Since March, the year in cinema has been defined by a near-total absence of significant theatrical releases—first, because theatres across the country were shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic and, subsequently, because even after they reopened people largely stayed away. The new 007 film and the new Wes Anderson film, among dozens of others, were bumped to next year’s schedule; “Soul” and “Wonder Woman 1984” are being released on streaming sites rather than in theatres; the Cannes Film Festival was cancelled, and many others, such as the New York Film Festival, were held online. In spite of this, 2020 has been, against the odds, a wonderful year for new movies. The absence of tentpole-type films—superhero spectacles, familiar franchises, star vehicles—had the welcome effect of thrusting independent films to the foreground. With “virtual cinema” releases, art-house venues such as Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center have stepped up to become, in effect, distributors; streaming behemoths, including Netflix, Amazon, and the newcomer HBO Max, are playing the part of art houses; and less prominent sites, digital versions of film festivals, and online self-distribution have taken the place of limited theatrical releases. Nevertheless, I had the sense, through much of the year, that even the best new independent films were being met with a muted response, stemming in part from (as I wrote about a month ago) a lack of media buzz but also, relatedly, from a collective sense of numbness in the face of the pandemic’s collective and inequitably borne tragedy and the disastrous political response to it.
The reality is that there isn’t a movie on the list of thirty-six below that has made a scintilla of difference in the nation’s crises this year, even if there are some great ones that address major political matters directly and movingly. It’s hardly the filmmakers’ fault. There’s no reason to expect movies to make a practical difference in electoral politics (despite Michael Moore’s longstanding efforts). But, at a time of emergency, in which the very survival of Americans and American political institutions has been in question, the impotence of movies to make a difference is an inescapable aspect of watching and thinking about cinema. Considering the changed state of movies in the face of the pandemic is impossible, and immoral, without also considering the governmental failures—rooted in indifference, incompetence, malevolence, and greed—that have made the pandemic an ongoing medical and social catastrophe.
This year has served as a terrible reminder that there’s no such thing as normalcy—for many individuals and for society at large, crisis is a permanent state of affairs, and what’s normal, alas, is the systemic failure to recognize and respond to it. Yet movies, generally speaking, aren’t up to the demands of depicting extraordinary events, whether they are the extremes of seemingly private life (violence, death, sex) or the enormities of politics and abuses of power. The movie business as a whole—both Hollywood and independent—internalizes and reflects norms. It emphasizes unity over candor, a good story over what’s really happening; it shapes stories to fit arcs rather than creating forms to accommodate realities. It fails to dramatize the connections between private life and the political situation, inner life and public power. Because of generalized, ingrained, and internalized guardrails against the kind of imaginative freedom required to do so, filmmakers tend to be disinclined to break a dramatic framework in order to say what’s on their minds. As a result, even some movies of progressive intent contribute to the drone of media conventions, and to their distortions; their tone and form fatally undermine their substance.
In a time of crisis, form appears frivolous, style is suspect, and beauty is undervalued—mistakenly. (Some of this year’s best films overtly confront this conflict.) The inner truth of experience and the authenticity of emotion are, in and of themselves, cleansing to a defiled mediasphere. The best of modern, post-classical filmmaking has always been an act of resistance, whether or not those films’ subject matter is expressly political. The fundamental politics of movies is the expansion of cinematic form, the creation of new possibilities of expression—most significantly, the expression and inclusion of experiences and ideas otherwise kept out of movies, whether owing to intentional suppression or falsely innocent conventions of storytelling. Progress in the arts, like progress in politics, isn’t linear; it’s dialectical, in multiple dimensions, and involves unforeseeable responses to unforeseeable events, including sudden and dramatic eruptions of creative originality and visionary imagination. At its best, filmmaking (like film criticism) points not at the present but toward the future. I’m anticipating a peaceful transition of political power at the beginning of next year, and also looking ahead to as yet unfathomable varieties of cinematic revolution to come.
A note on my list: I’ve counted as a 2020 release any new film that was made available online for any length of time this year, including those shown in online versions of festivals and special series. I didn’t, however, include some notable ones that were available online but also have upcoming releases by active distributors planned for next year, such as Matías Piñeiro’s “Isabella” and Jia Zhangke’s “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue,” both of which would have figured high on the list. So would several films that came out this year but have been sitting in the vaults for some time, including “Hill of Freedom” (2014, Hong Sang-soo), “And When I Die, I Won’t Stay Dead” (2015, Billy Woodberry), and “Jayhawkers” (2014, Kevin Willmott). Also, Steve McQueen’s series “Small Axe” isn’t, as some have maintained, a TV series; it’s a set of five feature films that he made in a short period of time—that’s quite an achievement in itself, which is rendered all the more imposing by the great artistic merit of them all. All five are, separately, among my best films of the year.
1. “Kajillionaire”
Miranda July’s exuberant yet terrifying drama, about a patriarchal family of scammers and a young woman’s spirit of resistance and liberation, is realized with an exhilarating imaginative freedom.
2. “Da 5 Bloods”
Dramatizing the inseparable link between the battle for justice and the battle for historical truth, Spike Lee’s film follows a group of Black veterans of the Vietnam War who head back to Vietnam with motives as mixed now as they were then.
3. “The Whistlers”
The Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu, who’s obsessed with the political implications of language, turns a classic dirty-cop thriller into an epistemological mosaic that’s centered on a Canary Islands language which uses whistling instead of speech—and on how it’s used to avoid government surveillance.
4. “Dick Johnson Is Dead”
When the documentary filmmaker Kirsten Johnson learned that her elderly father, Richard, a psychiatrist, was exhibiting symptoms of dementia, she invited him to live with her and filmed their new shared adventure. The result, which includes staged tragicomic sequences feigning Richard’s death and afterlife, plus the behind-the-scenes story of producing them, is a metafictional exploration of the metaphysical.
5. “An Easy Girl”
In Rebecca Zlotowski’s daringly subjective drama, a sixteen-year-old girl living in Cannes and unsure of her future is unexpectedly visited by her twenty-two-year-old cousin from Paris, a young woman who lives the fast life and draws her into it; the girl’s ensuing whirl of reckless behavior proves radically and surprisingly transformative.
6. “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”
Sidney Flanigan plays a seventeen-year-old high-school student in rural Pennsylvania who, unable to get an abortion in that state without parental consent, travels to New York for the procedure. The writer and director, Eliza Hittman, emphasizes the bureaucratic obstacles and administrative infrastructure abortion involves—and the inseparable connection of private life and public policy.
7. “On the Rocks”
Sofia Coppola’s comedic drama, about an artist who confronts the gale-force personality of her worldly, suave father, is a bitterly ironic challenge to the venerable ideal of male Hollywood cool.
8. “Lovers Rock”
The second film in Steve McQueen’s “Small Axe” cycle is a bracingly original musical centered on a house party by and for Black Londoners of West Indian descent, where joy and expectation meet romance and danger. McQueen, working with the cinematographer Shabier Kirchner, develops a boldly original style for dance and its emotional world.
9. “Time”
