Year in Review: Top 10 Films of 2020

If you need evidence of just what kind of year it has been, you need only look at the publish date on this piece. Under any other circumstances, naming the top 10 films of the year sometime around mid-April would seem lazy at best and derelict at worst. But, you understand. You lived through most of 2020 and a lot of 2021. The world is different, and that necessitates a different approach to cataloguing the best in cinema. So, here we are, doing just that.

You have waited this long, and I have written plenty about what the pandemic has meant for the film industry at large and my little site at the bottom of it, so I will not go on too much about this year’s films. I wish I had had the opportunity to see more of these on the big screen in the dark of the cinema, where great films play best. Regardless of the outside factors, though, do not let anyone tell you this was a weak year or somehow a lesser year for film. It was not. Great movies were out there to be seen. We just had to work a little harder to find them. In the end, they were worth the effort.

Before we get to the top 10, here are 10 more films from 2020 that deserve to be remembered in the years to come (alphabetically): Radha Blank’s incisive comedy about getting older in the art scene, The 40-Year-Old Version; Kitty Green’s devastating workplace harassment piece, The Assistant, featuring a final shot I cannot stop thinking about; Spike Lee’s one-two punch of hope and despair in modern America, Da 5 Bloods and David Byrne’s American Utopia; Kirsten Johnson’s experimental documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead, which confronts mortality with humor and honesty; Shaka King’s epic political screed Judas and the Black Messiah; Sean Durkin’s long-awaited and worth the wait second feature, The Nest, a marital drama that slices to the bone; Max Barbakow’s Groundhog Day riff Palm Springs, wherein the filmmakers somehow find new life in an old concept; and Emerald Fennell’s masterfully subversive rape-revenge fantasia, Promising Young Woman.

Special mention is reserved for Thomas Kail’s film recording of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway smash Hamilton. The musical is every bit as brilliant as you may have heard -- a perfect piece of art like Monet’s Water Lilies, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Welles’ Citizen Kane, or Nirvana’s Nevermind. It is unimpeachable. I just had no clue how to categorize it, even in a year as strange as this. Is it a documentary? Is it the show itself? Is it neither or both? Whatever it is, it is one of the best things I watched on a screen this year, and in this rundown of 2020’s best, Hamilton could not go unmentioned.

Without further ado, the top 10:

10. Bacurau, directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s previous film was the equally angry Aquarius, an anti-capitalist shot across the bow that hit hard enough to rile up the Brazilian government. This time, he and Juliano Dornelles, who served as the production designer on that prior work, pull no punches to literalize the destructive forces of colonialism on small communities. The film occasionally threatens to dip into futurism or sci-fi, but it never feels anything less than truthful in its tale of villagers forced to take up arms against the outsiders who would destroy them.

9. Sound of Metal, directed by Darius Marder

Riz Ahmed should be one of the biggest stars in the world. First-time feature filmmaker Darius Marder’s hypnotic, immersive Sound of Metal is proof of that. The logline sounds simple: A heavy-metal drummer loses his hearing. The film is anything but simple, investigating and interrogating all the ways in which we approach disability, the search for purpose, and our own sense of ourselves. Ahmed is the star that holds all of these planets in orbit, but the film is a glorious solar system all its own.

8. First Cow, directed by Kelly Reichardt

A man. A plan. A canal. Panama! Two men. A cow. A biscuit. America! Kelly Reichardt’s quiet, contemplative First Cow is one of the most insightful films ever made about capitalism, the means of production, and the American dream. Based on a novel by John Raymond and co-written with Raymond, Reichardt anchors this Western tale in the friendship of two men who want what we all want: security, comfort, and a future. She then deconstructs how these basic rights are kept from us and the consequences for daring to reach out and take them.

7. Nomadland, directed by Chloé Zhao

We used to idolize pioneers. The spirit of adventure and the thrill of discovery were an integral part of the nation European settlers hoped to build, albeit on land that was not theirs. Now, we look at those attempting to step outside the prescribed notions of family, home, and work as irrational dreamers. We assume something is wrong with them rather than the system we built in which to cage them. Writer-director-editor Chloé Zhao, who stunned with her previous feature, The Rider, finds in this paradox the building blocks of a story about a woman in search of something more, something grander than the society we built can offer her.

6. Another Round, directed by Thomas Vinterberg

Years beyond the Dogme 95 film movement that launched him on the international stage, Danish master Thomas Vinterberg crafts perhaps his most intimate and poetic work of art. By turns funny, sad, and buoyant, Another Round follows four teachers in varying states of disaffection, looking for anything to turn their lives around. The brilliance of Vinterberg’s film lies in its refusal to supply any easy answers or to let its characters off the hook. Their malaise runs deeper than a two-hour film could handle, and Vinterberg knows this, but he also knows that the joy in life is in the search, in the stubborn, innate desire to carry on in the face of madness.

5. Pieces of a Woman, directed by Kornél Mundrucszó

I had the great privilege of seeing director Kornél Mundrucszó and writer Kata Webér present their film White God at the Lincoln Center’s New Directors, New Films Festival in 2015. That film, which also appeared in my top 10 of that year, was a fantastical tale that found a way to criticize a crumbling society from the outside, in. With Pieces of a Woman, the filmmakers work from the inside, out in telling a story of personal tragedy and the road to absolution.

Leading actress Vanessa Kirby delivers a brilliant, devastating turn as Martha, a woman suffering through unimaginable grief and surrounded by people who neither understand her nor wish to. While they seek vengeance or personal satisfaction, Martha looks within herself to find the strength to continue living a life that need not be defined by tragedy. The film is dark, heartbreaking, and ultimately honest in a way few other films dare to be. It is not an easy film to watch, but it is all the more rewarding for that fact.

4. Never Rarely Sometimes Always, directed by Eliza Hittman

The story is in the details. It is in the small moments other filmmakers miss, other writers skip. It is about the little glances, the imperceptible movements, the emotions hidden from all but the camera. Few filmmakers are as adept at capturing and preserving these details as Eliza Hittman, whose similarly powerful Beach Rats also provided a searing insight into the lives of young people living just outside society’s view.

Starring Sidney Flanigan in a role and performance that should have Hollywood Studios knocking down her door, Never Rarely Sometimes Always follows a young woman looking to take control of her body -- and, therefore, her life -- in a culture that wants to subjugate, dominate, and ultimately destroy her. No abortion story is simple, but too often in mainstream films, it is portrayed that way. Hittman, who also wrote the script, has a deft understanding of the nuances and complexities driving young girls like Autumn (Flanigan) to find power in choice.

3. Sorry We Missed You, directed by Ken Loach

If you have followed the site over the previous year or so, you may be aware Sorry We Missed You was the final film I saw in a proper movie theater before the lockdown. It is one of only two films on this list I was able to see in theaters (along with First Cow, though I did see Sound of Metal at the drive-in). Streaming on the Criterion Channel now, as I type, this deeply humanist drama plays perfectly well on the small screen at home, but in truth, it was made for the big screen.

Not because it features booming sound and big action set pieces. Just the opposite in fact. All too often, size confers importance, so putting the Turner clan, a British family being crushed under the weight of the modern economy, on the biggest screens may be the only way to convey how truly important their story is. Ken Loach, in making this film, is telling a universal story, a story we innately understand but rarely give adequate space to in our thoughts. And what is the cinema but a space for just this type of story?

2. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, directed by George C. Wolfe

Another masterpiece from playwright August Wilson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom perhaps does not have the cultural cache of Fences or Radio Golf, but this film should ensure that changes. The story follows two careers that are not so much parallel but perpendicular to one another -- those of Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and Levee (Chadwick Boseman). She knows her career is on the decline and he believes his future is limitless. We meet them at the moment their paths cross.

This is Boseman’s greatest performance, and he will probably win a posthumous Oscar for his efforts. Davis delivers stellar work once again in a Wilson adaptation (remember her perfect turn in Denzel Washington’s Fences?). The entire ensemble, in fact, is brilliant, as Wilson ensembles are wont to be. But the film is more than the greatness of its cast. Director George C. Wolfe creates a space for these actors to work, but he also crafts a brutal indictment of an America that thinks it is better than it is, that wants to believe the “race problem” is a Southern problem, a problem left in the past. Wolfe, Wilson, and Co. know intrinsically that what is past is always present.

1. Small Axe, directed by Steve McQueen

If there is justice in the world of cinema -- and there so often is not -- Small Axe will someday be held in the same regard as other multipart epics such as Kryzstof Kieslowski’s Decalogue or Masaki Kobayashi’s The Human Condition. Breathtaking in its scope and heartbreaking in its intimacy, it represents the best of what cinema has to offer. Here, Steve McQueen proves once again that no other filmmaker working today better understands the ways in which social structures and cultural norms conspire to wreak havoc on the private lives of citizens forced to live in these worlds.

Other critics have considered the five pieces that make up Small Axe -- “Mangrove,” “Lovers Rock,” “Red, White, and Blue,” “Alex Wheadle,” and “Education” -- as individual films in their own right. That is their right, but in so doing they are ignoring the true beauty of the work, which builds in majesty every moment, right up until the final shot under the credits at the end of “Education.” The cumulative effect is like that of a symphony with each new movement building on and adding to the themes of the previous one. 

The West Indian experience in mid- to late 20th century England was not one thing. No people's experience ever is. There is joy and sorrow, oppression and ascension, triumph and defeat, and all manner of little victories and minor defeats in between. It would seem impossible to capture all of this in a single work of art. So it would seem. Yet, here we are, living in a world in which one of our finest filmmakers has gifted us Small Axe.