ScreenAnarchy Top Films of 2020

10. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, UK, 2020)

Steve McQueen has figured out the best way to capture a culture in a specific time period on film - with food and music. Lovers Rock is also one of those dream movies, where every decision of a filmmaker seems just right as it plays out organically and naturally. Taking one night at a large houseparty, Lovers Rock, named after the form of reggae love songs that everyone seems to know all the lyrics to, McQueen invites you into the West Indian culture in London in the 70s with open arms, even with the blemishes (such as blatant misogyny) and all. What keeps everyone together is the music. There are several blissful sequences where music does the job of storytelling: Carl Douglas's Kung Fu Fighting, the extended capella rendition of Janet Kay's Silly Games, and cathartic sequence of Revolutionaries' Kunta Kinte Dub. These kinds of gatherings, under the watchful eyes of the whites and police in the neighborhood, as McQueen surreptitiously suggests, were the only outlet these communities had for each other to let the steam out, before they go back to the white world they live within, next morning.

Vibrant, joyful and poignant, McQueen serves up a perfect holiday gift this season. Lovers Rock is thrilling to watch and a sweet middle piece companion to Small Axe Anthology that is filled with serious stories of political and cultural struggle of the West Indies community in London. — Dustin Chang

9. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow, USA/Hong Kong, 2020)

This gem of a comedy might be the sleeper hit of the year. What might seem at first glance to be riffing on hugely popular film about someone stuck in a looping day, Palm Springs gives the concept a 21st century update. This isn’t a test of personal character, nor punishment for crimes big or small. There is no existential key or revelation or growth that will allow Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti) to escape this seeming paradise (in reality, more like a sunny purgatory with endless alcohol). So how do you live when ever day is the same? What does it truly mean to fall into a rut, when all your needs are met, and there are no true challenges left, except how we live with each other? Only understanding our needs and the needs of others, of learning how to make existence bearable, and find real connections. And learn quantum physics to get out of a jam. — Shelagh Rowan-Legg

8. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark/Sweden/The Netherlands, 2020)

An experiment in day-drinking by four old friends serves up rounds of merriment and mournful regret in Thomas Winterberg’s beautifully observed toast to the sweet sauce and all its dubious powers. Mads Mikkelsen, reunited with the director of The Hunt, stars as Martin, a dreary history teacher who has lost his spark since giving up the booze, who rediscovers his thirst when persuaded to join his pals, all middle-aged educators who should know better, to test the theory of psychiatrist Finn Skårderud, that maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.05 improves your creativity and general well-being.

At first their experiments do indeed add a shot of exuberant joie-de-vivre to their otherwise unexceptional suburban lives, but it doesn’t take long before their indulging outstretches the recommended boundaries of their investigations, and with the additional consumption, a torrent of trouble surely follows. Unlike other cinematic ventures to dip a toe into the realm of alcoholism, Another Round never shies away from the elixir’s intoxicating allure. Even while nursing a crippling hangover or wallowing in a shame spiral of their own creation, it doesn’t take long before a tempting snifter wets the lips once again.

Drinking, Winterberg boldly concedes, is a whole lot of fun, even while also being a destructive force unlike any other. Drinking builds relationships as readily as it destroys them, and is undeniably ingrained within the identity, not only of the individual quaffer, but of, in this case, the Danish people and their entire way of life. So raise a glass, and imbibe greedily in this full-bodied, well aged, celebration of the booze-soaked life, which culminates in a frothy head of intoxicated, care-free physical expression that outshines anything to grace our screens all year. Skol! — James Marsh

6. (tie) I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, USA, 2020)

Charlie Kaufman's adaptation of Ian Reid's bestselling novel takes an internal narrative with a twist ending that works on the page (but could have easily been an implausible cop-out on screen) and vaults the reveal — this after peppering the film with esoteric breadcrumbs along the way — to twist that twist into a glorious, head-scratcher of a finale that owes as much to Rodgers and Hammerstein as it does to the book's author. Add to that some Lynchian family dynamics, a spontaneous dance number, and multiple character-within-character monologues, and you've got the recipe for the perfect ironic come-uppance for people who held their lofty opinion of the book over the heads of those who "didn't get it." I'm Thinking of Ending Things is a film only a director like Kaufman at his most obsessive could make, and every frame thrills with its unabashed nose-thumbing at conventional cinema. — Joshua Chaplinsky

6. (tie) Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman, USA/UK, 2020)

Master of adolescent angst, Director Eliza Hittman's third American Indie feature is a tender-hearted yet urgent road trip. Impressive chemistry between two best friends who must travel from the Bible belt to the big city of New York, and the real vibe from non-actors cast sell the desperate and muddled situation of teen pregnancy and abortion. The film immerses, the viewer a fly on the wall, the shared alien experience they have in the metropolitan city space and the natural criticism of religious doctrine versus pro-choice, as well as the revenue raising for the abortion procedure are all fascinating facets of this ordeal, anchored by the brilliant performances and authenticity of the urban night life. When the film quotes its title, it is a powerful moment, a universal connection to all those who have had to suffer this same indignity. — Kwenton Bellette

5. Relic (Natalie Erika James, Australia/USA, 2020)

In more common usage the term relic is a generic one. It describes something old, very old, and thus, is most often paired with the word ancient. But relic does have another connotation best understood when it is paired with the word sacred. In some ways, these seem to offer entirely different descriptions. An ancient relic invites images of dust, decay, of something once forgotten, once frozen in time, only to be rediscovered in some dry academic sense where it can be catalogued and once again sink into history. A sacred relic is something that has been carefully preserved. It is revered this bit of bone, or hank of hair, or perhaps, a finger, and, having belonged to a Saint or spiritual luminary, it carries with it a sense of mystical significance. To touch it is to walk away changed, reminded not just of the march of time but of those who have undertaken the journey.

Yet as different as these descriptions seem they are not that different at all. Relics both ancient and sacred both emerge from death. The death of cultures and the death of bodies. They are quite often both delicate, crumbling, fading. Both speak of things that have been nearly forgotten. The difference between them lies in what, or more appropriately in who, is being forgotten.

With these definitions in mind let me recommend one of 2020’s most original and haunting horror films. Relic deals with aging, and the things aging often takes away and the cost of remembering and holding those things, those people, sacred. Writer/director Natalie Erika James, powerful feature film debut brings three generations of women under the same roof as their matriarch starts a slow descent into dementia. Soon the four walls of the family home and the wooded area that holds the family history become a maze that may be impossible to escape. James has made a terrifying study of what it means to turn and face the inevitable together. — Dave Canfield

4. Mank (David Fincher, USA, 2020)

The ink-stained Southern California desert is the starting point for David Fincher's fantasia of dreams, which consists of finely-etched episodes in the life of an original piece of art. Gary Oldman's performance as writer Herman Mankiewicz anchors the tale, which recreates his greatest adventure, in providing the structure and the words upon which Orson Welles could spin a tale of wealth and corruption. It's a great story, jumping back and forth in time as Mankiewicz dictates the script and also lives a grand life as an admittedly spoiled writer in Hollywood's golden age. The film also weaves unexpected themes into its rich fabric. None of this is exactly essential to understanding how Citizen Kane came to be, and it diminishes Welles' role as director, but that's as it should be: sometimes, the Writer is king, and Fincher gives this particular writer all the plaudits he deserved, while also explaining something that is always hard to define, namely, raw creativity on a blank page. — Peter Martin

3. Nomadland (Chloé Zhao, USA/Germany, 2020)

Like a cold sunrise and a warm cup of coffee while sitting solitary in a camp chair, at a time where nobody is awake to join you, it is difficult to explain the emotional churn felt over the course of Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. Big-sky cinematography is diffused with staid perseverance in a portrait of America’s baby boomers, mostly women, who live perpetually on the road in their vehicles.

Forced into physically demanding jobs at Amazon warehouses, roadside diners, and grounds-keeping a State Parks to fund their perpetual travel the midwest in their custom-modified cargo vans, Toyota Priuses and or aging RVs into homes-on-wheels make these women and their ‘rigs’, offer a strange, often melancholy, juxtaposition to the rugged testosterone and vehicular mayhem of the Mad Max. I facetiously dubbed to Nomadland as "Fury Old". Finding a place with your tribe (or at the very least, some kind of psychological stability) in a demographic apocalypse-in-progress. This one brought about, not by peak oil and nuclear war, but by the sub-prime crash of 2008 instantly wiping out peoples livelihood and savings, coupled with the decades long exodus of union-wage manufacturing jobs, and high cost medical care in a country who guts social safety nets with the myth of rugged individualism. Less charitably, Nomadland might be also be labelled, How The West Was Lost. And yet, there is myth-making, promise and beauty here all the same.

Originally an engrossing nonfiction work of investigative journalism from Jessica Bruder, Zhao’s hybrid-vérité cinematic adaptation casts many of the actual women, non-actors essayed in those pages, to work alongside talented Hollywood actors, Frances McDormand (in her best performance since Fargo) and David Strathairn (who is tentative and steadfast in a pivotal supporting role). Not a conventional film entertainment by far, the pacing is observational and even meditative at times, but it is effortlessly accessible, built out of the detritus of our era, right before the next catastrophe. — Kurt Halfyard

2. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2019)

On the surface, filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s (Certain Women, Meek’s Cutoff, River of Grass) eighth film and third or fourth unqualified masterpiece, First Cow, explores a seemingly simple, straightforward friendship between two outsiders inexorably drawn together by need in the early 19th-century Oregon Country and the splendid Jersey cow of the title, but dig a little deeper — as the first, touching, present-day scene featuring Alia Shawkat and her canine best friend literally do — and First Cow quietly emerges as a provocative, poignant deep dive into male relationships in their sometimes nourishing, sometimes infuriating complexities and contradictions, but also as a penetrating, incisive, unsentimental exploration of attempting to survive, let alone, thrive, in a ruthless, merciless social and cultural system driven by the twin evils of toxic masculinity and rapacious, unfettered capitalism central to the curdled myth of the American Dream. A career-best John Magaro (Orange Is the New Black, The Big Short) and Orion Lee (Informer, Critical), perfectly embody Reichardt’s doomed central duo, both symbolic stand-ins for unfulfilling, subsistence-level existence under a deeply unjust, deeply exploitative system and as fully lived, deeply sympathetic characters. — Mel Valentin

1. Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, Canada/UK, 2020)

In his second feature film, Brandon Cronenberg uses a lot of excessive nudity and violence, so much so that in several countries, Possessor ran into trouble with certification boards. But the film is not just shocking for shocks’ sake, there is a reason for it. It’s an excellent film, with a deeper layer of ideas, and Brandon manages to get under your skin. And once you realize what the whole point was, well... Brandon likes it bleak. Brrrr.

You follow a woman who works for a shady agency, specialized in assassination. Their method: the brains of people close to the target are temporarily being hacked and taken over by an on-line operator. The operator will force the possessed person to commit the murder, get back online to their own body, and voila: a non-traceable assassination has been completed. The woman we follow is such an operator, a very good one even, but her latest kills are somewhat problematic: she gets way too violent, and there appear to be increasingly big lapses of control. Nevertheless, she takes on another assignment... but the moment she is in another body, trouble starts.

What happens next, and why, is what sets this film apart from regular exploitation fare. Possessor is not a fun film, but damn, it is good.— Ard Vijn

The Rest:

AK vs AK, Alex Wheatle (from Small Axe), Archive, Aren’t You Happy, Assassins, The Assistant, Bacurau, Beans, Beast Beast, The Best is Yet to Come, Bill & Ted Face the Music, Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn, Black Bear, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, Cadaver, Careless Crime, Children of the Sea, Class Action Park, The Cloud in Her Room, Collective, Come to Daddy, Cook Fuck Kill, Crazy Samurai Musashi, DAU, The Day of Destruction, Days, The Deeper You Dig, Deerskin, Desert One, The Devil All the Time, Dinner in America, The Disciple, Education (from Small Axe), Epicentro, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, Fauna, Feels Good, Man, The Fight, Fire Will Come, Fireball, Fourteen, Get the Hell Out, Giraffe, Gretel & Hansel, The Hater, His House, How to Overthrow the US Government (Legally), I Am Greta, I'm Your Woman, If I Were Winter Itself, Impetigore, In Transit, The Invisible Man, Jumbo, Just 6.5, Kajillionaire, Kyo Kara Ore Wa!! The Movie, Let Them All Talk, Liberté, The Long Walk, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Malmkrog, Mangrove (from Small Axe), The Mole Agent, New Order, News of the World, Night of the Kings, Nine Days, No Ordinary Man, The Old Man Movie, One Night in Miami, Parasite, Pelican Blood, Personal History of DC, The Platform, A Prayer for a Lost Mitten, The Predators, Promare, Queen of Black Magic, Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, Red Moon Tide, Red Post on Escher Street, Red White and Blue (from Small Axe), Residue, Saint Maude, Scream, Queen: My Nightmare on Elm Street, Shadow in the Cloud, Shape of Red, She Dies Tomorrow, The Show, The Social Dilemma, Special Actors, Spontaneous, Spree, Sputnik, Talking About Trees, Tenet, Tesla, Tigertail, The Trip to Greece, The Trouble of Being Born, Under the Open Sky, Underwater, The Vast of Night, La Véronica, Violation, The Way Back, Weathering with You, Wendy, The Whistlers, Wolf House, Woman of the Photographs, The Woman Who Ran, The Year of Discovery, Zola