Seen / read / heard 2020

Or read the best things of 2020

— January
— February
— March
— April
— May
— June
— July
— August
— September
— October
— November
— December

— All caps, bold: MOVIE
— All caps, bold, asterisk: SHORT* or ONLINE VIDEO* or TV*
— All caps, Italics: ART / LIVE EVENT / THEATRE
— Italics, bold: Book or Short Story
— Quotation marks: “Audio”
— Italics: Article ^^

December 2020 #

• 31/12 — SANTA CLAWS

• 30/12 — THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES PART TWO

• 28/12 — THE CHRISTMAS CHRONICLES

• ( < 27/12) — DEATH TO 2020*

• 27/12 — SOUL

• 26/12 — NOELLE

• 25/12 — THE MORNING SHOW* ( < 23/12)

• 25/12 — I GIVE IT A YEAR

• ( < 25/12) — How to do Nothing by Jenny Odell

• 23/12 — HER SMELL

• ( < 22/12) — THE RIPPER*

• 22/12 — THE FAREWELL

• 21/12 — THE BEACH BUM

• 20/12 — LANCE*

• 20/12 — SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

• 19/12 — TED LASSO* ( < 18/12)

• 18/12 — SONG EXPLODER: VOLUME 2* (NIN and The Killers)

• 18/12 — ARCTIC

• ( < 16/12) — Such a Fun Age

  Cyberpunk’d

  On the eve of the millennium everyone was afraid that all the computers in the world were going to go haywire. Could we imagine, then, that the real nightmare would be their non-stop use?

• 14/12 — AVA

• ( < 11/12) — White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination by Jess Row

• 07/12 — MANK

• 07/12 — SMALL AXE: ALEX WHEATLE*

• 06/12 — AD ASTRA

• ( < 06/12) — The Fighter by Michael Farris Smith

• 06/12 — NATALIE PALAMIDES: NATE - A ONE MAN SHOW*

• 05/12 — I HATE SUZIE* ( < 03/12)

• 05/12 — SONG EXPLODER: VOLUME 1: “R.E.M. - LOSING MY RELIGION”*

• 05/12 — 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world by Elif Shafak ( < 15/11)

• 04/12 — LE MANS 66 (FORD v. FERRARI)

• 04/12 — ZANELE MUHOLI

• 03/12 — FALLING DOWN

November 2020 #

• 30/11 — THE UNDOING* ( < 15/11)

• 30/11 — INDUSTRY* ( < 10/11)

• 25/11 — SMALL AXE: LOVERS ROCK*

• 24/11 — GROUNDHOG DAY

• 22/11 — TRIAL 4* ( < 21/11)

• 21/11 — PAWN SACRIFICE

• 21/11 — DARK WATERS

• 20/11 — 21 JUMP STREET

• 16/11 — SMALL AXE: MANGROVE

• 14/11 — HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

• 13/11 — The Devil all the time by Donald Ray Pollock ( < 25/10)

• 12/11 — WHITE BOY RICK

• 12/11 — THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT* ( < 06/11)

• 08/11 — REALITY BITES

• 08/11 — *An Architecture Critic Looks at Four Seasons Total Landscaping

  “Perhaps it was sabotage on the part of a minion who had had enough. There’s speculation on Twitter that Trump announced an event at the Four Seasons (hotel) before it had been booked, and aides had to scramble to find any venue that made his words true. None of these explanations makes sense, because the site was simultaneously too perfect to be accidental and too elaborate to be intentional. The end of an administration marked by episodes of sordid sex, wishful thinking, and mass death took place next door to a dildo-and-porn store named Fantasy Island and across the street from a crematorium. If you were hunting for such a symbolically rich stage, how would you even Google it?”

• 06/11 — SARAH COOPER: EVERYTHING’S FINE*

• 01/11 — A MOST VIOLENT YEAR

October 2020 #

• ( < 25/10) — BORGEN*

• 24/10 — THE WASHINGTON SNIPERS

• 24/10 — SORRY WE MISSED YOU

• 23/10 — The Plot Against America by Philip Roth ( < 26/09)

• 23/10 — TIME

• 23/10 — BORAT SUBSEQUENT MOVIEFILM

• 22/10 — OKJA

• 18/10 — ELF

• 17/10 — Red Pill, Blue Pill — James Meek on the conspiracist mind

• 17/10 — FISH TANK

• 17/10 — ARTHUR CHRISTMAS

• 16/10 — THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7

• 15/10 — GAME NIGHT

• 14/10 — MY OCTOPUS TEACHER

• 13/10 — Black, Listed: Black British Culture Explored by Jeffrey Boakye ( < 20/09)

• 12/10 — TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG

• ( < 11/10) — COBRA KAI: SEASON 2*

• 09/10 — THE BOYS* — SEASONS 1 & 2 ( < 05/09)

• 04/10 — THE GENTLEMEN

• 01/10 — DARK RIVER

• 01/10 — The Most Illuminating Moment of the Debate

September 2020 #

• 27/09 — AMERICAN FACTORY

• 27/09 — CUTIES

• 25/09 — COBRA KAI: SEASON 1* ( < 24/09)

• 23/09 — CHALLENGER: THE FINAL FLIGHT*

• 22/09 — Gun Love by Jennifer Clement ( < 15/09)

• 20/09 — RGB*

• 19/09 — BOMBSHELL

• 19/09 — Dancing With the Octopus by Debora Harding review – kidnapped at 14

  “Her mother had a peculiar response to the attack. Decades later she told her daughter’s husband, quite matter-of-factly, that the kidnap had never happened. Harding was so unsettled by her mother’s belief that the abduction was just a fantasy, she began to question her own memory. Could she have concocted such an event in her mind? She and her husband begin an investigation into the assault, scouring FBI records and newspaper reports to uncover the details of what took place. Records confirmed her memories were entirely correct.”

• 17/09 — Gene Weingarten: A neighbor asked for a tomato. This is where the story gets weird.

• 15/09 — Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk ( < 04/09)

• 14/09 — THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD

• 13/09 — THE SOCIAL DILEMMA*

• 13/09 — NOT OUR PROBLEM*

  Video about the experience of being black and living in Southwark in 1984. A Blackrod Production for Southwark council focusing on the issues of racism that the Black and Asian communities living in the borough are facing, and how the systems of education and housing are trying to combat these. Part of Peckham & Nunhead Free Film Festival

• 12/09 — AMONG THE TREES at the Hayward Gallery

• 12/09 — Ofqual and the Algorithm

  “Algorithms of one sort or another have been used in university admissions for years. In 1979, St George’s Hospital Medical School began using a computer algorithm to screen applications to its undergraduate programme. Unlike Ofqual’s algorithm it was remarkably accurate, agreeing with the judgments of a human selection panel 90 to 95 per cent of the time. It achieved this accuracy partly by mimicking the panel’s prejudices. Candidates with ‘non-European-sounding’ names were marked down and as many as sixty applicants a year were excluded on that basis. The Commission for Racial Equality was alerted in 1986 and the algorithm was scrapped. An article in the BMJ called it ‘a blot on the profession’. The algorithm was nakedly racist, though it’s worth noting that while it was in use the proportion of non-European candidates accepted at St George’s was higher than at other medical schools.”

  “The most widely reported bias followed from the judgment that any form of statistical adjustment would be methodologically unsound in classes with fewer than five students and only a slight adjustment should be allowed in classes with between five and fifteen students. Since smaller classes are much more common at private schools than at state schools and further education colleges, private schools’ results were much less likely to be downgraded.”

• 11/09 — THE COP IN OUR HEADS AND THE COP IN OUR HEARTS*

  “It’s hard to know what to do with your fear, especially when in isolation. Early on in the pandemic, I noticed what felt like an uptick in public scoldings of others deemed insufficiently obedient to the demands of the COVID lockdown. That might be benign enough, if it weren’t also that authorities were setting up “non-compliance” lines all over the country, resulting in increased calls to the police and then increased police harassment and punishment. At this moment of reckoning with police violence, I wanted to make a “quarantine” film that looks out, not in, and so decided to make this small rumination on the internalization of police culture and how it can turn neighbours against one another.” – Brett Story

• 06/09 — BURNING

• 02/09 — A General Theory of Oblivion by José Eduardo Agualusa ( < 29/08)

August 2020 #

• 29/08 — The Orange by Wendy Cope

  At lunchtime I bought a huge orange
  The size of it made us all laugh.
  I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
  They got quarters and I had a half.

  And that orange it made me so happy,
  As ordinary things often do
  Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park
  This is peace and contentment. It’s new.

  The rest of the day was quite easy.
  I did all my jobs on my list
  And enjoyed them and had some time over.
  I love you. I’m glad I exist.

• ( < 27/08) — WATCHMEN*

• 26/08 — THE AMERICANS* ( < 11/07)

• 25/08 — *Mindf*ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s Plot to Break the World* by Christopher Wylie (18/08)

• 24/08 — Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine ( < 10/08)

• 15/08 — Spring by Ali Smith ( < 11/08)

• 10/08 — Home by Warsan Shire

  no one leaves home unless
  home is the mouth of a shark
  you only run for the border
  when you see the whole city running as well

  your neighbors running faster than you
  breath bloody in their throats
  the boy you went to school with
  who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
  is holding a gun bigger than his body
  you only leave home
  when home won’t let you stay.

• 09/08 — The Decent of Man by Grayson Perry ( < 02/06)

• 07/08 — King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild ( < 18/07)

  “ Leopold’s letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary. The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more.”

• ( < 02/08) — THE RISE OF THE MURDOCH DYNASTY

• 01/08 — JOJO RABBIT

• 01/08 — “The Great Post Office Trial ( < 06/06)

July 2020 #

• 30/07 — I MAY DESTROY YOU* ( < 26/07)

  The Innate Black Britishness of I May Destroy You

• 30/07 — Ramble Book (audio) by Adam Buxton ( < 10/05)

• 26/07 — TELL ME WHO I AM

• 26/07 — “Burn It Down” — This American Life

• 26/07 — “Ziwe May Destroy Hamilton” — Still Processing

• 26/07 — 20 must-see documentaries to explain the world in 2020

  1— Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich 2— I Am Not Your Negro 3— The Last Dance 4– Spaceship Earth 5— On the Record 6—Welcome to Chechnya 7— The Unwanted: The Secret Windrush Files 8— Our Planet 9— 13th 10— Seahorse 11— Tiger King 12— For Sama 13— Honeyland 14— Miss Americana 15— Tell Me Who I Am 16— Hail Satan? 17— The Great Hack 18— Midnight Traveler 19— The Edge of Democracy 20— Knock Down the House

• 25/07 — PAIN & GLORY

• 22/07 — TOY STORY 2

• 21/07 — INSIDE OUT

• 20/07 — THE INVENTOR: OUT FOR BLOOD IN SILICON VALLEY

• 19/07 — “Ep. 406 - A Side of Franchise. 99% Invisible

• 19/07 — Signs Preceding the End of the World by Yuri Herrera ( < 18/07)

• 17/07 — TOY STORY

• 12/07 — The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova ( < 23/06)

• 11/07 — ”Your Call Is Important to Us“

• 10/07 — CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (The new one)

• 09/07 — JEFFREY EPSTEIN: FILTHY RICH* ( < 04/07)

• 07/07 — LYNN + LUCY

• 04/07 — QUEEN & SLIM

  *The Powerful Perspective of “Queen & Slim”

• 03/07 — WELCOME TO LEITH

• 02/07 — HOMICIDE

• 01/07 — HONEY BOY

June 2020 #

• 29/06 — BLACK & BRITISH: A FORGOTTEN HISTORY* ( < 22/06)

• 27/06 — KNIVES OUT

• 26/06 — ATHLETE A

• 25/06 — DA 5 BLOODS

• 24/06 — WILD AT HEART

• ( < 24/06) — The Women of Brewster Place Ditched for now (18/07)

• 14/06 — BLACKS’ BRITANNICA*

• 14/06 — THE UNWANTED: THE SECRET WINDRUSH FILES*

• ( < 07/06) — ”The View from Somewhere podcast“

  "Objectivity is the ideology of the status quo.”

  Hallin’s spheres of consensus

• 07/06 — “Politics Podcast: What History Can And Can’t Teach Us About Today’s Protests”

• ( < 06/06) — THE INNOCENCE FILES*

• 03/06 — CHRIS VOSS TEACHES THE ART OF NEGOTIATION* Masterclass ( < 28/05)

• 03/06 — “Winds of Change” podcast series ( < 17/05)

• 02/06 — A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James ( < 23/04)

  REMASTERED: WHO SHOT THE SHERIFF*

May 2020 #

• 30/05 — BLUE STORY

• 29/05 — WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

• 17/05 — DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE

• 16/05 — NORMAL PEOPLE* ( < 02/05)

• 09/05 — THE LAST BLACK MAN IN SAN FRANCISCO

• 09/05 — Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters by Ryan Singer

• 08/05 — Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez (audiobook) ( < 09/04)

• 02/05 — “Fiona Ex Machina - Still Processing”

• 01/05 — GARFIELD’S FUN FEST

April 2020 #

• 25/04 — UNORTHODOX* ( < 18/04)

  “#23 Exit & Return Part 1 & Part 2”

• 21/04 — Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli ( < 19/04)

• 19/04 — Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli ( < 04/04)

• 19/04 — COVID REPORT 14 04 20

• 19/04 — Coronavirus: 38 days when Britain sleepwalked into disaster

  On January 24 Matt Hancock told reporters the risk to the UK public was “low”. Johnson missed four Cobra meetings on the virus and he didn’t attend one until March 2nd.

  UK in a poor state of readiness for a pandemic. Emergency stockpiles of PPE had severely dwindled and was out of date after becoming a low priority due to austerity. Training had been put on hold for two years while contingency planning was diverted to deal with a possible no-deal Brexit.

  The government shipped 279,000 items of its depleted stockpile of protective equipment to China.

  The last rehearsal for a pandemic was a 2016 exercise codenamed Cygnus which predicted the health service would collapse and that there would be a lack of PPE and intensive care ventilators.

  The British In Vitro Diagnostics Association, which represents 110 companies that make up most of the UK’s testing sector did not receive a meaningful approach from the government asking for help until April 1

  By February 21, the virus had caused 2,300 deaths in China and was taking a foothold in Europe with Italy recording 51 cases and two deaths the following day. Nonetheless, Nervtag, one of the key government advisory committees, decided to keep the threat level at “moderate”.

• 17/04 — THE NICE GUYS

• 16/04 — THREE IDENTICAL STRANGERS

• 16/04 — The Arrestables by Jeremy Harding

  “XR had three demands and addressed them to government: it should ‘tell the truth’ by admitting to a ‘climate and ecological emergency’; it should ‘act now’ to bring carbon emissions to net-zero by 2025 and halt the decline in biodiversity; it should create a citizens’ assembly to advise government on how to reach the 2025 target. Managing a ‘just transition’ away from carbon – rebuilding livelihoods for workers in declining sectors of the economy, for instance – would be the objective; spreading the pain of the transition fairly, at home and in the Global South, would be the utopian principle.”

  “Crucially, they believe that it only takes 3.5 per cent of a population – sometimes less – to mount a non-violent protest and achieve success.”

• 15/04 — GARFIELD GETS REAL

• 13/04 — THE SERVANT ( < 12/04)

  Man Out of His Element: Joseph Losey in the 1960s

• 12/04 — PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE ( < 11/04)

• 09/04 — BOOKSMART

• 09/04 — “Wipe Out” — 99% Invisible

• ( < 05/04) — Something, Something, Something Murder by Damon Lindelof

  A almost-daily serialized story for NextDraft to help us, and him, through the quarantine

• 04/04 — A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan ( < 14/03)

• ( < 03/04) — TIGER KING: MURDER, MAYHEM AND MADNESS*

  “Frosted Flakes” — Still Processing. What Tiger King says about America’s unique relationship to freedom.

• 03/04 — “Delicious Vinyl” — Still Processing

• 02/04 — IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA: SEASON 14* ( < 16/03)

March 2020 #

• 29/03 — NOUGHTS + CROSSES* ( < ?)

• 26/03 — BACKDRAFT

  “It’s a living thing, Brian. It breathes, it eats, and it hates. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling, not because of the physics of flammable liquids, but because it wants to.”

• 20/03 — “Everyone’s a Critic” — This American Life

  “The music was loud, repetitive, and vacuous. Church is to elevate us to God, not bring him to human level.” Two stars. From France, “This is a scam. The children singing are circus animals.” One star. From Italy, “Don’t choose this place if you are expecting the gospel style of Sister Act.” One star.

• 15/03 — WHITE BOY

  Documentary about White Boy Rick

• 14/03 — Hostile Environment - How Immigrants Become the Scapegoats by Maya Goodfellow ( < 07/03)

• 13/03 — MAN ON A LEDGE

• 12/03 — “Confronting a Pandemic” — The Daily

• 10/03 — UNCUT GEMS (again)

• 09/03 — THE FIGHTER

• ( < 09/03) — “13 Minutes to the Moon - Series 2 - Apollo 13”

• 07/03 — NARCOS: MEXICO: SEASON 2* ( < 16/02)

• 07/03 — The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe ( < 16/02)

• 01/03 — How Stephen Miller Manipulates Donald Trump to Further His Immigration Obsession

• 01/03 — I will make you pay

February 2020 #

• ( < 24/02) — BETTER CALL SAUL - SEASON 5*

• 18/02 — “How do you track extremists online?”

• 16/02 — INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS’ WITTY SLATE CLAPPER*

• 16/02 — She Said by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey ( < 11/02)

• 15/02 — HUSTLERS

• 15/02 — “Wake - Still Processing”

• 14/02 — “The Catch and Kill Podcast with Ronan Farrow” ( < 27/11/19)

• 11/02 — “Chasing Cosby” ( < 14/01)

  Six-part podcast series. Essential listening - although some of the details are difficult going. In the week where Snoop Dogg called out Gayle King and ended with “Free Bill Cosby” and where Bill Cosby thanks Snoop Dogg for calling for his freedom - it is worth remembering how monstrous Cosby was for years.

  ‘You can hear their pain’: Chasing Cosby and the rise of #MeToo podcasts

• 09/02 — SNOWPIERCER

• 09/02 — PARASITE

• 08/02 — UNCUT GEMS

• 08/02 — The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy ( < 01/02)

• 08/02 — McDonalds Is Impossible

• 07/02 — “The Woman Defending Harvey Weinstein”

  “I was almost done interviewing Weinstein’s defense attorney when I decided to ask one more question: had she ever been sexually assaulted? “I have not,” she said at 23:50. “Because I would never put myself in that position.” Then things really heated up.”

• 01/02 — The Night of the Gun by David Carr ( < 23/01)

January 2020 #

• ( < 31/01) — HIGH LIFE

• 29/01 — Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert Caro (Audio) ( < 16/01)

  See Robert Caro

• 26/01 — THE EDGE OF DEMOCRACY*

  A new film argues that Brazil teeters on the brink of authoritarianism. It’s true

  How and Why The Intercept Is Reporting on a Vast Trove of Materials About Brazil’s Operation Car Wash and Justice Minister Sergio Moro

• ( < 26/01) — William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever by John Higgs

• 26/01 — STEVE McQUEEN YEAR 3 at Tate Britain

• 26/01 — WILLIAM BLAKE at Tate Britain

• 25/01 — LUCIAN FREUD: THE SELF-PORTRAITS at The Royal Academy

• 25/01 — PICASSO AND PAPER at The Royal Academy

  How Picasso’s Muse Became a Master

  “And lives were trampled. Picasso died, at the age of ninety-one, in 1973. In 1977, Marie-Thérèse Walter hanged herself; eight years later, Jacqueline Roque, Gilot’s successor and Picasso’s second wife, shot herself in the head. Paulo, his son with Olga, drank himself to death, in 1975, and Paulo’s son, Pablito, killed himself by swallowing bleach when he was barred from attending his grandfather’s funeral. This is a body count out of Greek tragedy.”

• 24/01 — “Episode 10: Charlie Brooker, screenwriter” on In Writing with Hattie Crisell

• 24/01 — “Kantor and Twohey: The Reporters Who Broke the Harvey Weinstein Story” on Here’s the Thing with Alec Baldwin

• 24/01 — THE TIME YOU HAVE (IN JELLYBEANS)*

• 24/01 — AN INVOCATION FOR BEGINNINGS*

• 24/01 — GOLDMAN v SILVERMAN*

• 24/01 — JOHN MULANEY AND STEPHEN COLBERT EXPLORE EACH OTHER’S DEEPEST ANXIETIES*

  “The worst dancer at a wedding is the one not dancing”

• 23/01 — An American Marriage by Tayari Jones ( < 12/01)

  There’s a lightness in the way it unfurls by alternating first hand narratives — race and gender the constant under (and over) current. The impact of society’s ills in the form of a cruel event. Real and fully formed — yet flawed — characters helpless, shaped by the world (and their upbringings) and yet determined despite it.

  “But someone was going to pay for what happened to Roy, just as Roy paid for what happened to that woman. Someone always pays. Bullet don’t have nobody’s name on it, that’s what people say. I think the same is true for vengeance. Maybe even for love. It’s out there, random and deadly, like a tornado.”

• 20/01 — HARD UP*

• ( < 18/01) — THE OUTSIDER*

• 14/01 — FIGHT CLUB ( < 13/01)

  ‘No chapter was longer than a music video’: Chuck Palahniuk on how he wrote Fight Club

• 12/01 — On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein ( < 28/12)

  I didn’t really understand what the Green New Deal was. I didn’t connect with it and when it was spoken about in the U.S it was the missteps which came first and then the inevitable pushback.

  This book, which comprises 10 years worth of Klein’s writing, helped me to understand. FDR’s original New Deal was a response to a national emergency — The Great Depression. During the New Deal decade, 10 million people were directly employed by the government, hundreds of thousands of buildings were built, 2.3 billion trees were planted and hundreds of thousands of public works were created. Supporters of the Green New Deal are intentional with reworking the name because the climate crisis requires an equally bold, adventurous — government backed — and immediate response.

  1. A Hole in the World (2010) — The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (the largest spill in US waters). BP refused to contemplate failure — spending $39 billion over 3 years on oil and gas exploration and $20 million a year on accident prevention.
  2. Capitalism vs. The Climate (2011) — The belief in some quarters on the right that “climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism.” The shift, over time, in perceptions around climate change and the declining belief that fossil fuels are a cause. There used to be bipartisan support (up to ~2008) and now its a key part of the ongoing culture wars. While those on the right see things as a conspiracy — their conclusions in themselves aren’t wrong. Capitalism is antithetical to what needs to happen (that said Soviet-era state socialism was a disaster for the climate too)

• ( < 12/01) — TRAVELERS (s2)*

• 12/01 — MACGRUBER Ditched

• ( < 11/01) — Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino

• 11/01 — TRAVELERS (s1)* ( < 06/01)

• 11/01 — Nam June Paik

• 11/01 — 1917

• 11/01 — The Harvey Weinstein Case, “Part 1” and “Part 2”

• 09/01 — The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow ( < 8/12)

• 08/01 — A BIGGER SPLASH

• ( < 07/01) — “The D.C. Snipers — You’re Wrong About”

• 05/01 — POINT BREAK

• 05/01 — ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ.

  It’s a strange film because it’s played like a “based on true events” but isn’t. Denzel Washington is great. Colin Farrell too easily eases away from scumbag to ally and what’s to be made of the ending: success by filing?

• 04/01 — THUNDER ROAD ( < 03/01)

  Starring, written and directed by Jim Cummings. His acting is something to behold. I found his changing facial expressions and moods mesmerising. The opening scene originally based on this short. The flipside to the Blinded By the Light coin.

• 01/01 — MYSTIFY: MICHAEL HUTCHENCE*

  A bit confusing in parts (the bit between MaxQ and INXS, haircuts and back), sometimes the home shot footage really worked and sometimes you could see they didn’t quite have enough. Some fascinating details about Michael which I didn’t know though — the splitting up of his family, his brother and the 'hit over the head’ theory was compelling. We know how it ends but still very sad watching it happen.

• 01/01 — THE 25 BEST FILMS OF 2019: A VIDEO COUNTDOWN*

  The full list:

  1— Portrait Of A Lady On Fire, 2— Parasite, 3— Little Women, 4— Ad Astra, 5— The Farewell, 6— The Souvenir, 7— Uncut Gems, 8— Synonyms, 9— Her Smell, 10— Knives Out, 11— The Irishman, 12— Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, 13— Pain and Glory, 14— Midsommar, 15— High Life, 16— Varda par Agnès, 17— Diamantino, 18— Transit, 19— Atlantics, 20— A Hidden Life, 21— I Lost My Body, 22— The Beach Bum, 23— The Hottest August, 24— Us, 25— Hustlers