2020 was a horrible year to release a movie. Cinemas were closed, festivals went online, release calendars collapsed, and some of the year’s finest work reached audiences through laptops when it deserved a packed room. The strange part is that the films themselves were often unusually alert to loneliness, uncertainty, grief, reinvention, and the fear that life had stopped moving.
Six years have made the ranking clearer. These eight films survived the chaos around their release and kept growing once the awards campaigns and first-wave hype faded. They found comedy inside repetition, hope inside displacement, and brutal honesty inside families, classrooms, marriages, and minds under pressure. Even now, they still know exactly where to hit.
8
‘Palm Springs’ (2020)
A wedding in the California desert turns into an endless prison for Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (Cristin Milioti), two guests forced to relive November 9 every time they fall asleep or die. The time-loop setup is familiar, and Palm Springs knows viewers already understand the rules. That lets the film skip the slow explanation and focus on what repetition does to people who have stopped believing tomorrow will arrive.
Nyles has already tried everything and found no permanent reward. Cristin Milioti’s Sarah refuses to accept that surrender, partly from stubbornness and partly from guilt over what she did before the wedding. Their romance develops through boredom, resentment, reckless fun, and the terrifying possibility that one person may want to escape more than the other. The film was released during lockdown,and accidentally became one of 2020’s most relatable stories. Everyone suddenly understood stalled time, repeated routines, and the need to find meaning inside days that had started blending together. Palm Springs made that anxiety funny without treating it lightly.
7
‘Promising Young Woman’ (2020)
In Promising Young Woman, Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) has built her adult life around the death of her best friend Nina. She dropped out of medical school, lives with her parents, works at a coffee shop, and spends nights pretending to be drunk so supposedly decent men reveal what they will do when they think a woman cannot resist. The film wraps the story in bright colours, pop music, romantic-comedy beats, and deliberately feminine styling.
That surface keeps colliding with a culture trained to protect men through excuses, reputations, and selective disbelief. Ryan Cooper (Bo Burnham) initially appears to offer Cassie a future beyond revenge, but his connection to Nina’s assault exposes how easily passive witnesses preserve the same system as active abusers. The film’s choices remain divisive, especially its cruel conclusion and police-based last move. That discomfort is part of its grip. Promising Young Woman refuses to give Cassie a clean victory or the audience a comforting idea of justice. The anger stays after the credits, exactly where it should.
6
‘Soul’ (2020)
Pixar had already explored grief, memory, family, and growing up. Soul went after a harder question. What happens when someone achieves the dream that has organised his entire identity and still feels strangely unchanged? Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) finally gets the jazz opportunity he has wanted for years, then an accident separates his soul from his body before the performance can secure the life he imagined.
The Great Before introduces Joe to 22 (Tina Fey), a soul with no interest in being born. Their journey gradually exposes the mistake at the centre of Joe’s ambition. He has confused having a purpose with earning the right to enjoy existence. Music remains essential, especially the moment he enters the zone while playing piano, but the film refuses to declare career success the highest form of fulfilment. A slice of pizza, sunlight through leaves, a subway musician, and ordinary time with another person gain equal weight. Jamie Foxx and Tina Fey keep the philosophical ideas warm and funny. Soul reached families during a year when millions were being forced to reconsider their plans. Its answer was gentle and urgently needed and it was — living cannot be postponed until the impressive part begins.
5
‘Nomadland’ (2020)
Fern (Frances McDormand) loses her husband, her job, and even her town after the gypsum plant in Empire, Nevada, shuts down. She moves into a van and joins a loose community of older Americans travelling between seasonal jobs, campsites, warehouses, and public land. Frances McDormand keeps Fern private without turning her into an empty mystery. Her independence is real, though grief also shapes every mile.
Chloé Zhao blends professional performers with real-life nomads including Linda May, Swankie, and Bob Wells. Their stories add economic anger without converting the film into a lecture. These people have worked for decades and still face insecure housing, limited healthcare, physical exhaustion, and employers ready to use them temporarily. Fern’s choices remain more complicated than simple victimhood. She receives offers of stability and leaves again. A conventional home has become difficult to separate from the life she lost with Bo. Nomadland sees freedom and precarity occupying the same space, sometimes within the same person.
4
‘Minari’ (2020)
In Minari, Jacob Yi (Steven Yeun) brings his wife Monica Yi (Yeri Han) and their children to rural Arkansas with a plan to grow Korean vegetables for immigrant communities across the American South. The family’s new home is a trailer sitting on wheels, far from the security Monica expected. Jacob sees land, independence, and a chance to build something of his own. She sees debt, isolation, tornado warnings, and a husband gambling the family’s future on pride.
Lee Isaac Chung, the director, reportedly drew from his childhood without making the Yi family a collection of inspirational immigrant symbols. Their home is loud, funny, tense, loving, and often divided. Steven Yeun gives Jacob ambition with enough selfishness to keep the dream honest. Yeri Han shows Monica’s fear without reducing her to the spouse blocking progress. Then Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung) arrives, swears, watches wrestling, drinks Mountain Dew, and disrupts young David Yi (Alan Kim)’s idea of how a grandmother should behave. The minari she plants grows easily near the creek while the expensive farm struggles. That detail lands without a speech. Roots survive differently after transplantation, and families do too.
Ruben Stone (Riz Ahmed) is touring with his partner Lou (Olivia Cooke) when his hearing suddenly begins disappearing. He is a drummer, a recovering addict, and someone whose emotional stability depends on music and the life they have built together. A doctor tells him the damage is severe and further exposure could make it worse. Ruben hears only the possibility of getting his old life back. Riz Ahmed commits to the panic without making deafness itself the villain.
Sound of Metal’s sound design shifts between muffled noise, vibration, mechanical distortion, and silence, placing the audience inside Ruben’s changing experience rather than observing it from a safe distance. At a rural deaf community led by Joe (Paul Raci), he learns sign language and begins connecting with people who reject the assumption that they need fixing. Ruben still sells his equipment to pursue cochlear implants, hoping technology will return him to Lou and music. The result sounds harsh and artificial, and their reunion reveals that both have changed. His last decision is beautifully simple because he removes the processors and sits still. For once, Ruben stops trying to outrun silence. It’s beautiful.
2
‘Another Round’ (2020)
Another Round is basically an experiment. Four teachers decide to test a theory that human beings are born with a blood-alcohol level slightly too low. They begin drinking during work hours, tracking their intake as if they are conducting legitimate research. Martin (Mads Mikkelsen), stuck in a deadened marriage and sleepwalking through his history classes, quickly feels sharper, warmer, and more connected to his students.
The experiment is funny at first because Mads Mikkelsen and the rest of the cast understand the excitement of adults suddenly rediscovering spontaneity. Drinking loosens Martin’s personality and gives him temporary access to the person he misses being. It also damages judgment, relationships, and a friend whose dependence is far more serious than the group admits. The film avoids a simple anti-alcohol message since Danish drinking culture, celebration, masculinity, and friendship are woven deeply into the story. Martin’s dance at the graduation celebration holds joy, grief, freedom, and danger in the same body. Mikkelsen launches himself toward the water, and the image offers release without pretending anyone has solved the problem.
1
‘The Father’ (2020)
Anthony (Anthony Hopkins) believes he is living independently in his London flat. His daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) keeps visiting, caregivers appear and disappear, furniture changes, and people he recognises insist they are someone else. The film provides no stable viewpoint outside his experience. Viewers have to navigate the same confusion, anger, suspicion, and terror that dementia is creating inside him.
Anthony Hopkins reaches places far beyond technical brilliance. His character can be charming with a new caregiver, cruel toward Anne, proud of his intelligence, frightened by a missing watch, and suddenly helpless when the world stops making sense. Anne has this separate heartbreak. She loves her father, resents what caring for him has taken, and feels guilty for imagining a life beyond the responsibility. The final breakdown strips Anthony of age, authority, and every defence he has used against fear. He asks for his mother and says he is losing his leaves. Hopkins does not decorate the pain. He becomes a scared child inside an old man’s body, and it is almost unbearable to witness.
The Father
- Release Date
-
December 23, 2020
- Runtime
-
96 minutes
- Director
-
Florian Zeller
- Writers
-
Christopher Hampton
