The Best Movies of 2020 - Top New Films of the 2020 Year
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The Best Movies of 2020

These are the phenomenal films that helped us overcome a challenging year. And you can watch them right now.

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best movies of 2020
Elaine Chung

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This was, in many respects, a year to forget—but not so when it came to film. Although most were viewed on inadequately small screens, the legion of fiction and non-fiction releases that helped us cope with our pandemic-wracked reality delivered welcome doses of excitement, drama, terror, and humor. Whether tapping into universal hopes and fears, or incisively reflecting our current insane circumstances, they offered insight and escape, as well as thrills of a breathtakingly varied sort. No one knows if 2021 will bring us back to theaters or have us continuing to experience new works on our TVs, tablets and phones. Yet as evidenced by the numerous gems that arrived over the course of the past twelve months, cinema remains as vital as ever. While we can’t celebrate them all, this year-long rundown has certainly tried to do justice to the finest that filmmakers had to offer. Dynamic, unique and altogether triumphant, these are our selections for the best movies of 2020.

65) On the Rocks

on the rocks
On the Rocks

With On the Rocks, Sofia Coppola reunites with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray for another odyssey involving a young woman and an older man. Though the results aren’t as dynamic as their prior collaboration, Coppola’s fizzy romantic drama nonetheless finds its headliner in outstanding form as Felix, the suave ladies-man father to Laura (Rashida Jones), with whom he embarks on an investigation into the possible two-timing proclivities of her husband Dean (Marlon Wayans). Seemingly riffing on Coppola’s own famous dad Francis, Murray is a charming force of nature as an incorrigible lothario at once devoted to his mother-of-two kid and wholly, hilariously consumed with himself, and his performance does much to enliven this breezy saga about Laura’s mid-life crisis. A nighttime race through Manhattan in an old-school sports car is the material’s comedic high point, and contributes to the warmth and affection that Coppola showers upon her metropolitan setting, here envisioned as a dreamy wonderland full of intrigue, adventure and alternately enervating and enlivening domesticity.

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64) The Trip to Greece

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Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon follow the path first traversed by Odysseus in The Trip To Greece, once again engaging in the witty banter and dueling celebrity impressions that have become the hallmark of this Michael Winterbottom-stewarded comedy series. For this fourth and ostensibly final installment, the bickering couple (Coogan arrogant and condescending; Brydon cheery and patient) enjoy fine meals and show off their imitative vocal skills, here highlighted by Coogan doing a pitch-perfect Ray Winstone as King Henry VIII. In keeping with its predecessors, the duo’s latest colors its humor with a strain of wistful regret rooted in their thorny feelings about transitioning into middle age. Anxiety about mortality turns out to be more pronounced than ever, particularly via Coogan’s Ingmar Bergman-esque dream sequence, which is related to dismay over his father’s failing health. Nonetheless, the alternately combative and chummy English pair remain in fine, funny form, and their swan song proves to be their most substantive collaboration since their maiden outing.

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63) Lost Girls

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Jessica Kourkounis

The true story of a mother’s search for her missing child, Netflix’s Lost Girls is a clear-eyed and moving expose about the many ways in which troubled young women are let down by parents, police and society at large. Using Robert Kolker’s book as her source, director Liz Garbus recounts Mari Gilbert’s (Amy Ryan) efforts to find her oldest daughter Shannan, a prostitute, after she vanished following a house call in a gated Long Island community. At every turn, what Mari discovers is a lack of urgency about, if not outright indifference to, her daughter’s disappearance, even after other bodies are found in the very same area. Ryan’s powerhouse performance as the fiercely determined Mari is the nucleus of this dispiritingly bleak tale, in which there are few concrete answers to be found, but plenty of blame to pass around. That Garbus doesn’t let Mari off the hook for her own mistakes, while nonetheless casting a reproachful gaze at the individual and systemic failings that allow such crimes to occur – and go unsolved – only strengthens her cinematic case for compassion and togetherness as the bulwark against tragedy.

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62) The Whistlers

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Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu once again melds his interests in language and genre filmmaking with The Whistlers, a neo-noir about a police officer named Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) who travels to the Canary Island of La Gomera to learn an ancient whistling language that doesn’t sound anything like a human form of communication. This subterfuge is demanded by Cristi’s gangster bosses, with whom he’s both in league with and tasked with nabbing by his law enforcement chief Magda (Rodica Lazar). Cristi’s playing-both-sides predicament is complicated by his relationship with Gilda (Catrinel Marlon), an alluring beauty whose femme fatale status is underlined by her famous noir name, and Porumboiu fractures his narrative so that chronology, like the various dialects employed by his characters, comes across as intricately coded. Repeatedly shouting out to both crime movies and Westerns – even its title and central conceit feel like references to Lauren Bacall’s iconic To Have and Have Not line of dialogue – the director orchestrates his action with slippery subtlety and droll humor, and he continually surprises on his way to an expressively non-verbal finale of light and music.

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61) Synchronic

Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson are genre filmmakers adept at crafting time-travel stories that double as subtle inquiries into the human condition, and their latest, Synchronic, is their most straightforward and high-profile venture to date. For New Orleans paramedics Dennis (Jamie Dornan) and Steve (Anthony Mackie), life has turned out to be an unexpected disappointment, and their discontent with their disparate stations in life (Dennis is an unhappy husband and father; Steve is a lonely and aimless ladies man) is amplified by a spate of deaths that seem to be related to a new synthetic drug called synchronic that causes Dennis’ 18-year-old daughter to disappear. As Steve soon learns, synchronic has the capacity to spirit users to bygone eras, which instigates a quest that speaks directly to larger issues of mortality, loss, grief, and the push-pull between dreams and reality. Everything is connected in this economical and thrilling sci-fi saga, as the writer/directors – aided by understated performances from their Hollywood leads – deliver a unique vision of intertwined fates, the links between the past and the future, and the importance of cherishing the present moment.

60) Bad Education

bad education
HBO

Using cheery smiles and go-getter glares to conceal profound depths of resentment, ambition and greed, Hugh Jackman gives the performance of his career as Roslyn, Long Island public school superintendent Dr. Frank Tassone in Bad Education. A dramatic account of the historic embezzlement scandal that engulfed Tassone and his colleagues – most notably, assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janney) – Cory Finley’s film (based on Robert Kolker’s New York Magazine article) is a ruthlessly efficient and even-keeled affair about the intense pressures of suburban academia, where educational-ranking achievements and college acceptance rates are intimately intertwined with real-estate prices. The director lays out the myriad forces at play in this ostensibly picture-perfect milieu in exacting detail, and his preference for longer takes means that the focus remains squarely on his performers. That, in turn, allows the HBO feature to rest on the sturdy shoulders of Jackman, who never resorts to caricature in embodying Tassone as a discontent striver whose eagerness for validation dovetailed with his lifelong deceptiveness, to disastrous ends.

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59) Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin

Werner Herzog is non-fiction cinema’s foremost philosopher poet, and with Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin, he pays reverent tribute to his celebrated writer friend Bruce Chatwin, who passed away from AIDS in 1989, and whose 1980 novel The Viceroy of Ouidah was the basis for Herzog’s 1987 film Cobra Verde. Splitting his documentary into chapters based on Chatwin’s books, and guiding his action with typically lofty narration, Herzog embarks on the sort of “erratic quest” for answers to existence’s biggest questions that were favored by Chatwin. The way in which nature, history, dreams and myth intertwine is a central focus here, as Herzog expresses how he and his subject were kindred spirits bonded by a shared fascination with ancient knowledge and a habit of embellishing facts in order to get at a deeper “ecstatic truth.” Though the director employs considerable archival material, its footage of his own journeys – set to Ernst Reijseger’s eclectic score – that really gets to the heart of Chatwin as an itinerant artist drawn to life’s far corners, and enduring mysteries.

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58) Color Out of Space

Nicolas Cage and H.P. Lovecraft are an ideal genre-movie pair, and Color Out of Space ably channels the latter’s gift for unreal terror while providing the former with a vehicle for charmingly out-there antics. Directing his first feature since being booted off of 1996’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Richard Stanley brings trippy majesty to his adaptation of Lovecraft’s short story about a family – led by Cage’s cassoulet-cooking dad and Joely Richardson’s breadwinning financial-whiz mom – whose lives in rural Arkham are upended after a meteor crashes in their backyard, spawning menacing magenta foliage, absorbing lightning, and radiating not-of-this-Earth colors. Madness has arrived in infinite-hued form, as Stanley evokes a sense of rifts opening between our world and the great abyss beyond, and delivers fantastical sights of both a CGI and practical-effects sort. Even amidst such insanity, however, the filmmaker never loses sight of his characters’ humanity, nor their humorousness, be it Tommy Chong’s local squatter or Cage’s paterfamilias, a dork prone to fits of rage and weirdness – such as when he demonstrates the proper way to milk an alpaca.

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57) Boys State

Politics are chaotic, combative and undertaken by both true believers and amoral schemers—a state of affairs depicted in starkly microcosmic terms by Boys State. Directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s documentary follows a number of kids as they make their way through Texas’ week-long Boys State program (sponsored by the American Legion), in which hundreds of teenagers are split into two political parties (Federalists and Nationalists) and asked to create a unified platform and elect officials. The most coveted of those positions is governor, which pits progressively oriented Steven against conservative Eddy in a battle that echoes those being waged in the corridors of Washington, DC power today. Guns, abortion and immigration are the most contentious of the hot-button topics tackled by these would-be representatives, and through their campaigns, what emerges is a portrait of politics as a war defined by personalities, prejudices, fearmongering, and dirty tricks and slander. It’s an acute snapshot of the American democratic process as filtered through an alternately inspiring and horrifying Lord of the Flies lens.

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56) The Beach House

Bio-terror comes in corrupting forms in The Beach House, whose contagion-based scares speak, subtly if severely, to our present moment. On a Cape Cod getaway, aspiring astrobiologist Emily (liana Liberato) and her going-nowhere boyfriend Randall (Noah Le Gros) wind up sharing accommodations with fiftysomething couple Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber), friends of Randall’s dad. Drinks and hallucinogenic edibles help alleviate the initial awkwardness of this get-together, but the good times are fleeting, thanks to a strange mist emanating from the dark, furious depths of the ocean, which contaminates the area with glowing Lovecraftian foliage and giant, slimy organisms. The normal order is quickly turned on its axis—quite literally, in one unforgettable shot—as alien forces infest, infect and annihilate. Aided by Liberato’s accomplished performance, first-time writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown stages his mayhem with assured efficiency, creating an air of impenetrable mystery through uneasy silence, compositions that devolve into cascading bubbles and a squishy foot-surgery sequence that would make body-horror maestro David Cronenberg proud.

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55) Young Ahmed

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne gaze into the dark heart of religious fanaticism in Young Ahmed, a drama that’s all the more chilling for proffering no easy answers. By the time the filmmakers’ story begins, urban 13-year-old Ahmed (newcomer Idir Ben Addi) has already been indoctrinated by a jihad-encouraging imam (Othmane Moumen). No amount of adult counter-programming can affect the kid, and when he attacks a female teacher (Myriem Akheddiou) for her modernist Islamic teachings, he winds up in a juvenile detention center and, then, at a farm where the affections of Louise (Victoria Bluck) complicate his worldview. With a stony countenance and dark eyes that mask his interior thoughts, Ahmed is a chilling protagonist in thrall to a rigid ideology that preaches violence against all heretics. Their handheld camerawork trailing him as he embarks on his cataclysmic rise-and-fall journey, the directors’ aesthetics are as formally rigorous and evocative as ever, capturing the unyielding nature of zealotry, as well as the difficulty of loosening extremism’s terrible grip on individuals’ hearts and minds.

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54) Ma Rainey's Black Bottom

Acting doesn’t come much bolder and more blistering than in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, George C. Wolfe’s adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play about a 1927 Chicago recording session by real-life blues legend Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) and her backing band, comprised of trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo), bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), pianist Toledo (Glynn Turner) and trumpeter Levee (Chadwick Boseman). Courtesy of Ma’s demanding diva imperiousness and Levee’s cock-of-the-walk arrogance, the session becomes a powder keg whose fuses are related to African-American oppression, ambition and music-industry exploitation. Wolfe keeps the material spry and sensual (as well as explosive) by keeping his roving camera trained on his stars, who swing for the fences with ferocious gusto. Davis has rarely been better as the take-no-shit Ma, staring down anyone who might question her authority – including her manager (Jeremy Shamos) and the studio’s owner (Jonny Coyne) – with a glare that would fell an angel. In his final screen performance, Boseman matches his co-headliner’s intensity, his Levee so full of vibrant, self-destructive fury, desire and life that it’s a tragedy the performance stands as the late actor’s swan song.

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53) Apocalypse '45

A companion piece to last year’s excellent The Cold Blue, Erik Nelson’s Apocalypse ’45 imparts a striking sense of WWII chaos and carnage via newly unearthed and restored material shot during America’s campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific theater. The vivid footage that comprises the entirety of Nelson’s non-fiction portrait is downright stunning, be it of soldiers crouched behind sandy dunes upon arriving at Iwo Jima, or aerial dogfights that are depicted via the POV of fighter planes’ gun turrets. Those jaw-dropping sights alone make Nelson’s latest a must-see. Yet greatly enhancing its trip back in time are the many recollections from WWII vets—including marine Hershel “Woody” Williams, who earned the Medal of Honor for singlehandedly taking out a series of enemy pillboxes with his flamethrower—whose commentary about their wartime duty serves as the film’s guiding narration. Thrillingly grand and revealingly intimate, it paints a timely portrait of the heroism, and sacrifices, required to uphold democracy.

52) Mank

Less a definitive answer to the question “Who deserves credit for Citizen Kane?” than a fictional drama about Herman J. Mankiewicz’s struggle to complete his most famous screenplay in a Hollywood torn between art and commerce, David Fincher’s Mank is a poison pen letter to the golden-age era that it channels with every one of its gorgeous chiaroscuro images, Bernard Herrmann -esque soundtrack notes, and artificial reel-change cigarette burns. Taking the form of a black-and-white film from the 1940s, Fincher’s inside-baseball character study scrutinizes the marriage of movies and politics, and the push-pull between self-destruction and creativity, through the lens of Mank (Gary Oldman), whose story flip-flops between his time in a ranch house writing Orson Welles’ (Tom Burke) masterpiece and his prior relationships with William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance) – the inspiration for Kane – and the mogul’s mistress, actress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried). Oldman is magnetic as the dissolute scribe, and Seyfried is even better as the not-as-dumb-as-you-think blonde starlet. Still, in an ironic twist, the real draw of this tribute to writers is Fincher’s remarkable directorial artistry.

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51) Driveways

Driveways isn’t simply one of the late Brian Dennehy’s final performances—it’s also one of his finest. In Andre Ahn’s touching indie, Dennehy is Korean War vet Del, who comes to befriend socially awkward young Cody (Lucas Jaye) after the boy and his mother Kathy (Hong Chau) take up temporary residence next door, cleaning out the pigsty that used to belong to Kathy’s deceased sister. All three of these characters are suffering in their own distinct ways, due to a combination of loss, loneliness and fear, and Ahn (working from Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen’s precise script) intertwines their plights with few contrivances and a potent measure of empathy, especially once Del and Cody begin developing an unexpected bond. Be it Kathy going through her sister’s things and cleaning a bathtub soiled by a cat’s corpse, or Del caring for his VFW pal Roger (Jerry Adler), who’s slowly losing his mind, the specter of death—and the memories summoned up by the end of the road—looms large over the proceedings, culminating in a shattering Dennehy speech of irreparable sorrow.

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50) Shirley

Despair, desire, and madness are all entangled in Josephine Decker’s Shirley, about the late horror writer Shirley Jackson’s (Elisabeth Moss) attempt to pen her sophomore novel Hangsaman while dealing with her unfaithful critic/professor husband Stanley Edgar Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) as well as two boarders, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his pregnant wife Rose (Odessa Young). The director’s follow-up to Madeline’s Madeline is a psychosexual affair about lost women driven crazy by callous, self-serving men, and their resultant fears and needs. As with her acclaimed debut, Decker’s latest recounts its action through expressionistic visuals—smeary, off-center compositions; intense close-ups; dreamy interludes in which fantasy and reality blend together—and a score of jangly, strident strings, rumbling bass and thunderstorm crashes. As the famed author behind The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, Moss radiates ferocity and instability, and she’s matched by Stuhlbarg as the creepy, codependent Hyman. It’s Young, however, who holds the hothouse material together as the self-actualizing Rose, whose journey mirrors that of the missing girl Jackson is writing about, and who serves as the beating heart of this slyly furious film.

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49) Emma

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Amazon

“Handsome, clever and rich” is how Emma’s tagline describes its matchmaking heroine (Anya Taylor-Joy), but it’s also an apt summation of director Autumn de Wilde’s Jane Austen adaptation, which is energized by meticulous style, spirited wit and passionate emotions. Hewing closely to its source material, the film charts Emma Woodhouse’s efforts to find a suitor for her doting companion Harriet Smith (Mia Goth) while struggling with her own blossoming feelings for her sister’s brother-in-law, George Knightley (Johnny Flynn). Round and round the romantic entanglements go, not only for these three characters but a host of others that de Wilde and screenwriter Eleanor Catton faithfully delineate in clean, bright brushstrokes. Its studied imagery suggesting a daintier variation on Wes Anderson’s trademark visuals, Emma boasts an aesthetic confidence that’s matched by its performers. At the head of that impressive pack (which also includes Bill Nighy) is Taylor-Joy, whose Emma exudes just the right amount of playful cockiness and ambition – qualities ultimately undercut by her realization that no amount of manipulations can change what the heart wants.

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48) The Way Back

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Gavin O’Conner (Miracle, Warrior) is modern cinema’s preeminent sports-drama director, a status he maintains with The Way Back, a conventional but deeply felt story about addiction, anger and the rough road of rehabilitation. Reuniting O’Conner with his The Accountant star, the film concerns Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), a former high-school basketball phenom who, in the wake of multiple familial losses, gets through his construction-work days and wayward nights with a perpetual drink in hand. By means of a job coaching his Catholic alma matter’s struggling team, Jack is blessed with a shot at salvation, turning around the fortunes of his players and, by extension, his own life. Subdued and melancholy, Jack’s journey is a familiar one, and yet O’Conner and Affleck – the latter turning in an expertly modulated, interior turn – shrewdly locate their protagonist’s alcoholism as the self-destructive byproduct of regret, resentment, fury and hopelessness. Also generating pathos from agonized father-son traumas, it’s a male weepy that, courtesy of its well-calibrated empathy, earns its melodramatic tears.

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47) Father Solider Son

Brian Eisch’s overseas tours of duty took an immense toll on his two young sons, Isaac and Joey, and his return home from the battlefield with a catastrophic leg injury only compounded their unique family dynamic. Father Soldier Son spends ten years with the Eisch clan as they struggle to overcome various hardships wrought by military service, as the now-disabled Brian grapples with depression and loss of identity, and his boys come to grips with a new, strained reality that permanently alters their emotional and psychological outlook on their own situations, and plans for the future. Catrin Einhorn and Leslye Davis’ intimate direction captures this family’s saga through ups (Brian’s new marriage) and downs (an unthinkable loss), in the process conveying how our dispositions and adult paths are inherently shaped by our parents (and the values they teach) as well as by the calamitous incidents that detonate our sense of stability. In this empathetic portrait of the scars of war, there are profound truths about grief, survival, and the ingrained patterns of our lives.

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46) Beanpole

People, Human, Sitting, Photography,
Non-Stop Production

Dramas don’t come much bleaker than Beanpole, director Kantemir Balagov’s wrenching story about the damage caused by war, and the exceedingly high cost of survival. In a 1945 Leningrad still recovering from the end of WWII, lanky Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko), aka “Beanpole,” works as a nurse even though her military service has left her with a condition in which she becomes temporarily frozen. Iya cares for Pashka (Timofey Glazkov), the young son of her frontlines friend Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina), and when Masha appears to reclaim her child – only to learn of an unthinkable tragedy – their relationship buckles under the weight of grief, guilt, regret, resentment and need. Cruel blackmail soon proves to be Masha’s means of coping with loss, but healing is in short supply in this ravaged milieu. Shot in alternately tremulous and composed handheld, director Balagov’s long takes place a premium on close-ups, the better to convey the dizzying anguish of his subjects, who are as decimated as their environment. Overpoweringly desolate and moving, it’s a vision of paralyzing individual, and national, PTSD – and, ultimately, of women banding together to forge a new future.

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