I feel like my brain is leaking out of my ears. I’m sure you’ve heard about this before; you’ve probably received like two other newsletters about it from people this week alone. On some level, I have no doubt we all feel this way — a perfect little cocktail of a terrifying global pandemic and the accompanying total abandonment of the normal everyday things that have kept our anxious generation as sane as we could possibly be. But I think part of feeling like your brain is leaking out of your ears is also feeling like it’s just you, all the time, going slowly crazier while everyone else is doing just great. The aggressive solitude of this stupid awful year has only made that whisper into a shout. When I sit down right now to do the things I love — like read a book, or watch a movie, or write this newsletter — I feel stupid. Stupider than everyone around me, and a hell of a lot stupider than I used to be.
There’s some kind of narcissism involved in taking it upon yourself to decide what the best movies of the year were. Sometimes that’s justified, in its own way; when you’ve seen a good one hundred or two hundred of the movies released in a year, your opinion is a little more interesting and qualified to me than if you’ve only seen five or six. This year, I saw about 60 new releases, but I still don’t know if I’m qualified. It’s more than just a matter of quantity of consumption; I feel, once again, like my brain is leaking out of my ears.
There are a scant few new movies that I really loved this year: Wolfwalkers, Another Round, Mank, Lovers Rock, Never Rarely Sometimes Always, just to name a few. But it’s almost unfair to discount the ones that I wouldn’t include simply because I didn’t connect with them during a year that I connected with so little. Maybe Soul would have landed harder if I’d seen it as it was meant to be seen, in a dark theater on Christmas with my family. Maybe the chilly claustrophobia of I’m Thinking of Ending Things would have worked more in a less claustrophobic world, one where I could watch it with my attention span fully intact. Even if I’d chosen to see these movies at home during a year where a movie theater was still open down the block, they may have been granted a little more of a chance; on some level, I think the occasional ritual of sitting in the dark for two hours with no distractions made me a much better movie watcher than I am right now.
So — and I’m sorry this took so long and also that the headline lied to you, but hey, that’s 2020 — this isn’t going to be a list of the best movies of the year, because I don’t think I’m quite ready to decide what those were. Instead, please enjoy this silly list of the movies that gave me comfort. Some were new acquaintances, and some were familiar old friends. All of them helped get me through 2020.
When Harry Met Sally…
A movie for missing New York, even if you’re currently living in it. Lonely, hilarious people falling in and out of love while autumn leaves fall.Spirited Away
That rarest type of beautiful thing, a wholly original story told with a soaring texture that makes you feel like you’ve known it your entire life. Fairy tales have never been this gorgeous and true.Groundhog Day
The movie of the year, accidentally made a few decades early. Watching the same idiotic circumstances repeat themselves over and over again while fruitlessly waiting for a vain idiot to turn around and start fixing himself? Might as well just turn on the news, am I right?!Attack the Block
John Boyega’s first performance, and still his best. A rip-roaring alien invasion thriller with a sharp, thorny edge.Do the Right Thing
Maybe the best American movie ever made. So tragically evergreen that we forget how funny, fierce, and watchable it is.Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
A David Lean epic, a Douglas Sirk romance, a Busby Berkeley musical, all through the clockwork-monstrous lens of one of Hollywood’s most underrated madmen. Nothing onscreen last year gave me more joy than the goofball earnestness of Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom’s mid-typhoon pirate wedding.The Age of Innocence
All of the cruel structure of mafia warfare, transposed by Martin Scorsese onto New York high society. A flick of the eyes at a dinner party is as brutal as a shot to the back of the head.Coraline
A movie about all the rainy days that make you miss your parents.Death Becomes Her
Robert Zemeckis’ Hollywood Hills horror-comedy is funny, scathing, and features some absolutely groundbreaking visual effects. Come for Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn’s dynamite murder party; stay for Bruce Willis’ last performance before being forced to only make movies that go straight to Redbox.Knives Out
A movie about a kind nurse and the rich shitheads who make her life a living hell. Might as well just turn on the news, am I right?!