2019 may have been a banner year for major film releases, but 2020’s slate was relatively scant. There was actually a reason for this: an outbreak of a novel coronavirus forced the closure of movie theaters, among other things, for almost the entire year. I had been opposed to the coronavirus as soon as I became aware of it, but as a film lover that was the final straw.
With the would-be blockbusters delayed to the following year, my top 10 list was limited to streaming releases:
That’s three Netflixes (1, 3, 7), two Amazon Primes (5, 8), an Apple TV+ (2), an HBO Max (6), and a Hulu (9). The other 2 went straight to paid VOD.
Perhaps also a sign of the times: This is quite the political list! Never Rarely Sometimes Always follows a teenage girl’s journey across state lines to get an abortion. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom adapts the August Wilson play about Black musicians in the 1920s and the white men who feed off their work. Two films, Mangrove and Lovers Rock, come from Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology series, about Caribbean immigrant communities in England. We also have two Spike Lee films. Da 5 Bloods is about a group of Vietnam War veterans reuniting to find the gold they buried decades earlier. To this day it’s the only instance I can recall of seeing a Black man wear a MAGA hat on film (Kanye West in SNL documentaries excluded).
The other Spike Lee film, David Byrne’s American Utopia, is superficially an apolitical concert recording until the unmistakably Spike-Lee-esque “Hell You Talmbout” sequence, a rendition of the Janelle Monae track with the refrain “Say their names!” And also Byrne telling younger viewers “you’re fucked” if you don’t vote, I suppose. Similarly, Palm Springs I think was intended to be more subtly political until it lucked into being released during a pandemic. People saw in its time loop narrative their experience of being stuck at home all day every day. But if you remove that reading (and consider it was produced in 2019), it becomes a film about the fatigue of reading the news in the years after the 2016 election.
Are the top 2 political? I guess you can make the argument about the extremely Irish Wolfwalkers. Is “Oliver Cromwell was a bad dude” divisive? I’m out of the loop on this one. Wolfwalkers certainly does him no favors1, and I’ve yet to see a pro-Cromwell work of art as beautiful. But if there’s a film that can play equally to left and right, white and black, Irish and English, it’s Dick Johnson Is Dead. Documentarian Kirsten Johnson realized that she had no footage of her late mother pre-Alzheimer’s, so she decides to film her father and as a goof they stage his death, over and over. The result is a film difficult to categorize. Black comedy elderly hangout documentary? Whatever it is, it’s profound and touching, and I think about it frequently.
Looking through my Letterboxd for all 2020 films I’ve seen, I’m concerned by how many I have zero memory of. There’s nothing more 2020 than not knowing what you did in 2020. Well, here’s a new top 10 of the ones I can remember. (I’ve since shied away from including shorts, so let’s call World of Tomorrow Episode 3 an honorable mention.)
- Dick Johnson Is Dead
- Wolfwalkers
- Minari
- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
- Sound of Metal
- Nomadland
- Lovers Rock
- American Utopia
- Da 5 Bloods
- Tenet
Still very America-centric; Quo Vadis, Aida? is probably #11, in my defense. I’d be interested in revisiting Nomadland. It was my #1 on the year-after list but has already significantly faded in my estimation. Maybe I let it being the center of some hall-of-fame worthy capital-D Discourse corrupt my memory.
It’s been a lot of fun to go back to these old lists and watch my taste evolve. Now it’s 2026, almost time to start looking forward instead of back. Almost. I have one more list to share which is yet to be written. Give me a week to work it out.
- The antagonist in Wolfwalkers technically goes unnamed, but it’s pretty obvious who it is. ↩︎