Avengers: End Game did not make the Top 15. It didn’t get close. Despite my injury it was decently entertaining. But it was uneven, was like three different contradictory movies at once, and the action climax looked terrible. Actually, none of Disney’s major blockbusters made it. Only one got even an Honorable Mention. I might have been too kind when I thought Star Wars Episode IX was barely passable. Frozen II was fun but hollow. I didn’t even bother to see the CG remake of Lion King. But the movie that sums up Disney for me was Spider-Man: Far from Home. It was safe, uncontroversial, and proudly unimportant. Why would anybody want to see that movie when last year's Into the Spider-Verse is better, bolder, and braver in every single way?
That's what I'm looking for, ultimately. I want originality. I want ambition. I want a movie that can never be replicated. A unique experience. Those experiences can still be found and even if general audiences just want cookie-cutter, originality might be more plentiful than ever. Foreign films have a better chance of getting a wide release and critical interest. Anime films have a proven audience and are much easier to find. There was room in the schedule for Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese to still do their things. Audiences were there. A classic parlor murder movie was one of the big hits of the fall. Netflix actually released good movies. Will one make the Top 15? Let's find out. And of course, the indie horror moment is as fruitful as ever.
2019 was a year where you could have had anything in the theaters. There was a movie for you. You don’t need to settle for what’s safe and familiar. Even if you just want a superhero movie, you could see over a dozen alternatives, from tiny movies like Fast Color to colorful spectacles like Promare. I've decided I deserve more than just the Disney slate. I wish more of you would decide to deserve more too.
Anyway, now that I'm officially an old man who is out of touch before he turns 30, let's talk about positive stuff the next 7,000 words or so.
Before I start my Top 15, I should burn out all the Honorable Mentions that didn’t make the final list. I saw over eighty movies in 2019, more than ever before in my life. So there’s a lot to say about movies that aren’t even my favorites.
But even before that. Real quick: here's the Honorable Mentions to the Honorable Mentions List: Shadow, Steven Universe: The Movie, Missing Link, One Piece: Stampede, Marriage Story, High Life, The Lighthouse, Long Shot, Dragon Ball Super: Broly, and Pet Semetary.
And now the Actual Honorable Mentions:
30. Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley) – I was ready to skip Toy Story 4 altogether just like I skipped the new Lion King remake. Toy Story 3 is still the perfect ending to this series. Yet to my surprise, Toy Story 4 justifies its own existence as a coda to the series. It's a kid’s movie about a topic highly relevant to children: retirement. An old toy learns to accept that his children no longer need him, and he has to find that next stage in his life. You can’t cling forever to your past. Everything changes, even the things you thought defined your own happiness. For even a toy, old age is the process of losing things, but you can still find a new meaning in your life.
29. Crawl (Alexandre Aja) – A young woman is stuck in a flooding basement with killer crocodiles. It’s a perfect monster movie. Nothing more needs to be said.
28. The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent) - Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to The Babadook is a movie that will not appeal to Babadook fans at all. It’s not a horror movie, though it is horrifying. People asked me how bad the rape scene was. I had to respond "rape scene? Singular rape? Oh no, you don't understand." No matter what fantasy you think you have about the founding of your country, if you live in a settler society, the origin story was not pretty. The Nightingale is about two people, an Irish woman and a Tasmanian Aboriginal man who try to survive against the brutality of the English military. The Nightingale's plot starts with the outline of a rape-revenge story, but turns into something much less satisfying but more compassionate.
27. Braid (Mitzi Peirone) – Nobody seems to have heard of this movie, which is a real shame. Up until just a few weeks it did not even have a Wikipedia entry. Braid is a psychedelic horror movie about a few characters trapped in a dada-esque nightmare of possibly their own creation that spoke to me. If I need to be reductive, it's The Lighthouse but starring women. Madeline Brewer, Imogen Waterhouse, and Sarah Hay all put in really great performances as each one takes turns as the villain and the victim in their depraved dollhouse game. Braid doesn't make any sense and isn't trying to, but it is thoroughly disturbing.
26. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski) – It’s John Wick… for a third time. John Wick 3 has the best action of this entire series. The opening fight in a knife museum is goddamned hilarious and then only gets funnier when John Wick fights dudes in a horse stable. It’s great to see that one of the guys (Mark Dacascos) from the horrible Double Dragon movie is now a legit action kung-fu Final Boss. The two Final Bosses from the Raid movies show up in a cameo. Every John Wick movie has been great. I just happened to like John Wick 2 a bit more.
25. Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry) – Elizabeth Moss delivers one of the greatest performances of the year as a punk rocker in the middle of a mental breakdown. Her Smell is a solid companion piece to 2018’s Vox Lux. (And in retrospect, Vox Lux deserved to be in my Top 15 over A Star is Born, inevitably I will make a similar mistake this year.) This whole movie is a "drama in five acts", five extended scene. It’s three scenes of Elizabeth Moss as Becky Something descending into manic self-destruction. Then two scenes of a painful journey redemption. It’s a busy frenetic movie that's a tough sit, though very much worth it. Sadly, nobody in 2019 wanted to see a movie called "Her Smell". It's a bad name.
24. Knives Out (Rian Johnson) – I don’t want to spoil, but in order to really talk about the things I loved about Knives Out, I need to give away some key things. So stop reading in a sentence, but first just know that mainly Knives Out is here because Daniel Craig can do a hilarious Louisiana(?) accent. Spoilers...in.…now. Knives Out is a murder mystery that reveals the killer in about a half hour. It's construction is fascinating. It places the audience in a position where they have to root against the charming Gentleman Detective from solving the case. Due to a puking disorder, the killer cannot lie. And yet, having seen the murder, you still wonder if there's something you're not seeing. You need the mystery solved and not-solved at the same time. Rian Johnson's talents are wasted by doing Star Wars, this is way more interesting.
23. Honey Boy (Alma Har'el) – Shia LeBeouf’s semi-autobiographical film might be total bullshit for all I know. Just ten years ago LaBeouf was walking around in a paper bag over his head saying "I'm not famous anymore" after getting caught plagiarizing a graphic novel. But even if Honey Boy is bullshit, it is an intense story of neglect and child abuse at the center of Hollywood itself. Who would have thought that the dark backstory of Even Stevens was actually a Florida Project-esque nightmare set in a crappy hotel? Shia LaBeouf plays his own father, an alcoholic fraud whose psychic damage to his son reverberates into the boy’s adulthood. Honey Boy is a vivid attempt to face your scars and the people who caused them. It's an imagined conversation with a terrible father, while trying to understand and forgive him.
22. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot) – This is one of those movies I wish could have made the Top 15. It’s gorgeously shot. It’s intensely poignant and sad. It’s about an issue that means a lot to me: gentrification and the erasure of culture by capitalism. But it’s also a more complex movie than just "the rich people did bad to us". This movie wants to explore the myth-making that’s central to any identity. How true ownership of a place is impossible and usually based on a fiction anyway. However, this movie is really weird. The dialog is strange, the main duo dress like they’re in the 1950s for no explained reason, and I never understood what their relationship was. I was way more confused than I should have been. Sorry. My bad.
21. Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell) – What the fuck was this? I ask that in the best way. Under the Silver Lake is the newest step in the journey of Weird Stoner LA Noir that began with The Big Lebowski and continued in Inherent Vice. This is an LA where women are kidnapped, every song you think means something was really written by a crooked old man, and all conspires are true. The main character finds his next clue by using a Nintendo Power magazine’s map of The Legend of Zelda. Whatever pretensions of #MeToo relevancy are lost a bit since our main character is an endlessly horny unemployed loser who somehow manages to get every woman he meets to date him. (Helps to be Andrew Garfield sometimes.) But Under the Silver Lake is wacky in a way rarely seen outside of David Lynch or Japanese visual novels. It was too out there even for A24, who dumped it into theaters to die. Again, needs more love.
20. Hustlers (Lorene Scafaria) – Jennifer Lopez’s character, Ramona, sums up the movie with this line: "This city, this whole country, is a strip club. You’ve got people tossing the money, and people doing the dance." What I love about Hustlers is that the movie both believes her and doesn’t. Hustlers is a populist crime drama where Wall Street strippers rob the rich after the Crash of 2008. We enter the film through the eyes of Destiny (Constance Wu), where we see Romana as this goddess superstar stripper, ruling over the endless party that was the 2000s. Then after the crash, Ramona is just slaving away in a department store, begging her bored boss for time off. We're depressed for her. It all makes sense to basically date rape bankers to get some portion of the life they took from you back. However, Hustlers keeps cutting away from the glamour of this Scorsese-style crime epic to a mundane suburb. We keep being sobered by the realism of the present. Hustlers is a movie smart enough to include the shameful hangover after the party.
19. Little Women (Greta Gerwig) – I never read Little Women at any point in my life. 19th century literature about women’s issues isn’t really my thing unless the woman in question is a phantasm living in some yellow wallpaper. So that said, I’m exactly the person who would find a movie like Little Women "twee". And this movie is more than a little twee, but it’s proud of its tweeness, it earns it. It understands it's a movie about a privileged perspective. And Little Women is a really damn good movie. Between Florence Pugh, Saoirse Ronan, and the perpetually great Laura Dern, this movie has one of the best cast of actors that aren’t Korean in any movie of 2019. I did want to see the next story Greta Gerwig had to tell after Lady Bird rather than her telling Louisa May Alcott's story instead If you want a splendid fairy tale-like vision of 19th century New England, this is your movie. It even does a clever subversion on the ending too.
18. The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine) – How do you celebrate failing upwards? The Beach Bum is how. Matthew McConaughey’s character, Moondog, is determined to do nothing with his life but party. In his previous film, Spring Breakers, Harmony Korine explored the idea of a party turned into pure chaos. It’s hedonism to the point of self-destructive nihilism. Only The Beach Bum sees nihilism as a good time. During the course of the film, Moondog learns nothing, he ruins a few lives, he destroys everything he has, and the world only loves him more. This movie seems like a blast to film, and it’s a blast to watch. McConaughey just hung with a few celebrities and ad-libbed nonsense, spent most of the film in a dress, and got baked with Snoop Dogg. I don't know if the movie even had a script.
17. Serenity (Steven Knight) – From one movie about Matthew McConaughey living on the beach to another. Over the past decade the concept of "ironically loving" a movie seems to have faded. I discovered the hard way that most bad movies are bad in a very boring un-fun way. So, if you like a "bad" movie, it isn’t "so bad it’s good". Odds are it is doing something you legitimately like. Cats fans are letting their freak flags fly with with horrifying sexualized CG felines singing and dancing. God bless them. For me, Serenity is my kind of fascinating mess of a movie. It's a neo noir cyberpunk post-modernist sex thriller. It switches genres as wildly as a Bong Joon-Ho movie. Serenity makes baffling decisions, has horrifying implications, and is incredible the entire way. The movie goes all-out on a fundamentally bad idea and is absolutely wonderful for it.
16. First Love (Takeshi Mikke) – Am I the only one who loved this Japanese gonzo crime epic? A boxer with a malignant brain tumor, a young girl tortured by the ghost of her abusive father, a crooked cop, a yakuza with an absurd plan to reach the top, a crazy girlfriend who will get revenge no matter what, a one-armed Chinese mob boss, and a lot of cocaine all crash together in one crazy night in Tokyo’s underworld. This movie is a ton of fun. Once you think it’s hit its final climax and it can’t get any more absurd, it only goes more and more off the rails. It’s a Tarantino crime thriller mixed with a horror film mixed with a meet-cute romance that all descends into the wildest action climax of the year. Where is the love for First Love??
Anyway, now that you’ve read my thoughts on Fifteen Really, Really Good Movies of 2019, here’s my picks for the Actual Best Fifteen Movies of 2019.
I struggled and pained for weeks on what exactly would make the 15th spot. This one place on this one list is the hardest I’ve thought about placing a movie in all the years I’ve been doing this. Every Honorable Mention was at one point in Top 15. Finally, First Love just barely got knocked out of the Ultimate True List by the movie I saw just a few days ago:
15. 1917 (Sam Mendes)
Imagine if a prestige AAA Sony single-player video game somehow snuck out of your PS4 and got onto a movie screen. That’s what 1917 feels like. "Video game-y" has been a cliché complaint of critics about movies for decades. I actually like video games, so this is not an insult at all to me. If you told me somebody was making a movie like The Last of Us or 2018's God of War, I would be excited for it. There is a filmic language that movies can learn from games. Replicating a free-floating camera of a third-person game and building entire "levels" to then shoot in long takes is an incredible achievement. Director Sam Mendes and his cinematographer Roger Deakins have done spectacular work here. 1917 is gripping in a way traditional filmmaking just cannot be - and gorgeous beyond words. The late-night shot of the ruined city lit only by flares is the most beautiful shot of all of 2019.
1917 would deserve all the credit in the world if it were just a technical exercise. But it also manages to recreate the emotional core of prestige games. I don't think Mendes or his co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns were playing much Uncharted when they came up with this story. But it has all those same general beats of a linear adventure game. There's big terrifying action moments punctuated by the main duo of Corporal Shofield (Geoge MacKay) and Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) building a real relationship in slower "cutscenes". Those two are great actors putting in very subtle performances. 1917, if it were a video game, would easily make my Top 10 (coming soon). It would be everything most World War video games are not: human, tragic, and a desperate struggle to survive with the sad workman's knowledge you have to do it all over again tomorrow.
14. Booksmart (Olivia Wilde)
Boner comedies don't usually rank very highly with me. It's not that I'm anti-boner jokes by any means. Just, comedy is often an element of movies I like anyway. Why only have comedy when you can also have drama or horror or romance or all of them at the same time? Booksmart ended up on the list not really because it was uniquely different from the typical boner comedy. (Admission: I still haven't seen Superbad.) This movie has jokes about scissoring and pedophilia and handjobs. It isn't anymore highbrow just because it's written from a woman's perspective. I just felt there was also a really solid coming-of-age story along with all those dick and pussy jokes.
Booksmart reminds me a lot of private school. There was a privilege that everybody kinda knew but didn't talk about. Your future was set, regardless of whether you studied or not. You were the "smart kids". You could drugs in the bathroom, getting in real trouble is only for poorer schools. And knowing that and how shitty that is, I'm still nostalgic for those times. I had great friends in private school that I still miss even though I haven't seen them in twenty years. Particularly Booksmart is a great snapshot of that moment right after Senior Year ends when you realize the person you were in high school isn't who you have to be. All those nonsensical barriers and cliques you set up are gone. You aren't an adult or any more mature, you're just free of high school's bullshit.
Also, I really hope everybody in Booksmart goes on to have the great and varied careers that the cast of Scott Pilgrim vs. The World has had over the last ten years. If anybody with power is reading this, please hire Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, Billie Lourd, Diana Silvers, Skyler Gisondo, and Molly Gordon in everything. They will make your movies better.
13. Shazam! (David Sandberg)
Joker is the movie I fear Warner Bros is going to use as a template for all their movies coming forward. But Shazam! is the movie I wish they would build off of instead. It's a movie with a lot of heart, aims for positivity and goodness in the world, and really captures that spirit of being an idiot kid doing stupid shit. It even takes the wholesome image of a Golden Age Superhero, Captain Marvel, and modernizes him in a way that works. This isn't an ironic rift on big corny heroes. This movie just goes for it, embraces classic superhero capes and spandex, and still manages to be a great comedy along the way. The climax of this movie is my End Game. When I realized this movie was saving nothing for the sequel and was gonna do the whole Captain Marvel thing, I was smiling ear to ear.
The other thing I truly love about Shazam! is that it takes the character of Billy Batson and applies him to a more modern problem. This is a movie about found family more than anything else. The world doesn't always give us such a simple nuclear family defined by blood. It also highlights the good parts of the foster system where there are good people doing their best. That this movie can then decide atypical families are a superhero's strength is a great message.
And Shazam! is clearly inspired a lot by Eighties family horror. There's a lot of references to Gremlins, which is always a good choice. It is willing to be scary, goofy, and even dark at times. People die in this movie. And people are saved in ways they never expected.
12. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie)
Back in 2014 I had the great opportunity to go to the New York Film Festival. During the showings I got to see a movie called Heaven Knows What about a doomed homeless romance in NYC. It was a movie that was willing to go dirty and film the most ignored parts of society. I thought Arielle Holmes, the star and inspiration of that movie would go on to have a successful career, which sadly so far she hasn't. Instead it was the directors, Josh and Benny Safdie who were about to embark on a path to greatness.
2017's Good Time was a sleazy crime thriller starring Robert Pattinson. And now they've made their best movie yet. Uncut Gems is an even sleazier thriller about a diamond jeweler pulling off a Ponzi scheme to feed his sports betting addiction. The Safdies also have tapped into their New York Jewish roots. It's great to watch a crime thriller that needs to pause so the kids can hunt for the Afikoman.
Uncut Gems will end up remembered for Adam Sandler's intense lead performance. The thing is, Adam Sandler is a great actor, he just usually doesn't give a shit. He cares roughly once every five years. Go watch The Meyerwitz Stories if you don't believe the man can act if he wants to. But Uncut Gems has so much more than Sandler caring. It's a two-hour panic attack as everything goes wrong for our "hero". He burns every bridge, abandons several routes of escape, and then doubles down on his worst behavior because he's just that broken. When Sandler puts on those shades he looks like the Devil himself, a being of pure chaos that will not stop until everything burns. But everybody is doing great work from the ever-great Lakeith Stanfield to basketball star Kevin Garnett and Julia Fox, whose ass alone is maybe the greatest find of 2019.
11. Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi)
Jojo Rabbit has had a very mixed reception online. There is an argument that this movie somehow diminishes the evil of Nazism by turning the entire movement into a joke. I feel that argument is weak. There's plenty to mock in fascism. Another argument is that this movie doesn't do much if you're actually a parent who needs help deprogramming children who have fallen into an Alt-Right Youtube hole. I think that one is stronger. This movie doesn't really help. But that's also asking a lot from a movie, and I don't know if there are too many great answers anyway. If Taika Waititi had solved fascism forever, he wouldn't be directing vampire comedies, he'd be saving the world. As for me, I thought this movie was wonderfully earnest and heartfelt. It knew exactly when to turn off the Taika Waititi-brand of oddball humor to dig deep into the drama of the situation.
The most interesting observation Jojo Rabbit has about fascism is that it's inherently childish. All movements of that stripe, from Trumpist Nationalism on down, are based on a child's moral development. The kids in the woods playing soldier in the Hitler Youth have as sophisticated a worldview as the idiots trying to start a war with Iran. They're all playing a fantasy of a black and white world. Jojo Rabbit also knows that fantasy has horrible implications and inevitably feeds into its own destruction. Little Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) has Adolf Hitler himself (Taika Waititi) as his imaginary friend. And Adolf Hitler himself probably had that same cartoonish figure with him in the Bunker. During the course of the movie Jojo discovers Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish girl living in his attic. And his simple "us vs them" view of the world is forever shattered.
Jojo Rabbit also inspired a theory of mine. No movie that ends with the main characters dancing happily can be bad.
10. Ready or Not (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett)
Ready or Not is a good reminder that not every great horror movie needs to be some indie art piece adored by critics. Like Crawl, Ready or Not is a simple concept executed perfectly. A newly married bride, Grace (Samara Weaving) discovers that instead of a Honeymoon, she is going to have to survive a night of hide and seek as her rich in-laws try to murder her. It's 95 minutes of cat and mouse with maybe my favorite movie ending of the year. It's tied with Midsommar, which will definitely show up later on this list. It's everything I liked about Adam Wingard's 2011 black comedy, You're Next. Only without all the things I hated about that movie.
Ready or Not also is a perfect double-feature with Knives Out, another film about a poor girl trapped in the intrigue of a wacky rich family. Turns out, when the chips are down, even the nicest and most liberal-seeming rich people will choose their comfort over your survival. A lot of movies wanted to tell that story in 2019.
In terms of a horror comedy, Ready or Not leans more in comedy than horror. The rich in-laws are more bumbling than fearsome. Yet while the villains are human, Grace isn't a genius survivalist either. I really have to give props to Samara Weaving for how willing she is to go super gross with this movie. She ends up swimming in gore at one point and she's game for all of it. But while the villains bumble and Grace trips, this is still a solid as hell thriller. Ready or Not is the kind of movie I would recommend to anybody. It is just extremely solid and a ton of fun.
9. Dolemite is My Name (Craig Brewer)
Netflix finally made the Top 15! And all they had to do was made the most feel-good movie of 2019.
Dolemite is My Name is an ode to the great comedian and actor, Rudy Ray Moore. Moore created the character Dolemite, an action star for a subsection of people Hollywood ignored for decades. Moore in this fictional biopic watches a bland White comedy in the theaters and gives the most perfect review I've ever heard: "This movie had no titties, no funny and no kung-fu." Consider that my reaction if Ford v. Ferrari wins Best Picture. Then Moore (played by Eddie Murphy, who like Sandler is giving a shit for the first time in years) realizes he needs to create a movie for people like him. He can be the a cheesy B-movie action comedy whose charm trascends all traditional ideas of "good". Dolemite is My Name shows that schlock filmmaking can be outsider art, and can have a real cultural impact.
Dolemite is My Name is written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. Back in the Nineties that duo wrote Ed Wood, a similar movie about an individual breaking into movies while ignoring or refusing to learn all the rules. Ed Wood was as much admiring its subject as mocking him. Dolemite, however, is all love for Rudy Ray Moore and his band of misfits. It sees his style of inept clumsy filmmaking as a work of true passion and success. One scene I particularly loved was when Moore's co-star, Lady Reed (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) tearfully thanks him for giving women like her a chance to be seen and be beautiful. Dolemite would never make sense to mainstream white America. But it made sense to its audience, who knew to laugh along with it, not at it.
8. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a movie I walked out of thinking "yeah, that was really good, but will it make the Top 15? I don't think so." A month later and I couldn't stop thinking about this movie. I was very lucky to catch this movie during the week it was in all of two theaters in December. (This is the main perk of living near NYC.) Hopefully more of you get to see it when it goes wide in February. I'd be doing the movie a disservice by calling it the female answer to Call Me by Your Name. They're both queer romances about brief intense flings set in picturesque European countryside. They both end with a long take on a character crying uncontrollably. They both linger in your mind and should not be missed.
But Portrait of a Lady on Fire has its own story to tell. It's about the limited options of women in that era (and sometimes still now.) A painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) travels to the isolated French coastline to secretly paint a portrait of a young noble daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is about to be married off. Marianne and Héloïse take up a complicated relationship. Héloïse sees a future where she is about to be sold to an Italian family, while Marianne can be whatever she wants. Men are barely in the movie at all. But they still control this story from the background, creating a ticking clock for these two women to have just a moment of freedom together. This movie even proudly features an abortion subplot. It's a reminder that while women throughout time were not always so lucky to have Alcotts or Gerwigs or Sciammas to tell their tales, their stories still existed and were important.
7. Us (Jordan Peele)
I've had well over ten months to think about Us. I'm gonna say something crazy right now: this might be a better movie than Peele's celebrated first film, Get Out. Get Out landed perfectly in the #Discourse after the 2016 election and hit exactly where it needed to blast "moderate" white Democrats. It's easy to read that movie as blasting people who switched from Obama to Trump. But really Get Out was about people who don't need to worry who is president, and how their "ally" status is always questionable. The NYT Opinion Board is the villain of Get Out, not Ohio bigots.
Us's social commentary is a lot more subtle. Us is a metaphor for everything modern American society is built upon. The scariest line in that movie comes from the dark alternate to our heroine, who tells us about her freakish family: "We... are... Americans...". On some level our system is built so that prosperity and happiness comes at the expense of somebody else. Somewhere out there, there is a dark twin to your life, whose poverty pays for your comfort. Or maybe, you're the dark twin to somebody else.
But beyond politics, Us is just a great horror movie. Jordan Peele created unique imagery here. You can recognize the twisted Bizarro people anywhere, with their red jumpsuits, golden scissors, and just incredibly... off mannerisms. There's rooms full of bunnies and escalators that only go down. This is original horror iconography that could launch an entire franchise. Us needed spectacular acting to be a success and it got it through its cast. Lupita Nyong'o as Adelaide and her Tethered opposite, Red, is close to the best actor of the entire year. (That's a hard call, as you'll see later.) Her raspy moaning voice as Red was a terrifying choice. But everybody in this movie is acting their ass off. Winston Duke can go from a nerdy teddy bear man to an imposing dark shadow. We even got the second best crazy Elizabeth Moss performance of the year.
6. Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
It is impossible to watch Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and not be blown away by how dynamite this production is. This movie is downright imposing with how well its made. It is so confident with its recreation of late-Sixties Hollywood. I think half the movie is driving montages through old LA neighborhoods. Clearly Tarantino is nerding-out while rebuilding a world he was never part of. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood never claims accuracy and then outright dismisses the history narrative altogether in the finale. It is a fairy tale of a Hollywood that never existed but Tarantino wishes for. It's very nature therefore is Conservative. However, I still loved the hell out of this thing. I'll forgive it for being just that good.
It's less a single movie script than a highly abbreviated season of a television series set in this fantasy Hollywood. But still, there's a great cast here of likable characters wandering through their lives. Tarantino is more sentimental than he's been since maybe Jackie Brown. The relationship between Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is a complicated show of male bonding. It's telling how they're completely unable to speak about their feelings at any point during the movie. The best scene of this flick is just them sitting back on a couch, drinking beer, and MST3K-riffing on an episode of a bad TV show Dalton has just filmed.
But mostly Upon a Time in Hollywood is a love affair with this idea of Hollywood. Tarantino turns a crappy cowboy show into high drama with great acting. He sends Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) into a theater to watch herself in a terrible Matt Helm movie, and is enraptured by the power of cinema to entertain. That's what Taratino wants to focus on: cinema itself.
5. Climax (Gaspar Noé)
Climax opens with a title card calling itself "a French Film and proud of it!" The first scene is shown on an old CRT TV bracketed with old horror VHS tapes. Get ready for something fucking nuts.
When I took the escalator up out of the basement of the Angelika Film Center after seeing Climax, I didn't realize I was holding my breath until I had reached Houston Street and the safety of reality. Climax had kicked my ass. It kicked the ass of the entire audience. We collectively moaned in pain and relief when the credits came on. I don't think I've quite had a film experience like that. Climax is another simple horror premise. A group of dancers in an isolated school building have a final rehearsal before a party. Only somebody has spiked the Sangria punch with a crap-ton of LCD. As the night wears on, everybody loses their fucking minds. We descend into EDM chaos as Gaspar Noé takes us on a long-take slow vision of Hell itself.
The most memorable long-take of Climax is already an incredible achievement. It's several minutes of the entire cast dancing in a single unbroken shot. It's an incredible feat of choreography that is an impressive as anything in 1917. That's when things are the most stable. Turns out when you have twenty or so young dancers, everybody is screwing everybody else. There's drama everywhere. Then the drugs hit and it all collapses slowly. Then it keeps collapsing. The horror is unrelenting. The worst moment you'll have in Climax is the realization that there's a little kid trapped in the school with them. It isn't going to end well for him. The second-worst moment is the revelation that one of the dancers is pregnant. It won't end well for her either. It doesn't end well for anybody. This is the worst drug trip you'll ever have.
4. Promare (Hiroyuki Imaishi)
As long as the world will allow me to keep writing Top Lists about movies every year, I will include at least one anime film on every list. Try to stop me.
Promare was the best time I had at a movie in 2019. That doesn't necessarily make it the Best movie of the year, but it is something worth recognizing. Anime crowds are a bit hit or miss. I've had sarcastic idiots trying to be funny talking over the Broly movie. Then I've had audiences be completely enraptured for everything that's happening. My audience for Promare started out pretty quiet. Slowly the movie won them over. We all lost our minds about two-thirds through this when the movie goes off-the-rails again and again. That theater exploded when Promare gave us the gift of a giant robot. Because, why not have a giant robot??
With a movie like this, you need to know what you're getting into and how to be on this movie's over-the-top wavelength. I think most film mainstream critics still aren't there, which is why Promare hasn't gotten the love it needs. But at least thirsty fanartists on Twitter love this movie.
Studio Trigger does not do things halfway. This movie starts with a preposterous premise about superhero firefighters going to battle against pyromancer mutants. Firefighters in this future, of course, use mechs that look like samurai armor and the mutants can, of course, create motorbikes out of fire. The opening scene is a huge twenty-minute long melee on a burning skyscraper, and that's Promare at its most grounded. The ending is a massive battle on a spaceship to save the Earth from an evil billionaire. Promare is full of color, shameless action, and has the best kiss of any movie of the year. In a year with like ten thousand superhero movies, this one was by far the best.
3. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
By critical reaction at least, Parasite is the greatest movie of 2019. I don't think the critics are even wrong. These lists are totally arbitrary. Mostly it's me showing off how cool my taste is anyway. I think Parasite is going to end up remembered as the true classic of this year. But right now, in January 2020, I have two other movies I think are better than it.
Bong Joon-ho is the kind of filmmaker whose work is best experienced with no knowledge of what is coming at all. If you think you know where his movies are going, you are wrong. The man refuses to stick to a single genre or an obvious narrative structure. His monster movies turn into comedies, his SciFi action movies turn into Verhoeven-esque satire, and his comedies turn into horror. Often the movie you think you're watching will swerve wildly several times. That's the case with Parasite, which starts out as a family heist movie with the goal of stealing... jobs. That's all the central Kim family wants: gainful employment with the rich family that lives on top of the hill, the Parks. Then suddenly, a curve ball tears the whole movie you think you're watching apart.
Parasite can be hilarious, it can be thrilling, it can be terrifying, it can be sad and poignant. Bong Joon-ho has decided that movies do not need to be one thing and so will make his movies everything. But more than that, this is another great commentary on class. Nobody liked rich people in 2019. Parasite sees the unequal divide that has torn these two families apart and decides it is based on nothing. They're both just people, only one group happens to be a lot luckier than the other. The entire cast is great. Ignore, language barriers, this is really good acting and don't let subtitles scare you away from that.
But Parasite also shows us how entrenched the system is. If you break into the upper class, it needs to come at the cost of somebody else. At the conclusion, the Kims cannot image any way out other than to dream for a lottery ticket to be the Parks. Capitalism's greatest trick was making people believe it was the only way things could work.
2. The Farewell (Lulu Wang)
Up until writing this very list, The Farewell was solidly in my No. 1 place. Every year I think the final decision between the Top 2 is the most difficult. I usually end up picking the movie I feel was more important than the one that entertained me the most. So Spider-Verse lost to Annihilation, and Baby Driver lost to Lady Bird. But really it is so arbitrary and meaningless. In this case, I really do not want you to think there was any slight to The Farewell. Most of the Top 5 ended up tied in my heart anyway. The Farewell though is an absolute treasure of a movie and you should absolutely see it. The numbers are nonsense. I'll come to disagree with these percise choices in a day anyway.
The Farewell explores a conflict at the heart of the Chinese diaspora - the cultural differences between those abroad and those at home. The New Yorker Billi (Awkwafina) learns her Nai Nai in Changchun (Zhao Shuzhen) has a terminal disease. Due to a superstition, the family refuses to tell Nai Nai of her illness, fearing that knowing you will die will speed it up. Billi then has to decide between her Western instincts and her duties to playing along with, what is effectively a fraud. They put together a sham wedding to explain everybody coming to visit. So The Farewell, despite its grim premise, is also a family reunion movie. All families are full of their own conflicts and personality struggles. That leads to a lot of warm comedy. You will laugh more than you cry, but you will definitely cry at the end.
The Farewell descrbies is a uniquely Chinese problem, but the overall feeling of the movie is universal. Forget the cultural particulars, The Farewell is a movie anybody who has a grandma should love. This is a movie about a the love between a grandmother and granddaughter, and that struggle to say goodbye to an older relative. My grandmother who was born in Eastern Europe and survived the Holocaust passed away a few years ago. This movie meant a lot to me having lived through that.
Really though, Billi and Nai Nai's connection is what makes this movie very special. It isn't the tragedy of the situation that makes you cry, it's how much they truly love each other, even in a sad situation.
1. Midsommar (Ari Aster)
Ari Aster has made two of the best movies of the decade in just two years. That's phenomenal. Both of his movies take a well-trodden horror subgenre in interesting and darker directions. Hereditary was a Satanic panic movie with ties to Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar has much of the structure of The Wicker Man (the original one, not the misgonyist one with the bees). Just with those structures Ari Aster tells stories about denial, grief, and the point where unpleasant realities can no longer be ignored. I hope he's doing okay. His art is a lot.
I think Midsommar is even better than Hereditary at making that statement. Our heroine, Dani (Florence Pugh), has just suffered the most awful of tragedies. The whole movie she is trying to swallow her grief and be "normal". That's the worst part of grief, having to face people who aren't living it. It's not easy to suffer together already, it's much harder to have to ask your boss for a break so you can weep in the bathroom alone. Life becomes a calculation when you meet people. Do you tell them how broken you are? How much pain and vulnerability can give to the people around you who don't share that pain?
And what if you're dating a complete asshole, the most despicable character of 2019, who will not be there for you when you need him most? That's Dani's particular dilemma here.
Horror draws itself to darkness. But in Midsommar, Ari Aster creates a horror film in blinding daylight. He takes sunlight and makes it as mysterious and disturbing as midnight blackness. It isn't just that this film takes place in the Arctic Circle where the sun barely sets. It's that all the horror you witness is completely explicit. Nothing can be hidden in the light. And in Dani's case, she cannot hide the truths she no longer wants to face.
One of the most interesting ideas behind Midsommar is the nature of the Swedish pagans our American protagonists run into. It isn't just a cultural difference where the pagans eat good Christians. Midsommar might even come down as pro-pagan over American douches. The film imagines in this village a place where everything is shared, even pain. They are creatures of empathy more than anything else. You cannot ignore your neighbor's suffering because that is your suffering. The Americans, meanwhile, can just brush off Dani's helplessness because it's inconvenient to them. Connections for people in our world are uncomfortable, awkward, and ruined by selfishness. Here in the land of Midsommar, it's automatic and natural. But all that empathy doesn't mean things still don't lead to barbarism and terror.
But this vacation is exactly what Dani needed.
...
Anyway, now that I have you here and you've suffered this long, let's some do some Random other business:
Top 10 Best Performances of 2019:
10. Zhao Shuzhen as Nai Nai in The Farewell.
9. Adam Sandler as Howard Ratner in Uncut Gems.
8. Elizabeth Moss as Becky Something in Her Smell.
7. Matthew McConaughey as Moondog in The Beach Bum.
6. Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton in Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood.
5. Adèle Haenel as Héloïse TIED with Noémie Merlant as Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire. I won't choose one or the other, you need both for this movie to work.
4. Robert Pattinson as Ephraim Winslow TIED with Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake in The Lighthouse. (See above.)
3. Everybody in Parasite.
2. Lupita Nyong'o as Red/Adelaide in Us.
1. Florence Pugh as Dani in Midsommar. And she could have made the list twice or even three times thanks to also being in Fighting with My Family and Little Women. Pugh had the greatest year an actor has ever had in my time of writing about movies.
Top 5 Best Monologues of 2019:
5. "I created so many of the things you care about..." by Jeremy Bobb as The Songwriter in Under the Silver Lake.
4. "I don't want no Beener bronco buster..." by Leonardo DiCarpio as Rick Dalton as Caleb DeCoteau in Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood.
3. "The idea of good fathers was only invented like thirty years ago..." by Laura Dern as Nora Fanshaw in Marriage Story.
2. "Once upon a time there was a girl and the girl had a shadow..." by Lupita Nyong'o as Red in Us.
1. "HHAAAAAAAAAAARK!!!" by Willem Dafoe as Thomas Wake in The Lighthouse. Don't you dare complain about that dude's lobster.
Least Interesting Movie of 2019:
Not to dunk on Disney again, but they truly have earned this one. It's Captain Marvel. (The Marvel one, not the DC one.) It was thoroughly bland, which is all the more impressive since it is the first female-led MCU movie. They wound up doing nothing with that. The movie's most interesting idea was to play up Nineties nostalgia, which as an idea is preening and a bit pathetic. I have already said too much. It was thoroughly cookie-cutter.
Movie I Wish I Loved More in 2019:
Sadly, it's Robert Eggers's The Lighthouse. I just didn't get it. I expected a horror movie and got a dadaist weird comedy. I also hate when movies do 4:3 aspect ratios, even if there's a good reason for it. But ultimately, while I thought there was a lot to love here, I have no idea what any of this is supposed to mean. I truly am lost. The performances are good, the scenes are interesting. How does any of that fit together though? It was two hours of things happening.
I also wish I were part of the Cats crowd.
Most Disappointing Movie of 2019:
This was a movie that should have worked. It had the right people behind it. It had the right idea. It was adapting a solid feminist horror movie from the Seventies. But the Black Christmas remake is like being trapped in a Twitter argument for two hours. I think you can be against college date rape and toxic masculinity and also against a really blunt bad slasher that's clearly been edited down to a PG-13. What a shame.
Worst Movie I Saw in 2019:
I don't try to see bad movies. There's too many good movies to waste your time on something you don't think you'll like. But the worst movie I saw was Godzilla: The Planet Eater on Netflix, the third of a trilogy of really bad anime Godzilla movies. Netflix does it again, releasing my least favorite movie of the third year in a row. These animated Godzilla movies are boring, depressing, look terrible, and the kaiju monsters are barely in them. Gen Urobuchi has done better work and will continue to do better work. But this needs special notice. Godzilla: King of the Monsters is not at all a good movie. But it was great compared to this.
Luckily nobody cared about this trilogy and as far I know, nobody but me saw them.
Top 5 Movies I Wish I Saw in 2019:
It is a physical impossibility to see every movie that comes out during the course of a year. I could have seen a hundred movies and still have been severely limited by my own access and knowledge. I just can't see everything. So here's 5 movies I regret not seeing:
5. War (Siddharth Anand) - It's an Indian action blockbuster that's apparently something like Michael Bay with dance numbers. I need to pay more attention to Bollywood as a general rule.
4. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Bi Gan) - I kept waiting for this movie to be released outside Manhattan then it never happened. This movie is best experienced on the big screen since it has an apparently impressive 3D effect. Missed my chance, sadly.
3. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar) - This topped IndieWire's Best Movies of 2019 list. I don't actually know what it is. Antonio Banderas is nominated for Best Actor for it.
2. Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska) - Another huge blind spot for me is documentaries. I just prefer fiction. This is a Macedonian story about families of beekeepers. There's really good buzz about it, pun intended!
1. Waves (Trey Edward Shults) - This left theaters literally a day after I found out it was in theaters. It's now on Prime, and I probably should still watch this movie but I don't want to delay this list any longer.
Will I Watch the Academy Awards This Year?
Hell no. That's what you get when you ignore The Farewell. I knew Promare and Midsommar probably weren't going to get much recognition. But how dare you snub The Farewell? How dare you pretend to be any kind of authority on movies after you do that?
I'm really mad, moving on.
How about the Top Movies of the Decade?
I would need to write about 300 movies in order to give that list any justice. Too many good movies get made in a year to truly cover them all, and a decade is an order of magnitude beyond that. Nobody has the time to catch up on that much filmmaking or to even read all 200,000 words I would have to write. And that mostly would be repeating what I did over this over this decade here on this blog anyway.
Just go and watch Mamoru Hosoda's Wolf Children if you're worried you missed something.
Preemptive and Probably Very Inaccurate Top 15 Movies of 2020 Having Seen None of Them: (AKA, movies I am most hyped for)
15. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)
14. Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (Cathy Yan)
13. The New Mutants (Josh Boone)
12. The Color Out of Space (Richard Stanley)
11. Gretel and Hansel (Oz Perkins)
9. No Time to Die (Cary Fukunaga)
8. Ride Your Wave (Masaaki Yuasa)
7. Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz)
6. Candyman (Nia DaCosta)
5. The Lodge (Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala)
4. In the Heights (Jon M. Chu)
3. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)
2. Dune (Denis Villeneuve)
1. Evangelion 3.0+1.0 (Hideki Anno) - H Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y P E
Have you seen Marriage Story yet? I'm really hyped for watching it and would really love to know how you thought it was.
ReplyDeleteIt gets mentioned several times in honorable mentions and in side-awards. It is a good movie, it is not a great movie. I thought it wasn't painful enough. Had the air of "rich people problems".
DeleteHoly Crap! Never could have guessed you watched Steven Universe. Have you followed the whole series or just stumbled upon the movie?
ReplyDeleteI watched the entire series in 2018-2019. I still need to catch on Steven Universe Future (and like thirty other TV shows now).
DeleteIt might be my favorite thing on television. It is a genuinely good thing.
Yeah man, it’s getting harder to finish all those good shows...there is just too many! SU is just pure goodness, I hope it keeps going in some form after Future ends. Here is to all those hotdogs out there.
Delete