Our Top Movies of 2020

When 2020 started, the routine of going to a theater, purchasing a bag of popcorn, and losing yourself in a movie for a couple hours was still mundane. Over the last few years, streaming services like Netflix and money-burning companies like MoviePass have pulled at the threads of the traditional theatrical distribution model, testing the limits of consumer behavior, but the business never felt like it might completely unravel. Even as comic book blockbusters grew in power and smaller titles shifted to VOD releases, the big screen retained its mythic appeal. That’s where the movies played.

Not any more. The ongoing pandemic has closed theaters across the globe, upended the release plans for the studios of all sizes, and potentially transformed viewing habits for years to come. Where did that chaos leave the committed moviegoer? With plenty of movies to watch. Whether you were arranging a socially-distanced screening of the latest Christopher Nolan adventure, journeying to a drive-in to catch an old favorite, or simply scheduling your own programming block in quarantine, film still had a role to play in helping people get through this difficult year. These are the best movies of 2020.

Palm Springs

Release date: July 10 
Cast: Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, J. K. Simmons, Camila Mendes 
Director: Max Barbakow
Why it’s great: Arriving on streaming in the middle of a pandemic, a time when many lives have fallen into unceasing loops of quarantine-related repetition and tedium, the Lonely Island produced comedy Palm Springs perhaps resonated differently than when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Jokes about doing the same shit over and over just hit harder now. Tracking a romance between a goofball wedding guest (Andy Samberg) and the bride’s self-destructive sister (Cristin Milioti), writer Andy Siara’s clever script combines Groundhog Day existentialism with a quippy take on quantum physics, doling out inspirational life lessons and math cram sessions at a clipped pace. In the same way Tom Cruise had to battle aliens in Edge of Tomorrow, the two must relive a wedding over and over, struggling to escape from an Instagram-ready, celebratory hell. It might not be as purely funny as Samberg’s other big screen adventures Hot Rod and Popstar, but Palm Springs finds its own winning spin on a surprisingly robust micro-genre.

The Platform

Release date: March 21
Cast: Ivan Massagué, Zorion Eguileor, Antonia San Juan
Director: Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia
Why it’s great:
The debut feature from Spanish filmmaker Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia boasts an appealing high-concept premise, an oddly affable leading man in actor Iván Massagué, and a series of brutal twists that should intrigue anyone currently watching the news and thinking about the possible end game of rampant inequality. The Platform takes place in a prison-like structure called the “Vertical Self-Management Center” where inmates live two to a floor. Those on the top get first dibs on a giant platform of food that descends from the ceiling everyday; those on the bottom get the scraps — or nothing at all.

Uncut Gems

Release date: December 25
Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, Idina Menzel
Director: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie
Why it’s great:
In the Safdie brothers’ wild new movie Uncut Gems, you meet Howard Ratner’s (Adam Sandler) asshole first. Seriously — the first image that Josh and Benny Safdie give us of Howard is his insides during a colonoscopy. As he lies on his back, his rectum exposed to doctors, it’s the calmest the boisterous diamond district dealer will ever be during this thrill ride, a scumbag masterpiece about jewels, basketball betting, and a frenetic moron of a man who gets into a fight with The Weeknd. Uncut Gems is a Sandler going big, huge even — and it just might be the peak of his career. There is nothing subtle about Howard, who speaks in a coarse New York accent at a persistently high pitch and wears an abundant amount of gold. Sandler’s mania is a perfect match for the Safdies, who have made an adrenaline rush of a movie that’s gloriously ridiculous and anxiety-inducing in equal measure.

Extraction

Release date: April 24
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Bryon Lerum, Ryder Lerum
Director: Sam Hargrave
Why it’s great:
Tossing aside Thor’s massive hammer and trimming his gnarly Avengers: Endgame beard, Chris Hemsworth picks up an assault rifle and gets to work in Extraction, a new Netflix shoot-em-up that re-teams the Australian actor with his former Marvel filmmaking buddies Joe and Anthony Russo. While Hemsworth’s gun-toting commando protagonist Tyler Rake — yes, that’s his name — lacks comic-book superpowers and Norse god strength, he can take a beating and keep fighting. At one point in the film’s big show-stopping chase sequence, Rake gets slammed by a speeding car. His solution? Locate a bigger vehicle, preferably a large truck, and hit the bad guy back.

Greenland

Release date: December 18
Cast: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd
Director: Ric Roman Waugh
Why it’s great:
Butler stars as John Garrity, a Scottish-born structural engineer who is currently estranged from his wife. However, their domestic situation soon takes a back seat to the imminent arrival of a massive and heretofore unknown comet. The good news is that John, along with Alison and their young, diabetic son Nathan, have been selected as part of a top secret government evacuation program because of his professional skills. The bad news, alas, is that by the time they finally make it to the military base they’re scheduled to leave from, a series of events cause John to once again be separated from his family. None of them end up making it on any of the planes. Assuming that Alison and Nathan may now be headed to the Kentucky ranch owned by her father, John also starts heading that way, encountering a number of harrowing scenes. The same goes for Alison and Nathan, who at one point are given a ride by a seemingly helpful couple, and that goes very badly very quickly. Eventually, the three are once again reunited and the final reels find them making a last-ditch effort to cross the Canadian border to an airstrip where, the rumor goes, a few planes are flying survivors out to an evacuation center in Greenland.

The Hunt

Release date: March 13
Cast: Betty Gilpin, Hilary Swank, Ike Barinholtz
Director: Craig Zobel
Why it’s great:
While not nearly as incendiary as the early coverage made it out to be, “The Hunt” gives skeptics ample ammunition to condemn this twisted riff on “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which a posse of heavily armed liberal elites get carried away exercising their Second Amendment rights against a dozen “deplorables” — as the hunters label their prey, adopting Hillary Clinton’s dismissive, dehumanizing term for the “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” contingent whose fringe beliefs have found purchase with President Trump. No matter who you ask, the “right to bear arms” was never intended as justification for Americans to turn their guns against those they disagree with, whereas that’s the premise from which “Lost” creator Damon Lindelof and co-writer Nick Cuse depart here — partisan politics taken to their most irreconcilable extremes — as Zobel proves just the director to execute such a tight, well-oiled shock-a-thon. Sure enough, Zobel, Lindelof and producer Jason Blum have wrought a gory, hard-R exploitation movie masquerading as political satire, one that takes unseemly delight in dispatching yahoos on either end of the spectrum via shotgun, crossbow, hand grenade and all manner of hastily improvised weapons. The words “trigger warning” may not have been invented with “The Hunt” in mind, but they’ve seldom seemed more apt in describing a film that stops just shy of fomenting civil war as it pits Left against Right, Blue (bloods) against Red (necks), in a bloody battle royale that reduces both sides to ridiculous caricatures. And yet, “The Hunt” is a good deal smarter — and no more outrageous — than most studio horror films, while its political angle at least encourages debate, suggesting that there’s more to this hot potato than mere provocation. Let’s assume we can all agree that there’s too much violence in American movies today. The danger of “The Hunt” isn’t that the project will inspire copycat behavior (the premise is too far-fetched for that), but rather that it drives a recklessly combustible wedge into the tinderbox of extreme partisanship, creating a false equivalency between, say, Whole Foods-shopping white-collar liberals and racist, conspiracy-minded right-wingers.

Greyhound

Release date: July 10
Cast: Tom Hanks, Elisabeth Shue, Stephen Graham
Director: Aaron Schneider
Why it’s great:
Tom Hanks continues his role as a WWII historian with “Greyhound,” an intense Aaron Schneider film that barely plays longer than an episode of the Hanks-produced HBO series “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.” At just over 80 minutes if you skip the end credits, fans of this war movie will be drawn to its lean, no-nonsense approach, one that employs more nautical terminology and shouted orders than character detail. For Hanks, who also wrote the film, all you need to know about Commander Ernest Krause is in what he did in service. Sure, Hanks the actor finds a way to inject a subtle glimmer of doubt or fear, but this is one of the most purposeful war movies ever made in how little it offers outside of the naval events that justify its existence. On the one hand, the direct approach is admirable in an era of bloated blockbusters, and there’s something about a simple story of well-told heroism that’s almost refreshing. However, Schneider can’t figure out how to elevate it beyond those minimal intentions, and “Greyhound” starts to become numbing in its tactics, a film whose simplicity feels more shallow than lean. And, yes, there is a difference.

Let Them Talk

Release date: December 10
Cast: Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen, Dianne Wiest, Lucas Hedges
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Why it’s great:
The self-contained world of a cruise ship—with all of its stately decks, long corridors, and dining rooms—ends up being an ideal location for a Steven Soderbergh movie. In telling a story of an acclaimed author (Meryl Streep) traveling to receive an award with two old college friends (Candice Bergen and Dianne Wiest) and a sensitive nephew (Lucas Hedges), the script by short story writer Deborah Eisenberg finds just the right combination of gentle farce and spiky intrigue. The many scenes over cozy meals and fancy cocktails have an uneasy tension that’s highlighted by Soderbergh’s abrupt editing and his steady camera. More broadly, the set-up allows an unpretentiously cerebral filmmaker to poke at questions about creativity, money, and personal responsibility that riddle his work, turning what could’ve been a breezy vacation into a slightly heavier trip. Like with last year’s equally adventurous High Flying Bird, all that talk becomes the action.

The Vast of Night

Release date: May 29
Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz, Gail Cronauer, Bruce Davis
Director: Andrew Patterson
Why it’s great:
This low-budget debut feature is a UFO movie that takes time to achieve lift off. In addition to saddling the story with a mostly unnecessary framing device, which underlines the already obvious echoes of The Twilight Zone, director Andrew Patterson and the film’s writers open the 1950s New Mexico-set story with a handful of overly precious exchanges featuring the two main characters, chatty DJ Everett (Horowitz) and young switchboard operator Fay (McCormick). In the beginning, these two might get on your nerves. But once the movie locks them in place, tampering down the acrobatic camerawork and letting the sound design take control, the material finds a more natural rhythm, drawing on the hushed intimacy of old-fashioned radio drama. Like many of the best UFO yarns, The Vast of Night taps into a deep sense of yearning. Wanting to believe is half the battle.

Miss Juneteenth

Release date: June 19
Cast: Nicole Beharie, Kendrick Sampson, Alexis Chikaeze, Liz Mikel 
Director: Channing Godfrey Peoples
Why it’s great:
Nicole Beharie, the star of Miss Juneteenth, knows how to make small movements matter. The way her character, former pageant winner Turquoise Jones, holds a cigarette, shops for a used dress, or watches her daughter perform on stage, her face teetering between fear and pride, helps evoke a rich inner life and a sense of history. Her interactions with her elderly boss, her religious mother, and her on-again-off-again boyfriend (a wonderful Kendrick Sampson) hint at a complicated web of broken promises and stalled commitments. Similarly, director Channing Godfrey Peoples’s patient approach to the material draws the viewer into the sweaty Fort Worth, Texas setting, a community centered around family and tradition. When people open car doors or step outside, you can almost see the heat waves.

The Way Back

Release date: March 6
Cast: Ben Affleck, Al Madrigal, Michaela Watkins, Janina Gavankar
Director: Gavin O’Connor
Why it’s great:
Disciplined in its approach and unapologetic about its contrivances, Ben Affleck’s basketball coach in crisis drama The Way Back is a sports movie that understands the fundamentals. What it lacks in flashiness or ingenuity—the underdog narrative of a crappy team hitting its stride under the leadership of a gruff coach hits all the requisite Hoosiers notes—it makes up for with an oddly enthralling downbeat craftsmanship. Little details, like the freeze-frame when the scores of games pop up on screen or the click-clack percussion-heavy music, accumulate emotional power over the film’s brisk runtime. Playing a washed-up ex-athlete with an immediately apparent drinking problem and a number of strategically hidden personal demons, Affleck delivers a weary performance that resonates with his off-screen persona (and his recent tabloid headlines) in ways both obvious and surprising. In brief stretches, director Gavin O’Connor, who helmed the similarly intense melodramas Miracle and Warrior, pulls off the ultimate sports movie trick of making you believe the character’s redemption isn’t inevitable. Every win is a battle—even if you know the results going in.

The Assistant

Release date: January 31
Cast: Julia Garner, Matthew Macfadyen, Kristine Froseth, Makenzie Leigh 
Director: Kitty Green
Why it’s great:
The systemic culture of indifference and cruelty that often forms around a powerful serial abuser gets put under the microscope in this studiously observed New York office drama, which draws inspiration from the behavior of Harvey Weinstein while intentionally blurring some of the details. We never learn the name of the tyrannical boss in the story and the exact nature of his crimes are never fully revealed; instead, Julia Garner’s assistant Jane, a Northwestern grad fresh off a handful of internships, provides our entryway into the narrative. The movie tracks her duties, tasks, and indignities over the course of a single day: She makes copies, coordinates air travel, picks up lunch orders, answers phone calls, and cleans suspicious stains off the couch. At one point, a young woman from Idaho appears at the reception desk, claims to have been flown in to start as a new assistant, and gets whisked away to a room in an expensive hotel. Jane raises the issue with an HR rep, played with smarmy menace by Succession‘s Matthew Macfadyen, but her concerns are quickly battered away and turned against her. Rejecting cheap catharsis and dramatic twists, The Assistant builds its claustrophobic world through a steady accumulation of information. While some of the writing can feel too imprecise and opaque by design, Garner, who consistently steals scenes on Netflix’s Ozark, invests every hushed phone call and carefully worded email with real trepidation. She locates the terror in the drudgery of the work.

Another Round

Release date: December 4
Cast: Mads Mikkelsen, Thomas Bo Larsen, Lars Ranthe, Magnus Millang
Director: Thomas Vinterberg
Why it’s great:
As the titular serial killer on NBC’s strange, hypnotic Hannibal, Mads Mikkelsen played a villain who was always in control, evading capture and carving up his enemies with skill and flair. In Another Round, the statue-like Danish actor is given what could be considered an even tougher acting challenge: convincingly playing buzzed, drunk, and obliterated. His character, a middle-aged high school history teacher, decides to partake in an ill-advised experiment with his friends where they maintain a 0.05% BAC throughout the day. On the surface, the premise of Another Round sounds like it could be the plot of an unruly Will Ferrell or Vince Vaughn comedy, yet another tale of prolonged adolescence and mid-life crisis. The movie is funny, filled with booze-soaked scenes of bad behavior and slurred speech. But it’s also genuinely moving and surprisingly melancholy, building to a dance-filled ending that lets Mikkelsen gracefully explore the thin edge between joy and oblivion.

Sound of Metal

Release date: November 20
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff
Director: Darius Marder
Why it’s great:
Ruben, the metal drummer played by Riz Ahmed in Sound of Metal, builds his life around structure. A recovering heroin addict, Ruben plays in a band with his romantic partner Lou (Olivia Cooke) until he suddenly loses around 80% of his hearing in the middle of a tour. Without the routine of his life on the bus and the catharsis of live performance, Ruben starts to spiral out of control and checks into a rehab center run by a deaf veteran (Paul Raci) who pushes him to think about his hearing loss on different terms. Director Darius Marder takes an abrasive, thoughtful approach to formally dramatizing the effects of hearing loss through inventive sound design while never losing track of the story’s emotional throughline or overshadowing Ahmed’s inward, multi-layered performance.

Bad Education

Release date: April 25
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Allison Janney, Ray Romano, Geraldine Viswanathan 
Director: Cory Finley
Why it’s great:
A chronicle of greed, status, and vanity, Bad Education shares more than a few qualities with Martin Scorsese’s financial crimes epic The Wolf of Wall Street, the story of another Long Island striver with slicked-back hair. Trading the stock market for the public education system, director Cory Finley’s wry docudrama, which takes its inspiration from a wild New York Magazine feature from 2004, charts the tragi-comic downfall of Roslyn School District superintendent Frank Tassone (Hugh Jackman), a charming and beloved administrator in a rising wealthy area. When his assistant superintendent Pam Gluckin (Allison Janey) gets caught allowing family members to make personal charges using the school’s credit cards, Frank’s world of healthy smoothies, expensive suits, and gleeful deception begins to unravel. Using a high school newspaper reporter as an audience surrogate (Geraldine Viswanathan), the script withholds key details of Frank’s life for large sections of the runtime, allowing Jackman to give a performance that gradually reveals new layers of emotional complexity and moral emptiness. Like the tweezers Frank uses to dutifully pluck his nose hairs, the movie takes a surgical approach to its subject.

Possessor

Release date: October 2
Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Bean
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Why it’s great:
Opening with a piece of metal piercing the top of a woman’s head, the second feature from filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg announces the type of movie it is right away. The son of body horror legend David Cronenberg, the director splices together elements of Inception, The Matrix, and his father’s own cyberpunk reality-bender eXistenZ to create an art-damaged thriller about an assassin (Andrea Riseborough) who uses advanced technology to take control of other people and carry out her assigned hits using their bodies. For her latest mission, she invades the mind of Colin (Christopher Abbott), the boyfriend of the daughter of a powerful tech CEO. Simple job, right? Not so fast. From the plot description, Possessor sounds relatively straightforward, but Cronenberg piles on enough gruesome gore effects, Walter Benjamin quotes, lengthy sex scenes, and hallucinatory montages to make this a sufficiently out there experience.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Release date: September 4
Cast: Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis 
Director: Charlie Kaufman
Why it’s great:
A snowy road trip, which finds a young woman (Buckley) traveling with her new boyfriend (Plemons) to the remote farm owned by his eccentric parents (Collette and Thewlis), turns into a journey into the hard problem of consciousness in the latest movie from Charlie Kaufman, the filmmaker who first emerged as the screenwriter behind brain-teasing comedies like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Older and gentler in some respects, Kaufman remains plagued by life’s biggest questions and tickled by occasional bursts of the surreal. Like the previous features he’s directed, the stunning Synecdoche, NY and the puzzling Anomalisa, this new one, adapted from a novel by Iain Reid, is a less outwardly comic affair. Riddled with references and quotations, including bits of Pauline Kael and William Wordsworth, the movie resists a single reading or an elegant interpretation, embracing neurosis as a subject and a style. As the characters think and talk themselves in circles, the ideas pile up like mounds of fresh powder. Best to bring your brain’s tire chains.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things

Release date: March 6
Cast: Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor
Director: Ken Loach
Why it’s great:
The modern gig economy is set up so that the customer rarely has to think very much about the person delivering a package to their door. Sorry We Missed You, the latest working class social drama from 83-year-old English filmmaker Ken Loach, is a harsh reminder that those piles of cardboard Amazon boxes have a human cost. The film follows married couple Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and Abbi (Debbie Honeywood) as they attempt to raise their two kids, keep their humble home in Newcastle, and and hold down jobs stripped of conventional protections. As Ricky’s domineering boss tells him at the beginning of the movie, he’s not an “employee.” No, he’s his own small business owner and independent contractor. Loach finds dark laughs and absurdity in the the convoluted language of precarity, particularly the way management attempts to sell poor working conditions as a form of empowerment, but he also captures the tender, intimate moments that occur in even the most soul-sucking jobs. Ricky and his daughter find joy in knocking on doors and leaving notes; Abbi, who works as a nurse, genuinely cares for her patients like her own family even if the company she works for refuses to pay for her transportation. Though the script leans too hard on melodrama in its final stretch, setting up scenes that don’t always deliver on their dramatic potential, Loach never loses his moral grasp on the material.

Color Out Of Space

Release date: January 24
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Joely Richardson, Madeleine Arthur, Brendan Meyer
Director: Richard Stanley
Why it’s great:
For a certain type of moviegoer, any film where Nicolas Cage says the word “alpacas” multiple times is worth seeking out. Luckily, Color Out of Space, a psychedelic adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short story from 1927, offers more than just furry animals and unhinged Cage theatrics. Mixing hints of science-fiction intrigue and bursts horror movie excess, along with a couple splashes of stoner-friendly comedy, Richard Stanley’s proudly weird B-movie vibrates on its own peculiar frequency. Cage’s Nathan, a chatty farmer with a loving wife (Joely Richardson) and a pair of mildly rebellious kids, must contend with a meteoroid that crashes in his front yard, shooting purple light all over his property and infecting the local water supply. Is it some space invader? A demonic spirit? A biological force indiscriminately wreaking havoc on the fabric of reality itself? The squishy unknowability of the evil is precisely the point, and Stanley melds Evil Dead-like gore showdowns with Pink Floyd laser light freak-outs to thrilling effect, achieving a moving and disquieting type of genre alchemy that should appeal to fans of Cage’s out-there turn in the similarly odd hybrid Mandy. Again, you’ll know if this is in your wheelhouse or not.

The Nest

Release date: September 18
Cast: Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Charlie Shotwell, Oona Roche
Director: Sean Durkin
Why it’s great:
“This was our fresh start,” says Carrie Coon’s Allison to her husband Rory (Jude Law) early on in The Nest, Sean Durkin’s severe drama of marriage and money. The way Coon delivers the line hints at a shared history, a series of broken promises and a desire to salvage a relationship through drastic change. The couple moves to London from America with their children so that Rory can secure a financial windfall: It’s the ’80s and regulations in the English markets are loosening. But the plan doesn’t work and soon Rory is spending money he doesn’t have to maintain a lifestyle Allison doesn’t even necessarily want. His reckless financial risk-taking feeds her natural cautiousness, which slowly turns into resentment and anger. Interrogating the way class anxieties forged in childhood can determine patterns of behavior, Durkin’s movie is as perceptive as it is tense.

Shirley

Release date: June 5
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman
Director: Josephine Decker
Why it’s great:
In short stories like The Lottery and novels like The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson conjured unease, tension, and queasy strangeness that made them difficult to put down. Fittingly, Shirley, an adaptation of a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, examines a highly pressurized moment in the author’s life that makes for occasionally nerve-rattling viewing. As played by Elisabeth Moss, Jackson can be temperamental, brilliant, and cruel, especially to Rose (Odessa Young) and Fred (Logan Lerman), the newlywed couple that move into the paper-strewn house she shares with her controlling professor husband (Michael Stuhlbarg). Where Decker’s previous exploration of the creative process, the dizzying Madeline’s Madeline, took an often nonlinear, combustible approach, Shirley retains some of the stuffy mechanics of the writerly biopic, particularly in the scenes of Jackson typing away at what will become her novel Hangsaman. (That book, which was partially inspired by the real-life disappearance of college student Paula Jean Welden, was written earlier in Jackson’s life than the movie portrays.) But Moss’s mischievous performance, the subtle interplay between the two women, and the feeling that the movie could tilt over the edge into chaos, chasing darker impulses and rolling around in the mud with Decker’s roaming camera, keeps it from falling into many of the traps set by the often worshipful “great artist” micro-genre.

Dick Johnson is Dead

Release date: October 2
Director: Kirsten Johnson
Why it’s great:
Watching Kirsten Johnson’s kind-hearted dad, Richard “Dick” Johnson, get crushed by an air conditioning unit, struck by a car, and knocked in the head by a construction beam provides a startling thrill. These strange little experiments, staged by his filmmaker daughter and carried out by seasoned stunt professionals, form the structural backbone for this tender documentary, a work of memoir sprinkled with touches of the surreal. Instead of just making a portrait of her father, a cheery psychiatrist from Washington, Johnson constructs a film that attempts to confront a universal fear by delving into matters of process. Death, terrifying and unconquerable, becomes an art project. Like with an episode of Nathan for You or, sure, even Jackass, there’s a delicate tonal line being walked: Why does Dick agree to go along with these elaborate stunts? The simple answer—he loves his daughter—becomes increasingly clear as Dick Johnson Is Dead unfolds.

Tenet

Release date: September 3
Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh
Director: Christopher Nolan
Why it’s great:
Despite all its time travel shenanigans and theoretical physics exposition, delivered by elegantly dressed characters as they stroll through scenic locales and dine over cups of tea with Michael Caine, Tenet has the attitude of a more straightforward action movie. John David Washington’s unnamed CIA agent gets a world-saving Ethan Hunt-like mission, which he accepts, and then goes about trying to accomplish without wrinkling his suits. That convoluted mission allows director Christopher Nolan to dip his toe into international spy-craft, a genre that meshes well with his logistics-obsessed filmmaking style, and string together a number of wildly impressive set-pieces, including a raid on an opera house, a heist that involves crashing an airplane, and a ridiculous desert siege built upon a handful of conceptual gimmicks I still don’t understand. In the background, Washington and Robert Pattinson, playing a British intelligence figure named Neil, forge a surprisingly touching buddy cop partnership, one that grows more poignant on further reflection, and Ludwig Göransson’s pulsating synth-heavy score never lets up, pushing sequences beyond mere comprehension or coherence.

First Cow

Release date: March 6
Cast: John Magaro, Orion Lee, René Auberjonois, Toby Jones
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Why it’s great:
First Cow, Kelly Reichardt’s evocative and wise tale of frontier life, begins with the discovery of two skeletons in the woods. An unnamed young woman (Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat) and her dog—echoing the human-and-canine pair at the center of Reichardt’s 2008 road story Wendy and Lucy—come upon the bones in the modern day Pacific Northwest. Then we flash back to a time when the Oregon territory was far less developed, an era of perilous opportunity and rampant exploitation, and meet Cookie (John Magaro), a bashful and unassuming cook for a team of unruly fur trappers. Eventually, he befriends the wandering King-Lu (Orion Lee), a Chinese immigrant who claims to be fleeing some Russians. The two stumble on an opportunity to make some money: A wealthy landowner (Toby Jones) brings the first cow to the region, and Cookie and King-Lu decide to steal the cow’s milk at night and use it to bake sweet honey biscuits, which they sell at the local market. The story has an allegorical quality, gently pulling at classic American notions of hope, ambition, and deception. Reichardt, who chronicled a similar historical period in 2010’s neo-Western Meek’s Cutoff and an equally rich male friendship in 2006’s buddy comedy Old Joy, has a gentle human touch that never veers into sentimentality. On a literal and metaphoric level, she knows where the bodies are buried.

Da 5 Bloods

Release date: June 12 
Cast: Delroy Lindo, Jonathan Majors, Clarke Peters, Norm Lewis
Director: Spike Lee
Why it’s great:
Exploding with historical references, directorial flourishes, and flashes of combat action, Spike Lee’s war epic Da 5 Bloods is a movie that embraces the inherent messiness of its subject matter. At first, the story sounds simple enough: four elderly Black veterans regroup and travel to Vietnam to recover the remains of their squad leader Norman (Chadwick Boseman) and search for a shipment of gold they buried in the jungle decades ago. But Lee, pushing the movie in sharply funny and emotionally fraught directions depending on the demands of the scenes, refuses to approach the Treasure of Sierra Madre-like set-up in a straight-forward manner. Instead, the movie pings between the MAGA-hat speckled present and the bullet-ridden past, using his older actors in the flashbacks as their younger selves to underline the strangeness of time’s passage. While some of the detours might test your patience, particularly once the men discover the gold and start arguing over what to do with it, the powerful ending, which becomes a moving showcase for the great Delroy Lindo, makes this a long journey worth embarking on.

Never Rarely Sometimes Never

Release date: March 13
Cast: Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Théodore Pellerin, Ryan Eggold
Director: Eliza Hittman
Why it’s great:
The Port Authority bus terminal provides the backdrop for a good deal of the drama and the waiting in Eliza Hittman’s powerful portrait of a teenager traveling from Pennsylvania to New York to have an abortion, a procedure she can’t receive in her home state. Quiet and watchful, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) observes the world around her from benches, bus seats, and doctor’s office chairs, dragging an enormous suitcase through the drab interiors of various midtown locations. She doesn’t tell her parents about her pregnancy or her trip. She’s joined by her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder), who wants to be a supportive friend and sounding board. Still, the two don’t talk much. The movie’s most striking image shows the two holding hands in a moment of shared vulnerability, like their bond transcends language. As a filmmaker, Hittman is most interested in behavior and gesture, approaching her story with the type of careful rigor that allows for poetic moments to emerge in unexpected places. It’s a style that’s especially suited to the challenging emotional terrain of the material.

Time

Release date: October 9
Director: Garrett Bradley
Why it’s great:
Phrases like “time is what you make of it,” “time flies,” and “time heals all wounds” get turned inside out by this exquisitely constructed documentary. Time chronicles the life of entrepreneur and activist Sibil “Fox” Rich as she lobbies for the release of her husband, Robert Richardson, from the Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. (The prison is shown from the sky in a chilling drone shot, emphasizing the enormous scale of the facility.) Filmmaker Garrett Bradley blends modern footage of Rich—taking care of her children, delivering moving speeches, and running her business—with intimate home video archives shot by Rich over the span of a lifetime. In one moment, you might see a giggling child; in the next shot, that child is a watchful teenager. Few movies display such a total command of craft, summoning complex ideas and grappling with fundamental truths, while telling such a profoundly moving story.

Bacurau

Release date: March 6
Cast: Sônia Braga, Udo Kier, Bárbara Colen, Thomas Aquino
Director: Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles
Why it’s great:
When a movie tells a story about a community joining together to fight off outside invaders, there are certain shots, moments, and heroics you want to see. Bloodshed, vengeance, and justice all have a place in Bacurau, a feverish, quasi-dystopian genre mash-up centered around a fictional Brazilian city in the country’s Northwestern region, but the film doles out its cathartic showdowns in an inventive, dizzying manner. After a stretch exploring the geography, political realities, and daily routines of the city, a scheming American villain arrives and, in an inspired bit of casting, he’s played by B-movie staple Udo Kier, reveling in the cruelty and complexity of the role. He’s leading a team of aspiring would-be commandos, the type of people who view killing as a novel thrill. (The movie would make for a revealing double-feature with its more outright silly American counterpart The Hunt.) Exposition gets tucked in odd narrative corners; the tactical demands of the situation shift; scenes play out in tense, curious confrontations. Eventually, the movie explodes like a volcano, bursts of stylized gore and righteous indignation flying everywhere. Both visually hallucinatory and morally centered, Bacurau excites and inspires in equal measure.

She Dies Tomorrow

Release date: July 31
Cast: Kate Lyn Sheil, Jane Adams, Kentucker Audley, Chris Messina 
Director: Amy Seimetz
Why it’s great:
The strobing lights and shifting colors that flash across the at crucial points in She Dies Tomorrow signal a psychological shift that can’t be fully explained or articulated by any of the characters. They all know something is wrong—unavoidable death is approaching, soon—but they can’t exactly put a name to it or make others empathize with their anxiety until the reaction spreads. And this condition spreads fast: starting with Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil), who just moved into a sleek new house, and jumping to her obsessive friend, and then that friend’s family and on and on. Is this a medical thriller stripped of jargon or a dark social comedy of manners stylized into a more abstract register? Quibbles about genre feel less urgent as the movie builds its peculiar world of dune buggies, leather shops, and swimming pools. Director Amy Seimetz scrutinizes behavior with a careful eye, and she brings joy out of the performers even in dire circumstances, but the movie’s big questions are metaphysical. Surrendering to the void or stepping into the light can only do so much.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets

Release date: July 10 
Director: Bill and Turner Ross
Why it’s great:
The theme song from Cheers succinctly summed up the communal appeal of the local bar: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” On the surface, this genre-bending documentary from brother filmmaking team Bill and Turner Ross is a straightforward celebration of that concept, one that explores depths of feeling, patterns of behavior, and types of language you wouldn’t see on a network sitcom. Chronicling the closing night of a Las Vegas dive called Roaring ’20s in November 2016, in the the shadow of Donald Trump’s election victory, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets introduces a series of bartenders and barflys, observing them in verité style as they watch Jeopardy! on TV, sing songs, and get in arguments. An Australian regular takes acid; a cake gets smashed. Just another night out. The setup is simple and the hangout vibe is a pleasure, but the story of how the the film was made, which goes mostly unacknowledged on screen, blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction in a way that gives the events a woozy texture. It’s a sentiment most bar-goers can relate to: Why let the truth get in the way of a great story?