From the Hail Murray to Minari, the 10 best things I ve watched during the pandemic Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic
Like so many people during the COVID-19 pandemic, I have spent a lot of time in front of my TV set.
Full disclosure: I spend a lot of time in front of my TV anyway. It’s a job requirement.
But I also usually spend time in movie theaters. I haven’t been inside one in more than a year. That’s also true for a lot of people.
Make no mistake: The pandemic is not over. Despite that, it sure seems like some people are acting like it s on the way out. I m not there yet, but it does seem like a shift in the fabric of things. So it s a good time to look back on the last year and how I spent it and what I spent it on.
Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons as Jake in I m Thinking Of Ending Things. | Mary Cybulski / Netflix
In
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (134 minutes), Jake (Jesse Plemons) drives Louisa (Jesse Buckley) through snow-covered country roads to meet his parents at their remote farm. Both are extremely uncomfortable. Louisa thinks repeatedly about terminating their seven-week relationship. Jake seems intent on displaying his shaky self-worth. They need to prove something to themselves.
Discomfort rises to terror as Louisa meets Jake’s parents, played intensely by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. The parents dramatically age and regress throughout the evening. Jake disappears and appears. The farmhouse seems to change shape, furnishings and configuration. Are we here alone?
Print
For Irish actress Jessie Buckley, picking up a dialect is like learning a piece of music. “Over time, it just kind of sinks in,” says Buckley, who obsessively listened to recordings of native Minnesotans talking before flying from London to Chicago, which doubles for Kansas City, for Season 4 of FX’s “Fargo.”
In it, she steals every scene as Oraetta Mayflower, a hospital worker with an upper Midwestern patois, a brittle smile and a habit of murdering her patients. Once she tried to poison her neighbors by baking them a pie spiked with a vomit-inducing syrup.
Oraetta is about as far away as you can imagine from the young woman she plays in Charlie Kaufman’s cryptic “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” now streaming on Netflix. On a road trip with her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), Buckley’s character is studying poetry. Other times, it’s quantum physics. Her name keeps changing. It’s a movie that eludes traditional explanation, which might be why Buckle
Teague Hipkiss/Warner Bros/DreamWorks/Fox Searchlight/CJ Entertainment The Edge’s Best Films of 2020 By Theo Smith, Sam Pegg, Jacob Hando, Louise Chase, Katie Evans, Becky Davies, Conor O Hanlon and Harry Geeves on
“Death to 2020” as Charlie Brooker sardonically toasted in his Netflix comedy special, and 2021 could not come anytime soon for the film industry. With hugely anticipated blockbusters pushed back by a year and venues shutting their doors to the public, cinema has taken an almighty battering from the COVID-19 pandemic that has led to widespread changes within distribution and exhibition that will continue to be felt over the coming years. However despite this doom and gloom, our Edge writers have come together once again to decide our annual list of the best films of the year. So sit back and enjoy our top 10 films of 2020!