My column for the March 2020 issue of Caimán Cuadernoas de Cine…   — J.R.

  

Greasing the wheels of commerce is usually the chief reason for end-of-the-year movie polls, which, like the Academy Awards, only intensifies our ongoing cultural confusion of film criticism with advertising. This helps to explain why (and how) Harvey Weinstein became Janet Maslin’s favourite film critic in her 1999 Cannes coverage for the New York Times, devoting far more space to his (negative) opinions about the prizes than anyone else’s, including the jury’s. (The fact that his own films in the festival hadn’t won prizes was of course crucial.) Perhaps because the head of that jury was David Cronenberg, an intellectual, the need for anti-intellectual cultural arbiters to drown out such controversial choices was as pressing two decades ago as it is today. We all need to be told not once, but repeatedly, why Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is more important to the state of our civilization, our lives, our senses, and even our ethics than Vitalina Varela, and whereas this sort of gatekeeping function was once reserved for the Times and its consumerist equivalents, today its counterparts have included, among others, Sight and Sound, Film Comment, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Cahiers du Cinéma, Positif, and, alas, even Caimán Cuadernos de Cine.

One reason for bringing up Cannes is that those who attend that festival have the jump on everyone else in perusing many of the likelier candidates for best-of-the-year lists, and those like me who depend more on what screeners are mailed to me several months later are still busy catching up. I finally caught up with Greta Gerwig’s Little Women after Christmas, only saw Uncut Gems a week or so earlier because a New York cinema commissioned me to write a piece about it, and in mid-January I still haven’t seen Motherless Brooklyn because no screener ever materialized, so the absence of all three from the list extracted from me by Sight and Sound in late October, along with An Elephant Sitting Still and Dark Waters, shouldn’t be at all surprising.

Lists of this kind are more important now than they’ve been at any previous juncture in film history, and for a very good reason — the unwieldy plethora of films that are currently available to us. The fact that most of these films are available via streaming and/or on DVDs or Blu-Rays rather than in theaters confuses this issue, especially for those older cinephiles who regard public screenings as an essential part of filmgoing. What remains public is the discourse about the films being seen, although the geographical spread of this discourse across the globe is quite unlike a review appearing only in a local publication.