Movie-watching in Pandemia, Part 2: Top 10 movies of 2020

Despite a pandemic that essentially shut down or reduced entertainment venues to shadows of their former selves, 2020 ended up being quite a solid year for movies. However, I still feel like we (or at least I) lost a lot by not being able to see the vast majority of those movies in an actual theater. It’s not so much the lack of a big screen or sound system I missed but rather that combination of (1) having a movie as an actual event or date scheduled on the calendar; (2) watching and sharing the experience of watching with a roomful of strangers (I’m fortunate, I guess, in that the movies and theaters I go to – or used to go to – tended to attract respectful and attentive fellow filmgoers, not jerks who would talk, text or bring their kids to child-inappropriate fare); (3) the immersive aspect of being in a theater and being compelled to give the movie my undivided attention.

That last element is the one I’ve felt the absence of most keenly, since I am easily distracted and have absolutely zero self-restraint when it comes to using my phone or laptop while watching anything at home. In my defense, it’s usually to look something up related to the movie (what do I recognize that actor from, how close is this to the real story/is this based on a real person, where was this filmed or is this CGI, who did this song/let me Shazam it, etc.), but the point is I let my attention wander and be diverted much more easily than if I were sitting in a theater – and the quality of my viewing experience is accordingly diminished. I tried not to let this propensity influence my judgment of a movie’s merits, yet I wonder if this list would look different had I seen these movies in a theater.

With that caveat – and the additional caveat that there were several highly acclaimed films, including Nomadland, Minari, and The Father, that technically got a festival and/or brief streaming release last year but that I unfortunately missed – here are my top ten films of 2020:

1. First Cow

I’ll be the first to admit Kelly Reichardt, while justly admired as a director, is not for everyone. Her films are very, sometimes painfully, slow, and even when they involve dangerous settings and situations, very little actually happens, at least in terms of outward action. This is no less true of First Cow, which focuses on the unlikely partnership of two even unlikelier adventurers in 19th century Oregon, yet I found myself completely engrossed by this strangely compelling story of a quiet baker and an entrepreneurial-minded Chinese immigrant who devise a business scheme of dubious legality that involves – you guessed it – the first cow to enter Oregon territory. The pacing may chafe those unaccustomed to Reichardt’s deliberate, unhurried style, but for the patient there’s great beauty in the verdant stillness of the Oregon woods and the moments of gentle rapport between the two protagonists (three, if you count the cow), and great suspense and dread as the invisible net tightens around them.

2. Mangrove

The first installment of Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s anthology series about the West Indian/Caribbean diaspora in 1960s-1980s London, it’s also the best. Based on the true story of the Mangrove Nine, it offers a rich portrait of a vibrant community and a searing depiction of the viciously racist and xenophobic policing that threatened to destroy it, as well as the courage and eloquence of the individual members who stood up in court to demand justice when slapped with a trumped-up criminal charge of rioting. The second half of the film, which focuses on their trial, bears many thematic similarities to Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7, although for me, Mangrove was much more powerful – essentially it was everything I wanted Sorkin’s film to be and wasn’t. Yet what lingers with me longest from Mangrove are its images of joyful celebration of Caribbean culture and the abuse of power that so obscenely disrupted it – whether a long shot from a window of cops pursuing an innocent black man, or a close-up of a clattering colander following a police raid. McQueen makes these historical wrongs intensely, immediately personal in a way that perhaps only he could have done. (Amazon Prime Video)

3. Palm Springs

Yes, this is essentially a remix of Groundhog Day for millennials, set in the (literal, as well as figurative) desert rather than the snowy tweeness of Punxsutawney. That debt doesn’t prevent it from being an utter delight in its own right, a better romantic comedy than the original, and the perfect movie for the COVID pandemic. It benefits enormously from being a two-hander (three-hander if you count the always-great J.K. Simmons) between a never-more-endearing Andy Samberg and the effortlessly winsome Cristin Milioti (who really should be a bigger star). Outwardly light and breezy, the film plumbs unexpected emotional depths in the question of what it means to pledge yourself for life to another person – appropriate for a movie set at a wedding on endless repeat. (Hulu)

4. One Night in Miami

In a year of impressive female directorial feature debuts, Regina King gave us one of the strongest in her wonderfully cinematic adaptation of Kemp Powers’ thought-provoking play about what might have happened at a 1964 meetup between Malcolm X, Cassius Clay (just before he became Muhammad Ali), Sam Cooke, and NFL player-turned-actor Jim Brown in Malcolm’s motel room. Powers, who also adapted the screenplay, imagines a probing, at times heated discussion between the four men – all at the cusp of a major moment in their careers – about whether they are doing everything they can to advance black power. The four leads (Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm, Eli Goree as Clay, Leslie Odom, Jr. as Cooke, and Aldis Hodge – my personal MVP – as Brown) are all excellent at bringing to life what could have been a rather stiff academic debate, while Powers and King, with the help of Tami Reiker’s beautifully fluid cinematography, do a terrific job incorporating external scenes and movement so naturally that the end result feels like an actual living, breathing movie, not just a filmed play. (Amazon Prime Video)

5. Promising Young Woman

Emerald Fennell (aka Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown and showrunner for Killing Eve) makes a head-turning debut feature with this razor-sharp tale of a woman (Carey Mulligan, fantastic) on a mission to teach the world – especially self-proclaimed “nice guys” – a lesson after her best friend is raped and nothing is done about it. Less a revenge thriller than a psychodrama with razor-sharp satirical edges, its pitch-black but carefully modulated rage striking an ironic counterpoint to the soft pastels of its visual style, the film continually, methodically pushes the viewer to recognize society’s complicity in not just the violation but the erasure of women who are denied acknowledgment of (let alone justice for) their wrongs. While the script repeatedly subverts expectations – sometimes at the expense of plot plausibility – and may give you tonal whiplash, that is very much by design, leading to a gut-punch of an ending that’s at once a fierce blow against rape culture and a concession to its primacy. Not everything in PYW works, but what does work exudes more energy and brilliance than just about any other film this year.

6. Another Round

Mads Mikkelsen and director Thomas Vinterberg team up again for this half funny, half melancholy Danish film about four friends who decide to test the hypothesis that drinking just enough to be mildly buzzed throughout the day will make their lives better, happier, and more productive. The results are about what you might expect, but the film refreshingly refrains from either endorsing or vilifying the experiment. Mikkelsen is marvelous and an entirely compelling reason in and of himself to see the movie; another is the delightful chemistry between him and the other three men who bond over their shared middle-aged male malaise.

7. Sound of Metal

Riz Ahmed (Nightcrawler, Rogue One, HBO’s The Night Of) shines as a heavy-metal drummer who’s forced to cope with suddenly losing his hearing. Thoughtful and eye or rather ear-opening, the film doesn’t always go exactly where you expect it to go, and its last two scenes were the most moving I saw in any 2020 movie. The film also stands out for its sound design, which evokes the protagonist’s aural disorientation with stunning effectiveness. (Amazon Prime Video)

8. The 40-Year-Old Version

Here’s another terrific female-directed debut feature (by Radha Blank) about a black woman in NYC approaching 40 who considers reinventing herself as a rapper as her once-promising playwriting career stalls. Shot almost entirely in black and white, the film pays clear stylistic homage to Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It but quickly establishes its own fresh, wryly funny voice that’s at once compassionate (towards the difficulty of relinquishing one’s self-perceptions) and unsparing (towards the biases of liberal white cultural gatekeepers). Like the otherwise very different Another Round, this film should resonate with anyone who’s wondered whether they’ve given up on the dreams of their youth and/or whether it's too late to forge new ones. (Netflix)

9. Lovers Rock

This was most critics’ favorite of the Small Axe series, and it’s not hard to see why, even if it’s a little slow and low on plot for those seeking a narrative thread. More of a mood piece than a drama, it’s a sensuous evocation of both a particular place and time (an ’80s reggae house party in London) and the universal feeling of falling in love or at least hitting it off with someone at first sight. (Amazon Prime Video)

10. TIE: News of the World and Soul

In a year that severely tested most people’s optimism and faith in humanity, both of these films offered a measure of assurance that yes, life is worth living even when the bottom drops out of it or everything around you seems to be devolving into chaos and disaster. Directed with unusual stateliness by Paul Greengrass and based on the novel by Paulette Giles, News of the World stars Tom Hanks at his Hanksiest as a traveling newsman in post-Civil War Texas tasked with reuniting a displaced young girl (Helena Zengel), who was raised by Kiowa Indians, with her only known blood relatives. It’s in many ways an old-school, old-fashioned, and very white Western—but it’s also beautifully filmed and beautifully acted, with Hanks and Zengel playing poignantly off each other as two lost souls who find kinship in a bitterly divided and hostile world.

Meanwhile, Soul, a spiritual sibling of Inside Out (both directed by Pete Docter), only with much trippier animation and even deeper existential concepts, can perhaps be best described as a Pixar riff on It’s a Wonderful Life – if George Bailey were an African American whose lifelong dream was to make it as a jazz pianist and his guardian angel were an unborn soul. In its lighthearted, cleverly quippy, quirky way, Soul provides a welcome reminder to even the most jaded viewer that there’s beauty and meaning to life beyond what you specifically wanted or thought you wanted from it. (Between Soul, Another Round, and The 40-Year-Old Version, 2020 seems to have been a banner year for midlife crisis movies – or maybe I’m just more attuned to them given my own age.)

HONORABLE MENTIONS: On the Rocks (AppleTV); Wolfwalkers (AppleTV); Emma (HBO Max); Babyteeth (Hulu); Mank (Netflix); Never Rarely Sometimes Always (HBO Max); and the rest of the Small Axe series (Red, White, and Blue; Alex Wheatle; and Education) (Amazon Prime)