2020 continues to be the single most nail-gnawing, agoraphobia-causing year on record. And for film critics and film fans alike, so used to crowded, unending festivals and weekly trips to the theatres – sometimes in snarling cineaste packs – it’s proven to be a forlorn and lonely year, indeed. Personally, I’ve sought refuge less in new releases and more in deep-diving into cinema history. (Who knew HBO Max had a deal with TCM?) Fact: You cannot see every film ever made in even the most workaday, chaos-free lifetime. You can, however, take a plague break to seek out cinema’s back catalog and catch films you’d never previously had time to see – Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer, 1932’s Rain, dozens of weirdly forgotten film noirs freely available on YouTube – while simultaneously supplementing your filmic diet and subjugating your social anxiety with cinematic comfort food: Hitch, the Marx Brothers, everything Cary Grant ever did. And then there were the surprise podcasts that I didn’t know I’d love as much as I now do. Joe Dante and Josh Olson’s relentlessly entertaining The Movies That Made Me is a perfect pandemic p’cast, as are Adam Green and Joe Lynch’s The Movie Crypt; Pure Cinema Podcast; and the terrorific Post Mortem With Mick Garris. Sometimes all you need is a friendly, knowledgeable, and like-minded voice in the dark, no cinematography necessary. A great podcast can slay the anxiety monkey in your head just as handily as your 100th viewing of Singin’ in the Rain, trust me on this.
1) Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
2) Color Out of Space
3) Possessor Uncut
4) On the Rocks
5) Suspiria (4K restoration)
6) Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
7) Apocalypse ’45
8) Come to Daddy
9) The Beach House
10) Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Marc Savlov’s Top 10 of 2020 in Film
A version of this article appeared in print on Dec 18, 2020 with the headline: Marc Savlov’s Top 10 of 2020 in Film
This article appears in The 2020 Top 10s Issue.