Really good list from Vox of some of the best movies of the year. This year I got more into renting films online, as there was a lot of good stuff to find with art house virtual cinemas and VOD. I’m not surprised there aren’t as many Hollywood movies on this list, since a lot of films got pushed back or mainly showed in drive-ins or regular theaters, like Tenet.
The ones I’ve seen on this list that I was really into were First Cow, The Painter and the Thief, Miss Juneteenth, The Assistant, Palm Springs, Bill and Ted Face the Music, The Forty Year Old Version, and Shirley. What was annoying with virtual cinemas was that there would be highly acclaimed movies like Nomadland and Minari that only got a week’s worth of screenings, and online screenings would get sold out quickly due to a lot of early critical buzz. I also didn’t like how new movies were on so many streaming platforms, and I’m only on a couple and didn’t want to sign up for other ones, so I didn’t see On the Rocks and Wolfwalkers, which are on Apple TV. I have wishful thinking that they’ll be put out on DVD, but I know that physical media like that is getting to be more obsolete.
I thought She Dies Tomorrow had a good premise, but a boring and overly slow execution.
I wasn’t into I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I just don’t think it was for me, I found it way too long and it dragged. I liked some of the offbeat and weirder aspects of the movie, but afterwards found that I didn’t really care about the story or characters.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was fun, I especially liked Rachel McAdams and the Iceland setting.
House of Hummingbird (not on the list) was one of my favorites, an excellent Korean coming of age movie about an adolescent girl in 1994 Seoul.
The Surrogate was really good, an indie drama-comedy about a young woman who acts as a surrogate for her gay male friends, and them dealing with complicated feelings when they find out the baby will be born with Down’s Syndrome.
Tommaso was a really interesting semi-autobiographical movie starring Willem Dafoe as a blend of himself and director Abel Ferrara, living in Rome with his young wife and daughter, and teaching acting classes, going to AA, and having marital issues.
For Hollywood stuff, I would include Birds of Prey. It was a lot of fun and so colorful and nutty, and was the second to last movie I saw in theaters this year (the last being short films at the Museum of the Moving Image).
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