Spencer TuckermanI watched 102 movies for this first time this year, and Letterboxd tells me 46 of them were released in 2019.
After a terrible start, the back half of 2019 was so incredibly loaded that it may have delivered the best movie year of the decade. I certainly haven’t seen everything, but 37 movies I saw felt worth discussion. Here are my favorites, in order:
37. Murder Mystery
A modern Sandler comedy that's more boredom than offensively bad deserves some credit. So does a Lake Como chase scene in a Testarossa. Ultimate, it feels like trying for drama over pure laughs forced Sandler to cut back on the garbage enough to make it enjoyable. It’s actually kind of a great exercise in doing barely enough to take a pretty lame movie into serviceable territory by picking elements that get brownie points: genre (whodunnit), location (Italy), and casting (Sandler and Jennifer Anniston).
36. High Flying Bird
Basically a white-collar drama set in the underbelly of the NBA. Shooting it on an iPhone and distributing via Netflix was an interesting microcosm of the movie's theme, but this was tedious at times. Feels like Steven Soderbergh kicking back on his Soderbergh-ness. It’s good, but I wish I had more fun.
35. Dolemite Is My Name
Perhaps my feelings would be different if I had history with Rudy Ray Moore, but I just don’t quite understand the fawning over this one. I think it works better as a Welcome Back party than as a movie. It’s a great showcase for Eddie Murphy’s return, and it has its charm, but I think Murphy has more in the tank than this one showed.
34. Long Shot
Pretty funny but also pretty dumb. It starts off great and really falls apart before it gets a chance to click, but it does explore some more complicated ideas. Theron and Rogen do enough to keep it afloat. Mostly it made me miss good rom-coms.
33. The Art of Self-Defense
Napoleon Dynamite 2: Fight Club. I’m a big Jesse Eisenberg fan, and some of the tone here is fun, but it seemed to be a bit smug in its delivery. I sensed some, “Look how quirky and subversive we are!” It’s a pet peeve of mine. It’s a bit of an Imogen Poots showcase as well.
32. Joker
Joaquin Phoenix is predictably riveting, and the overall tone is compelling. As a character study, it’s mostly very good. As a piece of narrative fiction, it’s occasionally brutal to watch. It has one of my least favorite qualities, which is not being nearly as smart as people think it is. If you just enjoy a unique take on a comic book villain, great. If you think this is a incisive dissection of society’s failings, or whatever, I can’t help you.
31. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum
Breaks the Hollywood record for Satisfying Bad Guy Deaths Per Minute. I liked John Wick as a sleeper success in 2014, but I just don’t love the genre enough to appreciate the same beats repeated again and again. I don’t think this is any better or worse than the first two, but my appreciation for the franchise is waning.
30. Jojo Rabbit
A couple of good performances but mostly an extremely odd two hours. Felt like every adult character was kinda poorly done. And there were definitely some... choices... plot-wise. I get it’s kind of a lighthearted humanist comedy, but did we really need to go out of our way to vindicate the story’s Nazis?
29. El Camino
Breaking Bad is my favorite series but I was never a big fan of revisiting it in movie form. That said, this was better than it had any right to be. It feels like a long, B-plus episode of Breaking Bad, which I guess is all you can ask for. It looks awesome and it has some strong emotional beats. Mostly it just felt like a good-maybe-great closure on something I didn’t care about getting closure on.
28. High Life
Uncompromising in the sense that it doesn't attempt to be enjoyable in any traditional way. It's often grotesque but occasionally beautiful. It doesn’t totally work for me, but they are absolutely, positively going for it, which I give credit for. And I love Robert Pattinson in this type of stuff. Someone smarter than me should write something about the way this is a perfect inverse of Interstellar.
27. Toy Story 4
It’s funny and the animation is jaw-dropping, but the plot is kind of annoying and totally superfluous to the series. It almost comes off as a reunion special. It’s fine, but never needed to exist at all.
26. Blinded by the Light
It’s corny and there’s nothing challenging or groundbreaking about it. But it’s also really charming and unabashed in its love for its inspiration. It will make a great Netflix rewatchable someday. Very British.
25. Ad Astra
Give it the Oscar for Production Design and for Sound Editing. The rest I didn’t like as much as I wanted to. There are too many great space movies in the last decade, and this felt underdeveloped (as much as I loved Pitt here).
24. Missing Link
It looks good and it’s really entertaining, but not much else when you start to dig. This was also marketed really poorly because I think it has an audience it (evidently) didn’t reach. Definitely worth it for fans of good animation, or for somebody looking to burn 95 minutes on something low-stakes but artful.
23. The Two Popes
One of the year’s best buddy comedies. More seriously, there’s some really cool camerawork being done—surprisingly spry, given the subject matter and target audience. I would not be shocked to see Anthony Hopkins and especially Jonathan Pryce get Oscar nominations. They deserve to be in the conversation, but this is also just great Academy Awards fare.
22. Booksmart
It gets too hokey in places, but it’s funny, charming, and has an impressive amount of genuine, endearing characters. It probably would’ve landed better for me if I were 18 and female, but this will be an important movie to a lot of kids.
21. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks, and Rhys and Cooper do some really good work, too. It excels in its patient moments but fumbles with some odd, cutesy mechanics. It’s in a weird spot where its fatal flaw is the same thing that made me run to go see it: Tom Hanks. He doesn’t need me to vouch for his incredible career, so I won’t. But I just can’t buy him as Mr. Rogers, especially immediately in the wake of a stellar documentary.
20. Triple Frontier
This was like Bad Decision-Making: The Movie. The first half is great, and it slowly comes unglued logically, as if they just got tired of keeping things airtight. Hard to judge it like that, though. I don’t think it was trying to be something it wasn’t, which is actually commendable. Something about Affleck’s performance here is magnetic. It helps make this one of my favorite Dumb Action Movies ever. It also makes me pine for more of these types of movies. It’s just a good time, in a great setting, with some cool actors, for two hours.
19. A Hidden Life
It’s got all of Terrence Malick’s wide-angle fetish, swirling score, and breathy voiceovers, and it struck a really good balance between narrative and lyrical. It also spent too much time investing in the wrong things. Malick’s goal has never been to create commercially palatable movies, but I think he’s one or two degrees from connecting, much like he did with The Thin Red Line in 1998.
18. The Farewell
Made me wanna cry. In the good way. It’s funny and fresh, but its most importantly very personal. As an avid This American Life listener, I first heard the story years ago. Seeing it come to live in such a touching way was very rewarding.
17. Ford v Ferrari
Dudes being dudes, 1966. It’s really loud and really fun. Maybe the best driving scenes I’ve seen on film. It occasionally veers too far into ‘Disney sports inspirational’, and the ending is uneven, but it’s a great theater experience.
16. Us
Jordan Peele is two-for-two, but I already hate how much the inescapable comparison to Get Out will dampen reception for this. It's incredibly fun, and while the deeper level doesn't work flawlessly like his debut, it's still great.
15. The Report
The Report is discouraging, and almost aggressively tedious and plodding. It’s all worth it to watch Adam Driver go to work. Even in a script that didn't give him much room, he was still blowing people off the screen in a few scenes. Great art direction as well.
14. The Peanut Butter Falcon
Really weird flaws and oversights, but it’s just too heartwarming to matter. Make 1,000 “Shia LaBeouf is a bad guy with a good heart” movies and I will see every single one.
13. Monos
Been a while since I've seen something ratchet tension so well with music and cinematography alone. I totally get where the Apocalypse Now comparisons are coming from. What an unsettling ride. It's like a shroomed-up Colombian take on American Honey.
12. Knives Out
One of the decade’s better Fun Movies. It just feels great. The music, the lighting, the setting, the color palette, the accents. It’s a nice place to hang out. I felt like it couldn’t quite get pacing right, and the ending fell a step short. Rian Johnson is pretty damn good at what he does, but he constructed this movie as if he was insecure about how many tricks he needed to pull. A tiny bit of trimming would’ve really worked for me.
11. Waves
My goodness. This is a punishing, gorgeous, complicated, exhausting movie. I feel like I just survived a shipwreck. It’s got its flaws but it just bulldozes right through them. What a spectacle. It’s one of those movies where I wouldn’t blame people who didn’t like it, yet I find it endlessly fascinating to break apart.
10. Little Women
What a bulletproof group of actors. It’s just fun to watch them on screen together, crawling over top of each other both verbally and occasionally literally. It will be fun, in 25 years, to look back and marvel at how Saoirse Ronan, Timothée Chalamet, and Florence Pugh appeared alongside one another in 2019.
9. Midsommar
Midsommar is surreal to the point of being consuming. It’s a movie largely based on psilocybic drugs that—by the end—feels like you’re in a trip of your own. It’s a visual masterpiece that will reward those with a strong stomach and a willingness to let their guard down and surrender to the strange.
8. Marriage Story
These are two incredibly gifted actors. It's just kind of a shame that they're flexing it in one of the most exorbitantly depressing movies I've ever seen. There are a few scenes that are just unreal. Someone here better be getting an Oscar.
7. The Lighthouse
It’s a romp through the surreal and paranormal. I’m not sure I could assign meaning to it, but I’m also not sure that matters. It looks really cool, it’s a lot of fun, and it combines two of the decade’s underrated, trendy figures: Robert Eggers as an emerging horror auteur and Robert Pattison as a heartthrob-turned-indie darling.
6. Honey Boy
Just when you think you’ve hit its most emotionally complicated moment, it turns again. Shia LaBeouf is just the best, and Lucas Hedges really tapped into something special. What a fraught and tender piece of work. The superpower of Honey Boy is its ability to take a concept that sounds like a grenade waiting to explode and lay it out on the screen in a nuanced, sensitive, tender way. This could have been a volatile, angry, bitter movie. Instead, LaBeouf managed to elevate it beyond that.
5. The Last Black Man In San Francisco
I love when I watch something and can feel how much the people who made it care about it. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a movie so elevated by its cinematography. The writing is great. The music is stunning. The acting is moving. But the visual spectacle of it all is legitimately breathtaking. What a gorgeous movie.
4. The Irishman
You come for the mob stuff and get sucked into an epic reflection on brotherhood and mortality. Scorcese is pretty good at this. Just your classic three and a half hour Al Pacino/Ray Romano/Action Bronson movie.
3. Once Upon A Time … In Hollywood
How does Quentin Tarantino make every movie the type of thing that swallows you whole and then shoots you out the other end like a rocket? It’s consuming, wonderful, and absurd. (And I love Brad Pitt.)
2. Uncut Gems
Sandler’s performance is miraculous. Kevin Garnett is the perfect NBA player for the role (others like Amar’e Stoudemire and Kobe Bryant were originally on the Safdie’s wish list). The score, by Oneohtrix Point Never, is mesmerizing and haunting. Julia Fox comes out of nowhere and anchors the third act. The Weeknd delivers a fully credible scene. Lakeith Stanfield’s understated bravado is flawless. The intro sequence!
Uncut Gems is a whirling and rabid race through one man’s impulse-driven life of high-stakes mistakes. Just when you think Sandler’s character can’t get any deeper, he parlays one bad choice into another. The film is a rubber band pulled so tightly that the only logical conclusion is a slingshot or a snap. Nothing here is quite action or typical “thriller” fare, yet the anxiety is poured on the viewer. The film is stunningly propulsive despite relatively little true action.
1. Parasite
Even before I’d reached the climax I caught myself wondering how director Bong Joon-ho had managed to stack so much on top of itself. You’re laughing, you’re crying, you’re sweating, you’re jumping.
It’s got a Jordan Peele mindset with Alfred Hitchcock sensibilities. No movie this decade blended genres so well, and painted such a complex portrait of its subjects.