The Best Movies of 2020
In 2020, we stopped going to the movies, so the movies came to us.
It was, to say the least, a challenging year. In addition to spreading disease itself, the COVID-19 pandemic propagated innumerable strains of misinformation. Many of these were dangerous in terms of public health (“The cure can’t be worse than the disease!” “Are the vaccines actually killing people??”), but I naturally found myself drawn to (and repelled by) the specious argument that COVID was heralding the end of cinema as we know it. This wasn’t really a new outcry but was instead a mutation of an ancient form of doomsday prophesying, mingling contemporary scientific concerns with age-old fears. And so it was proclaimed: Theaters are dead. Streamers have won. The collective pleasure of piling into large auditoriums has been replaced by the lonely convenience of turning on your TV. Christopher Nolan’s next blockbuster will be automatically downloaded to your phone.
The consternation over the long-term viability of the theatrical experience isn’t entirely unfounded. After all, while fretting about declining box-office receipts—and lamenting the homogeneity of the Disneyfied movies that do dominate the market—is something of an annual pastime in critical circles, COVID really did shut down theaters for most of the year; many of them shuttered permanently. Even now, as vaccinations rise and the public cautiously returns to a pre-pandemic “normal” (some of us more cautiously than others), it’s fair to wonder whether theaters successfully weathered the storm, and whether viewers who grew accustomed to the homey perks of on-demand viewing might resist returning to the multiplex or the art house in large numbers. Read More