The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025
6. 2020 - Another Round
Honourable Mentions: The Father, Minari, Tenet
2020 was a disruptive and scarily existential time for the movies, with the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic pausing life as we know it for large swathes of the global population and with it the theatrical model that had proven the lifeblood of cinema since its beginning. Some adapted. Others, like Christopher Nolan, stubbornly refused, ushering his sci-fi blockbuster Tenet into empty theatres in what remains the defining industry narrative of that year.
But while much of the discussion surrounding COVID-era cinema tends to dwell on off-screen logistics and the various audience habits that were changed in its wake, less is made of the "in-between movies" that managed to make it through the door - films that almost belonged to a different era altogether, but that still had to navigate a shifting social context all the same.
And one film, out of all of those that had to survive the pandemic, seemed to meet the occasion head-on - Thomas Vinterberg's Another Round.
The second of two collaborations between Vinterberg and his Danish compatriot (and internet heartthrob) Mads Mikkelsen, Another Round is a comedy-drama that ruminates on relationships with alcohol on both a broad and individual scale, sidestepping binge tropes for something much more nuanced, compassionate, and ultimately liberating. Mikkelsen is electric as a teacher in the midst of a midlife crisis, juggling his responsibilities of guiding another year of students through to graduation whilst microdosing booze to maintain a steady level of tipsiness with his colleagues, all the while navigating a crumbling marriage.
That a movie about the social connections forged and destroyed by alcohol arrived during the global pandemic is deathly ironic, but that only made Another Round all the more cathartic. Vinterberg's film takes that oft-quoted Simpsons axiom of alcohol being both the cause and solution to life's problems, and finds a way to engage the topic without dismissing the dizzying highs and nauseating lows that come with it.