It’s been a weird year, in so, so many ways, and really, this month isn’t any particularly weirder. Except that, for the first time since this all started, I’m a little thrown by what to do. On the one hand, movie theaters are “open” and new movies are being “released”. On the other hand, they’re kind of not really. And I’ve run out of silly little themes to construct mini-marathons out of, and Lord knows I’m not starting a new filmmaker retrospective while I’m still carving my way at such a glacial pace through Ingmar Bergman.
So there’s only one thing left: playing catch-up. At the start of August, I posted some polls of the various movies I was thinking about reviewing, and asking you all to help me prioritise them. I’m pretty much solely writing this blog post so that I can have a cleaner, simpler place to keep those polls in one place, so I can keep bumping this more readily. Also because I’m not going to let a once-a-century pandemic keep me from posting a monthly preview, even if there’s really nothing to preview.
Films that did, or were supposed to, open wide
(Removed from poll: Fantasy Island & Greyhound, both of which I’ll be reviewing soon. Tenet, Mulan, and The Personal History of David Copperfield are all coming without needing to go through the polling process)
Art films about which I am excited, or for which I have loyalties to the director
(removed from poll, First Cow, which I’ll be reviewing this week)
Smaller films that look interesting to me for this or that reason
(The voting is tight here! Nothing removed, a few things added. I suppose this is where Peninsula would go, but I’ll be reviewing that one in the near future without it needing to win a poll)
Streaming exclusives
(I’ll be reviewing the Netflix Original I’m Thinking of Ending Things this week without running it through the poll)
