Kevin's Top Ten Films of 2019
Right before the decade came to a close, 2019 went out with a particularly strong bevy of films. So much so that there are still many I have yet to watch, but from what I have seen, this year has been nothing short of remarkable. It is always a joy seeing established filmmakers exceed expectations with some of the year’s most anticipated films, but often finding the newer voices is just as rewarding and exciting. I am constantly amazed by the power of storytelling and its ability to elicit emotion. Compassion, joy, wonder, laughter, heartbreak. I believe you can find all these and more in the films from this year, and while there are so many I admire, here are the ones that stick out in my mind, providing a range of feelings that are particularly delightful to bask in for 2019.
But first, the caveats. There truly isn’t enough time in the day, because while I felt like I hit all the major films prior to making this list, there are still a handful I have yet to experience. Joker, Pain & Glory, Synonyms, Ash is the Purest White, and Transit are a few of the films I wanted to see, but didn’t find the time to. The Two Popes, Dolemite is My Name, Atlantics, and I Lost My Body are currently staring me in the face on my Netflix queue while 1917 and Varda by Anges are waiting in the wings for their Seattle releases. And I haven’t even mentioned Monos, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night, or An Elephant Sitting Still. So if you’re wondering where some of your favorites are, there’s a chance I haven’t caught them yet. So without further ado, I present my favorite films of 2019.
Honorable Mentions: The Farewell, Knives Out, Her Smell, Uncut Gems, Midsommar, Honeyland, Avengers: Endgame, Us, Love Antosha, Honey Boy
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10. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Most folks right now are mad for one reason or another. Some days we feel angrier than we can remember. Others, we feel that people are angrier than we’ve ever seen them. It’s taxing. No doubt this emotional drainage played a part in the decision to bring such an iconic figure as Fred Rogers to the silver screen. For generations, Mr. Rogers remained the icon of civility and kindness, a reminder of a bygone era where life might have felt safer. Whether numbers back that up is one thing, but people can feel the truth in the sentiment. So why not make a movie of Fred Roger’s life played by the nicest man in Hollywood, Tom Hanks?
The fruit was ripe for the picking. Any studio could have acquired the rights to Mr. Roger’s story, churned out a Saving Mr. Banks type sludge of mediocrity, and watch the money flow in. But A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood isn’t the Mr. Rogers movie people planned on seeing. It’s not a biopic. It’s not a completely factual recreation of the Esquire Magazine article it is based on. It’s not even about Mr. Rogers for majority of its runtime. Director Marielle Heller captures the elusive feeling that bought Rogers decades of longevity. That feeling where someone hears you, understands you, and accepts you while reaching through the fourth wall to help you. And what a magic trick it is when it's pulled off on the big screen! To say the movie feels therapeutic is an understatement. It is unabashedly so. “You were a child once, too” is a Fred Rogers quote not spoken in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, but rather, one felt in its very DNA. Perhaps just that thought alone will help people know what to do with all that ‘mad’ they have.
9. Booksmart
As a child I can only remember caring if a movie made me happy. Happy is if it could make me laugh, imbue me with a sense of wonder, or seemingly project my feelings onto the screen. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart careens unabashed through each of those benchmarks. Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein’s undeniable best friend chemistry as Molly and Amy elevate what could have been just an above average high school movie into something much more special. On the night before graduation, Molly and Amy decide to do what their nerdy selves avoided throughout high school: party. Booksmart brims with an infectious energy that never slows. It leans into a great soundtrack. It gives Billie Lourde a spotlight to shine. And if anything, I can only lament that I was not younger when I saw it for the first time.
8. The Irishman
I don’t know who killed Jimmy Hoffa and I don’t think Martin Scorsese knows either. He’s preoccupied with a number of other things, some admirable and some less so. But front and center, he cares about the longevity of cinema. In his words “cinema [is] about revelation — aesthetic, emotional and spiritual revelation. It [is] about characters… the way they can hurt one another and love one another and suddenly come face to face with themselves.” It is hard to disagree that, at the very least, these ideals are not a significant form of the art. Enter, The Irishman.
The boys are back in town. The boys? Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci. The town? Mainly Philadelphia. Spanning decades and cities, we are told a possibly true account of a truck driver named Frank Sheeran who climbs the mafia rank of teamsters, ultimately culminating in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. You are not wrong if it sounds like familiar territory for Scorsese and co, but there is an undeniable vulnerability in The Irishman that is unlike like Goodfellas or Casino. Scorsese includes an allegorical retrospective of his life’s work in Sheeran that matter-of-factly displays the emotional cost of living through these choices. No glorification of the mob. No lessons where death is the ultimate cost. Just Frank coming face to face with himself, and in a film where everyone is at the top of their game, this was a crippling joy to watch.
7. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
This movie appropriately feels like home. From its opening moments, writer/director Joe Talbot and writer/lead Jimmie Fails imbue The Last Black Man in San Francisco with an illuminating vibrancy that feels utterly new, but comforting. We follow Fails as he attempts to regain a quintessential Victorian home in San Francisco allegedly built by his grandfather. His family lost the house as the city became more and more like what it is today: a place accommodating to boom economies with a tendency to alienate those who are not part of it. This is a debut full of promise. Jonathan Majors, playing Fail's best friend Monty, is a, if not the, standout of the year. The Last Black Man in San Francisco’s ideas eventually outpace its conclusion, but the ride is compelling. It feels like art that could only be made today, by folks who are wise beyond their years. Perhaps the strongest testament to Joe Talbot’s debut is that no one who sees The Last Black Man in San Francisco soon forgets it.
For more thoughts on The Last Black Man in San Francisco, see Greg Arietta's review "When You Love A City That Doesn’t Love You Back."
6. Ad Astra
Stay with me here…The year was 1986, the last time the elliptical orbit of Halley's comet came near our planet and made itself visible to the naked eye. It was also the year a young actor named Brad Pitt would film his first uncredited appearance on the silver screen. Over three decades later, Pitt's credited Roy McBride would make his own return to Earth spurred by gravity during the opening sequence of James Gray’s Ad Astra. A sudden power surge during a space walk on the International Space Antenna leaves him and fellow astronauts plummeting to the planet below. Roy enters a death spiral, and when he recovers, falling debris rips his parachute, causing a crash landing that almost takes his life. During all of this, Roy’s heart rate doesn’t go above 80 BPM. The audience’s most likely tops 120.
The initial tumble to rock bottom Gray begins with earns both the poetic mirroring between the cyclical orbits of objects in space and cycles of trauma littered throughout the picture. Some find this film thuddingly literal, and to that I say, fair enough. Gray doesn’t seem preoccupied with cloaking his metaphors. Roy is told “a voyage of exploration can be as simple as an escape” in the scene following the tumble. And up until we meet him, he’s been living that. But as we follow Roy from Earth to the ends of the solar system in search of his father he vows to correct that habit. Even if it means not returning home. Like Halley’s comet, we feel as though Roy’s homecoming to Earth is not as inevitable as it might be in Ad Astra, a title taken from the Latin phrase “Per Aspera Ad Astra”, roughly translating to “through hardships to the stars.”
5. The Lighthouse
Certain movies tell you how to watch them a second time. They hold their cards so close to their chest for so long that it practically begs the audience to lean in with intrigue until the credits roll. An hour, a day, a week, or maybe longer passes by as your subconscious processes what it’s seen. And then, if you’re lucky, something clicks. Robert Egger’s The Lighthouse is one of these films. It is dense, it is maddening, and it is enigmatic Like a majority of its dialogue, it verges on unintelligible. But it is rewarding—if it clicks.
One part Greek myth, another part seafarer fable, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson disappear into their roles as stranded lighthouse keepers on a downward spiral towards insanity. Is it cabin fever? A nautical curse? Chemical poisoning? Eggers surely isn’t as forthcoming as many would like, but the audience is always in good, competent hands as he undoubtedly makes the film he intended to make. In all the ruckus and anxiety about what films are being produced now, this is unquestionably an outlier in the best possible way.
4. Marriage Story
“Getting divorced with a kid is one of the hardest things to do. It's like a death without a body,” writer/director Noah Baumbach says via divorce lawyer Bert Spitz (Alan Alda) in Marriage Story. “Death without a body” is in the realm of what the audience experiences watching Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) navigate the process of legal separation and child custody. It's no surprise that Baumbach is able to capture moments of familial noxiousness given his past work in The Squid and the Whale and The Meyerwitz Stories. He has always done well when faithfully illustrating two sides to the same argument, and while Marriage Story doesn’t transcend its premise, or “genre” if you will, it wholly realizes itself within those boundaries. Driver, Johansson, and Baumbach give career bests as they twist the —sometimes quite literal— knife.
3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Commissioned to paint a portrait of a taciturn young woman with the intention of seeking her suitor’s approval, artist Marianne (Noémie Merlant) finds the task increasingly difficult as her subject (Adèle Haenel) does not comply with her asks. That is the premise of the first hour of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. What follows is best left unknown. The last hour is a feast for the eyes and the heart. It’s a movie where glances say more than words and the lack of them say everything. Dialogue is a scarcity until it isn’t. Music is missed until it appears transcendently. Sciamma brings forth an ever-mounting depiction of affection that culminates into an absolute crescendo of an ending that leaves the silence during the cut-to-black deafening.
2. Parasite
A rich man’s joke is always funny but it’s a façade. His wealth buys influence, his influence buys admirers, and his admirers laugh. In Bong Joon-ho’s latest, we laugh at the Park family, not their jokes. They have the wealth, the influence, and, to an extent, the admirers, but what they don’t have is awareness, for themselves or those economically below them. Parasite follows the Kim family as they incrementally infiltrate the Park household in various positions in an effort to gain employment and ascend the economic class divide. The film itself is as sleek and meticulous as the Kim’s plan. Every nook and cranny of its story has purpose. The same can be said about the iconic Park home designed for the film, the pitch perfect acting choices of its ensemble, and the seamlessly balanced tone employed by Bong as he navigates genre after genre, all serving a unified vision. So while this film wasn’t the most deeply felt of the year (see my #1), it is no stretch of the imagination to say that in the future this might be looked upon as the art that most defined 2019.
Little Women
Little Women is the type of film we not only love but we treasure, clinging to the hope that future repeat-viewings will somehow transfer the infinite empathy embedded in its cinematic pages to us, its audience. It is both a testament to Louisa May Alcott’s semi-autobiographical source material and a slight indictment of modern society that a novel centering on the coming of age of four sisters in Civil War era America is still so relevant today. To her credit, director and writer Greta Gerwig tweaks the source material in her sophomoric feature in such a way to only improve on the agelessness. After 2017’s Lady Bird, Gerwig became only the fifth woman to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director in the award’s almost 90-year history. She is operating at an equally impressive level here, further bolstered by the absolute knockout of an ensemble she assembles. Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh are at the top of a crowded year of standout performances. The film and its characters wear their hearts on their sleeves, moving the audience to wipe tears on their own. Little Women bears the capacity of what a film can be and when another does not live up to that promise, we feel a pull at the corner of our mouths as we momentarily reminisce first falling for it.
