The 46 Best Movies of 2020, Because It's Still Been a Great Year for Film
There are two ways to think about the best movies of 2020. On one hand, this year has been a tragedy of Shakespearian proportions, with untold job losses and cinema closures. By some estimates, up to 80 per cent of Hollywood crews were furloughed or laid off in the first weeks of the pandemic, and the effect of that seismic shock will be felt for years to come. Even as the global film industry kicks back into gear, it's clear that things are different now, and will be for some time.
Which provides perspective two: this was a year without tentpoles, in which (almost) every major release was shunted from the schedule. Right now, the year's biggest-grossing movie is still Bad Boys for Life, which was released in January and has so far taken barely a quarter of 2019's Avengers closer. In a year without a Marvel movie, without a Star Wars movie, without a Bond movie, all those smaller, weirder films, which normally live in the shadows of the big studios, had space to breathe.
The straight-to-VOD model is terrible news for cinemas, and for anyone who believes in the power of the shared theatrical experience, but it also made it easier to seek out of the strange and short-run, to find foreign-language gems and unclassifiable genre-straddlers. Not that every disappointed Bond fan was satiated instead by the exploding heads of weird Brazilian western Bacarau, nor every Marvel devotee suddenly converted to subtitled cinema (the thing that stops people seeking these films out in the first place is not just that bigger movies get in the way). Still, there was a sense that, in 2020, there was more oxygen available for a more varied cinematic conversation.
Which is why our rundown of the best movies of 2020 is light on big budgets, but big on risk-taking. It's a more exciting, more varied a group of films than we could possibly have expected in January, when 1917 still seemed a shoo-in for the Best Picture Oscar and the most controversial thing happening on Hollywood was the beef between the Fast & Furious 9 cast.
In that vein, it seems churlish to rank films that vary so wildly in tone and intent. Instead, we present our favourite movies of the year, selected by the Esquire editors. These are our best films of 2020 because they moved us, or were memorable in a year we'd rather forget. They offered escapism, and new ways of looking at reality. They were funny and scary and heart-warming and life-affirming. And there's not a superhero among them.
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Filmmaker Kirsten Johnson grapples with the death of her dad, an event she is trying to prepare for as her father Dick suffers from advanced dementia. Unlike so many films about dementia, which focus on a narrow kind of forgetfulness, this is something different entirely, with Johnson staging her dad's death in increasingly inventive ways. This ranges from violent endings to strange accidents to help the pair face the bridge they will eventually have to cross. What might sound extremely morbid is in fact a reminder of our reticence to look death in the eye and the freedom which confronting it can offer. – Olivia Ovenden
Portrait of Lady on Fire
Fittingly, every shot in French writer-director Céline Sciamma’s slow-burning lesbian love story is a work of art in and of itself. Set at the end of the eighteenth century on a sparse island in Brittany, painter Marianne is commissioned to secretly produce a portrait of an unhappy young woman named Héloïse, who is being forced into marriage with a nobleman and has so far refused to pose for a picture. The artist is instructed to spend time with Héloïse, stealing the glimpses that will go on to inform her brushstrokes. But as the pair grow closer, those forbidden looks soon take on a new meaning.
Bacurau
Something weird's going on in Bacurau, a close-knit community in the Brazilian backcountry. First, the river was dammed. Then, the village disappeared from satellite maps. Now the phone signal's vanished and bodies are starting to pile up. Co-directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, Bacurau is a genre-mashing masterpiece, a horrifying, sci-fi-tinged western that touches on government corruption, social striation and the fight between natives and interlopers, served with laughs, shocks and inventive ways to deploy a blood pack. – Tom Banham
Saint Maud
StudioCanal and A24, the film studio behind recent celebrated horror films including Heredity and Midsommar, have teamed up with British writer-director Rose Glass for this story of a young nurse caring for a celebrated former dancer. Maud becomes obsessed with the idea of saving her soul and her descent into madness results in a gruesome ending. The story makes for a truly horrific sensory experience, with the sound of ripping flesh and baked beans bubbling making up the soundtrack of this escape to a sickly seaside town. – OO
His House
It was a very good Halloween for British horrors. Remi Weekes’ debut feature followed Sudanese refugees Rial and Bol as they try to adapt to a new life somewhere near Stoke. But their guilt and the terrible things they saw on their way to the UK follow them into their new house, and pull the couple apart.
There are two haunted houses here: the mouldering place Rial and Bol move into, where they’re tormented by visions and ghosts; and the UK itself. Superficially welcoming and helpful, the state expects them to drop their trauma and blend in. The landscape of the no-place they find themselves in traps them among concrete roads to nowhere. Weekes’ direction is expansive, expressive and knows its horror history, but His House used the jumps and dread to tell a story rarely told. – Tom Nicholson
Mank
In less deft hands, this ode to Citizen Kane, shot in the style of Citizen Kane, would feel like a student film. But David Fincher's been making Citizen Kane homages for decades, which makes Mank a delight, even for those who aren't in thrall to Old Hollywood. Granted, its thesis that Orson Welles nicked credit for the script from writer, raconteur and Hollywood lush Herman J Mankiewicz, has been largely debunked, but the truth doesn't matter when the writing's this smart. With a scenery-munching turn from Gary Oldman, and shot in lush black and white by Mindhunter's Eric Messerschmidt, this could be the one that wins Netflix its Best Picture Oscar. – TB
Ema
Pablo Larrain’s latest, following Jackie, finds the Chilean director combining a story of familial trauma and sexual dysfunction with… reggaeton. Using a lurid neon palette, Larrain revels in the some-time vulgarity of his set-up: he stages a dizzying succession of kinetic dance sequences, white-hot lovers’ quarrels and reconciliations (Mariana di Girolamo and Gael García Bernal, as the toxic central couple, hold nothing back), and giddily indiscriminate sexual encounters, which clash blithely with the storyline of an adoption process gone awry, to traumatising effect. The result is a feverish, wrenching, upsetting and yet funny drama, which probes at disturbing power dynamics in a wholly engaging way. – Caspar Salmon
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Miss Juneteenth
Miss Juneteenth is a quiet film with a loud message. It follows Turquoise (the superb Nicole Beharie), a former beauty queen in Fort Worth, Texas, whose dreams of higher education were waylaid by an unplanned pregnancy. Fifteen years later, her daughter (Alexis Chikaeze) is competing in the very same Miss Juneteenth pageant that Turquoise had won, and which had provided a full college scholarship. Juneteeth, as the film makes painfully aware, is a holiday, little-celebrated outside American Black communities, which commemorates the day two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, when slaves in Texas finally got word of their freedom. Writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples knocked it out of the park with her first film. – Valentina Valentini
On The Rocks
Lost in Translation duo Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray reunite for this New York caper about Laura (Rashida Jones), a writer who feels sapped of inspiration as she runs after her two children and amidst fears that her husband is cheating. Enter her playboy father (a rare, sleazy Murray) who encourages her to spy on her husband to catch him in the act, leading the pair on a wild adventure across the city, complete with a sports car chase with caviar snacks for the stake out. Coppola conjures an alluring snapshot of Manhattan, from the heigh-ceilinged Soho apartments to the lavish homes with a Monet lurking in a hidden corridor. It's a New York which feels like a relic of another time, but one that makes for enticing escapism. – OO
Possessor
Possessor is the nasty, glinting product of somebody who, after watching Being John Malkovich, asked: OK, but what if the person infiltrating the body of someone else was a contract killer, who could murder people under the guise of their host and then commit suicide? Brandon Cronenberg, the son of David, is as preoccupied with the psycho-horror of bodies as his father, and adroitly deploys this premise to ask questions about gender, identity, class and money. Andrea Riseborough as Tasya Vos, the identity-hopping assassin spiralling out of control, and Christopher Abbott as the man trying to resist her control of his body, give staggering, inhabited performances. – CS
The Forty-Year-Old Version
Spike Lee and Woody Allen loom large over Radha Blanks's tale of a Black, female playwright forced to compromise her art for a white producer's paycheque. Like in the films of Lee and Allen, New York is an uncredited co-star, a place of beauty, opportunity and bone-crushing struggle, but Blanks – who writes, directs and stars as a fictionalised version of herself – always finds the cracks where the light gets in. – TB
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
Chadwick Boseman’s final film is an oddly apt coda to his career. There were few bigger actors in cinema, but this adaptation of August Wilson’s play is small to the point of claustrophobia. Stuck in a rehearsal room on a sticky Chicago summer day, waiting for singer Ma Rainey, Boseman’s frustrated trumpeter Levee kicks against his workmanlike bandmates. It’s a wild, passionate, desperate performance. It’s a bit maudlin to read too much into this as a final statement, but as final statements go, it’s one of the best.
Ma Rainey is more than just a Boseman showcase, though. Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey is magnificently bolshy, a woman taking whatever advantage she can in a world set against her, and there’s a loving eye cast over the cogs, sprockets and needles of the old recording studio. As a piece about the Black experience, of surviving and managing and keeping your own fire burning, it’s as relevant as ever. – TN
Available on Netflix from 18 December
The Trial of the Chicago 7
The power of protest is the loud message of this new feature from Aaron Sorkin, which boasts an impressive cast including Mark Rylance, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon Levitt Sacha Baron Cohen, Jeremy Strong, Kelvin Harrison Jr and more. The film focuses on the fallout from the protests at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 in which different factions of the left came together to protest the Vietnam War, an incident which ended in a riot. In Sorkin's courtroom drama we see how Nixon's government attempted to frame the group donned The Chicago 7 despite flimsy evidence, a film which brings his talent for sharp and explosive dialogue to life. At a time when America has been overrun by protests, it's a reminder of the importance of resistance against a corrupt system. – OO
Selah and the Spades
Debut writer-director Tayarisha Poe loves stories of redeemable men who behave badly, so she brings Gossip Girl and gangster films together in this coming-of-age drama. Set at a posh New England prep school, five factions war with one another as their leaders stop at (almost) nothing to stay on top. Starring Lovie Simone, Celeste O’Connor and Jharrel Jerome, the performances invoke wisdom and grace, despite the youth of their players. But it’s the strength in the story and the decisiveness in its execution that keeps you glued to the screen. – VV
The Boys in the Band
The supremely influential 1968 off-Broadway play by Mart Crowley has lost none of its bite in this revival by director Joe Mantello, The story focuses on one intense evening in which a visitor interrupts a gathering of gay men in Sixties New York City. With a cast made up of exclusively openly gay actors, including Jim Parsons, Zachary Quinto, Matt Bomer, Andrew Rannells, Charlie Carver and Robin de Jesús, this Netflix adaptation feels, as with its source material, like an important moment of representation in gay culture, showing the many facets of sexuality and the prejudices which remain. – OO
Lovers Rock
The best film in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series has almost no story: it’s about one night, at a blues party, at the height of the popularity of reggae offshoot lovers rock. The film contains dozens of moments of swoon-inducing rightness, when everything it seeks to convey – the joy of communion; the sensuality of a room of bodies; the very feel of a subculture where Blackness is not perceived in relation to whiteness – is distilled into a gesture, or a song, that says it all. In one such a scene, McQueen tenderly films a succession of slow-dancers’ arms enfolding waists, and hands resting lightly on shoulders, as alcohol gives way to romance throughout the room. Janet Kay’s ‘Silly Games’ plays. We are there. It’s a miracle. – CS
Tenet
Christopher Nolan's latest head-scratcher makes his "dream within a dream" Inception look like quantum physics for children. The blockbuster action film is a Bond-esque espionage drama in which the world is under threat from the enemy of time inversion, a weapon which comes from the future armed with the experience of the past and is being manipulated by the 1 per cent. It's heady, confusing stuff, but a cinematic experience which is worth going along with for the ride. – OO
Swallow
Swallow is complex, but not in a confusing way that complex movies sometimes can be. It's a psychological thriller, horror, dark comedy, an anti-patriarchal drama, and it all melts together perfectly in 95 minutes. First-time feature writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis is best known for his 2011 documentary The Swell Season, which followed the rising stardom of the musical duo behind the 2007 Oscar-winning Once. Swallow is a tonal 180. It’s the story of a stifled Stepford wife who is newly pregnant and suffers from a psychological disorder called pica, which compels her to swallow dangerous objects. Though Haley Bennett has been around for a bit now, this is most certainly a breakout performance for her. – VV
Born to Play
If you didn’t know that women’s American football teams existed in nearly every major city in the United States, you would be forgiven. Even documentarian Viridiana Lieberman – a sports doc editor – only realised recently. But when she did, she knew exactly what her next project was, and used the semi-professional Boston Renegades and their 2019 season towards a hopeful Championship to touch on the larger story of the Women’s Football Alliance. Born to Play premiered on ESPN on July 1 and is currently streaming via their site in the US. As soon as it’s available here, we can’t recommend this cinematic, high-stakes sports doc highly enough. – VV
The Devil all the Time
This Southern Gothic adapted from Donald Ray Pollock's 2011 novel and directed by Antonio Campos is a story of generational trauma, revenge and redemption. The noir thriller assembles a rogue's gallery of ne'er-do-wells, including Bill Skarsgård as PTSD-suffering vet Willard, Tom Holland as his solitary son Arvin, and the most compelling of all, Robert Pattinson's honey-tongued preacher Reverend Teagardin. In this dark, bloody thriller we see how their paths cross in dead-end town of Knockemstiff, Ohio, a place where it's hard to outrun your past for long. – OO
Feels Good, Man
Evil has many faces. In 2016, Pepe the frog became one of them. The sweet green guy from Matt Furie’s cute slacker comic, Boys Club, who like going for a wee with his shorts and pants down, seemed suddenly to embody the sneering semi-ironic bigotry which had spilled from 4chan and onto the streets. Feels Good, Man tracks Pepe’s birth and happy early life, his descent through the imageboards and the communities who misused him there, and his redemption, all using Furie’s gorgeous illustrations.
It’s a vivid and empathetic exploration of what it means to create something, and how much what you create can ever belong to you when it floats freely on the internet. Hearteningly, Furie gets his revenge on rancid types like Alex Jones, who were gleefully using his creation to whip up hatred and make money doing it, via some deeply satisfying lawsuits. – TN
The Personal History of David Copperfield
"Oh good," you probably thought when you saw this film was happening. "Another Dickens adaptation. Fire up the breeches and unthaw Derek Jacobi: here we go again." But this was not your average Dickens adaptation. This was Armando Iannucci’s joyous take on the rambling life story of a nice young kid who gets shunted from boat-house to factory to eccentric aunt’s donkey-riddled country pile in the search for who he really is.
Iannucci has a lot of fun visually, and the cast is ridiculous: Tilda Swinton, Ben Whishaw, Benedict Wong, Peter Capaldi, Morfydd Clark, Hugh Laurie, and at the top of it all, lovely Dev Patel. He’s a perfect Copperfield, never less than entirely full of wide-eyed charm. – TN
I’m Thinking of Ending Things
A number of mediocre films came out this year in which a liberal American from the city returns to their home in the countryside, prompting a culture clash and a reconciliation. This is the Trumpy-Bideny America of Hillbilly Elegy or Uncle Frank. Charlie Kaufman takes this subject from an angle, scrabbling all of those certainties and political clichés into something dense and glitchy: nothing is as it seems here, as Lucy (Jessie Buckley) travels with her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons) to visit his parents. Kaufman’s post-modernism, his unapologetic singularity of purpose, his few but delectable jokes (that Robert Zemeckis shout-out!) and a strange, sedate coda, give this film a startling, almost daunting originality. – CS
Boys State
This Sundance-winning documentary from Apple and A24 is a terrifying yet inspiring look at partisan politics, offering a microcosm of America's future through a competition in which young boys vie against each other to form an elected government. In Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss's film we follow the Texas chapter of the competition run by the American Legion each year, the footage captured showing a melting pot of adolescent angst, male posturing and political point-scoring. – OO
Driveways
With one of Brian Dennehy's last performances before he died earlier this year, this moving film is a fitting farewell to the actor as well as a timely reminder of the bonds that connect us. The film focuses on a retiring young boy who accompanies his mother to clean out his late aunt's house and strikes up a friendship with the elderly Korean War veteran next door. Driveways goes beyond being a saccharine story about intergenerational friendship by creating fully realised characters whose connection you truly believe in. – OO
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Vitalina Varela
Vitalina Varela is the title, the main actor, and the inspiration for Pedro Costa’s latest document of the world’s dispossessed. The non-professional actor plays herself in this true story of a woman from Cape Verde whose husband left her to go to Portugal, and never returned: decades later, she arrives in Lisbon to confront him, only to find that he has recently died. Now, visiting his bare apartment, Vitalina is a like a living djinn, a phantom of sorrow and rage. Costa’s formally austere, glacially paced cinema finds reserves of grimy beauty in the recesses of each static, dimly lit shot. – CS
About Endlessness
‘Deadpan’ doesn't quite do the films of Roy Andersson justice; 'extinctpan' would be a better way to describe his latest, and perhaps last, movie, a succession of existential, sometimes comical, occasionally perplexing vignettes in which some minor incident or other befalls an individual, to no great consequence. In one, a woman waits for somebody at a station; he eventually arrives, and they walk off. Several episodes deal with a priest’s crisis of faith. One finds a man attacking a woman at a fish stall, to the discomfort of onlookers. Andersson’s laconic wit and disquieting neutrality are mesmerising; so too is this film’s hushed humanity. – CS
Palm Springs
The story of two strangers doomed to repeat the same wedding over and over again is not a horror story, but in fact a charming indie movie which gives the Groundhog Day format a fun refresh. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti are brilliant as the aforementioned duo, and the film also features a very enjoyable performance from J. K Simmons. As with TV like Russian Doll and I May Destroy You, Palm Springs cleverly uses time-loops as a way of dealing with trauma and pain through repetition, as well as mirroring our current stalled reality in a fairly freaky way. – OO
Happiest Season
Holiday romantic comedies don’t generally make the best-of lists, and for good reason. They’re often formulaic, narrow-minded and cloyingly sentimental. Happiest Season, co-written by Mary Holland and director Clea DuVall, might still be formulaic and sentimental, but with a lesbian couple at the heart of the narrative, it’s the LGBTQ+ miracle we all needed this year. The film has a stellar cast, including Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis as the will they-won’t they couple, and perfectly captures the spectrum of emotions wrapped up in the messy bow of needing family acceptance, staying true to yourself, and trying not to ruin the happiest time of the year. – VV
A Most Beautiful Thing
A Most Beautiful Thing is a documentary about a group of high school students in West Side Chicago in the Nineties who, against all odds, became the first all-black high school rowing team in the United States. Directed by former Olympic rower and award-winning documentarian Mary Mazzio, and narrated by Common, it's based on a book by the film's main subject, Arshay Cooper, who self-published a memoir called Suga Water about growing up in a neighbourhood of rival gangs in Chicago and how rowing changed his life forever. Mazzio came across it a few years back and Tweeted about it. The rest is history, as they say. – VV
The King of Staten Island
The story of Pete Davidson, and how he lost his firefighter father on 9/11, will make you see the comedian in a different light after watching this black comedy from director Judd Apatow. Davidson plays Scott, a character who is essentially himself and must deal with the rest of his family moving on with their lives as he feels stuck at the age he was when he lost his father. The fusing of grief and humour, as well as Davidson's emotional performance, make for a film which is some of Apatow's most personal and moving work yet. – OO
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
Eliza Hittman’s latest film tells the story of Autumn, a teenager from Pennsylvania who enlists her cousin, Skylar, to help her travel to New York in order to procure an abortion. Hittman sets her story in a similarly lower-middle class background to the one she depicted in 2017's Beach Rats: she excels at depicting money, the family, and the paralysing constraints of gender in this milieu. The film is unerring and moving when it portrays the unspoken bond between the girls, and quietly ferocious on the dishonesty of sanctimonious America. A lovely, loony humour occasionally undercuts this heartbreaking narrative, as when a baffled Autumn loses at noughts and crosses against a caged chicken in an arcade. Beautiful.
Uncut Gems
We’re all long past the point where the word ‘unprecedented’ meant anything. It’s worth remembering, though, that the second (third? Fourth?) coming of Adam Sandler at the centre of a devilish, magnetic thriller in January was the first unprecedented event of the year.
The Safdie brothers’ second feature took all the things that made their first, Good Time, so gripping and buffed them to a blinding sheen, while adding cinema’s first instance of Chekhov’s magnetic door release button. Sandler’s hard-edged gambler Howard gets his hands on a rare black opal, which he needs to sell to cover gambling debts. Unfortunately, NBA star Kevin Garnett feels its cosmic power and wants to hang onto it. A chaotic, tumbling, endlessly spiralling chase of bets, debts and violence ensues. Uncut Gems is the sweaty-palmed tragedy of a man who couldn’t slow down, who had a way out and a happy ending, but couldn’t turn down the chance to go double or nothing. – TN
Rocks
Rocks is at its effervescent best when Sarah Gavron, directing from a script devised in tandem with a diverse young cast, is wise enough to observe these girls hanging back, shooting the shit together in riotous (dis)harmony. First among this group are Rocks (Bukky Bakray), a teenager holding it together for her little brother after her mother walks out on them, and her best friend Sumaya (Kosar Ali, giving the supporting performance of the year). The film is a devastating, unflinching examination of social inequalities, studded with fine moments that capture the subtleties of the group’s social hierarchy and the unique properties of each discrete culture it depicts. Ken Loach called; he wants his authenticity back. – CS
The Assistant
The first wave of films trying to grapple with the #MeToo movement and its abusers have taken different tacts in their focus on the abusers, with Bombshell pulling no punches in portraying Fox News CEO Roger Ailes as an odious monster. In The Assistant, Jane is an aspiring film producer who begins working as the assistant to an entertainment mogul she discovers is a monster with a culture of silence protecting him. The power Harvey Weinstein exerted over his employees is chilling despite us only hearing from the character meant to represent him during phone calls. – OO
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1917
Sam Mendes's first world war thriller was (deservedly) pipped to Best Picture by Parasite, but its single-shot conceit made it a lock for the Cinematography gong. Without DoP Roger Deakins' work, this tale of two young privates sent on a life-saving mission across no man's land would be just another war film. With it, you feel every breath, bullet and heartbeat as they race to save their fellow soldiers from a march into German machine guns. – TB
The Invisible Man
The boom in horror has meant cinema has been rich with smart horror films looking at complicated ideas like prejudice, grief and trauma under the deceiving cloak of a scary story. Here, genre stalwart Leigh Whannell (Insidious, Saw) loosely adapts HG Wells’s 1897 novel of the same name to tell the story how a man terrorises his ex-girlfriend Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) after staging his suicide, touching on themes of gaslighting, anxiety and abuse. – OO
The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers follows his brilliant film, The Witch, with this startling black and white fever dream about 19th century lighthouse keepers Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) and Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson). The pair descend into madness as they go about their tasks on the rain-soaked rock, which forces them to confront their personal guilt and shame in a series of arresting and increasingly bizarre scenes. – OO
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Mogul Mowgli
Riz Ahmed stars in this visceral indie drama that wrestles with the ramifications of Partition and the scars still felt by the Pakistani diaspora. A debut script (co-written by Ahmed) and direction by Bassim Tariq, the story follows Zed (shortened and westernised from Zaheer), a British-Pakistani rapper on the brink of stardom. Just as he’s about to take off on a world tour, an autoimmune disease threatens not only his life, but his career and all of his relationships. Chopped up into sequences of vivid hallucinations and spoken-word jams, the scenes between with Zed and his father, or Zed and his community, bring the question “Who is British? into the light. – VV
Queen & Slim
A young couple go on the run after an altercation with a police officer in this modern remix of Bonnie and Clyde. When a video of the incident goes viral, the protagonists become symbols of the grief and pain people have suffered at the hands of the police. Both Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, and his on-screen partner Jodie Turner-Smith, give arresting performances in this story about police brutality and a divided America that is most devastating in its quietest moments. – OO
Parasite
Korean director Bong Joon Ho made history earlier this year with the first foreign-language film to win the 'best picture' Oscar. Parasite is a darkly comic story which weaves in ever-weirder directions as its tale of Seoul's haves and have-nots unfurls. Teenage boy Ki-woo (Woo-sik Choi) cons Yeon-kyo (Yeo-jeong Jo), the wife of rich business man Mr Park (Sun-kyun Lee), into hiring him as their daughter's English tutor. Ki-woo then lines up jobs for his whole family, allowing them to infiltrate the Park's stunnig house: his sister Ki-jung (So-dam Park) becomes an art teacher, his father Ki-taek (Kang-ho Song) a driver, and his mother Chung-sook (Hye-jin Jang) takes over as housekeeper. Slowly, their greed takes a dark turn. A biting social commentary about wealth inequality, Parasite is a world of horrors that is already in front of us. – OO
Kajillionaire
A Miranda July film is always going to be weird. But her brand of weird is like a ratty old blanket – you don’t remember how it came into your life but, if it were to disappear, you’d be devastated. Kajillionaire is the writer-director’s first feature in nearly a decade and it wraps its viewer in the introspective genius of July to tell the whacky tale of Old Dolio (expertly played by Evan Rachel Wood – is there nothing she can’t do?) a 20-something living with her off-the-grid conspiracy theorist parents in central Los Angeles. For a heist they’re pulling, they include a stranger (the always spunky Gina Rodriguez) and for the first time in her life, Old Dolio is exposed to outside forces. – VV
Emma
"Charming, handsome and clever", the eponymous heroine of Jane Austen's classic novel is brought to life by Anna Taylor-Joy in this whimsical adaptation from director Autumn de Wilde. If you weren't paying attention in GCSE English, the plot focuses on Emma's attempts at match-making and how their disastrous consequences reveal her stubbornness and vanity. De Wilde's Emma is a great addition to the long list of adaptations, with Wes Anderson colour palettes, twee costumes, a sharp script and brilliant performances from the likes of Bill Nighy and Josh O'Connor. – OO
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
In undiluted and uncensored Sacha Baron Cohen style, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm – a sequel to the writer-director-actor-impersonator’s breakout Borat – takes on America’s racist, pandemic-spreading patriarchy. And what a perfect time to do so. But the true star of the show is 24-year-old Bulgarian, Maria Bakalova. She plays Borat’s young teen daughter, Tutar, who’s spent most of her life locked up in their barn. As the shock-jock continues his mockumentary style to horrifying effect, including Bakalova in the joke, this film is as ridiculous and unbelievable as it is poignant and important. – VV
Waves
The story of a black middle-class family living in South Florida shows how a fraught relationship between father and son can have devastating consequences. Breakthrough actor Kelvin Harrison Jr is electric as Tyler, a wrestler unable to accept what it means for his life when he sustains a serious injury. With a stirring soundtrack, vivid cinematography and compelling performances, Waves will knock you off your feet. – OO
Cuties
From feature debut writer-director Maïmouna Doucouré comes this controversial and hard-hitting Netflix drama. Cuties – a French film about an 11-year-old Muslim in Paris who seeks friendship and experience outside her family and religion by joining a pre-teen street dance troupe – is less about entertainment than it is social commentray. The societal pressure on little girls the world over has brought them into a sexualised way of being which they don’t even understand. And while young girls have always imitated the older girls, Doucouré has a firm grasp on tween culture in 2020. – VV
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