5. Miss Juneteenth
Beautifully poignant and grounded by a knockout performance from Nicole Beharie, Miss Juneteenth is a wondrous film with a heart as big as Texas. Beharie stars as Turquoise, a Fort Worth native and former beauty pageant winner turned single mom. She enrolls her teenage daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) in the Miss Juneteenth pageant, which celebrates Black women and offers the winner a college scholarship. On the surface, Turquoise is vicariously reliving the pageant through her daughter, but underneath the taffeta dresses and royal waves, it’s about her striving to protect Kai from making the same mistakes she did. She desperately wants her daughter to go to college, to escape cycles of minimum wage jobs and regrets piling up. Turquoise is at once a force of nature and deeply vulnerable, with Beharie beautifully communicating the nuances of her hope and sadness. Considering director Channing Godfrey Peoples knocked it out of the park with her feature debut, Miss Juneteenth is hopefully a sign of what’s to come from one of the best new filmmakers to emerge this year. (Anna Swanson)
4. True History of the Kelly Gang
Beautiful, brash, beguiling — and that’s just Russell Crowe‘s beard! The whole of True History of the Kelly Gang is a rip-roaring Oz odyssey too wild to be boiled down to any single descriptor. The film plays a bit fast and loose with historical facts and instead captures the emotional truth of this band of outlaws. The eponymous Ned Kelly (George MacKay) is a boy manipulated by circumstance and parental guidance (or lack thereof) into a fighter always fated to go down in a blaze of glory. Director Justin Kurzel captures the Australian environment as simultaneously frighteningly barren and shockingly vibrant with bristling energy and a pugnacious spirit. With a supporting cast including Crowe as a bushranger named Harry Power (yes, his real name) and Nicholas Hoult as a dastardly constable who holds a baby at gunpoint, True History of the Kelly Gang is filled to the brim with audacious characters and wild fables. It’s all too good to be true, or is it? (Anna Swanson)
3. The Audition
There are few working actors with a command of the screen able to rival Nina Hoss. In Ina Weisse‘s The Audition, Hoss stars as a violin teacher who sees the X-factor in one of her pupils. Hoss’ Anna becomes committed to training him and refining his skill, even if the other instructors doubt him and her student forms a rivalry with her own son. The film begins subdued but builds tension masterfully. The best way to characterize it comes from FSR’s own Meg Shields, who once remarked that watching the movie feels like observing someone slowly tightening a violin string. It’s a spellbinding slow burn with one hell of a breaking point and with Hoss at the forefront, this intense character study is a must-watch. (Anna Swanson)
2. Dogs Don’t Wear Pants
It’s hard to know exactly how to describe Dogs Don’t Wear Pants. It’s weird and sad, brutal and hopeful, at times unwatchable and always impossible to look away from. The Finnish film follows a widower who stumbles into the world of BDSM to test his pain tolerance and make him feel alive again. It’s about pushing thresholds and feeling comfortable in your own skin. There’s a bittersweetness to it all, with surprising moments of humor and heart amidst gnarly nail removals and torturous teeth pulling. If you can stomach it all, this movie will be the most pleasant surprise you’ll experience all year. (Anna Swanson)
1. What The Constitution Means to Me
Alright, so this might not technically be a movie, but it’s close enough, and I can almost guarantee you won’t have seen anything else as soul-stirring as Heidi Schreck‘s stage performance, filmed here by Marielle Heller. Schreck bares her bleeding heart and personal history as she traces the legacy of the US constitution.
As a teenager, she would present speeches and participate in debates about the constitution to win scholarship money. Several decades later, she resurrects her fifteen-year-old self on stage and with the clarity of hindsight, explains exactly what this document has done for her. But she doesn’t stop there; she dissects the history of its protections and proclamations and how they’ve shaped the lives of various women, some that Schreck is related to, and some that she’s never met.
The result is a startling and powerfully moving experience. It’s funny and profoundly sad, a searing personal reflection with far-reaching political insight, and it’s the best thing I’ve seen this year. No qualifier of “movie” necessary. (Anna Swanson)
Related Topics: 2020 Rewind
