Year in Review: Best Onscreen Chemistry of 2020

by Team Experience

Chemistry may be something you can predict in a lab but in showbiz it's always been volatile, elevating some projects to unpredictable heights and dooming others with its absence or withholding or misdirections. Strong onscreen chemistry may be far less rare than capturing lightning in a bottle but it can feel just as miraculous. In the studio system they'd seize on any great example and repurpose it by ordering additional pairings of the stars involved. Modern Hollywood executive (and the stars themselves to some degree) have been notoriously dumb about capitalizing on incredible partnerships. This has made great onscreen chemistry basically a one & done phenomenon for the most part for decades... and thus all the more ephemeral and precious. So let's celebrate it.

We polled Team Experience on "best screen chemistry of 2020" and pooled the results. Sound off with your own in the comments... 

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Review: Sofia Coppola's "On the Rocks"

By Lynn Lee

What happens to a poor little rich girl when she grows up?

That question has fueled Sofia Coppola’s career, both to her benefit and to her dismissal by those who find her voice out of tune with the times.  I’m not one of the latter, so I sometimes feel oddly defensive about enjoying her films.  Although she’s far from the only writer or director to focus on the interior lives of wealthy white people, there’s something about her work that provokes a particularly insidious disdain in a way that Downton Abbey or Wes Anderson, say, does not.  Gender is an obvious factor in that difference, plus the shadow of her father and the advantages she’s assumed to have derived from him, as well as the limitations on her perspective of her own privilege.  Impatient viewers chafe at her characters’ seeming lack of chafing or rattling of the bars of their gilded cages, which Coppola presents less like cages than delicately tinted soap bubbles, their inhabitants’ discontents and subversions more often internalized than explicitly articulated.

Coppola’s latest feature, On the Rocks, plays in many ways like a wryly self-aware response to her critics...

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