Top Ten 2019

Other Top Ten Lists

I wasn't overly enamored with the movies of 2019, but every year has its cinematic rewards. Although 2020 is throwing that claim into uncertainty. Already dozens of high profile movies have been pulled from the release schedule, with who knows how many more to come. Many new films will drop on streaming services, but even so it's difficult to imagine a full and satisfying list of 2020 favorites eight months from now.

All the more reason to celebrate the treasures of 2019. My hope as always is to expose you to works of art that hadn't crossed your radar, or that fell by the wayside. This is the opportune moment for artistic exploration; we may have a freeze on new releases in all this craziness, but luckily we have a whole 100+ years of film to catch up on.

Here are some 2019 films that I missed that may have had a shot at this list:

Honeyland; Jojo Rabbit; A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood; Portrait of a Lady on Fire; 1917; The Nightingale; Climax; Atlantics; The Souvenir; Her Smell; Rocketman; Hustlers; Knife + Heart; The Last Black Man in San Francisco; The Farewell; One Cut of the Dead; Apollo 11


Untoward Awards

Most Disappointing: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Most Inane: Spider-Man: Far From Home
Most Nonsensical: Cats
Most Generic: Captain Marvel
Most Infuriating: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Most: Cats

Can't Remember: 6 Underground

Most Improved: Doctor Sleep
Sophomore Slump: Avengers: Endgame

Kindred Spirits: Knives Out + Ready Or Not
Kindred Names: Child's Play + Toy Story 4

Best Names:
3. Parasite
2. Knives Out
1. Velvet Buzzsaw

Worst Names:
3. Avengers: Endgame
2. Spider-Man: Far From Home
1. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

Worst Superhero: Captain Marvel + Avengers: Endgame + Spider-Man: Far From Home
Worst Adaptation: Spider-Man: Far From Home
Worst Sequel: Avengers: Endgame
Worst: Unplanned



Honorable Mentions

Dolemite is My Name - No movie last year brought me sheer joy and laughter the way Dolemite did. Eddie Murphy plays the real life figure who shot from sweaty anonymity to the annals of camp legend. These screenwriters are familiar with such themes, having also penned the great Ed Wood! Unlike that film, Dolemite feels too easy. Rudy Ray Moore's 'pull yourself up by the bootstraps' narrative is classic Hollywood fodder, but it rings increasingly false as we plummet further into late stage capitalism. The film suggests that if you believe in yourself and work hard, you too can overcome any structural barrier to find success--especially if you are low key exploiting those below you on the food chain! Of course, that cynical reading of the film can’t erase the playfulness on display, nor Eddie Murphy’s titanic, thoughtful, movie-carrying performance.

The Art of Self-Defense - I haven’t seen a single crumb of discourse about this movie, and that’s disappointing. TASD is a bit of a unicorn--a solid, self-contained, mid-budget drama/comedy/horror/quirky romance that exists in the heightened world of martial arts. Much like its characters, what the film demonstrates most of all is focus. Jesse Eisenberg’s Casey undergoes a surprisingly insightful exploration of toxic masculinity, amidst a cast of absurdly drawn characters. Despite the ironic distance and the shocking surges of violence, the film’s deadpan sweetness is its greatest weapon.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - Tarantino’s early career might have featured his most electrifying work, but his latter work shows maturity. The Hateful Eight used expressions of racial, gendered, and class violence not as pure shock value, but as a way to indict the audience in America’s dirty, inescapable truths. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does something different. Stranger. This alternate universe is a mesmerizing, balmy work about nostalgia, celebrity, and self-assurance. What may seem like glorified fanfiction (like the badass-off between Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth and Mike Moh's Bruce Lee, or the climactic flamethrower barbecue) is elevated by the quieter moments. Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate staring up at herself on the big screen. Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton tearing up when a young actress lets him know that he nailed his scene.

Knives Out - I’ve been a fan of Rian Johnson since his neo-noir-in-high-school debut, Brick. Looper is one of my favorite sci-fi films, and his take on Star Wars was the best since Empire Strikes Back (or at least since Genndy Tartakovsky’s animated "Clone Wars" shorts). The way he manipulates plot and genre conventions to unearth fresh insights tickles the mischief artist in me. Knives Out proves no less rascally, for it quickly reveals that (spoilers…) we are watching a mystery that we already know the solution to. This de-emphasis of the core pleasures of the mystery genre in turn emphasizes a whole host of other themes, conceits, and commentaries that make the film more about the journey than the destination.

Color out of Space - HP Lovecraft's work is notoriously racist and sexist. Modern adaptations generally attempt to sponge away the discrimination, but this is a disingenuous elision: the unknowable monstrous beings that are the main draw of his work are themselves representative of the vulgar Other, a concept at the core of racist and sexist thought. Color Out of Space circumvents this problem by having the alien Other be a cosmic color that infiltrates the earth's ecosystem--including the psyches of our characters. Thus the film becomes a commentary on the Other that we all contain within us that makes us unrecognizable even to ourselves. Also, it's a really fun but uneven movie with Nicolas Cage doing what only Nicolas Cage can do, and some of the chewiest sci-fi horror environmental visuals this side of Annihilation.

Us - If we were to judge movies by independent moments, Us would be pushing toward the top of my list. But art and criticism are not cumulative, they are semiotic--all aspects of a work must strive relate to all other aspects in order to bring about a greater, emergent meaning. In other words, Us kind of falls apart at the end. Jordan Peele’s creepy, cockeyed, brilliantly acted horror thriller has all the right ingredients, but a third act that delves almost comically deep into worldbuilding exposition makes it all a bit too literal to stomach. Maybe an earlier reveal could have benefited the film’s dramatic tension, maybe a better film would have remained teetering in abstraction, and maybe these critiques will evaporate upon a second viewing. For now, the movie remains a bold and fascinating experiment with an all-time great Lupita Nyong'o performance.

I watched 37 films released in 2019. Here are my top ten.

10. Crawl

We should never have come back here.

I struggled repeatedly to identify the tenth spot on this list. Crawl was a last minute substitution: I wanted to shine the light on a simple film that does everything better than it needed to.

Crawl is an increasingly rare beast--a mid-budget horror film that is tight and functional without aspirations towards being the next critically acclaimed ‘art house horror’ picture. It is simply a movie about a woman and her father being terrorized by alligators during a hurricane. This description likely conjured images of Sharknado and its ilk, but Alexandre Aja and his creative team trade in bombast for classical suspense. At its heart Crawl is a father/daughter story, and this father/daughter happen to be trapped in the slowly flooding crawlspace beneath their old family home, injured and on the verge of panic.

Kaya Scodelario play protagonist Haley with ruthless efficiency. We know just enough about her to know what she's capable of, what she wants, and what she needs. She isn't a helpless slasher protagonist, and she isn't a caricature of badassery; she is a human animal acting and reacting with a sharp focus on our most primal instinct, the preservation of life. Surrounding this understated lead performance with weighty special effects, nauseating tension, and precisely executed jump scares makes this film one of the standout underrated genre films of 2019.

9. John Wick 3

I do hope that Mr. Wick finds his way to safety.

John Wick 3 was a bit of a letdown from its predecessors. It's a testament to the mindboggling quality of the franchise that even a letdown would crack a top ten of the year list. The film feels a bit more cobbled together than I would like, and certain sequences (the desert...) stick out like a sore headshot. But when you consistently have the best choreographed action cinema this side of Indonesia, the highs are high enough that one doesn't mind the lulls too much. Career stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski and the rest of his creative team are mad scientists, cooking up new ways of portraying grace and power through impromptu weaponry--books, dogs, flurries of knives. Meanwhile, the intoxicating mythology spirals ever outward... and then collapses reflexively into itself with Mark Dacascos playing what is essentially a lethal John Wick groupie.

The third entry in this franchise saw a lot of audience members reaching their threshold for numbing hyperviolence. We'll see if this franchise can sustain itself without growing numb.

8. The Irishman

I heard you paint houses.

The Irishman wears the mask of a typical mob thriller, with an atypical level of care applied to the sweeping historical commentary and subtle performances. But as with every Scorsese film, it's about more than doing a shallow thing very well. Scorsese mobilizes these genre conventions in order to show us the emptiness at their core.

The final half hour of the film suffocates us with the melancholy that had been lurking beneath the drama for the entirety of the film's enormous runtime. We have just watched two and a half hours of manly men doing what manly men do to keep their families well-fed and in good standing. The Irishman’s project is to make that facade of justification seem small and impotent. Slowly, surely, unceremoniously, the movie peels off its cast members, until we are left with a husk of a protagonist who only has three points of human contact remaining: a nurse who doesn't understand his life's work, a daughter who won't speak to him, and a couple of FBI agents who seem almost bored prying at his sad old secrets. The film is an expression of anti-masculinity. Like so many other Scorsese projects, the film deconstructs far more than folks give it credit for.

7. Ready or Not

When you marry into this family you have to play a game.

Of the two films about resourceful women trying to outwit old money families that occupy stately old manors while dishing out class commentary and occasional shocks of violence, Ready Or Not received far less critical acclaim. After some reflection, I found that I preferred this film to Knives Out.

The genre conventions are different, of course. Ready Or Not is a horror thriller, with little mystery beyond ‘why are these loony white people so insistent on killing me.’ The film is laser focused on the perspective of Grace. Samara Weaving gives one of those rare star-making performances that are so delightful to discover. Her bulging eyes invite us to experience with her the whole gamut of heightened human emotion. She's funny, charismatic, grounded, and delivers on a hell of a body horror sequence. The film surrounds her with a cadre of delightful lunatics that straddle the line well between threatening and ridiculous.

All that would have been enough for me to heartily recommend the movie, but it was one specific moment that planted this one in my top ten. The absolutely audacious climax, the less said about which the better. I only laughed harder at Cats.

6. Marriage Story

I didn't even know what my taste was because I was never asked to use it.

Marriage Story, much like its title, is sort of pedestrian. Divorce is so common that the tragedy of it all gets undercut by its regularity. This film's three lawyers are all perfect foils for each other, a three-headed dragon of rupture filtered through bureaucracy.

I admire Marriage Story's honesty. Marriages are so bound up in years of context, patterns, wrongs, and secret private feelings that it can feel an impossible task to 'tell the story of a divorce.' Where to start? Noah Baumbach's solution is to begin in fantasy, and allow that fantasy to tussle with reality for the rest of the runtime. Marriage Story is an unflinching portrayal of the nastiness of a busted relationship, but it is not exaggerated or sensationalized. It treats its characters with uncommon dignity and gentleness, even as they're being buttheads. After all, the love that these two people clearly shared with each other will never entirely go away. That's what makes the arguments sting sharper, and the climactic fight of this film feel like we are being invited into something shockingly personal.

5. Uncut Gems

Holy shit I'm gonna cum.

The Safdie Brothers make pressure cooker cinema. Their films put bastards in bad situations to make the audience suffer. This sounds like a drag, but just like protagonist Howard Ratner's high roll gambling, the danger makes us feel alive.

We are tied to Ratner's hip throughout the entirety of the film's runtime. Adam Sandler, of all people, is our guide, and despite his performance being as shrill and obnoxious as ever--it works. Rather than seeing a buffoon acting idiotic for no reason, we see a man driven by voracious desires, consumed by libido. He isn't just a bullshitter, he is an artful bullshitter, the kind that nobody really believes but whose persistence allows him to squeeze out of binds regardless. This film feels like a rat man's Citizen Kane, the life's work of a born huckster truncated to a few tense days. Ratner is a master of deflection, and even as we are filled with disgust, we cannot look away.

Uncut Gems is full of such artistic gambles that shouldn't work, but somehow do. It's as if the Safdie brothers began with the broken character, and constructed their entire world around amplifying his brokenness. By the finale, we have joined Ratner in a religious, sexual ecstasy. As the adrenaline wears off, we are left to meditate on how humans construct desire, and why we are so persistently the authors of our own undoing. You would be hard pressed to find a sharper portrayal of the human Death Drive.

I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention that casting Kevin Garnett as a gem-obsessed Kevin Garnett in a movie called Uncut Gems is one of the most successful meta-moves I've seen in a while.

4. Midsommar

The Queen must ride alone.

Midsommar is powerfully subjective filmmaking. Ari Aster's follow-up to the jaw-dropping debut Hereditary may not be quite as pristine and haunting as that film, but it is every bit as much proof of his genius. In fact, you could argue that it's even more ambitious. It's (comparatively) easy to wring suspense and horror out of a shadowy house and sinister witchcraft. So much more difficult and unique is the queasy dread Aster achieves in bright Scandinavian sunlight. Early on Aster portrays a bad drug trip from the tripper's perspective, and that stomach churning effect only intensifies as the movie presses on.

In fact, collective infectious subjectivity is a central theme of the film. Florence Pugh masterfully portrays Dani, a woman who has decided to travel to the other side of the world with her boyfriend as an attempt to exorcise some recent trauma from her life. Of course, no matter where you go you take everything with you--including the emotional distance and resentment built up from the decision to remain in a codependent relationship.

This interpersonal dynamic gets teased out, explicated, and ravaged by the cult community they vacation with. Aster's brand of horror is woozy and oh so personal. The lasting images from the film are not the gore effects, but rather the scenes that portray the hysteria of group dance, or the soul-spilling catharsis of wailing alongside a cluster of other human beings.

3. Shadow

Without the real, there can be no shadow. A principle no one's understood.

Without the real, there is still a shadow. You should have grasped this long ago.

Director Zhang Yimou had already perfected the contemporary wuxia film years ago with House of Flying Daggers and Hero, and it was hard to envision what more he could contribute to that genre--until Shadow.

Shadow is the story of an emperor gone into hiding, hobbled by battle injuries, who has abusively trained a lookalike to stand in for him at the head of the nation (played in a brilliant bifurcated performance by Chao Deng). Shadow is also the story of the emperor's wife, who is navigating her loyalty to her husband as well as her attraction to the youthful doppelganger. Shadow is also a schematic, poetic exploration of gender as filtered through gorgeous, deadly combat.

The central symbol of the film is, fittingly, the yin-yang sign. It may be on the nose, but when an on the nose metaphor is explored with such depth of expression, it can become transcendent. The film's gorgeously choreographed masculine and feminine combat styles play out in a visual world that is constructed in rich blacks and whites. This style of black and white filmmaking is unique--skin retains some gradient of color, and there is an occasional splash of blood red. In order to achieve this effect, the filmmakers did not simply film in black and white or convert the footage afterwards. The sets themselves were constructed in greyscale, making the warmth of the human bodies eerily vibrant.

All this amounts to an epic fantasy with a convoluted plot that never gets so tangled that it becomes distracting. More to the point, you will not see the likes of this visual artistry elsewhere. I have no qualms at all about naming Shadow the most beautiful movie of the year.

2. The Lighthouse

Why did ya spill yer beans?

Then there's The Lighthouse, the grimiest, grossest, fartiest movie of the year, that somehow manages to be painfully beautiful nonetheless. For what is ostensibly a horror movie, there are few proper scares. I'd say one of the most startling moments is the very first shot, in which we are confronted with an aspect ratio that is absurdly cramped by modern standards. Is the whole movie going to be this claustrophobic? The answer is that it becomes far more claustrophobic than you can even imagine at first.

This is director Robert Eggers' follow-up to The Witch, another critically acclaimed movie that had my theatrical audience grumbling at the screen once the credits rolled. "That was it??" "I couldn't understand a word they were saying." "That was the worst movie I've ever seen." Many audiences rejected that film, and I can understand why. Eggers doesn't make horror films for modern viewers--creepy imagery, gnarly jump scares, a simple and digestible plot. No, Eggers makes horror for the psychologies of humanity past. The Witch represents what puritanical settlers themselves would fear. Just so with The Lighthouse, a fever dream constructed to play on the specific anxieties of turn of the century sailors, adapted from the journals of one such a man.

The results are avant garde. Reality bends, breaks, and reshuffles in a mimicry of the derangement of isolation. Robert Pattinson and (especially) Willem Dafoe give fearless performances as a young ne'er-do-well looking to make some coin, and an old petty lighthouse keeper, weary of the world and all its inhabitants. This film is an experience. I often had no idea what to think of it, but I knew that I deeply loved the cartoonish intensity of the performances, and the lewd mellifluousness of the period dialogue.

1. Parasite

They are rich, but still nice.

They are nice because they are rich.

Parasite was the best movie-watching experience of the year by a huge margin. Bong Joon-Ho is a master craftsman, and this is his most precise work. The plot lurches this way and that, leaping from tone to tone in a way that should not work as smoothly as it does. The film code switches alongside its characters. The cinematography is gorgeous, telling a story of two domestic spaces through visual parallels. The performances are brilliant, systematically varying in naturalism vs. theatricality based on the class and social position of the characters. The suspense is suffocating, the comedy exhilarating, and the drama tight enough to make you care about a huge cast of characters in so many specific and special ways. This is a film of strong images and moments that sometimes swim to the top of my mind unprompted, because they have reoriented how I think about our world.

Most importantly, Parasite is a film that speaks to our present moment with endless layers of nuance. Bong Joon-Ho remains one of the only prominent filmmakers who makes openly anti-capitalist films, and he does so with such acclaim because they also manage to be crowd-pleasers. So rarely does a political screed carry such entertainment appeal. The vast riches of this film make it enjoyable not only to leftists, but to liberals, centrists, anarchists, conservatives, whatever. Granted, many right-leaning folks have a twisted understanding of the themes at play, but that is less an indictment on the film's thematic control and more a compliment of its unwillingness to simplify our contemporary mess.

Who is the titular Parasite? At first we believe it to be our protagonists, a lower class family who run a complex grift to siphon money from a rich family in exchange for services that they are capable, but not qualified, to provide. As the film expands, we get the impression that the rich folks are the Parasites, living in luxury and privilege without a second thought for the countless folks who live below them, in both economy and altitude. Then, at the moment of the movie's first incredible lateral swerve, we wonder if the Parasite is the lower class couple who are literally living beneath the rich family and worshipfully surviving on surplus sustenance.

The truth is that all three groups are the Parasite; our capitalist system is an ouroboros that eats itself until all is thin and prone to shatter. This rupture occurs for our characters in one of the most stunning climaxes I have ever seen, with a huge cast all coming to bear on each other in ways that feel both inevitable and completely unexpected. These bizarrely specific events abstract into universal truth. And, as always, the poor folks are left behind to pick up the pieces.

Parasite is a movie that shows that even though rain falls on the poor and rich alike, it only cascades into the ruined homes of the proletariat. That so many people have consumed this film gives me great hope for the socially transformative power of art.