2020s Movies You May Have Missed

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is well on its way to a dominant box office performance, yet another signal of the movies’ return to the center of culture, or at least far nearer to it than in 2020 amid the COVID pandemic and the dawn of streaming. Sure, you’ve seen The Odyssey, or plan to, and made sure to check out the Dune films and Top Gun: Maverick. You were there for “Barbenhemier” and made sure to watch both Sinners and One Battle After Another last year during the awards race. Maybe you even helped a few Disney films break $1 billion at the box office.

Between limited theatrical releases, the fractured streaming landscape, and far smaller profiles, here’s a bunch of stuff you might have missed that is worthy of your time.

Honorable Mentions:

• I already named them in my top 10 of the decade two years ago: First Cow, Small Axe: Lover’s Rock/Mangrove, Nope, Never Rarely Sometimes Always

• They made too much money for this list, but I still think they’re underrated: Nope (again), Challengers, Tenet, The Iron Claw, 28 Years Later, Furiosa

• They came directly to streaming, and I think were hits: The Killer, No Sudden Move, Wake Up Dead Man

• Other Honorable Mentions: The Bikeriders, I Saw the TV Glow, Armageddon Time, The Vast of Night

Da 5 Bloods. Fresh off the success of BlacKkKlansman which netted Spike Lee his first competitive Oscar win, he jumped on the Netflix money train and made a long-brewing project about Vietnam veterans returning 50+ years after their combat tours to search for buried treasure. The result is as entertaining as that premise suggests and features a lead performance by Delroy Lindo that’s as good as anything you’ll see this decade. Alongside him, Chadwick Boseman steals the show with one of his sadly final performances as the squad’s beloved sergeant who never got to come home, a role as laden with pathos within the movie as it is outside of it. As with Spike’s best work, it’s accessible, touching, crowd-pleasing, and unafraid to state its politics plainly.

Pig. This is a small film with a small release during the height of COVID lockdowns, so it’s no wonder general audiences missed it, and might have had some misconceptions around it based on its star and description. Yes, Nicholas Cage plays a small-time truffle hunter whose truffle pig gets stolen. Yes, it’s something of a send-up of typical revenge tropes. No, it’s not all that funny. No, it’s not all that violent besides a few scenes. What we do have is a remarkable performance in the study of an initially enigmatic character whose search for justice takes him from the semi-criminal underground into the heart of the foodie scene two years before The Bear claimed the same turf. It’s really, really fascinating stuff.

The Green Knight. If you ask a certain corner of the internet, this is among the most visually arresting movies of the decade, and among the best medieval fantasy/fairy tale movies ever. Because this corner of the internet is rather small, there’s a good chance you’ve missed this film. I don’t know if I share its highest praises, but I think this is a very approachable and fascinating retelling of the ancient Arthurian poem that emerges as a great character study and rumination on the meaning of courage and sacrifice. Dev Patel gives a performance that frankly makes me think he’s capable of almost anything, and David Lowery’s direction and confidence to play this shockingly small and intimate story out slowly is bold but excellent.

Benediction. It’s understandable why an American audience in 2021 may have missed the final film from English auteur Terence Davies, starring Jack Lowden, but I’d encourage anyone with Hulu access to rectify this. It may appear from the outside to be a stuffy biopic of WWI-era poet Siegfried Sassoon but long stretches of it are full of biting catty dialogue among the players of the deeply underground England homosexual artist scene. It’s also fittingly impressionistic, featuring passages of Sassoon’s poetry read over war footage, or flash forwards to much later in his life; you cannot and should not tell the story of an artist like this traditionally. Most importantly, it features a lead performance from Jack Lowden that is among the very best of the entire decade.

Decision to Leave. This past year, critics, Oscar pundits, and folks like me who just watch a decent amount of stuff and pay too much attention to awards races were banging the drum for Park Chan Wook’s No Other Choice to get some nominations and maybe even get Park a trophy; that was not to be, as was the case with this film 3 years before. Decision To Leave works in a very familiar and approachable genre featuring a murder detective getting a little too close with the woman whose husband may or may not have been murdered, and embraces the psychological traditions of Hitchcock, De Palma, and Fincher without leaning heavily into his own penchant for gore. The camerawork in this movie feels like it’s reflecting the tech capabilities of the 2020’s in a significant way, and the two leads are excellent both alone and together.

Blue Jean. Every year is full of smaller, arthouse indie cinema that general audiences miss out on, but I want to especially shine a light on this film. Georgia Oakley made her directorial debut with this story of a girls physical education teacher trying to keep her lesbian identity secret from her employer, but an incident between two students threatens that possibility. Rosy McEwen is tremendous as the lead, full of reserve and simmering frustration, particularly around her girlfriend who is angry with her for keeping her identity secret. It’s also (sadly) an evergreen timely watch despite being set in the 1980’s, since it runs directly at a form of bias and hatred that gets masked in the name of protecting children.

The Northman. After crafting his reputation with the indie horror hits The Witch and The Lighthouse but before breaking through with the high-grossing and Oscar-nominated Nosferatu, Robert Eggers detoured out of horror and into revenge mythos with The Northman. This film did gross $75 million, likely the highest on this list, but was only discussed as a box office disappointment, and not nearly enough on its merits, which are plenty. Its slow-burn approach may have put some people expecting a primitive Viking brutality-fest, but it still delivers those goods while embracing an immersive atmosphere that many movies these days lack. What Eggers captures in-camera (with some digital help) is astonishing at times, and I think if audiences approach this one the right way, they’ll be more than pleased with what he conjures up.

Asteroid City. Ever since his mainstream popularity crested in 2014 with The Grand Budapest Hotel, it feels like Wes Anderson has been relegated to an object of fascination whose immediately recognizable style and tone people would rather salute from a distance than actively engage with. This is a mistake. He’s still doing great work, and I think this film is most representative of what he can do both despite and because of his obvious trappings. This ensemble sci-fi story of potential alien contact in the 1950’s American desert (also a play) is “obviously” cute, trite, tedious, dry, and intricately designed. Once you actually sink your teeth into it, you’ll discover a story of traumatized and repressed artists, parents grappling with raising a generation of children they don’t recognize, a tribute to the beatnik artistry that emerged in the ‘50s, and perhaps the greatest COVID lockdown metaphor Hollywood could conjure up in real time.

How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If you were swept up by One Battle After Another’s sense of political urgency and immediacy, and the delicate moral ground its revolutionaries play in, I would direct you to this movie in a heartbeat. This movie, made on a noticeably smaller budget than One Battle, tells the story of a disparate group of climate activists who gather to blow up an oil pipeline. It’s extremely direct and bold in its point of view in an age where that is rare, but it’s also highly entertaining. It employs the structure of Reservoir Dogs to great effect, meaning we frequently cut between the titular destructive effort and the motivation of each participant; also like Dogs, there’s potentially an informant in the crew. I’ll say no more, as this film speaks for itself.

La Chimera. This film is probably the least accessible on the list for all the reasons I’d recommend it. It’s an Italian production, told in a highly mannered and impressionistic style, with a dry oddball sense of humor and a wistful sadness, telling the story of a group of “Tomboroli” grave robbers led by Josh O’Connor. His character is a historian who’s fallen from grace in his native England and is seemingly blessed with the gift of divining the location of hidden tombs for his crew to loot; but don’t expect anything out of Indiana Jones. His behavior is never glamorous, and as the film goes on the depravity of what he and his group are doing is made clear. Despite all this, he’s impossible for the audience to quit as his journey is clearly not about the money. I really loved this one.

Hundreds of Beavers. Gosh, what a gem. This movie is pure cartoonish slapstick silliness to a degree that I don’t think has ever been approached in live-action filmmaking, making it one of the great singular visions of the entire decade. That’s a crazy thing to say about this story of a fur trapper in the 1800’s snowy frontier trying to kill animals that are portrayed by humans wearing animal mascot costumes, but here we are. It’s pure gut-busting genius that is at once the dumbest thing ever made and the most clever film you may ever see.

Black Bag. I get why this film was overlooked; it’s the latest of Steven Soderbergh’s breathlessly prolific output of movies either headed straight to streaming or at least feeling like they are. To date since 2020, he’s made No Sudden Move, Kimi, Presence, Let Them All Talk and The Christophers to go with the theatrical headline-grabbing Magic Mike’s Last Dance. I’ll admit to only having seen a few of these, but Black Bag is superior by far. It’s a dense, dialogue-forward, brief spy film that would wrongfoot anyone looking for Bond but works well as an update to Le Carré. The cast is stacked, anchored by an excellently repressed turn by Michael Fassbender and bookended by two protracted dinner party scenes where every line has double meanings, and the dialogue is dry, witty, sexy, and paranoid – usually all at once.

The Mastermind. Since I named Kelly Reichardt’s 2020 outing First Cow among the best films of the decade, I guess I’ll just have to talk about another excellent effort by her. Josh O’Connor headlines a movie on this list yet again playing a small-time criminal. In this instance, he plays an out of work architect who decides to rob his local low-security art museum of some rather obscure works. As one does in a heist film, he spends the rest of the film dealing with betrayals, law enforcement, and trying to avoid suspicion. The problem: he’s an out-of-work architect and amateur thief. Reichardt applies her trademark dry simple style to this trademark small story, and the result is mildly amusing but feels far more aching; we get much more Inside Llewyn Davis than anything goofy, and the movie is better for it.