WHAT I'VE BEEN WATCHING: DECEMBER 14 - DECEMBER 16

It's been a pretty slow week for me, meaning lots of time to catch up on some 2020 releases. Here are four that I find notable for various reasons, and my thoughts.

I'M YOUR WOMAN (2020), filmmaker Julia Hart's latest is a neo-noir from the point-of-view of Jean, the wife of a criminal who has been cast aside following her husband's latest job-gone-wrong. Hart attempts to reinvent the crime genre with a feminine perspective, but it's a shame the film is so tedious and ineptly written. Much of the film is a waiting game: waiting for something to happen, waiting for Jean to do something about her circumstances, waiting for the film to find its footing. Most of which never come to fruition. Stream on Amazon Prime Video.

TENET (2020), Christopher Nolan's latest sci-fi epic is just that: an epic. At 2 hours and 30 minutes, Tenet is a lot of movie. And it's all the better for it. Whereas the plot might feel convoluted, and it may feel like a choppy ride, the magnificence of the film cannot be understated. It is grand, ambitious, and mostly successful. I had a blast watching John David Washington and Elizabeth Debicki navigate their roles within this, at once hugely complex and occasionally stupid, world, and in the end, I was left with a sense of awe. I really liked this one. Buy on iTunes, Amazon Video, Google Play, or Youtube for $19.99.

THE PROM (2020), Ryan Murphy's feel-good musical about a queer teen barred from the prom and a rag-tag group of Broadway theater hacks who travel to Indiana to help, is absolutely monstrous in ways both good and bad. Nicole Kidman is wonderful, however, as the cow-bell playing Chicago understudy and James Corden delivers a mesmerizingly atrocious performance as a gay actor has-been, complete with an offensive lisp. The entire project is bizarre, almost indescribable, and surprisingly heart-warming, even if heavyhanded is too inadequate a term to describe the film. Stream on Netflix.

TIME (2020), a profound documentary about the prison industrial complex and its effect on a family of eight as the father, Rob Richardson, serves a sixty-year sentence for robbery. The film reads as a lyrical poem, eloquently portraying the love that emanates from the Richardson family as well as the loss and pain. Beautifully mixing black-and-white home footage with digital cinematography, the project is both a stunning time capsule of a family's love and loss, as well as a striking indictment of the prison industrial complex as a vehicle for modern-day slavery. Stream on Amazon Prime Video.