Will the winner be Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland”? Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”? Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking About Ending Things”?
This has been a very strange year at the movies, with most major theatrical releases either delayed or sent straight to VOD. I decided to poll 50 film critics, all of whom have, more or less, seen every major title this year, and that includes Oscar-contending December releases such as “Soul,” “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” “Mank,” and “News of the World.” The results gathered have been nothing short of interesting, fascinating, mind-boggling, you name it.
If anything, the top 20 that will be published on Monday will be a great way for movie fans to catch up on any movies they may have missed this year. The good news is that more than three-quarters of the titles are freely available to stream online. We are entering an interesting new phase in cinema, one which could very well dictate the way we both watch and feel moving images in the decades to come. The COVID-19 pandemic may have not necessarily killed the medium, but, rather, sped it up into what was going to be the inevitable direction of the digital free-format age. .