The 10 best films of 2020, from Uncut Gems to Shirley

As a difficult year draws to a close with the future of cinema in doubt, films have remained as beautiful and challenging as ever. The Independent’s chief film critic Clarisse Loughrey counts down the 10 best

Clockwise from top left: ‘Parasite’, ‘Uncut Gems’, ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’, ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ (CJ/Pyramide/ Netflix/iStock)

To have loved cinema in 2020 is to have endured slow, steady heartbreak. It’s to have watched the government flaunt its open disdain for the arts, leaving industries stranded and unsupported in the middle of a pandemic. It’s to have felt helpless while cinemas, multiplexes and independents alike have teetered on the edge of collapse, praying for the mercy of major studios that are scrambling to prevent their own annihilation.

But the films themselves – they’ve been as beautiful, challenging, moving and inspiring as ever. The events of this year may have changed the industry forever, but cinema will always find a way to thrive. In these closing weeks of 2020, it feels more apt than ever that we should celebrate the films we love – whether we saw them first on the big screen or at home on the couch.

To match a complicated year, a few complicated rules: all the films in this list were released in the UK from 1 January onwards. The filmed version of Hamilton, which debuted on Disney+ in July, has also not been included – no one needs reminding of the stage musical’s vast cultural impact – and so that there’s a chance to uplift a wider variety of directors, only one film from Steve McQueen’s masterful Small Axe film anthology has been included, though they are all worthy of attention.

Here are the 10 best films of the year.

10. And Then We Danced

Levan Akin’s film, set and shot in the capital of Tbilisi, argues that joy itself can be a form of radical defiance

Levan Akin’s And Then We Danced is giddy with the pleasures of first love – how it pulsates through the body and mind. Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani) is a dance student at the National Georgian Ensemble, a young man with a sharp jaw and hungry eyes. He’s danced with the same partner, Mary (Ana Javakishvili), for years – the two are a kind of de facto couple. But his rigidly constructed world soon starts to crumble after the arrival of a new dancer, Irakli (Bachi Valishvili). This stranger moves with confidence. He’s muscular but light on his feet, with open features and an easy smile. Desire swiftly takes over.

Homosexuality isn’t outlawed in Georgia, but the country remains in the stranglehold of conservatism. Troops had to be stationed at the film’s few Georgian screenings, after ultra-conservative and pro-Russian protestors swarmed outside of the cinema. Akin’s film argues that joy can itself be a form of radical defiance. Merab’s story isn’t just about the pangs of desire, but the slow untethering from tradition’s pressures and expectations. He soon begins to explore his identity and his sexuality through movement: whether he’s out celebrating in the streets, partying to Abba, or seducing Irakli to Robyn’s “Honey”. To Merab, those dances are an act of reclamation.

Read the review here

9. The Assistant

In Kitty Green’s austere but devastating drama, we’re never told the identity of the cyclopean shape that cuts across the screen like a shark through water. There are only context clues: a stark Manhattan office littered with elegant, minimalist movie posters; hushed phone calls about test screenings and trips to LA; and a young woman, with fear in her eyes, who arrives to pick up an earring left on the floor of the boss’s office. We know the predator in question is meant to be Harvey Weinstein.

The fact that Green allows him only to be referred to as “Him”, often in a timid whisper, speaks to the power of her film. “Him” might be Weinstein, but he could also be any of the other men – the ones not currently sitting in jail – who abuse their position in order to harm and exploit others. In preparation for the film, the director interviewed around 100 former and current assistants, working in different industries, compiling the results into a single character, Jane (Julia Garner). By following her daily toils, The Assistant captures the specific, nauseating feeling of both complicity and powerlessness – telegraphed so beautifully on Garner’s face.

Read the review here

8. Vitalina Varela

A still from the trailer ( Grasshopper Film)

Portuguese director Pedro Costa’s cold, incurious worlds are a kind of collective hallucination. He traps his characters – drawn often from the dispossessed population of Lisbon – in shadows and in despair. In the last two decades, he’s also transformed himself into a canny combination of storyteller and documentarian. Vitalina Varela takes its name from its lead actor. It also draws from her life story. In the Eighties, Varela’s husband left their home in Cape Verde and fled to Portugal, promising that she could one day join him. In Costa’s film, she turns up three days after his funeral.

She’s left to waltz through Lisbon, her new purgatory, faced with a final and all-consuming sense of isolation. Her husband is gone, having left only a few traces of his existence. And the darkness never relents. The houses around her twist up like jagged bones, seeming as stiff and artificial as theatre backdrops. Costa’s tableaus are so potent, so emotionally haunting, that they’re almost impossible to shake, even after the film has ended and light has finally returned to the world.

7. Uncut Gems

Raising the stakes: Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner in the Safdie brothers' 'Uncut Gems' (Netflix)

For Adam Sandler, the artful and artless, Punch Drunk Love and Pixels merely represent two sides of the same coin. His characters are always some heady combination of bitter egotism, childish naivety, and impotent rage, making him the unappreciated master of ruffled masculinity. In the Safdie brothers’ Uncut Gems, he delivers the best performance of his career playing Howard Ratner, a gambling addict and jeweller in New York’s Diamond District. The actor toys with his audience’s empathy, disgust and pity like a cat with its next meal.

The bitter comedy of Uncut Gems is how easily Howard can be broken. It’s an almost punishingly chaotic film, though each jittery camera move and line of overlapping dialogue is carefully orchestrated. He’s humiliated time and time again – chewed out in public by his assistant (Lakeith Stanfield) and dressed down in private by his estranged wife (Idina Menzel). Even the person most loyal to him – his doll-faced, attentive lover (Julia Fox, in a knockout debut) – ends up screaming in his face outside a club at 3am. Howard may be pathetic, but both Sandler and the Safdies find ways to spin tragedy out of karmic retribution.

Read the review here

6. I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Kaufman has taken Ian Reid’s debut novel, published in 2016, and done away with its traditional mystery trappings – replacing them with a single, despairing mood 

Writer-director Charlie Kaufman, once enough of an idealist to give his lovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a second shot, has curdled in the intervening years. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is arguably his bleakest film – it’s also one of his best. “I’m thinking of ending things,” a young woman (Jessie Buckley) says to herself. She chews over the words, repeating them over and over again in the hope that they’ll suddenly gain the significance she was searching for.

She’s not quite sure what she wants to end. Is it her life? Her relationship with Jake (Jesse Plemons)? They’re on their first substantial trip together – a visit to his parents, out on their farm. But details start to change without warning: clothes, jobs and hobbies. Jake’s parents (Toni Colette and David Thewlis) age rapidly between scenes, as if we’re watching corpses decompose before our eyes. Kaufman has taken Ian Reid’s debut novel, published in 2016, and replaced its bait-and-switch ending with a single mood – one that’s not so much about suicidal ideation or break-ups as the black hole of emotions they have a tendency to create. Suddenly, I’m Thinking of Ending Things starts to feel like the most frightening film of the year.

Read the review here

5. Lovers Rock

A scene from Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock (BBC/McQueen Limited/Parisa Taghi)

Mangrove, the first entry in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe film anthology, may memorialise the political power of direct action, but the second, Lovers Rock, argues that the pursuit of personal freedom can be just as revolutionary. Set in west London in the early Eighties, the film sees director Steve McQueen’s camera wander through a “blues party” – Black Britons, not often welcome in white-owned music venues, would set up makeshift establishments in private homes, serving up good food and intoxicating slow jams.

Martha (Amarah-Jae St Aubyn, in a powerful debut) finds herself drawn to the gallant and charming Franklyn (Micheal Ward). McQueen lets the film luxuriate in their flirtations, while keeping audiences keenly aware of how men and women navigate public and private spaces. Power dynamics shift as the characters move between bedrooms, up and down the stairs, through the garden, and back into the living room, now an impromptu dance floor. It’s here that McQueen stages the year’s most memorable scene, as a crowd of dancers are entranced by Janet Kay’s 1979 track “Silly Games”. At first, the camera snakes through their hips, sexual tension dripping down the walls. Then the record ends, but the song continues, as a joyful chorus of voices continue its cry of uncorrupted freedom.

Read the review here

4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant in 'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' (Curzon Artificial Eye)

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, director Celine Sciamma resists showing us the face of Heloise (Adele Haenel) for as long as possible. She’s the daughter of a countess (Valeria Golina) in 18th-century Brittany, sent home from the convent with an eye to securing a prosperous match. We first meet Heloise through the eyes of Marianne (Noemie Merlant), an artist invited to capture her likeness. The two of them are perfect opposites: Heloise’s gaze is piercing, the corners of her mouth turned down in a permanent scowl; Marianne’s eyes, meanwhile, are dark, wide, hungry.

With one look, we can already tell these women will fall for each other – even if they don’t yet know it themselves. Sciamma’s gorgeous, romantic film concerns itself almost entirely with the unseen power of the gaze. Through quiet, contemplative scenes, we’re invited to study these women just as they’re studying each other. But Portrait of a Lady on Fire isn’t only about the look between two women as lovers, but between two women in the position of artist and subject. As Heloise points out, when Marianne is painting her, where else is she meant to look but back at her?

Read the review here

3. Shirley

Moss and Odessa Young in ‘Shirley' (Curzon/Killer Films)

Josephine Decker’s film may be based on the life of Shirley Jackson, the great Gothic writer, but it isn’t tethered to it. This is a portrait not of her life, but of her genius. The filmmaker is free to imagine, however romantically, what kind of mind could have written the lonely, dark passages of The Lottery (1948) and The Haunting of Hill House (1959). The fictional Rose (Odessa Young) and her equally fictional husband Fred (Logan Lerman) are invited to stay a few days in Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband Stanley’s (Michael Stuhlbarg) ivy-covered home. A kinship grows between the two women.

It’s sexual. It’s spiritual. Their identities start to intertwine and blend into each other. Shirley is sensuous and beguiling, an act of pure witchcraft. The camera twirls like Stevie Nicks in one of her shawls; it stumbles towards the characters in order to scrutinise their faces. Moss, as excellent as ever, hardens her face into a predatorial glare. Her voice sounds both coarse and intimate, like she’s inviting you in on a terrible secret. When Rose confesses that Shirley’s writing makes her feel “thrillingly horrible”, you can sense an awakening on the horizon.

Read the review here

2. Jojo Rabbit

Taika Waititi as Adolf Hitler and Roman Griffin Davis as the titular protagonist in Jojo Rabbit. (Photo by K French/20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX)

No one makes a comedy about a 10-year-old Nazi and his imaginary best friend, Adolf Hitler, and lives under the delusion that they’re in for an easy ride. Yet Taika Waititi’s film, which won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, manages to be tender, daring and sharp. It’s precisely pitched so that it keeps its path steady and its ambitions in check. The writer-director’s trademark goofy, freewheeling humour is deployed here as a form of humanisation – not to make the characters more sympathetic to audiences, but to illustrate how easily fascism feeds off banal human flaws.

Set in the last days of the Second World War, it follows Johannes “Jojo Rabbit” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), a young fanatic so desperate to be accepted, he’s conjured up a make-believe Führer (Waititi) to give him daily pep talks. Meanwhile, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), Jojo’s secretly anti-Nazi mother, and Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), the Jewish teen she’s helped hide away, tentatively share their visions of a better life, whispered to each other during their tête-à-têtes in the dead of night. The kind of hope Waititi’s film offers is fragile, but precious – that love might be enough to carve a path to the future.

Read the review here

1. Parasite

Back in February, when Parasite won Best Picture – the first film not in the English language to do so – it felt like anything was possible in 2020. Such optimism may have hideously backfired, but the joys of Bong Joon-ho’s razor-sharp, electrifying film remain. The director, whose work is as playful as it is sincere and revelatory, takes an impish joy in making audiences feel at home, then ripping the rug out from under them.

The Parks, including patriarch Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and his fluttery wife Yeon-gyo (Cho Yeo-jeong), are fortressed in a glass-walled, minimalist home. It’s into this shiny, hollow world that the Kim family try to integrate themselves, after the son Ki-woo (Choi Woo-shik) is hired as an English-language tutor. He immediately hatches a plan to get the rest of the clan – his parents Ki-taek (veteran actor Song Kang-ho) and Chung-sook (Chang Hyae Jin), as well as his sister Ki-jung (Park So-dam) – employed. It’s exhilarating to watch their schemes, as intricately plotted as they are mildly preposterous, unfold. But the film, which marks Bong’s most daring examination of capitalism yet, has a few nasty surprises up its sleeve – everyone’s the “parasite”, and they all plan to leech off each other until they’ve been sucked dry. 

Read the review here