I’m starting a monthly newsletter. Every month you’ll get 4-5 short and sweet film recommendations sent to your inbox. My goal is to pick movies for a variety of moods, whether you need a low-stakes weeknight watch, an escape to a beautiful landscape, or if you’re ready to dig into a complex historical issue. Movies will be a mix of new and old, with an emphasis on female creators. The idea is to help you sort through the endless streaming content to find the movies that you might not have noticed.
Please give it a try, and let me know what you think. This first newsletter will be sent this week. You can sign up by following the link below:
Director Kelly Reichardt. Her beautiful movie, First Cow, was one of the last movies I saw in the theaters.
This was a good year for female directors. The cynical part of me wants to say that’s because the studios were more likely to release movies made by women in a year of cutting losses. But it may also be the result of efforts to boost equity in the wake of the Weinstein revelations, which occurred in late 2017. If a lot of female-directed/produced movies picked up for distribution after premiering at 2018 and 2019 film festivals, the majority of those titles would start coming out in 2020.
When I was writing this list, I wasn’t sure what should count as a 2020 movie, since the Academy Awards have been pushed back to April. Ultimately, I decided only to include movies that were available via VOD in 2020, so this list doesn’t include some big titles like Regina King’s One Night in Miami and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, although I plan to catch up with them when they are released later this month and in February. This list is a reflection of my year, and what I was able to watch on streaming platforms, “virtual” cinemas,” and via screening links. It’s probably a little quirkier than my previous best of lists in 2018 and 2019, but this was an odd year, and I’d guess that the next couple of years are going to continue to be unpredictable as Hollywood figures out what movie-going looks like in a post-COVID world.
Thelma and Alice 