15. Honey Boy
Movies that hit you so hard in the gut with raw emotion and genuine pain are hard to come by, but Honey Boy did just that this year. Based on Shia Labeouf’s adolescence as a child actor with an abusive father, the movie gives us insight into Labeouf’s most vulnerable moments. Noah Jupe, who plays young Otis, gives a breakout performance that hopefully will launch a long career for the talented young actor. Director Alma Har’el brings a sense of delicacy to such a painful story that you cannot miss if you’re catching up on this year’s releases. (Emily Kubincanek)
14. Midsommar
2019 was truly the year for sophomore features. Following his 2018 tale of family trauma, Hereditary, Ari Aster was quickly back this year with Midsommar, a break-up movie on a lot of mushrooms. Aster brought back his strange love for head trauma and grief but set it to the tone of Swedish folk music and pagan chants. Instead of a collapsing family, though, this is all about a collapsing relationship. Dani (Florence Pugh) and Christian (Jack Reynor) orbit each other like dying stars, poking and prodding at each other, but never leaving because it feels comfortable. It is a harrowing and too real portrayal of codependency that struck me to my core.
Most importantly, though, it was a vehicle for Florence Pugh to get the recognition she rightly deserves. Her performance as Dani is similar to that of Toni Collette in Hereditary. She throws her entire being into her character. She screams, cries, heaves, vomits; this is a physically demanding role, but Pugh was up to the challenge. Her emotional investment in the portrayal of grief and hurt makes Midsommar all the more effective. (Mary Beth McAndrews)
13. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’ deeply personal, beautiful but heartbreaking tale of gentrification and its consequences is easily one of the most exciting films of 2019 in terms of introducing exciting new talent. The screenplay, co-authored by Talbot and Rob Richert, melds personal details with universal Odyssean archetypes to create an intriguingly intimate epic of a young man fighting to return to a home that, in many ways, no longer truly exists. Realized beautifully with impeccable visual storytelling and amazing performances from Fails and Jonathan Majors, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is specific to its place and time while achieving an ageless, practically mythic quality. A loving portrait and razor-sharp critique bundled together in one fascinating and almost paradoxical package, it’s easily one of the most exhilaratingly original films to make it to the screen in 2019. And that’s before mentioning Emile Mosseri’s absolutely incredible score. That it did not even make the Oscars shortlist is such a gross oversight the Academy ought to be embarrassed. (Ciara Wardlow)
12. Transit
Christian Petzold’s Transit is a film that’s hard to explain but easy to love. The initial conceit is a bit of a head-spinner. It’s an adaptation of a WWII novel about German refugees fleeing through a French port city that modernizes the story — except not quite. The film takes place not exactly in the present but not exactly in the past. In Tralfamadorian fashion, it’s unstuck in time, with as many signifiers of 1940s France as there are examples of modern technology. It takes a moment to adjust to this, but once you get on board with the film’s wavelength the result is a remarkably simple narrative about characters bound to the ones they love, even at their own detriment as this is what prevents them from fleeing to safety. The film’s brilliance unfurls slowly, in a way that rewards multiple viewings (personally, I’m at eight watches so far and looking forward to my ninth). The film is never ostentatious about its narrative of fascism and its prescience in our current moment, but I firmly believe that years from now, we’ll look back on this movie and be amazed at how it had its finger on the pulse. There’s a bleak honesty in the way that the film’s characters know their freedom is hanging by a thread and yet are preoccupied with their relatively mundane personal dramas. There’s nothing more human than assuming you have more time than you actually do. (Anna Swanson)
11. High Life
Claire Denis has never made the same film twice. In fact, she’s never come close. She’s a filmmaker with a distinct style and a remarkably singular understanding of how to craft a film, allowing her work to be identifiable from a single frame, but she’s never repeated herself or failed to innovate. With her latest and first English language film, she delivered one of the coldest sci-fi films in recent memory — an accomplishment considering the inherent sterility of a space narrative — while infusing this journey to the stars with all of the brutality and tenderness that her deeply human stories are known for. High Life continued and exemplified Robert Pattinson’s hunger for challenging roles and his willingness to immerse himself in the most depraved corners of a character’s psyche in order to bring them to life. As an actor, he’s finely attuned to Denis’s sensibilities and he excels at delivering a brilliantly introspective performance that is getting little attention awards-wise but will surely be reflected on as one of the strongest performances of the decade. Pattinson’s work is just one of many pieces of the puzzle that come together to make High Life one of the best films of the year and, as we should expect from Denis, an accomplishment in cinema that is unparalleled and unrivaled. (Anna Swanson)
Related Topics: 2019 Rewind
