Top 10 - 2020

No, you're not going crazy: we're just over a month away from 2022 and I'm only now getting around to posting my top ten list for 2020. The reasons for this rather extreme tardiness mostly have to do with the fact that 2020 was a strange and tumultuous year; its many intersecting disruptions hardly need to be recapitulated. That perhaps the biggest personal impact the pandemic had on my life was how it threw my moviegoing out of whack reveals that I don't really have much to complain about. Still, with theaters shut down and so many films locked behind the paywalls of the seemingly hundreds of streaming services in existence, it was a weird and unsettling time to be a cinephile. I saw fewer new movies than in any other year of my adult life, and was playing catch-up long into 2021. Some notable titles, such as American Utopia and Wolfwalkers, I still have not been able to see. 

After all the real-world turbulence and my own temporizing, I decided to just make the damn list already (I am a completist, after all; I couldn't let a lacuna in my archives perpetuate the idea that 2020 was just one big void in time). Even more than usual, this feels like a provisional ranking, culled as it is from a relatively small pool of films to which I really responded. Notably, it includes more documentaries than I've ever had on any previous top ten, with non-fiction films taking up exactly 50% of the list. Chalk it up to a year in which facing ugly realities proved to be unavoidable.

My top ten, comprised of stills and a few words, is after the jump...

10.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, dir. Jason Woliner

One of the first films I know of to capture the sheer gobsmacking inanity and terror of the United States under the 45th president, from resurgent fascism to the science denialism exacerbated by COVID-19. Maria Bakalova amazes, and the laughs are both cathartic and painful in the right ways.

9.

Roy's World: Barry Gifford's Chicago, dir. Rob Christopher

A collage of archival footage and striking animation results in a tactile, lyrical evocation of a bygone Chicago, with recitations of Barry Gifford's stories providing a window into both his own life and one of the pivotal cities that shaped him.

8.

Quo Vadis, Aida?, dir. Jasmila Žbanić

Centered by a volcanic performance from Jasna Đuričić, this nearly real-time procedural trains an unflinching eye on the systemic failures that facilitated the Bosnian genocide. Unfathomable historical atrocity from a wrenching human-scale perspective.

7.

Collective, dir. Alexander Nanau

A disturbing deep dive into the vast institutional corruption of Romania's healthcare system; a reminder that such malfeasance grows wherever profit and power are placed over life; and a tribute to the critical role of journalists in holding authority accountable. An amazing feat of access and witness.

6.

City Hall, dir. Frederick Wiseman

Wiseman's portrait of his hometown municipality is characteristically multilayered, incisive, and absorbing in its carefully observed minutia. His longest work so far at 270 minutes, it uses its sprawling runtime to draw us into the complex networks of interdependent organisms that constitute a city.

5.

Nomadland, dir. Chloé Zhao

Blending fiction and documentary modes to more elegant effect than she did in The Rider, Zhao creates a contemplative American road movie mapping the social, economic, and spiritual journeys of those who find their calling - whether by choice, necessity, or an indistinguishable fusion of both - beyond the bounds of society. McDormand is a natural among the real-life nomads, whose stories and faces provide the film its most indelible textures.

4.

Dick Johnson is Dead, dir. Kristen Johnson

Johnson follows up her phenomenal Cameraperson with something on the other side of the tonal scale, a darkly irreverent and even extravagant docu-dramatic monument to her ailing father. What unites it with Cameraperson is its transcendent exploration of cinema as a vehicle for transmitting memory, processing the intangible, and preserving life.

3.

Crip Camp, dirs. Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht

The best documentary of the year was this exuberant, generous, invigorating account of the history and tirelessly enduring work of the fight for disability rights. An essential document of an oft-overlooked movement that also offers fine-grained, multidimensional portraits of its numerous players.

2.

Minari, dir. Lee Isaac Chung

Achingly delicate and emotionally supple, Chung's semi-autobiographical family pastoral tells a timeworn tale of the immigrant experience with uncommon intimacy, poetry, and the kind of resonant specificity that can only be born from firsthand experience. The cast is a perfectly calibrated organic machine of familial and communal tensions and small but profound transformations.

1.

First Cow, dir. Kelly Reichardt

Depictions of the ravages of capitalism and cultural imperialism rarely come in a form this beautiful or tenderly yearning. With rich, tactile historical texture (courtesy Christopher Blauvelt's earthy, rustic lensing and Reichardt and Raymond's detailed script), the film conjures a harsh, sensuous, and convincingly inchoate American frontier where human decency is both the strongest and most endangered breed of all.

There you have it. On to 2021.