Adrian Martin’s 2020 in Review: A year out of joint

Shakespeare was right: time is out of joint. I am surely not the only film critic to be experiencing strange effects of warping and distortion when I try to shake out the usual end-of-year list from my folder of accumulated notes. Feature films I saw ten months ago seem to have receded to the back of a dim tunnel, while some modest, digitally-shot shorts that emerged during the darkest period of lockdown are burned into my brain as if I had just seen them this morning. It’s like being caught in the middle of a zolly shot: you know, the type of tricky simultaneous zoom-in and track-out (or vice versa) where the world is both coming in too close and receding far away in the same movement.