Ten, in order of preference, that are tops:
Vitalina Varena (Pedro Costa)
First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
Lyrical, radical, fond, funny, tragic.
She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz)
The pandemic movie that wasn’t necessarily meant as a pandemic movie, this remarkable existential horror movie was not professionally reviewed by me, because I’m friendly with the director and my wife is friendlier still. Mrs. Kenny is the proud owner of a baseball cap quoting one of the movie’s negative reviews (pictured above), part of an entire fashion line available for your perusal here.
The Wolf House (Cristobal Leon and Joaquín Cociña)
Shirley (Josephine Decker)
Like Fincher’s Mank, a work of fiction. Once you’ve acclimated to that, it’s a dazzling and disturbing immersion in themes both Jacksonian and Deckeresque.
Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont)
Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas)
Cut Throat City (RZA)
Residue (Malawa Gerima)
Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg)
Remainder, in order that is alphabetical:
The 11th Green (Christopher Munch)
The Cordillera of Dreams (Patricio Guzmán)
Da Five Bloods (Spike Lee)
An exemplary Spike Lee notebook movie that’s also a whiplash-inducing triple-cross saga.
The Deeper You Dig (John, Toby, and Zelda Adams)
F11 and Be There (Jethro Waters)
Family Romance LLC (Werner Herzog)
Fireball (Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer)
The Ghost of Peter Sellers (Peter Medak)
Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos)
God of the Piano (Itay Tal)
Let Him Go (Thomas Bezucha)
Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh) Would be higher but I’ve still got a conflict of interest, professional-critic-wise.
Mank (David Fincher)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (George C. Wolfe)
Mr. Soul (Melissa Haizlip)
My Psychedelic Love Story (Errol Morris)
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin (Werner Herzog)
The Personal History of David Copperfield (Antonio Ianucci)
The State Against Mandela and Others (Nicolas Champeaux and Gilles Porte)
Synchronic (Justin Benson and Aaron Morehead)
System K (Reynaud Barret)
Tommaso (Abel Ferrara)
To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
A White, White Day (Hlynur Palmason)
The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan)
Yourself and Yours (Hong Sang-soo)
Zappa (Alex Winter)
Revivals/Restorations:
Change of Life (Paolo Rocha)
Raining in the Mountain (King Hu)
Not seen at time of writing:
A lot. To answer potential “where’s X” questions, they include Nomadland, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Minari, Tenet, Dick Johnson is Dead, The Assistant, Promising Young Woman, the entirety of McQueen’s Small Axe series, The Nest (although given the director I’m in no hurry at all), City Hall, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets.
I’ve been looking at other “Best Of” lists as well. This is the worst year for movies at the cinema since.…1963 (Oscar for best film Tom Jones, other nominees: America, America, Cleopatra, How The West Was Won, Lilies of the Field). But it’s probably been the flat-out greatest year for blu ray and 4K UHD releases ever. Looking forward to an eventual blu-ray consumer guide, Glenn!
It’s funny — I started making notes for a “Special Quarantine Consumer Guide” in March and got pretty far through it but never finished it. As for 4K, I’ve got a bunch of discs sitting directly to my left (mostly mainstream, but I’m hoping for some cult stuff soon) awaiting their viewing on a PS5 whenever I can actually get one.
Gotta thank you for the “She Dies Tomorrow” rec. What a weird, haunting, funny movie. In a perfect world, Jane Adams would be a frontrunner for best supporting actress.
For when you eventually get around to Tenet, I can’t help but plug a blog I wrote, which tries to get at what Nolan is up to by naming his protagonist “The Protagonist.” I thought Tenet was relatively weak but the meta aspect was interesting. Blog: https://weirdgeometry.com/blog/tenet
1963 wasn’t a bad year for film. If you’re Italian. Or French. But 2020 may well be the worst year in film since 1929.
Sight & Sound have now published their list. I realise now that many of the films on both your list and S&S’s have not been released over on the other side of the pond. But that still makes 2020 one of the shittiest years in film ever.
The link for Assayas’ “Wasp network” goes to the Joan of Arc review.
That’s fixed. Thanks.
Not being a subscriber to any streaming service, this was the year I dropped out of seeing new movies.
LET HIM GO is the only movie on your list I saw. Also saw THE INVISIBLE MAN and FREAKY and … that’s all I remember.
2020 was also the year I stopped posting on sites devoted to fanboy-nerd IP (comic books, superhero movies, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dr. Who, etc). The anger and vitriol reached a peak, with the Snyder Cut fans leading the charge. So I bailed out.
These are also the fans who defend corporations and attack directors as ungrateful brats.
I’ve found that reading novels is a good alternative to the dumpster fire that pop culture has become.