By Jon Kissel

Watching movies at home just isn't as good as in the theaters.  The drive-in isn't much better.  As coronavirus shuttered theaters and decimated the release schedule, I realized how much the forced concentration of sitting in a dark room with a socially-enforced no-distractions custom boosts the viewing experience.  Maybe that's why 2020 was the first year in a decade where I watched less than 70 year-of releases before it ended, or one that had so few to reach the A-tier.  Maybe the heavier straight-to-streaming schedule made everything seem less urgent, even as it put more obscure fare in front of more eyes.  I'm sure exactly no one would've seen Straight Up without a Netflix release.  If a lessening of passion for cinema is the worst thing that happens to a person in 2020, then they sailed through a momentous period of history unscathed.  That alone is something to be grateful for, and it's not like 2020 didn't have its fair share of exceptional movies, several of which are listed below.

​Gina Prince-Blythewood’s directorial debut, Love and Basketball, puts her alongside other talented female directors like Lynne Ramsay, Debra Granik, and Dee Rees whose output is unjustly sparse.  Prince-Blythewood’s quick first step should’ve earned her as much work as she wanted, but instead, she’s only directed three other movies in the intervening twenty years.  Her first film knows a thing or two about struggling for a thing and not getting it, whether that be a career in professional sports or a relationship with a childhood sweetheart.  Love and Basketball’s excellent grasp of its characters and their interplay is potent enough to power half a dozen films.  Packed into one complete package, it makes for a fantastic experience.

Victor Hugo’s classic Les Miserables has retained all of the raw power of its depictions of the French underclass some 160 years after its publishing, and in Ladj Ly’s fiery film of the same name, circumstances haven’t improved all that much.  The gamins of the present-day Montfermil banlieue still grow up in an environment where state authority is abusive and local authority is corrupt.  To paraphrase Hugo, both forces contribute to the clouds that will inevitably produce a thunderbolt, and Ly’s film does indeed strike lightning.  A film that has only become more relevant throughout 2020, as France has its own version of Black Lives Matter protests in response to police brutality and stop-and-frisk tactics, Les Miserables is a work that places a lot of pressure on itself with its iconic name and meets those expectations by embracing an angry humanist streak that Hugo would recognize.