There's almost certainly never been a weirder year in the history of the movies.
We will perhaps permanently lose our second biggest domestic theater chain. Most
major studio releases have been postponed in some cases more than a full year.
The traditional modes of production, distribution, and exhibition, already in
the throes of a years- or decades-long evolution is reaching a tipping point due
to the exacerbating circumstances surrounding the pandemic. AMC has already agreed to terms with Universal Pictures about an aggressive (and malleable) VOD strategy. Disney has released potential blockbusters to their own relatively young streaming service.
This isn't new. Netflix and iTunes started offering movies online over a decade ago. But we found out this year what it's like to live in a primarily virtual world. Well, that is of course not including the millions of frontline workers in healthcare and other service industries who never had that luxury, but I digress.
A growing revolution in the moving image hit its apex in ways that had little to do with what we consider "movies" in the traditional sense--and they came to us in a variety of directions. The first is clearly more pressing: cellphone footage of police brutality. Again, this isn't new. I'm old enough to remember quite vividly the Rodney King beating and the subsequent and volatile aftermath of that footage being released. But the recent acceleration in accessible technology has sadly made this an almost necessary tool to fight corruption and brutality. This all came to a head when the release of cell phone footage showing Officer Derek Chauvin's killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide (and eventually worldwide) protests of racial injustice. This came somewhat off the heels of footage being released of another senseless example of violence against a black citizen when white vigilantes shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery for the simple act of jogging.
On a hopefully lighter note, it's time to admit (begrudgingly) that the cell phone has not only become a dominant method for consuming content, but an increasingly viable way for creating it. In no way is this more apparent than the explosion of TikTok, the social network for creating short videos. (Even I joined it because, well, my friends made me.) Instagram's stories and reels features also fill this growing niche of video creation that puts the content directly in the hands of the consumers. And yes, many of these videos are nonsense. Some are charming sure, others little more than the narcissistic Facebook or Twitter posts of past years turned into a moving image.
Then there are the things that make you happy humanity didn't completely fall apart in the year of all years that it could have. As Broadway theaters have shut their doors, a crowdsourced musical version of Pixar's Ratatouille began to spring up on TikTok. Aspiring musical theater artists wrote and performed original songs, dancers choreographed their own numbers, and costume and set designers worked on production material for a show that didn't even exist. And the result was one of the most truly wonderful things in 2020, eventually leading to the somewhat professional streaming adaptation that dropped just as the year turned.
But if you're reading this, you're here for the movies. I feel like I say this every year, but there is no real point in trying to find a theme in any particular year's movies, no connective tissue to the myriad of films that happened to be released within a given specified calendar range. Movies that were lucky enough to get released in any format this year were created (at least for the most part) without the knowledge of what was to befall the world in the coming months.
And yet...
Many of the films that made my list express some sort of dissatisfaction or disillusion with the world, be it political or personal or both. These films either confront the various horrors of the world today--misogyny, sexual and racial violence, xenophobia, income inequality--or provide the needed respite from needing to constantly engage with them. Some of the very best of these are able to do both.
I'd be lying if I said the lack of bigger budget Hollywood fare changed the makeup of this year's list. Those types of movies tend to be outliers for me at least in terms of what I think the best of the best are. Yet speaking more broadly, it is perhaps that the noise created by the hype surrounding these tentpoles have quieted enough to make room for the smaller and more personal and idiosyncratic works. So, like the hope some had that the limitations to travel over the past year would reap some environmental benefits (turns out it didn't really), perhaps nature could have a hand in course correcting the cinematic landscape as well.
This is an eclectic list and while many lament what would seem like a lack of significant movies over the past year, like any other, I still had a tough time narrowing down my favorites and I am still filled with regret for the handful of titles I had to leave off*. Though we weren't able to see a number of nine-figure budgeted movies, 2020 was I think a real bright spot for American independent cinema. Young, up-and-coming directors with few titles to their name and veteran indie filmmakers alike are all over this list. And book-ending the top 10 are two incredibly disparate titles from a bona fide American master, one who can toggle seamlessly between big and low budget, narrative and documentary, yet whose stamp is unmistakably written on every frame.
*I will list them here, in the hopes you'll seek these out too:
Driveways (Andrew Ahn)
Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa)
The Woman Who Ran (Hong Sang-soo)
The Invisible Man (Leigh Whannell)
Mangrove (Steve McQueen)
Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)
Soul (Pete Docter)
Mank (David Fincher)
Time (Garrett Bradley)
What the Constitution Means to Me (Marielle Heller & Oliver Butler)
The Last Dance (Jason Hehir)
Hamilton (Thomas Kail)
Kajillionaire (Miranda July)
