The Best Films I Saw in 2020
By: Joel Blackledge
Tags: Film, 2020, Top 10, List

These are my favourite films I saw this year that I hadn’t seen before.

Honorable mentions: Drug War, Kandahar, Sunset Song, The Honeymoon Killers, Uncut Gems, Peterloo, White Heat, Election 2, Pickup on South Street, Full Contact, Soy Cuba, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, How Green Was My Valley, Mayabazar, Conan the Barbarian, Il Posto, Ball of Fire, Midnight Traveler, Education, Lawrence of Arabia, Zama, The Plan That Came from the Bottom Up, Another Year, So Long, My Son, Jallikattu, The Cranes Are Flying, Love on Delivery, Broadcast News, An American in Paris, Remember My Name

To the Ends of the Earth

Last year this film was commissioned to commemorate 25 years of diplomatic relations between Japan and Uzbekistan. The director that took up the challenge was Kiyoshi Kurosawa — known primarily for creating bone-chilling horror films, he’s perhaps not an obvious choice. Kurosawa trains his ruthless dissection of sociality on the story of a Japanese travel reporter (Atsuko Maeda) and her small crew shooting a light-entertainment documentary about Uzbekistan. What begins as a disquieting portrait of alienation gently and gracefully reveals itself as a simple fable about compassion, empathy, and collective ambition. Maeda is astonishing, making wild switches between on- and off-screen personas both believable and moving.

While I love Kurosawa’s horror films — Cure and Pulse are two of my all-time favourites — I was happily surprised to see how successfully his aesthetic translates to melodrama. Contemporary arthouse style usually strikes me as too cold, and too suspicious of happiness, to really resonate. How nice to watch an arty film unafraid to make the simple statement of ‘better together’.

A Moment of Innocence

When legendary Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was 17 years old, he was jailed for stabbing a police officer in protest against the Shah (and only released following the revolution). 20 years later, Makhmalbaf decided to track down the police officer and together make a film about the event. A Moment of Innocence is not that film, but rather a dramatisation of that (non-existent) film’s production. Already, as in the best Iranian films, it’s easy to lose track of what is ‘real’ and what is staged. That categorisation doesn’t really matter here.

Makhmalbaf plays himself, and as in his earlier film Salaam Cinema presents himself as a quietly tyrannical director — needling his cast not only to get the best performances from them but to expose the inherent absurdities of cinema itself. The actor playing the young Makhmalbaf develops misgivings about political violence, to which the older director offers an irresistibly universal temptation: “Don’t you want to save mankind?” History is repeated on film with the hope that, with kind and open hearts, it could be done better this time.

Lovers Rock

Generally, my cynical opinion of the convergence of film and TV is that it’s to the detriment of both. TV’s self-importance discards the unique properties that make it powerful medium; film, meeting it halfway, has fallen into an unambitious streaming service house style.

Enter Steve McQueen’s Small Axe: made for a BBC. slot that follows His Dark Materials, a series perfectly emblematic of “cinematic television” that fails to be meaningfully cinematic or televisual. McQueen’s clearest antecedents in television are anthology series like Play for Today. Those dramas were breeding grounds for British social realism— indeed, a lot of what we consider great about working class British cinema came from the theatre by way of television. It resonated because it was authentic, and represented the audience’s social and political experiences at a time when a lot of mass media was totally opposed to such realism.

Lovers Rock is both great cinema (formally audacious, technically precise, writes its own ticket rhythmically and structurally) and great television (drawn from working class experience, rooted in common memory and understanding). Screening a celebration of togetherness in 2020 might seem like an exercise in cruelty, but there was a surprise there too. I was taken aback by what I was seeing (the Silly Games, Ministral Pablo and Kunta Kinte Dub stretch) not just for its inherent qualities, but because I knew so many others were watching it at the same time. It was a canny and ingenious use of the medium, and the first thing to make me hopeful for the future of television in a long time.

Big Night

American filmmakers have always used food to tell the story of Italian immigration (hey, I even made a video about that). Big Night puts food front and centre, with a tale of two Italian brothers running a restaurant a restaurant in New Jersey. Despite their respective perfectionism and savvy, the restaurant is failing. Under advice from a more crass competitor, they risk everything on one big night: the ultimate spread in honour of Louis Prima.

This is a warm, authentic take on family drama — the 1950s period is evoked with wonderful and unshowy attention. Directors Stanley Tucci and Campbell Scott take the same approach to the material as the characters do to their food. Namely: it’s enough to do something traditional if you can do it very, very well. Rising out of this seemingly simple story are the tangled contradictions and limitations of creativity, idealism, professionalism, and loyalty. Success in the USA emerges as a process of compromise, both with others and with yourself.

Perfumed Nightmare

The 1970s saw the global emergence of Third Cinema, a wide school of filmmaking from “underdeveloped” nations inspired by anti-colonial struggle and thought. Films under the umbrella of Third Cinema can take almost any form, but I’ve never seen one quite like Kidlat Tahimik’s Perfumed Nightmare. Lacking, for example, the militancy of Fernando Solanas or the pained outrage of Med Hondo, Tahimik filters his portrait of Filipino life through his own irresistible charm. He casts himself as a jeepney driver with sights set beyond his home village — to Europe, USA, and even to space.

Tahimik weaponises his apparent naivety to assemble playful insights into the state of both the Philippines and Europe, where he moves for the latter part of the film. There is almost a stream-of-consciousness logic to proceedings, covering a chewing gum empire, modernist architecture, and the small but dedicated Werner von Braum fan club. For these 93 minutes at least, anything is possible.

Crippled Avengers

Crippled Avengers was released in 1978, at the dead centre of the Golden Age of Hong Kong martial arts cinema (another big release that year was The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, which topped this list in 2017). This was the third film from the ‘Venom Mob’, a troupe of outrageously acrobatic martial artists working in Shaw Brothers Studio. Almost all Shaw Brothers productions follow the same narrative structure: violent injustice (act 1), extensive kung fu training (act 2), bloody retribution (act 3). This is no different, except for the gimmick that each of the four heroes has a unique disability inflicted upon them by the villains: deafness, blindness, amputation, and brain damage.

With all of those pieces in place, what follows is almost pure cinema, as director Chang Cheh has his performers push their showmanship to the brink, just as their characters learn to fight using disability to their advantage. A great night at the circus.

The Lovers on the Bridge

The Lovers on the Bridge seems to undermine all of the dumbest stereotypes of arty French films, yet it’s also somehow the Frenchest, artiest, and filmiest of them all. This is a small love story told with all the panache and bombast of an action blockbuster — indeed, the budget and troubled production speak more of Apocalypse Now than Jules et Jim. Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche play two vagrants who find themselves living together on Paris’ Pont-Neuf, growing dependent and enamoured even as they recognise that their situation is not sustainable.

This is an anxious take on romance that recognises love as something not everlasting but ephemeral — a fact that accounts for both its joys and miseries. Sometimes this jittery energy is expressed in the wild, circus-like performances of its stars. At other times, it’s in genuinely jaw-dropping stunt work, such as the famous Bastille Day set-piece where youthful ecstasy conquers such irrelevancies as safety or logic. Romance here leaves a bruise; how wonderfully perverse to assemble two of France’s best-looking movie stars and then beat them up.

A Brighter Summer Day

Edward Yang’s 1991 film is an epic drama that includes gang warfare, family relationships, love triangles, state oppression, and rock n roll. It should, by that description, be somewhat shapeless or sprawling, but this is a meticulous and fiercely controlled film, only giving out the exact information it has to at any point. Yet that description isn’t any good either; this is also a mysterious and poetic work, letting images and performances sing in place of exposition.

Obscuring or revealing visual information is at the heart of Yang’s style here, even using a recurring motif of lightbulbs (wielded, shattered, turned off and on) to emphasise just how directed and manipulated our understanding is. Like the young protagonist, we wait in hope for the aching sense of romance to manifest, and also in dread of the chaotic violence that threatens to explode at any moment. A moving and elegant portrait of the first generation to grow up under the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

Fort Apache

These days the term auteur usually refers to a director with a signature style that is recognisable enough to identify them as the sole or defining artist behind a film. When the term was popularised by the critics of Cahiers du Cinema, the notion of artist-as-author in the public imagination was novel, as films were seen more as collective industrial outputs. Crucially, this context meant that auteurism was not about total artistic control (seemingly something that defines an auteur in the 21st century) but about cultivating a style and statement across an entire body of work within a studio system. That system was prolific enough to allow for that.

Alongside Hitchcock, the auteur par excellence was John Ford. Here was a director known almost exclusively for one genre, to the extent that it’s impossible to even list the defining characteristics of the western without invoking Ford somehow. By the time Ford made Fort Apache in 1948, he had already directed around 100 films— he was deconstructing and rebuilding the mythos he had helped to create about the American west.

Henry Fonda plays an arrogant Lieutenant Colonel dispatched to command an isolated calvary post in Apache territory. It’s a job he takes as an insult, and means to use it to leave a heroic warrior legacy, regardless of how little this suits the complex realities spelled out by the more sensitive Captain York (John Wayne). This is a complication of the victorious history of frontier settlement. For the climactic action set-piece, a foolhardy and doomed calvary charge, Ford practically recreates his famous chase scene from Stagecoach, released nine years earlier. In the first film, the fighting was thrilling and dynamic; here, it is funereal. It’s surely the mark of a true auteur that a filmography can continue to reveal such depths.

For Sama

Waad al-Kateab was an economics student at the University of Aleppo when the Syrian Civil War began in 2011. Over the following years, as many fled the city under siege, al-Kateab stayed to document the war. She also married a doctor and gave birth to a child. These are the core events of For Sama, al-Kateab’s own film of five years in wartime.

I’m honestly struggling to describe this film beyond that. There are almost too many things to discuss: images of war in an age of digital video technology, a rare view of the European refugee crisis from “the other side”, a shocking and deeply upsetting perspective on familiar news headlines, and alongside all of those things a masterpiece of first-person, diaristic filmmaking. What really happens when a hospital is bombed? How do you care for the sick and injured in the middle of a war? How does it feel to prepare for motherhood when you could be killed at any moment? These are the questions al-Kateab tackles head-on, often holding her camera in one hand and her newborn baby in the other.

I hope that describing this film as ‘miraculous’ doesn’t undermine the agency of a filmmaker of uncommon courage and resilience. For Sama feels at once remarkably unlikely and entirely necessary.