The summer I first listened to my father’s scratchy vinyl of the original West Side Story cast recording, I was particularly taken by Tony’s opening number, “Something’s Coming,” in which he revels in an almost cosmic feeling of anticipation. The tragedy is, he doesn’t know he’ll be dead by the end of the second act. But in the glorious few minutes of the song, when Tony croons sentiments like “There’s something due any day,” the world of the show—and the world of a young listener—teems with poetic possibility. What joy, to trust that something grand and clarifying is just around the corner.
Steven Spielberg’s new film version of West Side Story, one of the 20th century’s best musicals, has been delayed, pushed from its December 2020 release date all the way to next December. It’s yet another movie casualty of the COVID-19 crisis, a time in the world (and very potently in America) when it’s been hard to gaze out at the future, as Tony does, and see anything good growing on the horizon. Something is still coming, but we’ll have to wait just a bit longer.
That’s been the refrain for so much of Hollywood since March of this year, as one anticipated film after another has dropped off the release schedule. Marvel fans will have to wait many months more for Black Widow and Eternals. Big Oscar hopefuls may still open in January and February, but the normally lively and enriching fall movie season—when film festivals debut a glittery array of serious and inventive work and people make their annual pilgrimages to the art houses to see them—has instead been reduced to a skeleton crew of assorted titles that decided to brave the storm, or put themselves on demand.
For movie fans (and for those who work in and cover the industry—who hopefully are fans themselves) it’s been a dispiriting year. Without the usual rhythm of spring and summer blockbusters giving way to the smaller, more prestigious stuff of autumn, it’s hard to get a handle on what this year in movies actually was. Has there been a year in movies at all, really?
Well, yes, as it turns out. Through all the turbulence and existential angst, 2020 has managed to offer up some films that honor the form. Those movies have had a sustaining effect, certainly a larger onus than their makers ever thought they’d have, but worthy of the calling. Some critics’ groups like the New York Film Critics Circle, of which I am a part, have decided not to delay their year-end awards votes to give a chance to the January and February titles that are being counted as 2020 films by the Academy. We will instead consider only titles released in the calendar year. The reasoning being that, though the year’s selection of contenders has been seriously truncated, there is still much to be celebrated.
Should Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which premiered to raves at an in-person Venice International Film Festival and a more virtual Toronto International Film Festival, stick to its December release date, it will be one of the jewels of 2020. Nomadland is about displaced Americans who have found themselves that way by choice or by circumstance (or, in some fashion, by both). Zhao’s film takes a heaving breath as it gazes at the vast loneliness and loveliness of a country forever in search of itself. It’s a movie that feels very much of the here and now, following an itinerant woman’s journey across a landscape seized in struggle.
Frances McDormand’s performance in Nomadland may be the one to beat this year, though I’d throw some weight behind Carrie Coon, whose work in the September release The Nest is electrifying theater. A dark chamber piece from writer-director Sean Durkin, The Nest tells another story of scrambling economy, zeroing in on one family, vagabonds in their own right, as the bubble of their 1980s wealth fantasy bursts terribly. Coon is mesmerizing throughout, staging a glam tailspin that’s as righteous as it is frightening.
It wasn’t all dark stuff in 2020, though. In May, a planned theatrical release for Nisha Ganatra’s music-industry comedy The High Note was ditched for on-demand, where it played quite well. A frothy but savvy comedy, The High Note features a rare and beguiling movie turn from TV star Tracee Ellis Ross, who channels some of her mother’s diva swagger to play a pop and R&B star trying to revitalize her legendary career. Ross has able partnership in Dakota Johnson, the two actors giving vibrant buoyancy to a lushly mounted workplace comedy. The High Note was ideal late-spring fare, and is what I’m still recommending to anyone—my dentist, my parents, the nurse who administered my second COVID-19 swab—who asks me what they should watch while stuck at home but who don’t want anything too heavy.
When the Cannes Film Festival finally announced it was going dark in 2020—the festival organizers held out an almost cruel tendril of hope until mid-May—the fates of many non-English-language titles, which typically use the festival as a huge springboard into the American market, were cast into the unknown. But at least one title from last year’s Cannes, Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles’s stunning political allegory Bacurau, made it into theaters just before the pandemic. Once theaters closed, the film’s distributor, Kino Lorber, arranged for some virtual screenings. But I worry that this wild and urgent film—about a rural Brazilian town fighting off the worst kind of capitalist predation—got a bit lost in the mad shuffle of spring. So I’ll highlight it again here; in a year that sadly denied Americans access to many sterling foreign titles, Bacurau offers a holdover testament to the wealth of filmmaking happening all around the world.