Christopher Llewellyn Reed’s Top 10 Films of 2020

As I did in both 2018 and 2019, I offer, in my below 2020 Top 10 list, my 5 favorite fiction films and 5 favorite documentaries, in alphabetical order. I pull these from the two separate lists I already published at Hammer to Nail (where I am lead film critic). I will soon, on my blog, publish a longer list, with additional runners-up and honorable mentions. Enjoy!

• • Boys State (Amanda McBaine/Jesse Moss)
• • Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Justin Pemberton)
• • Farewell Amor (Ekwa Msangi)
• • First Cow (Kelly Reichardt)
• • Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President (Mary Wharton)
• • John Lewis: Good Trouble (Dawn Porter)
• • Kajillionaire (Miranda July)
• • Miss Juneteenth (Channing Godfrey Peoples)
• • Nomadland (Chloé Zhao)
• • A Thousand Cuts (Ramona S. Diaz)

Despite the pandemic, studios and distributors, major and minor, kept on release a plethora of content throughout the year, though some of the big-ticket items were postponed until 2021. I was not such a huge fan of the ostensible blockbuster items this time around, and my list reflects my preference for the smaller movies. Since I have previously reviewed all of them, I hyperlinked the titles to those reviews (whether on this site or on Hammer to Nail).

Christopher Llewellyn Reed

Christopher Llewellyn Reed is a film critic, filmmaker, and educator, as well as Film Festival Today's Editor. A member of both the Online Film Critics Society (OFCS) and the Washington DC Area Film Critics Association (WAFCA), and a Rotten Tomatoes-approved film critic, Chris is, in addition, lead film critic at Hammer to Nail and the author of Film Editing: Theory and Practice.