2020 was a hell of a year. I started a new PhD program and moved to a new state, all during a worldwide pandemic. I also watched 310 movies. This is the second year that I obsessively catalogued and reviewed every single movie I watched, including short films and miniseries – if it’s on Letterboxd, it counts. I find it to be a hugely rewarding exercise, and a fun way of ending the year by looking back the movies I enjoyed (or didn’t enjoy). Letterboxd rather handily provides a bunch of statistics about the movies you watch, so let’s get to it!
The first movie I watched in 2020 was The Last of Sheila, a fun murder mystery that also happens to be one of Rian Johnson’s favorites (he cited it specifically when talking about Knives Out). The last movie I watched was The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra, a hilarious spoof of 50s-era monster movies made on a shoestring budget, with terrible dialogue, visible wires, and crummy costumes. It’s been a tradition in my family to watch it on New Year’s Eve in the past, and we decided to watch it again this year. It’s great, and also probably explains a lot about my sense of humor and taste in movies.
Of the 310 movies I watched between January 1st and December 31st, 239 were first-time watches, while 71 were rewatches. Some stats to get us started:
- Those 310 movies add up to 522.5 hours, or about 22 days. They average out to 25.8 movies a month and 6 movies a week.
- I watched at least one movie every week EXCEPT for the week of August 12th-18th. This was actually the week I moved to Florida, and was, frankly, too stressed to even contemplate watching a movie.
- The week I watched the most movies was Week 23 – June 3rd-9th. This total is partly because I drunkenly watched a bunch of Bionicle movies with with my brother, Neil, and our friend Caleb this week.
- The longest movie I watched was Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th, a 6.5 hour documentary about, you guessed it, the Friday the 13th franchise. The longest narrative film I watched was Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman.
- The day I watched the most movies was Halloween – I watched 6 spooky movies, including Hocus Pocus, Night of the Demons, Halloween, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, Trick ‘r Treat, and Lucky.
- I watched the most movies on Saturdays, with 66. I watched the fewest on Mondays, with 23.
- My grade distribution is below. It turns out I’m a pretty generous grader (you kind of have to be, when your diet largely consists of crummy horror movies). It does at least take a lot to get a 5-star rating from me: Of the 14 that did, only 4 were totally new watches. Even among the 10 that I’d seen before, several were “ceremonial” fives, given to movies that I watched a lot as a kid and have a lot of fondness for.
| 1 | 1.5 | 2 | 2.5 | 3 | 3.5 | 4 | 4.5 | 5 |
| 2 | 6 | 19 | 45 | 46 | 58 | 82 | 38 | 14 |
- The highest-rated movie I watched this year, as determined by Letterboxd users, was, once again, Parasite. It was the same last year – I rewatched it a couple of times this year, and it’s still the highest-rated movie on the service. Taking Parasite out of the equation, the highest-rated movie I watched was Come and See, a harrowing war film that I will (a) never forget and (b) never watch again. The lowest-rated movie I saw was, um, Artemis Fowl (it is truly awful, and also happens to be my Worst Movie of the Year!).
- The most popular movie I watched (again, as determined by Letterboxd based on the number of users who have seen it) was Parasite. The most obscure was a short film called First Stories – Two Spirited.
- Letterboxd also gives you stats about genre, country, and language. The genre I watched the most was horror, just barely edging out drama (120 to 116). This feat was largely accomplished because of Hooptober, a challenge created by a Letterboxd user to watch 31 horror movies in October. I decided to try it this year, and actually succeeded! It meant watching a LOT of horror movies, to that point that frankly I am still a bit horror-ed out, but it was a lot of fun.
- The vast majority of the movies I watched this year were in English, and of those the vast majority were from the USA.
This leads me to one of my key observations about my viewing habits: though I do try to challenge myself to watch films I wouldn’t ordinarily see, 2020 was all about comfort food. Horror movies, bizarrely, offer a kind of comfort for me, but so do rewatches of movies I like – and so do Disney movies!
This year I set about watching a bunch of old Disney movies from my childhood. I still have a bunch more to watch, but it’s not surprising that my most-watched actor of the year is Jim Cummings, who has roles in a bunch of Disney movies. My other most-watched actor of the year is Kane Hodder – again, not surprising given how many horror movies I watched (he’s Jason in several Friday the 13th movies).
My most-watched directors are all Disney-related (Ron Clements, John Musker, and Wolfgang Reitherman). I do want to give a special shout-out to George A. Romero, though – I watched The Crazies and Creepshow for the first time this year, and have a newfound appreciation for the guy whom I mostly know as the director of my favorite zombie movies.
One final trend to note is that this was also the year I decided to watch a bunch of film noir. I didn’t see nearly as much as I planned to, but I did see a LOT and several of them made it on my year-end best-of lists. I really love the noir genre, and I’m going to try to finish that list this year.
And now it’s time for my top 20! For those of you following along on Facebook, this list will appear a little different from the top 25 I shared. That’s because it’s the for real final for all time list, and to make it I started totally from scratch, looking back at every movie I watched this year and determining whether it belonged on the list, then reordering them according to my whims at this exact moment. If I did this tomorrow, the list would probably be different, too.
- In a Lonely Place (1950)
- Meek’s Cutoff (2010)
- Brief Encounter (1945)
- Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)
- Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
- The Watermelon Woman (1996)
- The Battle of Algiers (1966)
- Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015)
- The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
- Tomboy (2011)
- The Gold Rush (1925)
- Paths of Glory (1957)
- Man of the West (1958)
- The Housemaid (1960)
- Taxi Driver (1976)
- The Assistant (2019)
- From Beyond (1986)
- Daughters of Darkness (1971)
- Losing Ground (1982)
- Real Life (1979)
And finally, the ten worst movies I saw in 2020. I should note that there are some movies on this list that are universally reviled, and other movies … one in particular … that a lot of people seem to have liked. In the list below, the higher the movie is the more I hated it (so #1 is the worst, #2 is the second-worst, and so on).
- Artemis Fowl (2020) – Why, Kenneth Branagh? And more importantly how? How did you – and Disney, and everyone involved – so completely and totally screw up a fool-proof premise? This movie is bad. It is BAD. Ugh just thinking about it is getting me angry all over again. Top of the mornin’.
- The Night Clerk (2020) – Possibly the most boring movie ever made. I have never seen a film less interested in its own premise.
- Truth or Dare (2017) – Honestly all I remember about this is that it’s terrible, don’t watch it.
- I’m Just Fucking With You (2019) – Gets the award for most annoying characters of the year!
- Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) – I obviously have a high tolerance for horror movie shenanigans but this movie – in which Jason turns out to be a worm that can possess other people – somehow managed to crawl under my admittedly already low bar.
- Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985) – What can I say, love the F13th franchise but when it’s bad, it’s BAD.
- Hack-o-Lantern (1988) – A truly strange horror movie featuring the world’s most eclectic Halloween party and a distressingly horny grandpa. Not recommended unless Joe Bob Briggs is providing commentary.
- Scoob! (2020) – The most cynical and incoherent children’s movie I’ve seen in a good long while.
- I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – Charlie Kaufman disappears up his own butt for 134 minutes, never to be seen again. A lot of people love this one but I was rolling my eyes for 99% of the runtime. #sorrynotsorry
- The Platform (2019) – One of those social commentary movies where the commentary boils down to “Classism is bad, actually!” Not a bad message but if your story is that thin you need good characters and writing to sell it, and unfortunately, this movie has neither!
And that’s a wrap on 2020! It was a wild year and I watched a lot of movies. Looking forward to almost certainly not watching as many this year.
criterion / watch 