The Top 10 Movies Of 2020, According To Everyone
It's December, which means Best of 2020 lists are here. With so many lists out there, who has time to read all of them?
Turns out: We do. But because you probably don't, we rounded up all the Top 10 lists we could find, smashed 'em together in a big spreadsheet and spit out overall Top 10 lists for the year's best movies, albums, songs, books, TV shows and video games. You're welcome.
The Best Movies Of 2020
10. 'Martin Eden' — Pietro Marcello
Martin Eden (Luca Marinelli) begins Pietro Marcello's film as a gorgeous naif, a sailor who bails out a rich kid in trouble at the docks. In return for his intervention, the kid's family introduces him to an upper-crust existence that he instantly wants to join. "Martin Eden" is a biting critique of capitalism and neoliberalism from the perspective of a bootstrapper: he's a ferocious individualist who eventually achieves fame as a writer and sneers at the working class he clawed his way up from; by intercutting his rise and fall with archival and faux-archival footage, Marcello manages to make his protagonist both an anti-hero and an Everyman.
[Vulture]
Rent it via Avalon Theatre
9. 'Dick Johnson Is Dead' — Kirsten Johnson
Kirsten Johnson has made two films as a director, both masterpieces of human connection. Following her collage documentary "Cameraperson," her father, Dick, began slipping away to dementia. Johnson resolved to make a film with him, rehearsing elaborate death scenes and reminiscing in between as a way to spend time together and preserve something of him on film.
Watch it on Netflix
8. 'Nomadland' — Chloe Zhao
Chloe Zhao's epic adaptation of Jessica Bruder's book features Frances McDormand in a performance that grabs the viewer by the heart and never lets go, as her character joins the growing ranks of itinerant seasonal workers who live out of their vans and make their living on the margins of the mainstream economy. Flinty and funny, McDormand never asks for pity for her character, who craves her independence but wouldn't say no to a living wage.
"Nomadland" will be released in theaters and on VOD next February
7. 'Time' — Garrett Bradley
Phrases like "time is what you make of it," "time flies," and "time heals all wounds" get turned inside out by this exquisitely constructed documentary. "Time" chronicles the life of entrepreneur and activist Sibil "Fox" Rich as she lobbies for the release of her husband, Robert Richardson, from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola.
Watch it on Amazon Prime
6. 'David Byrne's American Utopia' — Spike Lee
This grand and glorious filmed record of David Byrne's hit Broadway show, directed by Spike Lee, is a work of great joy and expressiveness, a tower of song with room for everybody. As performed by Byrne and his troupe of 11 musicians and dancers, the numbers — some of them recent Byrne compositions, others drawn from his body of work with Talking Heads — feel fresh and familiar at once, inclusive but also mildly explosive. Lee captures perfectly the urgency of Byrne's intent: to live in any meaningful way, we must stay connected.
[TIME]
Watch it on HBO Max or Amazon Prime
5. 'Bacurau' — Juliano Dornelles and Kleber Mendonça Filho
Udo Kier and Sônia Braga! Science fiction and western! "Bacurau," named for a fictional town in the Brazilian backlands, is a rollicking, violent adventure whose defiance of genre and narrative convention stands for a more general — and more pointed — form of defiance: against the arrogance of power; against the legacies of colonial cruelty and slavery that still afflict modern Brazil; against the authoritarian impulse to erase history, suppress joy and ignore urgent messages from the future.
Rent it on Amazon Prime or YouTube
4. 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' — Eliza Hittman
Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is 17 years old and pregnant. She's far from ready to have a child, but she's from rural Pennsylvania, a state in which she can't obtain an abortion without parental consent; she's far from ready to ask for that either. So she rides a bus into New York City, accompanied by her cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder), who has financed the trip with cash she stole from the grocery store they both work at. Eliza Hittman's intimately accomplished film tells the story of that journey, and does so with an open-eyed curiosity and dread that has you hanging on every random encounter, every telling tremor of a young woman's doubt and faith.
[Variety]
Watch it on HBO Max or Amazon Prime
3. 'Collective' — Alexander Nanau
On October 30, 2015, in a rock club in Bucharest named Colectiv, a fire killed 27 people and injured another 180. There was enough public outrage to cause protests and a shift in Romania's government. And then a journalist at a sports newspaper began to hear about some of the club patrons dying while convalescing in the hospital. He and his team of investigative reporters decide to dig a little deeper, and soon, a massive scandal involving power, corruption, lies and even the Mafia slowly begins to come into focus.
Rent it on Amazon Prime or YouTube
2. 'First Cow' — Kelly Reichardt
Released (barely, before shutdowns mandated that it migrate to VOD) in a year defined by the shock of a society forced to pull itself apart, "First Cow" magnifies that exact feeling. Set in the Oregon Territory circa 1820, Reichardt's adaptation of John Raymond's novel "The Half-Life" uses the peculiar bond of wandering chef Cookie (a tender John Magaro) and Chinese immigrant King-Lu (an overconfident Orion Lee) to explore the loneliness of an empty world and the excitement of finding some measure of companionship to chart a path forward. That's what the pair do, by stealing milk from the only cow in the region to make cakes for settlers passing through.
Watch it on Amazon Prime or Hulu
1. 'Lovers Rock' — Steve McQueen
This is the best entry in Steve McQueen's magnificent series of five films, titled "Small Axe," which examines Black life in Britain in the 1960s, 70s and 80s amid cultural and social upheaval. "Lovers Rock" might, at first glance, seem the most inconsequential installment, since it's simply about a house party in London circa 1980, and any major narrative is sacrificed for scenes of dancing, flirtation and communal bits of joy. But that's the point. McQueen is presenting a space that feels safe and independent, created and nurtured by Black people who would have struggled to get into the white-dominated clubs of the time.
Watch it on Amazon Prime
Honorable Mentions
If you've already seen the top 10, here are some other notable movies of the year, including "Soul," Pixar's new film that explores a jazz musician's journey after death, and "Palm Springs," a "Groundhog Day"-esque romantic comedy starring Andy Samberg.
13. 'Soul' — Peter Docter / 'Palm Springs' — Max Barbakow
A Note On Methodology
We wish we could say there was a super fancy algorithm that combed the internet and did this for us. But the truth is that the entity doing the internet combing was a human Digg Editor, and calculations were performed by an Excel sheet that ingested and re-ranked all the lists we fed into it (briefly: #1 ranked items received 10 points, #2 ranked items got 9 points... down through #10 ranked items, which got 1 point; items on unranked lists all got 5.5 points).
