The Top Ten Classic Films I Watched in 2020

 

The Top Ten (OK, it's 11) classic films I watched in 2020:

Day for Night

Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) film is probably the best of all movies about the making of a movie; no other film gives as great a sense of what it’s like to direct a film and of the complex internal dramas that take place throughout the process of a shoot. 

Faces Places

The penultimate Agnes Varda film (2017) is a totally enjoyable and surprising documentary about her public-art project, in which she joins forces with a 33-year-old French graffiti artist who goes by JR. 

Fireman’s Ball 

These hapless, sexist firefighters can’t seem to get anything right, including fighting a fire, which I think was a brave thing for Milos Forman to dramatize in 1967, when any critique of uniformed officers came as close as possible to a critique of the Soviet control of the government; I believe most Czech viewers, though maybe not the Soviet censors, got the point.

Fox and His Friends

This 1976 film stands as probably Rainer Werner Fassbinder's first great work, groundbreaking in many ways and a film that established RWF as a master at staging and composition and as a multiple threat, director, writer, lead actor; in particular, the film was one of the first honest and non-exploitative films about gay culture.

Harakiri

Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 film is truly one of the great Samurai films of all time though it's not as well known or recognized, perhaps because overshadowed by Kurosawa’s work in the same genre; the film engages viewers right from the start as the first half hour or so is among the most powerful sequences in Japanese film.

In the Mood for Love

Writer-director Wong Kar-Wai's film from 2000 is a sad and strange tale of a man and a woman, each in an unhappy and faithless marriage, who meet and fall in love but find it impossible to leave their marriages begin a new life with each other, which may remind viewers of the great British film Brief Encounter.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

The man above suspicion in Elio Petri’s from from 1970, a police chief who commits a murder and flaunts authority is played by Gian Maria Volonte, who he gives a great performance: cruel, brutal, and scary, especially in his rants against “political” prisoners (i.e., anarchists, Marxists, et al.), an outburst that seems eerily contemporary. 

Of Time and the City 

Terence Davies's documentary from 2008 is a personal recollection and evocation of his childhood in Liverpool (in the postwar years, the 50s and 60s), a moving and sometimes frightening testament to the hardships of poverty then and now and a testament to what Davies calls the English propensity for the dismal. 

Shame 

Ingmar Bergman's great film from 1968 responded to the critiques of his beautiful chamber drama for being remote from the issues that were rocking the world; in this film Bergman takes on some of his typical material, the strains and break-up of a marriage, and plays out the drama in the context of war and revolution. 

World of Apu

Satyajit Rays the conclusion of his Apu trilogy not only lives up to its reputation as a classic in world cinema — it may even go beyond its reputation, as it looks better, more original, more mysterious today than it would have in 1959, with so many beautiful and strange settings in Calcutta and in rural India that now feel like messages from time capsule. 

Young Torless

Volker Schlondorff's debut film, from 1966, about hazing and abuse in a boarding school, is of course painful to watch, but it's not unrelieved or gratuitous pain and its message, articulated by Torless in a passionate speech in which he attacks those who are indifferent and feckless or cowardly in the face of abuse and exploitation, resonates today, perhaps even more than it would have 50 years ago.