The Best Films of 2019
It’s the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the only list of the best films of last year that actually matters and that represents the indisputable, carved-in-stone, objective truth. If you’ve reached different conclusions, well, shame on you. The usual caveat applies… the list below isn’t ranked and shouldn’t be taken as an accounting of 1-10; I’ve divided the films into very rough thematic groups instead.
But first, the movies that just missed the cut!
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Richard Jewell; Knives Out
These two make for an interesting double feature as quite good films that are severely undermined by their facile political positioning. To be clear, this isn’t an exhortation to “stick to cinema” – but it is an assertion that if your movie is going to engage political questions, it should do so with nuance and honesty. I like these movies, which makes their massive unforced errors as concerns their treatment of political questions all the more disappointing.
On to the main event!
DECIDEDLY NOT FOR EVERYONE: Uncut Gems; Climax
I don’t think of “stress and anxiety” as emotions that movies usually try to inspire in their audiences, but that is the unifying quality for these two of the year’s most virtuosic works of filmmaking. Climax – which premiered at Cannes in 2018, but qualifies for this list by virtue of its 2019 US release – is the latest from Gaspar Noé, the Paris-based Argentine director who has made some of the most viscerally harrowing films of the last twenty-five years. The movie features a French dance troupe rehearsing and then having an after party. The rehearsal, making up the first half of the feature, offers masterfully choreographed and photographed dance performances, but it’s in the second half – when, it turns out, someone has spiked the punch with acid – that things really get going. It’s not fun to watch, but Noé’s eye for creating haunting images, coupled with the sense of burgeoning panic and chaos as the troupe tries to understand what’s happening to them, makes it impossible to look away.
Uncut Gems, the tale of an inveterate gambler named Howard Ratner who just can’t seem to stop himself from doing precisely the wrong thing at all times (Adam Sandler, in possibly my favorite performance of the year), is similarly disquieting, but where in Climax, the dancers have been drugged without their knowledge, there’s never any doubt that Howard has brought his misfortunes on himself. It’s a testament to Sandler’s performance and to the power of the film’s direction (by brothers Josh and Benny Safdie) that we – or, at least, I – still wanted Howard to pull it all off in the end.
AUTEURBIOGRAPHIES: The Souvenir; Pain and Glory
Two seemingly autobiographical pictures about filmmakers looking back at key episodes in their lives, The Souvenir and Pain and Glory nonetheless are markedly different in style, tone, and approach. The Souvenir, written and directed by Joanna Hogg, is essentially a coming-of-age story wrapped inside a tale of addiction. Hogg’s stand-in, Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne), is a film student in London in the 80s when she strikes up a relationship with a man name Anthony. The two become close, with Anthony quickly moving into Julie’s flat; it also becomes quickly apparent that Anthony is a heroin addict. The film follows Julie’s struggles to maintain her relationship with Anthony while pursuing her path as a filmmaker, with predictably tragic consequences.
If The Souvenir is a coming-of-age story, Pain and Glory is about rediscovery – the rediscovery of passion and the self, and perhaps also the rediscovery of one’s connection to one’s own past. The latest from Spanish auteur Pedro Almodovar has Antonio Banderas (deservingly Academy Award-nominated for this part) as Almodovar’s stand-in, an aging, physically ailing director named Salvador Mallo who cannot motivate himself to work and who is haunted by his relationship with his deceased mother. Certainly not a straightforward Hollywood narrative by any means, Almodovar’s film meanders a bit – now here, now there, now a leap forward – but stays true to its fundamental conflict, which is that between Mallo, his body, and his past.
THE BREAKOUT: The Farewell
I was surprised to find myself with The Farewell in my final top ten. I love the way the movie looks, and the questions that it asks around family, cultural identity, and deception are delicately handled, but I didn’t connect with it on a deep level, and I didn’t quite find that its detailed and touching observations about its characters’ lives and struggles added up to a larger coherent unity. What most excited me about this movie, rather, was the anticipation of the next thing that writer-director Lulu Wang puts out. This felt like the exploration of a burgeoning artist who has all the tools but hasn’t put everything together yet; I’m eager to see what her next project looks like once she’s processed the lessons of this one.
THE MOVIE I’M NOT TOTALLY COMFORTABLE ABOUT LIKING: Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood
I have a lot to say about Once Upon a Time… In Hollywod – so much, in fact, that after seeing it a second time, I wrote an 11,000 word essay on Tarantino’s history films (available on request for those with too much time on their hands; not even I would be so cruel as to dump such a piece into your inboxes). In brief: this is a delightful, breezy two and a half hours at the movies, but I’m very, very ambivalent about the late movement in Tarantino’s career around rewriting historical events, to the point that I’m entertaining questions like, “Can the existence of this film be morally justified?” (I’m entertaining questions, in other words, that I usually reject out of hand.) When it came down to it, a movie this deftly made, this well-acted, and this outright entertaining couldn’t be left off the list… but I had to think hard about it.
TAKING CONTROL: Bombshell; Hustlers
Between these two quite good movies about women taking control in dire circumstances, Bombshell is the one that’s the better, more perfectly constructed movie and is more of a crowd pleaser, while Hustlers is asking more interesting questions of its audience. Bombshell tracks three storylines around three women weathering the storm of the Roger Ailes harassment controversy at Fox News. (Megyn Kelly, played by Charlize Theron, and Gretchen Carlson, played by Nicole Kidman, need no introduction; the last, Margot Robbie’s Kayla Pospisil, is described as a “composite” of a number of real-life figures). While its narrative structure is unusual, its central theme – will justice be served? – is as classic a Hollywood subject as exists.
Jennifer Lopez has justifiably been at the center of commentary about and reactions to Hustlers; her explosive performance as Ramona, the queen bee of the movie’s stripper crime circle, is magnetic and makes the whole thing work. (I couldn’t help but feel bad for poor Constance Wu, a fine actress and the ostensible star of Hustlers, who had the misfortune of having to share a screen with Lopez.) Taken in its unity, it’s clear that the narrative of Hustlers is pretty thin, but the way that director Lorene Scafaria papers over the cracks, with stylized choreography and perfectly timed needle drops, fits her material well. Beyond its formal elements, Hustlers tells a story of crime driven by economic privation. To dismiss it as a “stripper movie” is to ignore that it’s asking some of the more interesting moral questions any film did in 2019.
THE TWO BEST MOVIES OF 2019: Ford v Ferrari; Parasite
Let me be clear: Parasite is the best film of 2019; Ford v Ferrari is my runner-up. Since I already wrote about Parasite in my 2010s decade list, I’m just going to reproduce that paragraph here:
“Around the halfway mark of Parasite, I thought I had a pretty good idea of where it was headed. Instead, it took an abrupt, unexpected left turn and became something much more daring than the already pretty-good movie I was expecting. The movie’s greatest achievement, however, is in its sensibility rather than in its narrative or its aesthetics. It is that rare story that shows a situation without passing judgment; every member of the two central families is both deeply sympathetic and deeply flawed.”
Having seen it again since then, I don’t think that ‘sympathetic’ is the word I should have used; the better, if less pithy, way to put it is that the film allows you to understand why each of these characters behaves as he or she does without instructing you what to think about it.
As for Ford v Ferrari, well, this movie embodies to the full everything that Hollywood does well. It’s not formally innovative or asking trenchant intellectual or social questions. It is, rather, an absurdly entertaining about cars, competition, and male friendship. It’s the most fun I had at the movies in 2019. If you haven’t seen it, you should.
A grab bag of quick hits…
FAVORITE PERFORMANCE (non-prestige division): Jake Gyllenhaal, Spider-Man: Far From Home
FAVORITE PERFORMANCE (prestige division): TIE between Adam Sandler, Uncut Gems, and Jennifer Lopez, Hustlers
THE “DOES SHE KNOW WHAT MOVIE SHE’S IN?” AWARD: Allison Janney, Bombshell
FAVORITE DOCUMENTARY: The making-of featurette at the end of They Shall Not Grow Old
THE CONCEPT THAT MOST DESERVED A BETTER MOVIE: Yesterday
MOST ENTERTAINING TRAILER: Downton Abbey
LAZIEST MOVIE: Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
And finally, in recognition of the films that did the most:
MOST FILM: Avengers: Endgame
MOST DIRECTING: Sam Mendes, 1917
MOST ACTING BY A MAN: Taron Egerton, Rocketman
MOST ACTING BY A WOMAN: Renée Zellweger, Judy
MOST WRITING: Steven Zaillian, The Irishman