Normally, we’d be at the height of Awards Season; instead, the cinema landscape’s still in limbo, with a selective assortment of VOD and streaming titles battling it out. Sound of Metal, one of my favorites of the year, would’ve surely received a buzz-building theatrical release in any other year instead of going straight to Amazon Prime, right? (Right?) Well, as the past few years of Netflix interference have shown, no matter the venue, Riz Ahmed’s intuitive, elaborate performance would still receive deserved across-the-board critical accolades.

Small Axe is a different story, as it further blurs the movie/TV line as an anthology series made for Amazon but with each of its five feature-length installments standing on their own. I made a point to see Lovers Rock because it’s by far the most acclaimed (and also the shortest), and I’ll get to the other four, if not within the next few weeks before I post my year-end list—even without cinemas, there’s no shortage of good stuff to watch, from the alarming, mesmerizing Romanian doc Collective to Brexit-informed London immigrant drama Cat In The Wall, plus titles that played VOD earlier in the year like the superlative Georgian Call Me By Your Name-inspired And Then We Danced or the Mexican subculture study I’m No Longer Here.

As usual for the season, I spent the week leading up to Christmas watching holiday-themed flicks, including the month’s only two re-watches, Going My Way and Holiday, the latter more of a New Year’s Eve film that excels chiefly by the charm of its cast. Among the discoveries, The Holly and The Ivy, a 1952 British film that anticipates the kitchen sink realism later in the decade more than it revels in the romanticism of the prior one and Remember The Night, a Preston Sturges-written, pre-Double Indemnity pairing up of Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck that’s far less cookie-cutter than you’d expect for the era.

Biggest misses included the almost universally reviled Wonder Woman 1984 (which makes Stranger Things look like Blue Velvet) and David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the first of his films to leave me cold. On the other hand, a few pleasant surprises: legendary new wave rock flop Times Square, which feels more like a butchered-by-its-studio art film than an exploitation film; Coco, easily my favorite Pixar since Ratatouille and The Incredibles; Possessed, more proof of Joan Crawford’s acting prowess; Family Plot, more evidence as to why Barbara Harris should’ve been a far more prominent ‘70s screwball icon; and Tesla, which didn’t go as far as it could’ve in the revisionist/deliberately anachronistic department, but I will not soon forget an insular, deeply in character Ethan Hawke-as-Tesla performing a karaoke version of a certain Tears For Fears song.

Films viewed in December in chronological order, with director, year of release and my rating (out of 10); starred titles are re-watches.

The Twentieth Century (Matthew Rankin, 2019) 7
Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955) 8
I’m No Longer Here (Fernando Frias, 2019) 7
Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda (Stephen Nomura Schible, 2017) 6
Sound of Metal (Darius Marder, 2019) 10
Collective (Alexander Nanau, 2019) 9
Dressed to Kill (Brian De Palma, 1980) 7
Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976) 7
The Social Dilemma (Jeff Orlowski, 2020) 5
Guest of Honour (Atom Egoyan, 2019) 7
Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1997) 5
Wander Darkly (Tara Miele, 2020) 6
Tesla (Michael Almereyda, 2020) 7
Christmas Survival (James Dearden, 2018) 4
Small Axe: Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen, 2020) 8
Words on Bathroom Walls (Thor Freudenthal, 2020) 7
Remember the Night (Mitchell Leisen, 1940) 8
Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993) 6
The Holly and the Ivy (George More O’Ferrall, 1952) 7
Possessed (Curtis Bernhardt, 1947) 7
Holiday (George Cukor, 1938)* 9
Holiday Affair (Don Hartman, 1949) 7
Going My Way (Leo McCarey, 1944)* 6
Wonder Woman 1984 (Patty Jenkins, 2020) 4
Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017) 8
Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright, 2007) 8
And Then We Danced (Levan Akin, 2019) 9
Times Square (Allan Moyle, 1980) 7
Cat In The Wall (Vesela Kazakova, Mina Mileva, 2019) 8