The 20 Best Film Scenes of 2020

In a normal year, most of us get to experience the best in cinema among others, as shared moments of rapture, giddiness, shock, or simple awe. The best scenes of 2020 were forced to perform a more mercenary but no less valuable purpose: to make us forget, for just a few minutes, the steady drumbeat of trauma and chaos in the outside world, not to mention our increasingly mundane surroundings. The scenes below gripped us because they utilized the building blocks of cinema—composition, editing, performance, ideas—to construct moments that managed, against the odds, to earn our undivided attention in a year where it became easy to feel trapped in your own heads. But these scenes weren’t simple distractions, as they also felt like reminders of the collective rapture that awaits us when we’re able to return to movie theaters. Christopher Gray

American Utopia, “Hell You Talmbout”

Despite its satirical undercurrent, American Utopia doesn’t wallow in cynicism, and the closing stretch breaks through the many layers of the show’s postmodern impunity for a stirring plea for a better world. David Byrne covers Janelle Monáe’s “Hell You Talmbout,” an enraged lament for black people slain by cops and white supremacists that’s given added emotional impact by Spike Lee cutting away to blown-up photographs of the men and women named in the song. And in testament to this seemingly perpetual cycle of violence, Lee fills the space after the song ends with photographs of others killed since this performance was filmed, including Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, alongside a wall of text printing a full screen of names that point to an urgent message at the bottom of the frame that screams “AND TOO MANY MORE.” Jake Cole

Another Round, “What a Life”

In Another Round, Mads Mikkelsen’s Martin and his buddies seek refuge from their crisis of masculinity through alcohol, by never being sober enough to feel a thing. By the film’s final sequence, the strategy has proven untenable. Martin, who thought he’d lost it all, receives an unexpected reconciliatory text from his wife. Finally, there’s hope for him, but the pull of alcohol remains an ever-present force in his life, and after indulging in the booze handed to him by a bunch of street revelers, he promptly breaks into an explosive dance routine to the sound of Scarlet Pleasure’s ecstatic “What a Life.” It’s the rare instance of a pop song bringing life, not schmaltz, to a scene. Too many unspoken words all knotted up are finally allowed to come out—not in words, because language would be futile. The body says it all. Diego Semerene

The Assistant, Taking It Up with H.R.

Throughout writer-director Kitty Green’s The Assistant, young, beautiful women are brought into an unseen movie mogul’s office at late hours, and are referenced by both male and female employees with contempt. Growing fearful for one of the women, Jane (Julia Garner) tries to complain to an H.R. officer, Wilcock (Matthew Macfadyen), who first encourages her to speak up before swiftly and chillingly proceeding to gaslight her. It becomes evident that we’re watching—from the perspective of a powerless yet ultimately complicit person—a parable about rich, insulated predators like Harvey Weinstein, and Green’s grasp of Jane’s indoctrination into this perverse world is impeccably believable. Chuck Bowen

Bacurau, Burning Down the House

Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s Bacurau doesn’t lack for memorable scenes, but one is especially powerful for the way it seeks to subvert our sense of the bodies displayed on screen. The sight of an old naked man is obviously intended to invite a certain type of gut reaction, which the filmmakers swiftly flip on its head when rifle-wielding hunters descend on him after he enters his home and they set the straw of its thatched roof on fire. Then, our sympathies are stirred again as the man and his wife, also naked, lay waste to the intruders, in a spectacularly bloody scene that’s punctuated by a shot of the couple inside the home, standing side by side in protective stances with rifles in hand. Sam C. Mac

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, An Old Man’s Warning

Of all the unforgettable lost souls we meet across the running time of Bill and Ross Turner’s Blood Nose, Empty Pockets, Michael Martin is the most haunting: a washed-up actor, alcoholic, and all-around tortured artist type who’s fashioned himself as the sage of a Las Vegas dive bar. For much of the film, his anguish is evident but unspoken of, as he’s perfected a façade of toasted resignation. Near the end of the film, though, when the bar’s closing and a drunk is forced to face his own thoughts, Martin’s veneer shatters, and he warns a young man not to become addicted to bars as he has. His words have the self-pity that’s common of drunk speechifying, but they’re also imbued with unmistakable poetry. Reaching a low point, Martin, a lost actor, can’t help but give a fine performance, fusing our culture’s mythology of alcoholism with his own misery. Bowen

City Hall, Trash Day

Frederick Wiseman’s films routinely feature contemplative passages that simply observe people at work, but leave it to a group of sanitation workers to turn one City Hall sequence into something close to spectacle. At first, by way of showcasing the efficiency of the workers swiftly collecting trash in a pristine neighborhood, Wiseman allows us to ponder how a sanitation department is an integral part of the machinery that makes a city function. But then he appeals to our childlike giddiness when the workers throw mattress into the crunching, grinding jaws of the garbage truck. Wiseman seems to be enjoying the show as well, because he extends the scene with an encore: In goes a whole barbecue grill, which culminates with a wonderfully spontaneous moment when one of the grill’s wheels gets clipped off and rockets into the air. Wes Greene

Donbass, Humiliating a Fascist

Cameras, we’re repeatedly reminded by Donbass’s mise-en-scène, are violators, as they merely augment the dangerous power of the person wielding them. The film’s most harrowing elucidation of this theme comes in a scene on a public street, where a Ukrainian loyalist, tied to a pole by a pair of armed separatists, endures various humiliations at the hands of a growing mob of passersby, one of whom decides to record the grisly spectacle with his smartphone. As the camera circles the action, the heckler’s phone presses right up into the face of the man, relishing in his suffering, and we get the sense that the escalation of violence may have never come to pass in quite this way were it not for the spontaneous idea to turn it into a video meme. Carson Lund

Freaky, The Kiss

For a while, Christopher Landon’s mash-up of Freaky Friday and Friday the 13th easily aces the slasher-movie bell curve. The pace is tight, the gore is unexpectedly inventive, if neutered by the preponderance of obvious CGI, and the stunt casting of Vince Vaughn as a hulking serial killer is inspired. There’s little at stake though, besides Freaky’s obsession with its own cleverness, until Vaughn’s killer, now inhabited by a teenage girl, shares a kiss with the boy (Uriah Shelton) she’s always liked and been too timid to approach. The tenderness of the moment is shocking and moving, tapping into the unmooring implications—the blurring of boundaries between genders, ages, desires, and shapes—that are often ignored by body-swapping movies. Bowen

Gunda, The Piglets’ Big Move

Though Victor Kossakovsky’s Gunda never subjects us to gruesome images of slaughter à la Georges Franju’s Blood of the Beasts, it nevertheless closes with a prolonged single-shot sequence that’s more heartbreaking than any depiction of the goings-on in an abattoir ever captured on film. In this sequence, a truck pulls up to the barn where the pigs live and drives off with the piglets, leaving the mama pig in a state of grief-stricken perplexity. For minutes on end, we watch her pacing around, clearly distressed and unable to fathom why her piglets have been taken from her. By the time the credits roll on Gunda, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths. Keith Watson

Ham on Rye, The Dance

Once we’re sufficiently acclimated to Ham on Rye’s foreboding, wistful atmosphere, the filmmakers spring a poignant and satirical surprise. The teenage characters aren’t making their way toward a formal event like the traditional prom, but a ceremonial dance at a deli, in which they eat sandwiches together before forming boys- and girls-only lines so as to evaluate one another and couple. The strangeness of this arrangement, like the general timelessness of the setting, underscores the arbitrary ornateness of real ceremonies—prom, homecoming, graduation—that insidiously serve the purpose of conditioning us to become well-behaved cogs in the social machine, like all the disappointed parents who lurk in the periphery of the film. Bowen

I Was at Home, But…, Criticizing a Director

Ameliorating I Was at Home, But…’s air of formal severity is its subterranean sense of playfulness, which casually reveals itself in the background of frames, the silent pockets of conversation, and the latter halves of Angela Schanelec’s long takes. In an extended tracking shot, as Astrid (Maren Eggert) walks alongside a filmmaker (All the Cities in the North director Dane Komljen) and berates him over what she interprets as his film’s ethical malpractice of casting actors alongside real hospital patients, it becomes clear that she’s displacing her own pain about her husband and son, who’s troubled by a case of sepsis brought on by his disappearance. But the irony is that her withering critique of acting as a false façade arises in one of the film’s more commanding instances of capital-A acting. The scene closes with the nearest Schanelec gets to writing a howler: “Unbearably bad cinema,” she says, “but I still hope you get the professorship.” Lund

Joan of Arc, Busby Berkeley-Style Formation

Across Joan of Arc’s most subversive scene, Bruno Dumont transforms the ceremonial preparation for battle of the young warrior Joan (Lise Leplat Prudhomme) and her troops into an elaborate musical number. The inherent absurdism anchoring the scene is bolstered by the sense of transcendence summoned by Christophe’s flute-driven ambient music, a recurring, metronome-like drum beat, and the peculiar beauty of soldiers’ precise geometric formations, which Dumont gracefully captures in bird’s-eye-view shots that recall a Busby Berkeley dance sequence. Here, war becomes completely ritualized—less a matter of victory or defeat than a performance of faith as the battlefield becomes an extension of the Catholic Church’s influence. Derek Smith

Lovers Rock, “Silly Games”

Largely, though not entirely, jettisoning the political anger of the other films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, Lovers Rock offers an abundance of sensory delights. Immersing us in a lively mid-’70s reggae house party, the film is bursting with music, sweat-soaked dancing, and Grenadian cooking that you can practically smell. As reggae and funk tunes fill the air, the camera glides through the house and weaves through the partiers like a half-drunk participant in the night’s revelries. In a standout scene, the entire crowd on the jam-packed dance floor stops busting a move for minutes on end to sing along in unison to the entirety of Janet Kay’s lovers rock classic “Silly Games.” It’s the pinnacle of pure, unadulterated joy in a series that’s infused with so much sadness and struggle, and its impact reverberates throughout the other four films. Watson

Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Never Rarely Sometimes Always

The political centerpiece of Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always is the scene that gives it its title, in which Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is made to respond to “personal questions” with the answers “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “always.” It’s then that she can go through with her abortion. All of the questions involve increasingly violent situations with men. And in one elongated closeup, the extent of Autumn’s experiences to date are painfully suggested across her face. Ben Flanagan

Possessor, The Face

In Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg physicalizes subjective terrain, but in a manner that preserves the mess of neuroses. Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), weak and unstable, is loaded into Colin’s (Christopher Abbott) mind only to find that his consciousness is willing to put up a fight for control of his body. What ensues is a surreal, mercilessly violent war of the minds. As the two battle, their faces alternately melt and converge, culminating in an astonishing image: Tasya’s face as a kind of clay puppet, which Colin crushes inward so as to cast her out of his body. This face literalizes the paradoxical notion of a ghost in the flesh, confirming Tasya’s own fears of annihilation even as she seeks to destroy another. As the two spirits become more and more confused, the escalating brutality writ upon collateral parties is understood to be part of a quest for the tangibility of the flesh that Cronenberg himself shares in his obsession with grainy, 1970s- and ’80s-era horror films. Bowen

Space Dogs, The Killing of a Street Cat

The obscure rituals of street-dog society captured by Elsa Kremer and Levin Peter’s Space Dogs raise various questions. How did the metaphorically reborn Laika, a mostly wild animal, form a kind of partnership with a limping, slightly smaller street dog, and what are the limits of this seeming friendship? Why can’t Laika, who appears to be a German Shepherd mix, figure out how to eat a cat? The latter scene is a decisive moment of the film’s de-anthropomorphizing project. The camera catches Laika chasing a small white feline, whose panicked hisses and quick dodges are no match for the power of Laika’s large frame. Watching and hearing Laika’s jaws crunch the cat’s bones, and then fail to actually get past the fur to the cat meat (he ends up leaving the body behind), his amateurish hunting reminds us of dogs’ dual nature: genetically dispositioned to live in human society, but capable of the ferociousness of the wild. Pat Brown

To the Ends of the Earth, Amusement Park Ride

Clearly short on ideas, the crew of a travel-focused Japanese reality show at the center of To the Ends of the Earth shoot a scene at a janky amusement park ride in a park in Uzbekistan, where the show’s host, Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), is secured into a bench that she may be too small for and is thrust head over heels innumerable times. Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa shoots the scene in dynamic long takes broken up with the production’s “footage” from on and off this seeming death trap, all of it underlined by Yoko’s screams, which quickly erase the impression that she’s anything but exhausted and horrified by the experience. Eventually an eerie double-consciousness arises, juggling the hope that Yoko’s agony will soon end with the necessity that this go-round will yield sufficient footage. The ride is repeated three times, each with a growing audience. It’s a novel, if nauseating, glimpse at the work of a film crew and the casual cruelties inflicted upon performers. Gray

The Twentieth Century, Tests of Leadership

It seems as if no aspect of Canadian culture, from its customs right on down to its cinema, is safe from writer-director Matthew Rankin’s scorching satire in the filmmaker’s delightfully bonkers The Twentieth Century. But it’s in a sequence that depicts a series of tests determining the country’s next prime minister that the film arguably reaches its sardonic zenith. With each distinctly Canadian task that the candidates face—from identifying species of conifers on smell alone to gruesomely clubbing as many baby seals as possible—Rankin hilariously and bitingly lampoons the very perception of Canadian identity. The scene pulls off the feat of being both wildly entertaining and illustrating a dubious element in politics: that it’s essential for the leader to repress their individuality and become a stereotype. Greene

Vitalina Varela, Funeral Procession

Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela picks up where Horse Money left off: immersed in a realm of suppressed memory and collective trauma. The film’s first image, of an alleyway lined by looming stone walls, cross-shaped gravestones dotting the upper right wall as a funeral procession silently emerges from the background shadows, renders a real street as a kind of military trench. The shot looks like something out of a post-World War I silent film, epitomizing Costa’s uncanny ability to balance realism and stylization. Cole

The Wild Goose Lake, Beware the Umbrella

Diao Yinan’s The Wild Goose Lake mostly works in noir terrain, but every once in a while it makes attempts at a martial arts film. And no such attempt is as bracing as the electrifying scene that sees gangster Zhou (Hu Ge) escaping from captors at a hotel. A shrewd combination of punchy editing, complex sound design, and slick action choreography, the whirlwind scene achieves a visceral intensity that belies its economic staging—a powerful reminder that cinematic spectacle need not rely on computer effects. And if that wasn’t enough, the sequence features a poor shmoe suffering a novel death-by-umbrella at the hands of Zhou—a showstopping moment of inventiveness that tips the scene further into action filmmaking virtuosity. Greene