This has been the strangest year, not just at the movies, but for life in general. With all that being said, and with the Oscars seemingly deciding to go on as planned on April 25th, 2021, we have a Best Picture race to talk about and it’s as unpredictable as you might imagine.

I abide by Sight & Sound‘s newly unveiled list of the best films of 2020.

Denis Villeneuve has reason to be angry about the HBO Max/Warner Bros. streaming deal from last week. The Quebecois filmmaker has emerged these last 10 years as a major voice in mainstream moviemaking, with films such as “Arrival,” “Sicario” and “Blade Runner 2049” earning him glowing reviews and a major fanbase. He was just getting started.

Since launching in November 2019, Disney+’s subscriber growth has blown past expectations, according to its CEO Bob Chapek. The mouse house’s streaming service closed the fourth quarter of the year with a total of 86.8 million subscribers; During its late 2019 launch, Disney’s goal was to reach 60 to 90 million subscriptions by 2024. Mission accomplished. They will surpass that number in the next few months.

It’s been three years since Nate Parker was “cancelled” by the industry at large for a past 1999 rape allegation. However, the director made a comeback, of sorts, last year at the Venice Film Festival with “American Skin.” Spike Lee was in attendance at the screening, supporting Parker and telling the audience that we need to “move forward.” A Venice career comeback seemed to be in-the-works for Parker, but, turns out, critics had their fangs fready for Parker, and a lot of work needed to be done before the actor-directorcould properly rehabilitate his career.

I had quite a few requests about posting the individual lists of those who participated in our 2020 critics poll of the best movies of the year. The following are *most* of them as about a dozen or so decided to abstain from having their lists revealed publicly due to their still being works in progress. Still, these are 100 or so lists here, the most mentioned titles being “Nomadland,” followed by “First Cow” and “Never Rarely Sometimes Always.” Given the drastic distance between the top 3 and then fourth place, I am quite confident that these three will be the most listed films of the year, all three directed by women, and all three having been theatrical released during the course of the year.

Filmed mostly in a single hospital in the city of Wuhan, Hao Wu’s “76 Days” shows the period of close to three months of lockdown in a Chinese hospital coping with an endless amount of outbreaks.

Chloe Zhao‘s “Nomadland,” which just won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, is not going to be a film for the masses, and all the better for it. This is a moody, and mesmerizing third film from the Chinese-American filmmaker, after her triumphant 2018 film, “The Rider.” Much like her previous efforts, this is Zaho’s 21st-century depiction of Americana angst, mixing non-fiction and fiction filmmaking in effortless fashion.

David Fincher’s “Mank” is now available to stream on Netflix. You can read my mixed-to-positive review, dated 11.12.20. Since then, I’ve given “Mank” a few more shots, but still cannot fully come around to its coldly detaching frames. The technical mastery is one thing, but the story left me cold and uninvolved. This was a bold movie to make for Fincher, but it lacks the stylistic stamp of his other films and feels more like a passion project -- his father wrote the screenplay back in 1993.