Best Scenes of 2020
“But what loving demands is that we face the fear of losing each other. That when it gets messy, we hold each other close. And when we can, we defiantly celebrate our brief moments of joy.”
Every year we watch hundreds of films that contain thousands of scenes within them, and through it all, we come away with a handful of moments that stick with us. These are the scenes we think about walking home or discussing over dinner with friends (or over Zoom this year). They contain the one liners, the gut punches, the tear-inducing, pull on your heartstrings, make you want to cry and you don’t know why moments that leave lasting impressions on us for days or even weeks at a time.
On a basic level, scenes are a fundamental building block with which a director constructs their films, but the way they orchestrate the contents within them can make all the difference in how we react to them. Whether it be a climatic revelation, a subtle moment of directorial brilliance, or a poignant punctuation to conclude a film, these scenes scenes display a creative, technical, and thematic mastery that we simply can’t stop thinking about. As selected by our writing team, these are our favorite scenes of 2020.
—
Major Spoilers for the films below
—
“Wake Up the Americans”
Tenet
Somewhere in Russia, a concert is about to begin. The audience takes their seats, a symphony tunes their instruments, the doors close, the lights come down, and just as the conductor taps his baton to begin the sonata, a thunderous gunshot reverberates throughout the auditorium. Terrorists stream in. People scream. And in the parking lot outside, a driver waiting in a van tells his partner, “Wake up the Americans.”
And so begins Christopher Nolan’s perilous Tenet. In what might contend for the director’s best action scene — which truthfully isn’t saying much — Nolan kicks off his Michael-Mann-inspired, action-packed, globetrotting blockbuster with an immediate call to attention. As terrorists take hostages, the group of waiting government spies, led by our mysterious ‘Protagonist’ (John David Washington), sneak in under the guise of a police SWAT unit. An anxiety-inducing score by Ludwig Göransson starts to slowly build — pulsating with distorted guitar riffs, sirens, and electric piano — and the moment the agents are about breach the auditorium, they break off from the SWAT unit and start looking for their extraction target containing unknown contents.
What makes this opener so great is how Nolan effectively builds a scene around a scenario, capturing your full attention without explaining the significance of anything, and keeping you in suspense the entire time. Why these spies want this metal cube or why a bullet suddenly fires in reverse is totally ill-defined, but it speaks to the carrot-on-a-stick strategy that makes you curious to know more. It grabs you, thrusting you headlong into two and a half hours of time-inverted technobabble nonsense that collapses under the weight of its own premise, but for those first ten minutes, it completely and utterly engrossing.
—Greg Arietta
Silly Games
Lovers Rock
If we know anything about Steve McQueen’s shot selections, we know he has a penchant for long takes. Frequently, his films’ most traumatic moments employ unbroken shots. But unlike some of the longer takes in Hunger or 12 Years a Slave, an unbroken shot in Lovers Rock pauses on a spontaneous chorus of young people on a dance floor for a shared transcendent moment.
Wires are rigged between speakers and turntables are accompanied by a milk crate catalogue of 7-inch blues and reggae records. A plastic-covered couch is relocated to the backyard to free up space for the dance floor in the living room. Once two bodies pair off and enter the dance floor, the rest follow. Soon you have every available person swaying to Janet Kay’s 1979 tune “Silly Games.” The track ends but the voices continue the chorus long after the record stops spinning. Gone is the cinematic language used to convey the feeling of the party. Now, we experience the party as if we attended it ourselves. We are in 1980 London, in a living room, swaying with the pairs on the dance floor while crooning in unison, “I’ve been wanting you. For so long, it's a shame.” What a special feeling.
—Kevin Conner
You can read Cinema As We Know It’s review on the film here.
Murder House Finale
VHYES
Jack Henry Robbin’s VHYES is chockablock with bizarre emotional peaks and one-off comedy bits, but the film shows its true colors as it reaches its climactic confrontation. Tonally, the film is steadily goofy and generally lighthearted, but there is one moment of horror so unpredictable that changes everything. Ralph (Mason McNulty) and his best friend Josh (Rahm Braslaw) explore the ruins of a local sorority house suspected to be haunted by the victims of a heinous crime, previously teased in silly dramatization segments. This murder house serves as the threshold where the recordings merge into Ralph’s reality, forcing him to face his internal fears. Suddenly the burned out house is filled with unspooled VHS tape that catches the low light like an alien substance, tangled like a bed of snakes. Ralph’s handheld camcorder shakes and blurs as he searches for an escape, and we can only helplessly watch. In a moment pulled straight from the Blair Witch Project, we catch a glimpse of a distorted ghostly figure. This terror is the exact terror of finding a scary movie on TV late at night when you were a kid, knowing it was going to give you nightmares later. It’s a culmination of the film’s disparate pieces into something ambitious and unpredictable, the essential spirit of VHYES.
—MeganBernovich
A Few Questions
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
In Eliza Hitman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a young girl named Autumn travels from Pennsylvania to New York to receive an abortion. The director of Beach Rats and It Felt Like Love pens an honest and immediate testimony on the difficulty of getting the procedure in America, and while the film is full of small moments of nuance and beauty, one scene in particular stands out for its emotional force.
At the Planned Parenthood in New York, the advising physician asks Autumn a series of questions that precede the procedure. They start out normal — do you smoke, do you drink, do you exercise, etc. — but as they progress, the questions become more personal, painting in the abusive backstory of how Autumn became pregnant. In a single four minute take, first-time actress Sidney Flanigan puts on a deeply moving performance that becomes one of the Never Rarely Sometimes Always’ emotional climaxes. Flanigan's eyes dart around the room as the advisor asks questions off screen. She fidgets in her seat. Her eyes water up and her voice trembles as she comes to brink of tears. It’s not only exemplary of one of the best acting moments of the year, but it’s also the scene where our sympathy for Autumn overflows. For the remaining forty minutes, we’re made aware of the deeper significance to this journey, and made angrier by that proper care is made so inaccessible.
—Greg Arietta
You can read Cinema As We Know It’s review on the film here.
The Funeral
Dick Johnson Is Dead
At the end of Kirsten Johnson’s latest, we find the friends and family of her father, Dick Johnson, gathered in a Seattle church to pay their respects. They share stories about Dick, like when he comforted a distressed friend who witnessed a death. Dick is described to us as someone whose heart was always willing to help, but whose mind showed recent signs of wear. The latter sentiment receives a moment of silent recognition. The tension in the air is palpable as this gathering commemorates the ostensible passing of their friend.
It is not for some time that we are clued in that Dick is actually alive, looking on through a porthole window of the church, like sailor with a periscope from the realm of non-living to the realm of the living. The funeral is a staged goodbye gathering before Dick moves to New York to receive more day to day care. You would assume the contrived nature of the funeral would undercut the emotions in its participants, but as Dick’s coffins fades from the alter via special effects, the leader of the event is inconsolable in a corner. To see Dick in one place with all those who love him is powerful. He is misty-eyed, and so are we.
—Kevin Conner
Firestarter
Ema
It is my long standing belief that films should have more dance sequences. Beetlejuice. Prom Night. The Big Lebowski. Another Round. I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Within their respective films, those dance numbers frequently stand out as highlights for their splendor and indulgence, but in Pablo Larraín’s Ema, dance numbers become an integral part of the narrative itself, including its opening.
Larraín begins his drama with a rhythmic montage that weaves the past and present together to establish our central conflict. One thread shows previous events that resulted in the titular Ema surrendering her adopted son to child services, while the other shows a present day interpretive dance recital where Ema takes lead. Set to the beat of the dance, Larraín cuts these timelines together to show how the specter of the past remains firmly embedded in the present. The iconography of a burning sun set against the dancers’ background suggests that Ema’s molten core is derived from the loss of her son in tandem with the interpersonal friction between her and her partner. It all coalesces with a searing kineticism that clearly defines the scorched motivations of the film — motivations that, as we will come to learn, are not extinguished easily.
—Greg Arietta
A Mother Says Goodbye
Gunda
For the overwhelming majority of Viktor Kossakovsky’s minimalist documentary Gunda you watch nothing but black and white shots of pigs, chickens, and cows who roam fields, sleep in styes, and live in coops. There are no spoken words nor even a single frame of informational text in the entire film. Just the sounds and visuals of animals doing animal things in their animal lives. But around the seventy minute mark, Kossakovsky disturbs the natural image with the arrival of a tractor.
There for but a moment, a tractor comes and goes, taking with it the motherly Gunda’s piglets and leaving her frantic as she searches her stye for her children. For well over an hour, a natural image has been maintained, curated so as to not show any humans what so ever. But within these brief moments Kossakovsky makes his first suggestion as to what Gunda is all about. Because Kossakovsky decided to align ourselves with the animals through observation, the industrious intervention by the tractor comes across as an intentional suggestion that industrial farming practices are cruel and inhuman, causing emotional impacts on animals that are commonly dismissed for the production of meat product. It’s the most eventful occurrence in the entire film, and it's one of the most dramatic scenes all year.
—Greg Arietta
You can read Cinema As We Know It’s review on the film here.
Closing Time
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
A fitting end to this list — and to the year 2020 — would be the end of Bill and Turner Ross’ Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. Throughout this pseudo-documentary, patrons of the Roaring 20s have been drinking the night away knowing that this will be the last night the bar is operating, all the while the 2016 US presidential election takes place that same evening. In the last montage, the Ross brothers string together brief vignettes of where these patrons go when the good times are over. Their favorite bar they went to escape is now closed, and now they must confront the realities they left at the door when they first arrived. Some are hopeful, others not so much. But as a windup musical carousel plays a melancholic chimed rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner,” there is the sense that all good things must come to an end, an ending that is somber and somewhat befitting for where we are as a nation.
—Greg Arietta
You can read Cinema As We Know It’s review on the film here.
Cinema As We Know It’s Best of 2020 Lists
All our favorites from the worst livable year on record