The year 2020 will mostly be remembered as the year of COVID-19, but as far as the movies were concerned, unless you read metaphorical allusions to quarantining and contagion into unrelated narratives, the artistic reckoning with the pandemic onscreen will take place in the years to come. (The off-screen, business side of this, of course, is an entirely different affair, and will be a reckoning of a different kind.) And so the best movies of 2020, to me, were ones that wrestled with realities we’ve long known. Realities like racism and the related stain of police brutality, which spilled out on actual streets across the United States in 2020 and was dramatized in various ways in Steve McQueen’s Britain-set Small Axe anthology, two installments of which bookend my list. Realities like dementia, which is a central theme of two of my top-ten picks, both of which rocked me in a year that saw my own 96-year-old grandfather’s memory fail him. As a counter to those difficult topics, arriving near the end of the year exactly when my soul was parched for something genuine and positive, came another Pixar miracle—titled, appropriately, Soul. What follows is the best of 2020 onscreen, albeit mostly experienced on screens far too small.
10. Mangrove
Notting Hill? Isn’t that where Hugh Grant lives? The first installment in Steve McQueen’s monumental Small Axe anthology, Mangrove, was for many of us an education. (It’s no coincidence that the final installment is titled Education.) Mangrove reminds us that in 1960s England, Notting Hill was home to a thriving Caribbean community—thriving, at least, when the local police weren’t brutalizing its citizens. We learn about this through a stirring court trial that makes up the second half of the film, yes, but also through the meals and music shared at the title restaurant. Like Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, this is a document not only of oppression, but of the cultural, communal richness that oppression means to snuff out.
This curiosity from brothers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross—which documents the final hours of a dive bar before it closes for good—makes my list because I’m still not sure what to do with it. Formally, it’s a conundrum: it poses as a documentary, but is actually a staged gathering of real barflies improvising around the central narrative conceit. Morally, it’s a quagmire: is this place, which allows everyone to come as they are, a portrait of grace at the bottom of the bottle or an oasis of enabling? One thing is for certain: Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets keeps you on your toes—as long as you’re sober enough to stand.
Another challenge, this time in the way it made me reconsider how I respond to Black art. New York City playwright Radha Blank writes, directs, and stars, playing a version of herself: a struggling Black creative type who has a crisis of conscience when a pandering White theater producer comes calling. Did I mention this was a comedy? Blank is a blast onscreen—especially when her character delves into comic-cathartic hip hop (with songs Blank wrote)—while also showing real filmmaking chops with a few formal flourishes. Even as I praise something like Small Axe elsewhere on this list, The Forty-Year-Old Version makes me pause and ask why.
When I hear the title of The Assistant, a hush comes over my mind, recalling the hermetic, dampened, office-gray atmosphere writer-director Kitty Green created for this day-in-the-life portrait of a young woman (Julia Garner) at the bottom rung of a film production company run by an abusive, predatory tyrant (whose face we eerily never see). A chronicle of quietly crushing conversations, condemning photocopies of headshots, and the pandering push across a desk of a metal tissue box, The Assistant reminds us of the most dangerous thing of all in a toxic work environment: silence.
A love letter to a fading father that we all get to read, Kirsten Johnson’s Dick Johnson Is Dead documents a father and daughter’s attempt to come to terms with his fading memory while they still can. Together they stage blackly comic scenes of ways he might die (falling down stairs) and giddy fantasy visions of his afterlife (involving glitter and dinner with Buster Keaton and Bruce Lee). Nothing will fully prepare Dick—or any of us—for the inevitable, but I can’t imagine a more gracious, creative way to try than this.
5. Relic
More memory material, but of a very different kind. In her directing debut, Natalie Erika James chooses to confront dementia via metaphorical horror: visiting her aging mother (Robyn Nevin) in rural Australia, an adult daughter (Emily Mortimer) finds the walls gradually disintegrating around her. James’ command of the genre—mood, camera movement, mise en scene miserablism—is astonishing, but it’s the ending, a mixture of body horror and unconditional love, that lands Relic on this list.
I finally met Portuguese director Pedro Costa in 2020, and I think we’re going to be fast friends. A combination of slow cinema and anthropological experimentation, Vitalina Varela stars a Cape Verde woman and non-professional actor of the same name, playing an immigrant to Portugal who means to reunite with her husband after many years, but arrives a few days after his death. A work of deep shadows and ennobling shafts of light (no movie from 2020 was so painterly), Vitalina Varela elevates the experience of being humbly human into great art.
3. First Cow
First Cow is the movie on my list that most reminds me of the Before Times (pre-pandemic), partly because of its historical setting—Oregon in the early 1800s, where two men form a friendship and business partnership making and selling oily cakes—but also for the way I saw it: on a big screen, with a hushed, enraptured audience. Kelly Reichardt’s gentle period drama can stand on its own merits (including its snapshot, 4:3 aspect ratio and its sensory soundscape), but I also treasure it as a precious artifact of a moviegoing time gone by.
2. Soul
In a soul-crushing year, this was 2020’s most life-affirming movie. The convoluted—if breezily navigated—plot involves the afterlife and body-swapping, but this original effort from Pixar (one of the studio’s best) ultimately lands as something far more mundane: a celebration of what the jazz pianist and band teacher at its center calls “regular old living.” Ingeniously designed and smartly comic (with an appropriately jazz-inflected score), Soul leaves you longing to return to the sort of regular old living that many of us enjoyed pre-pandemic—while also calling you to work so that more people, in the new era to come, will be able to share in it.
1. Lovers Rock
Another balm amid the tumult of 2020—as well as a reprieve from the intensity and outrage of the rest of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology—Lovers Rock documents, in woozy, weed-influenced detail, a 1980 London house party where the camera rides slow reggae rhythms amongst a handful of various dancers, in scenes ingeniously, elegantly edited. It’s an immaculately delirious work of freedom—from narrative, from main characters, from whiteness. Decalogue—Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 10-part series of short films, to which I’ve been comparing Small Axe—had its mini-masterpiece in Decalogue V (also that anthology’s most cinematic installment). For Small Axe—for 2020—that masterpiece is Lovers Rock.
