• The Forty-Year-Old Version

    Screenplay by Radha Blank
    Essay by Gina Prince-Bythewood

    Our stories are so vast yet so vastly untold. To center a Black woman in her own story takes courage and heart and fight and vision. And Radha Blank has mad vision. “The Forty-Year-Old Version” is a revelation. A sunburst of energy and light that inspires by its sheer audacity. Her film just made me happy. Everybody has a story only they can tell. The great ones tell it in a way that allows an audience to see themselves in it. “The Forty-Year-Old-Version” is so distinctly personal, yet so completely universal. It reflects an artist’s journey. To have a story that burns inside of you, yet no one sees it but you. It inspires courage to stay true to yourself, your art, your soul. It is art imitating life. Yet one cannot dismiss this art as Radha just telling her own story. She has drawn from her own tragedies, and humiliations, and mistakes and triumphs and crafted a classic underdog story with the dopest soundtrack that has its own story to tell. It is a personal story told brilliantly. That brings the audience into her world, her struggles, her dreams, and makes them our own. She draws us in with pathos and humor and truth. Oh, and that humor, mined from vulnerability and self-deprecation, endears us fully. It’s the specificity, the world-building, the complete flipping of tropes. To leave us with hope, and a belief in ourselves. That is the power of her pen. Radha is an artist who has found her unique voice. And used her courage and grit to show us.

    Gina Prince-Bythewood has directed and written such influential feature films as “Love & Basketball,” “The Secret Life of Bees” and “Beyond the Lights.” Most recently, she directed the Netflix blockbuster hit feature “The Old Guard.” Among the accolades Prince-
    Bythewood received for her work on the film include the Nancy Malone Directing Award from New York Women in Film and Television. Prince-Bythewood’s next feature film will be directing the historical epic “The Woman King” for TriStar Pictures, starring Viola Davis.

  • Judas and the Black Messiah

    Screenplay by Will Berson
    and Shaka King; story by Keith Lucas and Kenneth Lucas
    Essay by Baratunde Thurston

    I was shaking after I watched “Judas and the Black Messiah.” I felt rage, betrayal, sadness, awe and deep love simultaneously. This film’s moving images and more moving words transformed me in two hours and refreshed my education about my own people’s struggle for freedom. “Judas and the Black Messiah” is an unflinching gaze into the life and assassination of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton.

    I chose the word “assassination” purposefully. Police shot and killed this young leader in his home while he lay sleeping. I feel compelled to choose the right words because words have power, and because Shaka King, Will Berson and the Lucas brothers have placed these words with the care of munitions experts, timing them to explode off the screen and into our minds at just the right time.

    Of course, words in film require a delivery mechanism, and we have the most capable in this cast. Daniel Kaluuya (as Hampton) and LaKeith Stanfield (as Panther member and FBI informant William O’Neal) carry the bulk of this weighty story. And maybe it’s just me, but I thought I saw flashes of the tortured, captive duo we first saw together in “Get Out.” As I watched Stanfield, I just kept wondering, how is he holding all this together?

    Jesse Plemons (as FBI agent Roy Mitchell) and Martin Sheen (as J. Edgar Hoover) give us a window into the raw, racist fear of America’s most powerful and how far law enforcement will go to defend the status quo.

    But it’s with Dominique Fishback (as Deborah Johnson) that “Judas” departs from so many earlier retellings of the Black liberation struggle that tend to tell the story of men, with women present but lacking power or even full selves. Not so in “Judas.” It’s Johnson who challenges Hampton, a man well-versed in power, to more carefully consider how to use the power within his words. Then she helps him do it. It’s Johnson, in one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, who communicates the unique weight Black women bear in American society and the movement for Black liberation.

    “Judas and the Black Messiah” is a story of contradictions, within people and within the nation. When I was a child growing into my own political awareness and perspective, my mother would say to me, “heighten the contradictions.” She wanted me to turn up the contrast of stated values versus behavior. I thought she had made that phrase up. Turns out she probably got it from the Black Panthers! They saw themselves as working to heighten the contradictions so people could more easily see the corruption and racism of our society and choose something different.

    We are ready for this film. We’ve been primed recently by the racialized impact of COVID and police violence and unchecked white insurrection. That priming helps us see that America of the early 2020s looks too similar to America of the late 1960s. Both Americas are filled with contradictions, and “Judas” heightens them beautifully.

    Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated host, speaker and author of the New York Times bestseller “How to Be Black.” He is the executive producer and host of “How to Citizen With Baratunde,” which Apple Podcasts named one of its favorites of 2020.

  • Herself

    Screenplay by Clare Dunne and Malcolm Campbell; story by Clare Dunne
    Essay by Richard Curtis

    I think this is a beautiful and very timely script. Its starting point is the subject of domestic abuse, which has risen horrifically during the pandemic, such an important subject, here treated with truth and horror and yet some hope. And the second subject of the film is kindness and community, again, the big reveal of these COVID times — and the writing there is so gracious and delicate — small gestures, slight moments of what goodness and friendship feel like when you come into contact with them — beautifully cast small characters whose every word and deed confirms their personality. And then, the central plot, the building of a home for someone without a home, is both big and bold and cinematic — but also small and personal.

    It’s very interesting to me that the script is co-written by Clare Dunne and Malcolm Campbell. It’s the first script by Clare, the actress who plays the lead, her first film role, and it has all the integrity of a very personal project, and the confidence that the finished film is exactly what the writer intended.

    I worked with Danny Boyle last year, who said to me wryly, “The only things that matter in a film are the beginning and the end — and the beginning not so much.” This film satisfies his advice — a brutal and shocking beginning that lays out the stall of the subject matter with economy and skill — and then a powerful, deeply visual, double-edged ending that has all the intelligent, perceptive balance of the film as whole.

    Richard Curtis is an Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning screenwriter and producer, known for “Love Actually,” “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and “About Time.”

  • I'm Your Woman

    Screenplay by Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz

    Essay by Aneesh Chaganty

    Patient writing in thrillers is as common of an aspiration as it is difficult to achieve. More often than not, thrillers that attempt to allure audiences with quiet stories result in exciting pitches, but bloated screenplays. “I’m Your Woman” is not only a patient story, but also, the rare thriller that uses its silences perfectly. Its precise writing turns this often-hushed tale into a high-stakes affair of following the breadcrumbs — with just the right amount of dialogue and action to keep the audience on its hero’s trail before unexpectedly, and often beautifully, earning its keep as a thriller. And what a hero! In Jean (played by Rachel Brosnahan), writers Julia Hart and Jordan Horowitz recognized the vast potential of taking a rarely represented, albeit storied, archetype of the crime genre and turning a film’s entire spotlight … on her. It’s a brilliant writing decision that provides invaluable narrative specificity and cinephelic wonder. I felt like I was discovering a new room in a house I’d visited at least a hundred times since I was a kid. How had I not been here before? Writers Hart & Horowitz know this; it’s what gives them permission to take their time and what allows the story to succeed at its deceptively tight-roped intention. Until suddenly, bang.

    Aneesh Chaganty is the co-writer and director of “Searching” and “Run.”

  • The King of Staten Island

    Screenplay by Judd Apatow, Pete Davidson and Dave Sirus
    Essay by Mike Birbiglia

    Most people equate anti-heroes with characters like Tony Soprano or even Han Solo. They’re characters who give us every reason not to like them and yet somehow, we still do. In drama they tend to be characters who sometimes even kill people and retain a certain irresistible charm. They’re robbing you, but they’re smiling as they do it.
    Comedy can be more challenging when it comes to anti-heroes because one of the most common notes from Hollywood studios is that they want the comedic characters to be more “likable.” But often this process results in a death by a thousand cuts. Likable cuts. We end up with comedies that feel less like life and more like fantasy.

    Enter Judd Apatow.

    Apatow has always gravitated toward comedic anti-heroes, whether in “Larry Sanders” or “Knocked Up” or “Trainwreck.” He takes the risk of creating a protagonist the audience may not like, but executes a literary magic trick so that by the end of the film we do like the character, but in a way that we didn’t expect. In “King of Staten Island,” Apatow teams up with comedy star Pete Davidson and “SNL” writer David Sirus to create the character of Scott Carlin.

    Scott is unemployed, aimless and often stoned. He’s an aspiring tattoo artist whose only guinea pigs are his friends and occasionally unsuspecting, underage kids. When Scott is kicked out of his mother’s house, he’s forced to find a job, a place to live and a general direction for his life.

    A hapless Scott says to his younger sister Claire (Maude Apatow) just before she leaves for college, “I’m going to open that tattoo restaurant. I looked it up. I Googled it. It’s never been done — not even as a joke.”

    Claire doesn’t see it. She says, “No one wants to go to a restaurant and watch people get tattooed while they eat. It’s gross.”

    “It’s the best idea ever,” Scott retorts. “Ruby Tattoos-day. Where everyone’s welcome.”
    In another scene with the siblings, Claire tells Scott that “time is slipping away,” to which Scott replies, “Why do you think I smoke so much weed? So I can slow it down.”

    Scenes like these hang a lantern on the blend of inherent conflict and humor of life. Claire doesn’t see a path for Scott. Which is painful. And sad. And funny.

    These scenes feel like life and simultaneously serve the larger story the writers are telling. By the end of the film, Scott starts to see a path for himself. This path is flawed and never fully resolved. But he’s trying. We’re laughing as we watch him try. We’re choked up because we’re rooting for him.

    Mike Birbiglia is a comedian, actor and writer who most recently wrote the Broadway hit “The New One,” which became a book of the same name. Birbiglia also wrote the book “Sleepwalk With Me” as well as the feature film adaptation of the same name which won the Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. He is the writer and director of the critically acclaimed film “Don’t Think Twice,” starring Gillian Jacobs and Keegan-Michael Key. As an actor he has played recurring roles on the show “Billions” as well as “Orange Is the New Black.” He also acted in Judd Apatow‘s 2015 film “Trainwreck.” He currently has a weekly podcast called “Working It Out,” where he invites guests to try new material, including an episode with Judd Apatow.

  • Mank

    Screenplay by Jack Fincher
    Essay by Andrew Kevin Walker

    Don’t ask me about “Mank.” I have no objectivity to offer. I mean, a film made by more than a few immensely talented people I’m blessed to count amongst my closest friends, including the director, my beloved, (yes, editor, I am sure I want to put a comma there) David Fincher? A film that is a beautiful, frayed-at-the-edges valentine to Olde Tyme Hollywood, and at the same time a mirror held up to our corrupt, modern days of propaganda-skewed politics? What do you suppose I, a lowly (and often inebriated) screenwriter, think of this celebration of a lowly (and understandably inebriated) screenwriter, whose whip-smart remarks rival even the Greatest-Movie-Ever-Made dialogue he’s putting to paper? I do feel like you’ve got to see “Mank” more than once to truly appreciate its visual and auditory splendor, and to keep up with the crackling dialogue. Additionally, I did, I must confess, visit the set several times, back in the days (soon to return, one hopes) when such a thing was possible. But it isn’t only that I stood there on the soundstages of Los Angeles Center Studios, watching slack-jawed while the cast and crew bottled lightning. Or that I got to witness firsthand as Mr. Oldman expertly brought Mank to affable life. I was also privileged to have known the screenwriter who wrote “Mank,” David’s father, the late Jack Fincher. A kind and intelligent man. A dignified man. A man for whom, when I watched “Mank” the first time and saw his credit, “Screenplay by Jack Fincher,” on the silver screen, I shed a tear, wishing he were still around to see that title card for himself. So, anyway, like I said … don’t ask me about “Mank.”

    Andrew Kevin Walker is a screenwriter and producer known for having written “Seven,” for which he earned a BAFTA nomination for original screenplay, as well as several other films, including “Brainscan” and Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow.”

  • Never Rarely Sometimes Always

    Screenplay by Eliza Hittman
    Essay by Haim

    To say we were profoundly moved by Eliza Hittman’s poignant movie “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” would be an understatement. Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder elevated an already exquisite script with performances that kept us on the edge of our seats, teetering between fear and hope for the journey they embarked on with little more than each other. To watch these two young women, bound together with a connection that radiated safety, love, support and lack of judgment, was as breathtaking as the onscreen chemistry of the actors.

    The scene in which the movie gets its title is devastatingly moving and only one of many moments in the film that made our hearts ache and sink. Hittman’s filmic silence speaks louder than words, leaving us to engage with Autumn in powerfully subtle intimacy.
    There is no underscoring the importance of this movie, especially now when the future for Planned Parenthood is so uncertain. Hittman handled this intense and delicate subject in her movie with a grace and authenticity we could only hope as a society to attain in life. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is more than a work of art: it’s a haunting window into what it is like for many young women today who are facing one of the most important decisions of their lives as it pertains to their mind and body. It’s a reminder that women’s healthcare is imperative, important and to be watched closely as this movie.

    The musical group Haim are sisters Este, Danielle and Alana Haim, hailing from
    Los Angeles. The band’s critically lauded albums include “Women in Music Pt. III”
    and “Days Are Gone.”

  • On the Rocks

    Screenplay by Sofia Coppola
    Essay by Susan Orlean

    I wish my dad had been a smooth, witty super-wealthy art dealer (alas, he was merely a nice, clever real estate developer). And I wish, when I suspected my ex-husband was cheating on me, that I would have enlisted my dad’s help and we would have tracked my ex to Mexico (sadly, my ex chose Buffalo as his love nest — go figure). I wish the experience of teaming up on the find-the-cheater mission would have brought me close to my father, the way trench warfare bonds soldiers. I wish our banter had been economical and revelatory (we tended more toward sloppy and obfuscating). In other words, I wish I could live inside the world of “On the Rocks,” where these wishes come true, and the world has a crispness and clarity that feels exceptional. “On the Rocks” is about wishes: Wishing your marriage still had honeymoon electricity, and that domestic and child-rearing chores energized you rather than depleted you, and that disconnection between intimate partners can be rewired and repaired. Sofia Coppola builds this movie like a piece of ballet, each principal whirling in his or her own private pirouette, glancing off one another and changing course. Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, daughter and father, come together and then apart and together again, and we realize, in the end, that it’s their relationship, not Jones’ marriage, that is being fixed here. He’s the selfish, vain, charming absentee dad whom the dutiful daughter fears she can no longer beguile, now that she’s a sweatshirt-wearing, breathlessly busy mom. You don’t really worry that Marlon Wayans is cheating on Jones. Coppola, in her magically sneaky way, has redirected us with the lightest, surest touch. It’s the father/daughter relationship, not the marriage, that’s “on the rocks.”

    Susan Orlean is the author of eight books. In 1999, she published “The Orchid Thief,” a narrative about orchid poachers in Florida. It was made into the Academy Award-winning film, “Adaptation,” starring Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. Orlean has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1992. She is currently adapting her novel “The Library Book” for television.

  • Palm Springs

    Screenplay by Andy Siara
    Essay by Kumail Nanjiani

    I judge a comedy by how upset it makes me. As I watch a perfect comedy movie unfold, delight turns to envy to jealousy to anger. I start hoping for some misstep so I can finally start enjoying myself again.

    “Palm Springs” made me absolutely furious.

    I was watching this perfect movie waiting for some flaw to give me an excuse to say, “Yeah it’s really good, but….” No miscues came. I was enraged.

    Siara’s script takes the familiar and makes it new, subverting expectations at every turn. Oh you’ve seen a movie about people stuck in a time loop right? How about two people stuck in a time loop? How about three?

    And you’ve seen people realize they’re in a time loop and try various ways to get out of it. Well, here, Nyles has been stuck long enough that he says, “Can we skip this part?”
    What happens then, as an audience, is we get to experience a familiar premise in a way that completely avoids every single expectation we have of that premise.
    That fact highlights the ways in which the script is a mix of contradictions and opposites. It’s familiar and completely original. It’s sad and full of joy. It’s sincere and cynical. It is a film about stasis that is constantly evolving.

    We watch this story of people reliving the same day over and over and all we feel is the exhilaration of discovery. In that way, the experience of watching the film perfectly mimics the message of the film, summed up by the following exchange:

    “What if we get sick of each other?”

    “We’re already sick of each other. It’s the best.”

    Life is boring, repetitive, mundane and full of joy, excitement, love. Isn’t that great?

    No it’s not. I’m absolutely furious.

  • Soul

    Having grown up in the South Side of Chicago — the biggest Black ghetto in America during the Great Depression — I didn’t exactly come up in an environment that fostered childhood safety, let alone creativity. There were no film or television programs created to spark the mind of a child, and access to other media of inspirational content was limited. With such a background, I can’t help but marvel at the external, visual beauty of “Soul,” as well as the internal beauty of its storyline.

    In December 2018, director Pete Docter and producer Dana Murray came to my home to have a conversation about my jazz roots, as they were in the process of developing Pixar’s newest film, which would eventually become “Soul.”

    From the incorporation of jazz, one of the greatest African-American contributions to culture, to the prevalent conversation around finding one’s own purpose, screenwriters Docter, Kemp Powers, Mike Jones and the entire Pixar team have created a truly unique animated experience.

    It’s incredibly special to see jazz portrayed on the big screen for kids, because with America being one of the few countries without a minister of culture, it’s evident that our collective culture tends to lose sight of its roots. But if you know where you come from it’s easier to get where you want to go; and ultimately, the role of educating the next generation about our culture is placed in the hand of creators themselves.

    I can attest to the power of jazz as a uniting force, and the film captures much of what makes it special: mentorship, music education, improvisation, perseverance, balance and being present in the moment. Hiring my little brother Jon Batiste to do the jazz in the film helped keep the jazz element of the film real. And seeing the kids in Joe Gardner’s band room reminded me of when my high school band teacher, Parker Cooke, allowed me to have free rein over class instruments because I didn’t have any at home. It just goes to show you that a person’s belief and support is often the greatest gift you can receive!

    I had the honor of presenting Pixar with its first Oscar in 1996 for “Toy Story,” when I produced the Academy Awards, and it’s astounding to see how far it’s come. Aside from the overall beauty of “Soul,” it’s apparent that many of the questions Joe Gardner and Soul 22 ask themselves are somewhat reflective of questions that many of us viewers have been prompted to ask ourselves throughout the year 2020 and beyond. Congratulations to the entire team on a job well done.

    Quincy Jones’ career has encompassed the roles of composer, record producer, artist, film producer, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist, TV producer, record company executive, television station owner, magazine founder, multimedia entrepreneur
    and humanitarian. He has received an Emmy, seven Oscar nominations, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and 28 Grammys. In 2016, Jones received a Tony for revival of a musical for “The Color Purple.”

  • Sound of Metal

    Screenplay by Darius Marder and Abraham Marder; story by Darius Marder and Derek Cianfrance
    Essay by RZA

    A picture can paint a thousand words. But how many pictures can words paint? In our profession as screenwriters, we must always keep that equation in our creative consciousness. It’s our job and our goal to guide our interpreters, which include cast, crew and directors with the clearest path to paint the visual moving images we’ve scripted. Although writers accomplish this daily, it’s not an easy task, so I can imagine the “multiple” of the task that befell Darius Marder and his brother Abraham penning “Sound of Metal.” The film not only achieves in painting the boisterous “punk” grind of a fledgling metal band (with a bold female lead singer “Lou” played by Olivia Cooke) but it seamlessly intertwines it with the emotional turmoil of the rapid loss of a musician’s most important sense, sound (a tatted-out drummer Ruben played by Riz Ahmed). The writers were able to communicate these ideas internally and externally. Sonically, harmonically and even enharmonically. This was done so well that while watching the film, there were moments where I had to check my own hearing (mic check, one-two, one-two)…. The revulsion of being a musician losing his hearing in the middle of a tour wasn’t only achieved in the writing and remarkable acting of Riz Ahmed, but also in the choice of frequencies used in the sound design. I always wondered, did George Lucas write the sound for his lightsabers or laser blasters? Now I ask, did the Marder brothers write the low-frequency filter sweeps and the smothered mids in “Sound of Metal”? I would guess yes, just as I would guess they wrote the muted sign language dialogue between characters, the disturbing distorted sounds of the implants, and the thought-provoking gesture of every tattoo. This is what writers do. We write so the word can be “seen” and “heard” and in this case “unheard.” In my humble opinion, a screenplay translated into a movie should either have you walk away with questions or maybe obtain some answers. Darius Marder’s “Sound of Metal” does both. Thanks, guys.

    Robert F. Diggs, aka RZA, is a recording artistand founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan.

  • Borat

    Screenplay by Sacha Baron
    Cohen & Anthony Hines &
    Dan Swimer & Peter Baynham
    & Erica Rivinoja & Dan
    Mazer & Jena Friedman & Lee Kern; story by Sacha Baron Cohen & Anthony Hines & Dan Swimer & Nina Pedrad;
    based on a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen
    Essay by Peter Farrelly

    The world’s premier satirist, Sacha Baron Cohen, has come through again with the inspired, entertaining, and painfully relevant “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.” The original 2006 “Borat” is a masterpiece and one of my favorite comedies of all-time. “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is better. Unquestionably the most prescient movie of the year (or maybe any year), it doesn’t just resonate — it illuminates, predicts and warns, all the while making you laugh your ass off.

    Smartly directed by Jason Woliner, this is a hard movie to define. It’s a comedy first, but it’s also a thriller and a horror movie and a PBS-type special chronicling the deterioration of a nation in real time. Whereas the original had our favorite Kazakh chasing Pamela Anderson around the globe, this time he’s chasing a much less alluring muse — Mike Pence — during the waning days of the Trump epoch, a time when, for approximately 40% of our nation, truth has become subject to interpretation and a lack of evidence is proof that someone is out to get them. Throwing Borat and his long-suffering daughter Tutar into this mix is like trying to park a tour bus in a Trader Joe’s parking lot, but, surprisingly, they fit right in. Maria Bakalova’s high-energy turn as Tutar is sneaky brilliant, like a hen in the Fox News house. She’s a one-take wonder and deserves a bunch of award nominations, as do the writers. Sacha Baron Cohen deserves everything — for his performance, the cultural-significance of the project, as well as the heroism it took to make this. This is death-defying moviemaking of the highest order — and behind-the-scenes clips that Baron Cohen released alongside the film show just how dangerous it got. When Borat moves in with a couple of affable QAnoners for a long weekend, we’re horrified mainly by the men’s beliefs. But when they take him to a gun rally and Borat sings a song about the “Wuhan Flu,” the violence gets as real as Cartel Land as the assault-rifle-packing crowd attacks the stage with blood-thirst in their eyes. This is like doing Buster Keaton’s falling half-house stunt without the benefit of a rehearsal, a tape measure, or maybe even a window.

    Peter Farrelly is a two-time Oscar-winning filmmaker of “Green Book” netting Academy Awards in both the best original screenplay and best motion picture of the year categories. Farrelly, along with his brother Bobby Farrelly, is also the multi-hyphenate behind iconic American comedies such as “Dumb and Dumber,” “Shallow Hal,” “Me, Myself & Irene” and “There’s Something About Mary.”

  • The Trial of the Chicago 7

    Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin
    Essay by Peter Morgan

    It’s axiomatic to say Aaron Sorkin is gifted. But his work — always sharp, erudite, provocative, is also a gift to us. It gives those of us living outside America the gift of a window into the American psyche. It gives his fellow Americans the gift of a mirror into which to gaze to make sense of themselves. And the exacting standards he sets for himself gives mainstream cinema and television the gift of a playwright. Indeed his latest original screenplay — which ranks alongside his very best — harks back to his theatrical roots. Thirty years after “A Few Good Men” first opened on Broadway, in its moral force and idealism, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” also bears comparison with the mother of courtroom dramas, “12 Angry Men.” But where Lumet’s jury room was cramped and oppressive, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” is cinematic and epic: it zips and glides between past and present, particularly in one of the film’s most rousing scenes, which flits between Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and William Kunstler’s (Mark Rylance) mock cross-examination, one of Abbie Hoffman’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) freewheeling live performances and the clashes outside the Haymarket Tavern. As the sequence builds in intensity, the segments speak to each other across time and space, and you sense a playwright turned filmmaker relishing this vaster canvas; the canvas of American history itself.

    Returning to the theme of gifts, “Trial of Chicago 7” is also a Santa sackload of great parts for an exceptional company of actors, many of whom have rarely been better. But perhaps the biggest gift Sorkin dispenses, and the reason I’m here, chiming in, is the gift he gives his fellow writers. With “Trial of the Chicago 7” he once again succeeds in making me want to go back to my desk and write, to make sense of the madness around me. And in times as challenging and dispiriting as these, that’s the biggest gift of all.

    Peter Morgan is the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of “The Queen.” His other film credits include “The Last King of Scotland.”

  • First Cow

    Screenplay by Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt; based
    upon the novel “The Half-Life” by Jon Raymond
    Essay by Marilynne Robinson

    “First Cow” shows us the frontier as it must have been, squatters in Eden, itinerants of various nations gleaning the wilderness to sustain a tenuous life. Pompous Empire is there, too, and a crude economy based on beaver pelts that will collapse should fashions change in Paris. But these dwellers in unchinked cabins are acting out old humanity in a new world for no reason they can describe, or because things were harder elsewhere. The film is visually beautiful, in the way forests are when they are seen up close, not made sublime by distance. The story turns on a relationship of courteous loyalty that develops between two strangers. Where a conventional writer or filmmaker would exploit the period and the setting for the action and adventure we might reasonably expect, the eye of this movie is the moment of calm peacefulness enjoyed by two friends amidst the storms of greed, urgency and strife. This is a bold shift of emphasis, like the decision to put acts of violence off-stage, or to acknowledge that most of the wanderers into the West would not have owned a horse or a gun or a presentable suit of clothes. The mythic chivalry of errant gunslingers might have some basis in history apart from its celebration in contemporary dime novels. And what has it left us but a fascination with guns and with violence as the resolution of conflict. We now in our strange moment can see civilization the way these frontiersmen saw it, as random, frayed, as surviving among us as habit and nostalgia. And through it all what matters more than those sabbaths of unanticipated affinity and loyalty that make us friends?

    Marilynne Robinson is the author of “Gilead,” winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; “Home” (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and “Lila” (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and “Jack” (2020). Her first novel, “Housekeeping” (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award.

  • French Exit

    Screenplay by Patrick deWitt; based on his book
    Essay by Rodrigo Amarante

    Azazel Jacobs and Patrick deWitt are probably not gonna like what I have to say, but it’s too late to go back now. After watching this film, it’s hard to see them separated. They’ve created a third thing with this film, a perfect amalgam. It must hurt to see it. I’ve read deWitt’s books and have seen Jacobs’ films, and I loved both of their works, each with a very unique voice, each with a talent for creating worlds where likelihood is thankfully abandoned for the sake of luring you into a tale, to reflect something that is yours. I think that a story, a poem or a painting, can be read, and thought about, but it only really becomes useful if you have found yourself in it, like a dream. That’s when the story reads you, if you’re lucky. This film did this to me.

    It seems here that deWitt’s words, his particular style of dialogue, switching from refreshingly implausible to the kind of naturalism that most can’t fit into fiction, could only be enacted with Jacobs’ also unique sense of scene, of acting. I can’t separate them anymore. The space Azazel leaves, never underestimating the audience, never glossing nor greasing his characters, letting you think for yourself, is the perfect match to Patrick’s story and dialogue. They both have a playful generosity in their work, they do not shout to be understood, they whisper to have you come close and see for yourself.

    “French Exit” is a story that unfolds like no one would guess, especially touching because it hits you not where you have covered. It isn’t a story about leaving, let alone silently, but a departure from this very strategy. The title suggests the opposite of what the film brings forth at first; an overly announced exit, only to have you believe you get it when characters move to France. But that sense of comfort serves to leave room to reflect what is behind it, quietly charged: the plan to do so, and what it says about the maker. This reflects over every character, each with their own expectations, their own plans. It reflected over me. “French Exit” is less a film about a trip than it is about luggage.

  • News of the World

    Screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies; based on
    the novel by Paulette Jiles
    Essay by Kirk Ellis

    Paul Greengrass’ and Luke Davies’ script for “News of the World” is an exemplary adaptation. Faithful to the basic story architecture of Paulette Jiles’ award-winning 2017 novel, the remarkably spare script finds a cinematic equivalent to the author’s austere style and retains Jiles’ dark, elegiac vision of the West even as it compresses events and characters and invents situations absent from the source material. Perhaps the script’s most impressive quality is its essentially non-verbal expression, befitting the story of a taciturn war veteran and a semi-feral captive who must find a way to communicate that transcends language. In Greengrass and Davies’ version of turbulent post-Civil War Texas, words are fraught with peril. Even the stories from faraway places Tom Hanks’ Captain Thomas Jefferson Kyd reads to packed houses can prompt gunfire and riots. When people do speak, they speak simply and to the point.

    The script further pares back Jiles’ already stripped-down narrative, eliminating the (admittedly complex) Reconstruction Era subtext and narrowing the focus entirely to the growing bond between Captain Kyd and his charge, Johanna. The story exists entirely in the present, with only occasional, enigmatic references to the past — a necessary reminder that exposition and backstory are the two most overrated (and overused) elements in mainstream American screenwriting.

    In this existential approach, as well as its journey structure, “News of the World” at times recalls the elemental majesty of the classic “Ranown” series of late-1950s Westerns written by Burt Kennedy, directed by Budd Boetticher and starring Randolph Scott, plain-spoken tales of retribution told with simple elegance, also centered on a solitary man thrust into unexpected alliances. And like the best Westerns, it finds all-too-contemporary relevance in traditional archetypes.

    Kirk Ellis won two Emmysand the Humanitas Prize for his work as writer and co-exec producer on the HBO miniseries “John Adams.” Ellis is currently partnered with Fremantle TV and Israel-based Abot Hameiri (producers of “Shtisel”) as sho runner for “Bibi,” an ongoing dramatic series based on the life of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

  • Minari

    Screenplay by Lee Isaac Chung
    Essay by Alexander Chee

    “Minari” writer-director Lee Isaac Chung began his script with a disarming simplicity: he set down his Arkansas childhood memories as he could remember them, finding the story there. He refined the material even further over meals with the cast during filming. And so a scaffolding of what he couldn’t forget became this unforgettable story.

    Scintillating, intimate, immediate, “Minari” moves from one indelible scene to the next, asking and answering questions, stated and unstated, with the smooth assurance of a masterpiece that knows itself. Each member of this Korean immigrant family is starting over in this Arkansas landscape, even if they didn’t mean to, and they are trying to hold on to each other, even if, maybe, they can’t do both: The boy who complains his grandmother “smells like Korea” and picks a switch for his father to spank him; the big sister who lives every day watching over her brother, afraid for his life; the father who just wants to succeed once in this new world where no one tells him how things are done; the mother, who feels erased by her husband’s dream; the grandmother, who can’t cook but can play cards, showing up with red pepper flake, anchovies, an envelope full of cash and some minari seeds. These are the kinds of details you can’t fake, made available through this kind of autobiographical writing, resulting in a new quintessential story of our community’s history in America.

    Alexander Chee is an award-winning novelist and essayist, most recently the author of “How to Write an Autobiographical Novel.” He is a professor of creative writing at Dartmouth College.

  • Nomadland

    Screenplay by Chloé Zhao; based on the book by Jessica Bruder
    Essay by Cheryl Strayed

    Early on in Chloé Zhao’s extraordinary film “Nomadland,” Fern (Frances McDormand), a 60-ish widow who’s living alone in her van in the wintery high desert plains of Nevada, is asked if she’ll adopt an abandoned dog she’d found earlier that day. “No,” she says and, a couple minutes later, she pats his adorable head and walks away.

    “She’ll come back for him,” I said to my husband with certainty. Of course she would! That’s what happens in movies when a solitary character comes upon an orphaned dog. They make everything better for each other. The two of them become best friends. The inevitability of their bond becomes the very meaning of the movie: the savior becomes the saved.

    But I was wrong. Fern doesn’t return for him. Alone, she moves on.
    The blunt fact of that is one I keep returning to as I ponder “Nomadland” in the days since I first watched it, perhaps because Fern’s decision, and the way it both upends our expectations and rebuffs our longings, is emblematic of so much in this beautiful, unsparing film. Zhao — who wrote, directed and edited the movie — knows what we want. She decided to give us the truth instead, in all of its complexity and contradiction.

    “Nomadland” is a melancholy film, but not a sad one. It’s a solitary film, but not a lonely one. It’s a road film, but one more rooted in the wild, unpaved landscapes beyond. It’s a film about people who have been victimized, but who will not be victims. Of all the things I loved about the movie — and I loved everything about the movie — I loved its embrace of complexity and contradiction the most. Its sensibility is grounded in the knowledge that many things can be true at once.

    As the film opens, Fern is grieving her late husband, Bo, reckoning with her long goodbye of the place where they’d once made a home — the company town turned ghost town of Empire, Nevada — and learning to live as a nomad in a van she calls Vanguard. Over the course of the year that follows, she travels throughout the American West and Midwest, taking seasonal jobs that pay just enough for her to cover her expenses. Along the way, she meets other, more experienced, nomads, most of them senior citizens who’ve been wounded one way or another, who welcome her into the fold, share stories with her around bonfires, and offer her their practical advice and spiritual wisdom about how to make a life on the road. The most prominent of them are Linda May, Bob Wells and Charlene Swankie, who were first featured in Jessica Bruder’s powerful book, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century,” upon which the film is based. They play themselves in the movie alongside the exquisite (and exquisitely unvarnished) McDormand with stunning ease and candor.

    I don’t remember the last time I loved a movie as much as I love “Nomadland.” The look of it (cinematographer Joshua James Richards makes a poem of the American West with his camera). The sound of it (Ludovico Einaudi’s score is so moving you could watch the movie with your eyes closed). And most of all the tough shimmering truth of it that knows in the end we can only save ourselves.

    Cheryl Strayed is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestselling memoir “Wild,” the New York Times bestsellers “Tiny Beautiful Things” and “Brave Enough” and the novel “Torch.” Strayed’s books have been translated into nearly 40 languages around the world and have been adapted for both the screen and the stage. The Oscar-nominated movie adaptation of “Wild” stars Reese Witherspoon as Cheryl and Laura Dern as Cheryl’s mother, Bobbi. “Tiny Beautiful Things” was adapted for the stage by Nia Vardalos, who also starred in the role of Sugar/Cheryl. The play was directed by Thomas Kail and debuted at The Public Theater in New York City. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast “Sugar Calling” and “Dear Sugars,” which she co-hosted with Steve Almond.

  • One Night in Miami

    (Screenplay by Kemp Powers; based on his stage play “One Night in Miami….”)
    Essay by Jeremy O. Harris

    I held my breath and held my partner’s hand while waiting at the climax of Kemp Powers and Regina King’s “One Night in Miami” to see what decision Muhammad Ali would make, as though I was back in a dimly lit theater among an audience breathing the same air as the actors performing for them. So alive were these performers and so rich their words that the weight of thousands of tar of theatrical history pummeled me in the chest and demanded I let loose my breath then grab hold to someone near. The power of a skilled dramatist is to take ideas into their hands like a rope used to tie an audience inextricably to the circumstances of the characters so that through the mimesis on display we begin experiencing the world as they do. This skill is rarely amplified with the care and nuance that King brought to it as a director nor of this cast as a company but when it is, it is undeniable that works borne of the theater are incomparable to those borne anywhere else.
    To know as well that Kemp Powers, one of America’s exciting new voices, trusted that his words, ideas, and the collision of circumstance he conceived in his fictional account of real events could translate into a cinematic world without pomp or circumstance is a testament to his intellect as a screenwriter. Yet, the trust that of placing this work in the hands of one of America’s greatest actresses in her directorial debut is another testament and lesson to younger less-trusting writers because who else could have had the patience, eye and intellect to know how extend that trust to four great actors. Moreover, who else would know how to beat out his rhythms and his ideas with this company and not for them but a great actor? “One Night in Miami” is a masterclass in stage to screen adaptation and a testament to trust and skill being the classic foundation to great cinema.

    Jeremy O. Harris is the playwright and creator of the most Tony-nominated Broadway play ever, “Slave Play.”

  • Pieces Of A Woman

    Screenplay by Kata Weber;
    based on her stage play
    Essay by Gabor Mate

    “Martha is fine. She is always fine,” is one of the opening lines in Kata Weber’s soul-searing screenplay. Uttered by the lead character’s partner, Sean, a sensitive and vulnerable latter-day Stanley Kowalski, the assertion is almost immediately belied by the calamity that follows. The rest of the film dramatizes what is not fine about Martha and her world, but ultimately is. That paradox illuminates Weber’s script.

    Although there is drama aplenty in Weber’s rendition of what was originally a two-act stage play, directed in this movie version by her husband, Kornél Mundruczó, the subtlety in Weber’s writing of Martha and its nuanced realization by Vanessa Kirby is the interiority of the real action. We, the audience, are invited into Martha’s heart and mind as she endures the unspeakable loss of her newborn, the dissolution of her relationship and the well-meant but unfeeling demands of her Holocaust-survivor mother, Elizabeth, enacted with steely elegance by the redoubtable Ellen Burstyn.

    Films often portray trauma, but rarely with the keen insight Weber brings to the subject. Trauma, and its transcendence, are at the core of her story. The birth and death of Martha’s infant, depicted in a remarkable extended single shot scene that virtually moves the audience from witnessing the tragedy to experiencing it, serves to instigate new trauma. More accurately, it reveals the trauma that the seemingly functional lives of the main characters have harbored all along. For Sean, it triggers a spiral into familiar patterns of escape and self-destruction. Elizabeth’s response is to insist that her daughter emulates her defiant and vengeful response to her own birth trauma in Nazi-occupied Hungary. The redemption for them all, and for the audience, is Martha’s recognition of the transcendent and soul-rescuing difference between grievance and grief. “We shall be saved in an ocean of tears,” a great psychologist once said. Martha’s wisdom and salvation is that she emerges from benumbed rage to embrace sorrow.

    Gabor Maté is a retired physician and globally reknowned author.

  • The White Tiger

    Screenplay by Ramin Bahrani; based on the book by Aravind Adiga
    Essay by David S. Goyer

    Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s novel “The White Tiger” is the kind of film the traditional studios rarely make anymore — a keenly observed social satire depicting one man’s struggle to escape India’s soul-crushing caste system. In short, it’s a film about “real life.” A film designed to provoke its audience. And while the film takes place in India, Bahrani’s real target could be seen as the economic disparity baked into the fabric of America. We’d like to believe in the Horatio Alger myth — and indeed aspirants from all over the world long to emigrate to the Shining City on a Hill — but the simple truth is, the Western World is just as socially stratified as India.

    In Bahrani’s parable, there are those who starve and those with full bellies. It’s a modern-day “Great Gatsby” by way of “Goodfellas” and as a fellow screenwriter I find Bahrani’s screenplay impressively deft. Adaptations are harder than most people realize, particularly when dealing with source material as densely layered as this and told in first-person narration. The screenwriter has to decide what to keep, what to condense and what to excise. In a way, it’s like sculpting. Adiga’s novel is filled with interior observations, many of which had to be reconfigured into more exterior, cinematic moments. Economic inequity is a theme running through most of Bahrani’s work — from “Chop Shop” to “99 Homes” — but this is his most ambitious and accomplished work to date.

    David S. Goyer is a writer and producer, known for “Dark City,” The Dark Knight” and “Batman Begins.” His most recent projects include the Netflix horror series “The Sandman” and the sci-fi series “Foundation.”

  • Promising Young Woman

    Screenplay by Emerald Fennell

    Essay by Lisa Taddeo

    There is nothing I like to do better than excuse a woman for taking vengeance, nothing in the world.

    Emerald Fennell, who variously and freely understands that certain shades of pink are as good for disemboweling as they are to frost a cake, does more than merely excuse.

    Her “Promising Young Woman” is the antidote to the rape fantasy.  What if that drunk girl you picked up—you slimy nice guy who probably fills empty bottles of Barolo with boxed wine—what if she wasn’t drunk? What if the little steps you took towards evil could be seen in glaring black light? What if she had a glittering knife?

    That’s one of the core ideas of this lucid powder keg but it quickly heats and expands until it explodes its premise, glorifying all the complexities of a woman while also showing how that complexity can be used against her.

    “Young Woman” is comprised of at least five different genres and did not follow any rules, except the rule of never being boring. What Carey Mulligan did with Fennell’s words was not acting or existing but something that marries the skill of the former with the effortlessness of the latter. I couldn’t take my eyes off the palliative pinks and the sly, dark roses and the vortex blacks and wow lady, the devilishly-calibrated soundtrack drove home every scene. “Heathers” crossed with “Kill Bill” woven through with the raw silk passion of “San Junipero,” as timeless as it is futuristic as it is Velvet Underground as it is Cyndi Lauper.

    I felt both sunk and empowered after watching it. But mostly what I felt was admiration, and gratitude. Thank God there are women in film.

    Lisa Taddeo is an author, journalist and two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize. Her 2019 nonfiction book, “Three Women,” became a No. 1 New York Times international bestseller and is currently being adapted by Showtime as a TV series. Her debut novel, “Animal,” will be published in June.

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