scaryblog

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #12 : Queen & Slim Of all the films released in 2020, Queen & Slim was perhaps the 2020-est. Following two young African Americans who meet on a Tinder date and get plunged into a nightmare when a cop car pulls them over, Melina Matsoukas' film tackled police brutality and mass protest in scenes that echoed out in real life as the year progressed. But despite its bleak subject matter and the righteous anger fuelling it, Queen & Slim again and again finds beauty amidst the horror which features too much in the Black experience, whether it's the stunning visuals captured by cinematographer Tat Radcliffe, or the tender romance that unfurls between Jodie Turner-Smith's Queen and Daniel Kaluuya's Slim – a pair who, on their first date, wish they'd swiped left on each other. A road movie with an important destination, it gets there in style. This is a film I've had on my list to watch for some time ...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #13 : 1917 Much was made of the sheer technical achievement of Sam Mendes' World War I movie, presented as one extended take through the Boschian hellscape of the frontlines. And it is an astonishing feat – seamlessly stitched together, Roger Deakins' camerawork fluidly taking in every assault and eerie landscape. But 1917 is an emotional, visceral experience too, George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman putting in excellent, empathetic performances as the soldiers dispatched across No Man's Land to stop thousands of British soldiers walking into a devastating ambush. A frequently harrowing, heart-stoppingly tense cinematic odyssey – and filmmaking at its most immersive. This is a film I thought I'd already written up, but when I went to include the link to it for #12 in the list, I found that no such write-up exists. Which makes it the rarest of things - a film I actually chose to watch without some list telling m...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #14 : Hamilton Is it a film or not? Either way, it's one of the most outstanding and defining pieces of popular culture of the last decade, Lin-Manuel Miranda turning dry American history into a dazzlingly entertaining tale of bitter personal rivalry, revolutionary war, and the power of words. The songs, inspired by decades of hip-hop, are beginning-to-end sensational – but the real treat of the Disney+ version, filmed with the original Broadway cast in 2016, is getting up-close and personal to its knock-out performances. It's a vantage point that might ordinarily cost you hundreds of dollars. You can see the fire in Leslie Odom Jr.'s eyes as he sings 'Wait For It', feel Phillipa Soo's utter heartbreak in 'Burn', and – yes – almost feel the spray of Jonathan Groff's liberal saliva in the King George numbers. Dropped on the streaming service right in the middle of lockdown, Hamilton was vital e...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #17 : Tenet After the CIA-wetwork-level secrecy, the hype, the endless headlines about its release-date slippages and whether it could save cinema, Christopher Nolan's palindromic pulse-pounder turned out to be, well, just a film. But it was a film that kept us all talking throughout the dog days of summer, the actual 150-minute tale just a launchpad for feverish time-travel debates that made some at Empire turn into Charlie Day jabbing at an evidence board in It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Not all the dialogue was audible. The third act required DIY flowcharts to track. And it's debatable whether it needed to wrap up with a rap whose lyrics include "Last time I did the whippets (yeah)/ Last time I live reverse (yeah, yeah, ooh)". But still, this was an all-caps EVENT MOVIE in a year with very few of them – and a staggeringly smart one too, scenes looking like a Bond flick but sounding like a Mensa conv...

Continuing my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #18 : Onward Released just before the pandemic ramped up, Pixar's adventure fell prey to cinema closures – but turned out to be the ideal film for lockdown, with its fantastical escapism, gags galore, and themes celebrating the life-affirming bonds of family. Director Dan Scanlon drew from intensely personal details of his own upbringing and the father he never got to know, channelling it into the story of elf brothers Ian and Barley Lightfoot (a charming Tom Holland and Chris Pratt) as they embark on a magical quest to meet their deceased dad for one day only. In true Pixar style, it's incredibly emotional – with a beautiful final reel that delivers what audiences need rather than what they maybe wanted. But it's also a big, joyous adventure flick, with thrilling setpieces, D&D references aplenty, a surprising elf-mom action hero, and genius sight gags. Onward brought cathartic laughs and tears in a year when pe...

Starting my trip up Empire's   top 20 films of 2020 #20 : Host Here's a film that could truly only have been made in 2020. For most movies, the Coronavirus pandemic halted production – but for Host, it made it possible. Writer-director Rob Savage, and co-writers Jed Shepherd and Gemma Hurley, cooked up an ingenious lockdown horror presented as one terrifying Zoom call – and who can say that they didn't have one of those this year? Host's simple online-séance-goes-awry premise delivers more than its fair share of supremely inventive jolts, tailor-made to Zoom's video-call features, right down to its brilliant final credits. And for all its serious spooks it's laugh-packed too, with pitch-perfect performances from an utterly believable ensemble cast. The inevitable prospect of 'pandemic horror' wasn't exactly enticing – but Host made it essential, offering up one of the most complete and satisfying filmic experiences of the year in a runtime under an h...