And finally, the top 10 films of 2019, as chosen by me.
10. Sunset (László
Nemes)
László Nemes’ debut film – the great Son of Saul – got a lot of
attention for its depictions of the horrors of a Nazi Concentration Camp
through the eyes Saul – a Jew working the camps, who slowly goes mad, and
develops a kind of tunnel vision – blurring out the horrors all around him.
Nemes’ follow-up film didn’t garner the praise his first film did – but it
should have – as he deploys a similar style, or a much more diffuse, ambiguous
plot and character. This time, it’s a young Hungarian woman on the eve of WWI –
who returns to a hat store once owned by her parents, and finds how much things
have changed. The film descends into absolute chaos, and then at the halfway
point kind of restarts and descends once again – ending with a wonderful final
shot. The film may not have the immediate power of Son of Saul – but it’s a
haunting film, and a brilliantly directed one – keeping our focus on a
character who remains enigmatic until the end.
9. Under the Silver
Lake (David Robert Mitchell)
David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake is a stoner noir for our
strange, conspiracy minded times. It stars Andrew Garfield as a slacker turned
detective, trying to figure out what happened to his beautiful neighbor (Riley
Keough) when she goes missing. But he ends up going down so many rabbit holes,
so many side trips – and just kind of trips along. The film is also a stealth
critique of white privilege – Garfield’s character slowly reveals himself to be
an asshole and a misogynist – even if his search for truth and meaning hits an
honest place. The film is meticulously detailed – with hints in nearly every
shot at the mysteries and conspiracies in the film – even if they are all
meaningless. This is a film that belongs on a list with Altman’s The Long
Goodbye, the Coen’s Big Lebowski, Kelly’s Southland Tales and Anderson’s
Inherent Vice – and perhaps the one with the most to say about the here and
now.
8. A Hidden Life
(Terrence Malick)
Following his 2011 masterpiece, The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick
basically decide to stray further and further from narrative filmmaking in
movies like To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song and Voyage of Time. I
liked those films – I admired Malick following his muse where it took him (even
through all the twirling) – and yet am still happy that he returned to a more
narrative structure with his latest film – A Hidden Life – his best since The
Tree of Life. Telling the story of Franz Jagerstatter – an Austrian farmer, who
lives in a place that Malick makes look like the most beautiful place on earth,
who sees his life shattered with the outbreak of WWII – and his dawning
realization that he cannot support Hitler, no matter what that means to him and
his family. Malick’s film, of course, looks beautiful – his sweeping camera
work is amazing. The film really does feel like Franz’s decent into hell. The
film is long – nearly three hours – but it earns that runtime, and becomes
emotionally overwhelming by the end. This is another example of what Malick can
do that no one else can.
7. Marriage Story (Noah
Baumbach)
Noah Baumbach’s best film to date is this painful study of a couple
going through a divorce. The film doesn’t choose side – you could choose them
for yourself if you want to, but the film works best if you don’t do that. The artistic
couple at its core – actress Scarlett Johansson, theater director Adam Driver –
do love each other, but are realizing that it’s more complicated than that. As
the film progresses – the trips back and forth from New York to L.A. take their
toll, and the divorce turns ugly. As you watch the film, you feel sorry for
both of them – and acknowledge that both have done things that could be
considered downright cruel at the same time. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson
deliver two of the year’s best performances as these damaged, flawed people,
coming to terms with closing this chapter of their lives. The film is painful
and dramatic – there are scenes that will bring you to tears – but also funny
and deeply empathetic. Baumbach’s previous best film was The Squid and the
Whale – another tale of divorce, but that one through the eyes of a child. Now,
he’s moved on to tell a similar story from the inside out.
6. Us (Jordan Peele)
Jordan Peele’s debut film, Get Out, is the kind of instantly iconic film
that can be nearly impossible to try and follow-up. While I don’t think Us
caused as immediate a cultural impact as Get Out did (largely because “The
Sunken Place” was such a simple, and perfect metaphor) – I do think it is a
trickier, more ambitious film than Get Out was. It’s the type of film that you
have no idea where it’s going when it starts – just begins with an instantly
brilliant idea of a home invasion horror film, where the invaders are doppelgängers
of the family in question. Expanding that idea outward, Us becomes a parable
for American history – the ways in which we try to paint over the past, instead
of dealing with it, and how eventually, it will all come out whether we like it
or not. It’s also just the out and out scariest film of the year, a bloody good
time at a horror film, and features on the very best performances of the year
by Lupita Nyong’o, taking on the tricky duel role at the center of the film,
that you don’t realize how tricky it is until the film’s finale. Get Out proved
Peele could work beyond comedy – Us proves that is a true master of the horror
genre.
5. Midsommar (Ari
Aster)
Last year, Ari Aster made his debut with Hereditary – a brilliant family
horror film that brought in occult elements to a family that was already at each
other’s throats. But he outdoes himself with Midsommar – one of the great
“break-up” movies of all time, and a great folk-lore like horror film in its
own way. Florence Pugh is brilliant as a young woman, suffering through a
family tragedy, who decides to accompany her boyfriend (Jack Reynor, a perfect
example of a bad boyfriend) and his friends to a small Swedish village for
their Midsommar festival. What happens there is horrifying in more ways than
one – but also cathartic. Aster doesn’t really go for big horror movie moments in
this film – what he does is trickier, sustaining a mounting sense of dread for
two-and-a-half hours, often in the bright, brilliant, white sunshine. It all
climaxes with one of the best endings of the year. Further proof that Aster is
one of the best young horror directors – hell best director’s period –
currently working.
4. Parasite (Bong
Joon-ho)
Korean auteur Bong Joon-ho reached a new level with his Palme D’or
winning masterpiece Parasite this year. Like some of his other film, Parasite
begins as such an entertaining film – such a fun film – that the levels on
which Bong is working and layering into the story you don’t quite notice, which
makes it all the more effective when he lowers the boom. The film may start out
as escapist entertainment – but that’s just on the surface. When the film
descends into the darkness (both literally and figuratively), Bong’s class
warfare film really takes on a level of bite than is rare. It isn’t as
simplistic as say Ready or Not or Knives Out this Year (as much as I liked both
of those films) – because Bong isn’t interested in black and white villains and
good guys – but a system in which the poor are pitted against each, and will
never be able to rise up through the classes – and the rich are thoughtless and
ignorant, but not necessarily cruel. And Bong layers all of this into a film
that is still remarkably entertaining and amazingly well-made (Bong has a
perfect sense of where to put the camera at all times). It is a film gets under
your skin and stays there – the ending is a gut punch.
3. Uncut Gems (Josh
& Benny Safdie)
With Good Time, the Safdie brothers made one of the most intense films
of the decade – a film of propulsive energy, that just keeps gaining steam as
it goes along. With Uncut Gems, they try to top themselves – making a film that
I believe is designed to induce an anxiety or heart attack in the audience.
This almost indescribably intense film focuses on Adam Sandler’s character – a
jewelry dealer in Manhattan, who is running multiple different scams to keep
his gambling habit alive, and over a few days they all come crashing down upon
him. The main thrust has to do with an uncut gem from Africa – that he plans to
sell for big money, and solve all his problems – the problem is, he lets NBA
star Kevin Garnett borrow it – and then cannot get it back. There is also his
collapsing marriage to Idina Menzel, his increasingly fraught relationship with
his mistress Julia Fox – and the various people he owes money to. The film
never settles down for a minute – putting one impossibly intense sequence after
another after another – brilliantly shot by Darius Khondji with all the energy
you can imagine, and some of the best sound design of the year. Presiding over
it all is Adam Sandler is a towering, magnetic performance – the best of his
career, leaning into the opposite end of his persona that he explored so well
in his previous best work – Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love. With their
last two films, the Safdies have thrust themselves into the top echelon of
working directors.
2. Once Upon a Time in
Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Once Upon a
Time in Hollywood kind of feels like a summation for Tarantino – he is
apparently only making one more film before retirement after this, but I have
to wonder if, no matter what that film is, if it will be as brilliant and
touching a final statement as this film is. The film takes place in 1969 – in
the time leading up to the Manson murders. But Charles Manson is an
afterthought – he’s thrown on the dustbin of history where he belongs – as
Tarantino makes a buddy film about a former star (Leonardo DiCaprio) now doing
TV guest spots, and his stuntman buddy (Brad Pitt), The two are brilliant
together – they have an ease that is hard to get – but the film really soars
when they separate – when DiCaprio finds meaning in these guest spots again,
finds his art again, and Pitt heads off to the Spahn ranch for the most intense
sequence of the year. And Margot Robbie is brilliant as Sharon Tate – it’s a
small role, often she says nothing, but it’s such a touching one – one that
gives her back her humanity, makes her more than just a murder victim, which
all too often how she is remembered. The film is also Tarantino honing his
storytelling in ways I found unexpected – given how Inglorious Basterds and
Django Unchained ended, you couldn’t be shocked by the explosion of violence in
the end. But it’s after that in the final moments of the film where Tarantino
delivers the most emotional scene he has ever put on screen. In many ways, this
does feel like Tarantino’s final statement – about the value of making this
kind of entertainment, even if it ends up being mostly forgotten (look at all
the billboards for movies, or commercials for them, or even the soundtrack –
they are not full of classics as almost anyone else would have) – about this
lost of world of Hollywood, a world that was always a fantasy, but one you’d
rather live in. Tarantino is the first director I ever fell in love with as a
teenager back in the 1990s – his films are imprinted on my cinephile DNA – and
here he really does seem to be pushing himself further than before. I loved the
film when I first saw it – loved it more the second time – and I am growing
more convinced that this may well be Tarantino’s masterpiece.
1. The Irishman (Martin
Scorsese)
Martin Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker of all-time, and he come out
and said that The Irishman was his final film – that he had said all he needed
to say – I would have understood complete. The film feels like a summation in
many ways for Scorsese – certainly of the kind of loose trilogy of gangster
film he has made with DeNiro and Pesci (GoodFellas, Casino being the other two)
– but also on Scorsese’s worldview at large. This sprawling,
three-and-a-half-hour film about the life of Frank Sheeran (DeNiro) – a WWII
veteran, who becomes a teamster, and eventually rises in the ranks – becoming a
hitman for the mob under Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and growing close to Teamster
Boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Here, DeNiro is playing a very passive character
– pulled between two places, and unable to make a decision, he reacts, but
doesn’t act – and essentially slowly loses everything he values. The film is a
slow march to death – we’re all on that same march – but it’s about the
meaningless of this all, how Frank sells his soul, and gets nothing in return.
The other two gangster films Scorsese made with this team is kind of about how
everything was so much fun, until it wasn’t. Here, it was never fun – and you
are left broken and alone and no one cares. This is an epic masterpiece by
Scorsese – one of the best films of his brilliant career. For someone like me,
who has spent more time watching Scorsese films than any other filmmaker, it
really does feel like a familiar voice, now getting more serious, and walking
you to the end.
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