Wow, what an embarrassment of riches this year was. This was an exceedingly hard list to compile; there was such a glut of good films that I didn’t have time to see them all. So if there are any emissions, keep in mind that some movies haven’t been released here in Denver yet (A Hidden Life, Uncut Gems, Portrait of a Woman on Fire, 1917, Little Women), or I really liked them but they just missed the cut (High Flying Bird, Toy Story 4, Hustlers, Ready or Not, Rolling Thunder Revue, The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot), or I just haven’t gotten around to seeing them yet (Marriage Story, Waves, Peterloo, Jojo Rabbit), or I saw them but thought they were overhyped (High Life, Climax), or I just refuse to (I’m talking about Honey Boy here because I refuse to participate in Shia LaBeouf’s campaign to become the new James Franco). Let’s get started!
10: Knives Out
Rian Johnson’s delightfully twisty whodunit shows that the Last Jedi director can succeed in just about any medium or genre. Armed with a murderer’s row of talent (Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, and Christopher Plummer, to name a few), Johnson appears to go full locked-room mystery before letting the story bloom into something larger, stranger, and funnier. Ana de Armas is quietly brilliant in the lead role of Marta, but Craig is the real draw here. Bringing back his absurd Logan Lucky accent, Craig is having the time of his life (and simultaneously revealing why he’s so tired of playing James Bond). What shines through in Knives Out, more than anything, is his love of storytelling. And his skill at it.
9: John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
I would watch one hundred John Wick movies. The first twenty minutes of Parabellum are as breathlessly intense as the climax of any other action movie. Chad Stahelski’s kinetic, frenetic thriller starts at 10 and rarely dips below 9. Mileage might vary for this one, as it is the most steeped in the lore of John Wick’s wackadoo video game world, where everyone is a hitman reporting to some mysterious High Table. That’s fair. For those of us who aren’t turned off by that, Parabellum is a kind of masterpiece. Operatic in its violence, and centered around Keanu Reeves in yet another career-defining role, Parabellum is a film that I saw twice in theaters, and have not stopped admiring since.
8: The Report
Scott Z. Burn’s probe into the lies surrounding torture performed by American troops in Iraq is hard to watch, and impossible to ignore. Between this, Spotlight, and The Post, there is a renaissance of these types of films, deliberate stories in which the thrills come from conversation and discovery, and The Report might be the most brutal in its depiction of human depravity. Adam Driver is seemingly the only moral person in a world rapidly going mad, and through his steely, determined performance, we feel as helpless as he does. This is a film that will hurt you in your heart, a damning time capsule to remind us all of the time when this country lost its soul, a fact which makes it tragically, unbearably, timely today.
7: The Lighthouse
Robert Eggers followed up The Witch with a film that is either horror disguised as buddy comedy, or vice versa. Shot in 35mm black and white, in a 1:19:1 aspect ratio, The Lighthouse could work as a silent film, equal parts Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. As Willem Dafoe (giving his best performance since The Florida Project) and Robert Pattinson (now-predictably excellent) devolve into madness, the film veers from hallucinatory horror to tragicomic opera. Eggers’ fever dream of a film worms its way under your skin and eats you from the inside out.
6: Midsommar
In which Ari Aster singlehandedly dismantles the notion of the sophomore slump. The director of Hereditary returned, just a year after his debut, with this psychedelic, unnerving daytime nightmare. Florence Pugh delivers a fearless performance, never backing away from the depths of her character’s unfathomable grief. Despite the film’s bleak beginning (and ending), it is also one of the funniest movies of the year. Aster balances tone with aplomb, evinced by the single best scene of the year: Pugh, wracked with sobs, surrounded by women mimicking her every tear and wail. It goes from mocking to cathartic in one camera shot, and by the time the scene is over, you know you are watching the work of a master.
5: Ad Astra
James Gray might be the most unsung director in Hollywood (well, male director at least). He bounds effortlessly between genres in a way that would make Kubrick proud. He excels at whatever he attempts, be it crime drama (We Own the Night), historical romance (The Immigrant), or a Herzogian portrait of obsession (The Lost City of Z). So it’s no surprise that his first sci-fi film, Ad Astra, is an absolute stunner. Anchored by Brad Pitt’s quiet, soulful performance, Gray’s film looks to the stars and finds the same problems that bedevil humanity. Ad Astra is a film about fathers and sons, about the corrosive effect of toxic masculinity, and it manages to include moon pirates and a battle with a feral ape on a spaceship. Truly the work of one of our most gifted auteurs.
4: The Farewell
Lulu Wang’s tearjerker will, yes, produce some heavy sobbing, but it’s so much more than that. In the story of a family lying to a dying matriarch, unaware of her impending death, Wang explores not only the cultural divide between China and America, but also the basic-yet-lofty question of Who do our lives belong to? They are ours, yes, but they belong to everyone we know, everyone we love and who loves us. Awkwafina makes a fine case for herself as a dramatic actress, and her naturalistic, humane performance is in perfect concert with that of Shuzhen Zhao as her grandmother. So invested are we in Billi’s (Awkwafina) journey that, near the end, she makes a simple cry of “Hah!” one of the most exuberant, cathartic moments in any film this year. Call your grandmother, everyone. She misses you.
3: Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth – and, if you believe him (which you shouldn’t), penultimate – film is his most leisurely, and perhaps his most assured. It exists in a realm of dreams, fantasies, and memories. OUATIH is like reading the memoir of someone who knows the unknown, someone whose fingernails are still dirty from secrets. Every performance here is right in the pocket. Margot Robbie doesn’t just imitate Sharon Tate, but grants her humanity and gravity. Brad Pitt and Leonado DiCaprio, who stunningly have not worked together until now, are at their best, Pitt at his most laid-back, DiCaprio at his most intense, operating on extreme sides of the movie star spectrum and doing so with ease and aplomb. Perhaps the most watchable film of the year, Hollywood continues Tarantino’s trend of rewriting history. Here, in the film’s bloody final minutes, he seems to be wishing for a kind of peace, a kind of humanity.
2: Parasite
What else is there to say about Bong Joon-ho’s masterpiece? What other laudatory adjectives am I expected to come up with? The director of Okja and Snowpiercer again shows his mastery of, and affinity for, any genre in which he chooses to engage. So sure is Joon-ho’s hand (as director and co-writer) that the way Parasite transforms – from blackhearted satire, to taut thriller, to crushing tragedy – feels not just inevitable, but, in retrospect, expected. Anchored by one of the year’s finest ensembles, Parasite shows a master storyteller in full command of his craft. As with any film that taps into the zeitgeist, Parasite will spawn many weak imitations. But no one can imitate Joon-ho.
1: The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s somber, mesmerizing epic is an elegy for a genre which he helped define (it echoes Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in that sense). Scorsese has long been the subject of unfair, misguided criticism from people insisting that he glorifies the gangster life. The Irishman is his rebuttal to that. The life of a gangster is lonely, and usually short, a point that Scorsese makes whenever a chyron appears on screen describing when and how certain characters meet their ignominious ends. Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino are the most dialed-in they’ve been in years, but it’s Joe Pesci who steals the show. His Russell Bufalino is played as a corrective to all the flamboyant hotheads he made his name portraying. Over the film’s 210 minute runtime, Pesci makes a case for himself as one of our finest living actors. With The Irishman, Scorsese did not simply make one of the best films of the year, or his career. He made one of the best films in history.
As a bonus, here are GAMbIT’s best movies of the decade (taking care to avoid any Best Picture winners):
2010: The Social Network
2011: Moneyball
2012: The Master
2013: Inside Llewyn Davis
2014: Interstellar
2015: Mad Max: Fury Road
2016: Silence
2017: The Lost City of Z
2018: First Reformed
2019: The Irishman
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