The Best Movies & Shows Released in 2020 (Page 3)
Find the best movies and show to watch from the year 2020. These handpicked recommendations are highly-rated by viewers and critics.
Love & Anarchy is a raunchy and poignant series that mainly follows Sofie (Ida Engvoll ), a middle-aged consultant whose steady, predictable life is forever changed when she befriends the office temp, Max (Björn Mosten). Sofie and Max take turns daring each other to do unconventional things in public, from walking backward at work to […]
Love Life, like the Prime Video show Modern Love, is an anthology series featuring all sorts of romances and relationships. But unlike the latter, which gives us wildly different characters and plotlines in each episode, Love Life dedicates an entire season to one person. It follows them from the moment they meet their first love […]
Legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne returns with this enigmatic stage show, and with Spike Lee in tow, the film reaches for the heights of the iconic concert doc Stop Making Sense. For those unfamiliar, Stop Making Sense directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) captured the Talking Heads’ invigorating live show in their […]
After the success of Castlevania, it became apparent that there was a market for American anime– so Netflix teamed up with Powerhouse Animation Studios and the Greek-American Parlapanides Brothers to create Blood of Zeus. Claiming to be a tale “lost to history”, the show takes familiar strands of Greek mythos, such as demigod births, fantastical […]
Written proudly in the Mississippi vernacular, P-Valley tells a story of sex, trauma, and ambition in a totally unembellished way. There’s something decidedly un-Hollywood about it, both in the way it embraces its Black and Southern roots and in how it portrays stripping as the athletic feat it truly is. So even if the show […]
A great example that you don’t necessarily need millions of dollars to deliver something technically brilliant, Residue takes a simple story of a man coming home and layers its images and sound design together until it becomes something else entirely. And even with its aesthetic sophistication, the performances behind it still come off as nothing […]
This fun comedy-drama is about Bridget, a 34-year-old who hasn’t quite got it all figured out, but at least she’s trying: after terminating an accidental pregnancy, she gets herself a summer gig as a nanny for a fearless six-year-old by the name of Frances. Tackling a myriad of “taboo” topics including abortion, menstruation, and depression, […]
When history shoves you in the corner and current generations start to forget their roots, it makes sense to take up an urgent if frantic tone. That’s what the showrunners of Equal have done here. Scenes are packed with busy animation, star-studded reenactments, and paragraphs of history lessons (sometimes all at once), so much so […]
Marona’s Fantastic Tale is a rich story about life and death and everything in between, told entirely through the eyes of a dog. With breathtaking visuals and unmatched empathy, the film implores us to think about what might count as joyous and heartbreaking for our four-legged friends. Told normally and in any other way, we […]
Gunda offers an empathetic look at the lives of farm animals with its minimalist approach to the nature doc. Director Victor Kossakosvsky films without a sentimental score or voice-over narration, and shoots in a sparse yet striking black and white. This decision gives the film an intimacy often missing from more traditional modes. We watch […]
Misunderstood by some at the time of its original release, this three-episode adaptation of Dracula from the creators of BBC’s Sherlock goes from being a highly satisfying slice of horror to something totally unrecognizable—which is why it’s so rewarding to revisit today. Blessed with stellar production design, incredible practical effects, and brilliant performances from a […]
This beautiful drama is set over a summer in New York State. Kathy and her son Cody drive to her estranged sister’s house, who had just passed. Kathy plans to quickly sell the house and go back to her normal life but that doesn’t happen when she learns that her sister was a hoarder. Forced […]
This intimate and personal film is about Sibil Fox Rich, an entrepreneur and mother of six. Fox is driven by an unparalleled, contagious determination to succeed — so present in the mix of video diaries and present-day footage of her in Time. For the past 20 years, Rich has channeled that tenacity towards the release […]
There’s no point denying it: Michael Jordan is one of, if not the greatest of all time. What he did to place the Chicago Bulls on the map, to inspire his teammates to a three-peat championship, and to constantly reinvent himself and grow his name as a currency—all that continues to be a template for […]
The simple premise of this series, about real couples going to therapy, shouldn’t feel as revolutionary as it does. And yet, Couples Therapy feels like radical reality-TV, a focused and coherent undertaking. Couples of different histories, ages, races, and sexual orientations walk into Dr. Orna Guralnik’s New York office. Their problems are as diverse and […]
Mystery, domestic horror, and urgent true crime investigation rolled into one, Rewind sees filmmaker Sasha Joseph Neulinger revisiting his own abuse at the hands of a family member while remembering to let his case amplify into a call to action to protect children everywhere. His personal testimony would have been powerful enough, but he dares […]
Two misfits, an immigrant and a traveling cook, team up to start an unlikely enterprise in this slow but captivating drama. The story, set in 19th century Pacific Northwest, evolves around the arrival of the first cow to that part of the world. This presents a unique opportunity that the two main characters try to […]
For better or worse, The Reason I Jump isn’t a documentary made for autistic viewers but for a neurotypical audience that may not be very knowledgeable about autism. This means the film doesn’t really offer anything new to the conversation, and it misses the opportunity to truly let its main characters express themselves in their […]
Set in 1930s Hollywood, a decadent city festering with crime and corruption, Perry Mason is a stylish noir series that fully recalls the crime classics of its era. It has the hallmarks of an old-fashioned mystery, the most prominent of which is the titular detective himself, Perry Mason—a boozy antihero with a heart of rusty […]
On-screen, we’ve seen downtrodden Cinderella-esque leads, we’ve seen humans transform into animals, and we’ve seen whole families cursed, but Fruits Basket takes all these plot devices and transforms them into something completely different. As Tohru Honda gets to learn about the mysterious Sohma family, and she and friends gets into fun and wacky hijinks with […]
This adaptation of a tragedy by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson might retain the mostly minimal setting of its source material — two rooms in a Chicago recording studio — but the searing performances at its heart more than warrant the translation to the big screen. A ferocious Viola Davis plays the titular ‘Mother of […]
This stirring peek into the final days of a shuttering Las Vegas dive might be one of the finest odes to American bar culture yet. It also serves as a powerful portrait of a particular moment deep into the disastrous Trump years, yet right before the pandemic struck. Directors Bill and Turner Ross capture the […]
Reminding us that there’s so much more to American sketch comedy than Saturday Night Live, Sherman’s Showcase transports us into a bizarre variety show run by an egomaniacal host, where all the laws of space and time seem to be broken. It’s all ultimately very silly, but the jokes that this mock-variety series pulls out […]
This mini-series by Alex Garland (28 Days Later writer and Ex Machina director) is about a tech company like Google that has a building that only select developers (devs) work in. Sergei is one of the lucky ones that get the call but he disappears after his first day. His girlfriend, who works for the […]
By all outward appearances, The Villages—a massive and manicured retirement community in Florida—looks like it does offer paradise to its aging residents, as promised. The list of activities is endless, the seniors are all partnered up. “It’s like going back to college,” as one of them puts it, where people from all over the country […]
Cassie Bowen (Kaley Cuoco) is a hot mess. She’s flirty, flighty, and constantly blackout drunk, so when she wakes up one day to find a dead man next to her, it’s not entirely beyond the realm of possibility that she’s responsible for it. But as Cassie uncovers new memories over time, it gets harder and […]
This docuseries is a straightforward account of what actually happens in emergency rooms and about people who dedicate their lives to this extremely demanding work. Set in a New York hospital that has struggled in the past to compete with bigger establishments, it follows two brain surgeons, an OBGYN, and an ER physician. If you […]
This immersive documentary is about a beloved independent record store that opened in front of a major music chain in Manhattan in 1995. Its founders called it Other Music, a jab at the chain and a reference to the music it would carry. Other Music would go on to become a mecca that welcomes music […]
Frank Zappa’s creative scope could barely be defined – a mix of rock, composition, design, and in his early days even filmmaking. This documentary does its best to summarize the un-summarizable, starting with Zappa’s last time playing guitar and going back to early details like an infatuation with explosives as a kid. Zappa’s overwhelmingly full […]
This documentary from Ken Burns is a selection of stories from prisoners enrolled in a competitive college program. Many of the prisoners are in maximum-security facilities, some for serious crimes. Seeing their difficult imprisonment conditions, the struggles they come from, and yet their incredible determination to excel in their education – it’s all such a […]
This Obamas-produced documentary does much to change the way we may still view people with disabilities as helpless or to be pitied. First, Crip Camp cleans up footage from a 1970s New York summer camp for disabled teens to pristine sound and video quality, allowing us to see how vibrant and lively this community has […]
Mythic Quest is a workplace sitcom following the fictional video game studio Mythic Quest HQ. Created by the people behind It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the series is equal parts sentimental and funny, and with each episode running at more or less 30 minutes, it’s also a breeze to watch. This isn’t to say that […]
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It’s slower and stranger than most comedies you may be used to, but there’s still lots of heart to be found in the way Classmates Minus follows the lapsed hopes and wishes of its core characters. Beneath all its stereotypically male yearnings for control and romantic wish fulfillment, there are potent ideas here about how […]
The drug trade is international, but it is rarely portrayed as such on TV. Drug thrillers often take place in one country and in one or two languages (usually Spanish and English) – but in reality, there are producers, buyers, and sellers, all based in different parts of the world. So a show depicting the […]
