The past two decades have been a time of peaceful revolution in the movies. When tracking the fortunes of ambitious movies, it’s important to keep an eye on the spread-not, as in sports betting, the handicap of numbers but the aesthetic spread that separates the most original films of the day from prevailing commercial norms. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. On the other, an online release usually registers as a nonevent, and many of the great movies hardly make a blip on the mediascape despite being more accessible than ever. On the one hand, a streaming release is a wide release, happily accessible to all (or to all subscribers). The shift toward streaming was already under way when the pandemic struck, and as the trend has accelerated it’s had a paradoxical effect on movies. “The French Dispatch” has done respectably in wide release, and “Licorice Pizza” is doing superbly on four screens in New York and Los Angeles, but few, if any, of the year’s best films are likely to reach high on the box-office charts. The biggest successes, as usual, have been superhero and franchise films. The reopening of theatres has brought many great movies-some of which were postponed from last year-to the big screen, but fewer people to see them. From an artistic perspective, 2021 has been an excellent cinematic vintage, yet the bounty is shadowed by an air of doom.
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