With the theatres shut down for most of the year and the studios postponing their tentpole releases, this made room for smaller stuff, such as indies, docs, and foreign-language movies to come to the fore. Of course, the situation also meant that most movie marketing also disappeared, so one had to go searching for quality fare, relying more upon critics and word-of-mouth and year-end lists.

31. Hubie Halloween – Sometimes, Adam Sandler’s shtick is exactly what I need, particularly when it’s his goofy sweet shtick, and especially when he’s doing it in a movie set during Halloween.

30. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – This movie definitely would have played better in a packed theatre, where you could laugh in collective disbelief at such outrageous moments as the Moon Blood Fertility Dance scene. As it was, even on the small screen at home, Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova’s fearlessness (by holding her own with Cohen while also creating such an indelible character, the latter turned in one of the best performances of the past year) was still something to behold.

29. The Go-Go’s – A solid, warts-and-all documentary that chronicles the famous girl band’s rise from LA punk rockers to the top of the pop charts, covering, in the process, all the internal squabbles and bruised egos and the inevitable break-up.

28. The Dark Divide – David Cross, portraying real-life butterfly expert Robert Pyle, goes it alone in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest in this adaptation of Pyle’s book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide.

27. Range Runners – I’m a big fan of tight, efficient genre movies, particularly ones that involve a bloody fight for survival (in this case, it’s a solo trail runner who crosses paths with some nefarious criminals), so this one, directed by Philip S. Plowden and starring Sean Patrick Leonard, the nicest guy to every play bad, was right up my alley.

26. The Old Guard – Based on the Greg Rucka comicbook, this movie, about a team of immortal soldiers commanded by the great Charlize Theron, resonates not so much because of its decent-to-better-than-average action bits, but because of its three-dimensional characters (well, the good guys, at least; Harry Melling’s bad guy is pretty one-note) and their super interesting backstories.

25. An American Pickle – This tale of two Seth Rogens (one a modern-day New Yorker, the other his long-thought-lost great grandfather who fell into a pickle vat and emerged a century later unscathed and unaged) is funny and heartfelt.

24. The Mystery of D. B. Cooper – Back in the day when there was virtually no airport security, when, apparently, it was a regular occurrence for planes to be hijacked and flown to Cuba, some guy calling himself D. B. Cooper pulled off the greatest of mid-air heists. Still unsolved to this day, this doc looks at the four leading contenders to the true identity of this infamous thief.

23. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart – I had no idea The Bee Gees were as big a deal and as accomplished as they were, or that the anti-disco movement was largely prompted by racism and homophobia. Thanks to this super engaging documentary, now I do.

22. The Trial of the Chicago 7 – I don’t know what aspects of this movie are historically accurate or which ones have been Sorkinized (I suspect that the most overtly crowd-pleasing bits are the latter), but, being a sucker for a good Aaron Sorkinization, I totally dug this rousing courtroom drama.

21. The Mole Agent – Based on the access it attains and coverage it presents, I’m not fully convinced this is actually a documentary, but I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Regardless, this film, which purportedly follows an 83-year-old man who’s hired to go undercover as a resident in a retirement home in order to ferret out possible abuse, is a tender, charming, heart-tugging examination of friendship and loneliness amongst the elderly.

20. Wild Goose Lake – Filled with sprawling chases and gorgeous, neon and rain-soaked cinematography, this stylish movie about a criminal who’s forced to go on the run after he inadvertently kills a police officer is a sumptuous cinematic feast for the eyes.

19. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets – Documentary filmmakers Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross assembled a bunch of real-life bar flies and, over the course of two 18-hour days, produced this fly-on-the-wall fictional documentary/non-fiction drama about the last day and night of a bar in Las Vegas (it was actually shot in New Orleans, in an establishment that is still open). There is no over-arching plot at play here, other than the impending shutdown of what is clearly a place of bittersweet refuge and community, but small narratives do emerge and play out amongst the patrons. The film’s real strength comes from simply watching the many indelible, lived-in faces on display, on whose countenances we’re able to glean a lifetime of stories.

18. The King of Staten Island – Judd Apatow has now directed six exceptionally good comedies in a row. There are very few filmmakers who can lay claim to such consistent quality. His latest stars SNL’s Pete Davidson as a depressed, lay-about man-boy from Staten Island who’s semi-trying to get his shit together.

17. Da 5 Bloods – This movie, about a group of veterans returning to Vietnam in order to locate the found gold they left behind decades earlier, has everything you’d expect from a Spike Lee joint: potent social/political commentary, classic narrative structure, powerful performances (including one of the last ones by Chadwick Boseman), assured direction, great needle-drops, and, of course, that bloody double dolly shot.

16. Another Round – I don’t usually like to watch people who are under the excessive influence of foreign substances. I just find it super irritating. As such, it’s a testament to Mads Mikkelsen’s enourmous charm and unique screen presence that I was not only able to tolerate his turn as a middle-aged teacher who, along with a group of friends, undertakes an experiment to retain a constant alcoholic buzz (in the hopes that it will enhance his daily state of living, which it initially does), but, more than this, I was also able to feel a genuine emotional connection with his plight and journey of self-discovery.

15. Feels Good Man – I’d been tangentially aware of 4Chan and Pepe the Frog, but it wasn’t until I watched this incredibly absorbing and informative documentary that I learned exactly what the former was, and how the latter went from banal cartoon character to internet meme to alt-right icon to, eventually, an official symbol of hate in the eyes of the Anti-Defamation League.

14. Class-Action Park – One part paean to the free-roaming, unregulated 80s, one-part cautionary tale of this very same thing, this super engaging documentary about an infamous theme park in New Jersey that was largely staffed and attended by unruly teenagers makes you yearn for that simpler, bygone analogue era when nobody seemed to be paying all that much attention to what kids did with their free time. Notably, it makes the point that this lack of supervision had some serious downsides, too.

13. Let Them All Talk – A famous writer (played by Meryl Streep) sails to England on the Queen Mary II with her nephew and two longtime, on-and-off-again friends (played by Candice Bergen and Diane Weiss) so she can accept an award. It doesn’t sound like much of a plot, but, thanks to the playful skill of the great craftsman Steven Soderbergh, this deceptively slight movie is a joy to watch.

12. The Assistant – With meticulous, quotidian detail, writer/director Kitty Green presents a single, soul-deflating day in the life of a PA working in a film production office under a mostly unseen Harvey Weinstein-esque beast of a boss. Despite its explosive, of-the-moment subject matter, it’s hard to imagine a more low-key, mundane presentation of events, which, in turn, makes what it depicts all the more disturbing.

11. The Painter and the Thief – If this was a straight-up fictional story, I might have thought the filmmaker was trying too hard, that he’d employed one or two twists too many. As it is, though, this story is not fictional, thus making it something of a miracle that it was captured at all. So as not to ruin anything, I’ll just say that, as the title suggests, it’s about a painter and the thief who steals two of the painter’s paintings, and the unlikely, yet ultimately profound, friendship they end up forming as a result.

10. Palm Springs – This infinite-time-loop movie about some wedding guests who find themselves stuck in a single day that just keeps resetting itself is funny, clever, and thematically resonant. Best of all, it’s knowingly set in a post-Groundhog Day world, meaning that, unlike a lot of similar films that waste unnecessary time with a big set-up, Palm Springs starts in medias res and just expects you to keep up.

9. Sound of Metal – What initially muted my enthusiasm to watch this was how basic and uninteresting its plot sounded: a heavy metal drummer suddenly loses his hearing. What I realized after watching it was that Sound of Metal wasn’t about being deaf, per se (though this particular state is admirably replicated by some stellar sound design); rather, it was about dealing with any significant life-altering occurrence, and, more importantly, how one might find their way through said roadblock towards some kind of acceptance and inner peace.

8. A Sun – Like everyone else, I was only made aware of this one after Variety picked it as their best film of the year. Who knew that as I was cycling through all the mediocre and seemingly uninteresting options on Netflix this gem was there all along, just waiting to be discovered? Directed, co-written, and beautifully photographed by Mong-Hong Chung, A Sun focuses on a Taiwanese family and the tragedy and strife they experience after one son participates in an horrific criminal act. I don’t really want to say much more than that, except to encourage everyone to check out this exhilarating, emotionally wrenching, truly stunning film.

7. Portrait of a Lady on Fire – This was one of the very few movies I saw in the theatre in 2020, way back in January, and it stuck with me all year. Set on an isolated French island at the end of the 18th century, writer/director Céline Sciamma’s passionate, impeccably composed film about a painter who’s hired to paint a wedding portrait of a young woman pulses with vitality and emotion.

6. I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Because I just knew it’d be a bleak, challenging, painfully self-reflexive experience, it took me a long time to work up the gumption to watch writer/director Charlie Kaufman’s latest, which is ostensibly about a man taking his girlfriend home to meet his parents. I wasn’t wrong in my initial, sight-unseen assessment. But, similar to his best work (Adaptation; Synecdoche, New York), I found that as soon as I started watching it I tuned in, then gave myself over, to Kaufman’s singular vision.

5. Never Rarely Sometimes Always – For me, there was no more memorable shot in all of 2020 than the heartbreaking, single-take close-up of Sidney Flannigan’s Autumn answering the multiple-choice questionnaire about her sexual history in preparation for the abortion she’s had to travel across state lines to obtain. In this moment, the lines between actor and performance and character ceased to be, and all I could see was an all-too-real young woman struggling against the myriad indignities with which her world had burdened her.

4. First Cow – Kelly Reichardt tells the stories, and, more importantly, presents the moments, that exist between the stories that are traditionally told. In First Cow, she focuses on the friendship that develops between a chef and a Chinese immigrant in 1820s Oregon. Special recognition must also be paid to the film’s technical achievements, for both its utterly convincing day-for-night photography and for its overall look; I would have sworn the latter was the product of super-16mm film stock, but, as it turns out, it was actually all digital.

3. Les Misérables – This isn’t yet another adaptation of the Victor Hugo novel, rather, it’s titled as such because it’s set in Montfermeil, where Hugo wrote his most famous work. Employing a gripping verité style, the movie follows a group of three cops (a racist veteran, his complicit partner, and an idealistic newcomer who’s just transferred in) as they aggressively patrol their beat in the ethnically diverse commune. They eventually come to commit an act of violent misconduct against a young boy, which then sets off a frantic search by both the officers and some local elders to find the footage of the incident that was captured by a drone, which further escalates the tension and ultimately leads to not just one of the best endings I saw in 2020, but one of the best endings I’ve ever seen.

2. Collective – I watched this remarkable documentary, about a journalistic investigation into the aftermath of a tragic nightclub fire in Bucharest, with my mouth perpetually agape. Director Alexander Nanau delivers one too-incredible-to-be-believed-but-I-just-saw-it-on-screen-so-it-must-have-actually-happened moment after another. This was easily the most thrilling, enraging, holy-shit film I saw all year.

1. David Byrne’s American Utopia – Being only tangentially aware of David Byrne’s music, and never before being all that interested in concert docs, I was completely unprepared for how much I ended up enjoying this Spike Lee-directed documentation of Byrne’s Broadway show. As it was, the entirety of this production – the music, the staging and choreography, Byrne and his fellow performers, Lee’s shot selection and editing – ended up captivating me like nothing else did in 2020.