my favorite movies of 2020:

(1) The Father

(2) The Trip to Greece

favorite of 2020:

The Father

(Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Olivia Williams, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell. Directed by Florian Zeller.)

Anthony Hopkins won the Oscar for Best Actor at age 83 — and became the oldest person ever to win any acting Oscar — for playing a father with dementia (also named Anthony) in this daring and unsettling movie. Variety’s review summed it up:

“The Father” does something that few movies about mental deterioration in old age have brought off in quite this way, or this fully. It places us in the mind of someone losing his mind — and it does so by revealing that mind to be a place of seemingly rational and coherent experience. …

All the actors in “The Father” are vivid ([Olivia Colman] brings her role a loving vulnerability that warms you), but Hopkins is flat-out stunning. He acts, for a while, with grizzled charm and roaring certainty, but the quality that holds his performance together, and begins to take it over, is a cosmic confusion laced with terror. Anthony is losing more than his memory — he’s losing himself. The triumph of Hopkins’ acting is that even as he does, you’re right there with him.

(How to stream The Father.)

2nd favorite of 2020:

The Trip to Greece

(Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon. Directed by Michael Winterbottom.)

This movie and the earlier ones in The Trip series (which were some of my choices for 2010 and 2017 plus one that’s not on this list) all focus on comedic banter between the same two friends, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon — British actors playing themselves. Each movie also brings up drama involving their families or relationships, but The Trip to Greece takes a darker turn than the earlier movies. The dramatic parts of these movies might feel unsatisfying, but you can appreciate them if you see them not as full-fledged plot arcs, but as rough sketching to add dimension to the two men and to contrast with the comic masks they wear when they’re around each other.

High points of The Trip to Greece include Bergman-esque black and white dreams Coogan has while his father is ill, and Coogan and Brydon’s ad-libbed vocalizing to imitate Gregorian chant while floating through caves which ancient Greeks believed were pathways to the underworld — you can see a bit of that at the beginning of this trailer:

We’ve not got much time left. You gonna miss me?

Oh, yes … and no!

Yes and no?

I find you very entertaining … but you can be exhausting.

Exhausting? Me? Good God, you should meet you!

Stream it on Hulu or these sites.

Click here for the full list of my favorite movie(s) of each year from 1920 to 2020.