ON FILM: The last of the best movies for 2019 – Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

We start off every year by checking in with a few heavily invested moviegoers/critics for their thoughts on the past year's best. And then we run them with a minimum of editing. This week's batch should put 2019 to bed. (Unless I missed somebody.)

Tanner Smith

The critics

Tanner Smith, Arkansas-based filmmaker and critic, smithsverdict.com

Dan Lybarger, regular Movie Style contributor, justincaseitmatters.tumblr.com

Piers Marchant, regular Movie Style contributor, sweetsmellosuccess.tumblr.com

Favorite Films of 2019

Parasite -- I went into this crushing commentary of the haves and the have-nots almost completely cold ... I came out of it excited to tell everyone about it. One of the best films of the decade.

Avengers: Endgame -- It's amazing when I think of how far the Marvel Cinematic Universe has come since its origin over 11 years ago. Once it was going, we knew it was building up to something huge, and thankfully, it didn't disappoint.

Marriage Story -- Were I an Academy member, I would consider Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story for best actor (Adam Driver), best actress (Scarlett Johansson), best original screenplay (Baumbach), and best picture. Some of the best writing and acting of the year is in this film. (P.S. God bless Netflix!)

Toy Story 4 -- Nine years after a satisfying conclusion, I get a Toy Story sequel I didn't know I wanted. And it was as moving as reuniting with old friends (in the best possible way).

Doctor Sleep -- Mike Flanagan, the best director working in the horror film genre today, had a major challenge with this sequel to The Shining: respect and appeal to the legacy of not only filmmaker Stanley Kubrick but also novelist Stephen King. He pulled it off big-time.

Little Women -- I saw this beautiful adaptation of the popular L.M. Alcott novel twice, and I'll definitely be seeing it many more times in the near future.

1917 -- One of the best cinematic experiences I had [last] year comes from one of the best World War I films ever made. (I think both DP Roger Deakins and director Sam Mendes have outdone themselves with this one!)

US -- Another commentary on the haves and the have-nots, with a very intriguing premise and beautiful execution from writer/director Jordan Peele, who proves yet again that he's one of the most talented filmmakers working today. A satisfying horror film.

A tie between Joker and Uncut Gems -- Cheating, you say? Well, it's my list, and I'll do what I want with it. Both character-based dramatic thrillers are as effective as they are brilliantly acted.

The Farewell -- If there's anything more important than a comedy that can make you laugh, it's one that can make you feel. The Farewell is a beautiful film that handles both the comedy and the drama flawlessly.

The Irishman

Love, Antosha

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Booksmart

Knives Out

Luce

Dolemite Is My Name

Shazam!

How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World

The Lighthouse

Honorable Mentions: Honey Boy, The Lego Movie 2, The Mustang, Velvet Buzzsaw, The Souvenir, Brittany Runs a Marathon, Antiquities, Blinded By the Light, Fast Color, Happy Death Day 2U.

Dan Lybarger

The best movie of last year may be lying on the floor of my apartment because it got lost in the shuffle as I raced to endure Cats. Often, my favorite movies for a given year sometimes screen after I've voted in my critics' polls.

As I narrowed my list of favorite movies down to 10, I noticed that there was an inordinate number of science fiction and space travel movies in the final cut. Apparently, there are still filmmakers who want to test the limits of what constitutes cinema. Some of the stories might be familiar, but others make the definition of what a movie is just a little bit longer.

Parasite -- Bong Joon Ho's latest is actually a break from his movies about giant pigs and slugs and a train hurtling through a frozen apocalypse. With Parasite, a struggling unemployed family slowly takes over the lives of an upwardly mobile tech executive's (Sun-kyun Lee) clan with eerie, often funny and ultimately heartbreaking results. Like Jordan Peele's Us, it explores the underground economies below the surface of the civilized world. Its occupants are quite real, even if they are unseen.

Marriage Story -- Noah Baumbach's depiction of the last vestiges of affection leaving a marriage may be set in a rarified world of theater and television, but the difficulty of breaking up is never easy, no matter where you live. Anchored by a multitude of terrific performances, Marriage Story also carries just enough reminders of who people do fall in love and grow to miss it even when living together is no longer an option.

Little Women -- It's ironic that the one of the most vibrant and expertly created movies of the year is an adaptation of a 19th-century novel that seems to be filmed ever generation or so. Greta Gerwig cleverly tweaks the chronology of the Alcott story, giving it a brisk pace and a sense of foreboding that keeps the oft-told tale from feeling like a relic. Soarise Ronan is an ideal Jo March. Writers of any gender can identify with her struggles to get into print.

The Irishman -- Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) may not be the reason Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) disappeared from the face of the earth nearly four and a half decades ago, but we haven't ruled out alien abduction or rapture yet. Nonetheless, Martin Scorsese's depiction of the confessed mafia enforcer is an emotionally devastating coda to his previous movies like Goodfellas and Mean Streets. It's not a spoiler to say that Sheeran's reward for his service to gangsters like Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) was humiliatingly paltry. Pesci's low-key turn as Bufalino is the movie's highlight. While Pesci is best known for playing volatile criminals, his Bufalino rules by suggestion. His whispers carry the weight of Moses descending from Mt. Sinai.

1917 -- While Sam Mendes' single-shot real time approach is a technical challenge, the unusual storytelling approach helps make the horror and the moments of adrenaline from World War I seem real. Far from glorifying the carnage of World War I, 1917 draws its excitement from following two grunts (George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman) racing to deliver a message that will stop a potential massacre. The film vividly captures the claustrophobia and deprivations that Mendes' grandfather and other soldiers endured.

Ad Astra -- James Gray's latest adventure is as much about parenting issues as it is about how humans might settle at the end of the galaxy. Brad Pitt effortlessly conveys the conflicting emotions he has for his single-minded father (Tommy Lee Jones). If the story borrows a bit from Heart of Darkness, it also has some impressive effects that didn't make the shortlist of the Oscars despite making you believe that Pitt is running from space pirates. Perhaps the voters thought the moon scenes were shot on location.

Apollo 11 -- On second thought, maybe they thought they were watching this breathtaking account of how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made it to the moon. Apollo 11 includes 70mm footage that had been unseen in nearly 50 years. As a result, the mission seems less like a paragraph in a history book than a current achievement.

High Life -- French director Claire Denis turns the way we depict space travel upside down. She movingly depicts how prisoners could be sent away from earth, not for the spirit of adventure but as punishment for what they did here. With his work here and in The Lighthouse, Robert Pattinson leaves his listless performance as a vampire in the Twilight saga behind. His performance follows his character for over a decade, and it's easy to forget that makeup is involved.

The Nightingale -- Australian writer-director Jennifer Kent proves that her terrifying The Babadook was not a fluke. This chilling look at colonization features terrific performances by Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin and Baykali Ganambarr and looks at the complicated history of Australia in a fresh, intriguing light. The images are ruggedly beautiful, and Kent wisely decides viewers can reach their own conclusions about her tale.

Dark Waters -- When adapting a true story for the big screen, it helps to select one that needs little embellishment to be engaging. Director Todd Haynes (Carol) sticks with the facts in this account of how DuPont poisoned the water in West Virginia. Mark Ruffalo tones down the outbursts that made him effective as the Hulk, but neither he nor Haynes downplay the difficulty in confronting a corporate titan. Bill Camp, who was great as a grizzled New York cop, is equally believable as a West Virginia cattle farmer here.

Runners-up: Flannery, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Raise Hell, Us, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Knives Out, Dolemite Is My Name, Booksmart, Be Natural, Blinded by the Light, Midsommar.

Piers Marchant

In many ways, 2019 served as a crucible, and no more so, at least cinematically, than with the venerable superhero flick. After a deluge of big studio films on the subject of capes and spandex (the MCU includes 22 films since the 2008 release of Iron Man; the nascent DCU, running in fits and starts has seven), we saw the explosive close-out of the previous "phases" with Marvel's Avengers: Endgame; as well as the rise of pseudo-art-house comic book film, Joker, in the same bloody year.

The talk on Film Twitter -- the living definition of 'tempest in a teacup' -- was all about those films, and Martin Scorsese's now-legendary takedown of the genre by referring to the superhero films, collectively, as "theme parks." But in truth, there were many, many other films that came out during the year, some of them utterly brilliant, some of them ridiculously awful. Here are my picks for both, with some of what I wrote about them at the time in my review.

10. Avengers: Endgame

"There are so many small but noteworthy details -- opening the film with Traffic's "Dear Mr. Fantasy"; the name drops, and special shout-outs to comics' fans; the small character beats that allow each protagonist more than just a quip or two; the closing credits, which give singular notice to the stars who have been there from the beginning, and wisely do not use the signature Marvel trick of teasing out the next film, which gives the series, at last, a sense of real closure, if only temporary -- the film feels as if it has been created and calibrated with the utmost care. For a film destined to break the bank no matter how shoddy they might have made it, Marvel has poured enough genuine soul into it to earn its inevitable bounty."

9. Her Smell

"In some ways, the film takes on a sort of Raging Bull aspect, Martin Scorsese's classic film about a boxer's rise and fall, only to turn the ending on its head. In Scorsese's picture, we see Jake LaMotta, now fat and retired, attempt to break into showbiz as a comedian, the scenes draped in cutting sardonicism. [Director Alex Ross] Perry gives Becky a much less punishingly ironic turn, but instead a hero's journey, venturing away from the abyss into something a good deal less grandiose and realized."

8. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

"It's also a film about the versions of the stories whose ideas lend depth and valor to our otherwise nondescript lives, the things we hope make us the heroes of our own narratives. In this way, Jimmie's story is conflated with that of the city itself, and the palpable sense of loss he feels about his family's house is mirrored in the city's own loss of identity."

7. Under the Silver Lake

"[Director David Robert] Mitchell fairly stuffs the film with portents, symbols, and runes, some real, some imagined. Squirrels mysteriously fall dead at Sam's feet, a parrot in his courtyard keeps calling out something he can't decipher, a dog killer stalks the neighborhood, and graffiti-strewn about the area calls out to him. Films are always encoded with symbolic meaning, utilizing visual language to instill emotion and establish significance for the audience (think of Spielberg's girl with the red coat in Schindler's List or James Dean's red windbreaker in Rebel Without a Cause), Mitchell's film gives us so many options, almost everything can be read symbolically, which perfectly captures the paranoia his character feels and the pointlessness of trying to make sense of it at all."

6. Marriage Story

"Noah Baumbach's latest film, about the dissolution of married couple -- played extraordinarily well by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson -- will no doubt get comparisons made to Bergman's brilliant Scenes From a Marriage. But whereas that 1972 film concerned the relationship itself, its highs and lows and metamorphoses, Baumbach's film is much more about the logistics, legal and otherwise, of ending a very much shared life together."

5. Midsommar

"Viewing [director Ari] Aster's films is a bit like walking into an art installation -- quite literally, as he populates his frame with stunning compositions and art-focused mise en scene, as with the beautifully designed wooden structures of the compound, or the exquisite murals and art displayed on the building's walls (a huge shout-out to his production designer, Henrik Svensson, and the art directing crew) -- but, as with Hereditary, behind all the sumptuous, hand-crafted beauty, there is a cruel, brutal core of humanity's continued savagery. If art represents the best sort of impulses of humankind, in Aster's hands, it becomes yet another facade, hiding -- or in this case, exemplifying -- our instinct for vicious barbarity."

4. Parasite

"By the end, as it swerves inexorably into blood-soaked violence, the film reveals to be a bit of a con itself, drawing us in with its enticing humor, then opening up into a much darker vision, before ending on an emotional note of surprising vulnerability. Through it all, [director Bong Joon Ho] shows a mastery of odd tones, from the opening comedic salvo, to the final emotional beats."

3. Uncut Gems

"It's one of those pressure-cooker films, where the steam builds more and more intense as Howard gets in and out of trouble through his ability to constantly shift the playing board. There's a scene about midway through, with various aggrieved characters coalescing at once in his office, as he's trying to have a speakerphone conversation with his doctor, that's so stressful, you will want to avert your eyes and remind yourself of the exit signs."

2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

"It's also an unexpected joy to watch the nonchalant swagger of [Brad] Pitt match up with [Leonardo] DiCaprio's more high-strung ministrations. Two of the biggest film stars alive playing mostly washed-up TV actors may stack the irony, but both of them settle in so well into their characters, you can't help but admire the result. Rick is a dude whose ego has gone from tumescent to shriveled -- he parks his car miserably in front of one of his own old movie posters -- but beneath all his hubris and despair, he actually has a lot of talent. As always, it's pure joy to watch Pitt smoke up a screen, a middle-aged Redford speaking every line with a sinfully breezy smile, whose confidence extends around him like the golden hue of his deep suntan."

1. Knives Out

"More than the plot itself, an ingenious and kinetic thing that's as satisfying as a hot bowl of soup on a raw and windy day, there's the sense of joyous chaos from the cast. Those scenes where the family is all together, in the drawing room and continually at each other's throats are so delicious, they should come with a napkin. The interplay between vets like [Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis and Toni Collette] is filled with fractious energy, the characters revisiting age-old disagreements ("Your kid's a brat!" -- "Your kid is a Nazi!") with sadistic glee. Even when they band together, in moments, against what they believe to be a common enemy, it's clear the harmony between them is more Iggy and the Stooges than Beach Boys. In short, [director Rian] Johnson has devised a perfect ensemble of dreadful characters and set them all against one another in a narrative fishbowl filled with lye."

Other Worthy Mentions:

Amazing Grace, American Factory, Apollo 11, Bacurau, Birds of Passage, Charlie Says, Cold Case Hammarskjld, Dark Suns, Dark Waters, Ford v Ferrari, Greener Grass, In Fabric, John Wick 3, Jojo Rabbit, Luce, Midnight Traveler, Ms. Purple, Pain and Glory, Rewind, Something Else, Terminator: Dark Fate, The Farewell, The Hole in the Ground, The Irishman, The Lighthouse, The Nightingale, The Report, The Souvenir, The Vast of Night, This Is Not Berlin, Us, Varda by Agnes, Vitalina Varella.

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MovieStyle on 01/24/2020

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ON FILM: The last of the best movies for 2019 - Arkansas Democrat-Gazette