2020 Didn’t Kill Cinema But it Didn’t Help
This year will be remembered for many things. Sweat pants. Zoom humor. The post-Election Day realization that a solid minority of Americans were in a cult. Warner Bros. selling out its filmmakers (sorry, “content creators”) for some short-term streaming buzz. What people may not remember — and for good reason — is that the top box office performer of 2020 was released just seventeen days into the new year. And it was Bad Boys for Life.
That fact by itself would not be cause for concern. Ticket revenue and quality generally do not track together. But while the latest adventures of Mike and Marcus hardly made for a stellar entry in the buddy cop genre, it was a welcome respite from having the year’s blow-out revenue earner be yet another cog in the Marvel or DC machine. More troubling was that a middling actioner released in the depths of Dumpuary sold more tickets than anything else, including a new Christopher Nolan movie whose trailer release was greeted with Star Wars prequel levels of anticipation. Once news of COVID-19 really began to take hold, going to a movie theater quickly dropped off most Americans’ to-do lists. (Of the many pandemic workarounds schemed up to make life less enervating, putting out new releases at drive-ins was inspired but by definition not an option for mass movie-going.)
This makes measuring 2020’s cinematic output something challenging. Because even though critics measure movies based on their individual merits, we also cannot help separating the wheat from the chaff by other non-scientific measurements (like the ever-mysterious “buzz”) which become more vaporous in a strictly online environment. There are only so many hours in the day, after all. Digital releasing has dramatically expanded the number of “new releases” out there, not to mention balkanizing where they can be found. As early as 2019, a certain segment of moviegoers would have gone to whichever closest theater was showing the new Sofia Coppola. Now, once they hunted down On the Rocks, they had to figure out whether to pony up for Apple TV. A curious advantage of this more arbitrary landscape meant that larger event movies like Ron Howard’s entirely unnecessary Hillbilly Elegy were even easier to ignore. After all, it was only on Netflix.
Once people largely stopped going to theaters, moviegoing became essentially an at-home phenomenon, making the differentiation between movies and television seem even more arbitrary than in the past. Were viewers going to click on the new foreign documentary with a hard-to-find VOD link or just let Netflix spool them into the next Queen’s Gambit episode? The torrent of streaming content also meant that one part of a critic’s job — pointing people towards lower-profile movies they might have missed, an uphill slog at the best of times— became even more crucial.
Pandemic viewing habits meant that people were much more likely to have seen or heard of a limited-release drama like Kitty Green’s chilly study of gendered office power dynamics The Assistant than similarly impressive indie releases like Brandon Cronenberg’s body-horror cyberpunk thriller Possessor or the Ross brothers’ inventive barfly faux-documentary Bloody Nose Empty Pockets. That is largely because the former opened in theaters just before theaters began shutting down and movies tossed into the pandemic streaming free-for-all had that much more difficult a time getting noticed.
All of which points to the circumstances of 2020 making the problems already inherent in the movie business that much worse. Next year will probably see more theaters give up the ghost, pushing in-person moviegoing to even more of a boutique than mass experience. The franchise factory will crank back up. More directors will be drawn by the security of lucrative streaming deals rather than taking the bigger risks of nervously watching opening-weekend grosses.
But they will keep making movies. If 2021 is anything like this year, there is going to be plenty of reasons to go to theaters once they have fully reopened. Here are some of the movies that would have been great to see on the big screen this year.
1 — Collective
It sounds like a bad joke. Ask a movie critic what’s the best thing they saw this year that absolutely, positively can not be missed, and get this as an answer: A documentary about (wait for it) endemic corruption in the Romanian hospital supply market. Nevertheless, if you are a person who goes to the movies for edge-of-the-seat drama, stunning revelations, the search for truth, hiss-worthy villains, and plucky heroes, Alexander Nanau’s crusading journalist epic has everything you are looking for. Watch here.
2 — Nomadland
Frances McDormand embodies the battered and frayed soul of fringe America in Chloe Zhao’s gorgeously melancholy ode to hitting the road and the costs of leaving everything behind. Playing a wandering soul who cut her ties to the grid after losing her husband and the shuttering of the plant around which she plotted her whole existence (a real-life Nevada ghost town shown here in one of the year’s most haunting sequences), McDormand drifts around the West in a loose confederation of van-dwellers who seem like either remnants of a romantic hippie/range-riding past or harbingers of a safety net-less future. Official site.
3 — The Vast of Night
A lushly photographed and atmospherically spooky 1950s-set mystery in which a couple teenagers in an isolated Western town try to figure out whether some mysterious transmissions indicate the presence of aliens. Director Andrew Patterson knows how to nod to early Spielberg and weave in extended an extended Twilight Zone homage while still creating an entirely original piece of work. The opening steadicam sequence tracking the characters through the pell-mell of a packed school gymnasium alone already feels like a classic. Watch here.
4 — The Wild Goose Lake
Yi’nan Diao’s Chinese noir delivers a gang war drama with sharp visuals and a punchy aesthetic that feels both hard-boiled and romantic at the same time. The smoldering looks between the leads (Hu Ge as the man on the run and Gwei Lun-Mei as the woman who can’t stay away) register nearly as much drama as the police manhunt narrative. Once upon a time, a crime saga this sharp would have given the director a shot at their own Hollywood blockbuster. Official site.
5 — Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Eliza Hitman (Beach Rats) takes a potentially moralistic shaming drama about a pregnant teenaged girl traveling from her small town to New York for an abortion into a perceptive and emotion-wracked story of friendship, loyalty, and the frayed social safety net. The grit and texture of New York street life has enough tactility to practically rub off on your fingers while the performances from Sidney Flanigan and Talia Ryder are heartbreakingly naturalistic. Watch here.
6 — First Cow
The most satisfying moment in 2020 cinema may have come about halfway through Kelly Reichardt’s nineteenth-century Western mumblecore First Cow. After a string of failures, a wandering cook (John Magaro) finally figures out he can make a living in a rough frontier town by frying up and selling “oily cakes” (like mini donuts with a drizzle of honey) to the delighted locals, who bite into the cakes with the look of people who have just discovered what Krispy Kremes taste like. There is a lot more here, particularly Reichardt’s winsome depiction of the warm bond between the cook and his somewhat larcenous roommate (Orion Lee) and the unlikely tensions that erupt from their stealing milk from a rich man’s cow. But movie’s richness in large part resonates from its appreciation of the transporting nature of seemingly small delights. Watch here.
7 — The Painter and the Thief
Benjamin Ree’s psychologically dense fly-on-the-wall documentary about projected fantasy tracks the lengths to which an artist goes to explore motive once she confronts the man who broke into a gallery and stole two of her paintings which remain missing. A largely silent addict with a dark background, he sits for her sketching and painting as she pores over every aspect of his face and personality in search of some ineffable answer that appears increasingly less likely to appear . The longer Ree sticks with the story, the more it becomes a double-sided mystery in which viewers will wonder less about what he did with the missing works but what lies behind her intense stare? Watch here.
8 — Tenet
Christopher Nolan’s circular paradox of a science-fiction espionage thriller resembles what Shane Carruth (Primer) might have gotten up to after being given a blockbuster budget, some movie stars, and a shelf-full of John le Carre. The suits, cut-glass dialogue, luxe settings, and effortless cool on the part of John David Washington and Robert Pattinson ease the delivery of a headache-inducing plot about the present-day world fighting a war against vaguely-understood future enemies. If nothing else, Nolan succeeds by introducing the concept (at least cinematically) of “temporal pincer movement” as brain-knotting time-hopping military strategy. Watch here.
9 — Lovers Rock
This short, sharp, music-soaked entry in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series makes for another fantastic entry in the One Night One Party subgenre. A clutch of disparate West Indians come together at a house party in 1980 London to find community, look for love, show off some moves, and let the pitch-perfect DJ set wash over them, even as violence threatens to erupt inside the party as well as outside, where white toughs and a cold world await. The charged, thrumming scene in which the DJ keeps spinning the Revolutionaries’ addictive dub number “Kunta Kinte” for an entranced crowd is one for the ages. Watch here.
10 — 76 Days
Weixi Chen and Hao Wu’s stunning documentary tracking the 76 days of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Wuhan, China is both an action-packed dispatch about fighting a deadly and then-little-understood disease on the front lines and also a emotional time capsule of deep and shattering loss. Watch here.
Other Bests/Worsts
Honorable mentions: American Utopia, Apocalypse ’45, The Assistant, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets, The Boys in the Band, Crip Camp, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Mank, One Night in Miami, Palm Springs, Possessor, Soul, Welcome to Chechnya, White Noise.
The disappointments: Ammonite, Birds of Prey, Hillbilly Elegy, The King of Staten Island, News of the World.
Director: Charlie Kaufman (I’m Thinking of Ending Things)
Actors: Riz Ahmed (Sound of Metal), Anthony Hopkins (The Father), Orion Lee (First Cow), Delroy Lindo (Da 5 Bloods), Frances McDormand (Nomadland), Amanda Seyfried (Mank).
Ensemble: The Boys in the Band
Music: Small Axe series
Cinematography: True History of the Kelly Gang
Debut director: Regina King (One Night in Miami)
Breakthrough performance: Radha Blank (The Forty-Year-Old Version)
Semi-annual award for best anachronistic karaoke: Tesla for Ethan Hawke’s wildly time-inappropriate rendition of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”
