The Best Movies of 2020 So Far

As the Film School Rejects team continues to try to be safe, we're celebrating some of the best movies we've watched so far in 2020.
Best Movies So Far

Bad Education

A popular school superintendent in a prosperous district is shocked to discover that trusted members of his department have been embezzling millions of dollars from taxpayers. Cory Finley’s follow-up to the deliriously great Thoroughbreds turns a true story into a fascinating and immensely charismatic tale headlined by one of Hugh Jackman’s best performances. The movie is merciless with viewers, twisting their loyalties with cruel abandon, and it ultimately leaves you both entertained and drained. (Rob Hunter)


Be Water

There is a better you. It merely needs to be discovered and pulled free from your current form. Bruce Lee’s determination to improve is lovingly detailed in Be Water, the feature-length documentary directed by Bao Nguyen and trickily jammed into ESPN’s 30 for 30 series. Through archival footage, snippets of his few films, various letters, and an eclectic collection of interviews from friends, the doc details Lee’s magnificent will to evolve and share his philosophy of refinement with as vast an audience as possible.

Doors and walls were continually erected around him, and like the heroes he bullishly portrayed, Lee smashed them with calculated passion. Be Water exudes with Lee’s spirt, and the doc acts as a starter kit for the uninitiated or a celebration for a loving fanbase denied what should have been decades of personal as well as cinematic growth. (Brad Gullickson)


Birds of Prey

Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is often the best part of the nothing-burger that is Suicide Squad, even if its camera tends to leer at her in a shamelessly belittling way. Birds of Prey lets Harley come into her own, gleefully taking charge of her narrative with fabulously entertaining results.

Director Cathy Yan brings humor and playful attention to detail often lacking in DC’s more recent cinematic fare. The movie strikes a great balance between lambasting superhero movie tropes and indulging in them, and Robbie as Harley flourishes in the spotlight in the company of a wonderful cohort of new supporting players. Ewan McGregor is deliciously terrible as the villainous Roman Sionis. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is another standout as Huntress, a single-minded assassin whose murder curriculum skipped seduction lessons in a long-overdue, refreshingly and relatably awkward subversion of the usual black widow archetype.

Birds of Prey also delivers on the action. The smart choice to bring on John Wick helmer Chad Stahelski to oversee second unit photography pays off with excellent results. Most of this year’s anticipated tentpoles have been postponed indefinitely, and it will be a long while before cinema-going returns to what it was, but at least we got this one rollicking, action-packed good time to help hold us over until then. (Ciara Wardlow)


Da 5 Bloods

Netflix

When the hell was America ever great? Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is another challenge against those who wear our history with pride, and it should wallop some god damn sense into us as we walk into the presidential election in November. The movie sees four Black veterans of the Vietnam War return to a land they never should have been inside in order to retrieve buried treasure and make peace with the friend they left dead in the mud.

Peppered throughout the film are slices of newsreel footage that cut bloody swathes across apple pie nationalism and expose the festering wounds that still pockmark our country no matter how many Rambo or Missing In Action sequels Cannon Films shat out. Da 5 Bloods is simply Spike Lee’s best work in a decade, and it feels good to have him raging to as many people as possible on Netflix. (Brad Gullickson)


Dogs Don’t Wear Pants

It shouldn’t be possible for a film that is overflowing with mutilation to be classified as one of the best feel-good movies of the year, and yet here we are. Dogs Don’t Wear Pants is a wholly original, wildly unpredictable, and sincerely beautiful portrait of grief and human connection. It centers on Juha (Pekka Strang), a doctor who lost his wife some years prior and feels her absence every day. When he crosses paths with Mona (Krista Kosonen), a dominatrix, he discovers incredible pain is a powerful way to remind yourself that you’re alive.

Their relationship is, to put it mildly, intense, but the film is also deeply vested in Juha’s struggle, his stagnation, his determination to be a good father to his only daughter, and his inability to fully contend with the loss he’s endured. Juha’s grief is as complicated, messy, and emotional as any of the forms of consensual torture depicted in the film. Very little of this tastes good going down, but I suspect that the film wouldn’t be as deeply rewarding as it is if that was the case. (Anna Swanson)

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