It wasn't supposed to be this way.
Cinemas should this year have been booming because of releases like 'Tenet,' 'Mulan,' 'No Time To Die,' 'Wonder Woman 1984,' 'A Quiet Place 2,' 'Dune,' 'The French Dispatch' and 'The Many Saints of Newark'.
However, multiplexes and arthouse cinemas found themselves shutting their doors at various times throughout the year because of a pandemic.
Throughout 2020, Covid-19 upended family life, education, the economy, workplaces, retail, restaurants, bars, sport and all forms of entertainment.
With hospitals in many countries struggling to cope with patients who succumbed to Coronavirus and families mourning the loss of loved ones, the closure of cinemas was an inevitable but bitter pill to swallow.
Cinemas sadly had to shut their doors at a time when escapism was desperately needed.
And when they did reopen, the filmgoing experience just wasn't the same.
It just didn't feel like the sanctuary it once was.
Social distancing ensured capacity in cinemas was significantly reduced, mask wearing was obligatory and snacks had to be purchased in advance online.
Film Festivals too found themselves migrating online, with audiences purchasing the right to stream previews of future releases.
The We Are One Festival in May saw Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto and Tribeca team up with YouTube and other film festivals around the world to screen for free 35 features, 72 short films and 15 360 VRs from around the globe over 10 days, as well as TV shows, web series and panel discussions with directors and actors like Jane Champion, Jackie Chan, Diego Luna, Bong Joon-Ho, Claire Denis, Francis Coppola and Steven Soderbergh.
It was a nice gesture but it still wasn't the same.
While Cannes could only publish a list of the films it would have screened, Venice, Toronto and Tribeca did at least go ahead with a mixture of in-person, online and drive-in screenings.
Closer to home, festivals in Belfast, Foyle, Galway, Cork and the Arabic Film Festival in Dublin also went digital.
Drive-ins enjoyed something of a revival during the pandemic, enabling audiences to revisit modern classics in the safety of their own cars.
Some studios, however, took the plunge and just went for streaming releases in the absence of cinemas.
Disney led the way with Kenneth Branagh's 'Artemis Fowl,' Niki Caro's live action 'Mulan,' Thea Sharrock's 'The One and Only Ivan' and Pete Docter's animated feature 'Soul' launching on its Disney+ on-demand service.
Although in the case of Branagh's blarney fest, that was probably a blessing - helping it avoid the ignominy of taking its chances at the box office in the face of a heavy critical pasting.
Tom Hanks saw his Sony Pictures naval drama 'Greyhound' go to Apple TV+.
Sofia Coppola's reunion with Bill Murray, 'On the Rocks' managed a limited release when cinemas tentatively reopened before appearing on the same platform.
Amazon Prime provided the home for Coky Giedroyc's disappointing adaptation of Caitlin Moran's 'How To Build A Girl' with Beanie Feldstein, Sacha Baron Cohen's so so 'Borat Subsequent Moviefilm' which featured a memorable sequence with Donald Trump loyalist Rudy Giuliani and David Freyne's charming tale of gay Irish teens 'Dating Amber' with Fionn O'Shea and Lola Petticrew.
Sky Movies and Now TV in the UK also had exclusive rights for Marc Munden's competent remake of the children's classic 'The Secret Garden' with Colin Firth and Julie Walters and screened it on the same day as it was released in cinemas.
Having trialled limited releases and acquired movies from some of the biggest names in the industry in recent years, Netflix was particularly well equipped for the Covid age.
For the most part, it left the competition stumbling in its wake with an impressive slate of streaming releases that entertained audiences and movies that attracted awards buzz - even if the quality, as always, was hit and miss.
Spike Lee was one of the first out of the blocks with a disappointing Vietnam War tale 'Da 5 Bloods' with Chadwick Boseman, Clarke Peters and Delroy Lindo.
Liam Hemsworth scored an early lockdown hit with Sam Hargreaves kidnapping action tale 'Extraction' which drew from a script by Joe Russo.
Charlize Theron got to flex her action star muscles again in Gina Prince-Bythewood's nonsense mercenary tale 'The Old Guard' with Matthias Schoenaerts.
Jamie Foxx teamed up with Joseph Gordon-Levitt for a ropey sci-fi drama 'Project Power' from Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost about a drug that gives people temporary superpowers.
On the other extreme, David Dobkin's cheese fest 'Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga' was endearing old guff with Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams and Pierce Brosnan starring in a tale about an Icelandic bid to win the contest and Dan Stevens stealing the show as a Russian.
Adam Sandler duly trotted out another toe curlingly awful Netflix comedy 'Hubie Halloween' that seemed light years behind his remarkable performance in the Safdie Brothers' intense drama 'Uncut Gems' for which he was shamefully overlooked for a Best Actor nomination at the Oscars.
Radha Blank's well judged black and white indie comedy 'The 40 Year Old Version' undoubtedly gained an audience it might not have got on the arthouse circuit.
The same is probably true for Remi Weekes' taut British asylum seeker horror film 'His House' and Edoardo Ponti's Neapolitan tale 'The Life Ahead' in which his 86-year-old real life mother, Sophia Loren turned in one of the performances of the year as an ex-prostitute and Auschwitz survivor who raises street kids.
Anne Hathaway ought to have known better with Dee Rees' incoherent South American thriller 'The Last Thing He Wanted' in which she played the least convincing photojournalist ever committed to the screen.
Ron Howard, meanwhile, unfairly drew brickbats for his adaptation of JD Vance's 2016 memoir 'Hillbilly Elegy', with some critics accusing him of trading in poverty porn, gross stereotyping, making a gauche play for Oscar glory, shamelessly trying to assuage liberal guilt and trotting out a "sickeningly irresponsible parade of death and despair".
This was despite a drama which boasted high octane performances from Gabriel Basso, Owen Asztolos, Amy Adams and an almost unrecognisable Glenn Close who should be hard to ignore in the race for next year's Best Supporting Actress Academy Award.
Howard and Netflix's crime appeared to be releasing it after a polarising US Election, with some critics taking exception to its depiction of the type of working class, Scotch Irish voters who weighed in behind Donald Trump.
Although it was noticeable that the same hysteria did not greet Antonio Campos' tale of Appalachian sexual and religious oppression 'The Devil All The Time' with Tom Holland, Robert Pattinson, Mia Wasikowska, Eliza Scanlen, Jason Clarke and Riley Keough.
Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons teamed up for Charlie Kaufman's typically quirky 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' which also featured Toni Collette and David Thewlis.
Ben Wheatley also fell foul of some audiences and critics, with an equally hysterical reaction to his adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' with Lily James, Armie Hammer and Kristin Scott Thomas.
His transgression, it seemed, was daring to remake a story Alfred Hitchcock brought to the big screen so memorably in 1940 but to his credit he tried to bring a fresh interpretation to the story.
James Corden's portrayal of a gay Broadway star attracted some over the top criticism as he joined Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington and Keegan Michael Key for Ryan Murphy's camp as Christmas musical 'The Prom'.
George C Wolfe's screen version of August Wilson's play 'Ma Rainey's Black Bottom' was notable not just for being Chadwick Boseman's last film or for its barnstorming Viola Davis performance but for the way it overcame it's theatrical origins to produce something more cinematic.
The same could not be said for David Fincher's sombre biopic 'Mank' about the writer of 'Citizen Kane' or George Clooney's miserable apocalyptic science fiction tale 'The Midnight Sky'.
Other films, particularly indie movies, took their chances with rentals on a range of streaming services.
Comedies like the Miss World protest film 'Misbehaviour,' with Keira Knightley, Jessie Buckley and Gugu Mbatha Raw and Simon Bird's delightful 'Days of the Bagnold Summer' with Monica Dolan and Earl Cave provided much needed mirth as people were confined to their homes.
Dramas like Eliza Hittman's gripping teenage abortion tale 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' and Kitty Green's #MeToo movie industry tale 'The Assistant' also attracted more attention than they might have in normal circumstances had they been confined to arthouse releases.
Both of these were part of a slew of indie films by women directors that earned a lot of admiration.
Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan's 'Saint Frances' waded into similar territory as Hittman's movie but from the perspective of a 34 year old and brought a much lighter touch to its frank subject matter.
Channing Godfrey People's 'Miss Juneteenth' also announced her as a director to very much keep an eye on and featured a central performance from Nicole Beharie as a well meaning single mum which deserves awards season recognition in 2021.
'Trolls: World Tour,' the animated sequel with Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Chance the Rapper and Jamie Dornan to the 2016 hit 'Trolls,' raced to success on digital platforms and then enjoyed a decent run when cinemas reopened.
Not everything was gold, though.
Woody Allen's 'A Rainy Day In New York' with Timothee Chalamet, Elle Fanning and Liev Schreiber turned out to be one of the veteran director's most insipid tales, securing a digital release after getting mired in the ongoing controversy around his private life.
Malik Vitthal's 'Body Cam' with Mary J Blige was a misguided attempt to use the horror movie to examine institutional racism in the police.
In a massively disrupted year, the first of two blockbusters to make it onto cinema screens, Christopher Nolan's 'Tenet' suddenly had a lot more riding on it.
A typically complex Nolan thriller with John David Washington, Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki and Robert Pattinson, it was touted as the film to save cinema.
However it ended up sharply dividing audiences, thanks to an enigmatic plot that made some viewers feel like they were not smart enough to fully grasp all its intricacies.
Patty Jenkins' sequel 'Wonder Woman 1984' just about made it to a pre-Christmas cinema release in the UK but unfortunately, it hit multiplexes just as a new strain of Covid forced the British Government and devolved nations to impose new restrictions on cinemas and other entertainment venues from Boxing Day.
In the US, Warner Bros decided to give Jenkins' film a simultaneous streaming release for a month from Christmas Day on HBO Max.
Box office for the film in those countries where cinemas remained open was decent, even in the US where HBO Max also saw a massive surge in streaming.
The studio subsequently angered Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve and other directors when it announced that its 2021 slate of movies including 'Dune,' 'The Matrix 4,' 'The Suicide Squad' and 'Godzilla versus Kong,' would get the same treatment.
Villeneuve, Nolan and others cried foul after being kept in the dark about the announcement.
However there is no doubt that the disappointing box office for 'Tenet' in the US and other territories influenced the studio's decision .
It was defended by Steven Soderbergh on the grounds that it made sense economically, even if he did feel sympathy for directors like Villeneuve who had no inkling of the plan.
Digital streaming provided an outlet too for movies whose cinema releases in March were brought to an abrupt halt thanks to the lockdown.
One of the best of these was Nick Rowland's tense rural Irish thriller 'Calm with Horses' with Cosmo Jarvis, Niamh Algar and Barry Keoghan which in normal times would have been cult viewing in cinemas.
Craig Zobel's heavy handed political horror film 'The Hunt' with Betty Gilpin and the British comedy 'Military Wives' with Sharon Horgan and Kristin Scott Thomas also rushed their digital releases after lockdown dramatically ended their theatrical runs.
When reviewing the year, it is tempting to talk about 2020's movie year as BC (Before Covid) and AD (Alternative Distribution).
And because BC coincided with awards season, a lot of its fare tended to be very good indeed.
In normal circumstances, we would probably have begun this review of the year raving about the extraordinary Academy Award Best Picture win for Bong Joon-Ho's South Korean masterpiece 'Parasite'.
No-one could have predicted when Joon-Ho's class thriller captured the Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2019 that it would go all the way to Best Picture glory at the Oscars - making history as the first ever foreign language film to take the top prize.
Whether it really ushers in a new era of international movies challenging English language features regularly for the top prize is debatable.
Although Celine Sciamma's 'Portraot of a Lady on Fire' and Ladj Ly's contemporary thriller 'Les Miserables' earned a lot of admirers beyond the world cinema set.
'Parasite's' triumph was a significant achievement, with HBO moving quickly to commission a TV spin-off.
But if you think more foreign language films might win the Oscar, just remember Michel Hazanavicius' 2011 film 'The Artist' did not trigger a wave of silent movies after its Academy Awards triumph.
The favourite to win Best Picture this year was Sam Mendes' stunning First World War tale '1917' and, in any other year, it would have been a deserved winner.
Mendes' and cinematographer Roger Deakins took a leaf out of the book of movies like 'Russian Ark,' 'Utoya: July 22' and 'Son of Saul' by giving the film the appearance of one take.
A technical tour de force, it was not only dazzlingly shot and choreographed but tightly scripted and impressively performed.
George Mackay and Dean Charles Chapman made engaging heroes who find themselves on a dangerous adventure behind enemy lines in a film that burst with British and Irish acting talent like Colin Firth, Benedict Cumberbatch, Mark Frost, Andrew Scott, Daniel Mays, Adrian Scarborough and Richard Madden.
Taika Waititi picked up a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his wonderfully skittish Second World War Germany tale 'JoJo Rabbit' in which Roman Griffin Davis' Nazi Youth recruit knocked about with Adolf Hitler as an imaginary friend, while Scarlett Johansson's mum hid a Jewish girl in their house.
Chinonye Chukwu's death row drama 'Clemency' gained fans in cinemas and on digital platforms, thanks to Alfre Woodard's barnstorming performance as a prison warden bled dry by all the prisoners she has had to watch go to their deaths.
Woodard's performance was a glaring omission from the Oscars shortlist for Best Actress - a fact that only serves to highlight the ridiculousness of awards season.
The same sense of awards season injustice hung around the treatment of Melina Matsoukas' excellent 'Queen and Slim' - a topical tale of two young African Americans on the run for the killing of a racist cop that featured blistering performances from Jodie Turner-Smith and Daniel Kaluuya and some stunning cinematography by Tat Radcliff.
Issues of institutional racism were to the fore in Steve McQueen's anthology of five films 'Small Axe' which went straight to broadcast on BBC1 and streaming on Amazon Prime in November and December after appearances at various film festivals.
Tackling racism in the police, in education and the care system, McQueen's five films - 'Mangrove,' 'Lovers Rock,' 'Red, White and Blue,' 'Alex Wheatle' and 'Education' - also shone a light on the experiences of London's Carribbean community in the 1970s and 1980s.
'Lovers Rock,' with its brilliant recreation of an underground blues reggae party, found itself topping many film and TV critics' end of year lists.
Back in the BC age, Peter Cattaneo's underwhelming choral movie 'Military Wives' with Sharon Horgan and Kristin Scott Thomas had a brief theatrical run before quickly bouncing onto Video on Demand services.
There was an ill advised horror movie reboot of the romantic TV series 'Fantasy Island' from Blumhouse.
Although to be fair to the low budget horror production company, they did a much better job with Australian director Leigh Whannell's imaginative take on 'The Invisible Man' with Elisabeth Moss.
Arguably the worst film to hit cinema screens in 2020 was Stephen Gaghan's terrible adventure tale 'Dolittle' which saw Robert Downey Jr bizarrely doing an impersonation of a hoarse Anthony Hopkins trying to whisper the lyrics of 'Goodness Gracious Me'.
Guy Ritchie also got to do his Mockney Tarantino routine all over again with 'The Gentlemen' with Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant, Colin Farrell and lashings of misogyny, homophobia and racism.
Rather depressingly, the film did quite well at the box office despite a rather shameful attempted rape scene and the usual Ritchie nonsense.
Todd Haynes' 'Dark Waters' saw him very much play along with the conventions of the underdog legal drama with a starry cast that included Mark Ruffalo, Tim Robbins, Anne Hathaway and Bill Pullman.
Autumn de Wilde's vivacious adaptation of Jane Austen's 'Emma' was not only a visual treat but a very witty take on the novel with Anya Taylor Joy, Bill Nighy and Miranda Hart.
Robert Eggers gave audiences an intense black and white period drama 'The Lighthouse' with Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe battling the elements in a dark tale laced with Kubrick, Bergman and loads of Jung.
Marjane Satrapi's retelling of the Marie Curie story 'Radioactive' with Rosamund Pike looked great but suffered from a tendency to state the obvious.
From Australia came Justin Kurzel's rather trippy take on the country's most famous outlaw Ned Kelly, with George Mackay shining as him in 'The True History of the Kelly Gang' which also had strong performances from Nicholas Hoult and Russell Crowe.
However the most thrilling period drama was Armando Iannucci's wonderfully inventive 'The Personal History of David Copperfield' in which he colourfully rebooted Dickens for cinema audiences with the help of great performances from Dev Patel, Tilda Swinton, Hugh Laurie, Ben Whishaw, Rosalind Eleazar, Peter Capaldi, Daisy May Cooper, Paul Whitehouse and Bronagh Gallagher.
Daisy May Cooper's brother and co-creator of the BBC sitcom 'This Country', Charlie Cooper popped up in s minor role in Michael Winterbottom's disjointed fashion industry satire 'Greed' with Steve Coogan, David Mitchell and Isla Fisher.
Terrence Malick protege Trey Edward Schults delivered a very striking family drama 'Waves' that didn't quite measure up to the sum of its parts but which showed real promise as a filmmaker.
Fresh from receiving decent reviews for his portrayal of the children's TV presenter Fred Rogers in Marielle Heller's clever 'A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood', Tom Hanks shocked his fans with the news that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted Covid-19 while he was filming in Australia a Baz Luhrman movie about Elvis.
Thankfully, Hanks and Wilson overcame the Coronavirus but others were not so lucky.
As the world mourned the loss of hundreds of thousands of people from Covid, cinema also lost some big names in 2020.
The most shocking was undoubtedly 'Black Panther' star Chadwick Boseman after a private battle with cancer.
The world also said goodbye to screen legends Kirk Douglas, Sean Connery, Olivia de Havilland, Max Von Sydow, Honor Blackman, 'Alien' star Ian Holm, Diana Rigg, Forces sweetheart Vera Lynn, and 'Carry On' star Barbara Windsor.
Directors Alan Parker, Joel Schumacher, Carl Reiner, Terry Jones, Lynn Shelton and horror filmmaker Stuart Gordon passed away.
Composer Ennio Morricone, cinematographer Allen Daviau, country singer songwriter and occasional actor John Prine, British comedian Bobby Ball, 'Purple Rain' screenwriter William Blinn, 'Shrek 2' animation director Kelly Asbury and film producer Stuart Cornfield were among those who left us.
2020 was also the year when 'FX: Murder By Illusion' star Brian Dennehy and fellow character actors Geoffrey Palmer, Jerry Stiller, John Sessions, Michael Angelis, Mark Blum, Lucia Bose, Michael Lonsdale, Patricia Bosworth, Hilary Heath, Allen Garfield, John Shrapnel, Orson Bean, Marge Champion, Earl Cameron, Anthony James, Nicholas Tucci, BJ Hogg, Boris Leskin, John Saxon, Matthew Faber, Anthony Chisholm, Dieter Laser, Bruce Allpress and Hugh Keays-Byrne of 'Mad Max' passed away.
'Jerry Maguire' star and wife of John Travolta, Kelly Preston, country music icon and occasional actor Kenny Rogers, 'Chariots of Fire' lead actor Ben Cross, 'Days of Heaven' star Linda Manz, Bollywood actor Ranjit Chowdhury, US comic actor Fred Willard, 'Aliens' actor Jay Benedict, rising Bollywood star Sushant Singh Rajput, 'Hidden Agenda' and 'Last of the Mohicans' star Maurice Roeves died.
The lives of Bollywood actor Rishi Kapoor, 'Lolita' actress Shirley Douglas, 'Jaws' actress Lee Fiero, 'Inside the Actors Studio' presenter James Lipton, 'Queen of Katwe' actress Nikita Pearl Waligwa, 'Nanny McPhee' star Raphael Coleman and the espionage novelist, John Le Carre also ended.
In a year when former Vice President Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump after four years of dysfunction in the White House, politics was rarely away from the screen.
Delroy Lindo's character in Spike Lee's 'Da 5 Bloods' was s rare African American Trump supporter, while documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney delivered a withering look at the Republican President's inept handling of the Coronavirus pandemic in 'Totally Under Control: Trump and Covid-19'.
Satirist Jon Stewart, however, was more concerned about the zero sum game approach to all US politics with a smart, yet surprisingly gentle comedy 'Irresistible' with Steve Carrell, Rose Byrne and Chris Cooper which went on digital platforms.
As we head into 2021, we do so in the knowledge that a Covid vaccine is being rolled out.
But we are also embarking on 2021 with a new lockdown, thanks to the more virulent Coronavirus strain that emerged in Britain in recent weeks.
In a lot of towns and cities in the UK and Ireland cinemas are closed once again just like a lot of businesses.
And even when things do eventually settle down, it is hard to believe that social distancing, hand hygiene and face coverings will not still be s part of everyday life, let alone cinemagoing, after being hardwired into us during 2020 and into 2021.
Cinemagoing will continue to exist and it is arguable that, like live music and theatre, there will be a real yearning to watch entertainment communally again.
However the means of distribution may change.
2020 might be the year when the movie film industry finally embraces simultaneous theatrical and digital releases.
The big challenge is to ensure that the indie voices who gained more prominence this year continue to get that exposure.
Cinema may never be the same again.
Ten Best Films of 2020
1. Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho)
2. The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci)
3. 1917 (Sam Mendes)
4. Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu)
5. Small Axe: Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen)
6. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
7. Soul (Pete Docter)
8. Queen and Slim (Melina Matsoukas)
9. Saint Frances (Alex Thompson and Kelly O'Sullivan)
10. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always (Eliza Hittman)
Worst Film: 'Dolittle' (Stephen Gaghan)
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