#portraitnation

This year’s Césars were tame, by comparison: actress Corinne Masiero stripped on stage, using her brief spotlight to focus on the pandemic and the crisis of shuttered cinemas across France. May they open as soon as it’s safe, because many of the filmmakers prominent in these social movements have new movies on the horizon. As the older generation retires, this newer group of progressive filmmakers is making waves on the festival scene, working from perspectives often denied or overlooked in mainstream cinema. French cinema is at a sort of crossroads, and the next Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Divines or BPM could be just around the bend.

Letterboxd members are well schooled in the power of Agnès, and Céline Sciamma has entered the worldwide critical sphere—and Letterboxd’s highest ranks—thanks to the success of Portrait of a Lady on Fire (🖼️🔥 forever), but there are many more French storytellers worthy of your watchlists. Alongside Sciamma, here are nine more for your consideration.

Céline Sciamma’s ‘Petite maman’.

Céline Sciamma

Coming soon: Petite maman Watch now: Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood

Before her worldwide hit Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Céline Sciamma helmed a trilogy of acclaimed coming-of-age stories, Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood. Her fifth feature, Petite maman, both lives in the world of this trilogy, and radically differs from the trio.

Petite maman premiered at the 2021 Berlinale, where the North-American rights were snapped up by NEON, Sciamma’s partner on Portrait’s release. In the film, Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) is eight years old when her grandmother dies, and she goes with her parents to help empty the house. One morning, her mother, Marion (Nina Meurisse) disappears, and she finds a young girl also named Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) building a fort in the same place her mother had as a child. A non-traditional view of motherhood, Petite maman’s supposed twist is never meant to be a twist at all, as this Miyazaki-like fairytale never tries to hide where Nelly’s mother really is.

Unlike other time-travel films, Petite maman is not concerned with physics. It’s a gentle act of love that blurs generational lines, answering the question of what it would be like to see life through your parents’ eyes at your age.

What Sciamma does here is radical even for her, creating an entire film that lies in a safer place of childhood. Where in Water Lilies, Girlhood and, especially relevant, Tomboy, shot in the same forests of Cergy, she depicts the full violence that comes with adolescence, the two young girls here console each other, and don’t have a camera on them for the rougher events of their childhoods.

Sciamma’s earlier films about youth feel like personal catharsis, but also unflinchingly show coercion, a child being outed, and teenage gang violence. With Petite maman, the two young girls are allowed to live in the more innocent parts of their childhoods, and though they deal with grief, worries of abandonment, and one nervously awaits a major surgery, Sciamma now tells a weighty story without needing to show pain on screen.

The end result is a warm, nostalgic film that isn’t bound by time period or the specifics of setting. It’s a live-action Ghibli fairytale that, despite having Sciamma’s youngest leads, has matured from her earlier work. The plays acted out by the children sometimes parallel their own stories, and once, in a scene of a countess and maid, almost seem to be calling back to past films, in this case Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Many times, including at the film’s Berlinale Q&A, Sciamma has said she does not write characters, but stories and situations to enter. This feels more than true with this latest effort, a steady hand extended to an audience, promising us that it will be okay, some day.

Alice Diop’s ‘We’.

Alice Diop

Coming soon: We (‘Nous’) Watch now: Towards Tenderness (‘Vers la Tendresse’)

Through the many shortcomings and scandals of France’s César Awards, a memorable win of recent years was Alice Diop’s 2017 award for best short film for Vers la Tendresse (Towards Tenderness), a prize she dedicated to victims of police violence. The film is a 38-minute poetic exploration of how men view sex and romance in the French banlieues (suburbs). One line in the film summarizes Diop’s central thesis: “It’s just hard to talk about love. We don’t know what it is.” These young men struggle to conceptualize love from what they are taught, and their flaws are laid bare in the name of understanding the limitations of masculinity.

Though more abstract, Diop’s new film, We, which had its premiere in the 2021 Berlinale industry selection, comes from a similar desire for collective understanding. The train line of the RER B crosses Paris from north to south, and with it, so does an attempt to connect fragmented stories around the city. The film heavily recalls the Varda tradition that a documentary can be made just by walking and waiting. Using a series of suburban vignettes, Diop is able to piece together a wildlife conservatory of ordinary lives, looking at her own community and trying to capture the warmer side of society. She talks to a mechanic, a writer, and even her own father, in a sort of David Attenborough of human landscapes. We weaves through parts of the city with overwhelmingly Black and immigrant populations, building a nostalgic breed of documentary not focused on the gotcha! reveal.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s ‘An Easy Girl’ (2019).

Rebecca Zlotowski

Coming soon: Les enfants des autres Watch now: An Easy Girl (‘Une fille facile’)

Writer and director Rebecca Zlotowski has steadily released a film every three years since 2010. Her stories have centered on Jewish and North-African characters, and her television series Savages, based on a series of novels from Sabri Louatah, focuses on the attempted assassination of a fictional Arab President-elect in France. Very little has been spilled about Zlotowski’s newest film, Les enfants des autres, which began shooting in March. We know that Virginie Efira and Roschdy Zem are attached, and there were casting calls looking for children, and for extras for a scene set in a synagogue.

Though each of her four previous features have their strengths—and I’m even partial to Planetarium, an overzealous magical-realist film about American sisters with a supernatural gift, set in the Parisian film industry around the rise of anti-semitism—2019 Cannes selection An Easy Girl, readily accessible on Netflix, is a choice pick. Notable for its controversial casting of Zahia Dehar, who became infamous for relations with the French national football team while an underage sex worker, this choice proved to be a clever deception in a film about how women said to be easy with men are dismissed.

Dehar plays the older cousin to newcomer Mina Farid’s Naïma, a sixteen year old who longs for her cousin’s seemingly glamorous lifestyle. Naïma soon learns this life isn’t just fashion, but about learning to please wealthy men in order to get what she wants, while never having to give too much of herself away. While most of the director’s closest contemporaries are pioneers of a coherent movement of female gaze, Zlotowski chooses here to shoot through a decidedly male gaze, challenging her audiences’ perceptions of how they treat her characters before we come to understand them.

Also noteworthy is Zlotowski’s debut feature Dear Prudence, based around a diary she’d found in the street. Starring a very young Léa Seydoux as a seventeen-year-old girl who joins a motorcycle gang after the death of her mother, the film’s unique source material makes this Zlotowski’s most intimate film.

Julia Ducournau’s ‘Raw’ (2016).

Julia Ducournau

Coming soon: Titane Watch now: Raw (‘Grave’)

Julia Ducournau’s cult-favorite, coming-of-age, cannibal gorefest Raw quickly made her a name to watch. When Garance Marillier’s Justine tastes meat for the first time at a veterinary-school hazing, it awakens a cannibalistic desire within her. Shot as one would an erotic realization, Raw is at its essence an uncontrollable thread of self discovery.

Already backed by NEON for US distribution, with a possible mid-2021 release date, Ducournau’s follow-up Titane looks to be a wild thriller, if somewhat more traditional than the teenage “monstrous feminine” body-horror of her early work. Much of the production has been kept under wraps, but we know Vincent Lindon stars alongside newcomer Agathe Rousselle. Lindon plays the father of a mysterious young man named Adrien LeGrand, who is found in an airport with a swollen face, claiming to be a boy who had disappeared ten years before. Ducournau is a filmmaker unafraid to shy away from the provocative, and Titane is all but guaranteed a major platform come premiere.

Catherine Corsini’s ‘La Fracture’ (2021).

Catherine Corsini

Coming soon: The Divide (‘La fracture’) Watch now: Summertime (‘La belle saison’), An Impossible Love (‘Un amour impossible’)

Coming a generation before many of the other filmmakers here, Catherine Corsini is best known for her complex romantic dramas. Her most recent are the 1970s feminist-tinged Summertime (2015), starring Cécile de France and Izïa Higelin as a couple torn between rural farmlands and Paris, and An Impossible Love (2018), a novelistic chronicle of a couple (Niels Schneider and Virginie Efira) as their relationship sours from 1958 to the present day.

Summertime, which is currently available to rent or buy in the US, is Corsini’s first film to consciously depict a relationship between two women (though 2001’s Replay is ambiguous as to what is happening between Pascale Bussières and Emmanuelle Béart’s characters). The young lovers learn what freedoms they gain and lose between the pastoral countryside, and the feminist organizers they run with in Paris. It’s a fairly standard romantic arc, but illuminates a fiery counter-culture feminist era, and is a staunchly progressive film from a national cinema built so firmly upon a more traditional view of seduction.

La fracture, Corsini’s latest (and the third film produced by her life partner Elisabeth Perez) centers on yet another couple (Marina Foïs and Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) who are on the verge of breaking up when a demonstration outside causes tensions to rise at the hospital they’re confined within. A relationship under strain alongside French protest culture? Extremely French subject matter indeed.

Claire Burger’s ‘Real Love’ (2018).

Claire Burger

Coming soon: Foreign Language (‘Langue étrangère’) Watch now: Real Love (‘C’est ça l’amour’)

Most likely known for her Clouzot-tinged music video for Kompormat’s ‘De mon âme à ton âme’, starring Adèle Haenel, Claire Burger is a filmmaker heavily rooted in location. Her past films, including a graduation short and two features, have been set in the north-eastern town of Forbach, where she grew up, just fifteen minutes from the German border. This looks to be a thread that runs through her next film: Foreign Language is about a friendship between two girls who live on either side of the French-German border. BPM producer Marie-Ange Luciani is set to produce; a poster for BPM made a cameo in Burger’s last feature, Real Love.

A personal story, Real Love is one of non-traditional fatherhood and a family that does not rely on masculinity. When his wife leaves, Mario (Bouli Lanners) is left to raise his two teenage daughters in their small town, all while taking part in a community-theater production. Most of the film is told from the perspective of the younger daughter (Justine LaCroix), experiencing first love with a girl from school, who doesn’t seem to want anything serious.

Notably, after her debut and a lengthy series of short films, this was the first time Burger, who edits her own films, cast professional actors, in the case of Lanners and Antonia Buresi (as a theater director). Yet it is the performance of the actresses playing the sisters that most touched the hearts of Letterboxd fans—as Lyd writes, “Maybe it was the opera music or the fantastic performances by Justine Lacroix and Sarah Henochsberg as the daughters, but it just affirmed so many things about life choices and the tipsy-turvy nature of love as just, everything.”

Marie Amachoukeli’s ‘Party Girl’ (2014).

Marie Amachoukeli

Coming soon: Rose Hill Watch now: Party Girl

A rare non-Sciamma project backed by producer Bénédicte Couvreur, Marie Amachoukeli’s solo debut is much anticipated, after Party Girl, where she was one-third of a directing trio with Claire Burger and Samuel Theis (who is shooting a feature of his own titled Petite Nature). Outside the collaborations with Burger, which began in film school, Amachoukeli is screenwriting for a number of films including Franco Lolli’s The Defendant, and has collaborated with animator Vladimir Mavounia-Kouka on two shorts, The Cord Woman and I Want Pluto to Be a Planet Again. A synopsis has yet to be released for Rose Hill, but in an old interview with Brain magazine, Amachoukeli mentioned searching for backers for a lesbian spy comedy.

Party Girl is essentially docu-fiction, with actors cast as versions of themselves building an authentic troupe of real people. Though it’s a collaboration, Amachoukeli shines as a screenwriter, introducing the story of a bar hostess who still lives the partying, single life of a woman in her twenties, despite having reached sixty. She is thrown when a man asks her to marry him, and she must reconstruct her outlook on love. From such young filmmakers, Party Girl is a sensitive portrait of an imperfect, ageing woman, which feels so rare in a cinematic landscape that longs for a fountain of youth.

Audrey Diwan’s ‘Happening’ (2021).

Audrey Diwan

Coming soon: Happening (‘L’evenement’) Watch now: Losing It (‘Mais vous êtes fous’)

French memoirist Annie Ernaux works by reconstructing her life over and over as time passes. One of her more well-known books, L’évènement, retraces her experiences trying to get an abortion in 1963, during a time when the procedure was banned in France.

Audrey Diwan—whose 2019 debut film Losing It follows a pair of young parents (the always-charming Pio Marmaï and Céline Sallette) working through the father’s spiral into addiction and recovery—has a knack for solid performances. She’s able to write a relationship under strain with nuance, and Céline Sallette’s character shows strength as a mother choosing between protecting her children and repairing her relationship to their troubled but good-hearted father, whom she still loves dearly. This skill for writing family should pair well with Ernaux’s deeply personal prose.

Happening sweeps up a small army of promising young actors: Being 17 star Kacey Mottet Klein, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire and School’s Out supporting breakout Luana Bajrami, appear alongside lead actress Anamaria Vartolomei. Her character, Anne, is a bright student who risks everything once her pregnancy starts showing, so that she can finish her studies. Audrey Diwan’s film isn’t the only Ernaux adaptation currently, with Danielle Arbid’s Passion Simple having premiered at Venice in 2020.

Claire Simon’s ‘I Want to Talk about Duras’ (2021).

Claire Simon

Coming soon: I Want to Talk About Duras Watch now: Mimi

One of few figures to bridge cinema and literature equally, Marguerite Duras was a social commentator on her world; she grew up poor in French-colonized Vietnam, took on a staunch leftist perspective, and developed a singular tone in her observational assertions. Duras’s 1975 film India Song, based on her novel of the same name, was a landmark in feminist film. Through a hypnotic structure (“a viewing experience like no other, one that touches all of the senses,” writes Carter on Letterboxd), India Song delivers a strong criticism of class and colonialism through its story of Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), a French ambassador’s wife in 1930s Kolkata.

In I Want to Talk About Duras, writer-director Claire Simon (best known for her documentaries on the seemingly mundane) adapts a transcript of conversations between Duras (Emmanuelle Devos) and her much younger partner Yann Andréa Steiner (Swann Arlaud), in which the pair break down the codes of love and literature. These conversations were published in a book named after Steiner, who met Duras when he approached her after a screening of India Song.

The highlight of Simon’s previous work is Mimi, in which she settles down in the countryside with an old friend, and tells her life story over 105 minutes. Recently programmed as part of Metrograph’s Tell Me: Women Filmmakers series, it’s clear the film was selected for its authenticity. However, many Letterboxd members may heavily benefit from seeing The Graduation, her 2016 documentary about the famous Parisian film school La Fémis, and its difficult selection process. Most of the other filmmakers in this list passed through its gates, and Claire Simon’s Wiseman-lite documentary sheds light on the challenges these young people take upon themselves for a chance at a world-renowned filmmaking education.

Amandine Gay’s ‘Speak Up’ (2017).

Amandine Gay

Coming soon: A Story of One’s Own (‘Une histoire à soi’) Watch now: Speak Up (‘Ouvrir la voix’)

Amandine Gay has much to say about access to film school—and opportunities in the film industry—for those outside the mainstream. Initially on the radar for her Afro-feminist activism, Gay arrived on the cinema scene with Speak Up, a narrative reclamation focusing on the diaspora in France and Belgium.

Talking to Francophone Black women who may not be considered formal scholars, allowing her subjects to speak as experts on their own experiences, Gay disproves the idea that France is a race-blind society. She shoots mainly in regal close-ups and using natural light, allowing her subjects the clarity to speak for themselves, unfiltered. (And to put to bed the misconception that Black performers are harder to light, one of many important angles discussed in an excellent interview with Letterboxd member Justine Smith.)

Using family photos and home videos from subjects, Gay’s engaging documentary work is a mouthpiece to spark conversation. Her next documentary, Une histoire à soi, centers on transnational adoption and will likely take a similarly conversational approach in exploring a unique cultural divide; putting the microphone in front of those who can provide a first-person point of view. Though not officially backed yet, she’s also—for years!—teased a Black lesbian sommelier film on podcasts and in interviews. That’s a story that I hope won’t need much more maturing before we see it. A votre santé.

Related content

Feature-length French films by Women—Sarah’s list

The Official Top 100 Narrative Feature Films by Women Directors—featuring Portrait of a Lady on Fire at number one

Little White Lies: 100 Great Movies by Female Directors

The top ten in the 100 highest rated, obsessively rewatched films of 2020.

Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire is now top of the heap, where Spike Jonze’s Her was number one last time around. In fact, only Jaws and Carol remain from the last top ten. The Letterboxd community favors a wider world view: in 2017, the top 100 had only one film by a female director; in 2020 there are eight. The list has gone from exactly zero films entirely in languages other than English, to two (Portrait and Parasite), with several more containing a portion of non-English dialogue. Not quite leaping the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, but it’s progress. And, there is substantially more LGBTQ+ representation all round.

This year’s top 100 shows that we still like to return to the idea of the auteur, and the challenge of a franchise. In 2017, Christopher Nolan was the filmmaker with the highest number of highly rated, obsessively rewatched films; in 2020 Quentin Tarantino has taken the lead, just ahead of Nolan. Joining them in the multiple-titles group are Edgar Wright, Peter Jackson, Joe and Anthony Russo, epic-scale filmmakers from whom we’ve learned so much, and whose films have more to offer the viewer on every watch. (When ratings are not part of the equation, Avengers: Endgame—still with a respectable 3.9 average—was the Most Obsessively Rewatched title of 2019. “You give me someone flying, turning invisible, super speed… that’s where I live,” explains obsessive rewatcher Max Joseph this Letterboxd interview. “In Endgame, I get a little bit of every genre and mood.”)

Obsessed with obsession

What is “obsessive”? To put some kind of parameters around the search for this year’s top 100, our team looked for the feature films that had five or more rated watches from a minimum of 150 Letterboxd members each, then we sorted that list by the ratings of those members.

But that word—“obsessive”—got me thinking. Just how obsessive are we talking here? It’s reassuring to know that Parasite is, naturally, a film we enjoy returning to, but when we’re talking about rewatches plural, what happens when we sort these 100 highly rated titles by another value: the number of diary entries logged by these obsessive members. And what would that list say about our tendencies as watchers?

Spoiler: we also pulled those numbers, and found an entirely different top ten:

The most obsessively rewatched, highest-rated films of all time, as at 2020.

Look at that image. Compare it with the inarguable cinephilia of the ratings-based top ten, which soars on critical strength. What are we seeing here? That’s not the question. The real question is: what are we feeling? What do these ten films do to us so consistently, that helps them to retain high ratings across many, many, many rewatches?

You see, in the top 100, members typically log their favorites between five and seven times—but there’s a select handful of titles that see an average of up to 24 viewings per obsessive member. You read that right. There is a film on Letterboxd that multiple obsessive members have watched 24 times or more, at the time of writing.

Comedy that never gets old

The film in question is Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows, a genre-smart mockumentary about three vampire housemates just, well, pure vibing. It’s entirely in a league of its own, no doubt helped by a spin-off series, with the next entry, The Lonely Island’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping racking up an average of 17.7 rewatches per obsessive member.

These top two most obsessively rewatched titles make sense. When you’re feeling low, or when there’s some time to kill, what better place to turn than somewhere where the jokes never get old? As James writes on Letterboxd, Shadows “never fails to make me laugh”. Never fails. Taking a chance on a new comedy harbors its risks, so when you find the ones that work, you have to hold onto them like gold dust. It’s the sense of familiarity that comes from the same sharp, self-aware sketches, the endlessly quotable one-liners and screenshots that make memes feel like works of art.

(On that note, I asked the team: what were the highest-rated, obsessively rewatched comedy specials? No surprises: Bo Burnham’s masterful 2016 Netflix special Make Happy, and John Mulaney’s Kid Gorgeous at Radio City. Comedy is good when it catches you off guard—but in a pandemic, it’s even better when you can rely on it to deliver that same rush of endorphins, every time.)

Thank you for the music

Speaking of pick-me-ups, ever notice how much better you feel after karaoke? Or, when you know everyone else has gone out so you can let rip across every inch of the house with ultimate privacy? The cathartic thrill that comes from a sing-along is what keeps our obsessive members returning to musicals, increasingly. There’s comfort in memorized lyrics; the words we yell and hold dear.

You’ve got this in Popstar (‘Finest Girl’, anyone?) and, crucially, in a double-bill of jukebox musicals celebrating ABBA’s greatest hits: Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. With fifteen rewatches on average for the former, and almost seventeen for the latter, the sequel’s slight upper hand proves the film’s triumphant formula—there really is an endless supply of ABBA bangers—but also that the repurposing of the most pivotal tracks (‘Mamma Mia’ and ‘Waterloo’) will work even better the second time around, due to the familiarity, both of the songs and now their new-found purpose in this world.

The feeling of singing along with Lily James as Donna, as she dances around Paris with her young Harry, of latching onto Cher’s every breath as she reunites with the eponymous Fernando—these moments become part of our own memory, and the satisfaction that comes from performing them again and again never fades. It’s also why so many musicals are rewatchable staples. Singin’ in the Rain, Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody and Pitch Perfect all feature in the top 100.

Out of interest, I asked the team to lift the curtain on non-narrative music films to see which greats we return to. Again, zero surprise (to me, at least): Jonathan Demme’s transcendent Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense is, and has long been, the highest-rated, most obsessively rewatched concert documentary on Letterboxd. And it’s only been a few months, but the Disney+ filmed version of Hamilton is up there, along with Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. #BEYHIVE, come in.

Maybe we should trust love

At the other end of the spectrum, two titles in the most obsessively rewatched top ten point to our tendencies to find catharsis in our most extreme, most vulnerable expressions of emotion. Our two revealing films here are Love, Simon and Interstellar—one a grounded and sensitive coming-of-age picture of a teenage boy’s coming out, the other an epic space-travel thriller. Still, both films understand that, ultimately, love transcends all.

These films make room for us to revisit these most searing feelings, of love hidden, lost, afraid or universal, they let us cry out what we relate to, and escape into whichever onscreen emotions we prefer to project ourselves into beyond our own lives, time and time again. Because however much changes, you know you’ll always crave and be rewarded by love. (And by the existential exploration that often accompanies these big feelings: Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow is the highest-rated, most obsessively rewatched short film with Letterboxd members.)

Ink spots and needle drops

The idea of projection—of escape beyond our own lives—comes back often when thinking of the rewatch. But certain titles reveal how we choose to find escape in a quite literal form; observe the love for Tangled, rewatched on average ten times per obsessive member.

And then there’s Shrek 2, revisited on average 7.9 times (more on this bizarre, outstanding oddity on its own soon). The leap of faith into an animated world is one that offers a blank canvas painted over with new colors: the pastel pinks and soft peach oranges of sunset skies in Tangled, the rich purples and blues of the twinkling lights of the afterlife in Coco, the playful blue waters of Moana, with the sun giving everything a new glow. Animation works as relaxation here, clearing the mind and coloring it calmly time and time again. Elsa said it first: you can, and should, let it all go.

It is entirely probable, of course, that no Letterboxd parent is logging the Frozens—or any other animated family film, for that matter—as often as their household is actually watching them, the truth of which would completely upend this data. We know the math underpinning this whole exercise is somewhat arbitrary, but it’s an interesting starting point from which to analyze why certain things just work, again and again.

Take the oddity that is Shrek 2, deserving of its own dissection purely because of how masterfully it combines so many of the previously established elements. This film and its predecessor create so many vivid images that fit into the category of animated escapism, but music plays a major part, also. ‘Accidentally In Love’ by Counting Crows as Shrek and Fiona blissfully enjoy their honeymoon period; ‘Funky Town’ by Lipps Inc. as Shrek, Fiona and Donkey roll into Far Far Away; Jennifer Saunders as Fairy Godmother, with her sublime cover of Bonnie Tyler’s ‘Holding Out For A Hero’. There are too many perfect needle-drop moments to count, and every time the rewatch comes around, they feel new.

Add to the comforting visuals and euphoric music the countless one-liners, perfectly performed by Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers, but really, here, Rupert Everett as Prince Charming—a squirm-inducing, note-perfect pantomimic performance. Shrek 2 might just be the defining example of what makes a good movie the best movie, and one that only grows greater with every rewatch. Lucky us.

Festive fever

The inclusion of A Christmas Story, the second-last in our most rewatched top ten, makes sense when considering the times in our lives when we turn to movies for comfort (and discomfort: note the Hallowe’en-related rewatchables in the top 100). A Christmas Story might not be your first festive choice, but you will have your own equivalent. The Muppet Christmas Carol also made the top 100, with Elf, Love, Actually and the Home Alone movies bubbling under. We recognize all the beats, and seeing as the holidays return each year, it’s natural that we return to the titles that make us feel most at home within them.

Like Carol. Darling Carol. The last of our top ten most most most rewatched. Flung out of space into our eyeballs by Todd Haynes as some sort of Christmas miracle, its rewatchability as much seasonal as it is about love, representation, vintage glamor and that final scene. Let’s see where Happiest Season sits this time next year, shall we?

And so, what can filmmakers and distributors learn from what we want to see, not just once, but again and again? In just four years the list of titles the Letterboxd community has chosen to revisit and protect has blossomed with an open heart and feverishly enthusiastic mind.

Looking over the top 100 highest-rated, obsessively rewatched films in 2020, we want more queer love: Portrait, Moonlight and Carol but also Booksmart, The Favourite, Call Me by Your Name. We definitely need more singing and dancing: Suspiria, La La Land, Singin’ in the Rain, Mamma Mia and beyond.

We want more adventure, more time travel, more mind-melters, more drinking, exploring, investigating, more talking animals, more drugs, more laughs, more tears, more goosebumps. We want more full-body feelings of falling in love with a movie you know you’ll hold onto with everything you’ve got.

In the end, numbers can only tell us so much, and these numbers are drawn from what we’ve already seen, which is what’s already managed to make it through the system. There’s as much to learn from how these films were made as there is from what they’re about. Because, no matter how many AI tools people dream up to help with the green-lighting process, moviemaking is fundamentally about magic. And when all the right ingredients make it into the cauldron, the spell can be so strong that a film will win our hearts forever.

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The Highest-Rated Obsessively Rewatched Club for 2020