Last Cinema Standing’s 2020 Year in Review

David Byrne's American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee

It would be foolish of me to try to sum up 2020 in a single post. There are too many threads, too many tendrils, seismic shifts and imperceptible changes. You were there. You know. No matter your experience, you felt it, too. We felt it together.

It does not escape my attention, either, how lucky I have been over the past nine or so months when so many others have suffered so much. My wife and I kept our jobs when so many others lost theirs. Our jobs permitted us to stay home and stay safe when so many others got no such permission. We have stayed reasonably sane in a world that has seemed increasingly insane. None of this is taken for granted. 

The pandemic has been an international tragedy without recent comparison, and no part of our shared global experience has been untouched. Beyond that, our American experiment has been tested by calls for justice and equality ringing loudly, clearly, and necessarily. Time will tell if we pass that test, though we have not received high marks in the past. We cast more votes than ever before in a presidential election, suggesting an entire populace crying out for someone to listen, to hear us, to understand what we have gone through and effect some kind of change.

But, no one wants to hear about all that from a movie guy. You came here to read about the movies, and the movies are mostly what I am here to consider. The mission statement of Last Cinema Standing is there in the title: to celebrate the filmgoing experience until the last theater closes up shop. I never meant for the name to be so literal, but the world had other plans.

March 10, 2020, was the last time I sat in a movie theater with strangers, collectively basking in the glow of that big bright screen. Even then, it felt odd as the news of a deadly virus began to seep into the public conscience. With optimism in my heart, I left the theater that night and purchased tickets for a screening scheduled for about a month later. Of course, that screening never happened. Nor did any others. At least, not in the traditional sense.

This year forced us to consume movies in a new way, but the industry has been heading that way for a long time. Despite the boom of billion-dollar blockbusters, cinema attendance has been consistently down for years as streaming services have taken pole position in the business of what we watch. In 2020, no one was talking about what opened at the cineplex Friday, but rather, we talked about what debuted on Netflix last night. Theaters will be back, but that shift in the cultural conversation feels more permanent.

Out of necessity this year and good business sense for any year, the big studios finally struck a blow to the heart of the long-sacrosanct “theatrical release window.” That is why you were able to watch Wonder Woman 1984 at home on the same day it was released to whatever theaters are currently open. Though the change was inevitable and a long time coming, it still felt like a bomb to the struggling theater industry. The future, as Stanley Kubrick once put it, will be to learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

A non-traditional year, then, calls for a non-traditional send-off. It has been a semi-regular tradition around here to present a year in review right around the start of the new year. The best performances, moments, quotes, and of course, films of the year, presented, dissected, and celebrated. We are still going to do all of that, but it will look a little -- okay, a lot -- different on this go-around.

There are too many things I have yet to see and too many things I will not get to see for me to have any authority on what the true “best of 2020” might have been -- if I ever had such authority to begin with anyway. Among those eluding me this year, my No. 1 most anticipated movie of the year, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland. It is an ironic twist for a year that began with me grappling with whether to include Celine Sciamma’s brilliant Portrait of a Lady on Fire in my year-end consideration because by most measures it was not a 2020 film. Now, “2020 film” is a term so broad as to be meaningless.

Instead, I will share with you the best new things I saw in 2020 and call it good. Potentially great films such as Nomadland and Minari and many others will just have to wait, and we will consider them in due time. It is not a perfect solution, but it is the best we can do. What has 2020 been if not an exercise in all of us doing the best we can do?

In addition to more traditional end-of-year content, we hope to have a few more pieces up as a supplement, including an ode to the return of the drive-in, a discussion of the film-vs.-television debate, and maybe a couple others. Check back over the next few days, and we will sift through 2020 together.

As always, thanks for being here, and we can’t wait to see you again at the movies.