Favorite Movies of 2023

I don't have a lot to say here, so I'll make it very brief. These are my favorite movies! I've (obviously) not been doing reviews on the blog this past year, but I am still updating my Letterboxd, so when it says "Read original review," it's linking to that.

Looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks! Feel free to share your own favorites!

Favorite Movies

1. May December
Stunning, unclassifiable cinema. I've liked a lot of what Todd Haynes has done in the 21st century, but the slipperiness of this film feels like a return to the complex semiotics he was playing with in his '90s work.

[Read original review]

2. The Boy and the Heron
Miyazaki came out of retirement not just to make the best animated movie of the year and a dense, self-reflexive meditation on loss and creation but also to make sure that people remember that his movies can pivot from cute magical hijinks to grim nightmare fantasies full of bird poop and blood. The gooey-ness of Miyakazi films is underappreciated, but it's front and center here. I guess that might sound off-putting, but I've yet to meet someone who didn't enjoy this movie on some level, so don't knock it until you've tried it.

[Read original review]

3. Knock at the Cabin
Speaking of not knocking (hahaaa) until you try it, I feel like I still encounter a lot of people who still have not forgiven M. Night Shyamalan for his wilderness period. Those people are missing out majorly. Without expending a lot of energy, you could probably convince me to say that this is the best film of his career. Obviously the best performance of Dave Bautista's career.

[Read original review]

4. Killers of the Flower Moon
Replicates the slow, horrific march to the grave that Scorsese achieved in The Irishman, only this time, it's a genocide. I'm very much into this late-style Scorsese.

[Read original review]

5. Afire
People don't seem to like this one as much as the previous few Christian Petzold movies, and it certainly doesn't have the mythic, political overtures as, say, Transit, but in place of that, it is as vicious a character piece as he's ever done.

[Read original review]

6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
The fact that this flopped at the box office is so incredibly depressing to me. This should be a family film instant classic; Rachel McAdams should be getting an Oscar; Kelly Fremon Craig should be getting Greta Gerwig money, acclaim, and household name status. I suppose prospects of it finding an audience streaming on [checks notes] Starz is unlikely, but I'm hoping.

[Read original review]

7. You Hurt My Feelings
Most of the time with Nicole Holofcener, you know exactly what you're going to get, and that's what's nice about it. Good to see that her partnership with Julia Louis-Dreyfus continues to bear fruit. Bonus points for tunneling into some very specific anxieties of mine this time around.

[Read original review]

8. The Holdovers
I thought for sure after the nostalgia-baiting trailer and opening stylistic pastiche that I would find this too cute, but no, it's very good! Sure to be a new sad-sack Christmas classic. It will probably be up for all sorts of awards, and I can get behind that.

[Read original review]

9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The most technically and aesthetically adventurous mainstream American animated movie in years, more so than the first one by a considerable margin, and that alone was probably enough to land this in my top 10. On top of that, though, I was actually into the story, and while I am entirely prepared to eat crow if the sequel resolves all of the threads in this movie with a wet fart, for now, I am actually excited to see what happens next.

[Read original review]

10. Godzilla Minus One
In addition to just being a very entertaining monster movie, I want to highlight how great the design and effects are on Godzilla himself (itself? themself?): maintaining the lovably bulgy proportions of the old "dude in a rubber suit" Godzillas while also containing the scale and menace that CG can provide. The best effects of any effects-driven movie I saw this year, which should put American studios to shame.

[Read original review]

Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Honorable Mention: BlackBerry—In the year of the "brand biopic," this caustic take on a brand doomed to fail stood out. Great performances all around, too: Glenn Howerton just screams the whole movie, and it is very watchable.

Would Have Been in the Top 10 If It Were Actually a Feature Film: That collection of shorts adapting Roald Dahl that Wes Anderson did for Netflix—I've enjoyed Wes Anderson's output of the past decade even as he has divided some of his fans while tunneling deeper and deeper into the hermeticism of his aesthetic. However, this is easily his best work since at least The Grand Budapest Hotel. An utter delight, and the "it's a stage play, but also an audiobook" format proves surprisingly flexible for telling four very different stories.

Best Documentary: In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50—A compelling rumination on mortality and Robert Fripp's dictatorial regime within the band. Terrific music, of course.

Best Action: Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One—I mean, it's a new Mission: Impossible movie, so of course. There also wasn't a ton of competition. A very limp year for American action films.

Best Action Sequence: John Wick: Chapter 4—That said, I gotta give props to John Wick fighting his way up that staircase (twice!) near the end of this entirely too-long series finale. For as much as Cruise gets all the Keaton comparisons (mostly valid), that one sequence feels like the strongest evocation of silent comedy I saw in a mainstream American film this year. The train crash scene in Dead Reckoning comes at a close second, though.

Movie I Laughed Most Watching: Bottoms—This bizarro-world high school comedy is something of a return to the '90s/2000s heyday of the spoof movie, e.g. Not Another Teen Movie, though rather than parody anything specific, Bottoms instead just goes for the weird and the heightened. It doesn't all work, but most of it does.

Best Joke: Barbie—Ken mansplaining Pavement to Barbie is probably only funny for the very narrow swatch of boring, approaching-middle-age men that I consider myself a part of, but this was a big moment for us.

More People Should Talk About This One: The Starling Girl—Evokes its Christian fundamentalist milieu with more accuracy than anything I've ever seen in a movie even approaching mainstream, and while for me that alone would be enough to rush out to see this film, it also does a terrific job telling a very human story that I found riveting. Maybe the contours of this movie just appeal to me more than most people, but I am surprised this hasn't gotten more attention.

"Mia Goth Is Sexy / Scary" Award: Infinity Pool—In what may become an annual fixture of this list (MaXXXine may come out this year!), I have to shout out Mia Goth's performance here, which is far and away the best thing about Infinity Pool (a movie I enjoyed otherwise, I should stress). For Your Consideration: Mia Goth draped across the hood of a car, shouting the protagonist's name while reading negative reviews of his ill-begotten novel.

Best Audience Con: Skinamarink—Basically an avant-garde film marketed as a horror film, and it somehow made $2.1 million! I liked it, for what it's worth, but mostly, I respect the audacity.

Best Vibes: Rye Lane—A very fun, frothy rom-com with a tremendous sense of place, style, and music. Just a good time overall, I felt good watching it, and I have nothing but good memories about it.

Most Vibes: Enys Men—I almost gave this the "best" vibes award, but I don't think "best" is the best way to describe something that feels this mysterious and at-times threatening. Still, it's unparalleled in the thick atmosphere it creates. Good thing, too, because that's basically all it does.

"Not Her Best, But I Appreciate That She's Still Doing Her Thing" Award: Showing Up—Every Kelly Reichardt movie feels like a miracle for existing, especially in a film economy that doesn't make a lot of space (or funding) for these kind of without-a-marketing-hook pieces of gentle rumination.

"Good For Her" Award: Poor Things—I didn't love this as much as some people did, but Emma Stone did great work with out-of-left-field performances this year (see also: The Curse). Very interested to see what else she does now that she seems to be in her weirdo phase. Also, good for her character; seems like she had a great time.

"Good For Him" Award: Beau Is Afraid—Ari Aster, man, I think it's cool that you are comfortable enough to spend $35 million setting fire to all your good will you've earned so far. I genuinely respect that.

"Don't Know How to Work This In, But I Feel Like I Should Include This One" Award: No One Will Save You—Probably doomed to be forgotten as it lies buried on Hulu, but this is a very fun, exciting, clever alien invasion thriller.

Most Played in the Room Adjacent to Me: The Super Mario Bros. Movie—My son got majorly obsessed with Mario and Donkey Kong this year, so as soon as this got put on Netflix, it was curtains for my hopes of getting him into European arthouse cinema during his midday movie/rest time.

Worst Animated Movie of the Year: Nimona—Despite there being two animated movies in my top 10, this was a particularly bad year for feature-film animation, and this was the worst of the worst that I saw (consider yourself lucky, Disney's Wish). Thoroughly irritating, and it looks bad.

Worst Movie of the Year: Your Place or Mine—Probably not actually the worst movie of the year, but I watch so few streaming-dump "content" movies that it feels pretty egregious when I do happen to sit through one.

Best Non-2023 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2023: Theorem—This film simply refused to leave my brain since I saw it in March. A bourgeois family has a sexual encounter with the divine and the spirals into oblivion: the story all of us Christians living a middle class American existence should be wrestling with.

Mini Reviews for July 4 - 10, 2022

In case you missed it, I published a post about Kate Bush's Hounds of Love as part of my series on progressive rock. You can read it here, if you're interested!

Movies

On the Rocks (2020)
Pleasant. Doesn't have the dreamy It factor of Sofia Coppola's best, but Bill Murray and Rashida Jones make a ridiculously charming father-daughter duo, and I enjoyed their low-key hijinks here a lot. Grade: B

 

 

 

 

The House of Mirth (2000)
Terence Davies does a great job of capturing the brutality of the Edith Wharton novel (my favorite of hers that I've read, for what it's worth), and Gillian Anderson specifically is 100% keyed into the very specific kind of detached, diorama-like spin Davies is putting on the material. Anderson is really, really terrific here, probably the technical best performance I've ever seen from her (I'm sorry, Scully!); the way that in the early goings she is able to let us understand the terrified insecurities of her character without letting slip one bit the mask of pretensions to high-brow society is masterful, multi-tiered acting—and when that mask does slip as she hits rock-bottom near the movie's end, it's some true fireworks. As for Davies, this isn't anywhere as ornate as his work in the '90s, but it's still beautiful, this time in a suffocating way that feels appropriate to the early-20th-century upper-crust-NYC setting. Overall just a very well-done costume drama. Grade: A-

The Color of Money (1986)
I was honestly a little bored whenever they weren't playing pool, and Tom Cruise is actively annoying here. But the pool sequences (especially those in the run-up to the finale, when Paul Newman's character is basically high on gambling—for a movie that goes out of its way to sneer at cocaine, this definitely has that "Marty remembers how good coke felt" feel) are electric. The very '80s atmosphere and Scorsese's occasional flashy new-wave touch make this feel ages removed from The Hustler, but about halfway through this, I realized that there are only 25 years separating this from The Hustler, while there are a full 36 years between Top Gun (which came out the same year as The Color of Money, by the way) and Top Gun: Maverick, which seems impossible to me because those movies feel way closer to one another than this and The Hustler. I don't know if that's just a testament to my screwed up perception of time and era proximity or if there's truly a much bigger shakeup in Hollywood ethos between the early '60s and the mid-'80s than between the mid-'80s and now. Grade: B-

Eat the Document (1972)
Just an hour of footage of Bob Dylan mumbling his way through his '66 tour, the clips strung together by what could generously be called experimental editing, intercut with concert footage of music that for the most part would be mercifully rescued and restored by the Bootleg Series Vol. 4. There are some really great kernels of scenes, almost none of which last long enough, but what's here is great (esp. the famous bit with John Lennon griping at Dylan for being too mopey). Warts and all, I found this kind of hypnotic and fun. Grade: B

 

 

 

Music

Arcade Fire - WE (2022)
This album was initially positioned as a return-to-form after the uneven Everything Now, ditching a lot of the disco/kitsch interests of that 2017 album for a sound more in-line with Neon Bible or The Suburbs. However, Arcade Fire ironically end up with basically the same two issues as they did with Everything Now on WE: occasionally embarrassing, obvious social commentary and an deeply uneven quality control throughout. Incredibly, the worst of these issues are clustered all on one track, the epic multi-part suite "End of the Empire," which plods along with boring observations about Society(TM) and the impending collapse of America until finally climaxing with the triumphant(?) declaration that "We unsubscribe, fuck season five." I say this as someone who is both deeply anxious about the collapse of America as well as generally an apologist for Arcade Fire's heart-on-sleeve brand of self-serious cringe: this is awful. Just truly, truly awful. At over nine minutes in length, "End of the Empire" takes up nearly a quarter of the whole album, and like the "Peter Pan" --> "Chemistry" --> "Infinite Content" --> "Infinite_Content" sequence on Everything Now, it forms a wretched centerpiece that nearly derails the whole record. I guess on the plus side, making it just one track means that you only have to press the skip button once this time? Anyway, the rest of the album is much better: occasionally great, even. "Age of Anxiety I" is an effectively nervy, groovy opener with a dancefloor pulse, "The Lightning I, II" is a terrific song in the classic Arcade Fire model, beginning with a folky mid-tempo melody that builds to a lose-your-mind ecstatic anthem of a climax, and "Unconditional I (Lookout Kid)" is Arcade Fire being corny is the right way. And that's more or less it; there's not a lot to the album, and if it weren't for the totemic black hole that is "End of the Empire," WE would be unremarkable, a solid but hardly earth-shattering release showcasing Arcade Fire returning to the safe territory of what they do best after a few records trying to push their sound forward. I'm hoping this doesn't signal the beginning of their "U2 in the 21st Century" phase, because they've not made nearly enough music to justify that sort of coda. Maybe I'm the problem, though, because I do really enjoy their back-to-basics tracks here. Grade: B

Mini Reviews for June 15-21, 2020

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there, especially my own.

Movies

Black Mother (2018)
A beautiful collage essay on Jamaican identity and the women who inhabit it. The movie's style makes this somewhat of an inherently spiritual film, with on-the-street voiceovers floating over footage of Jamaica like priests giving homilies, all framed by the biological liturgy of pregnancy trimesters, which the movie explicitly structures itself after. But the last fifteen minutes especially are transcendent, an ecstatic prayer by a woman who says that Jesus has called her away from the church into the world, followed by a childbirth sequence intercut with majestic shots of churning water. The rest of the movie is interesting, but those last minutes I found extremely moving. Grade: B+

Mansfield Park (1999)
Probably the most overtly revisionist I've seen a Jane Austen adaptation be: sexually frank (is this the first Jane Austen movie to have a sex scene [with nudity]?), queer leaning (lots of lesbian subtext, plus [I think??] some polyamory at the end), and it uses a somewhat throwaway detail from the novel to make a whole subplot about slavery/abolition. Very cool, interesting stuff. I wish the movie were more adventurous in its form, or even interesting at all—this is some pedestrian filmmaking, and the only thing notable about it is that it has an early incarnation of the "actor talking to the camera to read a letter instead of using voiceover" device that has become apparently the industry standard for Austen adaptations. Grade: B

Delwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (दिलवाले दुल्हनिया ले जायेंगे) (1995)
This is a completely overwhelming sensory experience: stunning music, colors, choreography, locations. Some really interesting ideas about what it means to live in a country as a non-native, too—the movie opens on a lovely lyrical moment of an aging Indian man feeding pigeons in London, reflecting on his alienation within the UK even after decades of living there, and while it seems weird for a while that we open on this character of whom we see maybe five minutes of over the course of the first half of the movie, the importance of that opening scene immediately snaps into focus the instant we see him arrive back in India—his body language changes, his face softens, he even becomes part of one of the dance sequences. I also really like the extremely goofy streak this movie has, like how Shah Rukh Khan's character basically turns into Bugs Bunny for a minute to snare his rival in an elaborate trap in the woods. But speaking of SRK, I hate to say it, but his character is the one keeping me at somewhat of an arm's length from this movie. I had a really hard time feeling anything for his character, and when he's half of the central romance that forms the emotional core of this movie, that means I'm having a hard time accessing that emotional core. This all intersects the fact that I am not at all a part of the Indian culture this movie depicts (or even very familiar with it), so I'm going to pose my feelings as questions rather than make any value statements about the plot, but these two issues are basically what's locking me out: 1. How am I supposed to care about a character who is 100% a douchebag for the part of the movie in which he and Simran (his co-protagonist/love interest, played excellently by Kajol) fall in love? Like, he actively ruins her European vacation, harasses her when she begs him repeatedly to leave her alone, grabs her when she asks him not to, rips her clothes, and "jokes" about having raped her while she was drunk, which gives her a mild panic attack the next morning—I had a difficult time flipping the switch into seeing him as a heartthrob to root for in the second half of the movie, especially since there didn't really seem to be any change-of-heart moment or character development to warrant that switch? 2. Why is it supposed to be romantic that, when not just Simran but also her sister and her mother are begging him to elope with Simran because her father is such a domineering man and will never approve of the marriage, SRK's character is determined to play by the rules and convince Simran's father to "give" her to him in marriage? He's such an anarchic force of nature for most of the movie, and it was jarring to see him play so hard into (patriarchal?) family values in this one aspect, especially when all the other characters we like are telling him to do otherwise and also especially because just like an hour before in the movie, he'd been asking Simran to have an affair with him. Tl;dr - for me, DDLJ is a cinematic feat and a truly captivating experience until I have to engage with SRK's character, but maybe I just don't understand the culture enough? Grade: B

Cape Fear (1991)
People talk about this being Scorsese's B-picture/Hitchcock/DePalma tribute, and it is gloriously that, with the Hermann score and all the camera tricks, the pure pulp of its premise and its thrills-and-chills-style slow-burn-into-literal-burn climax. But I don't see enough people talk about the weirdly ambitious thematic stew that's simmering right below the surface of this movie. Unless I'm forgetting something, this is the only Scorsese movie that deals directly with Protestantism, and the way that he overlays it with the American South (another Scorsese rarity) is fascinating—DeNiro's character, a rapist and inhuman monster, speaks in tongues and snake-handles, quotes the Bible endlessly, and enforces a sadistic atonement-style justice, while at the same time driving a car with one of those "American by birth, Southern by the grace of God" bumper stickers; Confederate flags are all over this movie, usually in association with DeNiro's character, and there's even a scene in which none other than Gregory Peck defends DeNiro in court—an allusion to the original Cape Fear, sure, but with Peck's southern-fried lawyer defending a rapist from vigilante justice, there's no way it's not also a really sick inversion/deconstruction of To Kill a Mockingbird, too. I have no idea if all these elements hang together, but the movie seems to be presenting some sort of idea about the Southern identity as a crucible of religious ecstasy intertwined with fear: of the Other, of the oppressed, and (if you're an Other or an oppressed person) of the monstrous oppressors and the legal/policing system and "civilized" Southern gentility that allow them to continue to create an atmosphere of terror—where the law of the South is defined less by the book (though that book is certainly systemically bent to protect a certain white protestant hegemony—time and again demonstrated by DeNiro doing technically legal things that are still terrifying) than by the overbearing cultural weight of a Christian theology obsessed with pain and judgement (embodied by DeNiro's tattoos). If that's really what this movie is going for, it would probably carry a lot more weight if the central terrorized family were anything other than suburb-y liberal white people. But still, for an ostensible paycheck job from a team just off the height of Hollywood prestige with Goodfellas, this is a weird, wild posture, and an intriguing piece of the ongoing conversation within Scorsese's filmography about Americanism and Christianity. Grade: B+

Winter Soldier (1972)
There isn't much to Winter Soldier besides the experience of for 90 minutes listening to American soldiers confess to the war crimes they and their peers committed in Vietnam. It's nauseating and horrifying, of course, but also, in their testimonies, the soldiers also give one of the starkest and most clear-eyed accounts of the indoctrination of nationalism and white supremacy on a cultural scale that I've ever seen. Consistently, these soldiers talk about how the very structure of the military machine trained them to dehumanize the Vietnamese (not just the Viet Cong): the body count tallies as mission objectives, the language (always slurs and animal vocabulary, never just "the Vietnamese"), the tail-wagging-the-dog logic of the violence ("How do you know they were VC?" "Because they're dead"). These were not just individual soldiers cracking toward sadism (which is what I was taught in school); the whole endeavor from the top down was shaped to produce racist, supremacist, sadistic actions creating senseless slaughter. So obviously, this movie is an essential document of the Vietnam War. But I guess what I'm saying is that what's ultimately profound about it is the way that it also transcends its historical moment and becomes about the whole project of American white supremacy/imperialism in general. Hot take: it's not a good project, y'all! Grade: A

The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (残菊物語) (1939)
Exquisite style and poignant tragedy—a beautiful 19th-century Japan bent around the abject destruction of a woman who just wants this dude not to suck so much at acting. I never felt that invested in the central romance, but maybe that's the point? Grade: B

I was part of the conversation about this movie on this week's episode of the Cinematary podcast—if you're interested, you can listen here.

A Day at the Races (1937)
Someone should have been fired for making a two-hour-long Marx Bros. movie. Even adjusting for that, it's definitely not their best. Some good bits: I like Chico's book con and the part where Harpo smashes the piano and plays it like a harp. But there's a disappointing shortage of good Groucho material (the horse pill bit notwithstanding), and at two hours long, pieces of this movie just draaaagggggg, which is absolute death for the Marx Bros. style of comedy. As an aside, I spent a good part of this movie wondering if Queen intentionally modeled the Marx Bros. by following up their groundbreaking A Night at the Opera album with the baggy, inconsistent A Day at the Races. Grade: B-



Television

Tuca & Bertie, Season 1 (2019)
Lisa Hanawalt (whose human-animal-hybrid work you probably recognize from BoJack Horseman) has created a show about two Millennial women trying to navigate adulthood in a big city, and that would be a major yawn from me (we have like ten shows with that premise, right?) except that this is like the Looney Tunes version of that concept: a totally buckwild and anarchic execution of urban ennui that keeps the delirious animal puns and "yes, and" escalation of absurd jokes from BoJack Horseman but jettisons any pretensions to realism at all, opting instead for an anything-goes visual aesthetic where reality is rubbery and unpredictable. Character dialogue can appear as words on the screen, whose letters act as objects that the characters interact with; scenes connect to each other with a kind of fevered-dream logic conveyed with phantasmagoric intertitles; characters' bodies stretch and twist into elaborate visual puns. The story itself is just okay, but the animation is the most fun, inventive TV animation I've seen, maybe ever. Between this and The Midnight Gospel, I would say that Netflix has the most exciting television animation happening right now. But then Netflix went and cancelled this. Booooooooooooo. Grade: A-

Music

Yves Tumor - Heaven to a Tortured Mind (2020)
Yves Tumor has shaved off a lot of his experimental impulses for this album, which isn't a bad thing. The result is a record that sounds a lot like peak TV on the Radio, if that band had leaned a little more heavily into neo soul. "Kerosene!", the lush, anthemic fourth track that samples Uriah Heep of all things, is undoubtedly the standout here, and the rest of the album doesn't even get close to that high. But it's all solid throughout. Between this an the new Moses Sumney album, 2020 is turning out to be a pretty good year for ambitious psychedelic soul. Grade: B+

Mini Reviews for December 30, 2019 - January 5, 2020

I've read a couple books and listened to some music, but I've also been traveling and thus didn't have a ton of time to write about them. I'll get to them later.

In the meantime, don't forget my pair of "Favorites of 2019" posts. You can find the movie one here and the music one here.

Movies

Cats (2019)
There was probably never going to be a good way to adapt the all-time-terrible Andrew Lloyd Webber Broadway smash Cats (and please, can this movie be the moment when everyone collectively wakes up and realizes that it was never good? That's right, not even "Memory"), but this is definitely one of the worse ways to even attempt to turn that musical into a movie, starting with the choice to superimpose actors faces over CG cat-human hybrid bodies but continuing on down the line to every single filmmaking choice including just the basic shot composition and blocking (which obscures 90% of the CG choreography 90% of the time). Still, I'd be lying if I joined in with the chorus of people calling this the worst movie of 2019—or even if I just said I didn't like it. The worst movies are either ideologically toxic or boring, and Cats is neither. Especially in this age of hyper-cautious movie studios, it's a rare treat to get a movie that goes so disastrously awry at every single turn as this one, and I had a terrific time with it. I can't quite rate it highly enough that I might trick someone into thinking that I recommend this movie on its own terms (half of the theater walked out before the film's halfway point, leaving just me and my friends to have a collective freak out), but, like, as a movie working against itself at every turn on its own sui generis rubric, this is great. Grade: C+

Gosford Park (2001)
I've not watched a ton of post-'70s Robert Altman movies, so my main associations with the man are primarily American, primarily counterculturally informed. So it was interesting to see a movie of his so far out of that milieu: i.e. one that takes place in the intensely buttoned-up, intensely stratified world of early 20th century Great Britain. The verdict is that it's about 70% shaggy Altman-esque ensemble observational drama, about 30% murder mystery that kind of pays off all the kind of aimless observational drama in the preceding hour-plus. The buildup to the murder feels far too long, but then again, once that plot jumps in, it racks the movie into crystal-clear focus on the ugliest, saddest implications of the class tensions that have been waltzing in front of the camera the whole time. I like that. Grade: B

The Wind Will Carry Us (باد ما را خواهد برد) (1999)
As always with Kiarostami and his movies, there's a lot to unpack with The Wind Will Carry Us. My initial takeaway is that this is basically like Kiarostami's take on the whole Hallmark original movie thing where the city slicker goes to the quaint small town and learns to renounce their city-slicking ways and appreciate the slow, personalized pace of the small-time life—in fact, Kiarostami finds the correct way to frame this story, which hinges on the tense interplay between the urban exploitation of rural "quaintness" and the interlocking systems of contemporary life that affect us all. It's a gorgeously shot, strikingly funny movie that's of course a lot more complicated than what I've described, more of a dense modern text of potent symbols and richly evocative scenes than anything like the moralizing narrative I've just framed it as, and I've barely scratched the surface of it myself. But this is a good one, for sure. Grade: A-

Kundun (1997)
I'm 100% here for the Philip Glass score and Thelma Shoomaker editing, but I'm maybe only 50% here for the Martin Scorsese direction and Melissa Mathison screenplay. The music is stunning throughout, and there are some edits here (especially in the final, highly impressionist final fifteen minutes or so) that are just jaw-dropping in their beauty. As for Scorsese/Mathison, Kundun is the first feature for both of them that is outside a Western, Christian milieu, and both the screenplay and the direction have a stuffiness about them that feels like the sort of careful reverence you might use when approaching a tradition you are not a part of. It's stuffy and robs the material of anything like the more incisive moments of either artist's typical work, and it kind of makes me wonder how suitable either one was for this project in the first place (ditto with the choice to have everybody speak in English—come on, Scorsese, even your bud Schrader had his "Asian" film in the regionally appropriate language!). For Scorsese in particular, his beatific stance toward the Dalai Lama is basically the opposite of the thorny complexity he affords his Christian protagonists and even Jesus Christ Himself, and while I completely understand why an outsider wouldn't want to imbue complexity onto a religious/political tradition not their own, it really makes some of Scorsese's work here feel like a noble failure. But that music! Those edits! Grade: B-

Enter the Dragon (1973)
The last new-to-me movie I watched in 2019 (though I did rewatch Frances Ha with my wife sometime later in the evening). Anyway, it's a lot of fun. I've never seen a Bruce Lee movie before, and this seemed like an alright introduction. It was basically a Bond movie, which means that it has the boring stretches and tedious archetypes that usually plague Bond movies, but Bruce Lee kicking and punching his way through the baddies is way more fun than, like, Sean Connery sleeping his way through a small army of women. Also, I like that Bruce Lee's character is just named Lee. Grade: B+

Favorite Movies of 2019

2019 sucked. It sucked on a personal level for me and my family, it sucked on a national level, it sucked on a global level.

My son was born, though, which is just such a wonderful ray of positivity in my life while at the same time ushering in a kind of mournfulness for him and the world he will inherit from my generation and the ones prior. I want my son to have a world full of joy and beauty, and while certainly those things will persist, they will do so alongside God only knows what horrible inheritance of the modern age. But in the absence of a material reality that's going to leave a more beautiful world for my son, there is at least art and the legacy it can leave on the human earth for my son to encounter, and readers, you all know that the cinematic arts are near and dear to my heart.

So here are my favorite movies of the year. When my son asks me about this year (if he cares to—and honestly, why would he? I certainly wouldn't want to hear about 2019), I'll have to tell him about children in cages and my brother's death and my grandfather's decline and Jeff Bezos hoarding his billions like a really boring version of a fairy tale dragon. But I also hope to be able to tell him about what made me feel awe and wonder and that rush of being alive, and these movies will undoubtedly be a part of that.

Anyway, enough hand-wringing. Here's the list. As always, it's limited to movie that had either a streaming or theatrical release in the United States during 2019. Also limited to the movies I actually had a chance to see in 2019. So before you ask, no, I didn't get to see Knives Out or Rise of Skywalker.

Also, don't forget about my Favorite Music of 2019 post, in case you missed it and are interested!

Favorite Movies

1. Long Day's Journey Into Night
Filmmakers have long compared cinema to dreaming, but when the protagonist of Bi Gan's towering Long Day's Journey Into Night falls asleep, it results in one of the most thrilling and transporting sequences of film I've ever seen: an hour-long single take that affirms that filmmaking is the nexus between waking and dreaming, heaven and earth. The movie is one half mystery and one half that dream sequence, and honestly, I couldn't describe much more about the opaque plot. But it doesn't matter when it's composed of some of the most dazzling minutes of film ever. The Wizard of Oz for the arthouse. This is why I love movies.

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2. The Lighthouse
Both an unsettling dream of a film and also the funniest comedy of the year. Melville meets Beckett meets whatever strange thought is in director Robert Eggers's head. Willem Dafoe is mesmerizing. The cinematography is lush. The Lighthouse is God. Why'd ya spill yer beans?

[Read original review]

3. Little Women
The kind of movie that makes you glad you were alive to see it. I wouldn't be surprised if after repeat viewings, this became my favorite movie of this year.

[Read original review]

4. The Irishman
Scorsese's death-obsessed swan song for the modern gangster genre is one of the man's best. Like Silence a few years ago, it's about grasping for God and some sense of meaning within a life that has caused immeasurable suffering and resulted in crushing isolation: a bleak rumination on fevered and heartbreaking memories that try desperately (and unsuccessfully) to obscure the wasted life and rotten soul of the protagonist.

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5. Uncut Gems
The most intense movie on this list by far. Adam Sandler's turn as a jeweler who pays his debts with gamble upon gamble is one of the more visceral depictions of the aftershocks of the Great Recession put onscreen (the movie takes place in 2012), Darius Khondji's grainy, nervous cinematography and Daniel Lopatin's relentless, pulsing score highlighting the sweaty desperation of Sandler's character. It's a movie of almost transcendent griminess, and when it reaches its inevitable, heart-stopping conclusion, you'll realize you haven't taken a breath for two hours.

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6. Parasite
Twisty and tense, provocative in its ideas—Gatsby-esque in its critique of capitalism and the pretensions of the upper class, Hitchcock-esque in its propulsive, deadpan drive.

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7. Hustlers
The best mainstream Hollywood release of the year (if we don't count Little Women); the best Goodfellas riff since the OG itself; a rip-roaring heist film by way of a female friendship dramedy. A lot of the movies on my list appeal pretty much to my own niche set of interests, and Hustlers does that, too, but it's also far and away the biggest crowdpleaser of all ten here. I can't say enough good things about it.

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8. Her Smell
Terrible title. Good movie. I can't think of a "rise and fall and rise of a musician" movie that does that arc more effectively than this one. One of Alex Ross Perry's best.

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9. Us
Get Out's messier, more ambitious younger sibling. There's an intensity to the sheer commitment to its host of wild ideas, and the resulting movie is breathtaking in its scope. Jordan Peele's got it, that mad Twilight Zone energy. Lupita Nyong'o's got them, the best performance(s) of the year.

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10. Transit
Transit takes a WWII novel and transplants it into contemporary Europe, provoking questions like: What if there were Nazis in 2019? What if they marched through the streets to round up refugees? What if they didn't wear swastikas and stuff and instead just had on riot gear and police uniforms? Weird, right? Guess we'll never know what that would be like.

[Read original review]





Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Screenplay: High Flying Bird—I'm pretty sure it's Little Women. But if it isn't Little Women, then it's certainly Tarell Alvin McCraney's electric writing on High Flying Bird. And I don't even follow basketball.

Best Florence Pugh in a Flower Crown: Midsommar—Again, this maybe should go to Little Women. But this one gets bonus points for putting Pugh in a flower dress, too. I admire the commitment to the bit.

Best Action: John Wick 3: Parabellum—I mean, it's John Wick. He has a fight on top of a galloping horse.


Animated Corner Award: I Lost My Body—At least among the ones I saw, 2019 was a distressingly weak year for animated movies, hence nothing making my top 10. But animation is also the thing I love most about cinema, so I feel weird leaving it off completely, so here's this movie that was interesting but that I wasn't super enthusiastic about.

Documentary Corner Award: Apollo 11—On the other hand, this was a tremendous year for documentaries (honestly, a great decade for documentaries, which is a relief after the 2000s were a nadir for the form), and Apollo 11, the movie made of mostly previously unseen footage of the original moonshot, is the very best. Its focus on the mundane details of the mission and the spaces around its most famous moments cut through the cultural mythology of the event and emphasis just what a jaw-dropping feat of engineering and physical dexterity landing on the moon was. Stunning.

"Documentary" Corner Award: Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story—Too good not to include, too fake to call a documentary.

Concert Documentary Award: Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé—Completely thrillingly assembled footage of the instantly iconic "Beychella" performances. It also probably belongs alongside Rolling Thunder Revue in its work in furthering the mythologizing of its central artist.

Best Outer Space Award: Ad Astra—2019 was a really tremendous year for space movies. If you're looking for "hard sci-fi," you can't get much better than this movie's rigorously thoughtful, realistic depiction of near-future space travel.

Best Philosophical Implications of Outer Space: High Life—I wrote about this at length for Cinematary, if you want to read that.

Best Conspiracy: Under the Silver Lake—A conspiracy film for the internet era. The biggest conspiracy of them all is that you're inventing it all yourself. Facts may not care about your feelings, but what if they also don't care about making any coherent sense?

Best Ghost Story: Atlantics—It's kind of a ghost story. I dunno. See it yourself and find out.

Best UFO Enthusiast: Ash Is Purest White—You'll know him when you see him.

"More People Should See This" Award: Greta—Don't remember too many people talking about this thriller, but it's a good one. Go see it!

"Thank Goodness I Don't Live In Florida" Award: Crawl—Hurricanes? Alligators? No thanks.

"Nope, Florida's Still Not Worth It" Award: Beach Bum—Not even a ridiculously fun Matthew McConaughey performance and some really cool cinematography can make this place somewhere I want to be. Plus: SHARKS??

"You Do You, Man" Award: Glass—M. Night Shyamalan is just doing his thing, and this year "his thing" was making a logically suspect, bizarrely paced mythological elevation of the Avengers. It's very odd, it's not really that good, and it's entirely a Shyamalan joint. Glad our test-grouped-to-death corporate blockbuster age somehow made room for a movie like this.

Least-Favorite Trend of the Year: "Hello, my name is the Walt Disney Company! Remember that thing of ours that you like? We're here to make it worse!"

Worst Disney: Dumbo—A very crowded field; I can't remember a year in which I found so little to like among the corporate titan's film output. And I didn't even get a chance to see The Lion King. But this completely misbegotten live-action adaptation of the bona fide animated classic gets the dubious honor as my least-favorite out of a whole host of rotten.

Worst Movie of the Year: Climax—Gaspar Noé can go sit on a tack. An LSD-laced tack.

Best Non-2019 Movie I Saw for the First Time in 2019: Dusty Stacks of Mom: The Poster Project—Jodie Mack's beautiful, idiosyncratic, personal re-interpretation of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, by way of the collapse of her mother's poster business. It's basically perfect, and while it's devilishly hard to track down, if you can do it, DO IT. It's so great.

Mini Reviews for December 16-22, 2019

Pre-holiday week = little movie watching. Holiday travels = late posts.

Movies

It Chapter Two (2019)
After the first movie, Andy Muschetti and co. had three major problems in adapting the remainder of Stephen King's novel: 1. The adult material is far weaker than the kid material in the novel, 2. The adult material only really makes sense when it is cross-cut with the kid material (as it is in the book), and 3. The adult material features a good chunk of the super bizarre mythology that made people talk about the novel being "unadaptable." For problem #1, the filmmakers basically just threw up their hands and said, "What are ya gonna do?", as Chapter Two makes no real attempt to make the adult material any more compelling than it is in the book. For problem #2, Chapter Two decides to invent new material for the kids to cross-cut with the adult scenes, which is an inelegant solution, but the more elegant solution was to have planned the first one to account for the necessary cross-cutting, so now that they're stuck making just the sequel, again: "What are ya gonna do?" For problem #3, the movie basically jettisons all but the barest sketch of the book's mythology (goodbye, Cosmic Turtle, we'll miss you), which would probably have been the best decision had this movie had any good ideas on what to replace it with, and unfortunately, it doesn't; the finale is instead a protracted, CGI-heavy, repetitious slog tied together with some pretty weaksauce themes. So what you have with Chapter Two is a movie that's overlong, undercooked, and unfun. It has little of the complexity of the novel and none of the charm of Chapter One, and I didn't have a good time at all. Grade: C-

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019)
On the one hand, this is a great conceptual documentary centered around the idea of myth-making and the slippery concept of what "Bob Dylan" actually is—the insertion of intentionally misleading/false information here is getting all the attention, but just as important is the use of fictional scenes from Dylan's film Renaldo and Clara as if they are actual footage of conversations between Dylan and Baez, etc. It's all very interesting and funny and playful, and I dug it. On the other hand, this movie is just a great compilation of some truly stupendous concert footage—the "Rolling Thunder Revue" performances are much less iconic and well-worn than the folk/electric period Scorsese used in his other Dylan doc, No Direction Home, which means that this movie's live footage feels much more special and revelatory and fresh, especially if (like me) you hadn't heard the Bootleg Series release of this music beforehand. These particular renditions of old classics are incredible, and the intense performances of then-contemporary material from Desire and stuff stands toe-to-toe with the reinterpreted '60s material. Plus, you get an off-the-cuff moment of Joni Mitchell playing an early version of "Coyote" for a room of Dylan and his folks, which is beyond cool. So whether you're here for the weird thematic games or just some stellar concert doc material, you're going to have a blast. Grade: A

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013)
Its lack of that Lord and Miller touch makes the humor feel forced rather than effortless, and the screenplay in general is just kind of dull and predictable (although "Evil Steve Jobs" is a fun enough [albeit redundant] concept for a villain). That said, though, the creature design is super fun—the movie never runs out of inventive ways to visualize food/animal puns, and I thought that was a hoot. Grade: B- 

Mini Reviews for December 9-15, 2019

One more week until school is over for the semester. Lord, hasten the day.

Movies

Marriage Story (2019)
In places, Marriage Story has the same vibe as Woody Allen's Interiors, in the sense that it showcases a director reaching just out of their comfort zone in a self-conscious attempt to make a Great Movie, and visibly straining in the process. The scenes unfold in artfully restrained long takes girded with stately camerawork focused on blood-letting performances—it's practically begging the Bergman Scenes from a Marriage comparisons, but here I am making the Allen-compared-to-Bergman comparison, so... I dunno. It's all just so deliberate and airtight, and all of its biggest flourishes feel like Baumbach sat down and said, "Now here's where I have to write an epic, ugly argument," and "Here's the big courtroom scene," and "This is the place where I put in the monologue about gender inequality," etc. With apologies to Baumbach, who it seems has very much lived this in real life, there's nothing of the spontaneity and molten hostility of the great "marriage on the rocks" films, i.e. Before Midnight, Allen's own Husbands and Wives, and the like, settling instead for grand gestures that approximate the form of these movies rather than coming up with a living document of its own. Which is not to say that this movie isn't good—it is! Very good at times! Johansson and Driver give top-tier performances, the writing is the bleeding-edge sharp typical of all Baumbach movies, and the movie is both hysterically funny and achingly sweet at times. But all of the best material occurs when the movie untenses its shoulders and unbuttons its collar, so to speak, and forgets about its ambitions: a lengthy comic interlude involving an accidental knife wound, a handful of scenes involving the screwball-paced casual sniping of creative-types hanging out with one another—basically, when the movie is content to be another Baumbach feature rather than trying to be the Baumbach feature. Unabashedly love Driver's character's barely reigned in contempt for driving, though—solidarity, brother. Grade: B

I Lost My Body (J’ai perdu mon corps) (2019)
A lot of people have already noted that the romantic half of this movie is a lot less interesting than the "I'm a disembodied hand trying to claw my way back to my body" half. Fewer people have mentioned that both halves are basically in the service of nothing but some melancholic mood piece fluff—the whole movie cross-cuts between these two timelines until we basically get to the inevitable reunion and then... that's basically it? There's a coda that makes a callback to a significant moment earlier in the film, and then there's a revelation about the protagonist's childhood. But the movie never gave me any reason to care about any of this. Maybe there's a metaphor here, but I dunno, I didn't see it. That said, the animation is amazing, and I am very partial to the hand's whole "Steadfast Tin Soldier"-esque journey, which is both familiar and strange in some delightful ways. Grade: B

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)
I appreciate that a director with the stature of Linklater has been consistently willing to work on projects that defy conventional ideas of "importance." Where'd You Go, Bernadette isn't really the kind of movie people are mourning when they talk about the shrinking space for mid-budget films in the modern studio landscape, but it is absolutely the kind of movie most in danger of going extinct from this economic reality: crowd-pleasing, sentimental dramedies without much by the way of thematic ambition on their minds, imperfectly scripted but impeccably acted—you know, like We Bought a Zoo and that kind of thing. This is basically Linklater's We Bought a Zoo, only a little better because it's animated by a typically great Cate Blanchett and a ridiculously watchable Bill Crudup, as well as some pretty interesting material regarding architecture and mental health on the fringes of the plot. It's still a little goofy in places, and the last thirty minutes or so don't work in the slightest. But I had a good time with a lot of the other pieces here. Grade: B-

The Unknown Girl (La Fille inconnue) (2016)
It doesn't quite have the bite of some of the previous Dardenne brothers movies (side note: what's up with Kid with a Bike being virtually ignored in the end-of-decade lists? EXPLAIN, film critics community!), but The Unknown Girl is still an engaging little gumshoe movie with its boots planted in the textures of the Dardennes' social realism. I enjoyed it. Grade: B+

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (2005)
It's clear that Scorsese and Co. put a lot of time into archival research, assembling this movie from mostly preexisting footage, some of it rarely seen before, others from better, more lively documentaries. It's fine that the movie is never as live-wire as something like Dont Look Back, because how could it be? The new interviews the movie gets—with old folkies like Joan Baez and some pretty obscure characters like the (extremely enthusiastic!) studio tech who helped record Highway 61 Revisited, as well as the man himself—are decently candid; Baez in particular is upfront about the extent to which Dylan personally hurt her with his erratic mid-'60s behavior, which is a perspective that's not often explored in the "Dylan goes electric" mythology, and I'll be honest that watching this documentary was the first time it occurred to me that I'd probably be a lot more fun to hang out with Joan Baez than with Bob Dylan. In fact, in general the movie walks a decently impressive tightrope between taking seriously the reasons why people felt betrayed by Dylan's abandonment of the folk revival scene while also not denying the small-minded stodginess that underlined a lot of that reaction, too. As a PBS-style piece of informative filmmaking, it's a great introduction to Dylan's early career, with enough obscure/new info sprinkled in to keep the veterans happy. As a piece of cinematic art, it's nothing special. Grade: B

Television

Wormwood (2017)
Netflix Bloat is a real thing, and it's a shame to see it happen to my boy Errol. At its core, Wormwood is a classic Morris piece in the vein of The Thin Blue Line about epistemology and the hall of mirrors one walks down when you challenge the modern authority state for the truth—this one centered around the officially accidental death of CIA employee Frank Olson that was not unlikely an assassination on the part of the CIA. It's a gripping premise and yields some fascinating material, especially in its first and final episodes; Eric Olson, Frank's son, is the sort of tragic hero at the center of this series, whose quest for the truth is bound to be confounded by the tenacity of the powers that be in keeping an air of ambiguity, and Morris does a good job of showing just how broad a net "the powers that be" actually is, especially in the final episode, where Seymour Hersh, in a completely bananas interview, basically tells Morris to his face that he knows what Morris and Olson want to know but that he won't out of a commitment to standards of journalistic integrity—which of course raises all sorts of fascinating and bitter questions about the true purpose of journalistic standards and the extent to which they truly are capable of speaking truth to power. So that's all great. BUT. There's absolutely nothing here that warrants a six-episode, 256-minute miniseries. This would have been a great feature film, but at the length that it is, it's too long at least twice over, and large stretches of time are padded out with redundant and somewhat extraneous reenactments, seemingly just for the purpose of making this long enough to be a series rather than a rich feature. At times, Wormwood even becomes something I never thought I'd say about a Morris project: tedious. It's super unfortunate, because there is some terrific stuff here. Grade: B-