Although time no longer has meaning in the dark horror of COVID season, the calendar informs me that the time of year has rolled around again to make a top 10 list of my favorite movies. 2020 was a surprisingly not-bad year for movies, considering all of the circumstances surrounding the industry. Although Hollywood studio output basically shut down around March, there was still a steady stream of independent and foreign films that trickled in throughout the year, resulting in an overall very nice crop of films. I was worried I would have nothing to put here this year, but once again it was incredibly hard to cut my list down to only 20 (ten listed films and ten honorable mentions). Great movies like Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, The Invisible Man, The Personal History of David Copperfield, and i’m thinking of ending things (just to name a few) didn’t get a spot despite being excellent. I will say that the list definitely leans (even more) independent and foreign this year, because those are the movies that were available. Honestly, I find it hard to believe that most of the big delayed films would have found their way onto this list, though, so this probably isn’t too different from how it would look anyway. Despite the lack of big blockbusters, I still think that the movies on this list have a broad appeal; certainly, they were the highlights of my year spent indoors.

Notable Absences

As always, despite my very best efforts, there are movies that slip through the cracks, or that I legitimately didn’t have an opportunity to see this year. I always like to list them upfront so that my readers can know that I’m a huge poser and have zero credibility to be making a top ten list of any kind. Two of the biggest omissions are Nomadland and Minari, both of which are storming best-of lists around the critical community, but have only played at a couple of exclusive film festivals and have had no streaming or theatrical runs. I’ve also just missed a few critical darlings, including One Night in Miami, Saint Maud, Vitalina Varela, and Sound of Metal. Furthermore, there are two excellent streaming titles that I did not consider for my list this year: Hamilton (on Disney+) and American Utopia (on HBOMax), both filmed versions of critically acclaimed Broadway shows. While both are excellent and definitely worth your time, they’re not really films so much as filmed plays, and that was enough of a distinction for me to exclude them. Alright, that’s all of the absences (that I’m aware of), so let’s start talking about movies I did see this year.

Deliberate Snubs

This is my annual section for movies that are definitely getting awards consideration, and may even be winners of some of the big ones, but that I am intentionally excluding for one reason or another. These are not necessarily bad movies, per se, and some of them are even good, but they are movies for which I have a major complaint that excludes them from consideration on this list. It may be an inflated sense of self-import, a critical issue with some singular element of production, or just a case of wasted potential. I try to include movies that people might ask about if they didn’t see them on the list anywhere.

• Mank – Absolutely my biggest snub of the year, as this one is showing a lot of support among critics, but I hated this movie. It’s the first David Fincher movie I haven’t loved, and that hurts. It’s an adaptation of his dad’s screenplay, and I think that’s part of the problem. There was no effort made to kill any darlings in this overwrought, overacted, insanely historically inaccurate biopic of the guy who wrote Citizen Kane. The protagonist hits every single conceivable stereotype of self-destructive, self-important, holier-than-thou, angsty white dude posturing, and the movie has a contemporary theme shoehorned in so awkwardly that watching it unfold almost gave me whiplash. If you come at Kane, you best not miss by even a little, and this ham-fisted, awkward ‘mystery’ is a mile wide. (Streaming on Netflix)
• Palm Springs – This one isn’t a bad movie. Not at all. It’s a perfectly pleasant 90-minute distraction. It’s here because my mind has been boggled by seeing this show up on multiple end-of-the-year lists by others. I’m increasingly trying not to be down on other people’s enjoyment of things, but this movie just seemed so light, so insubstantial, that I had forgotten almost everything about it a week after seeing it. I couldn’t recite a single joke from it now, or remember anything but the barest traces of the plot. I didn’t dislike it, because you can’t dislike something that you don’t ever think about at all. There’s nothing wrong with this inoffensive little comedy, but I have difficultly thinking of anything that would put it in a top ten. (Streaming on Hulu)
• Soul – Another movie that isn’t bad at all (and in fact by many standards is quite good), but it’s another Pixar movie that’s going to win Best Animated at the Oscars despite there being multiple other more deserving films this year. My biggest problem with this title, though, is that it’s not a children’s film. It’s just not. There are maybe a half dozen jokes in this entire experience that are actually aimed at young people, and entire sequences will go so over their heads that I cannot foresee them getting anything out of it. What eight year old has use for Knicks jokes and Carl Jung references? On top of that it has an infuriatingly cop-out ending, and an internal mythology that makes little to no sense when thought about for more than a couple seconds. Perhaps my expectations for Docter’s follow-up to Inside Out were too high, but this whole film was a big disappointment for me. It’s a huge pile of visually brilliant moving images, ironically without the soul to hold it all together. (Streaming on Disney+)
• Trial of the Chicago 7 – This one gets the boot because of how smug it is. It has the puffed-up air of a movie that matters, when it really doesn’t. The protagonists aren’t likeable in the least, the movie actively downplays the actual danger faced by black people in this era to instead focus on a group of insufferable white college jerks who are doing political activism for a laugh. If you want a movie about political legal change, watch Mangrove. It’s made more competently, with protagonists that you might actually be capable of tolerating, and with an ending that may actually have an emotional impact, unlike the limp, lifeless Trial. I spent the entire movie feeling like I was being lectured at by a college sophomore, with no self-awareness, on the importance of political activism. Hard to recommend this one. (Streaming on Netflix)

Honorable Mentions

These are ten movies that almost made the top ten. There are another ten movies here, but there could easily have been twenty since it ended up being a surprisingly good year for movies. All of these movies are excellent in their own way, and each of them is worthy for inclusion for a number of reasons. I chose films that I really wanted to talk about for this section, so these aren’t necessarily numbers eleven through twenty or anything like that, just a selection of movies that barely missed the list that have some noteworthy feature that I thought worth highlighting. The movies are simply presented in alphabetical order. These may fall into the ‘only if you’re really into the idea’ camp for many people, and there are some really weird ones in here too. Maybe you can use it to expand your film horizons!

• Butt Boy – Look, I’m just going to dive right in here (pun intended): the premise of this movie is that a serial killer is murdering people by disappearing them up his butt. This is, patently, a ridiculous idea and a terrible basis for a film. The magic of Butt Boy is that it plays this idea so straight, and so earnestly, that it alchemically goes around the bend of terrible and back to brilliant. Detective Fox (Tyler Rice) is a hard-drinking, hard-working cop who’ll stop at nothing to catch a killer. Chip Gutchell (Tyler Cornack) is his AA sponsor and the likeliest suspect in the murders. From there proceeds an entirely formulaic cop and criminal story that wouldn’t be out of place in an episode of Law and Order: SVU. But the movie never once winks at the camera, never acknowledges how insane absolutely everything about it is, and therein lies its genius. This one’s absolutely not for everyone, and really isn’t even one of the best movies of the year, but I laughed like an idiot almost constantly at the bizarre juxtaposition of entirely standard crime movie tropes with the most off-the-wall premise for a film in recent memory. If it sounds even remotely like it might be your thing, you absolutely owe it to yourself to give it a shot. Thinking about it still puts a smile on my face. (Streaming on Amazon Prime)

• Dick Johnson is Dead – I don’t watch nearly as many documentaries as I probably should, but I made time for a few of them this year. This is by far my favorite. Kirsten Johnson (director of the amazing 2016 Camera Person) was worried about her father’s declining health, so she decided to process it the way any reasonable documentarian would: she made a movie about all the horrible ways he could die, using movie magic to realistically portray a number of violent ends. And then her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And she kept making the documentary. What follows is one of the most beautiful, funny, sad, and hopeful meditations on fatherhood, declining health, and death that I have seen. The movie waxes rhapsodic with fantastical (and gorgeously filmed) depictions of heaven in one moment, and in the next sits down with a person losing their memory, their livelihood, and their self and just talks about the horror of that creeping inevitability. It’s no exaggeration to say that I (noted poor handler of “dad stuff” in movies) spent at least half of the movie with tears in my eyes. When Johnson narrates “I can’t imagine what my life will be like without this man,” I expect you will feel the same if your relationship with your dad is anything like mine. (Streaming on Netflix)

• Driveways – This was Brian Dennehy’s (of First Blood fame) final film before he passed away this year. Perhaps it’s coincidence that it’s a beautiful, elegiac film about loss and grief, but it feels serendipitous. The plot is simple: a single mom (Hong Chau) and her 9-year-old son (Lucas Jaye) arrive in a rural town to sell the house of her deceased sister. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sister was a hoarder, and the simple job ends up being a mountain of work. The lonely old Korean war vet next door (Brian Dennehy) offers to help, and a gentle, slow friendship begins to develop between the old man and the young boy. The film is suffused with death and loss but never feels hopeless or bleak. Instead, it’s about how we live with those feelings and how our shared humanity becomes a balm in our hardest times. It’s also a fantastically American film in the best sense, not shying away from our faults and weaknesses but also celebrating our potential. And it’s capped off by a truly beautiful front-porch monologue that manages to bring all of it together. A movie to watch if you are ready to feel some really big emotions, this is a surefire recommendation to anyone who loves movies. (Streaming on Showtime or rental through Amazon)

• Freaky – Christopher Landon is at it again, proving that there is life yet in some of the oldest and hoariest of horror tropes. Happy Death Day was a no-doubt horror-comedy masterpiece, and this movie solidifies him as a delightful innovator within that particular genre space. Whereas that 2017 film was a mashup of horror with Groundhog Day, this movie pulls the same trick but with Freaky Friday, and to just as delightful a result. Shy high school girl Millie Kessler (a divine Kathryn Newton) is the next intended victim of local serial killer The Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), but due to some magical shenanigans, they end up body swapped instead. And that’s it. There’s really almost nothing to say about this movie other than to describe its premise and to tell you that it’s the best possible version of that premise that I can imagine. It hits all the plot points that you would expect, tells the jokes that you would expect, and does it all as well as it could be done. It is also a great showcase for what Landon can do with the additional freedom of a (hard) R rating, which turns out to be quite a bit. The acting is a joy (give it a chance even if you hate Vaughn; his lumbering physicality is perfect here), and the laughs blend perfectly with the gasps. It’s an incredibly fun time at the movies. (Available to rent on Amazon)

• Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – Now this is how you adapt a stage play into a film. Unlike the dismal 2016 Fences, this adaptation of an August Wilson play is lively and beautiful, showcasing what film can add to a stage play with its own unique visual language. If you’ve heard of this one, it’s likely because of the searing final performance of Chadwick Boseman as Levee, which is every bit as powerful and devastating as anything you’ve heard. What I most noted about the movie, though, was the brilliant way it highlighted the strengths of both live drama and film. The movie feels very much like watching a stage play because it is so well put together technically as a film. Many such adaptations (including the aforementioned Fences) simply set out to film the play, and it never really works. What feels electric and alive on a stage ends up flat and boring in front of the camera. Not so with Ma Rainey, though. Through excellent editing and cinematography, the work comes alive in a way that truly respects both the work’s origins and its new medium. And man, that ending. It may not be symbolically subtle, but it’s damn affecting and retains every bit of the power of the original. An object lesson in how to do adaptation correctly. (Streaming on Netflix)

• The Old Guard – Possibly because of the lack of blockbusters, this was a very poor year for action movies. Then, out of nowhere, came The Old Guard, a very big, very loud, and very (smartly) dumb action movie that had me grinning throughout. There’s an action movie on this list every year, and even though this was a generally weak year, I think The Old Guard would be a winner regardless. Although not as face-meltingly violent as the movies that sometimes earn this spot, it openly and joyously embraces its very silly comic book origins in a way that I wish more big-budget DC and Marvel adaptations would. This is a story of immortal warriors protecting humanity from the shadows, and it is perfectly aware of the tone such a story needs. The action is legitimately great, led by a delightful Charlize Theron who is still firmly in the ass-kicking mode of her Mad Max work here. As with Freaky, I feel there isn’t really all that much to say here. It’s a great action movie executed very well, with a great sense of pacing and a good escalation into the final over-the-top action scenes. It even takes a little down time along the way for actual character arcs and quieter moments, which is more than most of these can be bothered to do. It doesn’t demand much of its audience, but it is generous with its pleasures. If you missed it on Netflix this year, it’s definitely worth your time. (Streaming on Netflix)

• To the Ends of the Earth – Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to Akira) continues to be impossible to pin down as a director. From being a foundational voice of new Japanese horror with Kairo and Cure, through critically acclaimed traditional family dramas like Tokyo Sonata and bizarre sci-fi experiments like Real, every time you think you have him pinned down he shifts again into something new. This year, he’s made a curiously meta-film, a travelogue about travelogues. Yoko (Atsuko Maeka) is a Japanese TV journalist who is on location in Uzbekistan to make an episode of a travel show. The entire film was shot on location and is truly beautiful to behold. This is a cinephile’s movie through-and-through, with nature cinematography that would make John Ford blush and mise-en-scene that says more than the characters do in some scenes. It’s hard to summarize the movie because it has so very much on its mind. Its about the alienation and paranoia that comes from being truly ‘foreign’ in a place, it’s about the challenge of being a woman surrounded by men (there are only a couple other females that are ever even seen in the movie), it’s about the artifice of movie (or TV)-making, and it’s about the assumptions that we make about foreign people. It’s also a genre rollercoaster, starting off as a movie about making movies, but segueing extensively into open melodrama and even non-diegetic musical before the credits roll. Although the breadth of its scope may in some ways prevent it from fully cohering, there was no way I could leave it off my list this year. I was spellbound by it throughout my viewing, and never knew where it was going to take me next, just like the very best travelogues. (Not yet available streaming)

• Spontaneous – If you watch only one teen romance movie about people inexplicably spontaneously combusting this year, make it this one! In all seriousness, this is a delightful and surprisingly thoughtful movie that was horribly slept on this year (it currently has a whopping seven reviews on metacritic). It effortlessly enters the hallowed ranks of the (checks math) fewer than ten good movies ever made from a YA novel, thanks to an abundance of snark and a near-total disregard for most of the tropes of its genre. Isolated teen Mara (Katherine Langford) is just trying to survive her senior year when that phrase becomes much more literal for her and her classmates with the unexpected explosion of a girl in trigonometry class. Dylan (Charlie Plummer) is another survivor of the horrifying ordeal, and the two quickly begin a surprisingly sweet romance that is interrupted periodically by the continued unexplained deaths of more and more students in their class. To say too much more would be to give away too much, but the government gets involved and things begin to get quite dark indeed. The movie’s greatest trick is in constantly keeping you on your toes. It lives up to its title incredibly well, with sudden astonishing bursts of violence coming when you least expect them, rendering the viewer a nervous wreck as they constantly wait for the other shoe to drop. The movie is legitimately funny in a way few teen films are, and isn’t afraid to get really dark or really thoughtful in a way that feels earned. In a year that was astonishingly good for offbeat romances (check out Love and Monsters or Words on Bathroom Walls for more wonderful rom-coms), this one stood head and shoulders above the others. It’s truly a perfect tale for our modern times, and it stuck with me for far longer than I expected. (Available to rent from Amazon)

• Vast of Night – This delightful throwback is, by its own admission, little more than a Twilight Zone episode writ large and with a few modern bells and whistles. And if you love those old black and white morality plays, you will find much to love here as well. As in love with 1950’s audio technology as it is with classic sci-fi, this is the story of a small-town New Mexico radio DJ (Jake Horowitz) and a young switchboard operator (Sierra McCormick) who begin to think something strange is happening over the airwaves the night of the big opening basketball game of the season. The film has the best sound design of the year, with crackling static and otherworldly noises playing out over the lines of the switchboard. There are actually entire sequences left entirely black so that the viewer can focus entirely on that hissing, indistinct audio, placing you so firmly in the shoes of the protagonists that the lines between you blur. This is a movie to be watched in the dead of the night with your full attention, eyes straining into the blackness, ears struggling to pick up the faintest signs, wondering what really lies out there in the space just past where we can see and hear. Perhaps it loses a little of its luster upon rewatch, but that first experience of it is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, really. The night is palpable, captured in impossibly long takes (that weren’t faked) and filling the film with the air of quiet menace that has haunted our minds since we first banished the dark with the discovery of fire. (Streaming on Amazon)

• The Wolf House – Garnering this year’s award for ‘movie that is incredibly good but that I’m not sure I can in good conscience actually recommend that anyone watch it’ is this stop-motion living nightmare from Chilean directors Joaquin Cociña and Cristóbal León. A young girl escapes from a reclusive German religious colony in the mountains of Chile and finds her way to a strange house whose only residents are two pigs. She nurtures the pigs and changes them in increasingly horrifying ways, haunted always by the idea that the colony or a wolf will find her. The narrative is hardly the point here, though. This is a movie firmly in the ‘art film’ genre, more focused on symbolism and theme than story. And symbolism and theme abound, with significant messages about colonialism, religion, abuse, and psychological trauma, all captured in a nightmarish form of stop motion that I’ve never seen before. The whole movie is painted progressively onto the walls of an actual house, with the movie playing out in progressive paintings across the walls, floors, and ceilings, often supplemented by papier-mache structures that grow organically out of the walls. The technical artistry alone would be spellbinding, if you weren’t distracted by how disturbing and weird all of the imagery is. It really has to be seen in motion to be believed, but unless you’d really like to watch some body horror as filtered through a child’s craft project, I’m not sure the experience will be worth it for every viewer. Still, absolutely one of the most memorable things I saw this year, and if you’ve got the stomach for it, an incendiary criticism of the horrors of colonialism and cultural Darwinism. (Available to rent on Amazon)

The 10 Best Movies of 2020

10. Blow the Man Down (Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy): This delightful first feature (one of an unbelievable four feature film debuts on this list) is one of those movies where the location is as much a star as the characters. Although it could reductively be described as Fargo but in Maine, that description would bely this movie’s greatest strength: the uniquely feminine filter through which all of its action unfolds. In the same way that Lynne Ramsay fundamentally reimagined the ‘violent revenge’ film in 2017’s You Were Never Really Here, Cole and Krudy here do the same for ‘small-town noir.’ In a thought I will echo repeatedly on this list, I could hardly believe it was a debut. The plot finds two very different sisters (Sophie Lowe and Morgan Saylor), home for their mother’s funeral, thrust into accidental and unfortunate criminal conflict with town matriarch Enid Nora Devlin (character actress Margo Martindale, cast in yet another perfect Margo Martindale role). Things spin out of control (as they are wont to do in these situations), and we the viewers have a ball watching the plot work itself out. It’s hard to describe how refreshing it is to see a noir where all of the primaries are women and there’s a token man bobbing around the edges of the plot. There’s a delightful scene where a befuddled husband wanders in from the blaring Patriots game in the other room, muttering that he dropped his fork. The huddle of women plotting around the dining room table replace the utensil and send him toddling back to his game. The movie is filled with charming touches like this, which left me with a smile plastered across my face throughout. And that’s not even getting into the movie’s excellent use of symbolic color or the way that it manages to incorporate an authentic Greek chorus (no joke) to the proceedings. Oh, and I’ve not yet been able to stop thinking about the ending: blow the man down, indeed. Absolutely do not miss if you have even the slightest interest in crime films. (Streaming on Amazon)

9. Black Bear (Lawrence Michael Levine): Levine has crafted his greatest film yet in this difficult and strange examination of creativity, narrative, and abuse. Aubrey Plaza turns in the performance of the year as Allison, a frustrated director retreating to a remote cabin in upstate New York to recharge and brainstorm her next movie. Or, at least, that’s what it seems like when the movie begins. In a twist that I won’t spoil here, the movie turns entirely around on itself and becomes something very different before eventually calling into question the entire premise itself. It’s a truly bizarre journey, and one that will leave you questioning exactly what was real and what imagined, but in a very good way. Plaza is electric, playing her character(s?) with more range than she’s ever displayed before. This is not a movie for the faint of heart; it deals very directly with a host of difficult topics, including toxic masculinity, alcoholism, depression, and emotional abuse. It’s also, despite all of that, quite funny, with multiple sequences earning full-throated laughter. It’s still not a cheery watch, even with the levity; it will have you constantly thinking and reconsidering your assumptions about who is in control, and what control even means. The movie also serves, at times, as a fascinating examination of how movies are made from a technical perspective, but it never loses sight of its themes or becomes self-indulgent. The black bear of the title serves as an enigmatic coda to the narratives the movie crafts, one of those delightful symbols that activate the viewer’s curiosity without feeling frustrating or opaque. It’s a movie that demands repeat viewings, and I expect that I will continue to uncover secrets of its densely layered narrative as time goes by. (Available to rent from Amazon)

8. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt): Reichardt returns, a full decade after the brilliant Meek’s Cutoff, to the western genre and again makes a quietly revolutionary film. As always, she is here concerned with what it means to be an American, and with all the contradictions and confusions inherent to that designation. Beautifully filmed (like Meek’s Cutoff before it) in ‘old-timey’ 4:3, the film follows Cookie (John Magaro), a sensitive cook heading out to the Oregon Territory, who has a chance meeting with Orion Lee (King Hu), a Chinese immigrant on the run from a lynch mob. The highly unlikely couple team up, and eventually concoct a get-rich quick scheme selling pastry to hard-bitten frontiersmen. The only catch is that the recipe requires milk which they steal from a rich landowner’s prize cow, the first one in the territory. Despite that exciting description, the film proceeds at a pace that could charitably be called ‘patient,’ with incredibly long takes and much time spent on the atmosphere and feel of the world. If you don’t enjoy a movie that really takes its time, this one might not be for you. The whole movie is shot brilliantly, with an emphasis on natural light and a subtle desaturation that makes the world feel as chilly as an Oregon morning. In many ways the movie is a love story, although one far more subtle than, for example, Brokeback Mountain, and a perfect example of how knowing the ending doesn’t really make the discovery of it any less powerful. It’s a beautiful movie, and it’s a testament to the quality of its production that I was never bored, even in its smaller moments. Like so many movies of late, this one struggles with what Vonnegut described as the schizophrenia of being American: the violent pull towards opposing extremes, tearing us apart as we try to fulfill our dual dreams of personal fulfillment and economic success. A smart and timely film that works on both its narrative and symbolic levels. (Streaming on Showtime or available to rent from Amazon)

7. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen): Steve McQueen (of Hunger and 12 Years a Slave fame) made a staggering five films this year, a feat rarely matched by a contemporary director. All five form a thematic whole titled Small Axe, after the Bob Marley song of the same name. They cover the plight of black men and women in the United Kingdom over decades of abuse and repression in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Lovers Rock is the best of them by a mile, though. While all five are legitimately worth watching, this tightly engineered, 68-minute film feels the most assured and cohesive. Taking place over a single evening, the movie follows a number of people attending a house party in 1980s West London, weaving in and out through the house and surrounding yard in true ensemble fashion. The sound of Reggae music (the Lovers Rock of the title) is a constant throughout the film, muffled and distant as we sit with partygoers on a couch in the backyard, or pulsing and insistent as couples grind together on the dance floor. This isn’t to say that there’s no plot, though; rather, there are a huge number of narrative threads that we pick up at separate times. One girl has snuck out of her religious family’s home to come to the party; another is having her society debut tonight at 17. This man has lost his father and is drinking away his pain; that one looks a bit too wolfish to be safe around the young girls. The way the movie captures the actual feeling of being at a dance, the couplings and partings, the betrayals and gossip, the buzz and thrum and sexuality of it all, is a thing of beauty. In a series of films that is constantly balancing a celebration of Caribbean and African culture with the horrors of white oppression, this movie feels like the most joyous and beautiful entry. That’s not to say that the specter of white supremacy isn’t present, but it’s almost more powerful here through the way that it bleeds in from the edges in insidious ways. But this movie is stronger for its emphasis on the joys of community, the strength that can be found in our connections with others, and the simple beauty of an impromptu sing-along. For anyone who has ever known the intoxicating cocktail of arousal, hope, fear, anticipation, and energy that is a night at a dance, this movie is an absolute can’t-miss. (Streaming on Amazon)

6. Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles): My favorite movie about colonialism this year (that may not sound impressive, but it’s a rapidly expanding genre these days). Filho and Dornelles have crafted a delightful movie that dramatically redefines itself at the halfway point into something that I can’t imagine anyone predicting on their first viewing. In the small rural Brazilian city of Bacurau, the village matriarch Carmelita has died, resulting in the return home of a number of her relations. The city is in dire straits, victim of a water shortage due to damming by uncaring politicians; in addition, tourism is nearly nonexistent due to violent gangs on the roads. The town museum is a dusty ruin and the people, while happy and loving, are facing truly difficult circumstances. And then strange things begin to happen. The telephone signals go down inexplicably. The water truck is shot up on its weekly run. And something that looks very much like a UFO seems to buzz over the one tourist couple on mopeds that shows up at the town. It’s all very mysterious, but the eventual unfolding of what’s actually going on in Bacurau is a delight that I wouldn’t dare ruin. It’s delightfully weird and much smarter than it initially lets on, with multiple narrative elements being recast in surprisingly different lights as the story unfolds. It all culminates in a gonzo wild west finale that you have to see to believe. This was some of the most fun that I had at the movies this year, and even if you aren’t interested in the loftier themes, I think you’ll find the movie as fun as I did. Excellent and intelligent outsider cinema. (Available to rent from Amazon)

5. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell): Another astonishingly assured feature film debut, this movie takes an ingenious and nuanced (actually nuanced, not just super-woke liberal nuanced) look at sexual abuse culture and the #metoo movement. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) dropped out of her incredibly promising medical school career when her friend was the victim of a horrible sexual assault. Now in a seemingly permanent state of arrested development, she lives at home with her parents, works a dead-end job as a barista, and spends her nights and weekends performing incredibly elaborate schemes to find and shame potential sexual predators at local bars and clubs. All of this changes when an old medical school classmate, Ryan (Bo Burnham) accidentally stumbles through her coffeeshop door, and she begins to wonder if it’s possible to move on from her never-ending war on men to search for a little bit of happiness of her own. The movie has a whole lot on its mind, from the malaise affecting many millennials who feel they have little control over the world to the cost, emotional and physical, of a crusade. Burnham and Mulligan are a delight, with a simple and easy chemistry that makes you fall in love with them as easily as they seem to fall for each other, culminating in what is legitimately one of the best romantic montages that I have seen in a very long time. This is a movie that understands the language of cinema, and weaponizes it against the viewer in a variety of truly brilliant ways, constantly subverting your expectations and surprising you with where it’s going. It’s also a fantastic reimagining of the ‘badass killer’ movie, with John Wick’s pistols and blades replaced with biting words and manipulative schemes. The thrill of joy at seeing villains dispatched with brutal efficiency is the same in something like Wick as it is here, just with cranial trauma replaced with spiritual devastation. My wife and I had very different reactions to the ending of the film, but I can guarantee you that regardless of how you feel about it, it will get you talking and keep you talking for many days after the credits have rolled. A movie of our times and for our times, we need more like this being made. (Still in theaters)

4. House of Hummingbird (Bora Kim): Although there are echoes of 2018’s Eighth Grade and even 1999’s The Virgin Suicides in this first film from Korean director Bora Kim, it reminded me of nothing so much as Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. The sense of youth totally adrift in an uncaring world, the moral and emotional absence of parents who are such in name only, and the bleak acknowledgement that often there is no practical means of escape from these things all suffuse this film with a melancholy that is only accentuated by the grim and brutalist setting of the expanding urban sprawl of 1990s Seoul. 8th grader Eun-hee (Park Ji-hoo) drifts aimlessly between a school where she is rejected as a delinquent, cram school with her only apparent friend, and a home where she is ignored by her parents and beaten by her older brother. The movie never descends into self-indulgent maudlin pity, though, deftly balancing the despair of Eun-hee’s world with moments of beauty, understanding, and hope. This hope is most notably carried by Eun-hee’s new Chinese tutor (Saebyuk Kim), and perhaps the first person in Eun-hee’s life to not just take an interest in her as a person, but truly attempt to help her develop her talents and self. This is a sad, sad movie, to be certain, but it always feels like it’s earnestly striving for a way out and through to something better, and it never feels like it’s piling on just for the sake of emotional manipulation. It knows that there aren’t always convenient or clear answers, though, and isn’t afraid to leave the viewer or the characters with unanswered questions and stymied dreams. Penalized by some critics for being overlong or too immersed in Korean culture for general audiences, the movie is admittedly not necessarily for everyone, but if you are interested in foreign film or the unfortunately undertreated theme of female adolescence, you would be hard-pressed to find a more moving examination of the countless indignities and hopes of being fourteen. (Available to rent on Amazon)

3. Wolfwalkers (Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart): Cartoon Saloon is at it again, effortlessly upstaging outfits a hundred times their size with the best animated feature of the year by any standard. This Irish studio turns out hit after hit (The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014), The Breadwinner (2017)) each destined to lose the Best Animated Oscar to whatever formulaic movie-by-numbers the Disney corporation churned out that particular annum. It’s depressing, but at least I can use this space to add another voice to the growing chorus praising this bold and brilliant group of animators. In this year’s effort, Robyn (Honor Kneafsey) is a young apprentice English hunter who has journeyed to Ireland with her father Bill (Sean Bean) as the latest part of an effort by the Lord Protector’s (Simon McBurney) attempt to eliminate wolves from the forest surrounding 1650s Kilkenny. The locals, unsurprisingly to any student of history, aren’t really all that fond of the English interlopers, however, and their stories about spirits and monsters in the woods might not be all talk. As the intrepid young Robyn gets drawn more fully into the strange and mysterious forest, she becomes increasingly entwined with the fate of the wilderness and the city. All of this unfolds in beautiful traditional 2D animation, with the movie pulling in fascinating ways from actual medieval art styles. There are flattened perspective shots that look taken out of an illuminated manuscript, and in a number of beautiful montages the movie even experiments with triptych animation to amazing effect. Despite the ingenious and sophisticated style of animation, though, this is actually a movie for children, and one that I can see children actually enjoying unlike the aloof Soul. It has a great fish-out-of-water protagonist, and a delightful friendship that any child would envy as its central focus. The drama feels earned and the stakes feel high, and I can see this becoming a movie that is legitimately enjoyed by young and old alike, as well as serving as a fascinating historical perspective, something that young people get all too rarely in their movies. Watch it with kids or by yourself; everyone will get something out of this beautiful fable. (Streaming on Apple+)

2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma): I know all the cool critics got to watch it last year, but this one wasn’t available to me until January. It was entirely worth the wait, though. Absolutely every bit as good as every bit of seemingly hyperbolic praise that was heaped upon it, this French-language period piece is a haunting romance and one of the most exquisitely filmed movies in recent memory. In 18th Century France, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is commissioned to secretly paint an engagement portrait of the stubborn young Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is clearly uninterested in her arranged marriage. The women spend time together by day for discreet observation, and Marianne paints by night. The two are inexplicably drawn to one another, however, and they eventually begin a romance that cannot hope to survive in the time and place they live. The movie is beautiful and passionate, every bit as magnificent an examination of queer romance as 2017’s Call Me By Your Name. The sweeping romance of it all still leaves room for delicately observed period detail, though, with a respect for the history of the region and the culture. Art is obviously a central theme, with the concepts of observation and portrayal recurring over and over throughout the movie, with each of the central couple having their turn as the creative force of their relationship. It understands how different the world is when observed through the eyes of a woman as opposed to a traditional masculine perspective, and is faithful and consistent in its representation of the subtleties of feminine observation. More important than any of those theoretical and symbolic trappings, however, is a romance that feels authentic and real. The movie never gets so far lost in its musings that it forgets to anchor itself in the beautiful and tragic romance of its central characters. If you love Roman Holiday, A Star is Born, or any of the staples of hopeless romance in the history of film, you owe it to yourself to see this masterpiece. (Streaming on Hulu)

1. Swallow (Carlo Mirabella-Davis): I think it likely that I am the only human being in the world who put this at the top of their list this year, but it’s my list and I can do what I want. I didn’t see a movie more powerful, more spellbinding, or more upsetting in the entire year that unfurled since I first watched it at a film festival in January. I’ve seen it another two times since, and its dark power retains an amazing hold on my mind. Young bride Hunter (Haley Bennett) is living what seems to be a fairytale life. Her incredibly wealthy husband Richie (Austin Stowell) has swept her away from middle-class obscurity and simultaneously into an upscale mansion and a society she has only ever dreamed of. The couple gets pregnant almost immediately, but Hunter’s face doesn’t quite reflect her husband’s joy, a curious detachment and isolation written upon it, captured in close-up. It’s shortly thereafter that that she begins to feel a strange and unnatural craving to devour inedible objects. Pica, a very real and dangerous disease, is only the surface level of the film, though, which is really about a raft of psychological and emotional issues affecting women in relationships with an unbalanced power dynamic. Hunter’s condition may provide an abundance of body-horror squirming for the audience, but it is easily matched by the psychological horror that we see play out on her face as she is trapped, first metaphorically and later literally, in a situation that spirals further and further out of her control. Control is actually a central theme here in more ways than one, and despite how many other films on this list are exploring power dynamics, this does by far the best job of looking at the issue from a variety of angles. As a jaded, cynical moviegoer I also place a disproportionate weight on a movie’s ability to surprise me, and boy did this one manage it: not in a manipulative “oh, what a twist” way, but in an authentically brilliant one that seems incredibly obvious, but only after the fact. And, like Knives Out last year, it has the best closing shot of any movie that was made this year, a perfect summation of everything the movie was about all encapsulated in its closing credits, of all things. This is a vital, beautiful, and urgent film and I can’t wait to watch it another three times, even the scenes that I can barely watch through my fingers. (Streaming on Showtime or available to rent from Amazon)

And that’s it! The objectively correct list of the greatest movies of 2020 (and also a bunch of other really pretty good movies that you might wanna check out if they sound like your deal). Agree? Disagree? Either way I hope you had as much fun watching movies as I did this year, and also that 2021 might prove a bit of a return to normalcy for us all. Thanks for reading this gigantic wall of words, and I hope that at least one of these movies provides you with a couple of hours of entertainment. If it does, I’ll be a happy cinemagoer indeed.