To say 2020 has been a rough year would be a gross understatement. Sometimes, it helps to pinch one’s self, as a kind of gentle reminder that what we’re living through is not normal, and that it won’t always be this way. Many of us have been put through the wringer this year (again, an understatement), and we can only hope to emerge on the other side with more reluctant hope for what comes next, less time for Donald Trump and his criminal ilk, and dreams of a vaccine reaching the American public sooner rather than later.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2020
Throughout the year, while many of us were sequestered at home trying to avoid getting sick, films old and new provided a refuge and a very necessary distraction from what was going on in the world. Criterion Channel subscribers could do a deep-dive into 1940s Columbia noir or the obscure filmographies of slept-on auteurs like Julie Dash and Sara Driver, while a broad holiday comedy like Clea Duvall’s excellent “Happiest Season” emerged as a progressive, crowd-pleasing corrective to a yuletide-movie formula that has become as bland as day-old egg nog in recent years. My larger point: whatever else this year decided to throw at us, you can’t say we didn’t have plentiful viewing options.
The films I’ve chosen to write about for this list are films that largely emphasize the importance of connection, in one manner or another. Many focus on a personal connection, friendship, or working relationships. Others are about how artists connect with audiences, musicians with crowds, or, in one instance, how a long-married couple tries and fails to reconnect with one another. We must all remember that, while many argue that the primary job of the movies is to entertain us, that is also an art form that can teach us about the world. In that sense, movies have become even more of a conduit for connection than they were before (Roger Ebert’s immortal quote about cinema as a “machine that generates empathy” comes to mind).
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2021
Here are the ten films I enjoyed the most this year. As always, thank you for reading.
Click here to follow along with our various Best of 2020 lists.
10. “Beanpole”
From a level of pure narrative, “Beanpole” is about many things. This anguished masterpiece from Kantemir Balagov is a study of two women who tend to the sick and invalid. It is also about losing a child. It’s about the bond between people whose only common ground was surviving an unthinkable time. It’s about the foolhardy yet morally imperative notion of sustaining hope in a world that gives you no reason to do so. In its own wrenching, way, “Beanpole” is one of the rawest and most radically empathic movies of 2020. This is an odd thing to articulate when one considers how grueling most of the film is. It seems naïve to hope that most viewers will come away from Balagov’s latest praising its inherent sense of compassion: after all, this is punishing, capital-A arthouse filmmaking that slithers along at a disciplined crawl, interposing instances of cruelly mesmeric poetry into its confidently woven narrative fabric. “Beanpole” is an open wound of a movie, one whose gaze is powerfully focused on the trickle-down side effects of mass genocide; in this case, the idea that a nation can collectively experience PTSD. Sound familiar? Despite the grim onslaught, “Beanpole’s” elicitation of spiritual emptiness is one of the most disquieting visions that cinema has offered us in 2020. The film’s expression of demonstrative emotion, particularly carnal impulses such as lust and sexual affection, only emphasizes the futility of attempting to live frivolously during a time when one’s humanity is on the line. What makes “Beanpole” linger in one’s memory is Balagov’s suggestion that we should keep going, keep loving, keep living, even if it seems like there’s nothing worth living for. To aspire towards something grand in the wake of a cataclysm – that requires true bravery.
9. “Sound of Metal”
There is a seething yet serene intensity in the filmmaking of Darius Marder’s savage “Sound of Metal” that will immediately register as recognizable to viewers, such as this writer, who grew up banging their heads to heavy metal records. On paper, the film’s logline makes it sound like yet another slice of tastemaker-approved misery porn, and yet the reality is that this somber, extraordinarily compassionate realist drama is anything but. Riz Ahmed gives the performance of a lifetime as Ruben, a jumpy, unwaveringly single-minded sober addict who plays drums with his partner Lou (Olivia Cooke, astonishing) in an underground noise-metal group. When we meet him, Ruben is rapidly losing what little hearing he has left. “Sound of Metal” seamlessly bridges a tricky tonal gap between its first and second acts: going against our expectations, the film mellows out, receding from the frazzled early scenes before becoming, like Ruben, more at peace with itself. The first-rate sound design mirrors Ruben’s disorientation, drowning us in hellacious feedback before letting us soothe in restorative waves of silence. It’s reductive to call “Sound of Metal” an indie recovery movie, but part of what makes the film so affecting in 2020 is the relatable human spectacle of seeing an ordinary individual endure loss before building themselves back up again, piece by piece, with resilience and grace. “Sound of Metal” depicts hardship with painstaking quotidian observation; we see Ruben come undone more than once, although Marder is wise to never condemn his character’s flawed behavior. There is not a single moment of false sentiment in this harrowing and wrenching tale of survival: the filmmakers consistently make the smart choice in scene after scene, all the way up until the breathtaking final sequence, in which all of the film’s melodrama turns out to be earned.
8. “Mank”
Any fears that David Fincher would gloss over the scandal and bottomless greed of Hollywood’s golden age can effectively be put to bed after one has seen “Mank,” the iconic director’s immaculately dreamlike, hypnotically dense deep-dive into the psyche of “Citizen Kane” screenwriter and perpetually sozzled Tinseltown insider, Herman J. Mankiewicz. There’s an alternate version of “Mank” that plays like a distant cousin to “The Artist”: that is to say, an overly glitzy paean to the salad days of the last great art form, one that overlooks the ugliness and avarice that the business was partly founded on. Then again, Fincher is the guy who gave the world the likes of “Zodiac” and “Se7en”: grisly, classical American nightmares rooted in a profoundly unaffected cynicism. Fincher’s lack of faith in human progress is genuine; as bracing as, say, finding your wife’s severed head in a box. If the elegiac, politically loaded “Mank” doesn’t reach the otherworldly heights of Fincher’s earlier triumphs, it’s never for lack of grace. “Mank” is one of 2020’s most gorgeously transportive cinematic head-trips: a feverish, scurrilously sharp psychodrama (don’t you dare call it a biopic) that captures the seductive allure of the movie capital of the world in its infancy without ignoring any of the putrid principles that are integral to the industry’s inherent design. A huge part of what keeps “Mank” humming is Gary Oldman’s witty, winsome, wonderful central performance as Mankiewicz. The erstwhile man of letters was a smash on the dinner party circuit, and Oldman, uncharacteristically subdued here, masterfully captures the paradoxical sides of Mank’s bigger-than-the-room persona: the artist and the dealbreaker, the idealist and the pragmatist, the life of the party who, moments later, descends into slurring, drunken lunacy. Making a great film about the canonical great film is, generally speaking, an undertaking reserved for madmen. Lucky for us, Fincher is still as mad as ever.
7. “Minari”
Lee Isaac Chung’s extraordinary “Minari” is named for a bitter, resilient Korean herb that is capable of thriving in even the most unforgiving environments. In another filmmaker’s hands, “Minari,” a tender immigrant story whose emphasis on seemingly unremarkable domestic routine echoes the seminal social dramas of Yasujiro Ozu, might have been obvious, cloying, and unpersuasive. And yet, there is a remarkable, gently breathtaking pull to the quietude of Chung’s film that is designed to wash over the viewer like a warm bath. Watching “Minari” during one of the most difficult weeks of my life – a week where I lost my grandmother, and languished, along with my beleaguered fellow citizens, at the hellish spectacle of the most soul-draining election cycle in recent memory – felt like drinking a healing cup of tea before getting an amazing night’s sleep. This movie is just that delightful, but it’s also a whole lot more, in its own genteel, unobtrusive way. “Minari” is a work of seamless character drama that is deeply concerned with cycles of regeneration and endurance, so it stands to reason that the film has a regenerative and enduring spirit of its own. “Minari’s” rueful, wholly unexpected climax, which brought tears to my eyes, tips its hat to the resoundingly hopeful ending of Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson,” which suggests that there is hope for rebirth in the wake of destruction. Like the robust and hard-wearing seed that gives Jacob’s clan reason to believe that their stay in America will be a fruitful one, “Minari” is built to last: it is a resplendent humanist triumph that reflects the strength of one family in the face of impossible odds.
6. “First Cow”
“First Cow” is a pure-hearted, impossibly sympathetic picaresque that’s content to meander and find its own way: it’s a kind of shambling arthouse buddy movie that’s been set against a frontier backdrop and imbued with the classic American soul of John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, Edna Boies Hopkins, and John Sayles, while nevertheless being unmistakably, unavoidably a Kelly Reichardt joint. “First Cow” is blessed with a thoughtful, literary-feeling authorial touch, and while the film’s roundabout diversions might seem minor in the grand scheme of things, they eventually come to reveal a rich well of meaning. Reichardt’s latest is a sneaky, often marvelously muted deadpan comedy about our country’s flawed “by-the-bootstraps” ethos, as well as an unforgettable fable about male friendship. In so many fewer words: “First Cow” is a movie that’s ostensibly about two reluctant pals that ultimately ends up being about a nation’s identity. “First Cow” is also about the difficulty of pulling off life’s first act; the film certainly acknowledges that the era it depicts was far from an unforgiving one. Reichardt also understands that, in spite of the hardships of frontier life, people need and have always needed something to soothe their souls, whether this proverbial tonic existed in the form of whiskey, sugary comestibles, or an affirming talk with a friend. Reichardt uses silence and languor the way some painters use light and shadow, and audience members who have had their attention spans destroyed by decades of brain-frying Hollywood products may react to the film with hostility. That would be a shame. If only more movies were as tranquil, delicate, and lovely as “First Cow.”
5. “American Utopia”
“We know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been.” These lyrics kick off “Road to Nowhere,” a transcendent hymn to the transitory nature of existence penned by David Byrne and the Talking Heads. Intentionally or not, the lyrics of “Road to Nowhere” also function as a kind of philosophical mission statement for the band itself. The Talking Heads have remained relevant for nearly four decades because they are one of rock n’ roll’s most enduringly human groups. The band’s songs traffic in the confusion and ecstasy and chaos of real lived experience: one reading of “Once in a Lifetime” suggests that the song is about becoming disillusioned with having everything, “This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)” is a string of non-sequiturs about venturing outside of yourself only to end up right back where you started, and “Life During Wartime,” well… it’s not really about what the song’s title promises, but it still slaps after all these years. Spike Lee’s almost overwhelmingly blissful “American Utopia,” a sensational, you-are-there live interpretation of Byrne’s endlessly playful artistic mindscape, nearly matches Jonathan Demme’s immortal “Stop Making Sense” for the sheer scope of its fervid, shape-shifting sense of invention. Particularly during a year where each passing day can feel more despairing than the one that came before, “American Utopia” is so euphoric that it practically feels like a drug: if nothing else, the film is a joyous and hyper-kinetic celebration of the act of living. The numbers in “American Utopia” are imbued with the choreographic dexterity of ballet, the spontaneous glee of an all-night jam session, and the outré athleticism of a sports match, and during a year where some of us have forgotten how to exist around other people, Lee’s landmark of concert cinema is a welcome reminder of the need for human solidarity in the face of hopelessness.
4. “Mangrove” / “Lovers Rock”
Steve McQueen is an inimitable visual artist whose work tends to cut closest to the bone when he’s telling a story that is fundamentally political in nature. With “Small Axe” – an astonishing anthology of five McQueen-directed films, each focusing on a different element of London’s diverse West Indian community, largely as that community has struggled with political upheaval, fractured family ties, and the oppression of Black bodies at the hands of a bigoted police force – the great director is returning to his roots. The result is one of his most galvanizing works. The shattering first chapter, “Mangrove,” is perhaps the most hard-hitting of the five films: it’s the story of a former Caribbean restaurant in West London’s Notting Hill neighborhood, the Mangrove, which allegedly played host to a rotating local gallery of intellectuals and radicals, and what exactly transpired when principled, working-class Trinidadian owner Frank Critchlow (Shaun Parkes, revelatory) took a stand against the cretinous local police. If “Mangrove” is a slice of earthy social realism in the vein of Ken Loach (with a dash of courtroom drama thrown in for good measure), the intoxicating and rapturous “Lovers Rock” showcases McQueen at his most expressionistic. Pretty much the entirety of “Lovers Rock” highlights the beauty of bodies in motion – singing, dancing, awash in the welcome presence of strangers –and this exuberant chapter showcases McQueen’s lesser-seen romantic side. Other films, particularly the John Boyega-starring “Red, White, and Blue,” which looks at the futility of attempting to change systemically corrupt institutions from the inside out, are similarly riveting; you’d better believe that McQueen hasn’t lost an ounce of his arthouse cred after taking a rare swing for the mainstream with 2018’s “Widows.” The spirit of “Small Axe” is genuinely militant, and there’s a lot to admire in McQueen’s refusal to tone down his signature severity and formalist rage for middlebrow audiences who refuse to acknowledge that the injustices depicted in both “Mangrove” and “Lovers Rock” still persist today.
3. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”
Until now, Eliza Hittman has specialized in woozily erotic mood pieces about the magnetic pull of summertime lust. Hittman’s first two films (“Beach Rats,” “It Felt Like Love”) were staged against the permanently humid backdrop of under-depicted Brooklyn enclaves like Gravesend and Bay Ridge, and while there are countless attributes that make Hittman an ingenious and innovative storyteller – her aversion to needless expository dialogue, the startling degree of regional specificity in her films, her ease with first-time performers – her confidence has never been on display more so than in her soft, jagged, totally heartbreaking, and ultimately note-perfect road movie, “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.” Hittman has previously been compared to the likes of Claire Denis and Larry Clark, but with this poetic and starkly openhearted drama, Hittman is cementing her status as an artist that other filmmakers should be comparing themselves to. This is simply one of the most unflinchingly honest movies about being young and adrift that has seen a U.S. release in years, and the fact that Hittman made a film this candid and unvarnished for a studio like Focus Features is nothing short of a miracle. “Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always” is an intricate marvel of texture, empathy, and immersive neo-realist storytelling, and Hittman lends even the film’s more minor moments a verisimilitude that is redolent of John Cassavetes at his most humane, firmly establishing this tale as that of a young woman navigating an inhospitable, male-dominated urban ecosystem on her own terms. It is that rare film that makes time to understand the perspectives of each of its characters – it is far too generous to judge them – and in this writer’s opinion, it is one of the more emotionally rewarding independent features to see a release this decade.
2. “The Nest”
Aspirations to affluence can corrode your sense of happiness and render you an embittered shell of your former self, which is only one of the many dazzling insights offered by Sean Durkin’s “The Nest,” a brilliant, entrancingly patient, fearlessly ugly study of one family’s emotional unraveling. Some of us have been waiting ten long years for a new film from this director, whose last picture, the bloodcurdling cult drama “Martha Marcy May Marlene,” was one of 2011’s best and most memorably unsettling films. Durkin is clearly fixated on poisonous familial dynamics and the passive-aggressive mediocrity of would-be father figures, although Jude Law’s Rory O’ Hara – a vulpine, suspiciously enthused go-getter capitalist whose ruthless sense of ambition turns out to be his undoing– is ultimately a more pitiable figure than the sinister but aloof abuser that John Hawkes unforgettably played in “Marcy.” “The Nest,” set in the Reagan ’80s, is the story of how Rory drags his family, meaning his increasingly fatigued American wife Allison (Carrie Coon, who matches and even eclipses Law in scene after scene, giving her most accomplished performance to date), and his two impressionable children, into a mess entirely of his own making. As this is happening, Durkin skewers the Thatcher/Reagan dogma of putting oneself first with a surgeon’s sense of remorseless precision. Much of “The Nest” will be watched with a hand placed over one’s mouth, or a cool sweat nipping down one’s neck as one thinks, “This can’t get much worse, can it?” The terrible truth is this: the worse things get for the O’ Haras, the more repugnantly watchable this movie becomes.
1. “Nomadland”
The anchor of “Nomadland,” Chloe Zhao’s searing and magnificently sensitive docu-dramatic road odyssey, is perhaps our greatest living actress, Frances McDormand. It is not hyperbole to say that McDormand has never been more heartbreakingly vulnerable than she is here, to the point where this role almost feels like a kind of spiritual cleansing. This is an astonishingly restrained performance; with Zhao and cinematographer Joshua James Richards simply following the “Fargo” actress in many awe-inspiring long shots as she wordlessly traverses lonesome swaths of the forgotten American West. Zhao’s film is about the challenge of living life without a center, and how one is supposed to hold on to what’s left of one’s humanity when everything else has been stripped away. “Nomadland” also tackles the question of what it means to forge community on the margins of society, and as she did in “The Rider,” Zhao fills the corners of her story with arrestingly idiosyncratic and revealing turns from non-professional actors: most of the folks who pop up in “Nomadland” are the type we simply don’t see in movies (apart from a low-key, leathery David Strathairn, who plays a fellow nomad who takes a liking to McDormand’s central wanderer), and the fact that the writer/director/editor makes space for each of these folks to have a moment to shine alongside an honest-to-goodness star qualifies, in this context, as a profound act of generosity. “What’s remembered lives” goes the film’s most memorable line; it’s a maxim that reflects the hard-won transcendence of one woman’s journey of spiritual rediscovery as much as it does the staggering amount of loss we’ve all had to collectively endure this year. And yet, in spite of everything, this credo turns out to be true: the memory of what we’ve lost does eventually take on a beautiful new life of itself. In other words, what’s remembered truly does live.
Honorable Mentions:
Kelly Oxford’s directorial debut “Pink Skies Ahead” won’t see a U.S. release until next year, but it was nevertheless one of the more brutally funny – and brutally honest – comedies I watched in 2020. Ditto for the justifiably beloved, LOL-funny “Palm Springs,” which updated the perennial “Groundhog Day” formula for our current, upside-down era of self-isolation, ultimately turning out to be that rarest of things: a genuinely inventive, uproarious, and emotionally engaging mainstream comedy.
“Dick Johnson Is Dead” was my favorite documentary of 2020, although the engrossing “Boy’s State” and the depressingly prescient “Feels Good Man” both qualified as excellent runner-ups. “Shirley,” which almost made this list, was another victory lap for up-and-coming experimental auteur Josephine Decker, while Spike Lee’s incendiary, scorched-earth anti-Vietnam buddy movie “Da 5 Bloods” would have probably made the cut f the filmmaker hadn’t also blessed us with one of the greatest concert movies in recent memory earlier this year. “Kajillionaire” was another enchanting deep-dive into the one-of-a-kind mind of Miranda July, while the dry, serrated “Bad Education” was an exceptionally worthy follow-up for promising “Thoroughbreds” filmmaker Cory Finley.
Charlie Hunnam turned in a pair of commanding performances in two great movies that didn’t quite crack my top ten, but are very much worth seeking out: that would be Justin Kurzel’s commandingly ferocious “True History Of The Kelly Gang,” and also Max Winkler’s “Jungleland,” a brilliantly acted palookaville saga in which the “Sons of Anarchy” actor gave one of the year’s low-key great performances. There was also “Shiva Baby,” the most nerve-wracking look at contemporary Jewish anxiety since “Uncut Gems,” Thomas Vinterberg’s bruising and darkly hilarious “Another Round,” Amy Seimetz’s exceptionally unnerving “She Dies Tomorrow,” which was was well worth the wait for those who were itching for more from “The Girlfriend Experience” director, and also the gloriously whacked “Color Out Of Space,” which offered genre movie mavens a heaping dollop of psychedelic goop, Nic Cage mania, and strange things happening to alpacas.
That’s it for this year, guys! Here’s to hoping that there are brighter skies on the horizon in 2021.