When I started writing the introduction of this year’s list, I had the inevitable thought: “no one ever reads the introduction.” So I’m keeping it short this year. Short and honest. Short, honest, and shameless.
The following fifteen movies were moments of awakening from a slumber of despair. They’re not just some of the best movies of 2020—they’re handrails for an ever-steepening uphill battle. Proceed without them at your own risk. Also, sorry about the list coming a month later than usual. Beyond the obvious world-collapsey reasons for the delay, I’m also a recent graduate with a Master’s in the humanities, so it’s not like I’m putting health insurance on the table by writing things I care about. If you appreciate my work, consider a donation to help me leave day jobs behind. Maybe, with your contribution, I can put this list out on time next year.
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Honorable mentions:
THE ASSISTANT - a cold, sparse drama inspired by Harvey Weinstein’s scandals and the corporate structures that enabled him. Rocks and hard places as business calls and cubicles.
GUNDA - the documentarian behind Aquarela uses his formalist approach to make a startlingly convincing argument for veganism. A farm animal will make you cry, I guarantee it.
ONE NIGHT IN MIAMI - a superbly acted conflict-of-ideas screenplay that downplays the mythmaking power of paragons—the protagonists are Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke—for the sake of healthy argument.
THE NEST - some have called it “a horror movie without the horror”. I think of it more like a “family drama without the family”. They both fit, and they’re both compliments.
SOUND OF METAL - Riz Ahmed gives a live-wire performance in a film that puts us through hearing loss via the magic of sound design. A disability story with the rawness of an open wound.
15. LOVERS ROCK
Written by Steve McQueen and Courttia Newland, directed by Steve McQueen
If I could climb inside my screen and pop into any 2020 movie, it would be Lovers Rock—though I definitely would’ve harshed the vibe, which is kind of the point. Lovers Rock is the second film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology, a series of stories about West Indian immigrants in London, and the only entry that I wouldn’t recommend watching first. The rest of Small Axe is tales of struggle and strife, but Lovers Rock is a straight-up party. Literally: the whole thing is a one-night house party. It feels all the more euphoric in the context of the violence being escaped, so watch (at least) one other Small Axe entry before it. Then you can breathe in the thick, constant haze of weed smoke, soak in McQueen’s unusually sensitive direction, and melt away as the revelers harmonize to reggae and seize the joy that’s out of harm’s way.
Where to watch: Lovers Rock and the rest of Small Axe are streaming on Amazon Prime.
14. EXTRA ORDINARY
Written and directed by Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman
It’s hard for first-time feature filmmakers to nail down something as nebulous as tone, but Ahern and Loughman know exactly what they’re going for with Extra Ordinary. It’s a very relaxed, very silly take on the paranormal comedy (like Ghostbusters but with a dollop of Irish deadpan), and despite the clear influence of its inspirations, its low-key weirdness is always distinctive. It has an amusing habit of deflating its own tension to keep the jokes coming—like a movie comprised entirely of kooky b-plots. And what comedians to fill them with! Maeve Higgins as a medium who prefers the tedium of driving instruction? Will Forte as a one-hit-wonder who’d sacrifice a virgin for his fame back? What else do you need, permission to laugh?
Where to watch: Extra Ordinary is streaming on Fubo TV, hoopla, Showtime, Kanopy, and DIRECTV (what even are some of these?), and available for rental and purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
13. Fourteen
Written and directed by Dan Sallitt
So close!
Fourteen is a true-to-life film, even truer to life’s miserable non-rhythms than many of its mumblecore contemporaries. While the hyper-realistic, minimally stylistic American indie usually elevates just above reality with the crackle of its dialogue, Fourteen is in the mud, too tired to say anything clever. It follows the dissolution of a friendship between two women who’ve known each other since they were fourteen, dipping into moments of disconnection that could only be identified as such in retrospect—we don’t watch them drift apart so much as we keep finding them in different places. Sallitt’s spartan direction conveys the matter-of-factness of growing apart, while gut-punch performances from Tallie Medel and Norma Kuhling rattle against the cage of loss in painfully natural ways.
Where to watch: It’s available for rental and purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime.
12. EMA
Written by Guillermo Calderón, Alejandro Moreno, and Pablo Larraín, directed by Pablo Larraín
The most scintillating synthesis of cinema and interpretive dance since Madeline’s Madeline. A departure for Larraín from his previous film Jackie, which subdued the dread in its bones to echo its self-repressed protagonist, Ema is wild, expressionistic, and quintessentially queer—not only in the sexuality of its characters but in its narrative handling of sex as well. Ema grabs the madonna-whore dichotomy and shreds it, gnaws it, spits it out and engulfs it in flames. Frenzied and pornographic, it gives women an aesthetic often denied to them: maximalism. The internal, irreconcilable contradictions of womanhood are magnified and liberated with such zeal that the world is forced to lose old perceptions and adapt to what remains.
Where to watch: Depends on where you live. It shouldn’t be hard to find legally if you’re in the U.K. or Chile. Most everywhere else is being starved by limited distribution. It was streaming on MUBI for a limited time, but I’m sure none of you would go looking for a download of that stream.
11. TIME
Directed by Garrett Bradley, edited by Gabriel Rhodes
In 1997, Black parents Sibil and Robert Richardson attempted a bank robbery. Sibil took a plea deal and served three and a half years in prison; Robert, on the other hand, refused the plea deal and was sentenced to 60 years in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Time, assembled from a two-decade period of home videos and new footage, wants you to feel every day of those 60 years. It’s a film of human trial and human toll, shorn of documentary detail-chasing that would dehumanize just by distraction. By focusing solely on the Richardson family, Time’s censure of the U.S. prison system is indirect, but paradoxically, the most direct approach possible—how broken are we, that we’d demand anything more than a glance at the system’s human cost before tearing it all down?
Where to watch: Time is streaming on Amazon Prime.
10. SPONTANEOUS
Written and directed by Brian Duffield
This’ll be a cult classic in due time if the teens know what’s good for them. Easily the biggest surprise of the year for me, Spontaneous operates on a grim but fitting metaphor for school shootings: spontaneous combustion. It takes place at a high school where students start violently exploding for no reason but are expected to maintain some sense of normalcy. A freewheeling mashup of drama, sci-fi, romance, and black comedy, it’s quite the tonal octopus, sinking its tentacles into multiple genres but juggling them with the balance of one brain. And it works, save for some too-obvious political posturing. Spontaneous is an indignant burst of pop cinema that grows beyond its central metaphor to really, authentically grapple with the meaninglessness and tragedy integral to maturity. A coming-of-age story for a world that’s killing its kids.
Where to watch: It’s streaming on Epix, available for rental on FandangoNow, Google Play, and YouTube, and available for purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
9. HIS HOUSE
Written and directed by Remi Weekes
A visceral debut from Remi Weekes, His House has drawn compulsory comparisons to the work of Jordan Peele because it’s a social issue horror from a Black perspective. But where Peele’s films strip back the veneer of post-racism, His House mines the traumas of displacement and survival’s guilt, and—apologies to Peele—it does so without a pace-halting exposition dump. Following two South Sudanese refugees as they adjust to life in London and mourn the loss of their little one, the film trades in uncompromising imagery from the first minute. You’d have to work hard to justify the use of a drowned child refugee as a horror motif, but Weekes earns the gravity of that real-life evocation with a film that’s as pensive as it is scarring.
Where to watch: His House is streaming on Netflix.
8. COLLECTIVE
Directed by Alexander Nanau, edited by Alexander Nanau, George Cragg, and Dana Bunescu
In 2015, a fire at the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest killed 26 people. These 26 deaths, caused in part by the issuance of a license to a nightclub without a fire permit, were the tipping point for a revolution against the corrupt Romanian government (sounds nice). Within five days of revolt, the entire ruling party—Romania’s center-left Social Democratic Party, a jump to the left from America’s right-wing Democratic party—had resigned (SOUNDS NICE). But it didn’t end there. 38 more victims would die in the hospital after receiving inadequate care for their burns. Nanau’s documentary Collective starts there, at the precipice of a disturbing conspiracy involving a pharmaceutical company and their watered-down disinfectants. It’s hard to think of a more timely documentary than one uncovering the deadly bond between the healthcare industry and a neoliberal government. And like previously mentioned docs Gunda and Time, Collective saves its most heartbreaking truth for its final moments.
Where to watch: It’s available for rental on multiple VOD platforms.
7. SORRY WE MISSED YOU
Written by Paul Laverty, directed by Ken Loach
Loach and Laverty’s fourteenth collaboration, once again in the form of a kitchen-sink drama about the plight of the working class. This time, the gig economy is the subject of the socialist filmmakers’ ire: Ricky Turner, whose family has been in dire financial straits since 2008, thinks he’s hit the lottery with a delivery driver position that’ll let him “be his own boss”. Turns out, to the lack of surprise of the exploited, it’s one of those jobs that labels workers “independent contractors” to avoid providing a living wage or adequate workers’ rights. Laverty’s no-frills social realism and Loach’s humane approach to politics are a poignant meld as usual, but Sorry We Missed You is strengthened even further by the beleaguered tenor of its performances. The rare moments of rest on the family’s faces are just shattering in their brevity.
Where to watch: Sorry We Missed You is streaming on The Criterion Channel and Kanopy, and available for rental and purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
6. SHIRLEY
Written by Sarah Gubbins, directed by Josephine Decker
Shirley is a story about horror author Shirley Jackson and a caretaker she never really had. It lives between the lines: Shirley’s fictional version of Shirley, a woman in a toxic marriage with an academic, uses the experience of her tortured caretaker to inform her latest novel, a fictionalized version of a real woman’s disappearance. You can practically taste the metatexuality. It’s definitely an avant-garde work—visually, Shirley is lurching and spasmodic, disorienting its audience with swiveling camerawork and lighting that casts shadows like wet ink. Decker’s control over this explosion of style is a marvel. When she’s disorienting, she’s engrossing; and when she orients us, the stillness of her mic-drop imagery is seared in our minds. Shirley spins us ‘round the yellow-wallpapered room only to grab our shoulders and beg the question: if she went insane here, who wrote the story?
Where to watch: It’s streaming on Hulu and available for rental and purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
5. THE WOLF HOUSE
Written by Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña, and Alejandra Moffat, directed by Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña
The Wolf House is a stop-motion horror film presenting itself as a kids’ safety PSA produced by the Nazi cultists of Colonia Dignidad. Its setting and characters, which are life-size and composed almost entirely out of papier-mâché and paint, bleed and morph and reconstruct across the screen like an art project possessed by the devil. It’s grotesque, yet… creative, a sinister coupling that extends to the ways in which fascistic, fanatical messaging is woven into the “children’s tale”. To the brain, The Wolf House is a fascinating, unsettling experiment in art’s propensity for evil; to the heart, it feels like hate trying to take form—and feasibly—as a formative text for the next generation.
Where to watch: The Wolf House is streaming on Shudder and available for rental and purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
4. MINARI
Written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung
It feels superfluous to say that Minari is based on Chung’s experiences growing up. The film feels so lived-in—so ripped from vivid memory and compressed, as if by magic, onto the screen—that I’d never believe it was pure fiction. Chung rebuilds his childhood point-of-view in the form of David, a boy with a close-knit Korean-American family but an unsteady upbringing, given his father’s opportunity-chasing across the states. Their new life in Arkansas is sometimes promising but always isolating, prompting each of them to reach outside their family bubble to manage. The grasp Minari has on the crisscrossing consequences of communal life—both macro and micro, culturally and personally—is practically alchemical, and a director who can foster a family of such holistic performances is rare. Also, Youn Yuh-jung is unquestionably the most delightful grandma in movie history.
Where to watch: It’ll probably have a wide release by the time I’m done writing this. Check your local theater if you’re vaccinated and not an idiot. It gets a VOD release on February 26th.
3. DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD
Directed by Kirsten Johnson, edited by Nels Bangerter
Dick Johnson is (was?) the father of Kirsten Johnson, the documentarian behind Cameraperson. When Dick’s dementia began to worsen, Kirsten presented him with an idea: to stage elaborate “deaths” for her dad, on camera, to help the duo come to terms with the real thing. It’s a black comedy for those who like their chocolate with 70% cacao. If you’re of a sweeter persuasion, worry not: the infectiously gleeful Dick has you covered. You couldn’t have written a sweeter guy. He radiates warmth like he invented it, which makes his deaths all the funnier—and his death all the scarier. Dick Johnson Is Dead is a movie about dealing with death, but it’s also a movie about dealing with death through a movie. By constantly highlighting the artifice of her production, Kirsten trains our minds on the underlying question: why can we only stare death in the eyes through a lens?
Where to watch: Dick Johnson Is Dead is streaming on Netflix.
2. first cow
Written by Jonathan Raymond and Kelly Reichardt, directed by Kelly Reichardt
It’s the 19th century and settlers are making their way on the American frontier. Cookie Figowitz, a baker, arrives in the Oregon Territory with no prospects to speak of. But his fortunes change when he meets the entrepreneurial King Lu, who proposes a business venture for the two of them: stealing milk from the colony’s only cow, the property of a wealthy landowner, to make and sell biscuits. You could say that they seize the means of production, if you’re so inclined. Reichardt’s film isn’t so forward. First Cow is slow, quiet, and patient; if the camera must move, it crawls, and Reichardt locks that pace into the film’s DNA by serving as editor as well. There’s enough time to study the tug-of-war between ambition and resources before industrialization sped it up—back when we could feel our hands on the rope, back when we could milk the udders ourselves. Nostalgia for a better future.
Where to watch: It’s streaming on Fubo TV, Showtime, and DIRECTV, and available for rental and purchase on multiple VOD platforms.
I’m thinking of ending things
Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a masterpiece of inevitable, inescapable interiority; it’s the voice inside my head that told me no one would read my introduction; it’s the snowstorm we’ve been driving through blind. The mortal connotations of “ending things” are appropriate, but in a narrative sense, the title refers to a relationship on the rocks. It’s like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in a minor key. Its long, drawn-out scenes are full of monologuing, often with a nakedly didactic bent: through the mouths of his characters, Kaufman quotes his favorite thinkers, acquiesces to the plague of finitude, and—in a dry, winking justification of his ever-shrinking distance from his work—laments that our creations, passions, and selves are mere composites of what we consume. Our minds are, in every sense, already made up. The existential gloom makes glimpses of genuine connection, like the one, sweet scene in which the two bond over ice cream, feel like exceptions to a terrible rule. In No Exit, Sartre wrote that hell is other people; in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman responds wearily, “yes, but what if we, also, are other people?”
Where to watch: I’m Thinking of Ending Things is streaming on Netflix.
See you next year, whatever that’s like!