Best Movies of 2020 - The New York Times

But in thinking about my favorites of the year and all the many new and old titles I’ve seen, I also thought a lot about how I watched movies and, well, just watched.

A big-screen fundamentalist, I love going out to the movies, to first- and second-run cinemas as well as to art houses, museums and cinémathèques.

I know which theater and studio in Los Angeles (where I live) has the biggest screen, the best sound, sightlines and seats — me, I like to sit in the middle of the theater, perfectly centered.

But going to the movies was one of my first adventures in sovereignty, one of the first ways that I experienced navigating ordinary life without parental supervision.

So I found it challenging learning to watch the movies I was reviewing at home, how to respect the focus they required and deserved, how to sit — and keep sitting — on the sofa and not hit the pause button, not check Twitter.

I finally figured out how to really watch the movies I was reviewing at home when I categorically separated them from the other images I was soaking up, the stream of faces, shapes and moments that also defined my year: Sarah Cooper’s devastating Trump performances; Doggface skateboarding to Fleetwood Mac; the Scottish sports announcer Andrew Cotter and his dogs Olive and Mabel; the sometimes shocking science videos demonstrating how far sneezes and coughs can travel (27 feet!); and the friends and strangers whose lives I’ve watched as they made bread, settled into new homes, marched for Black lives and, at times, mourned the deaths of loved ones.

But all these streaming images are entirely different from the discrete pleasures of movies not just in terms of how they look — the integrity of their images, where the camera is — but also how movies begin and how they end, the specific rhythms, shape and sense of time they create.

Streaming blurs time and before you know it you’ve watched four episodes of “The Crown” back to back.

This is of a different order of how we experience time when we go out to the movies, which give us two or more hours’ respite from the clock-and-capitalism-determined flow of everyday life.

(Watch on Kino Marquee.).

(Watch through virtual cinemas.).

(Watch through virtual cinemas starting Dec. 11.).

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on Netflix.)?

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

Here are some other movies I’m grateful for: “76 Days,” “Alex Wheatle,” “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” “Buoyancy,” “Circumstantial Pleasures,” “Coded Bias,” “Crip Camp,” “Da 5 Bloods,” “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” “Emma,” “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds,” “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey,” “House of Hummingbird,” “I Wish I Knew,” “The Invisible Man,” “Lost Girls,” “Minari,” “Miss Juneteenth,” “Nomadland,”“The Old Guard,” “On the Record,” “On the Rocks,” “One Night in Miami,” “The Photograph,” “Tesla,” “The Traitor,” “The Wild Goose Lake,” “Sorry We Missed You,” “Soul,” “The Truffle Hunters,” “The Truth.”.

I missed going to the movies a lot, but I didn’t much miss the Hollywood fare that has dominated screens in the past few years.

But I would insist that this sequel to a cringey, pranky, 14-year-old classic is undeniably the most 2020 movie of all time.

(Watch “City Hall” through virtual cinemas; watch “Collective” on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on streaming platforms.).

(Watch on Kino Marquee.)

Best of all, Radha Blank, making her feature debut, is a brilliant filmmaker, with an eye for the absurdities of New York theater and for the glorious theater of the city itself

(Watch on Netflix.)

(Watch on streaming platforms.)

(Watch on Netflix.)