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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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.

[Read original review]

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 23-29, 2019

Ahhh, Winter Break.

Movies

Little Women (2019)
There are minor spoilers in this review, so I guess if you don't want to be spoiled on the plot of one of the most widely known stories in American literature, beware.
To call this "Greta Gerwig's" Little Women undersells, as auteur theory always does, the tremendous collaborative authorship among the writer/director Gerwig, the composer Alexandre Desplat, the cinematographer Yorick Le Seaux, and what is undoubtedly one of the most perfectly assembled casts of the past decade—all of whom take their various roles and inhabit them to such a deeply magnificent extent that they feel like individual works of art of their own authorship. And yet the most impressive and marvelous feat about this particular adaptation of Alcott's oft-adapted novel seems directly attributable to Gerwig herself, and that is the way the movie positions itself in relationship to its source text. This movie is cinematic literary adaptation executed to perfection; Gerwig has scripted the film with a clear and earnest love for Alcott's work, but crucially, more than any other Little Women adaptation I've seen, she also understands this story deeply enough that she's not too precious with it to tweak and tighten in order to make it the best version of itself, underlining buried subtext, inventing incidents to fill in gaps, drawing connections between seemingly unrelated character beats, shuffling the structure to draw out the poignancy of its arcs, all while feeling 150% within the spirit of what Little Women has meant to its millions of fans for the past 150 years. It's Gerwig's structure in particular that's such a remarkable act of creation; rather than tell the novel's story chronologically, she's taken its two volumes and cross-cut between them, jumping back and forth between the March women's adulthood and idyllically remembered childhood. It's a seemingly simple creative decision, but the story flourishes around it. Little Women has always been a story about siblings, but with its cross-cut structure in this movie, it becomes—and whether this is in the book and lost in other adaptations or simply Gerwig's own spark, I'm not sure (I've never actually read the book)—it becomes a bittersweet rumination of the interplay of memory and the passage of time within a family unit and the ways in which adulthood transforms sibling relationships and inevitably scatters and isolates siblings from one another. This—along with some judicious tweaks of iconic scenes from Gerwig's screenplay, to say nothing of the cast's work in sculpting these characters—magically makes some of the story's more befuddling and flat choices (e.g. Amy and Laurie, Jo and Bhaer, etc.) feel like rich and melancholy realities of growing up. This is no more true than in its depiction of Beth's death, which, in most versions of Little Women I've seen, has always felt somewhat like a forced dramatic climax to a story that isn't really in need of a climax. But Gerwig's split structure gives Beth's fate a weight that goes far beyond the loss of a sibling; it is a manifestation of the unstoppable march of time and how it robs and pillages from childhood, how it fundamentally imbues memory and the self-identity built upon those memories with a twinge of pain. I found myself thinking a lot about my own brother, who died in October, and how the pain of his death was not just on the basis of his death in and of itself but also on the ways in which it bifurcated the lives of me and my siblings into a Before and an After and threw into relief the whole host of changes my family has undergone, both big and small, that have made life a little sadder, a little more complex, a little richer. There's a way that the wholesome purity of the Little Women story can feel a little precious and alien in relation to lived experiences, but the fundamental triumph of this particular version is that it's not just the story of this one family rendered in deep emotional hues but also so achingly real at every turn that it becomes, improbably, the story of families writ large. To turn to the old adage about how the specific becomes the universal in fiction would damn to the realm of cliché a movie that sails beyond the dichotomy of "original" and "cliché" into the realm of Truth. A complete triumph. As advertised, one of the best of the year. Grade: A 

Uncut Gems (2019)
Basically a two-hour stress attack. For those of you for whom that sounds unpleasant, don't worry: it's also a very funny, very exciting thriller that's also a tremendous showcase for both a magnificent, throbbing score by Oneohtrix Point Never and a towering tragicomic performance from Adam Sandler. Sandler in particular is a marvel; as with his iconic Punch-Drunk Love performance, he knows how to take the particular quirks of his comedic persona and twist that into a terrifying intensity that feels both of a piece with his broader body of work and also complements the particular vision of the directors (here, the Safdie brothers, whose vision feels very much of a piece with the nightmare anxiety cinema of Good Time and Heaven Knows What). It also bears mentioning that I probably laughed more during this movie than I did during any of those Adam Sandler movies I had to watch this summer. Grade: A

Atlantics (Atlantique) (2019)
For a deconstructive ghost story, Atlantics is not nearly as oblique as it could be. It is, in fact, a pretty straightforward forbidden-love romance with a pretty straightforward class conflict as the backdrop: a woman is engaged to be married to one dude, but she is in love with another dude (that her family doesn't approve of); this dude is a construction worker whose boss is exploiting him and his colleagues. Even when the supernatural stuff starts creeping into the story about halfway through the movie, these threads still follow familiar paths. It's just that these paths weave together in unexpected and completely striking ways that feel as indebted to the folkloric slow cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul as they do to, like, Ghost and stuff like that. This isn't slow cinema, though, and the movie remains accessible and briskly paced throughout, animated by a row of truly great performances from its main cast and some stunning cinematography by Claire Mathon (who also shot Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which I haven't seen but by its reputation seems to be setting Mathon up for an all-time-great 2019). I was a little less thrilled about the conventional early stages of Atlantics, but once it gets going, it's spectacular. Grade: B+

The Art of Self-Defense (2019)
This movie adds absolutely nothing new to the cinema of deconstructed toxic masculinity that wasn't already done by the likes of Fight Club and stuff. But there are some extremely solid jokes in its extremely arch rendering of male social codes, and Jesse Eisenberg is pitch-perfect as the lead—his thousand-mile mannequin stare has never been better suited. Grade: B

Another Year (2010)
Mike Leigh has a knack not just for achingly humanist stories but for finding richly specific nooks of the human experience that often go unexplored. Another Year is, in many respects, a film about class and the anxiety and insecurity that comes out of the financial and social precariousness of the lower-middle class. But Another Year goes for none of the tried-and-true tropes of depicting class struggle, instead focusing on one single sliver of that experience: the ways in which the disorienting unsteadiness of being lower-middle class and isolated from others by the grinding machine of living in a capitalist system intersects your relationships with those who are just slightly more stable and comfortable than you are. It's a warm, tender, quietly wrenching story that finds its beating heart in its human characters, rendered brimming with life by the core cast of Jim Broadbent, Lesley Manville, and Ruth Sheen. Here at the decade's end, it seems like people have gone a bit quiet on Mike Leigh, and he's certainly not the flashiest director out there. But movies like this are a perfect example of just how much of a treasure his work is. Grade: A-

Television

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Season 3 (2019)
This show's commitment to high-wire dialogue acrobatics and sweeping visual designs is still as on-target as ever, but Mrs. Maisel is running into some serious problems dramatically this season. It's increasingly clear that the series has no idea what to do with the privilege of its characters, which gets highlighted this season with Midge's arc on tour with a black (and closeted gay) musician, a plot with an intriguing premise but little payoff. It's also clear that the show has no idea how to grow these characters past the types established in the first two seasons; there's a lot of struggle on a scene-by-scene basis, but (with the exception of Susie, who this season gets probably the best arc of the show since Midge's back in Season 1) almost none of this coalesces into forward momentum or change, despite near-constant crises that would seem to warrant some kind of growth. The very final scene of the season seems to portend some pretty big changes on the horizon, and if Season 4 can use that to freshen up these characters, then great. But until that happens, we're left with a show comprised entirely out of scenes that are immensely enjoyable in the moment but have little dramatic tissue connecting it all together to move things forward. Grade: B

Books

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (1990)
I read this so I could teach it to my AP students this spring, but I'd been meaning to read it since forever anyway. I don't know why, but I'm surprised that it's as great as I'd heard. I was expecting an honest, emotionally intense short story cycle about the experiences of soldiers in Vietnam, which this totally is. But I was not expecting the metafictional elements at all, and they kind of blew me away, deflating a lot of the stodgy traditions of typical "vérité" war literature. So uhhh... if you're interested in taking AP Literature & Composition this spring, you'll get to hear me stan this book pretty hard. Grade: A

Favorite Movies of 2017

Well, here we are again—another one of these lists. I'm not going to do one of those long preambles. As usual, this post is divided between my favorite movies (emphasis on "favorite," not "best," whatever that means) and other movies I thought were notable, either for good or ill. Also as usually, I admit that I (obviously) haven't seen every 2017 movie, and I resent that the elitist and outdated distribution schedules have kept some of my most-anticipated movies away from Knoxville (more importantly, The Post and Phantom Thread).

I hope y'all enjoy it. Please, disagree with me; share your own picks; discuss. I've said it before—I love discussing this list stuff.

Favorite Movies

1. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
It's all about death, when you get right down to it: our lives, our actions, our thoughts—whether or not we're conscious of it, they're all defined by that firm bookend. Warm and easy-going, The B-Side resembles that other Errol Morris masterpiece, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, by allowing a mix of editing and unfettered obsession over a craft (here, Polaroid portraitry) to accumulate into a towering treatise. I haven't seen a ton of people love this movie as much as I did, but more so than anything else I saw this year, The B-Side is profound.

[Read original review here]

2. Good Time
A damning character portrait disguised as a feature-length chase sequence, Good Time is fun until it's devastating. It's the sort of movie where you'll spend most of the runtime with your hand over your agape mouth, your eyes dazzled by the gorgeous nocturnal cinematography, your ears ringing from the assaultive score. If you haven't already seen it, the most viscerally exciting movie of the year is well-worth your time.

[Read original review here]

3. The Shape of Water
In the running for Guillermo del Toro's best English-language film, The Shape of Water is by turns swooningly romantic and gory, baroque and grimy, nostalgic and mythic; it's a blender of all of del Toro's best preoccupations, from classic Hollywood to B-movie trash, and it's great. You'll believe a fish-man can dance.

[Read original review here]

4. A Ghost Story
David Lowrey's hypnotic, unpredictable art film about grief is something of a feature-length remake of the "I got a rock" refrain from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, right down to the sheet ghost. The magic of this movie is that it's also heartbreaking, and not in that gentle Charlie-Brown-style way—it's legitimately staring-into-the-void-style sublimity.

[Read original review here]

5. mother!
If Darren Aronofsky wanted to just make provocative, stylistically adventurous Bible movies for the rest of his career, that would be a-okay with me. Whatever you think of the theology here, the sheer daring of this movie's scope is in a league of its own.

[Read original review here]

6. The Beguiled
Sweatiest movie of the year, bar none. This is supposedly set in Virginia, but this is definitely Louisiana, and rarely has humidity been so palpably captured on film. It's Sofia Coppola's best in quite some time, and it's no accident that it's also a tight, mean little thriller, Coppola's usually dreamy atmospherics morphing into something as sinister and phantasmagoric as it is beautiful.

[Read original review here]

7. A Quiet Passion
An exquisite tribute to Emily Dickinson couched in Terence Davies's usual visual splendor—a particularly good match of subject with director, as Davies's understated formalism complements Dickinson's own poetic style wonderfully.

[Read original review here]

8. Logan
The only superhero movie in this superhero-stuffed year I'd call "great," and while we've had plenty of movies with politics on their minds, this, with its apocalyptic squalor, is one of the few that really captures my fears of where we seem to be heading.

[Read original review here]

9. A Cure for Wellness
Something something good taste something bad script something something. I don't care. This movie looks awesome, and it's the best gothic horror we've gotten at the movies since Crimson Peak. Plus, there's no topping the compositions and lighting of the visuals here.

[Read original review here]

10. Your Name
It has all the gorgeous detail of previous Makoto Shinkai features and, a first for me with his work, a story I really bought into. The final half hour or so of the film is some of the most cosmic, beautiful film imagery, animated or not, of the year.

[Read original review here]






Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting

Best Zeitgeist-Defining Movie: Get Out—This is the 2017 movie, and I don't see many good arguments to the contrary. It's far from my favorite, but Get Out is still really freaking good, hilarious and frightening in equal measure, bolstered by a diverse cinematic tradition alluded to heavily in Jordan Peele's dense and frequently brilliant screenplay. But this is more than a spot-the-allusion film; it's a film that uses movies like Night of the Living Dead and Invasion of the Body Snatchers to genuinely subversive ends, playing off our familiarity with the beats and images of these movies to shock us. Also, it's about race; more specifically, it's about predatory white people. Let's not pretend like that isn't the most 2017 plot in all of cinema.

Best Drama: The Salesman—And I mean "drama" in the sense that it resembles a play. Asghar Farhadi's The Salesman isn't play-like in the derogatory way that movie critics usually mean when they compare the two media; rather, I'd just like to call attention to and celebrate that way that, like always, Farhadi brings a tense efficiency to the screenplay that recalls the immediacy of the stage. Farhadi's movies are as tight as drums, and while there are some elements in The Salesman that makes it less tight than, say, The Past, it still makes a mighty sound when struck.

Best Coming of Age: Lady Bird—I haven't had a chance to formally review this one yet (it's likely the final 2017 movie I'm going to see in a theater), but I love me some coming-of-age cinema, and this one is very good. Willing to be honest about the specific ways in which high school students can be various shades of pretentious and careless in a way that recalls last year's masterful The Edge of Seventeen, it's a tremendously well-observed film that, for all its plot shagginess (and there is that, sometimes to its detriment), is so sharp and specific in its characterization of Lady Bird herself that she practically jumps off the screen to shake your hand.

Best Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049—I get the thematic and narrative critiques of this movie, but I won't hear anyone dissing Roger Deakins's astounding, beautiful, lay-me-down-to-rest-because-I-have-seen-the-face-of-God visual work. Some kudos probably goes to the production design, too, without which this probably wouldn't have been so stunning. But come on; it's also Deakins we're talking about here.

Best Cry: Coco—Pixar, y'all. "Remember meeeee..."

Best Action: John Wick: Chapter 2—It's like dudes in suits shooting each other in art galleries in highly choreographed ways. What's not to like about that?

Best "Not Quite the Best Action, but Hey Look! Tarkovsky!": Atomic Blonde—Don't get me wrong: the action in Atomic Blonde is very good. It just isn't John Wick: Chapter 2 good. Still, there's a fight scene in front of a projection of Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, so major points to this movie for making a cheap retro allusion that I am physically unable to resist. Take that, Ready Player One.

Best Action (Ape Division): War for the Planet of the Apes—Apes on horses! Apes with guns! Apes breaking out of concentration camps! Apes doing all sorts of things! All our movies should have more apes. (But all kidding aside, this really is a good movie)

Best Animation: The Boss Baby—Am I losing my mind? Pixar has the photorealism, Cartoon Saloon has the serious stylization, Illumination Entertainment has all the really crappy-looking stuff, but it's DreamWorks Animation—frikkin' DREAMWORKS—that's actually doing the animation I like best on an aesthetic level these days. This studio has finally done what I'd considered impossible and made CG animation as flexible and convincingly cartoonish as hand-drawn stuff, and for that, they have my sincere gratitude.

Animated Movie I'm Most Thankful For: The Breadwinner—This movie is flawed in significant ways, but, along with the DreamWorks output this year (?!?), it most pushes English-language animation in directions I wish the whole medium would all go: serious-minded, audience-trusting, culturally diverse, stylistically (not realistically) animated.

Best Opening Sequence: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets—The first five minutes of this movie, set perfectly to David Bowie's "Space Oddity," are the best five minutes (opening or not) of any movie this year. It's a warm throwback to the optimism of sci-fi's 1940s/50s golden era, only flipped to show interplanetary contact to be an intrinsic element of this future utopia, not its greatest threat. Any other year, it wouldn't be a particularly political statement, but with every inter-species handshake, it's impossible not to feel that cooperative multiculturalism is a necessary piece of humanity's future, and also to feel the chasm between that ideal and our contemporary political discourse.

Best Opening Sequence (Non-David-Bowie Division): Baby Driver—Edgar Wright's crime caper never really delivers on the promise of this scene as an action movie intricately choreographed to pop music, but for its opening scene (and honestly, the decidedly more pedestrian second scene), Baby Driver is the perfect realization of this premise. It's wonderful.

Best Use of "Take Me Home, Country Roads": Logan Lucky—This movie's a lot of fun all around, but it's only a great movie in one moment, and that's at a children's beauty pageant, of all reprehensible things. People sing this song; it's moving.

Best Use of the Word "Poop": Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—There's a lot of poop-centric stuff in this movie. It's great.

Worst Use of a True Story: Same Kind of Different as Me—Pure Flix strikes again! This time, they've skimmed over all the legitimately interesting stuff about the kind of amazing true story that informs the plot and instead left us with the most boring, cookie-cutter inspirational trash ever. Hurray!

Most Misunderstood: The Glass Castle—Critics saw a toothless weepy in a tremendously difficult, thorny film about what it means to feel love for a genuinely abusive person. This is not a movie of easily-arrived-at adages; it's a film that languishes on messy, complicated, intentionally problematic questions and doesn't suggest anything cheap about its film-ending catharsis.

Best Quote: The Big Sick—"This is why I don't want to go online, 'cause it's never good. You go online, they hated Forrest Gump." Terry (a great Ray Romano) gets it.

Best Use of Social Media: Personal Shopper—Briefly, the quiet psychological thrills of Personal Shopper get cranked up to sheer horror-movie levels, and it's all thanks to a clever playing off of what we know about texting and social media engagement.

Best Use of Outer Space: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—There's a lot about these Marvel movies that's getting stale, but I'll give them this: as long as they are making colorful, goofy, imaginatively designed space-opera visuals (see also: Thor: Ragnarok), I'll probably still watch them.

Best Shower: Alien: Covenant—You'll know it when you see it.

Best Kiss: Alien: Covenant—Again, you'll know it when you see it.

Best "Well, We're Going to Be Making These Movies Until Human Extinction, So We Might As Well Make It Interesting": Star Wars: The Last Jedi—This actually probably belongs again to Alien: Covenant again, but I'm not confident that they'll be making Alien movies for that much longer. Star Wars, though... Star Wars is forever. The Last Jedi is likely the most experimental that we're going to see Star Wars get for a while (though judging by some of the fan outrage, they need to get a lot more so—just rip that band-aide off, Kennedy), and even this isn't too dramatic of a departure (I can't be the only one who wanted Rey to join Kylo like he asked). However, it's by far the most interesting engagement with the series mythology since the prequels, and this is the first time since Lucas was at the helm that the Star Wars universe felt like a living, breathing place full of species and planets we haven't seen before. It's enjoyable.

"Good Try, I Guess" Award: Song to Song—Does Terrence Malick actually know what rock music is, or did he just read the Wikipedia page? QUESTIONS TO PONDER.

Worst Application of Corporate Synergy: Beauty and the Beast—We did not need this movie, and we certainly didn't need it to be as bad as it was. Disney's been pretty good at making questionable (and nakedly money-grubbing) decisions at least blandly enjoyable this decade, but NOPE. Not this one.

Best Slow, Monarchical Death: The Death of Louis XIV—The title says it all, and let me repeat: it is sloooooow. But it's also beautifully costumed, and there's something about the languorous, meticulous way that we watch the Sun King pass from this life that feels so profoundly conscious of the realities of death in a way that reminds me of Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes.

Best Non-2017 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2017: Ordet—A dialogue between realist modernity and old-time supernatural religiosity that feels like a genuine expression of both worldviews and, more impressively, a genuine fusion of both. It's a majestic film, one of the best-ever about faith, right up there with Tarkovsky's Nostalghia and Bergman's Winter Light though considerably more optimistic than either of those, and without a doubt the most fully I've been moved by a motion picture this year.