The 25 Best Documentaries of 2020
Though the pandemic has all but murdered moviegoing in 2020, for the lowly documentary film, the distribution landscape has never looked more promising. Often relegated to festivals and then, if fortune-favored, Netflix or HBO, documentaries rarely receive the attention or the right platform to reach more than a specialized audience. If it seems like 2020 was a particularly bright year for documentaries, that might be because you could actually watch many of these at home, streaming through virtual cinemas or online festivals or via services like Mubi and Kanopy (off the top of the dome).
In the spirit of such bounty, the following 25 documentaries cover a broad swath of picks: Jodie Mack’s feature-length
The A.V. Club’s list of 2020’s best TV shows was determined by a voting body made up of staffers…Read more
But, with all the time in the world to catch up on Peak TV or, at least, considerably more we also challenged ourselves to seek out bold new stories and storytellers, and even question what makes TV, TV. We found restoration and vital discussion in Michaela Coel’s
I May Destroy You, a profound exploration of abuse survivors, and let Steve James take us on a trip through the life-crushing bureaucracy and systemic racism of Chicago, a
Streamers,
OK Emily, you say
I May Destroy You, I say how high! Michaela Coel’s series is, very straightforwardly, a show about consent, sexual trauma, and recovery, but it is not just those things, whatever
just could mean in this context. At the end of the first episode, Coel’s character Arabella is drugged and raped at a bar, but before that there’s
already enough for a whole series up on screen, one about the dynamics and dating habits of a group of friends, about the social milieu of a cohort of young Black Brits, about the emergence of an incredibly talented but raw young writer totally entangled with social media. Those threads never go away, they just infuse the show with
Hallo Meine TV Club Freunde,
My German is rudimentary high school level, so who knows if that’s correct, but I will take a brief moment to hop into Emily’s
Babylon Berlin party anyhow.
Babylon Berlin! Few shows this year have been more aware of the power of the image both visually and thematically and as Emily so correctly diagnoses, few shows had the kind of runway that this one did. The sprawl makes room for mistakes, but the sprawl also makes room for one-off experiments and odd narrative sidetracks. And I truly believe that there’s no shortcut for the feeling of having lived with characters for many, many hours. Some shows squander that, of course, and some manage to use their brief runs much more efficiently than others in terms of character development (