2020 Top 10

The Year's Best Films

1. Vitalina Varela  There’s a transcendence to Pedro Costa’s filmmaking that earns the term “art film.” In this spinoff from Costa’s Horse Money, the writer-director collaborates with the titular heroine—a Cape Verdean in Lisbon—to tell her own story of seeking the truth about her late estranged husband. Varela’s mesmeric performance compliments Costa’s peerless work, alive and gorgeous from its subject to its mise en scène to its painterly cinematographic interplay of shadows and light.

2. Collective  Documentary filmmaker Alexander Nanau explores two timely topics in the nonfiction film of the year: the fragility of society and the crucial role of investigative journalism. Nanau observes as a deadly nightclub fire in 2015 reshapes Romania’s political landscape: in particular, health care negligence and fraud—in shamefully overwhelmed pre-Covid hospitals—reveal the depth of governmental failure and corruption. Key to the nation’s fortunes is an unlikely last bastion of the news: a sports magazine that pivots to hard news.

3. First Cow  Kelly Reichardt scores again with this adaptation of Jonathan Raymond’s novel The Half Life. Filmmaker and novelist collaborated on the screenplay, which convincingly transports us to 19th-century frontier America while keeping one foot planted in our not-so-evolved 21st-century landscape. In dramatic terms, First Cow tells the story of an unlikely friendship born of an entrepreneurial business arrangement between John Magaro’s white itinerant cook and Orion Lee’s Chinese-immigrant striver, but at heart, the film serves as a meditation on capitalism, from its infancy to its late stage occupying a space between ingenuity and crime.

4. Nomadland  Chloé Zhao wrote, edited, and produced this part-commentary, part-character study based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. In exploring the alternative culture of Americans living out of RVs—alternative, that is, to the American Dream rat race—Zhao places professional actors (like David Strathairn) amongst real-life nomads for heightened authenticity. The soul of the film, however, resides in Frances McDormand’s leading performance, an utterly convincing study in the psychology of willful isolation.

5. Lovers Rock  Percy Bysshe Shelley called poetry “the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.” Perhaps the best compliment one can pay Lovers Rock is that it feels like a cinematic poem, taking a very specific, very personal experience and translating it into a filmic language that makes it identifiably universal. This telefilm in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series expands our understanding of London’s culture of West Indian immigrants circa 1980, but its swoony, sweaty depiction of romance blossoming at a reggae house party movingly reminds us of something 2020 robbed from us: communal public experiences.

6. Never Rarely Sometimes Always  Set where the reality meets the remove of a social issue, writer-director Eliza Hittman’s abortion drama takes us on the sad journey of a 17-year-old girl seeking an abortion under a patronizing patriarchy. In beautifully understated performances, Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder capture a friendship tested by crisis. In scenes like the one that gives the film its title, Hittman gut-punches us with the blithe bureaucracy and moral judgment that often stand in the way of a girl’s difficult personal choice.

7. City Hall  The brilliant Frederick Wiseman stays true to form with his latest four-and-a-half-hour documentary film to paste up a collage of details defining an American institution—in this case, the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The film shadows Mayor Marty Walsh in his duties, but this microcosm of the political challenges facing modern America also follows Wiseman’s pattern of finding meaning in the mundane (from a city-inspector walkthrough to a weekly garbage pickup) as well as the everyday heroic (public servants and community organizers addressing evictions and economic advancement).

8. Fourteen  Writer-director Dan Sallitt explores a friendship over time in this quietly observant drama. Brooklynite Mara (Tallie Medel) enjoys a closeness with best friend Jo (Norma Kuhling), but the latter’s mental health issues and drug abuse take an ever-more-distressing toll on her and the friendship as the years slip by. Sallitt’s delicate touch and the empathic performances build a potent tragedy around a recognizable, cruelly isolating problem with no clear solution.

9. Sound of Metal  Riz Ahmed’s heavy-metal drummer and addict Ruben faces a traumatic life change in the narrative filmmaking debut of screenwriter Darius Marder (The Place Beyond the Pines). Temporarily and tentatively reliant upon a new community, Ruben crawls through the stages of grief, achingly resisting acceptance of his “new normal,” the love offered by his girlfriend (Olivia Cooke), and the caring mentorship of a community leader (Paul Raci, in one of the year’s best supporting turns).

10. Driveways  In a year that was anything but, sometimes you just needed a film that’s nice. Driveways was that lovely warm hug of a movie this year. On paper, the tale of a single mother (Hong Chau) and her young son (Lucas Jaye) befriending the grumbly old war veteran next-door (Brian Dennehy in his final film role) sounds schmaltzy and old hat. But Andrew Ahn’s gentle touch (along with the acknowledgement of tough realities) and three outstanding performances make Driveways the film you didn’t know you needed to put a smile on your face.

Honorable mention: Hamilton (Disney+), What the Constitution Means to Me (Amazon Prime Video), and David Byrne's American Utopia (HBO).

Runners-up: The Assistant; Babyteeth; The Painter and the Thief; Red, White and Blue; Martin Eden; Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Amazon Prime Video), The 40-Year-Old Version (Netflix), Soul (Disney+), Possessor, Wolfwalkers (AppleTV+).

More top docs: The Social Dilemma (Netflix), After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News (HBO), Welcome to Chechnya (HBO), The Cordillera of Dreams, Boys State (AppleTV+).

Animated winners: Soul (Disney+), Wolfwalkers (AppleTV+), Onward (Disney+), Weathering with You, Over the Moon (Netflix).

The Year's Worst Films

1. The Secret: Dare to Dream  This brand extension of the bestselling self-help franchise was arguably more than a terrible movie; it was a dangerous one. Released in the middle of a global pandemic, this spiritual romance insisted that the power of positive thinking can magically solve every problem.

2. Artemis Fowl  Nothing that needs to work works in Kenneth Branagh’s YA fantasy adaptation: not the casting, not the script, not the direction, not the design, not the score. This movie plays like Branagh farmed out all the work so he could kick back in his trailer.

3. Fantasy Island  TV’s Fantasy Island returned again, this time as a big-screen horror schlockfest. Every fantasy still has a twist, but now with a lot more blood. A dopey idea dopily executed.

4. The Grudge  After a dozen films, including an American trilogy, the Japanese-born The Grudge franchise just can’t let it go. This “sidequel” to the American trilogy films wastes a top-notch cast (Andrea Riseborough, Damian Bichir, John Cho, Jacki Weaver) on its dull daisy chain of death.

5. Scoob!  This too-cynical attempt at relaunching Scooby-Doo—and, yes, a Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe—became Warner Brothers’ first big experiment in dumping lackluster theatrical material onto VOD. Now residing on HBO Max, this chaotic action comedy has the dubious distinction of featuring an animated Simon Cowell hanging with Mystery, Inc.

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