‘Parasite’ and the other Best Movies of 2019
Police shootings, vile rich people, environmental catastrophe, political circuses, and the odd romance. As ever, the movies of 2019 reflect a tense and rattled world. This was apparent not just in smaller dramas and message documentaries that specialize in such things: Even the instantly forgettable children’s musical Frozen 2 was centered around an ancient blood feud.
Rather than simply forecasting doom on the horizon, however, what we are seeing on screens now feels more like coming to terms with our anxieties in order to accept and understand a future inevitability. That may sound like a recipe for grim tidings and in many cases it is. But 2019’s better movies teased out the humanity, the humor, and even the glimmerings of hope amidst that darkness.
Granted, some of that hope showed up in fairly angry ways. Two of the year’s better genre offerings—Knives Out and Ready or Not — smuggled a vicious critique of the upper-class into their tightly-wound plots. The former, Rian Johnson’s excellently twisty and brilliantly acted Agatha Christie pastiche, did a bait and switch by making viewers think they were puzzling out which of a wealthy author’s vile offspring killed him (was it Chris Evans? Michael Shannon?? Jamie Lee Curtis???) when the real story was the quietly heroic Hispanic home health aide whose resonant decency sharply contrasts with the family’s decadent myopia. The latter, an arsenic-funny horror comedy about a rich clan whose tradition for when anybody marries into the family is a Hunger Games-like night of competitive bloodletting, goes right for the jugular when the bride-to-be (Samara Weaving) disproves economic Darwinism with bullet, blade, and sarcasm.
Meanwhile, Star Wars: The End (We Promise) and Avengers: Endgame (It’s Really Not) showed once again that the studio system will milk a profitable but utterly exhausted franchise well past its creative expiration date as long as bodies keep filling seats. Another slate of Marvel movies is already forming up with a certain military precision to occupy theaters for the foreseeable future. It remains an open question how much longer non-event movies can continue to wage insurgent campaigns for the attention of moviegoers increasingly captured by studio franchise propaganda. Here are some of 2019’s best candidates for grabbing people’s attention:
1 — Parasite
Hilarious, angry, shocking, and hypnotic, this acerbic satire starts as a straight comedy, in which a young Seoul man scores a dream job as tutor for the daughter of a wealthy family. Seeing the parents as easy marks — none-too-bright in general, they seem particularly blind to anything poor people do — he discovers a way to stop his family’s scrabbling on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Soon his mother, father, and sister are all working in the house and getting away with everything they can. They are hardly cinematically virtuous working stiffs, more akin to the grifter-ish clan in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters. But as he showed with his breakout Marxist revolution-on-a-train thriller Snowpiercer, writer/director Bong Joon Ho is sharply attuned to the buried resentments of class differences, which here are suddenly and bloodily weaponized in an unforgettable twist.
2 — Uncut Gems
Yes, it’s true. The best actor of 2019 just might be Adam Sandler. Just watching his hyperbolic but also surprisingly subtle portrayal of a Diamond District hustler frenetically balancing multiple scams while simultaneously trying to keep his mistress and wife happy, not to mention sell a gem-encrusted Ethiopian rock to wide-eyed Celtics star Kevin Garnett (playing himself), is one of the year’s most nerve-wracking movie experiences. As in their last movie, Good Time, the Safdie brothers present New York as a scuzzball wonderland where everybody is pursuing wildly improbable and quasi-criminal dreams while operating on no sleep and too much caffeine. Jittery and enrapturing.
3— Booksmart
We’ve seen the premise for this teen comedy before — nerdy social pariahs trying to make one big splash before graduating high school. But Olivia Wilde’s sharp, subversive take throws a curveball at its Ruth Bader Ginsburg-worshipping heroines once Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Mollie (breakout star Beanie Feldstein) discover they’ve wasted four years avoiding parties to focus on studying because all the popular kids they despise also got good grades. After that, there’s nothing for it but one night of damn-the-torpedoes hedonism. It’s a fresh, original, and ridiculously funny update on the Superbad template.
4 — Ash is Purest White
An alternate history of modern China refracted through a pulsating crime narrative, Jia Zhang-Ke’s saga follows a gracefully gorgeous moll (Tao Zhao) as she puts everything on the line for her arrogant gangster boss lover (Fan Liao). Seemingly on top of the world in the early 2000s, their perfect little crime enterprise is shattered when a new wave of punks come flooding in, representing a rapacious new era of gangster capitalism. Tracking the disruption and chaos of modern China with gorgeous camerawork and a poetic moodiness, the movie tosses in blips of surrealism that, given the rate of the country’s change, feel hardly different from reality.
5 — The Lighthouse
The latest historical horror provocation from Robert Eggers (The Witch), this bottled-up two-hander suggests what might have happened if David Lynch had ever tried his hand at adapting an H.P. Lovecraft story. Set at an isolated lighthouse in the 1890s that feels like it may as well be the 1600s, it watches the two keepers — Robert Pattinson as the brooding new arrival with a dark secret and Willem Dafoe as the quasi-self-satirizing old salt — try to keep their wits about them as the sea rages, supplies run low, the hooch flows, and reality bleeds into dark Cronenbergian fantasy. Mixing nightmarish dream imagery with sharply observed interpersonal drama, Eggers presents a twisted and unnerving portrait of madness at the edge of the world.
6 — One Child Nation
It is well known that back in the 1970s, China instituted a policy of letting parents have only one child (rural families could be allowed two) in order to fight off overpopulation and starvation. The aftermath is less well known outside of China. This eye-opening documentary from Nanfu Wang and Zhang Lynn takes an on-the-ground, personal approach (Wang returns to her rural village to interview people about what they did) to the policy and the human price that was paid. The horrors recounted range from forced abortions and sterilizations to the many babies (mostly female, seen as less valuable) abandoned to starvation. Set against that toll, the reactions range from searing guilt to stony insistence that the alternative would have been worse. Refusing to take sides, Wang and Lynn’s quiet stunner of a movie lets peoples’ stories speak for themselves.
7— Queen & Slim
Melina Matsoukas’ brisk, romantic, and daring feature debut turns that oldest of American movie tropes — criminal lovers on the run — on its head. Mismatched couple “Slim” (Daniel Kaluuya, more charismatic than usual) and “Queen” (an indeed regal Jodie Turner-Smith) are finishing up a lackluster date when a bad traffic stop ends with them killing the police officer after he shoots Queen thinking she’s reaching for a gun. Hitting the road with vague notions of fleeing to Cuba, they trawl through a beautifully captured American South of fog-shrouded small towns, lugubrious criminals, and suspicious eyes. (Matsoukas’ video background shows up in a rapturously rendered, romantic, and dreamy segment when the two dance in a juke joint that feels like an episode from out of time.) Focusing more on its couple’s relationship than the surrounding media circus, the movie winds a bracing critique of systemic racism into a chase narrative that ends in a far more complicated and tragic place than viewers may expect.
8— Ad Astra
A near-future space adventure that mixes up Kubrickian rigor with an affecting mournfulness, James Gray’s ambitious venture into science fiction sends astronaut Brad Pitt far into the solar system on a likely suicide mission to find out whether his long-missing father (Tommy Lee Jones) has gone Colonel Kurtz after his long isolation in space. Along the way, Pitt faces one incredible set piece after another, from abandoned space stations to isolated madness-shrouded Mars outposts and a run-in with lunar pirates. The last, a near-silent, zero-G moon rover chase sequence, is not only a technical marvel deserving lengthy study by future filmmakers, but also a cautionary tale about the limited ability of technological advancement to change the basics of human nature.
9—1917
Pulling from both the pell-mell adrenalized rush of Children of Men and the soulful realism of Dunkirk, Sam Mendes revitalizes a career marred by too many Bond movies and overwrought Oscar seekers with this terse and occasionally overwhelming war movie. Two British soldiers are ordered to make a dash across enemy territory — which the brass promises is now unoccupied — to stop another unit from launching an assault certain to be a massacre. As 1,600 lives, including one of the men’s brothers, hang in the balance, the two race through a landscape that is alternately hellish (rats scurrying over rotting corpses) and gorgeous (the paradisaical green fields that lay beyond no man’s land). Heightening the real-time pacing, Mendes shot it in one seemingly continuous Steadicam flow (there are hidden cuts, much like Hitchcock did with Rope). Though hampered by some episodic time-stretching gimmickry, 1917 masterfully threads potentially futile heroism with a relentless and even poetic horror.
10— When Lambs Become Lions
Director Jon Kasbe spent three years shooting this poignant, grippingly dramatic documentary, and it shows. Tracking the parallel stories of two men on either side of the endangered elephant crisis in Kenya — one is an ivory poacher and all-around fixer, the other a ranger assigned to protect the elephants — Kasbe shows how pride and economic realities can muddy up a seemingly simple story of good and evil. Beautifully shot, it feels at times like a haunting last message from a world at an environmental tipping point.
11— Us
The less one knows about Jordan Peele’s ridiculously creative and ambitious second feature the better. Suffice it to say that the movie starts out as a fun family vacation comedy that first turns into a home invasion thriller with an unreal twist (the invaders look like dead ringers for each member of the family) before veering off into a see-it-to-believe-it last act that calls to mind everything from George Romero to The Twilight Zone, while scattering canny references to the camp vampire classic Lost Boys. Peele may overextend himself with his conclusion, but its haunting imagery and the stinging political subtext will stay with you.
12— Loro
The latest gaudy free-for-all from Paolo Sorrentino (The Young Pope, The Great Beauty) is a gutsy portrait of Silvio Berlusconi and the myriad ways his corrupted appetites drag Italy into the gutter. Even chopped down to a mere 151 minutes for its American release — the Italian version came in two parts — Loro is an overexuberant circus of a movie, presided over by the great Toni Servillo as the mythical man whom the story’s various pathetic courtiers spend are desperately courting for approval. As ever, Sorrentino frequently overindulges in the post-Fellini decadence for his sumptuous feast of carnality (the dead sheep?). But he chases it with a stinging, dark humor that makes the whole endeavor uncomfortably relevant.
13— Birds of Passage
Already one of the great modern crime epics, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s thrilling and tragic movie follows the rise to power of an indigenous clan in the Columbian desert as they discover the profits to be made trafficking drugs to America but are blindsided by the price to be paid. Easy money and power fuels greed and corrupted morality. Traditions and family ties decay. Like all great gangster sagas, it’s a familiar tale in the outline, but the downfall is still mesmerizing, in large part due to the filmmakers’ close observation of ritual and magnificent sense of spectacle.
14— Marriage Story
A humane, heartrending, and sometimes explosively emotional story of a onetime ingenue (Scarlett Johansson) divorcing from her theater director husband (Adam Driver), Marriage Story gets under your skin like shrapnel from an explosion. Honestly, there was not much in Noah Baumbach’s work that suggested he had this kind of movie in him. As perceptive and funny as Kicking and Screaming and The Squid and the Whale were, their specificity of autobiographical experience made them somewhat narrow in appeal. But even though Marriage Story might also be inspired from the filmmaker’s life, and the couple are swaddled in luxurious artistry, there is a universality to the frayed-nerve emotional combat. Also, Driver’s unexpected and unexpectedly soulful rendition of Sondheim’s “Being Alive” might be the year’s single best movie musical moment.
15— Sea of Shadows
Richard Ladkani’s eco-thriller documentary mixes you-are-there action jitters with strident messaging, creating what feels like a new kind of cinematic reportage about the collision of human greed and environmental frailty. Set in the Gulf of California, the movie details the efforts of activists and journalists trying to keep the dolphin-like vaquita (who keep getting caught in nets meant for totoaba, known as the “cocaine of the sea” for the value of their bladders on the Chinese black market) from extinction. Righteous and somewhat terrifying, Ladkani’s movie sets up the fight for the vaquita as a kind of test: If this species cannot be saved from cartels and corrupt officials, then untold other species, and the Earth itself, are in for a tough time.
Honorable mentions: American Factory, Apollo 11, The Edge of Democracy, The Farewell, Ford v Ferrari, Her Smell, A Hidden Life, Honeyland, Hustlers, I Lost My Body, The Kingmaker, Knives Out, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Maiden, The Report, Rocketman, Woman at War, Yesterday.
The disappointments: Avengers: Endgame, Blinded by the Light, Downton Abbey, Gloria Bell, The Goldfinch, Joker, Where’d You Go Bernadette?.
Best actors: Christian Bale (Ford v Ferrari), Jessie Buckley (Wild Rose), Adam Driver (Marriage Story), Cynthia Erivo (Harriet), Halldora Geirharosdottir (Woman at War), Paul Walter Hauser (Richard Jewell), Elisabeth Moss (Her Smell), Adam Sandler (Uncut Gems).
Breakthrough performance: Lauren ‘Lolo’ Spencer (Give Me Liberty)
Best ensemble: Knives Out
Best director: James Gray (Ad Astra)
Best music: Marriage Story
Best cinematography: The Lighthouse
Best repertory re-release: Babylon (1981)
Best Criterion DVD: 1984
Semi-annual award for distracting digital effects: De-aging Robert De Niro in The Irishman
