start of every game; they score 3, 5, and 7 points respectively. You can count the partial tiles in the frame towards these patterns.

And there are buttons, which you can get by placing three tiles of the same color together, either in a row or in a triangle, and once again you can count the frame’s partial tiles to create those trios. You can’t create a group of six for two buttons, however; each group of three has to be separate. There are six colors of buttons, and if you collect one of all six colors, you get a bonus rainbow button. They’re all worth 3 points apiece.

You start the game with two random tiles from the supply, and on each turn, you’ll place one of them on your board, then replace with one of the three tiles in the supply. The game proceeds until all players have filled their boards, at which point they score their points from the scoring hex tiles, their cats, and their buttons.

That’s as detailed a description of Calico’s rules as I can give, and it’s not even 500 words. It’s an extremely elegant game that you can learn in a few minutes, but the game changes each time you play depending on the hex tiles, the cats, and the random draws of quilt tiles from the bag to supply the market. The first two options can be random, but you can also use them to fine-tune the game to the difficulty level you want; the rulebook suggests a starter game with specific tiles and cats for first-time players, which I think is also useful for learning the game’s icons and symbols.

The one drawback to game play is that you’re limited to the tiles that appear on the table, and, with only three tiles of each specific color/pattern combination and 108 tiles in total, you can easily find yourself waiting for a tile that never comes. You have to play in a way that allows you to capitalize if you get the tiles you want but prepares you for the more likely outcome that you get some of what you need, and even so, you can still lose just because the right tile never appeared. That randomness can also help level out the playing field between older and younger players, or more experienced players and newer ones, and in this case I’d say the randomness is in service of the game’s larger goals rather than just being there for its own sake.

The art in Calico is cute, maybe a little over the top in that regard, but artist Beth Sobel is one of the best in the business, with Wingspan, Lanterns, and the new edition of Arboretum all to her credit. Those cats on the scoring tiles are, in fact, actual cats, and they get their own bio section in the back of the rulebook, if you care about such things. Ultimately I’m swayed by the combination of easy-to-learn rules, subtle strategy, and replayability, though, all of which make Calico (belatedly) one of the best new games of 2020.