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?

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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.

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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 May 27-June 2, 2019

HELLO! The randomly selected reader suggestion for this week is Zardoz! I'll keep the rest of the suggestions in the pool, and if you want to put in a suggestion for next week (or put in a second one), here's the link:

Just click here to submit a suggestion for next week's review post!

Movies

Zardoz (1974) Reader Suggestion!
I love the idea that John Boorman's immediate response after the success of Deliverance was to rush off and make this tripped-out sex odyssey, The Holy Mountain by way of (anachronistically) The Man Who Fell to Earth by way of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Truly one of the most singular and bizarre movies to come out of that bananas window between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars, when a lot of film sci-fi was stretching toward these sort of singular and bizarre statements already. Like a lot of that '70s sci-fi, Zardoz is a shaggy social satire bursting with ideas, striking imagery, and a ton of really off-beat costuming choices. Also like a lot of '70s sci-fi, it only barely hangs together on a plot level, and its reach exceeds its thematic grasp, especially toward its muddled conclusion. In some ways, its structure, where the first half is basically a character getting a tour of this weird future world and the second half is devoted to that character tearing that future world to shreds, feels more of a piece with Brave New World and other talkier socially conscious sci-fi novels of the mid-20th century than it does with '70s sci-fi cinema; in other ways, it bears exactly zero resemblance to anything, literary or cinematic. Not even the James Bond movies showed us this much sweaty Sean Connery skin. Thanks to whomever it was who recommended this movie to me, because that was something. Grade: B

Kaili Blues (路边野餐) (2015)
I was completely in the palm of this movie's hand for about the first hour, enough so that I was thinking about revising my rough "best of the decade" list I've started secretly compiling for the end of the year. Then the 40-minute single-take shot happened, and somehow, that jarred me out of the movie a bit. The shot takes what is initially one man's mystically infused personal quest and then blows it up into the story of the city of Kaili as a whole—which, normally that kind of "personal is a synecdoche of the communal" thing I would be a huge fan of, but there's just something about the way that that element of the movie interacts with those other elements that rubs me wrong, and the movie loses some of its unpredictable magic by tying the film down to what can be attained in a single shot. But make no mistake: this is still very good. It's got that Tarkovsky energy where every frame (that isn't part of the long take) vibrates with this spiritual potential energy that only bursts into something tangible once or twice during the film, but when it does, even subtly, it explodes. There was a shot early in the movie involving a projector and a train where I thought my head was going to melt it was so magical, and the movie ends on a similar effect. The whole thing is profound in this ineffable way that you so rarely get even in this kind of slow cinema, and I had a blast. Grade: A-

Would You Rather (2012)
A macabre, mean little thriller that violently riffs on the titular sleepover game. This gets commonly compared to Cheap Thrills (the reason I watched it, tbh), both being game-based metaphors for America's wealth divide released just a few months apart. Would You Rather has a much sharper political subtext, with the protagonist entering the game because of healthcare debt rather than just generic unemployment and with a much cleaner understanding of how the wealthy/powerful use the violence of the state to coerce the lower classes into a modern capitalistic game that they might otherwise rebel against (there's a butler literally holding everyone at gunpoint here, and it's revealed early on that he used to work for Mi6, so...). But also... Would You Rather just isn't as good as Cheap Thrills. Jeffrey Combs's sadistic gamemaster is about as compellingly watchable as David Koechner's parallel character in Cheap Thrills, but otherwise, the cast here is pretty cardboard and play barely sketched characters who are even less interesting than the performances, to say nothing about the even-less-engaging cinematic style. Plus, the lack of any sort of black-comic edge makes this movie just straight misery, and maybe I'm just a bourgeois loser for wanting my bleak class commentary to be just a tad bit more fun than this, but what can I say? Grade: B- 

The Beginning: Making "Episode I" (2001)
This is a remarkable making-of documentary on a number of counts, including the way it has virtually no interviews and instead presents a kind of fly-on-the-wall/Frederick Wiseman approach onset, giving us viewers a tremendous look at the moment-by-moment process of making The Phantom Menace. But more than anything, with the dramatic irony brought on by watching this in 2019, a deeply sad tragedy undergirds nearly every minute of this movie. Watching, for example, a young Jake Lloyd so genuinely excited to land a role for which he would be mercilessly harassed to such an extent that he would essentially renounce Star Wars forever; Ahmed Best throwing himself so completely and jovially into the physicality of Jar Jar Binks, a performance that would for all intents and purposes end his acting career; George Lucas himself working so dedicatedly to expand and challenge the Star Wars franchise, a vision for which he would receive so much hate that he would sell it off to Disney a mere decade later. This was Lucas's passion project, a bizarre little experimental film that just happened to have a budget of millions and an audience of billions, and regardless of how you feel about the final product of the prequels—I haven't watched them recently enough to have stronger feelings besides the notion that they don't deserve to be the whipping boy for the franchise—there's no denying just how singular the whole Lucas-led Star Wars series was: the most lucrative independent film project of all time, probably the most personal movie franchise to have ever made as much money as it did. In a lot of ways both technical and business-related, The Phantom Menace has proven itself to be one of the most important works of American mainstream filmmaking of the past twenty years, but perhaps the biggest one is how the fallout from this movie (alongside, much later, the Hobbit movies) made studios hit the brakes hard on this sort of blockbuster auteurism and eventually land at the bland competence of, for example, the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In Lucas's own words, Jar Jar is the key—a blessing in the specifics of how we rarely get characters this baldly terrible anymore, a curse in what it means that studios put up the bumpers so high that we can't get a character this baldly terrible again. To watch this documentary is to watch the movie industry change right before your eyes. Grade: A

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
I'm sure this has been said before, but it just clicked with me while I was watching this movie just how important the late '30s were for establishing certain norms in American mainstream entertainment. Among this movie, The Wizard of Oz, and *sigh* Gone with the Wind, there is an enormous innovation in how Hollywood films approach spectacle—no longer the majestic tableau of the silent era or the hushed theatricality of the early sound era but a bombastic-yet-fleet style defined by kineticism and color and musical sweep and actor charisma. The Adventures of Robin Hood is incredibly watchable in a way that feels distinctly modern compared to some of its immediate peers. Errol Flynn is pitch-perfect as Robin, the swashbuckling action is impressively staged and tensely executed, and every bit of this movie is a joy to experience. I had no idea that Disney's Robin Hood movie was basically 80% cribbed from this movie, but it makes sense, given how well this whole package works; why reinvent the wheel? That said, as is the case with most Robin Hood stories, it is a huge deflation that all the simmering populist energy is ultimately in service of propping up a monarch more than it is about the protection of the poor and that the central injustice to be righted in these stories always lands on the wrong person being on the throne rather than the poor being oppressed. So all the bit with King Richard in the movie's climax feels pretty dull to me. On a related note, it's kind of amazing that the 2010s, with all its discourse about wealth inequality and populism, still hasn't managed to make a good Robin Hood movie. Be better, filmmakers. Grade: A-

Television

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Season 6 (2019)
Still fun enough, I suppose, and the cast is, as always, extraordinarily engaging and winsome. But at this point, I'm mostly sticking with the show out of sunk cost. I've stuck with it this long; why not see it through to the end? I think I'm just tired of it; it's basically the same show it's ever been (the move to NBC doesn't seem to have made any huge creative changes to the show, although it feels just a tad sillier than it used to be—not sure if that would have happened at Fox anyway). But whereas something like Bob's Burgers is off-beat enough that even its recurring tropes don't wear thin, Brooklyn Nine-Nine is so conventionally a workplace sitcom that the longer some of its manners continue, the staler they feel because it's apparent that, aside from the amazing cast, we've been here before. Like I said, it's basically the same it's ever been, so this is more me than the show. But I'm wearing out on the Nine-Nine. Grade: B-

Music

Vampire Weekend - Father of the Bride (2019)
Vampire Weekend isn't aiming for new fans with their first new album in six years. If you hated the preppy cosmopolitanism and Paul Simonisms of their first three albums, you're not going to be swept off your feet by Father of the Bride; if you enjoyed the wry lyrical turns, sharp hooks, and subtle melancholy of their first run, you'll probably find something to like here. I'm mostly in the latter camp, though unfortunately, most of what I found to like were things I'd already found; the best material ("Harmony Hall," "This Life," "Sunflower") the band dropped as singles long before the album's release. It's not as if the songs beyond the pre-release material are bad, but it's disappointing that there isn't a "Hannah Hunt" hiding deep in the tracklist. I suppose some might attribute this to the departure of Rostam Batmanglij from the band prior to this album's recording, and without Batmanglij playing instruments or producing, there's definitely a looser feel to the music. The tight precision of the previous album's production has sometimes been traded for some intentionally messy choices, like including studio chatter or burying melodies in off-format mixing or making the album 18 tracks long (!) or just overall letting the band slow down and sound more jammy, in the style of Grateful Dead or some other '70s FM rock. I gotta say, it's telling that the best song by far here, "Harmony Hall," has a Batmanglij writing credit. It's not that these new styles don't yield good songs or even that these are that radical of changes (like I said, if you liked their previous material, you'll like this), but it's clear to me that the band's strengths lie more in the highly affected production and tight songwriting of their past than in their apparently whoolier future. But the band is hardly adrift without Rostam. As always, their lyrics are barbed in unexpected ways and slyly political. It's fascinating to see what may be the quintessential Obama-era indie band deal with a distinctly post-Obama world, definitively on the other side of the ambivalence of Modern Vampires of the City and into a much more studied weariness; "I know pain is as natural as the rain, I just thought it didn't rain in California," Ezra Koenig sings on "This Life," his duet with Danielle Haim that sums up pretty neatly the intersection of self-aware privilege and regretted idealism at this album's emotional core. There were probably more concise, more disciplined ways to get us to that emotion, but the fact that they made it to begin with is something. Grade: B+