Marshall and the Movies

What a year, huh?

I began 2020 with grand plans of jetting off to the Venice Film Festival in September and instead learned to love the virtual film festival. I traded New York’s repertory theaters for pop-up drive-in cinemas, AMC A-List for a parade of streaming premieres. In a year that I will mostly remember for revisiting comfort films as WFH background noise as well as catching up with some long-postponed classics, I still managed to see over 185 new releases in 2020. Here are my ten favorites, a crop notable for being half non-fiction films and finding unique ways to grapple with all manner of issues transpiring off-screen.

(P.S. – I tried something a little different for 2020 and originally published my top 10 in zine format, alongside some writing I did earlier in the year about each film. The reflections here are new and exclusive to this list. For more information about how to read the zine, drop me a line somehow and I’ll arrange a view for you.)