A few weeks ago, the Academy announced that it would be extending the eligibility window for next year’s Oscars by a few months. The reasoning behind this decision was clear: With so much uncertainty about when theaters can open again, there’s no guarantee that the kind of big prestige projects that normally dominate awards season will even open by year’s end. In other words, the Academy would rather bend their own rules for the first time in 40 years than risk having to watch and nominate films that don’t fit the normal profile of an “Oscar-winning movie.” Even for them, that’s pretty insulting.
Because here’s the thing: Though nothing’s hit theaters since March, though countless releases have been postponed, and though many promising upcoming titles may be pushed back until next spring or even later, 2020 has still been a pretty damn good year for movies. It’s a weird one, for sure—we should definitely be complaining right now about another week of bloated July sequels, not arguing over which Netflix original comes closest to looking like the blockbuster of the summer. But plenty of interesting and worthwhile films have made it to streaming platforms over this ongoing home-viewing season, to say nothing of the ones that opened in theaters before they closed their doors a few months ago. Imagine if the Academy actually did limit itself to these less massively budgeted options. It’d be the most fascinating Oscar race ever!
Below, we’ve singled out, in chronological order of release, the 25 best films of the year so far. All became commercially available in the States—on a streaming platform, through video-on-demand, or via the ancient practice of projecting a movie on a giant screen in an enclosed public space—sometime after the first of the year. You won’t find too many likely Oscar contenders in this group, not with the studios and mini-majors eyeing that suddenly lucrative early-2021 window for their major award contenders. These are the Oscar nominees that should be—a list that includes radical American indies, foreign-language triumphs, Hollywood monster movies, form-bending documentaries, acclaimed anime, a bona fide avant-garde feature, and one stirring sports/recovery drama starring Ben Affleck. And when applicable, we’ve cited where and how you can watch these films that AMPAS probably won’t.
Weathering With You
Google Play, iTunes August 4; Blu-Ray September 15
In a near-future Japan beset by rising sea levels, a runaway teenage boy meets, helps, and moons over a young woman who has the power to control the weather. Though its setting has sci-fi overtones, this latest animated romance from Makoto Shinkai (Your Name) is more interested in using fantasy to explore the relationships between its endlessly charming characters. As 2020 has pressed on, the fuzziness of the movie’s climate-change allegory looks more and more like a secret strength, allowing Shinkai to focus on his rare talent for drawing out affecting lyricism from a world on the brink of doom. [Jesse Hassenger]
Zombi Child
Criterion Channel, Amazon, iTunes, Fandango, DirectTV, VUDU
Bertrand Bonnello, the French director behind teen-terrorist thriller Nocturama, returns with another provocative coming-of-age story, this one overrun by the zombies and ghosts of France’s colonial past. Cutting between two temporalities and locations—an all-girls boarding school in present-day Paris, and a sugar plantation in 1962 Haiti—Zombi Child unravels a Gordian knot of intergenerational trauma, cultural appropriation, and white guilt to the beat of trap music and Jacques Tourneur. Boldly subverting genre tropes and audience expectations, it’s the kind of powerful cerebral punch Bonnello specializes in, just with an extra dose of voodoo surrealism. [Beatrice Loayza]
Beanpole
Mubi, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, iTunes, Fandango, VUDU
Early into Beanpole, a young boy suffocates under the weight of a woman paralyzed by seizure. It feels like a warning: Abandon all hope, ye who watch. And yet this stark and painterly drama, set in Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) in the aftermath of World War II, is too shrewd to simply devolve into misery porn. Its writer-director, the preternaturally gifted Kantemir Balagov, tempers the despair with a focus on the mutating, codependent bond between two survivors trying to find a path forward through the rubble of the old world. Beanpole may see a reflection of national trauma in their struggle, but it never reduces them to symbols; you probably won’t find an onscreen relationship this year more complicated than theirs. [A.A. Dowd]
The Assistant
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, VUDU
Imagine a version of Jaws that kept the shark off screen entirely, and which focused instead on the inner-workings of Mayor Vaughn’s office, turning a blind eye to the carnage for the sake of money. That’s akin to what Kitty Green accomplishes with her disquieting procedural about a day in the life of an overworked personal assistant (Julia Garner) to a movie producer who never appears on screen or is referred to by name. Maybe it says something that the first American dramatization of Harvey Weinstein’s abuses won’t look at the perpetrator directly. But there’s a moral clarity to his absence; by instead examining the network of enablers the mogul built around himself, The Assistant becomes an indictment of a whole industry—a monster movie about everyone who allowed the monster to keep feeding. [A.A. Dowd]
After Parkland
Hulu, Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, VUDU
At a time when so much about politics and the social order seems hopelessly broken, the documentary After Parkland suggests real, positive change may be just over the horizon. Directors Jake Lefferman and Emily Taguchi emphasize the “after” part of their title, following a handful of students and parents in the wake of the horrific 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas shooting, showing how these people quickly converted their grief into anger and their anger into action. The current waves of public protest sweeping across the United States were presaged by the events covered in this moving and energizing film, which charts what happened when the rising generation began demanding more than “thoughts and prayers.” [Noel Murray]
Vitalina Varela
Grasshopper Film, Virtual theaters
In the films of Pedro Costa, lost souls wander a mythic purgatory of memories and decaying slums, reciting dreams and life stories. His style isn’t to every taste, but its glacial pacing and dark, Renaissance-meets-noir tableau compositions come close to pure poetry. In his latest, a middle-aged Cape Verdean woman travels to Portugal to bury her estranged husband; all he has left behind is an unfinished house in the outskirts of Lisbon and happy memories of the home they built together years ago in Cape Verde. Vitalina Varela is one of the few Costa films with a readily comprehensible plot, but as always, its meanings are lyrical. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
The Invisible Man
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, VUDU
From the ashes of the Dark Universe rose this suspenseful standalone, which re-envisions a classic movie monster as the gaslighting ex-boyfriend from hell. Director Leigh Whannell stages some nifty effects sequences involving his imperceptible menace, but he’s more interested in psychological terrorism—a game of escalating harassment that gives this primo Hollywood thriller the chill of real-world horror. And in Elisabeth Moss, Whannell finds the most emotionally expressive of scream queens, filling in the outline of an invisible threat with her rage and fear. [A.A. Dowd]
The Whistlers
Amazon, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, VUDU
There’s deadpan and then there’s The Whistlers, the Romanian neo-noir so bone dry that it’s a wonder it has any saliva left to pucker up and blow. That’s not to say this is a dour film; it’s simply a uniquely pitched one, as director Corneliu Porumboiu strips a glamorous story full of exotic locations and paranoid intrigue down to its most mundane elements. The film plays at times like an ironic take on post-Tarantino crime cinema, convoluted in its timeline and shameless about adding in a splashy needle drop because it looks cool. But stay with it and The Whistlers’ withholding femme fatales and unsmiling crooked cops begin to blossom like evening primrose, immersing you in a world that’s pretty damn seductive despite itself. [Katie Rife]
A White, White Day
“Everyone grieves in their own way” is the adage tackled by this slow-simmering Icelandic drama, in which a widowed cop (a magnificent Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson) finds roundabout and increasingly violent means of grappling with his feelings. Mirroring his misdirected mourning process, writer-director Hlynur Palmason drifts into mysteriously significant detours, like a sequence depicting a stone tumbling down an embankment for several minutes on end. It’s a bold treatment of a common subject, emotionally indirect until it suddenly, powerfully, isn’t. [A.A. Dowd]
The Burnt Orange Heresy
Additional theaters August 7
Based on a book by the eccentric crime novelist Charles Willeford (adapted to the screen by A Simple Plan writer Scott Smith), The Burnt Orange Heresy replicates the experience of reading a slim, literary caper story, filled with flavorful dialogue and dark twists. Director Giuseppe Capotondi keeps the running time short and the set-ups simple, letting sumptuous European scenery and magnetic actors do most of the work. Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki play two impossibly sexy sophisticates, drawn into the orbit of an influential art dealer (Mick Jagger) and a famously reclusive painter (Donald Sutherland). Expect lots of quirky, high-toned banter among four folks whose intentions are rarely pure. [Noel Murray]
The Way Back
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, VUDU
Ben Affleck’s regular pandemic canoodles for the paparazzi only constitute his second-most compelling performance of the year, behind his redemptive turn as a heavy-drinking construction worker making good in Gavin O’Connor’s well-measured drama. Taking a coaching gig for an undisciplined high school basketball team sounds like a tidy and saccharine metaphor, but the conviction Affleck brings to broken-down lug Jack Cunningham bridges the gap between the sentiment of crowd-pleasing Hollywood character studies (of the mid-budget variety we don’t see so much these days) and the grit of real life. This is the ability of a movie star in the classical mold: to coax something true from a night at the multiplex. [Charles Bramesco]
First Cow
Digital services July 10
Kelly Reichardt’s latest film is built on two things: An earnest belief in the power of tenderness in the face of overwhelming historical violence, and delicious deep-fried dough. Both come courtesy of the character of Cookie (John Magaro), a mild and soft-spoken drifter in 1820s Oregon whose friendship with unsinkable Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Orion Lee) serves as a stand-in for the American Dream writ large. That’s where the First Cow of the title comes in, as the entrepreneurial duo begins stealing milk from the only cow in the territory in order to build up the pastry business that King-Lu insists will catapult them to wealth and fame. It’s a madcap setup for Reichardt, who infuses First Cow both with the subtle rhythms of nature and a sweet sense of humor. [Katie Rife]
The Wild Goose Lake
The plot, about a gangster (Hu Ge) who kills a cop and then goes on the lam, barely holds together. But maybe that’s because director Diao Yinan (Black Coal, Thin Ice) sees it more as a clothesline on which he can hang his remarkable sense of style. Pistols, motorcycles, fistfights, rainstorms, seedy hotels with oscillating fans, nightclubs blasting effervescent dance pop—this sleek Chinese manhunt thriller has it all, and bathes whole stretches of its action in bright shades of nocturnal neon. The violence, meanwhile, can be so stylized that it borders on the abstract; one death by umbrella seems to tilt the film into dream logic. The impression is of an ecstatic play on genre. Who needs story when you have this much sumptuous, uninterrupted noir cool? [A.A. Dowd]
Bacurau
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Fandango, VUDU
Bacurau is one of those films that you don’t want to say too much about, but absolutely must discuss with as many people as possible. It’s two revolutionary calls to arms in one, the first half constructing a socialist paradise in small-town Brazil through low-key indie drama and the second exorcising the demons of colonialism in a juicy explosion of cathartic action-movie violence. As far as agitprop goes, Bacurau is definitely on the more batshit end of the spectrum, mischievously dropping in whimsical sci-fi details in the lead-up to Udo Kier’s appearance as the sociopathic embodiment of Trump-era American entitlement. Throw in Brazilian acting legend Sonia Braga as the town matriarch, and you’ve got an unforgettable film in more ways than one. [Katie Rife]
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, VUDU
Abortion is both an everyday phenomenon and a life-changing event, a contradiction that Eliza Hittman’s breakout drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always cradles as delicately as a baby bird who’s fallen from its nest. That same description could apply to Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), a 17-year-old girl in small-town Pennsylvania who knows that she’s not ready to be a mother, but faces a difficult road in getting to New York City to get the healthcare she needs. So she enlists her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) to come along, traveling on cash stolen from their supermarket job and protecting each other from the dangers of moving through the world in a female body. Hittman’s film is understated and at times practically wordless, but the intimacy of its storytelling transcends the need for dialogue. [Katie Rife]
The Grand Bizarre
Over the last decade, experimental filmmaker and animator Jodie Mack has used various materials (fabrics, circuit boards, movie posters) to explore patterns of form and meaning in an age of capitalist mass-production and internet-fueled sensory overload. In The Grand Bizarre, her first feature-length work, a motley array of textiles from across the globe come alive through stop-motion techniques. But even as the film offers up a kaleidoscopic whirl of rhythm and color, its inventive soundtrack continually highlights the (unseen) labor involved in its production. While making a film we can tap our feet to, Mack reminds us that the world we live in is only too material. [Lawrence Garcia]
True History Of The Kelly Gang
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, DirectTV, VUDU
Lots of movies have been made about the bank robber, bushranger, and Australian folk hero Ned Kelly (including what may be the world’s first feature film). But this fictionalized biography, adapted from Peter Carey’s bestselling novel, finds a fresh angle by sidelining the recounted-to-death details of Kelly’s Outback outlaw days. What emerges in their place is the story of a boy willed into infamy by his upbringing and drafted into a class war by some very bad role models (flavorfully played by Essie Davis and Russell Crowe). Every bit as Shakespearean as director Justin Kurzel’s actual take on the Bard, True History Of The Kelly Gang locates a middle ground between man and legend, suggesting that the “true” history of Ned Kelly may be lost to history. [A.A. Dowd]
Fourteen
Grasshopper Film, Virtual theaters
Full disclosure: an A.V. Club contributor makes a wordless cameo in Fourteen. Furthermore, the film’s writer-director, Dan Sallitt, is a film critic himself, with plenty of friends in the profession. So maybe take the praise with a grain of salt. Just don’t skip this uncommonly perceptive drama about the waning, years-spanning friendship between a self-destructive serial monogamist (Norma Kuhling) and her unofficial emotional sponsor (Tallie Medel). Sallitt’s voracious appetite for movies may actually inform his diligent avoidance of cliché, though the fluid way Fourteen skips forward through time—cueing us to each leap with shifts in the central dynamic—feels entirely his own. As for Kuhling and Medel, they’re both superb, conveying all the vagaries of a relationship in flux. You can trust us. Neither of them are critics. [A.A. Dowd]
The Vast Of Night
The Vast Of Night is a film enamored with analog technology and midcentury science fiction, set in a time and place that’s so iconic—1950s New Mexico—it’s unnecessary to state what it’s actually about. That gives director Andrew Patterson and writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger room to play with form, structuring the dialogue-driven story like a radio play and peppering it with the occasional bit of digitally enabled bravado. But none of these experiments would matter without sympathetic characters, provided here by Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz as small-town dreamers whose encounter with the otherworldly takes place against the backdrop of a high school basketball game. All involved are talents to watch, but until then—keep watching the skies. [Katie Rife]
Shirley
Hulu, Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Fandango, DirectTV, VUDU
Two Elisabeth Moss vehicles appear on this year’s list, and that’s no surprise—she could turn a grocery list into a fascinating psychological study. But her talents are especially well suited to the thorny bramble of a personality that was horror author Shirley Jackson, a woman whose inner darkness was both essential to her creative process and incredibly damaging to those around her. As in her previous film, Madeline’s Madeline, director Josephine Decker blurs the lines between artist and muse, reality and fiction, creativity and self-destruction, creating a darkly romantic portrait of morbid obsession that’s both a character study and an invitation to grab Shirley’s hand and walk with her to the edge of exhilarating oblivion. [Katie Rife]
Tommaso
Kino Marquee, virtual theaters
Abel Ferrara, the punk chronicler of addictions and inner turmoils, has never made a movie as disarming as this improvised, diary-like character study about an aging American movie director (Ferrara regular Willem Dafoe) who has left New York to start a new, sober life in Rome. Though the subject matter is blatantly autobiographical (with Ferrara’s wife and daughter playing the family of the title character), it’s also deceptive. Gradually, the film reveals the self-destructive impulses that lurk beneath the daily effort of sobriety and the surface of domestic bliss. The conclusions are equally lacerating and ambiguous—a portrait of the addict-artist as wannabe savior and anti-hero. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]
Babyteeth
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, DirectTV, VUDU
The contours of YA romances have become so familiar that when Babyteeth bends, twists, and hybridizes them, it feels wonderfully alien, even as it imbues potential clichés with humanity. Director Shannon Murphy’s adaptation of the Rita Kalnejais play follows a relationship between screw-up drug dealer Moses (Toby Wallace) and seriously ill good girl Milla (Eliza Scanlen), as her well-to-do parents (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) look on with concern. Despite ample opportunity, the movie never succumbs to life-lesson instructions about seizing the day or the power of love. Its emotional, frayed-end messiness (and accompanying sense of humor) makes it more classically romantic, and genuinely unpredictable. [Jesse Hassenger]
Miss Juneteenth
Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, Microsoft, Fandango, Redbox, DirectTV, VUDU
One of the goals behind elevating Black filmmakers is to bring underseen perspectives to a wider audience, a task that Channing Godfrey Peoples’ film Miss Juneteenth accomplishes with artistic sophistication and genuine heart. Nicole Beharie stars in a rich, subtle performance as Turquoise, a hard-working single mother in Fort Worth, Texas whose attempt to relive her glory days as a beauty queen pushes her relationship with her teenage daughter Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) to a turning point. The film’s mother-daughter dynamic is warm and never overplayed, as is its beautifully shot, lovingly detailed depiction of Southern Black life, lending the film a realism that enshrines even small moments as sacred. [Katie Rife]
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
Virtual theaters July 10
Documentary purists have already balked at this uproarious new project from Bill and Turner Ross, which presents itself as a fly-on-the-wall portrait of a Las Vegas dive bar going out of business but was actually shot in New Orleans, with the brothers casting locals (including one former actor) as the barflies. Yet so successfully does Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets simulate the alternately jovial and antagonistic vibe of a local, legendary watering hole that the circumstances of its production start to seem less than relevant. Once the beer is flowing, a fake bar quickly becomes a real one, intoxication coaxing out the personalities of the “performers.” Which is to say, the environment may be constructed, but the humanity captured within definitely isn’t. [A.A. Dowd]
Palm Springs
Hulu July 10
Yes, it’s yet another time-warp movie, this one starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti as guests at a never-ending wedding, zipped back nightly to the morning of the nuptials. Yet Palm Springs breaks the cycle of bad Groundhog Day imitations. It is, instead, a good Groundhog Day imitation, justifying further recycling of the premise through sheer force of goofy-sweet personality, random bursts of hilariously shocking violence, and a plot that finds a malleable metaphor for relationships in the purgatory of a forever repeating day. Now is either the best or worst time for a film about two people stuck in one place, doing the same thing over and over again. Either way, though, a romantic comedy as charming as Palm Springs is always welcome. [A.A. Dowd]
109 Comments
Um, I’m sorry, where is would-have-been-Oscar-winner Sonic the Hedgehog? smhWhile I did enjoy Weathering With You, I can fully understand why people hate the film for its ending.
The further out from my viewing of Weathering With You the more I think I love the ending. The message of 99 out of every 100 of these anime films feels like it’s “family and tradition are important, please be kind to your grandparents even if you think their devout Shintoism is a little hokey” (including Your Name and its spit-wine MacGuffin), so for WWY to say the exact antithetical to that is honestly pretty fucking punk.
??? I didn’t get that out of the ending at all. The ending was pretty clearly “I want to be with my beloved, even if it dooms Tokyo.”
To explain further, the way I took it was this: the adults are okay with literally performing human sacrifice on a child in order to preserve the status quo. Honoka and Hina’s decision to forsake that makes the message, to me, that it’s not our kids’ responsibility to patch over our fuck-ups. Climate change isn’t something we can just put a band-aid over, and it’s unfair to future generations to put the onus on them to find a solution.
I took it more like a Snowpiercer-style ending where if the choice is living in a morally bankrupt society or ending it all, best to end it all. That’s a bleak perspective, but at least it is different from “Yay! The heroes fixed the problem and will live happily ever after”.
I’m disappointed by the lack of love for Bad Boys For Life.This list is invalid. Good day sir!
This list is shit for the lack of Bad Boys for Life. When the only valid criticism of your movie is that marketing should have waited until the next installment to give the movie name to you know we talking greatness.
In all seriousness, I’m surprised by the lack of Emma, as that is pretty much the only traditional Oscar-bait movie that has been released to theaters this year (it opened in March, a couple of weeks before the pandemic really hit the US).
I’m a little disappointed they’re extending the eligibility by a few months. Was really looking forward to that Sonic/Birds of Prey showdown for the final Best Picture spot.
Well, at least no one can take away the fact that in ten years when we look back (if we’re alive to look back) that we’ll collectively wonder WTF at the top grossing movie of 2020 being Bad Boys For Life.
Sonic was actually a pretty fun movie.
I get that the site’s review of Da 5 Bloods was unfavorable (although oddly its author isn’t a contributor to this list), but is everyone here in lock-step on this opinion? I think the review itself was pretty misguided (docking it for sins of omission for things it didn’t actually omit but maybe weren’t the primary focus), but I think there is a lot of the film-making and acting (especially Delroy Lindo’s performance) which would be undeniably great even if this was a normal year. It’s probably “messier” (which I consider a benefit in this case rather than a pejorative) than most of the films on this list, but I’m pretty stunned that there aren’t any (or enough) of the critics here that consider it one of the very best this year.
Agreed. It struck me as the right kind of messy as well.
as the right kind of messy as well.
I love this. So many of Lee’s films hit me this way—lots of ideas jammed together, some internal contradictions, lovely sound/visuals, but, damn, he makes me think (and, often, laugh), in a way that many other filmmakers don’t.
Thanks for this, I may give it a shot then
This wasn’t a formal vote like at the end of the year. More an overview of stuff that got good notices from folks at the site. FWIW, I liked D5B a lot.
Ah, thanks, I was wondering why this list had so many movies on it(a little work for my hand to record all of them!) for a “Best Of.” I didn’t read the intro where that was probably explained. I look forward to the inevitable “Best Of” lists by season, with thematic pairings. “The Best Bleak Films For Winter.”
Personal opinion and all, but I found Da 5 Bloods intensely annoying, almost as if the Spike Lee who made BlackKklansman and Do The Right Thing was replaced by a pod person who understands nothing about human narrative.
Ok so you’ve now seen 3 Spike Lee Joints, way to go
I’ve seen five. I chose my two favourites to make the comparison. How many do I have to see before I can have an opinion on any of them?
I thought the review mistook muddled politics for a muddled film, personally. I thought it was a beautifully made and acted piece of work that I never wanted to look away from.
Da 5 Bloods was fucking great. Spike’s greatest works are always messy as hell.Definitely in top 5 films of 2020 I’ve seen.
I’d argue it was the best on film roll of Delroy Lindo’s storied career
I thought it was really good, but I didn’t like BlacKkKlansman much so I just figured I’m out of step with how most people regard Spike Lee these days.
It’s the best movie of the year. Easily.
Several here I’ve had my eye on for a while, which is good.On the other hand, quite a few of the ones I’ve already seen which are featured here are… not bad, by any means, but feel like slim pickings in a list ostensibly dedicated to the “best” of the year.“Wild Goose Lake”, for example, is a film I really liked, but it succeeds mostly based on its energy and pacing, as the core narrative is noticeably thin in the moments it slows down.
Similarly “Bacurau” was a big disappointment to me, as it’s neither as deep or exciting as many people/sites (including here) seemed to suggest. The first half has a lot of promise, but it soon abandons its more interesting threads in favour of a pastiche of half-baked ideas that turn it into a pretty generic B movie with vague allegorical pretensions, before ending with a stunning “is that it?”And “The Vast of Night” is really good. But, again, in any stronger year I doubt it would be being held up as one of the year’s “best films”.Still, I’ve got many others (“Beanpole”, “First Cow”, “Palm Springs”) to check out!
I feel the same way about Bacurau, Vast of Night, Shirley, and Invisible Man. I enjoyed all of them quite a bit and definitely found them a lot more engaging than the usual summer blockbuster spectacles (which I also enjoy, but channeling Scorsese, they’re basically thrill rides). But they all felt a little undercooked in different ways, with Invisible Man surprisingly feeling the most fleshed out because it leaned into and accepted that it’s a fairly standard thriller/horror flick at its core. That said, I may be judging them harshly as I’ve taken the theater closures as an opportunity to catch up on a lot of classics like Paris, Texas, so most movies are going to look pretty mundane by comparison.
Vast of Night has definitely been one of my favorites this year, but it’s so laser focused My Brand that I don’t think it’s possible to be objective.
No,no–you are right– it’s good. Not really my brand, but the premise, acting, sound design and swoopy/mobile camera were so, so good.
The only one I’ve watched is Bacurau and I liked it quite a bit—I can’t fault your take though. I will say for me that maybe as someone from Brazil some of gestures at people and characters landed well with me, the web of relationships in the town are familiar as a place, and to some degree it is the acting out of the fantasy of comeuppance, and the casting. The way that despite the criticisms of the Hamilton, the casting of that show works in context of the history of Broadway, or Black Panther was simultaneously another (a better I thought, but basically another) kinda bland Marvel superhero movie. So the context for me for Bacurau,a s a Brazilian movie to get some kind of steam outside of Brazil, is the often good but often poverty porn or Elite Squad exploitation flick—City of God being the big mix of the two.China is making some great noir lately, but Wild Goose Lake I skipped because it looked thin, and I figure I’d catch it later.
…some of gestures at people and characters landed well with me, the web of relationships in the town are familiar as a place…This is actually what I loved the most (particularly in the first half). I wanted to know more about the characters, the town, the interactions between them all. Who were they, why did some people like/dislike each other, what histories and what web of secrets tied them all together…In that sense I guess I kind of wanted it to be more like Dark (the series) where the plot really serves as a way of explaining and exploring the characters and their relationships – which I felt the film basically abandoned in the second half for… well, I am trying to avoid spoilers, so let’s just say a quite predictable flip on an existing movie trope.Still, I’ll definitely grant you that, as a non-Brazilian (in case that wasn’t clear) there will definitely be things that didn’t resonate with me quite as deeply as they would with a Brazilian viewer/audience (though, to its credit, the first half, at least, felt like it got its points across and made me empathise with the characters anyway).
Oh, like I said, I can’t fault your read of the movie, and I didn’t want to presume. I was quite young when my family left, so my Brazilianness feels kinda of tenuous, but it’s definitely the source of my enjoyment of the second half of the movie, even while seeing exactly what you did. I’m reading a comic about one of the runaway slave communities now, so there’s that echo too, but I think part of my enjoyment partly comes from the predictability. An old Brazilian teacher from one of my many attempts to get Portuguese to stick in my head lamented how the movie Central Station showed all the poor parts. Brazil has a lot of poor parts, and the trajectory of those stories is familiar, so Bacarau’s simple turn was still emotionally satisfying.
Oh, I didn’t think you were bring presumptuous at all. Was good to get a different perspective. All art is (to an extent) subjective after all, and it’s interesting to get an alternate take, particularly when it’s from a different background/context like that!
“In that sense I guess I kind of wanted it to be more like Dark (the series) where the plot really serves as a way of explaining and exploring the characters and their relationships”I haven’t seen Dark, but one of the things I really liked about Bacarau was how it embraced its movie-ness and did not explain everything. The beginning is really cool, it creates a place where the interactions are comprehensible but don’t entirely make sense to a viewer (particularly an American one like me, it sounds like) and that’s very engaging, I want to see how everything fits. What happens next is when people don’t engage with the mystery and where that attitude gets them and that’s pretty great on its own terms.
Ooh baby
Thanks for not making this a slideshow.
Beat me to it
We are all blessed this day.
2020 is finally looking up.
Oh now you did it.
He fucking did. All the other ones have been slideshows. Goddammit.
Welp, you jinxed it.
The prophecy has been fullfilled!
Actually, on the slideshows, I discovered you can turn them into a regular list by minimizing the window.
Interesting. I’ll keep that in mind for next time.
And that was the best movie of all.
Jesus, don’t give them any ideas.
In 2020, I would have guessed that a movie titled The Burnt Orange Heresy would have been something completely different.
A scathing critique of 1970s colour palettes?
The Burnt Orange Heresy A prequel of sorts to The Planet of the Apes movies which focuses on Dr. Zaius’ various manipulations of human accomplishments in an effort to glorify his “species”….oh you already read one or two subtexts here, didn’t you?
I hope people start using it to call You Know Who after his November defeat. (knock on wood.)
Ahhhhhh, yes!
If Jaja Ding Dong from Eurovision Song Contest doesn’t get nominated for Best Original Song this year, I will be absolutely disappointed.It may not be the best movie, but the songs are so catchy myself and my kids end up singing them throughout our day. Catchy as in, we’ve watched the movie 5 times in the last week. Whatever keeps them busy.
The songs were good, Stevens’ in particular, but the movie itself was a disappointment. Lots of praise for a reheated Talledega Nights with fewer laughs and sloppy direction.
So perfect for these stay at home quarantine days!
If Ferrell is going to steal from himself, better Talladega Nights than Step Brothers
Husavik will almost certainly get the nomination for that movie and it has a very real shot at winning.
cannot understand anyone thinking The Assistant is a good movie. it has no plot, no story, no forward movement. it is essentially a pity party for the new hire at a company who is sad because she actually has to do work. and it is boring as hell.
but it has Julia Garner.
are you saying The Assistant is getting better reviews than it deserves only because Julia Garner is in it, or that The Assistant is good because Julie Garner is in it? For me The Assistant falls in to the ‘dull movie in which nothing happens” category.
I think the point was to feel the futility Garner’s character feels in combatting an abuser. But I think if Garner wasn’t a wonderful actor the movie wouldn’t have got as much acclaim. I posted below that I think it doesn’t work really is because the movies paints everyone else as bad people, usually it’s a collective environment of “good people” ignoring the reality of the abuse in lot more nuanced way.
yeah i didn’t get that her coworkers were presented as bad just becasue they told her what to do (for instance made her, the low man on the totem pole, get lunch) and went about their days doing their work instead of stopping everything to set straight the boss.Garner sold the movie. i agree the acclaim the movie is getting is mainly to her performance
I mean they seemed bad in their lack of concern for the abuse they all knew was happening, it only really seemed to truly weigh on Garner’s conscience. But I guess this is representative of Weinstein, where I’m sure the people protecting him were probably lacking some humanity.But yes, Garner is a force!
i think the other characters felt the same way somewhat and had some sympathy for Garner’s characters but had been there longer and were accustomed to it, plus yeah throw in some lack of humanity on their part. also, Garner’s character is the protagonist and her portrayal as such wouldn’t have the impact it was supposed to if she had allies. i dont think this was a movie about defeating the big bad.
I think there may have been oh, I don’t know, COUNTLESS subtle cues you were missing in the relationship that Garner has with her coworkers in that movie.
I think she is wonderful and deserves all of the acclaim she’s received for Ozark. I’d love to see her in some more good roles.
Wow I feel like I missed quite a few of these! I really enjoyed The Whistlers, I can still recall a lot of scenes from memory, I always think that’s a good sign.I actually thought The Assistant fell short for me for some reason. I loved Julia Garner’s performance, but I think the rest of the characters could have been a lot more nuanced in how they feed the monster exactly(everyone seemed obviously bad except for her), because it’s often the subtle acts of complicity that keep these abusers in power and it would have asked the viewers to examine their own actions a lot more and how these environments develop.
This feels like every movie released this year.
Nope. Missing clear Oscar winners Sonic the Hedgehog and Bad Boys 4 Life.
Not to mention Trolls: World Tour and Scoob!I have seen so few movies from this year that Trolls: World Tour is actually the best movie I’ve seen from this year so far. Scoob! is easily the worst of them and yet is still in my top five because I’ve seen four.
Of course, at the rate we’re going, this may wind up being the final list for the year.
I have seen *zero* of these, thanks (mostly) to this stupid year. I’m going to catch First Cow tonight, though, and I really have no excuse for not watching The Vast of Night yet, so – this weekend!Then I’ll have some actual opinions, boy howdy.
I’m surprised Bad Education isn’t on this list. I’ve watched that 3 times since it came out.
I really liked Alice Wu’s Netflix movie The Half of It, starring Leah Lewis (George from Nancy Drew), a gender-swapped reimagining of the Cyrano story and an unconventional take on what a rom-com actually is
I just watched that yesterday and it was so lovely!
I caught The Whistlers on a whim at my city’s film festival last year and had a lot of fun with it. Glad to see it here.
I’d like to chime in for the sole purpose of saying that First Cow is not a good or remotely interesting movie.
Dang it, Cats was released a week to early to make the list.
So glad to see The Way Back on this list. The last movie I actually saw in the theater … with my sponsor no less.
Even with the extension of the deadline, Ben Affleck has a solid chance at Best Actor.
I’ve only seen Zombi Child and Beanpole but I liked them both, especially the former, even if I didn’t think it was quite as good as Nocturama.
This list is somehow the first time I’ve noticed that AVC reviewed both Your Name and Weathering With You, and I’m gobsmacked that Weathering got the higher review + better recommendation!I will admit that Shinkai movies are visually at their best when he gets to play with an urban environment, but I think that Your Name did a much better job with a lot of the same playthings; stronger score, themes which felt both better realized and more intertwined with the teenage romance, and it a strong ending where Weathering seemed to get buried beneath its own stakes.I haven’t seen the rest of these yet, but I’m looking forward to Palm Springs and will catch Bloody Nose and Wild Goose Lake as soon as it’s convenient. The trailer for Beanpole pretty much ruined my life (I remember some sort of harrowing sound effect underlying the whole thing) so I think I’ll skip that.
I couldn’t agree more with Weathering With You.
Great 2020 movies not listed: Swallow, Vivarium, Come to Daddy, The Platform, Color Out of Space, Extra Ordinary, The Hunt, Sea Fever, The Lodge, Blood Quantum
God I hated Vivarium. Could have been cut down a lot into a Twilight Zone 30 minute episode or less. Which I probably would have still hated but it would have been over much quicker.Sea Fever was a non-event, a total void for me and Blood Quantum strangely very lacking for me but I thought The Platform was good. Haven’t seen the others.
The site didn’t seem to review it, but I’d suggest INCITEMENT as one worth watching. Fascinating look into Israeli politics on the eve of Rabin’s assassination without feeling didactic or underlining present-day parallels.Can’t understand the critical praise for THE INVISIBLE MAN beyond “this has #MeToo overtones, so that makes it good.”
“she could turn a grocery list into a fascinating psychological study”As much as I think Moss is fine at acting, this statement is absurdly hyperbolic.
well, maybe if she was staring, unblinking, directly into the camera lens while doing so.
There isn’t an irrelevant second-wave feminist from the 1970s who doesn’t flick the bean to her nightly; poor Lizzie has been typecast as every Germaine Greer wannabe’s go-to gal since Mad Men.I caught a few minutes of Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake: China Girl, and holy hell was it bad. It was every 60+ lesbian lecturer I had at uni’s moist dream.Having said that, full props to Moss for not mangling an Aussie accent. That was genuinely impressive.
I’ll pitch a fun rental in The Hunt. Wait, where are you going? Hear me out! I know it’s kinda trashy, but it’s having fun with both sides, and never takes itself too seriously. Betty Gilpin kicks some ass, and it’s got some really fun kills. In fact, the movie unfolds in a way where I never knew what to expect. Kept me on my toes.
No argument here. I’ve watched it a few times now. It has a good drive/momentum to it.
This Invisible Man made empty spaces seem incredibly intimidating, and I enjoyed it.
Did you guys miss The Outpost or is nobody into it? I thought it was one of the best—and most honest—war films in years, made a little better by the fact that it’s a true story, directed by an Army vet, and features real soldiers. I felt like it cut through a lot of the jingoism and rah-rah emptiness of most recent war films. I haven’t seen any mention of it via AV Club.
It’s no surprise I haven’t seen most of these, but I did see Never Rarely Sometimes Always. It has a quiet brilliance to it.But the best movie I saw this year is still 1917. Oscars be damned it opened wide on Jan 10, 2020.
1. Emma2. The Gentlemen3. Birds of Prey4. Da 5 Bloods5. UnderwaterThese are my favorites from 2020, but I have many to see still.
I still need to watch Emma. The only other adaptation I’ve seen is, well, Clueless, and back then I didn’t know it was a modernized retelling of one of Jane Austen’s novels.
I’ve only seen Vast of Night from this list but I think if it more as a good low-budget effort by promising filmmakers than a best-of-year candidate.
I haven’t seen one of these! What’s my prize? Although I will be watching Palm Springs soon. As in tonight if it comes on at midnight…
I just realized Onward wasn’t mentioned. I really liked it but maybe the cool kids didn’t?
Onward is fantastic.Among other things, it was a return to form for Pratt.
I find the lack of Onward legit upsetting.Top five Pixar.
Greyhound was outstanding. Best naval movie since Master and Commander, and it nails so much of what it’s actually like to be on a warship.Sorry not sorry if this disagrees with your “it’s a dad movie!” snark.
Were links to Amazon removed? A lot of the streaming links start with a stray comma like something was there, then deleted.
4 of these films were submitted to the Oscars last year – “Weathering with You”, “Beanpole”, “The Whistlers”, “A White White Day” in the International Category. I don’t think they’re eligible this year. I would also add “Ema” to this list. Chile will most likely submit it as their film and it most likely will make the shortlist.
“Emma” blew me away. Its so beautiful to look at. The performances and costumes are top notch & it takes Austen story telling on a whole new level. Plus I always appreciate a good femgaze film.
Why no Mike D’Angelo? 🙁
Zombi Child Criterion link is to an unrelated article.
The best movie of the year is easily DA 5 BLOODS. You clowns are out of your minds.
I could understand maybe why people wouldn’t didn’t like them but i LOVED LOVED LOVED The Vast of Night and Palm Springs.
I’ve seen none of these and only heard of four of them. This has been a strange strange year.