The Best and Worst of 2020

This was an exceptionally difficult year in many ways. Movie theaters were not immune to the pandemic and was one of the industries hit hardest by it. Most theaters throughout the country were forced to close throughout most of the year, the effects of which will surely become clearer over the next year. Most studio films were either postponed until 2021 or diverted to some form of streaming option. For those who were willing to watch something other than franchise films, 2020 put the spotlight on indie films.

As a result of all of this the box office for the year was greatly skewed. The biggest earners were largely first quarter films whose release weren’t abbreviated by the pandemic. What would normally be the 10th highest gross of the year ended up being the highest gross of the year, that being Bad Boys for Life at $206.3 million. Sonic the Hedgehog was a distant second at $146 million, after which the rest of the list drops significantly below $100 million. You’d have to go a long ways back in box office history to see many of the year’s highest-grossing films reach far below $100 million. This certainly makes very clear why the major theater chains may not survive.

So, what did we get most out of the movies from 2020?

Well, because most of the big-budget films got booted out of the year, one thing that was spotlighted - and will be spotlighted in this list - were films that managed to do a lot with very little. Those who only desire to see franchise films and the like may have found the year lacking in movies. But anyone interested in more than that were exposed to a wealth of smaller films that said a lot with very little.

What was said? There were a handful of films that spoke to issues of race, police brutality, and the divisive politics of our time. What I saw recur was a sense of empathy for others: towards those with physical challenges, minorities, and women. There were a lot of movies about women and the toxic masculinity and patriarchy they face on a daily basis: Birds of Prey, The Craft: Legacy, The Assistant, Shirley, Mulan, and a handful you’ll see on this list all touch on, if not explicitly illustrate the various little and big ways women are condescended to, controlled, or threatened on a daily basis by society. It’s a shame the year was dominated by a pandemic. For those who were able to redirect away from that there were these films that, hopefully, allowed many to “finally get it” and for women to experience a catharsis or comfort in seeing they are not alone.

With all of that said, let’s get right to…

The Worst

5. Wendy

Yes, my wife named this the Movie They Didn’t Get recently, so I may be risking a night on the couch for this. But count me as one of the many who didn’t get it, I guess. I loved Behn Zeitland’s Beasts of the Southern Wild from 2012. It dawned on me a year or so ago that I had not seen another film by him since. So, when I learned he had a film coming and it was his take on the Peter Pan story I was excited and intrigued. My expectations were tempered when I heard it wasn’t very good. Its reputation preceded it and was accurate. Wendy has the look of Zeitland’s previous film: lower class Southern Americans, grainy yet gorgeous cinematography, focus on adolescent girl. It even had a beautiful score, one of the year’s best. But it was a shell of what made Southern Wild great. It had the ideas - hell, it’s a pre-existing IP, so it shouldn’t be hard for Zeitland to hang his ideas on that rack! But it just wasn’t executed well. Here’s hoping he doesn’t take another 8 years to try to recapture some of that Southern Wild magic.

4. I’m Your Woman

I love Rachel Brosnahan. All I needed to do was watch 10 minutes of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to know she has that magic quality about her. I will gladly see her take on any other project in-between seasons of my favorite Amazon Prime series. I’m Your Woman was an unfortunate disappointment. It didn’t help that Brosnahan’s character was every bit the opposite of Midge Maisel: where Midge has a spark and energy, Jean is a void forced to wait around wherever she is placed and keep her lips zipped around everyone. The film shows us what we’re missing in all of those crime films with all of the suspense and action: a woman and a baby pacing around a house, hoping someone doesn’t drop by to kill them. The pacing is often as exciting as it gets.

3. Antebellum

Janelle Monae is a force to be reckoned with. The score is one of the best of 2020. The cinematography, exquisite. The first five minutes of this film is among the greatest of the year… It all goes downhill from there. Stupid character choices. Moments that make no sense. Entire scenes that don’t pay off. A non-linear structure that is actually worse than a linear structure. Antebellum has interesting ideas. The real horror of this film is how those ideas are executed.

2. The Secret Garden

Adaptations are funny. If you adhere too closely to the source material - especially if a previous adaptation has - you risk boredom and claims of unoriginality. However, if you steer too far away from the source material you can lose sight of what people loved about it or even beg the question, “Why use the source’s name at all?”. This version of the Francis Burnett novel is somewhere in-between, yet still manages to be less interesting and miss the mark. The film makes changes to the story that add nothing, fails to make its central kids flawed enough to have an arc, and sanded down the edges of the 1910 novel with a 2020 perspective of its characters (no pun intended). It even changes the entire point of the titular garden, adding a magical realism that dazzles visually, but feels hollow. Since I’ve seen next to nobody talking about this film it seems it got lost in the VOD shuffle because of the pandemic. This is as it should be.

1. Run

This film seemed to be the thriller everyone wanted to talk about in October. It had decent reviews, so I expected a decent, if somewhat flawed, bit of suspense. Imagine my surprise when I learned the movie everyone kept saying was “really good” was this bit of nonsense. I was a fan of Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller Searching. That was surprisingly good. This is a film where we’re supposed to believe that a teenager never remembers walking as a child. Where we’re supposed to believe nothing ever seemed fishy about her mother’s behavior before she discovered she’s taking medication prescribed to her mother. Where we’re supposed to believe that, when the teen takes a moment to duck out of a theater to run to the pharmacy down the street to learn more about said medication, the mother soon shows up there… because it just makes sense that her daughter would go from the theater’s bathroom to the pharmacy down the street! Why wouldn’t that be the first place she’d look for her daughter? And we’re supposed to accept that her mother imprisons her in a basement right next to a box of exposition. And that said mother kept newspaper clippings that spell out the entire backstory of the plot. This movie is dumb and beneath everyone involved. Sarah Paulson needs to find a comedy or a sci-fi film or something that isn’t the same unhinged or disturbed character she’s played in Glass, American Horror Story, and Ratched.

Dishonorable Mentions:

Shirley,

The Witches,

The Lodge

The Best

There are a couple of things interesting about the following list: 1) less than 1/3 of the list overlaps with my Film Faves list on the latest episode of The Movie Lovers. 2) all but 2 or 3 movies on the list are small features. No superhero films. No science fiction. No action movies. Most of the movies’ budget were less than $10 million. There are two films with budgets of $35 million and $45 million, respectively. I was able to see over 50 films this year. Take that as you like. I was unable to see Another Round, City Hall, The Forty-Year-Old Version, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Martin Eden, Minari, One Night in Miami, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Possessor, and Promising Young Woman. And before you ask: I do not count Nomadland as a 2020 release. Most of the time what I haven’t seen doesn’t make much difference, as they wouldn’t make the list anyway. The one exception to that I can recall was back in 2011 when I hadn’t quite landed on the film of the year (I resigned myself to Melancholia, a film that is anything but mediocre) until I caught up with 13 Assassins after I published my list. Also, last year’s 1917 would’ve certainly bumped Joker off my list. Promising Young Woman may be a similar case. We’ll have to see in a few weeks.

Here we go…

10. Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

I was torn between Time and Crip Camp as the best documentary of the year. Both are excellent. I chose to go with Crip Camp, which I feel lends to this consistent theme of empathy that we see in the year’s films. Crip Camp educates us about a place where the disabled (or differently abled, if you like) felt a sense of belonging and community in a summer camp. And then it becomes about how those same people grew up to be noticed, be counted as part of society and make some important changes. Crip Camp shows us that these bodies we experience life with do not make us who we are. That what makes a person is truly what’s inside these shells. It is beautiful and inspiring.

9. The Vast of Night

This is one of a couple of films that has grown in my estimation over time. The craftsmanship in this directorial debut and how so much is accomplished with so little is exceptional. This movie literally puts you on the edge of your seat just by focusing on characters listening. They’re listening to sounds. Or they’re listening to other characters tell stories. Both are riveting and require so little. At one point the film literally forces its audience to focus on what it is hearing by going black. It’s a throwback to an older form of science fiction, one about small towns and close encounters. And it is pulled off brilliantly.

8. The Trial of the Chicago 7

There were two films this year about protestors on trial. This felt the least rote, the most energetic, and was the most interesting and entertaining of the two. I was completely won over by Aaron Sorkin’s account of an event in history. It was extremely timely and the first great film I saw in a few months. It was an opening salvo to the awards season. And it was a firecracker of a movie!

7. Wolfwalkers

This is the 2nd of 3 films on this list that grew in estimation over time. It is probably the best animated movie of 2020 and, because of being on Apple TV+, the least-seen. Cartoon Saloon is the Pixar of today in that they are relatively new to the full-feature game and are knocking it out of the park with every single release, this being their fourth. And, due to their predilection towards beautiful traditional animation, they are also compared to Studio Ghibli. They are that good. And Wolfwalkers is, too.

6. Da 5 Bloods

I think there were few films as complex as Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods in 2020. It’s not that the story itself is complicated. What made Da 5 Bloods complex and interesting was how it dealt with issues related to the Vietnam War, PTSD, xenophobia, reparations, and racism. The film points out several African American artists and Civil Rights leaders from the ‘60s that history has celebrated and contrasts with African American soldiers who don’t get the same treatment. It also confronts its audience with the disproportionate amount of blacks who were sent to war over whites. Like many of Spike Lee’s films, there’s a lot Da 5 Bloods confronts us with. The remarkable Delroy Lindo literally confronts us, the audience, in a monologue that breaks the fourth wall. Unlike many of his peers from the ‘80s, Spike Lee has proven he still has a lot to say and the skills to effectively say them as a filmmaker.

5. The Invisible Man

Director and writer Leigh Wannell managed to achieve two impressive things with February’s The Invisible Man: 1) rise above Universal’s original Dark Universe kick-starter, The Mummy, with an exceptional take on one of Universal Studios’s classic characters. 2) Make the film more than a straight-forward popcorn horror film and be socially-relevant. The Invisible Man was a post-MeToo film about abusive misogyny and gaslighting, a brilliant angle on the H.G. Wells concept that shifted the focus and rose the material above expectations of an average thriller. It wasn’t always able to clear the practical issues related to the concept, but it’s one hell of an effort that is better than it ought to be.

4. First Cow

Kelly Reichardt is a director I’ve championed before. Her films are not well known to anyone outside the critic and cinephile communities. She’s never made a film that’s made over $100 million. She’s never been nominated for an Oscar. That last bit might change with First Cow. Reichardt makes small movies. And while her recent work has starred the likes of Jesse Eisenberg, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Dakota Fanning, Kristen Stewart, and Laura Dern her film First Cow is even smaller with mostly unrecognizable faces save Toby Jones in a supporting role. Yet First Cow is the film topping over a dozen critics’ Top 10 lists and included in 90 others. It’s a film that sneaks up on you. It’s textured, grubby, and provides a vision of early Oregon Territory so real it may as well have been actual footage of the period. It follows two men and their business venture. There’s so much about that venture that speaks to capitalism, entrepreneurship, the American Dream, and what would eventually become of those things in the centuries to come. It’s a film about the optimism and potential of what laid ahead for our country. And it makes us reflect on what we did with that potential. First Cow is a great example of how 2020’s films proved you can say so much with so little.

3. David Byrne’s American Utopia

I never would’ve expected a concert film to be the movie of 2020 and the movie we needed in 2020. David Byrne’s Broadway performance and Spike Lee’s filming of that performance not only spoke to our issues with race and political division in our country, but it also spoke to the necessity of our unity, growth, and healing. It also provided the year with one of its most joyous experiences. The year 2020 was, in many ways, joyless. And, with theaters shut down, there was very little joy and escapism to be had at the movies. American Utopia partially provided a salve with performances of such songs as ‘Road to Nowhere’, ‘Burning Down the House’ and many others. It was the first film of 2020 that made me want to get up and move and one of the few to make me smile. It is one of the greatest concert films I have ever seen. And one of the most necessary films of 2020.

2. Sound of Metal

This is the last of the three films that has grown in estimation the more I think about it. This is so true that it actually went up a spot right before I started writing about it. This story about a drummer losing his hearing and struggling with getting it back or accepting his new reality fell just outside of my Film Faves list on the podcast. The sound design is one of the best. It’s like The Vast of Night in its forced focus on what the audience hears. Sound of Metal just has the added component of empathy towards the deaf. Not sympathy, empathy. I have never experienced what it’s like to lose hearing or to be surrounded by and engage with the deaf before. Sound of Metal helped me realize what I’ve been taking for granted and also appreciate those for whom silence is life. Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci are fantastic! And, in case the year 2020 didn’t already demonstrate this in America, Sound of Metal is the film this year that exemplified how strong our desire for normalcy - for everything to go back to how it was - is and how some will risk their own well-being and irreversible damage in order to get that sense of normalcy back.

1. Never Rarely Sometimes Always

When we reviewed this film at the beginning of the summer I knew the rest of the year had a mountain to climb in order to top it as the best film of the year. A couple films came close, but none that I saw did. Like many of the movies on this list, Never Rarely Sometimes Always accomplishes so much with so little. This story about a teen, accompanied by her cousin, seeking an abortion across state lines just needs two girls, a handful of low-key locations, and a camera in order to give us a subjective experience of being a young woman in America. The deck is stacked against girls: they often can’t make their own choices about their body and men everywhere either want something from them or to use their power against girls. Yet this isn’t some man-hating diatribe. This film provides a great opportunity for men willing to empathize to understand and for women to relate and maybe gain a certain catharsis and validation. But the former is most important. There were a handful of post-Time’s Up and MeToo stories by women about toxic masculinity, the patriarchy, and sexism in 2020. Never Rarely Sometimes Always was the one that helped us experience them.

Honorable Mentions:

Time,

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,

The Assistant

Dick Johnson is Dead,

Mank

That just finally puts the year 2020 to bed! Be sure to check out the latest episode of The Movie Lovers that looks at the year as a whole and counts down our favorite films from the year.

What do you think are the best films of the year? Comment below!