2020 movies: 35 films to watch this year

(Image credit: Illustrated | javarman3/iStock)

last updated 17 January 2020

I'm calling it right now: 2020 is going to be the year of women directors.

Over a third of the movies I'm most looking forward to in the upcoming year will have women at the helm, a percentage that is still painfully too low, but also, encouragingly, the highest since I've begun making these lists. From established names like Sofia Coppola to newcomers like Autumn de Wilde, it's safe to say the future isn't just female — the present is as well. Hey Academy voters, bookmark this page!

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When you talk about "unadaptable" stories, you tend to mean literature that is either so stylistic, or so internally-focused, that it wouldn't translate well to screen. My favorite H.P. Lovecraft short story, "The Color Out of Space," is unadaptable for another reason: it revolves around a pigment that is "almost impossible to describe ... it was only by analogy that they called it color at all." Good luck putting that on screen! Then again, count on director Richard Stanley (who hasn't made a fictional film since 1992's Dust Devil) to be the one to attempt it. Starring Nicolas Cage, who is good again, The Color Out of Space could be the movie that pulls this one off (even if the "color" seems from the trailer to be, well, a more terrestrial fuchsia).

Parasite is a lock to win the Oscar for Best International Feature this year, but Beanpole — Russia's submission — is, in my opinion, an equally terrific film (I had an opportunity to see it at the New York Film Festival last year). Finally being released into theaters this January, Beanpole is set in Leningrad in 1945, not long after the horrific two-year siege with the Nazis has been lifted. Quiet Iya has returned from the war, working as a nurse and acting as surrogate mother to her absent friend's 3-year-old son, Pashka. Beanpole is only the second film by 27-year-old Kantemir Balagov (Closeness), who won Best Director at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival for his effort, but its tragic handling of the traumatic aftermath of war is masterfully done.

I'm happy to blame Marvel for our obsession with film universe timelines, a concern DC's Birds of Prey throws right out the window. "So, did Suicide Squad happen? Does Batman exist here? Is Billy Batson a few cities away? No one knows for sure," writes Gizmodo of Birds of Prey, which was conceived by Harley Quinn actress Margot Robbie when she realized (as she told Variety) that "there was a real gap in the market for a female ensemble action film." Described by director Cathy Yan as being "Pulp Fiction meets Rashomon," the story finds Harley teaming up with other ladies on the supervillain Black Mask's (Ewan McGregor) hit list, including Black Canary (Jurnee Smollett-Belland) and the Huntress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). Every year there are more than enough superhero movies; Birds of Prey, at last, sounds like something new.

Downhill is the English-language remake of the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure, a movie I'd found so funny when I saw it, I literally doubled-over with tears streaming down my face in the theater from laughing (in a bizarre twist, the particular scene I'm referring to actually became a Twitter meme last summer). While remaking Force Majeure is, admittedly, rather unnecessary — to quote Bong Joon Ho's Golden Globes acceptance speech, "once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films" — I won't pass up an opportunity to laugh at the same jokes all over again. And some new ones, it seems, too! Based on the trailer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell put their own comedic fingerprints on this story about a doomed ski vacation that leads a married couple to rethink their relationship.

The umpteenth Jane Austen adaptation might not usually be worth your attention, but let me be totally clear: Emma deserves to make you sit up straight. For one thing, it's being brought to screen by Autumn De Wilde, a high-fashion portraitist and music video director whose discerning eye will have a heyday with the requisite Georgian costuming (lace! Hats! PARASOLS!). Playing the titular Miss Woodhouse is Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch), while Eleanor Catton — the author of the Man Booker Award-winning Luminaries — is penning the script. Looking bound to be one part The Favourite, one part Love & Friendship, the result is a timeless comedy of manners, the likes of which, nevertheless, you've never seen before.

A new Kelly Reichardt film is always cause for celebration, and First Cow is no different (I saw it at the New York Film Festival last year). Set in the early 1800s in the wilds that would one day become Oregon State, First Cow tells the story of a fur trapper named Cookie (John Magaro) and Chinese immigrant King-Lu (Orion Lee), who team up to steal milk from the only cow in the entire region — which belongs to a wealthy, if oblivious, English landowner. Cookie and King-Lu use the stolen dairy to make and sell buttermilk biscuits, dangerously flirting with the potential to get caught. With a delicate score by William Tyler, this quiet film is worth slowing down for.

Seeing the first A Quiet Place (2018) was one of my favorite moviegoing experiences ever: You could have heard a pin drop, literally, in the sold-out theater, as if we were the ones being stalked by monsters attracted to sound. The movie was a massive success, grossing over $340 million on a $21 million budget and earning an Oscar nomination for sound editing. The sequel, A Quiet Place: Part II, apparently bounces back and forth between the present and the past; in the trailer, we see Evelyn (Emily Blunt) and her family's first white-knuckle encounter with the monsters. But as the sharp-eyed Jerrica Tisdale notices for CinemaBlend, we also know that "based on Evelyn's still-bandaged foot" in other parts of the trailer, "A Quiet Place II probably doesn't take place too far after the first one ended." Here's to at last learning the Abbotts' ultimate fate.

Disney doesn't have a perfect track record when it comes to live-action remakes of its animated films, but I have a whole lot of hope riding on this adaptation of fan-favorite Mulan. Part of what has me optimistic is the fact that it looks like the remake is going to depart fairly significantly from the animated version, rather than be a shot-for-shot remake. Gone is the original movie's humor (RIP Mushu) and songs (although "I'll Make A Man Out of You" was a banger), and in are actors Liu Yifei in the lead role and Yoson An playing a rewritten love interest, Chen Honghui. What still has the potential to be rather thorny, though, are the movie's politics: The original Mulan bombed in China because its title character was "too 'individualistic' and 'self-aggrandizing,'" MTV writes. With the ever-important Chinese box office looming over the new production, how far is this Mulan willing to push its feminist themes?

One part rom-com, one part murder mystery, The Lovebirds is a new project from The Big Sick director Michael Showalter. The movie reunites Showalter with lead actor Kumail Nanjiani, who stars opposite none other than the brilliant Issa Rae of Insecure. The two play a couple who are forced to work together to clear their names, and save their relationship, after being sucked unwillingly into a murder mystery. As Popsugar puts it, "two of the funniest people on TV, up to wacky hijinks while solving a murder? Seriously, just take my money, Paramount!" Mine too!

The tenure of the world's most reluctant 007 is at last coming to an end. The final installment of the Daniel Craig pentalogy, No Time to Die finds a retired James Bond being reenlisted to find a missing scientist. Léa Seydoux returns as the Bond girl, although it might be more fitting to give that title to Lashana Lynch, who plays Nomi, a 00 agent who will soon be taking over the franchise as the "new James Bond" (at least in codename). The hilarious Phoebe Waller-Bridge, of Fleabag acclaim, was brought in to "liven up" the script, which means I, for one, am totally sold (as if I wasn't already — avowed James Bond fan right here). No news yet on who's doing the theme song for the 25th movie, but my vote, as it is every year, is for Guns N' Roses.

The subgenre of rape and revenge films gets a 21st-century twist in Promising Young Woman. Cassie (Carey Mulligan) once dreamed of being a doctor, before her life was derailed by an assailant. Now she leads a double life, going to bars and pretending to be drunk and vulnerable in order to lure predatory "good guys" into taking her home. Fittingly, the film is written and directed by Killing Eve showrunner Emerald Fennell, who has already proven herself adept at walking the line between pulpy and high-brow. I'll be listening for how this movie goes over with critics at its premiere at Sundance at the end of the month; I'm rooting for Promising Young Woman to pull it off.

Few stars have been able to successfully pull of the transition from musical artist to actor, but Janelle Monáe has more than proven herself in supporting roles in Hidden Figures, Moonlight, and Harriet. At last she's taking center stage in Antebellum, which shares a producer with Get Out and Us. Monáe will play Veronica, an author who "finds herself trapped in a horrifying reality and must uncover the mind-bending mystery before it's too late," in the words of the studio. Based on the trailer, it seems safe to say there are some kind of parallel realities at play here, one in our present and one in the antebellum South. I'm intrigued.

I've made it something of a habit of muttering to myself "remember Benh Zeitlin" every few years and, well, he's actually back this time! After making a splash with Beasts of the Southern Wild back during what felt like the Late Cretaceous period (it was actually 2012), the buzzy director has at last finished his sophomore film Wendy, based loosely on Peter Pan. Last time around, Zeitlin coaxed an Oscar-nominated performance out of then six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, and he's introducing another promising youngster, Devin France, as Wendy Darling in his newest film. Adds the studio: "Lost on a mysterious island where aging and time have come unglued, Wendy must fight to save her family, her freedom, and the joyous spirit of young from the deadly peril of growing up."

If I've learned anything from this awards season, it's never write off a war movie. In Greyhound, Tom Hanks plays the captain now — specifically, Commander Ernest Krause of the USS KEELING. A career Navy officer, this is Krause's first time at war, and it is the brooding and troubled leader's job to get a convoy of Allied Ships across the North Atlantic during the dangerous early days of America's entry into World War II. Hot on the tail of the U.S. destroyers, though, are Nazi U-boats. Based on the novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester, Hanks himself helped write the script.

I am extremely into the use of New Order's "Blue Monday" in this trailer, which shows Diana Prince living in 1984, some 66 years after the events in the first Wonder Woman movie (Gal Gadot is reprising the role — un-aged, of course, seeing as Wonder Woman is immortal). While Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), Diana's love interest, was assumed dead in the first movie, the trailer confirms he is somehow (???) back. Which would be a good thing, since Diana is going to need all the help she can get facing down enemies Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) and Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal). While Wonder Woman was set in London, 1984 will see Diane finally make it stateside. "She's Wonder Woman. She's got to come to America," is how director Patty Jenkins put it. "It's time." Buckle up.

Thirty-four years after some navy guys flew airplanes and played volleyball, the same guys are back ... to fly more airplanes (no word on the volleyball part yet). Tom Cruise will reprise his role as Pete "Maverick" Mitchell, who is tasked with preparing Top Gun graduates for an extremely dangerous mission — including "Rooster" (Miles Teller), the son of Maverick's late best friend "Goose." While most action movies these days are full of uninspired green screened-backgrounds and unrealistic CGI, part of what makes Top Gun: Maverick so exciting is that "the film uses real airplanes and real pilots, and that's really Tom Cruise pulling Gs," writes Popular Mechanics. Get hyped with this wild (and extremely worthwhile!) behind-the-scenes video.

Before there was Hamilton, there was In the Heights. The movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's first musical, In the Heights follows several characters living in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood, a place where "the streets were made of music." At the heart of the story is a bodega owner Usnavi (played in the musical by Miranda, and in the adaptation by Anthony Ramos) who dreams of moving to the Dominican Republic, and Nina (Leslie Grace), the "one who made it out," who is recently returned from Stanford. Miranda will also appear in the film as Mr. Piragüero, the owner of a piragua stand. Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) is directing the film, and was apparently so moved by the material that he gave his baby boy the middle name "Heights."

After a brief foray into war and superhero movies, Christopher Nolan is back to break your brain once more. Tenet might best draw comparison to Nolan's other mind-bending blockbuster Inception, seeing as I feel like I need to read an entire Reddit thread just to figure out what happened in the trailer. Other than pure speculation, though — of which there is plenty — we literally don't know anything at all about what the movie is going to be about. John David Washington plays the lead role, in which he is maybe (?) a dead (??) time-traveler (???), while Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki also star. More good news for Nolan fans: Indiewire confirms he shot on IMAX and 70mm film, and that Tenet is reportedly his most expensive movie yet, with an estimated $225 million budget (The Dark Knight Rises was his only other movie to break $200 million). Let the puzzle-solving begin!

I'll admit it: Jungle Cruise has the potential to be terrible. Based on the best attraction at Disneyland (yes, I said it!), the movie is another of the studio's ride-to-movie adaptations, which has brought us the likes of Pirates of the Caribbean (good) but also The Haunted Mansion (not so good). Still, I'm pulling for Jungle Cruise, which tells the story of the ambitious explorer Lily Houghton (Emily Blunt), who hires the Amazonian riverboat captain Frank (Dwayne Johnson) to guide her into the heart of the rainforest. Taking many cues from the Bogart-Hepburn film The African Queen, Jungle Cruise doesn't look set to give up the ride's corny sense of humor either; the "backside of water" joke promisingly made it into the script.

Widely considered to be one of the best television shows of all time, The Sopranos ended with its famous jaw-dropping finale way back in 2007. Thirteen years later, Sopranos director Alan Taylor has re-teamed with the series creator and writer David Chase to release a prequel to the story of the crime family in The Many Saints of Newark. The movie is set during the 1967 Newark riots, when the city's black citizens and the Italian-Americans were at each other's throats. Michael Gandolfini will play the young Tony Soprano; Michael is the son of the late James Gandolfini, who had played the original role. Deadline adds that "there are expected to be call-backs and shout-outs to numerous other series characters in the film, which is set in the earlier time period." A number of older shows have recently been extended into movies — Breaking Bad's El Camino and Deadwood: The Movie — and The Many Saints of Newark will likewise be a can't-miss event for Sopranos fans.

Shaun Of The Dead director Edgar Wright is returning to horror for his sixth film, Last Night In Soho, although he'll reportedly be "eschewing the laughs ... for a more hardened genre exploration set in the seedy, neon-lit heart of London," writes Empire. There is also reportedly a time-travel element to his new movie: Thomasin McKenzie's character, Eloise, is apparently able to "experience" the U.K.'s Swinging Sixties, possibly by using Anya Taylor-Joy's (The Witch, also the aforementioned Emma) character, Sandy, as a conduit. Sandy, though, doesn't look like she's doing too well herself, based on a photo posted by Wright on Instagram. I'm still waiting for a lot of details (and a trailer) on this one, but Wright is one of the most distinctive directors working today; this may not be Baby Driver 2, but you won't want to miss it.

I was a big fan of the author Roald Dahl when I was a child, and my younger self would have been thrilled to know that Back to the Future director Robert Zemeckis is adapting The Witches, starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, and Chris Rock. It's been a few decades since I read The Witches, though, so I'd forgotten the premise — that a young boy has a run-in with some child-hating witches at a hotel, and gets turned into a mouse (there's more to it, I promise). Zemeckis is not the first to have made a movie of The Witches (Nicolas Roeg tried in 1990, to the revulsion of Dahl), but Variety writes that his version will be "more rooted in the original source material."

When I think of the immensely talented director Chloé Zhao, I think of quiet, meditative pictures like Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider, the latter being one of my favorite films of the past decade. Back in 2018, though, Zhao was tapped to do something entirely different: direct a Marvel film set in the distant past about a race of aliens called Eternals, who have to defend the planet against the Deviants. Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, and Salma Hayek are among the actors playing Eternals; Game of Thrones' Kit Harrington will play Dane Whitman, AKA the "Black Knight" (more about him here). Even if I normally wouldn't go for an ensemble superhero movie like this one, Zhao is one of my favorite filmmakers working today. I'd expect an ambitious and unique result.

It's been five years since writer/director Tom McCarthy made a movie — that being Spotlight, which won Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. His follow up, Stillwater, will star Matt Damon as an Oklahoma oil rig worker who travels to France to petition for the release of his estranged daughter (Abigail Breslin), who's been imprisoned for a murder she claims she didn't commit. (Getting big Amanda Knox vibes from the plot synopsis). The Oklahoman also notes that 2020 is a big year for Sooner State film sets: Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, is shooting there later this year.

The "Legendary MonsterVerse" gets a little bit bigger this year with a sequel to Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Kong: Skull Island. While neither of those movies was exactly Citizen Kane, I'm a total sucker for gorgeous, over-the-top visuals of giant monsters fighting. Happily, director Adam Wingard describes the forthcoming Godzilla vs. Kong to ScreenCrush as "lots of monsters going crazy on each other" — in other words, it's about exactly what the title says it's about. But Wingard doesn't want his movie to just be a brawl: "If I had my way, I want people to really be teary-eyed at the end of the movie, and be that invested in to what's going on," he said. Color me curious.

The late, great film critic Roger Ebert described David Lynch's 1984 attempt at adapting Dune as "a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time." Tell us how you really feel! Anyway, to say that fans of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel about the sandworm-infested desert planet Arrakis have been waiting a long time for a worthy adaptation is an understatement. In 2020, Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve will try his hand at it, with Timothée Chalamet starring as the hero, Paul Atreides. Oscar Isaac, who plays Paul's father, Duke Leto Atreides, told Collider that "[t]here are some things that are — for lack of a better word — nightmarish about what you see. There's just this kind of brutalist element to it. It's shocking. It's scary. It's very visceral."

Is it entirely necessary to remake West Side Story? No. Am I going to protest that Steven Spielberg is directing the film, with a screenplay by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner? Also no! Expect the same Romeo-and-Juliet story of star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria, but with fresh new faces — Ansel Elgort will play Tony, and 17-year-old newcomer Rachel Zegler will play Maria after being one of 30,000 people to audition for the part. Additionally, Ariana DeBose will take over Anita from Rita Moreno, who won Best Supporting Actress for her work in the original movie (although Moreno is due to appear in Spielberg's remake too, but as a different character). With its awards-season release date, I might even prematurely bet on West Side Story to be your 2021 Best Picture winner.

Leos Carax is another one of my favorite working directors, but he sadly hasn't made a movie since Holy Motors, some eight years ago. He'll finally return in 2020 with his English-language debut, which promises to be one of the wildest movies of the year. Set in Los Angeles, the film is a musical that tells the love story of a stand-up comic (Adam Driver) and an opera singer (Marion Cotillard). Driver and Cotillard will do their own singing and — I kid you not — the original music is being written by the 1970s art band Sparks. Carax has long been a master at incorporating musical scenes into his movies, such as actor Denis Lavant running to David Bowie's "Modern Love" in Mauvais Sang, or the accordion interlude in Holy Motors (which has been my phone's ringtone since 2012), so if anyone can pull something like Annette off, it's him.

It's been too long since we've seen actress Vicky Krieps in a major role, her last big outing being in Phantom Thread in 2017. She'll return this year in Mia Hansen-Løve's first English-language film, about a group of American filmmakers who go to the homeland of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman and "lose their grip on reality as they start to write their next scripts," Indiewire writes. Mia Wasikowska and Tim Roth also star, with Krieps replacing an initially-cast Greta Gerwig, who got busy with other things.

Spike Lee's fourth collaboration with Netflix will be the feature film Da 5 Bloods, which has secretly been test screening for audiences in recent weeks. I've heard a few exciting rumors that it might be Lee's best feature in a long while, which is saying something seeing as he was nominated for three Oscars for BlacKkKlansman back in 2018. The movie apparently follows four African-American veterans who return to Vietnam to look for the remains of their dead squad leader (Chadwick Boseman) as well as for rumored hidden gold.

Kirsten Johnson is a cinematographer who has worked on more than 40 feature-length documentaries, including the Oscar-nominated Invisible War (2012) and the Oscar-winning Citizenfour (2004). She's also a director in her own right, most notably for her memoir-film Cameraperson (2016), which examined her role behind the lens. Her new movie, coming from Netflix, is described as being about how she and her 86-year-old father "stage[d] his death in various ways to help them confront his inevitable demise with humor and poignancy." The film will premiere at Sundance later this month, and is characterized by the festival program as "exuberantly creative, joyous, funny, and heartbreaking." I'll probably cry through the whole thing.

Somehow six years have flown by since David Fincher last gave us a movie (Gone Girl, in 2014), but as a fan of his television show Mindhunter, I really can't complain too much. Still, I'm ridiculously excited for his Netflix biopic Mank, about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman). Howard Fincher, David's late father, worked on the script, but while Mankiewicz "was known for a satirical sense of humor [...]," Deadline writes, "this story isn't a happy one." Fincher is also re-teaming with Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (The Social Network) on the score.

Apple nudged its way into the television business last year, and this year it'll break into original feature films. Teaming up with studio A24, Apple's first bet is on a film that reunites director Sofia Coppola with her Lost in Translation star Bill Murray. According to The Hollywood Reporter, "Rashida Jones also will star in the movie that follows a young mother who reconnects with her larger-than-life playboy father on an adventure through New York." Coppola became the second woman to ever win best director at the Cannes Film Festival for The Beguiled in 2017; production for On the Rocks allegedly started in New York last spring, so potentially she has a chance for a repeat on the Croisette this spring, too.

I could not have been more impressed with Josephine Decker's bold film about a New York City theater trope, Madeline's Madeline, in 2018, and I'll be first in line to see her new film Shirley, which stars Elisabeth Moss as Haunting of Hill House author Shirley Jackson. Based on a screenplay by Sarah Gubbins (I Love Dick), Shirley follows a young couple who move in with Jackson and her husband, Bennington College professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), only to become a source of inspiration for Jackson's next novel. While being a graduate of Bennington myself makes me a little touchy that this was actually shot at Vassar, I'll have my ear to the ground to hear how it goes over at Sundance later this month.

Joanna Hogg's 2019 movie The Souvenir was quietly considered one of last year's best films (in fact, Sight & Sound magazine named it the best). It centered on Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), a young film student who found herself in a fraught relationship with an older drug addict name Anthony (Tom Burke). Based loosely on Hogg's own experiences, the sequel will also star Swinton Byrne as Julie, and Tilda Swinton (Swinton Byrne's real-life mother) will reprise her role as Rosalind, Julie's mother. "[It's] focusing very much on Julie again," Hogg told The Film Stage, "so she's a through-line for the whole project, and it's Julie at film school and the next stages of film school and the work that she does and how her life experience is fused with her creativity." Now that you know what to get excited for, don't get caught unprepared; the first part is streaming free on Amazon.

Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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