The thing I usually say here is something along the lines of, “It was a bad year for movies. Then October rolled around, and suddenly it wasn’t.” I don’t say that every year, but when I do, the “until it wasn’t” part usually means the movies got anywhere between pretty good and great. But this year is a tiny bit different. 2020, for me, was an outright bad year for movies. Then December rolled around, and suddenly it was fantastic.

Of course, it’s completely understandable why movies took a bit of a dip. Without seeing the data, and being an outsider in general, it’s hard to tell which area of the entertainment industry got hit the worst. But it’s easy to imagine it was film. Movie theaters becoming non-viable. An audience growing increasingly used to watching things on their couch. Expectations of nine figure budgets that studios have spent years training audiences to expect no longer being an option for the time being. It’s easy to imagine many executives seeing the writing on the wall as written in blood.

However, I’m not an executive. I’m the guy who gets to watch, and from my end, though there were a handful of noteworthy films, it didn’t get consistently good until December. (Or really, November 20th, which is when Mangrove hit Prime, but you get what I’m going for here.) Then it was nonstop hits. Granted, not all of these movies were necessarily released during the winter. However, of the eleven movies I’m going to be talking about in this article, I watched seven of them in December.

So yes, it’s more than a bummer that most of this year was a bit of a desert for me, movie wise. There are also several heavy hitters I didn’t have the opportunity to see because I’m not a professional film critic with access to screeners, most of which are listed in the “Will Watch Someday” section. Moreover, I didn’t see eye to eye with a lot of critics this year. I found First Cow too calculated, Da 5 Bloods too tonally schizophrenic, I’m Thinking of Ending Things emotionally impenetrable. There’s a few more, and I’m sure there’s some other “bah humbugs” I could think of.

All that said, however, having a whole month of great movies almost made the desert worth it. Some Oscar seasons, you get three or four great movies in a row. There was a streak in December when I got nine. Specifically, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Education, David Byrne’s American Utopia, Collective, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, Martin Eden, The Painter and the Thief, Boys State, and Soul. And only two of those made the list.

2020 sucked. But at least it ended well.

Runner-Up: Palm Springs

There will come a day when I will tire of time loop stories.

Throughout the last decade, they’ve been coming at me from all angles. In movies from Edge of Tomorrow, Happy Death Day (and its sequel), Source Code, and a few more. In TV from Russian Doll. In video games from Elsinore, Outer Wilds, and the promise of 12 Minutes and Deathloop. In comic books and short stories and novels. I feel like there’ve been time loops everywhere.

If there’s one place I’ve seen them the most, however, it’s in screenplays. They’re high concept, science fiction (or science fiction adjacent), and if you play your cards right, cheap to make. Whenever you get all three of these ingredients together, the next thing to expect is a lot of hungry writers, and thus many screenplay sites and services have seen their fair share of them. I’ve read a few of them myself. More than ten, if I recall correctly.

So yeah, I’m getting a little sick of it.

Say you’re writing one of these scripts. How long do you spend explaining the loop? What are the rules? How much time do you spend figuring out how to get out of the loop? How much time do you spend on the fun and games? Does the loop ever change? What’s the loop a metaphor for?

Of course, there are still plenty of unique ways to answer these questions, and I’m not saying that all time loop stories are bad from now on. (12 Minutes looks pretty damn cool, for what it’s worth.) However, the problem isn’t how you answer these questions. The problem is that you have to answer them in the first place, each and every time, and therein lies the cause of my frustration. Insert joke about encountering the time loop formula so many times that I’m beginning to feel like I’m in a loop myself.

All that said, I didn’t say I was sick of time loop stories. I said I’m getting sick of them. I’m not quite there yet, and it’s thanks to movies like Palm Springs.

The difference between Palm Springs and many time loop stories is that it embraces the loop for its hangout potential. Imagine you’re stuck in a time loop with another person. What do you do? Maybe you’re smart enough to be able to figure out how to get out of it. Chances are, however, that you’re not. Know that I don’t mean that as an insult. After all, I’d be right there with you if we were stuck together.

So me? I’d probably spend a lot of time hanging out, getting drinks and indulging in some consequence free behavior. Maybe start a fight or two or see what having a drug habit’s like.

Palm Springs has the same idea, and in the end, it’s a movie that explores what actual people would do if they were stuck in a loop and unburdened by the need to carry out a movie plot. Though Nyles has been in the loop for years and Sarah’s only just entered, we watch them bring out the best and worst in each other, not because a screenplay forces them to, but because that’s what you do when you’re around someone long enough and you get to know them. It’s funny, and it’s also quite moving when it wants to be.

Of course, they end up doing a movie plot anyway. But it’s the last thing I think about when Palm Springs comes to mind. And hey, I went the whole write-up without making a comparison to being stuck in place and COVID!

10. Soul

I’m going to give you an annoying screenwriting reason as to why this movie’s on the list. It’s not the heartfelt exploration of existentialism or humanity or emotion it deserves. However, chances are you’ve seen it by now, or you’ve at least heard of it, and you already know how most people are responding. Or if you don’t, I’ll say it like this: In my mental ongoing ranking of Pixar films, it’s easily in the top ten. Somewhere in the top half or the middle.

It’s Pixar. You know what that means.

So… I like Coco and Inside Out an awful lot. But I failed to connect with them as hardly as I feel like I was supposed to on first viewing.

In the case of Inside Out, it was because I thought it spent too much time explaining itself. Though it’s not as noticeable as, say, Inception or Tenet, a sizable percentage of the dialogue in Inside Out is exposition. This, in and of itself, doesn’t mean “movie bad” or anything like that. In fact, Inside Out climbs higher and higher in my Pixar ranking every time I rewatch it. (Also in the top ten for me.) But the first time I saw it, I felt that my attention was being pulled more towards the logic and machinations of the world building and the plot than it was towards the characters and their journeys. I still felt for them. Just not as hard as I could’ve.

Similarly, I felt, and still feel, that Coco is slightly over-plotted. The artists and animators and everyone in between built one of the most beautiful looking worlds I’ve ever seen in an animated film in Coco’s version of the afterlife. The problem for me, however, is that we don’t get to just take moment or two and just spend some time in it. Instead, every second of Coco is spent trying to figure out how to get Miguel out of this world, and though of course he has to leave, it would be nice if we had a scene or two where something wasn’t being explained or someone wasn’t chasing him or he didn’t have to execute a plan. Of course it’s impactful, especially if you’ve ever had a relative suffering from dementia. But it still felt too busy to me.

Again, these are both fantastic movies. But when it comes to late Pixar, a proper balance between exposition and storytelling isn’t always struck, and though it shouldn’t bother most people, it bothers me. Mostly because I’m aware of it as I’m watching.

Soul, however, strikes that balance as well as it can.

Sure, there’s exposition. It’s a necessary aspect of screenwriting, especially when you’re dealing with something as conceptual as Soul. However, whenever it can, it communicates how its world works visually. And not just world building information either, but tone and worldview, even in its non-visual elements. For example, the chaotic but intimate jazz of the real world versus the streamlined electronic music of its version of pre-life communicates loads of information while not explicitly telling the audience anything.

As a result of this effort, Soul hit me with full force on first viewing. It’ll probably hit me again even harder on the second and third rewatch. Before, I was too distracted by the mechanics of the storytelling. Now I’m too distracted by my awe of them.

9. On the Record

I spent a lot of time in 2020 watching documentaries about sexual assault and the #MeToo movement.

This year, I finally got around to watching Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator, the documentary about Bikram Choudhury, the famous yoga instructor behind Bikram Yoga that was accused of assaulting multiple female students. I also saw Athlete A, the documentary about the conspiracy to cover up years of extreme sexual misconduct by doctor Larry Nassar, who was in charge of overseeing th US Olympics women’s gymnastics team, among many others. There were a few more as well.

Of all the sexual assault documentaries I watched this year, a genre that routinely breaks my heart and one I wish didn’t have to exist in the first place, the one that stuck out to me was On the Record.

On the surface, it’s a documentary about the years of abuse wrought upon many women in the music industry by hip hop mogul and Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons and music mogul L.A. Reid. And at that, it does a thorough and heartfelt job exploring the lives of the women these men have harmed and what they have to say.

Most of the focus, however, is on a former A&R at Def Jam named Drew Dixon. She’s responsible for bringing us such songs as “I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By” by Method Man & Mary J. Blige, “Maria Maria” by Santana feat. The Product G&B, “American Boy” by Estelle feat. Kanye West, and much much more. Drew Dixon is an undeniably brilliant and talented person, and I feel ashamed that the only reason I know her name is because of this film.

On the Record is a documentary about predators, but it’s more a documentary about the decision to come forward about a predator. It’s a staggering dilemma. In coming out against men like Simmons and Reid, or any powerful man for that matter, you’re risking your privacy, your safety, your mental well-being, and your future. However, if you say nothing, the behavior continues, and the predator finds a new target.

Ultimately, the brilliance of On the Record is that it communicates the full haunting weight of having to make that decision in the first place. Of course, all these docs spark rage and heartbreak in anyone who watches them who is capable of empathy. However, while On the Record is about a handful of women, in a way, it’s about anyone who’s body has been rendered a play thing by a powerful man. It’s a harrowing but necessary watch.

8. Driveways

There’s two kinds of movies I often have a hard time writing about in these top ten articles.

The first are movies that generally rely on a vibe, but are too generally sad to be called proper hangout movies. Driveways is a movie about a single Asian mother who visits her dead sister’s house in order to clean it up and sell it while her young son bonds with the elderly next door neighbor. (Culture clash is a part of the story, hence why I brought up their race.) All in all, it’s actually a pretty upbeat movie. But there’s an undercurrent of grief and heartbreak that runs through the story, and it that’s fairly hard to describe unless you’re actually in it.

The second are slow movies that don’t have a lot of plot. I wish I had a good reason this time for why these are hard to write about, but I don’t. These kinds of movies rob me of a lot of my crutches. I can’t talk about structure or narrative expectations being subverted or any of the kinds of things I obsess about too much thanks to my fancy screenwriting degree that has netted me a grand total of, like, three hundred bucks.

Driveways is both of these kinds of movies.

Though there is an arc and a sense of story, it’s not as reliant on narrative tropes to relay its emotional poignancy. It’s the kind of movie that you just kinda have to show up to in order to find out whether or not you’re on board.

Me personally, it’s one of the most emotional experiences I had with a movie in 2020, despite it being slow as molasses. But it would take more mental steam than I have now in order to fully describe it. Plus I’ve been writing top ten lists for a while, someone stole the entire damn muffler system off my car, there was an attempted coup, and my brain is soup. So I’m going to rely on the word I always invoke when it comes time to talk about movies like this. Driveways is intimate.

But not just intimate in the feel good sense of the word. And, again, not intimate in the hangout sense either. Rather, it’s an intimacy that comes with the specificity of details and a kind of emotional intelligence only great writers and directors can make shine.

Though the little description I wrote above makes it seem like the mother is the protagonist, equally as important is Cody, the young son of the mother. (Whose name, by the way, is Kathy.) Cody is a quiet kid with severe social issues. So severe that when it’s bad enough, he vomits, an occurrence that has apparently happened so many times that Kathy isn’t shocked anymore when she gets a phone call. These details don’t make this movie special in and of themselves, but they’re important because they shape Cody’s view of the world. A view that’s vital to establish because one of the things Driveways intimately understands is how impressionable kids at Cody’s age and disposition can be. How one bully can temporarily shatter your world, and how one person showing you a little bit of kindness can alter the entire trajectory of your life.

Driveways is, ultimately, an incredibly affective exploration of this kind of intimacy. It’s brilliant at doing so, and the very least, you should give it a chance.

Also, we need to talk about Hong Chau more.

7. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

Many people probably saw this movie and thought it was a documentary. Those same people may have done a little bit of reading on it afterwards and discovered that it was anything but. Those people thought they were watching a documentary about the last day of operations at an off-strip dive bar in Las Vegas when they were really watching an intimate stage drama with a mix of actors and real life barflys shot in New Orleans.

I knew where it was shot. I knew it wasn’t real. In fact, I was a least somewhat familiar with the Ross Brothers before, having admired their cinematography work on I Am Not Your Negro. I read a lot of early reviews that were all too willing to tell me every single thing that happens in this movie, and I even knew which one of them were actors. Or at least some of them.

After about five minutes in, I thought I was watching a documentary about the last day of operations at an off-strip dive bar in Las Vegas.

That’s how real the space feels. That’s how real the people who occupy it feel. Even if some of the scenes feel more like movie reality than actual reality, it didn’t matter. Before the halfway mark, I, who has maybe one or two drinks a year, felt like I’ve been getting drunk in a corner of that bar for years.

To put it simply, it’s one of the most immersive movies I’ve ever seen.

6. Time

As I mentioned above, about a week before writing this here post, I discovered that the muffler was missing from my car.

Street cleaning in my neighborhood is every Wednesday between 11:00am and 2:00pm. I got in my car at 10:50, turned it on, and discovered that my car was louder than a jet engine. I drove it around the block. Everyone I drove past stared at me.

I did everything you’re supposed to do. I called AAA and had it towed to my mechanic. (Which, luckily, is within walking distance of my apartment.) I walked over, they took my info, and I walked home. The next day, the garage called and said that the muffler had been stolen. And not just the muffler either, but essentially, the entire exhaust system. Gaskets, pipes, sensors. The whole kit and caboodle. What I thought was going to be a hundred dollar deal was actually going to cost upwards of $2500. So I called my insurance.

Luckily, they’ve covering it, and I only have to pay the relatively low deductible. All of this went well. Suspiciously well. Until I had to file a police report.

Trying to file it online. Failing, because the website said I don’t live in Los Angeles county, despite “Los Angeles” being in my actual address. Finding the number. Being re-routed to several different departments. Being put on hold. Explaining the same information to multiple cops. Blah blah blah. What should’ve taken a half hour tops ended up taking my whole day.

It was only a few hours of my life. Fox Rich has been waiting for the release of her husband for twenty years.

There’s a danger in the above paragraphs, that danger being that anyone thinks that I am in anyway comparing my experience to Fox’s. I’m not. The chasm between the bit of bureaucratic incompetence I encountered and the generations of systemic and racial injustices that led to the situation the Rich family found themselves in couldn’t be more wide and incomprehensible.

I bring this story up to draw a comparison between how we handled it. In the time Fox got out of prison for an armed robbery, she started petitioning the courts for the release of her husband Rob, she become a successful entrepreneur, a noted speaker on criminal injustice, an author, and she raised six children, all of whom seem to be on track for success themselves. Throughout Time, we only see her lose her cool once, in what may be the most cathartic and heartbreaking scene from a film in 2020. There were assuredly other instances, but given what we learn about her as we watch her tapes and the footage the documentarians shot, you could probably count them on one hand.

I was on the phone with the cops for only a few hours and I let it ruin my day and sink me into a funk for what was, in hindsight, an embarrassingly long amount of time.

Fox Rich possesses more patience, grace, and poise then I can ever hope to have. Maybe with enough therapy and self-reflection, I can be lucky enough to became just a little tiny bit like her. Probably not. But maybe.

5. Wolfwalkers

There are plenty of points to be made about the writing in Wolfwalkers. Important points. Points about patriarchy and colonization and environmentalism and feminism and religious oppression and (pull out your impact font) society. Wolfwalkers is a fantastic script that pulls all these themes together and makes them work, and it deserves to be discussed.

The characters are well-formed and empathetic, the story is fascinating and huge in scope, the pacing is perfect. It’s everything you could possibly want from an epic animated adventure.

But look at this fucking movie.

Look at this fucking movie.

LOOK AT THIS FUCKING MOVIE!!!

4. Mank

Before the #MeToo movement, the whole self-congratulatory movie about old Hollywood thing was, at most, kind of annoying.

Pointing out that the Oscars tend to reward these kinds of films at too high a rate is by no means a new thought. It’s pointed out so much in fact that, to be honest, I get almost as annoyed by people pointing it out as I am by the these movies themselves. And hey, not all of those movie are bad! But then I remember why people point it out so much in the first place and I come back to my senses. It is, of course, unbearably smug and superior to constantly reward movies about yourself.

Now that Hollywood’s been mostly exposed for what it actually is, every time we release one of these movies, it’s like taking several massive steps backwards. We don’t need these movies anymore. We need movies about what Hollywood really is and what it really was.

Yet, sometimes, I still feel this knee-jerk impulse to defend movies about old Hollywood when they’re good, and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just because I’m trying to be a part of this industry, and thus I feel on some level like it’s a judgement on myself. The implications of that make me shudder, and I want more than anything for this industry to change forever. If I ever find myself in a position of power, I hope with everything I have that I don’t lose sight of that.

Anyway, Mank is a movie released by a streaming service about a screenwriter who watches the men who ran the Hollywood studios interfere in a state election for greedy and selfish purposes, and upon doing so, he realizes that he’s complicit in the same system that allows this kind of behavior in the first place. So he writes a movie that forever taints the man who’s responsible for pulling the purse strings.

I wonder why this movie resonated with me so much? Also, film twitter can go fuck itself.

3. Red, White and Blue

A little over a six months ago, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer working for the Minneapolis Police Department. A week ago to the day of writing this, Donald Trump encouraged an armed mob to attack elected officials in the Capitol Building, and the culpability of the Capitol Hill police is still, at this moment in time, a bit of a question mark. On one hand, officers were killed. On the other, the footage of some officers opening gates and posing for selfies speaks for itself.

So… how the fuck are you supposed to make a movie about a black man joining the police department in 2020? Or any year afterwards for that matter?

To be perfectly honest, from the moment Leroy announces his intentions to become a cop, I realized that I was rooting against him. Of course, he joins for noble reasons, and of course, he’s joining at a different time in history when police forces all over the world were more universally respected and unquestioned. But thanks to a healthy obsession with hip hop, as well as a number of other factors, I can’t recall a time in my life where I ever trusted cops or the personality of anyone who would want to be a cop. And I’m a white guy who will never fully comprehend what it means to be on the wrong side of police discrimination. Leroy’s a black man in Thatcher’s UK. I couldn’t immediately wrap my head around it.

So how do you release a movie in 2020 about a black man joining the police department? Simple. You have him join with the intentions of creating real lasting change. Then you watch him fail. In fact, not only do you watch him fail, but you watch his colleagues treat him like dirt, including directly putting him in harm’s way, and you watch the leadership turn a blind eye after propping him up and telling him he has promise. You watch the community he considers himself a part of distrust him for entirely understandable and justifiable reasons. Then you watch him break.

Leroy tries to make the system better. Then the system crushes him in every conceivable fashion. Then it just ends. No resolution. No climax. Just credits.

It’s a giant “fuck you” to the notion that the issues of systemic violence and racism in the police force will ever truly be solved. In a way, Red, White and Blue was one of the bleakest movie of the year.

2. Bad Education

I love stories about scams, and I love stories about scams in any form they may take. Especially when the scammers get caught or their lives turn to shit.

Back in high school, I watched the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. I became obsessed with the idea that a bunch of power dorks were putting all this effort into what was, ultimately, a pretty dumb scam. There’s a guy named Lou Pai. He was a higher-up in the company who sold all his shares and left the company seemingly because he impregnated a stripper. Because he did this, he was never charged with insider trading like the rest of the management. It’s fascinating stuff.

My love of stories about scamming never really ended. Whenever a new company fell or a new CEO arrested, I’d read all about it. I don’t even limit myself to stories about the private sector, but governmental corruption or bribery on larger scales as well. Collective, the documentary about corruption in the Romanian medical system, came damn close to making this list, and I had even put some thoughts into writing a script about Razak until the Black List script beat me to the punch. Hell, my undergrad thesis film was about a financial aid scam being run out of college office and in 2019, I fell further down the rabbit hole of scam rap than I’ll ever care to admit. (Actually, I’ll admit it right now. Scam rap is hilarious and I love it. There.)

All this brings us to Bad Education, a fraud story about an elite public school in Long Island, the script for which I read a few years ago and fell head over heels in love with.

It has everything you could want in a fraud story. First, you have a complicated fraudster, in this case Frank Tassone. Despite his funneling of millions of dollars out of the school, he’s still cares deeply about the students, and he’s the kind of person you’d otherwise want in charge of an institution like a public school if it weren’t for the fact that he’s a thief.

You also need greed fueled stupidity for the extra element of schadenfreude, and boy does Bad Education deliver.

Most scams fall apart because the right person was paying attention at the right time. In the case of Enron, for example, an investor and a journalist noticed some irregularities in the financial statements. In the case of Bad Education, however, it’s because the second-in-command at the school used a fraudulent credit card to buy thousands of dollars worth of contracting supplies at various chain hardware stores to build a pointless skywalk at the school. The fact that they got Jimmy Tatro, or Dylan Maxwell from season one of American Vandal, to play the son is a work of casting genius.

I could go on forever. I adored everything about this script, from its characters to its “fuck you” ending. However, when I read it, I thought the chances of it being made were pretty low. Though it would be cheap to make, it’s not sexy, and it’s not a guaranteed cash cow.

And god knows what the wrong director would do with it. I didn’t like Thoroughbreds, so I was skeptical when it got announced as an HBO movie with Cory Finley. But I got to give it up. Finley did an outstanding job. Probably didn’t hurt that he had one of the best ensemble casts of the year either.

1. Lovers Rock

I’ve become acutely aware of the fact that I “enjoy” a lot of art about black suffering.

There’s an obvious reason for this. European colonialism has touched every continent on this planet, and with it, profound unforgivable suffering was inflicted on every being that didn’t look like a white male. So yes, when it comes to the black experience, particularly in America, not every story is going to leave you feeling good.

Still, you read a book about growing up in black in rural Virginia and how your life was defined by instances of violence, and then you listen to a song about the daily social alienation of being black and trans, even in a place most people regard as inclusive, and then you watch a TV show that offers a glimpse at how white society treats black women’s bodies as disposable, and you read another thing and watch another thing and listen to another thing. It has an effect on you.

Now, I say this not to complain. The fat white guy feels sad taking in art about the suffering his people have inflicted for centuries. Boo fucking hoo. And I also say this not to condemn anyone for making art like this. Even if it was my place to dictate what art about race gets made and what art doesn’t, I still wouldn’t stop it. And it’s not my place. And it never will be.

I say this because at some point in the year, I began to wonder if I’m intentionally seeking out suffering. I hear of a book about slavery or a documentary about a racial injustice or an album about hardship, and I run to it without a moment’s hesitation. It’s not that I intentionally avoid work about race and joy either. But when it comes on my radar, I don’t greet it with the same amount of urgency. Maybe it’s because works about systemic racism feel more important. And they are important. But still.

And it isn’t just works about race either. It’s really anything that’s about joy in general, regardless of who’s feeling it. I don’t know why I’m built this way. But after Lovers Rock, that behavior stops.

Lovers Rock isn’t free from strife. There’s racist hooligans hovering near the party the film revolves around, waiting and willing to cause trouble to any unsuspecting woman who happens to cross their path. Moreover, there’s police who’ll take any opportunity they can to ruin anybody who attends the party’s lives. There’s toxic masculinity that takes its ugliest form in an attempted rape. There’s mental illness and economic inequality and so much more.

But there’s also singing and dancing. There’s music. Fucking unbelievably great music that doesn’t stop from the moment the party begins. There’s a sense of community rich with culture. There’s youth and romance. There are possibilities that seem endless and a sense of genuine, indomitable happiness. All this underlines what may be the biggest tragedy of the entire Small Axe series, which is that this act of black joy is, in and of itself, an act of resistance. Yet even though I was painfully aware this, I still found myself completely lost in the experience, and I didn’t want it to end.

It was the most moving experience I had with a work of art across all mediums and genres in 2020. It’s an experience of happiness I’ll be seeking out from now on with the same passion I out works about strife. Maybe even more so.

Honorable Mentions

Alex Wheatle
The Assistant
Athlete A
Beastie Boys Story
Boys State
Collective
Cuties (A rabid pack of racist shitheads on the internet who are oddly obsessed with pedophiles don’t get to derail the experience of this movie.)
Dick Johnson is Dead
Education
The Forty-Year-Old Version
Hamilton
His House
The Invisible Man
Mangrove
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
On the Rocks
Shithouse
Sound of Metal
The Vast of Night

Will Watch Someday

City Hall
Minari
Nomadland
One Night in Miami
Possessor
Promising Young Woman (Though I read the script and quite enjoyed it!)
Vitalina Varela
I’m sure there’s more.