The 25 best films of 2019, and other fine motion picture entertainments

Sofia Boutella and company, Climax, directed by Gaspar Noe

I have never found ranked lists of anything entirely credible, because after all what could be the really credible meteric by which a critic could take a group of films, or books, or restaurants even, that they admired during a discrete time period and break down their various levels of quality to the extent that the distinctions between one and ten were so argumentatively substantial that you could understand just why the tenth best was at that bottom rung (as opposed to why that first best so roundly exemplified the virtues of the art form under discussion). I doubt that most critics go to the trouble of really breaking down those distinctions, if any in fact exist. And it seems like the process, which I suspect might be more of a math problem than an aesthetic one, would be laborious, tedious, and sure, ultimately pointless.

Which is a long-winded way of getting to the point that I'm not sure why, this year, I decided to present 25 of my most-loved films of 2019 in a ranked list, the assembly process of which mainly consisted of shuffling around the 17 titles below the top eight. Or the 20 titles below the top ten. Or something. Which is not to say, for instance, that I don't think Little Women is a better film than Marriage Story, for those of you apt to raise an eyebrow. I do. But not worlds better. Only a bit. 

1) The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)

The piece I wrote about this movie for Decider is not a proper review but does contain some, you know, observations. It also has an explanation as to why the content of this blog has been even less than less than robust for a while. I also, for Decider, wrote about Pacino's Hoffa and Nicholson's Hoffa. 

2) Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)

Beautiful, vulnerable, surprising. And in terms of acting, practically a tie with The Irishman. 

3) Black Mother (Khalik Allah)

4) Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

My thought upon leaving the screening was, "Goddamn him, he did exactly what I did not wish for him to do, and he made me love it." 

5) High Life (Claire Denis)

A refreshingly blunt science-fiction movie. 

6) Climax (Gaspar Noé)

Lurid sensationalism done right. 

7) Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler)

8) Uncut Gems (Josh and Bennie Safdie)

Stressful. The only movie to elicit an actual nightmare for me in some time. 

9) Rolling Thunder Revue (Martin Scorsese)

A delightful jest, with notable music.

10) Asako 1 + 2 (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)

11) The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)

Let me Rolle it to you.

12) Portrait of a Lady on Fire  (Céline Sciamma)

An impressive hybrid of Art Film and Movie-Movie With Strong Rooting Interest.

13) Little Women (Greta Gerwig)

Guys, it's good! It's got mise-en-scéne! But seriously: I kept hearing about how radical and stuff it was, but what more impressed me about the picture was its genuine tenderness. There's a rare delicacy of feeling here.

14) The Burial of Kojo (Blitz Bazawule)

15) Dark Waters (Todd Haynes)

People have said things like, "Todd Haynes should work outside his comfort zone more often" but why is taking on a directing job at the request/behest of another artist you admire some kind of alienated labor? The direction and the restless inventiveness of Ed Lachman's cinematography are nothing but assured. And yes, I am going to be replacing much of the household cookware. 

16) Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)

Doesn't take sides. 

17) In Fabric (Peter Strickland)

18) A Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi Gan)

19) Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)

A very good Bong Joon Ho picture.

20) The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch)

Not just another Jarmusch movie, but that also. There's real and new discomfort under its droll get-off-my-lawn-surfaces. 

21) Suburban Birds (Qiu Sheng)

22) Sorry Angel (Christophe Honoré)

23) Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas)

24) The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)

I've come around a bit on it since the above-linked Venice consideration. My more recent consideration is, if you think it's too much, good. Think about why you think that.

25) Our Time (Reygadas)

There they are, then. 25.

Unranked, then, other films I enjoyed, and reviewed, in alphabetical order:

Apollo 11  (Miller)

Aquarela (Kossakovsky)

Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)

Barbara Rubin (Chuck Smith)

Burning Cane (Phillip Youmans)

By the Grace of God (François Ozon)

Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt)

The Eyes Of Orson Welles (Mark Cousins)

First Love (Takashi Miike)

Grass (Hong Sang-Soo)

Hotel By The River (same guy)

Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez)

The Load (Ognjen Glavonic)

Piercing (Nicolas Pesce)

The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow)

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (Matt Wolf)

Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood)

Shadow (Zhang Yimou) 

Sword of Trust (Lynn Shelton)

Velvet Buzzsaw (Dan Gilroy)

Films I enjoyed but did not review include these: 

Ad Astra (James Grey)

A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood (Marielle Heller)

Diane (Kent Jones)

Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer)

Knives Out (Rian Johnson)

The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)

Midsommar (Ari Aster)

The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)

Us (Jordan Peele) 

Restored films:

A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan)

Duet For Cannibals (Susan Sontag)

The Fate Of Lee Khan (King Hu)

Hyenas (Djibril Diop Mambéty)

The Juniper Tree (Nietzchka Keene)

Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey)

Queen of Diamonds (Nina Menkes)

Films I Could Not Review

Of course, I was quite taken with both High Flying Bird and The Laundromat (whose Brechtian finale proved something of a critical point of contention), and I recommend those films highly. But I remain too much personally in the camp of Steven Soderbergh (sorry if that sounds like a humblebrag or whatever you call it) to recommend them without full disclosure. Here, for example, is a photo taken of myself yucking it up in Venice, at the film festival, with Corey Bayes, the first associate editor on both films, and someone who has helped me out with a wonky piece or two. What an afternoon that was! Earlier in the day, I was hotly excoriated on Twitter by a "positive" film blogger who called me something like a "shit scumbag" for making sport of some eminently-make-sport-of-able thing he'd said about Joker. Anyway, here he comes waltzing (I had another verb, beginning with a "w" and ending in a "g," but it was not positive enough) into the very same reception (and not nearly so well dressed as Corey and I, not to mention the mysterious beauty behind us), and I'm thinking — get this — "Now's the time to mend fences. I should introduce him to the gang." I then mentioned the events of earlier in the day to Corey, who said, "He must be a very important person if he can call you such things." Anyway. I never got around to making the introductions. Like the song says, "Oh well. We'll catch up some other time." 

That's it. Surely the year also offered us terrible films, and bad-as-opposed to good films, but I've got to get back to work on the book so better not to stir up stuff. See you around these parts in April I hope. 

Comments

[Oliver]

My only complaint about 'Apollo 11' is that it should have been a half-hour longer! I'm sorry I missed the IMAX screenings.

[Andrew David Del Monte]

Glad to see Dead Don't Die and Asako I & II get some love, two of my favourites.

I'd be very, very interested in reading your thoughts on the weird Jennifer Carpenter sequence in Dragged. Also, I think Zahler should have just set that movie in Vancouver since they did basically nothing to disguise it. I enjoyed the film but find some of Zahler's dialogue annoying. Also, he may not be an actual racist, but he does seem to want people to wonder if he is an actual racist, and I don't see how that improves his films, really.

BTW, hope you publish another reading list this year! Thanks to this blog I started reading Robert Coover and Harry Mathews. Happy new year!

[Bobby]

I always look forward to posts here. Thanks for doing it!! A great breakdown of the year. Hopefully, we'll get a Best of Blu Ray of 2019? Thanks again, Glenn!

[Kevin Oppegaard]

First of all Glenn: I want to thank you for your jazz albums list - comments are closed but I wanted you to know that I subsequently purchased both the rediscovered Bill Evans at the top, and I love them.

I know it's way down on your list, but can you explain why everyone likes The Souvenir? I've watched it twice at home on blu-ray and I totally don't get it. It's badly shot and edited, both the leads are lifeless and the story is dull. But there it is as Sight & Sound's no. 1 film of 2019. Is it just me?

[Glenn Kenny]

Kevin, I don't know if it's just you but I enjoyed it. I thought the cinematography was low-key rather than poor and thought the editing was appropriate to the theme and story. What are you gonna do? No accounting for taste, as they say.

[Andrew Del Monte]

Hi there! I really disliked Joker but also find it a little confusing which movies you deride as offensive or amoral somehow, and which you don't. Long story short, I don't really understand how Dragged Across Concrete or Climax could be considered less offensive on the subject of race than Joker (even though I greatly prefer both movies). Re: Climax, I was definitely uncomfortable with how the black characters were depicted as violent, rapists or incestuous; and there was something suspicious about the way, as the film becomes more grotesque and disturbing, the extreme close-up shots of black bodies and faces were intended to amplify those qualities. Would be interested in hearing your thoughts, and hope my tone isn't taken as contentious in any way.

BTW, weird coincidence (?) which you might enjoy: the last shots of both Oscar nominated Jokers in their respective films were direct lifts from shots of De Niro in a Scorsese movie: the inverted shot of Ledger was taken from Cape Fear, and the shot of Phoenix being chased by orderlies was taken from King of Comedy when the security guards are chasing Rupert in the network offices. I guess I can’t say for sure if the shot in TDK was a conscious lift but in the case of Joker I think it’s obvious.

[Glenn Kenny]

Andrew:

OK, let me lay it out for you. In "Joker," the exasperation Fleck has toward his female, African-American social worker doesn't so much seem to have its roots in the Inefficiency of the System, given the waves of resentment Fleck/Phoenix aims directly at her. The bus sequence features Fleck finding reasons to be hostile to a conspicuously overweight African-American woman. Later, when he has a gun, he aims it at a television set that's showing the African-American dance team, the Nicholas Brothers. At the end of the movie, he murders an African American female doctor.

In "Climax" I did not notice that the close ups of the people of color were any more or less conspicuously grotesque than the close ups of anyone else, so you got me there. As for "Concrete," as I said in my review, yeah, Zahler is clearly trolling every now and again viz. race but not unforgivably. Given the fact that the movie ends with establishing its African-American protagonist as having more integrity and brains and resilience than anyone else in the movie is a salient point. If Zahler did that just to fool people into thinking he's not a white supremacist, he's doing white supremacist wrong.

There you have it. "Joker" is still and will always be garbage. Total garbage, not just racist garbage.

[Andrew Del Monte]

Fair enough. I guess to me the provocations of Joker don't seem much worse than Zahler's (especially in Brawl), but I guess everyone's bothered differently. These things are probably harder to swallow in a shit movie (topnotch cinematography notwithstanding).

Re: Climax, it was provocative enough on race for the (not extra sharp) guy I saw it with to comment that it captured "what was going on in France" where "the immigrants are tearing up the country." Personally I was just uncomfortable and put off, but again, we're all different. Anyway, thanks for the time.

[George]

"Mr. Kenny, your comments about 'Joker' indicate you are unfit to write about movies. Martin Scorsese needs to watch it so he can learn how to direct. The fact that 'Joker' got more Oscar nominations than 'The Irishman' shows that Todd Phillips is The Man." -- DC Fanboy/Incels everywhere

Seriously, I was amazed that sites devoted to nerd culture (comics, superhero movies) were filled with comments defending "Joker" weeks before it was released. As with "The Dark Knight," fans decided in advance -- without seeing it -- that this movie was a masterpiece.

Their most typical comment was that "the critics" were saying "Joker" would lead to mass murders in real life. Funny, I read many reviews and don't recall such a comment ...

[George]

The other trend I noticed on fan sites: accusing critics of being "subjective" and bringing opinions (gasp!) into their reviews.

Apparently, movie reviews are supposed to be "objective" and not include any opinions. Maybe just a plot synopsis, and a graf about the films's box office.

Of course, if you hail these movies as instant classics, there won't be any fan complaints. If you don't praise them, however, you're "not being open-minded."

[Gordon Cameron]

That unfortunate bugbear might have been brought in from fan responses to videogame journalism. Gamers are endlessly griping that a review is 'subjective' as if there were any other kind.

[George]

Another annoying fan trope: the idea that Joker is some obscure, low-budget indie/arthouse film that somehow was discovered by the public, made a billion dollars, and is now up for Oscars. A true underdog story!

Stephanie Zacharek wrote a Time column nailing that one. That and the way comic-book fans continue to portray themselves as an oppressed minority, even though Hollywood does everything it can to cater to their tastes.

I was a comic-book fan back when fans really WERE bullied misfits. But that time ended a couple of decades ago. Now that fans are driving the bus, I don't have much sympathy for their gripes.

[Jon K]

I've really been out of the loop movie-wise for the past year due to a hectic work situation, so I'm stoked to see this list. Seeing "Black Mother"listed so high piqued my interest since Criterion Channel is streaming it at the moment. Will give it (and others) a watch when I can find the time. Thanks, Glenn.