The best films of 2020 (so far): from Extraction to Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Never Rarely Sometimes Always ★★★★★
This scalding abortion drama centers on teenage heroine Autumn, who’s magnetically played by first-time actress Sidney Flanigan, as she tried to explain herself in a New York abortion clinic. As Autumn responds to each of the intensely personal questions with one of the title’s four straightforward multiple-choice options, the fog suddenly rolls back and she recalls how she became pregnant. Read the full review.
Calm with Horses ★★★★
This Irish thriller is a firecracker directing debut for Nick Rowland. Played a brooding Cosmo Jarvis, laconic ex-boxer Arm in west Ireland does the dirty work for a local family of drug dealers. In a performance that's reminiscent of Tom Hardy’s career-best work in The Drop, Arm makes of this ungentle giant, a tough guy who’s had enough; someone brutally convincing and not to be underestimated. Read the full review.
Selah and the Spades ★★★★
New to Amazon following acclaim at Sundance, this anything-but-cute debut from writer-director Tayarisha Poe is about warring cliques at an exclusive American boarding school, where queen bee Selah (a ruthless Lovie Simone) is on the lookout for a successor. The tone is mock-Shakespearian with some of the hard-boiled intensity of Rian Johnson's Brick, but the vision feels fresh and defiantly singular: Poe is clearly one to watch. Read the full review.
The Whistlers ★★★★
Oddball ingenuity abounds in this clever diversion from Romanian maestro Corneliu Poromboiu, a surprisingly high-octane narc thriller. It relies on a daft and original method of passing on messages without police interception: the drug runners in question are hiding out on La Gomera in the Canary Islands, where "el silbo", a whistled register of Spanish, has long been used to communicate across miles of valleys and ravines. Read the full review.
The Assistant ★★★★
Harvey Weinstein does not physically appear in The Assistant, nor is he named, but this seething treatment of workplace terror, starring Ozark's Julia Garner as a bottom-of-the-ladder Hollywood assistant, has him very much in mind. Read the full review.
True History of the Kelly Gang ★★★★★
Having just scrambled clear of 1917, George MacKay gives the performance of his life in this rowdy and ravishing adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel, which dynamites the life and legend of the notorious Australian bandit. Justin Kurzel (Snowtown, Macbeth) directs. Read the full review.
The Invisible Man ★★★★
Elisabeth Moss senses her controlling ex-lover lurking unseen in every corner in this ingenious and often terrifying new spin on the classic HG Wells novel. Equal parts haunted house ride and sober treatise on domestic abuse, this is horror with more on its mind than up its sleeve. Read the full review.
Dark Waters ★★★★
Murk is the watchword in this riveting legal procedural, in which Mark Ruffalo’s lawyer doggedly picks at the seams of a horrifying public health cover-up. Director Todd Haynes riffs on the great paranoid thrillers of Alan J Pakula, as well as his own 1995 masterpiece Safe. Read the full review.
First Love ★★★★
The 103rd feature from Japan’s Takashi Miike is an unabashedly bananas gangland romp which follows a runaway call girl and a young boxer through one chaotic night in the Tokyo underworld. Stylish and darkly hilarious, with strong overtones of Edgar Wright, it’s a perfect entry point into the prolific pulp auteur’s oeuvre. Read the full review.
Togo ★★★★
This dog-sledding adventure about a true-life Alaskan medical relief mission starring Willem Dafoe works a treat. With majestic photography, this canine biopic retells a life-or-death 1925 sled run in Alaska, a piece of American heroic myth, where the wrong dog, Balto, is usually credited with saving hundreds of children's lives. The one which led his team across hundreds of miles of frozen waste with an antitoxin for diphtheria was, actually, Togo, with Dafoe as his proud owner. Read the full review.
Moffie ★★★★
Moffie – derogatory slang for a gay person, derived from Afrikaans – is the new film from South African director Oliver Hermanus. It relates a yet-to-be-told story focusing not on race, but sexuality, in an era when lockstep conformity was state-policed, and military service helped inculcate some horrifically illiberal values. Read the full review.
The Perfect Candidate ★★★★
This Saudi Arabian drama from Haifaa al-Mansour (who shot Saudi Arabia's first-ever feature film, Wadjda , in 2012) follows a female doctor who makes a tumultuous run at local politics. The Perfect Candidate is a stirring, often enjoyably infuriating tale of society’s resistance to resistance. Read the full review.
The Personal History of David Copperfield ★★★★
Armando Iannucci’s ingenious adaptation of the Charles Dickens novel turns its young orphan’s search for identity into a whistle-stop farce, loaded up with wisdom and wit. Dev Patel heads a sparky ensemble cast with enough multicultural credentials to give Laurence Fox a fit of the vapours. Read the full review.
And Then We Danced ★★★★
This heady romantic drama, set in Tbilisi, is about the sexual awakening of an ambitious young Georgian dancer, played in a ferociously lithe acting debut by Levan Gelbakhiani. His desire for a charismatic rival drives a story that never goes quite where you expect, and the photography is radiantly lovely. Read the full review.
Who You Think I am ★★★★
Juliette Binoche stuns in this French thriller about the dangers of online dating. Spurned by a younger lover and chasing eternal youth, Binoche's character decides to set up a fake dating profile, and things start to spiral. Read the full review.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire ★★★★
With Portrait of a Lady on Fire, writer-director Céline Sciamma examines the suppressed but lasting power of the female gaze through the life of a reluctant sitter for an undercover artist. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), a noblewoman living on the coast in 18th-century Brittany is observed from afar by painter-in-disguise Marianne (Noémie Merlant). Sciamma’s splendid, multi-layered conceit manages to carry equal weight as a love story and a manifesto of sorts for feminine art. Read the full review.
Extraction ★★★★
This Russo brothers action romp starring Chris Hemsworth for Netflix is crammed with shootouts and helicopters and big, stubbly chins, and every 10 minutes or so, somebody will be thrown off a roof. In short, it’s simultaneously no-nonsense and all-nonsense: a chance for a well-liked star to be put through their old-school practical action movie paces, and for an audience to join them for the ride. Read the full review.
First Cow ★★★★★
First Cow is a funny old title, referring, in Kelly Reichardt’s wonderful new film, a debuting bovine character actress called Evie. She is the first cow to make it to the Oregon Territory during the 1820s, a time when the competitive fur trade – “soft gold”, as they called it – brought settlers to the area from far and wide. A film of understated beauty. Read the full review.
End of the Century ★★★★★
A brief encounter in Barcelona prompts two men (Juan Barberini, Ramón Pujol) to wonder if they’re not strangers after all, but in fact met in the same city 20 years before. This beautiful wisp of a romance, a debut from Argentina’s Lucio Castro, becomes a slippery yet profound meditation on time, memory and desire. Read the full review.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood ★★★★
A cynical journalist (Matthew Rhys) has his brittle male ego detoxified by the children’s television presenter Fred Rogers (an Oscar/Bafta-nommed Tom Hanks) in this meditative, enticingly eerie drama from Marielle Heller. Read the full review.
The Lighthouse ★★★★★
Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe go mad inside a giant phallic symbol in this ferociously entertaining black-and-white maritime shocker from Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch. With gale-force-ten performances and atmosphere sluiced on by the stormload, it’s one of 2020’s first essential cinematic experiences. Read the full review.
A Hidden Life ★★★★★
The lately errant Terrence Malick makes a grand, stirring comeback with this spiritual war epic about the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), who faced execution during World War II for conscientious objection. It’s a gorgeously hewn tribute to an utterly non-performative protest against state power. Read the full review.
Waves ★★★★
This kaleidoscopic coming-of-age melodrama hits hard in its opening movement, then enthrallingly twists and refracts into more introspective forms. Kelvin Harrison Jr and Taylor Russell excel as the Floridian siblings whose lives are derailed by a horribly avoidable tragedy, while director Trey Edward Schults keeps vibrancy and grit. Read the full review.
Weathering with You ★★★★
The unflaggingly dazzling new animation from Japan’s Makoto Shinkai is another magical teenage romance in the Your Name vein – this time between a Tokyo runaway and a girl with mysterious meteorological powers. No climate talk here though: just a sweet first-love fable with the metaphor dial cranked up to apocalypse. Read the full review.
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