This last year I’ve needed movies more than ever, and I’ve also noticed a few interesting effects that 2020 has had on my film-watching habits – aside, that is, from the fact that I saw none of the movies on this list in a cinema. With most of 2020 spent locked up indoors, I started relishing the little incidental bits of audio-visual information that graced my screen. At the same time, the dismaying responses to local and global political circumstances have only intensified my desire for a cinema that is both attentive to the realities of everyday life and critical of the various systems that govern our lives, and I think the films I’ve designated as my top ten of this year reflect that.
Read More2020, a sinisterly bad year. While the world caught fire all at once and every facet of normalcy went up in flames, cinema was a true comfort in these troubling times. The last 365 days were a challenge all their own, full of hardship and loss, but from the other side, I can say I appreciate the movies that made things a little easier on the days that couldn’t get any worse. The sheer act of ranking art with numerical values is in and of itself a contradiction, but these ten films prove that, even when the world turns sideways, cinema will always be there to renew faith in our collective existence, now and into the future.
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