Before getting into this year’s roundup, here are a few honorable mentions for movies that probably aren’t going to make a lot of best-of lists this year. But I enjoyed them for one reason or another, and wanted to highlight them for you here.
Caught Stealing is a feel-bad movie that nevertheless is a lot of fun, just a great example of Darren Aronofsky monkeying with tones in a way that most filmmakers would feel uncomfortable with. It was marketed a little like a Guy Ritchie movie but this is very much a Darren Aronofsky picture, one suffused with notions of addiction and religion and suffering. But it’s more hopeful than most of his movies, offering a light at the end of the tunnel.
David Mamet’s Henry Johnson had my single favorite scene of the year, the twenty-or-so-minute opening sequence. It’s just two men talking—Evan Jonigkeit (the titular lead) and Chris Bauer, probably best known for his work on The Wire and True Blood—but their conversation is part mystery, part philosophical treatise, and absolutely mesmerizing.
I am very much on an island when it comes to Ethan Coen’s second solo outing. And I don’t think Honey Don’t entirely works; it’s the very rare movie that could’ve afforded to be ten minutes longer just to set up the big reveal at the end a little more effectively. But it’s a knotty, sexy, original movie, the sort of thing critics are always claiming they want more of. I still think a lot of reviewers were simply put off by the film’s conclusion, which cuts across the average critic’s ideological sensibilities in fairly striking ways.
One Battle After Another is another movie that I don’t think entirely works, but the first forty minutes are fabulous. If this movie had skipped the last five or ten minutes of codas, it might have made my top ten. But it veers into repetition and sentimentality in a way that I simply find grating every time I watch.
I’m a sucker for Bruce Springsteen, so take this with a grain of salt, but I found Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere pretty gripping. It helps that the film doesn’t hew to the traditional musical biopic form; it’s an odd, combative movie.
After the Hunt, contra Honey Don’t, is the sort of movie that very much could’ve afforded to be ten (or maybe twenty) minutes shorter. But I’m including it here solely because it is, alongside a handful of movies that did make the cut, one of the better movies in recent years to really grapple with the nature of social media and its pernicious influence on society.
And now, on to the top ten!
10: Black Bag/Presence (tie)
Two Steven Soderbergh originals in one year? How am I supposed to choose? The answer is, I don’t, and I cheat by putting them both at the end of the list! It’s my list, I can do what I want.
Anyway: Presence is a fun little experimental sort of movie with a clockwork-tight script that reveals the ending about thirty seconds before it happens, meaning that it’s perfect. (I got goosebumps just now while thinking about it! Good screenplay by David Koepp, there.) Black Bag, meanwhile, is the sort of high-concept spy thriller that falls squarely under the category of “movies for adults.” Which means none of you went to see it in theaters. But it’s streaming now, so I hope you check it out.
9: Bugonia
What if the “Do your own research” people are right? That’s not precisely the question asked by Bugonia, but it’s not not the question. Either way, it’s a provocation from Yorgos Lanthimos, one that lands almost entirely thanks to the work done by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone in the lead roles.
8: Train Dreams
I’m a sucker for this sort of voiceover-narrated journey through American history, sue me. Train Dreams is the sort of Malick-tinged movie we deserve more of, dangit! And just beautiful to boot.
7: Marty Supreme
If I’m being totally honest, part of me feels bludgeoned into liking Marty Supreme so much: It is an absolutely frenetic film, one pulsing with energy from start to finish. I haven’t felt quite like this since, well, Uncut Gems, another frenetic, anxiety-inducing masterclass. It has one of the best casts of the year, a fact made even more impressive when you consider that so many of those involved aren’t proper actors. Of course, this also helps things. David Mamet plays a stagehand in a play and one of the hosts of Shark Tank plays a vampiric capitalist: how much more naturalism can you ask for?
6: Warfare
This is one of those movies that may need to be seen in a theater to fully appreciate it.1 But there’s this moment in Warfare where troops under fire call in a “show of force” and if you’re not a combat vet you don’t know quite what that means but then it happens and it’s a jet SCREAMING over the top of the street and it’s genuinely rattling, so much so that you can understand why the concussed troops under fire react so poorly to it.
5: It Was Just an Accident
It Was Just an Accident is a fine example of anti-authoritarian cinema, perhaps doubly so since the filmmaker was sentenced to house arrest for the crime of making this film.
4: 28 Years Later
28 Years Later is among the most-British movies ever made. It’s honestly hard to explain if you’ve never lived there, but … it’s just a movie that is, fundamentally, about the idea of Britain and what it means and how it is changing and what it means to resist that change. And Danny Boyle splices the ideas in with almost experimental editing, putting in pieces of old films that call to mind a different time and reinforce that self-conception. Between new films from Soderbergh, Aronofsky, and Boyle, it’s been a great year for fans of late-’90s/early-’00s auteurs.
3. Weapons
Weapons is everything you can ask for in a mainstream horror movie: It’s an original story with great actors; the cinematography is sublime, managing to pull off the apparently impossible task of shooting at night in a way that keeps the action dark but visible; it has the perfect mix of laugh-out-loud comedy and gasp-in-terror scares; and its politics are slippery enough to keep it from falling into solipsistic didacticism.
2. Sinners
Everyone focuses on the “music of the ancestors” sequence in Sinners and for good reason, it’s a great cinematic voyage through time via the lens of music. Fun stuff. But I think the “Rocky Road to Dublin” sequence a little later is even better, a visual representation of the way cultures mix and merge and mesh into something more powerful than their separate parts. The last twenty or so minutes of this movie was the best, the most raucous experience I had with an audience this year.
1. Eddington
Eddington nails the insanity of 2020 and the reverberations of that period—the politics, the pandemic—in a way that’s almost uncomfortable. Hell, it is uncomfortable. I understand why folks don’t want to revisit that time, but no other film understands the way social media has infected our society from top to bottom. Almost certainly the most important cultural document on this list, and shockingly funny, to boot.
The other two movies that most obviously fall into this category: Avatar: Fire and Ash and F1. Joseph Kosinski’s F1 is by far the better of those two films, for reasons laid out by Bill Simmons and his crew on the Rewatchables.
I have to say I sat through the first half of Eddington totally uncomfortable thinking I do not want to relive this, I'm a healthcare worker I have some very personal feelings about that time, just like everyone else, but then the movie Just ramps up and becomes beautiful.
I live in a cultural wasteland where at least half of these movies never showed. I did love Sinners, Bugonia, and One Battle After Another. Thanks for the recommendations! We do get the Oscar shorts and they show all the Oscar nominees so I may get a chance to see some of them on the big screen. And there’s always streaming and dvd.