#plot twist maybe el actually painted the painting the whole time and just had will carry it for her

[zaiexs]

i- i just can’t make this up guys it’s like if i called will a bald boy with superpowers

[subvertingyourexpectations]

Top Ten Films of 2019

2019 was… I’m gonna be honest, not a very great year for cinema. Aside from a handful of standouts, I have seen very few things that completely blew me away. Especially given the past few years, we haven’t gotten a Roma, or a Phantom Thread, or a Denis Villeneuve movie. Anyway, this is my top ten favorite films of 2019. 

But first…

Films That Would Make It But Didn’t “Technically” Come Out in 2019

Long Day’s Journey into Night

I already talked at length about this film, but I love it to pieces. It has twisted the visual language of cinema into its own beautiful and bizarre version, crafting a puzzle box of a movie that I absolutely adored. But, it technically came out at the end of 2018, so it can’t be on the list. 

Tigers Are Not Afraid

If you like foreign films, this is a must-see. If you like tragic dramas anchored by some terrific child actor performances, this is a must-see. If you like horror movies, well, it’s not really a horror movie but people keep describing it as one, so you should probably see it. It’s a beautiful little imaginative tale about the effects of the drug war on orphaned kids, and if you can catch it on streaming I would definitely check it out. But, even though it came out in limited release in August, it came out in Mexico in 2017, so I can’t include it. 

One Cut of the Dead 

Maybe the most original film I’ve seen in years? The first half is a terrific little zombie flick all in one camera shot, and somehow the second half expands on this and is ten times better. Watching this in a packed house was one of my favorite moviegoing experiences of the year. It’s one of the most funny and, again, original movies I’ve seen in years.  

Shadow

UGH ALL THE GREAT FOREIGN FILMS DIDN’T COME OUT IN 2019. Anyway this movie is incredible and is maybe the best use of grayscale I’ve seen in any film. 

Movies That Might’ve Made the List But I Sadly Have Not Seen Them Yet

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Pain and Glory 

1917

Bad Education

Little Women

The Souvenir 

Okay, now onto the actual list…

10. Ad Astra

Brad Pitt and James Gray’s remake of Apocalypse Now in space is maybe the weirdest premise for a movie, and yet I really enjoyed Ad Astra. There’s clearly some touches of studio interference that make this movie worse (read: Brad Pitt’s narration), but the underlying themes of anxiety and depression are some of the best I’ve seen on screen. Couple that with Brad Pitt’s best performance of the year (yes), the visual splendor on display, and this movie is an easy inclusion in my top ten of the year. 

9. Uncut Gems

I need to go lie down. After really enjoying the Safdie Brothers’ previous films (Good Time and Heaven Knows What), I was really excited for this movie, and I was not let down. The frenetic, dare-I-say crackhead energy that the Safdies are able to convey in their films is immensely satisfying to watch, and the way Adam Sandler channels it is one of my favorite performances of the year. The last twenty minutes of this movie is just pure panic attack. 

8. The Irishman

Somehow Scorsese’s 209-minute long epic is one of the most watchable films of the year. This is just a terrific example of everyone firing on all cylinders; the performances are great, the script is great, the editing is unbelievable (this movie feels like it is two hours long), and the directing and thematic development towards the third act is some of Scorsese’s best.  

7. The Farewell

A calling card for director Lulu Wang as much as it is for Awkwafina in dramatic roles, The Farewell is an absolute delight. The family dynamics throughout all feel refreshingly authentic, and the film masterfully weaves between its comedic moments and tragic undertones. If it wasn’t for some choices made at the ending, this would probably rank higher on my list. 

6. El Camino

How bad was 2019 for film? A Breaking Bad movie is my sixth favorite film of the year. It doesn’t matter if we “needed” this movie or not, El Camino is just so incredibly well-made and enjoyable. It’s always a pleasure seeing something new in the Breaking Bad universe, but more than that I think this film is a genuinely beautiful swan song for one of the greatest characters in television.

5. Waves

This movie is meandering, aimless, pretentious, and completely style over substance. And yet, the last half hour of this movie hit me harder than almost anything this year. Regardless of how you feel about the characters, I feel like Waves has an overwhelmingly positive message in the end, which is to grow away from your hatred and learn to forgive and love. I’m sure many people will find the way this movie gets to that message to be kind of pointless and wandering, but to me it just turned a pretty good film into one of my favorites of the year. 

4. The Mustang

My local 3-screen art house closed in April of this year. I went there as often as I could, because they were the only theater in town that would play a lot of independent and foreign films. It was the first place I saw Roma, and the first (and, let’s face it, last) time I saw Stalker on the big screen. The last night they were open, I went and saw The Mustang, not based on anything to do with the movie, just because I wanted to be there one last time. It was completely sold out, far busier than I’d ever seen them. In the past I’d always had free roam of where to sit, but that last night I was in the third row from the front.  

If Ad Astra is about depression, then The Mustang is about anger, and learning to overcome your anger and grow as a person. It’s about a prison in Nevada that has a rehabilitation program where violent convicts train wild Mustangs, which are later sold to local ranches and farms. Roman (a terrific performance from Matthias Schoenaerts) is one such convict, and his personal struggle to overcome his anger is beautifully realized against the backdrop of having to fight a wild animal. (Seriously, he goes in swinging and it does not end well for him.) It’s a great story, and it’s a must-watch if you haven’t seen it. The emotional ending coupled with the fact that my favorite theater was closing left me a complete wreck when the credits rolled. (I’m starting to realize my top five films all just boil down to “the ending wrecked me”.) 

3. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part

This is like The Mustang but for kids.

Okay okay, hear me out, I only saw this movie once when it first came out 11 months ago, and I’m not ever watching it again because I thought it was perfection. I feel like on a repeat visit the songs will become grating, the plot will feel ridiculous, and the themes of toxic masculinity that I appreciated so dearly will seem like faint whispers instead of clear subtext. And yet in the theater, I absolutely adored the songs and the plot and the clear subtext about being a better brother/man. The real-world parallels that were a surprise twist at the end of the first film are used beautifully in The Second Part, because the plot is simply just one big metaphor for a little sister who wants to play with her older brother. It’s touching, it’s funny, and it gets stuck inside your heart. It’s such a shame that the LEGO film franchise is all but dead, because if we had kept getting films like this, children’s movies would definitely be better for it. 

2. Parasite

Everything fantastic about this film has already been said about it by people far smarter than me, so I’ll just say this: it is every bit as amazing as people hyped it up to be. This movie is a biting satire, a laugh-out-loud comedy, and an edge of your seat thriller. It has left an imprint on my brain since I first saw it back in October, to the point where as much as I have tried to analyze and dissect, this film, I don’t know if there’s a single flaw with it, there’s genuinely nothing I would change about this movie. If you see one movie this year, it should be Parasite. 

1. The Last Black Man in San Francisco

In July of 2019, I had to make probably the biggest decision of my (brief) career thus far. I was going to leave my management position at a 24-screen theater I’d loved dearly to go work in an office. I loved everything about the movie theater, I’d worked there for almost four years, but at a certain point it just had diminishing returns. Newer upper management and constant changes coming down from the big-whigs had turned my favorite building into a place I started to resent, a place I didn’t recognize. I tried to fight the change, and re-institute everything I loved about this building that I practically grew up in, but you can’t fight change, and you shouldn’t romanticize the past.  

I’ve never seen these themes more realized in film than in The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It tells the story of Jimmie Fails, a native San Franciscan who has to watch the city he’s loved his whole life descend into a rapidly gentrified hellscape that leaves many homeless and helpless. He often visits his childhood home, a beautiful three-story house with a “witch hat” on top, now owned by an older white couple. This doesn’t stop him from romanticizing the house, romanticizing the past, as he constantly visits and attempts to fix up the house, oftentimes clashing with the current inhabitants. 

This disdain from the couple is an all-too-real parallel message that he’s getting from the city itself: You’re not welcome here anymore. Much as Jimmie has tied his identity to this home, and this city, he is hardly welcome in either. But for one brief instant, he gets to live his dream. The house gets stuck in a familial dispute, causing the older couple to move out. Leaving behind a big empty house that no one is occupying, Jimmie and his best friend Montgomery decide to just move right in, and have their way. They bring in all the old furniture from Jimmie’s childhood, they paint the walls, repair the original woodworking, all in service of Jimmie’s dream to simply exist in this space, and preserve something sacred.

Eventually though, reality comes crashing down, and try as he might, Jimmie can’t stay in the house, and he has to learn a hard truth: you cannot tie yourself emotionally to a physical space. Whether it’s a house, a city, a job, you simply cannot love something that doesn’t love you back. You will get hurt every time. 

But it’s so easy to love. It’s so easy to play the piano in the entranceway of your childhood home. It’s so easy to relax in the sauna upstairs, or smoke on the balcony, or just lay on the floor and admire the witch hat. The Last Black Man in San Francisco makes you fall in love with this house, and with Jimmie and Montgomery, and as much as we see ourselves in them, we too have to learn the same lessons. As much as we want to inhabit a space, and get the fullest potential out of it, you cannot ever stop change, and you cannot stand in the way of it without going insane. 

And maybe it was just because I was going through this personal development the first time I saw this movie, but it hit me like a ton of bricks. It stuck in my brain so much that by the time I saw it a second time, I was a complete mess; I cried four times. I cried for Jimmie, I cried for the house, and I cried for myself. I cried for the things we all lost, the things that would never be the same, and because we would have to learn to accept that. This is what’s so beautiful about The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and on top of the phenomenal acting, emotional script, and gorgeous visuals, it’s what made it my favorite film of the year.