According to Dictionary.com, the 2019 word of the year was existential. Existential defined as “of or relating to the existence and/or concerned with the nature of human existence as determined by the individual’s freely made choices.” In choosing the word existential, the importance lies in that it, “inspires us to ask big questions about who we are and what our purpose is in the face of our various challenges—and it reminds us that we can make choices about our lives in how we answer those questions.” If that is the importance of the word existential, then I can’t describe a better word to describe how I felt about the 2019 year in films. As the movie landscape continuously becomes bombarded with the same formulaic box-office hits, it’s the gems found within that provide me the most hope, as they ask the questions that the word existential ponders us to question. These are the films that ask questions not for purely the creation of entertainment, but because they view the world of cinema as life and death, a world in which the words and images spattered on the screen work to make a difference in a viewer’s perspective of life.
Despite the extraordinary work created that make up my top ten, I can’t deny the utter delight I had in watching a handful of other films as well, from the deft reflections towards cinema and life by a legendary auteur in The Irishman, to the colorful and woozy nightmare of a break-up/empowerment film in Midsommar, to the cold, distant, and repressed nature of human existence at its worst in High Life, to the mid-life crisis of a toy cowboy in Toy Story 4, to A Marriage Story, A Hidden Life, The Lighthouse, Hustlers, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; my list of honorable mentions could go on and on as 2019 provided a year of magic in the land of cinema. However, due to social constructs that deem a top 18+ a strange thing for our eyes to behold (and the mere fact this feature would be unnecessarily longer than it already is), here are my top ten films of 2019, a list that will surely change the moment it is published.
10. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar, 2019)
If one thought The Irishman was the movie about self-reflexivity and ruminations, one has not seen Pain and Glory, the epitome of this concept. Centering around Salvador Mallo played by the devastating Antonio Banderas and director Pedro Almodóvar’s surrogate, Pain and Glory depicts the self-revelations of a director in amidst of a creative crisis. Unable to create any inventive piece in the modern-day, Mallo finds himself recollecting his past, trying to puzzle together what made him loathe and repress the past that shaped him to who he is today. Depicting a man who is all over the place, Pain and Glory embraces this messiness, demonstrating the awkward, yet needed embrace of our past. Almodóvar provides a kaleidoscopic nature of seeing that past, giving new meaning to what we have perceived through a buoyant use of colors and a smattering of self-deprecating humor, injecting Pain and Glory with a dose of personalness, honesty, and vulnerability rare in films today. In the end, the past is the past for a reason, a state or action that has already happened. Pain and Glory invites us to give that past a new meaning, understanding that the power of the past is not to be stuck within it, but how we use it in the present and future.
You can read PJ Knapke’s full review of Pain and Glory here.
9. Booksmart (Olivia Wilde, 2019)
Calling Booksmart the female Superbad is an insult to Booksmart. Period. Filled with utter love and endearment for all involved in the making of the film, Booksmart is a rarity in the male-dominated Hollywood machine. Booksmart follows Molly and Amy, played by the utterly delightful Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever, as they try and manage to cram the last four years of partying they missed in one final day, roaming the L.A. streets, finding themselves in one new adventure after another. Despite the teen-comedy skeleton that the film operates within, Booksmart injects vitality into the film that matches no other. While the film centers on the beautiful and intricate female friendship of Molly and Amy that is both nuanced and just damn refreshing to be seen on the silver screen, Booksmart smartly gives equal love to its supporting cast, giving each character their own time and space to shine and deliver.
From the gregarious yet confident Gigi (Billy Lourd) to the ever-so-serious drama geeks George and Alan (Noah Galvin and Alan Crute) to the well-intentioned yet desperate-to-be-liked Jared (Skylar Gisondo), Booksmart embraces this teenage symphony to its fullest, letting each teenager muddle through their awkwardness and boisterousness freely, without the face of any judgment. In turn, Booksmart creates a colorful and diverse conglomeration of joy and heart, making it more just than the female Superbad. However, what lies in the soul of Booksmart is its ability to understand the anxieties of being alive now. In a century where the need to be extraordinary has amplified, Booksmart empathically recognizes the desperations in trying to get to that state while unraveling the consequences of that desperation. Equally loving as it is critical in its two leading ladies’ blind eye to the world around them, Booksmart shows that not everyone is who we make them out to be. In a world filled with fake social media personas and needs to be great, Booksmart helps us understand that knowing the surface-level is not enough anymore.
You can read Megan Bernovich’s full review of Booksmart here and listen to UW Film Club’s podcast on Booksmart here.
8. Transit (Christian Petzold, 2019)
Based on the 1944 novel of the same name, Transit is one of the quietest films of the year. However, stewing within its quietness, Transit is also one of the most transfixing yet melancholic films of 2019, one that leaves the viewer crushed in the end. Despite the novel’s distinct time and setting (after the German occupation of France), in this adaptation, the ambiguous time-period of the film is what transcends it into a woozy bewildering experience that makes it Casablanca’s strange German cousin. With people wearing 20th-century clothing, speaking in 20th-century dialect, communicating without modern-day technology but surrounded by 21st-century cars, Transit provides a strange dichotomy that is both beguiling, yet entrancing, like a dream (or nightmare) about something that happened before yet, could also happen in the future. It’s despairing, challenging, yet rewarding at the same time.
Centering around Georg (Franz Rogowski), a German fugitive desperate to escape the fascism invading Europe, Georg finds himself in the heart of a missing identity triangle, continuously pretending yet trying to grasp onto anything real in the hopes of escaping the past yet ever so present nature of fascism. Yet, with every road he takes, Georg’s refugee status finds him entrapped, with no room to escape, consistently finding himself back in the same room, the same restaurant, and with the same people. In turn, Transit becomes a poignant tale about the cyclical yet despairing nature of the all too relevant refugee crisis that somehow also translates into a story about universal loneliness. In a year full of dramatic finishes and final shots, Transit’s final shot truly had my jaw drop, dropping for the clinging of a connection, knowing that it’s the only thing left.
7. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie, 2019)
In 2012, if you had told me that I, a lifelong Lakers fan, would be actively rooting for the Celtics to win a basketball game for at most 10 minutes, I would have told you that you were fucking crazy. Yet somehow, the Safdie brothers were able to create the perfect concoction that was able to do just that. Following Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), Uncut Gems is a film that revels in absurdity and bad decisions that surely will make the average viewer scream. Enchanted by the financial prospects of an Ethiopian opal, Howard finds himself in a flurry of poor choices, mountains of broken amends, and burdens of debts so large, it would make Atlas crumble. Yet, despite these precarious situations, Howard operates in the only way he knows how, yelling, screaming, and gambling his life away. Desperate to reach the next high that gambling allows him to achieve, Uncut Gems is a tight and tension-filled opera that simply never slows down, creating a mesmerizing cacophony of sadism and agony as we watch this man swiftly produce his own demise.
However, one cannot look away at the fire that lay in Howard’s tracks as Sandler’s enlightening and frenetic performance makes Howard simply mesmerizing to watch as Sandler creates a pitiful anti-hero that begs the sympathy of others. From the opening sequence, the metaphors are clear. We begin with a scene of Ethiopian diamond miners getting injured in search of an opal that transitions into the mystical clouds that lie within said opal, and then finally transitions in and out of Howard’s colon. No matter the outcome of the world around him, it is clear, Howard’s despicable and addictive personality that seemingly hurts everyone that encroaches his path is too much within him, turning Uncut Gems from an erratic thriller to the ultimate Shakespearean tragedy.
You can read Ryan Circelli’s full review of Uncut Gems here.
6. 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)
In a nation that screams for war, nearly every second a tweet is sent out to the void, 1917 is a hard reminder of the uselessness of it all. Set in the midst of World War I, a war started by pettiness, 1917 centers on two boys, Blake and Schofield (Dean Charles-Chapman and George McKay) as they are sent on a mission to deliver a message across No-Man’s Land to prevent the British troops from entering a trap. As we follow the two boys as they make their way across, we can’t help but understand their pain, as we live the moments of horror and despair side-by-side with them. Continuously tracking their progress through a mesmerizing “one-shot” trick, 1917 never misses a beat, absorbing the viewer in a state of panic and fear as the use of the one-shot creates an utterly terrifying and tension-filled experience, perfect for the claustrophobic nature of the trenches of the First World War.
With flares flying across the sky to airplanes crashing onto a field of peace to a somber moment of refuge, 1917 reveals the horrors and desolation that wars only have to offer. Combined with the stunning Thomas Newman score, a breathless and soulful acting job by Charles-Chapman and McKay, and of course, the technical beauty created by cinematographer Roger Deakins, 1917 is a marvel to behold that left me completely devastated by the end. World War I was a war largely founded upon nothing. A war that sent millions of young boys into a battlefield that they were not ready for. However, despite the grandiosity of war, 1917 zooms in on the effects of it, revealing the horrifying and cyclical nature of it all. There is no patriotism nor bravado in war. There is just a meaningless pattern that sends boys to die in the hands of one another, all for the sake of nothing.
You can read Levi Bond’s full review of 1917 here.
5. Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
Why does one go into the bleak and black void of space? Is it to be the next pioneer of our era? Or is it to catapult oneself so far away to escape the confrontations of others? While a majority of films that dabble in space travel ponder on the former, Ad Astra is far more interested in the latter, allowing director James Gray to create a meditative and vulnerable piece of poetry, taking advantage of the irony of the vastness of space. With a stunningly stoic yet subtle and passive performance by Brad Pitt, Ad Astra follows astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) as he ventures in the depths of space in search of his father. A heart rate that never goes above 80 BPMs, Roy is the embodiment of the perfect astronaut and peace, but the latter is a state that he seemingly has not yet achieved. Through constant psychological tests that read more as words that need to be said aloud to be believed, and the persistent yet deteriorating belief of the heroism of his father, before our very eyes we see the true colors of Roy McBride. Roy McBride is the man that turned into a shell of himself, a person terrified of everything that’s in front of him, that he rather run off to the depths of nowhere.
Yet, despite the vastness in which this film ventures off to, creating a gorgeous palette of a neon malaise combined with a spectacular Mad Max-esque off-road sequence and haunting Max Richter score in the process, Ad Astra revels in the fact that the further and further we get away from Earth, the only difference becomes the fact that there is less of us. However, we still have ourselves and our thoughts and expectations, whose knives get larger and larger the further one ventures. Deconstructing the male mythos, Ad Astra finds its intimacy in its confrontation and forgiveness, turning the grandiosity of the male mythos into a minuscule personal story of hope, making us realize that the vastness of our galaxy is one too large to conquer and hide away from and remarking that the true pioneers are the ones who finally decide it is better to come out of that place of hiding and grasp on to whatever they have left.
You can read PJ Knapke’s full review of Ad Astra here.
4. Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry, 2019)
“You can’t be fully acquainted with Becky Something until you want her to fuck off. Remember that.” If one thought Uncut Gems was anxiety-inducing, then Her Smell will make you want to pull all of your skin off. Following the punk girl band, ‘Something She,’ Her Smell is constructed in a five-act theater structure, each act following a live real-time event with the first three displaying a truly terrifying spiral into oblivion that is both horrifying yet awing. Despite the disturbing nature of the first three acts that truly make you want Becky Something to “fuck off,” it is the awing part of her that makes you want to stay, turning Her Smell into a complete and complicated picture of a woman in flux. With Elizabeth Moss giving the performance of a lifetime, Moss injects a vitality through her Shakespearean and non-sensical monologues that are utterly absorbing. Combining the vitality with the sorrowfulness that Becky Something inadvertently wears on her skin, it makes it difficult to look away at the fire that lay in her path.
Yet, there is a pity, a deteriorating figure grasping onto anything that will spark that neurotic rush she once had for the musical medium, and through the awing yet pitiful nature of Becky Something’s twisted Shakespearean tragedy is where Her Smell finds its balance leading to a completely devastating final two acts. Although Alex Ross Perry is often known to have a “cruel” streak in his films, Her Smell toes the delicate line between cruel and sympathetic perfectly as he shows the compelling story of a woman on the verge of collapse. Through a combination of a constantly pulsating sound design mixed with hand-held footage, steady cams, and extreme close-ups that zoom in and out to capture the chaos that Becky Something leaves in her path to the sterile cinematography as we and her recover from the destruction, Her Smell creates a challenging yet highly rewarding film, forcing us, like the members of her life, to resign to ourselves as we hope that the woman we are watching that is so clearly falling, find her way out of the hole, she dug for herself.
3. Little Women (Greta Gerwig, 2019)
Little Women is the anomaly of the year 2019. One of the warmest and empowering stories of 2019, Little Women is a film that finds joy in the simplest interactions and familial bonds, digging through the warmth of life rather than the harshness of it. Following the March sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth, Little Women provides much food for thought, giving each March sister their room to tell and explain their own stories with little judgment abound. Jumping from past and present day, this is where Little Women shines as a necessary depiction of the 140-year-old text as the film juxtaposes the stark reality of life with the dream-like fairytale of youth, commenting on the economic exchanges made in life and on the irony that we face in our youth of desperately wanting to shed the fantasy of youth, but desperately craving it with age.
Blending the text with Louisa May Alcott’s own life to present an enlightening and empowering ending, while also solving the Professor Baer/Laurie issue that I had with the novel, director Greta Gerwig creates a compassionate and soulful film of simply being human. The smart use of time along with a sharp script makes Little Women one of the most joyous films of the year. Despite its source material’s age, Little Women is very much the modern feminist tale we needed, showing young women their ability to choose, have strength, yet still be able to love, despite the unfortunate circumstances that society has bound them in.
You can read Stephanie Chuang’s full review of Little Women here.
2. Parasite (Bong Joon-Ho, 2019)
Combining accessible and auteurship is no feeble task and is why Parasite feels like a miracle of a film. Winner of the Palme D’or at Cannes, Parasite follows the Kims, a ragtag family that gets by through taking odd jobs such as folding pizza boxes and feeding off the luxuries and excess of others. However, when the opportunity to tutor an upper-class family (the Parks) presents itself, the Kims cannot refuse as they one-by-one infiltrate the Park family. Despite the subtlety that is often featured when discussing auteurship, Parasite makes its theme immensely clear: this is about capitalism and the divides caused by it. From the hilarious yet poignant script to the explicit set-design to the operatic choreography that is displayed, no stone is left unturned as director Bong Joon-ho wears his metaphors on his sleeve, never allowing the viewer to forget what the film is about. But, there is no clear villain.
As the film plays out, we see just how the film gets its title name, as we view the complicated and parasitic nature that comes out of individuals due to the consequences of capitalism. In a world that is motivated by individualism and competition, the landscape, for those diminished to the bottom, is bleak. Parasite exposes that landscape for our very eyes to feast on and through a combination of genres that include comedy, satire, thriller, and domestic drama with an addition of a script and shifts of tone that would surely make Alfred Hitchcock weep, Parasite is cinema at its highest level. A creation of high-entertainment and intense critique, it is truly one of the best films of 2019.
You can read Joe Lollo’s full review of Parasite here and listen to UW Film Club’s podcast on Parasite here.
1. The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019)
Lulu Wang’s breakout hit is the perfect combination of heartwarming and heartbreaking, an oxymoron perfect for the story based on an actual lie. Based on her This American Life episode, Lulu Wang manages to create a personal tale of the immigrant family living in the modern world, a story that struck me like no other 2019 film did. In its brief 98-minute runtime, The Farewell explores the neverending struggle of any first/second-generation American immigrant, unpacking the complicated emotions of wanting to be there for a family that one can often feel so distant from. However, despite the extreme sentimentality that familial tales often revel within, The Farewell strays away from traditional melodramatic beats, maintaining itself in the reality of the situation at hand. Wang understands that as she not only restrains the tone of the film in becoming too overbearing, while also providing a glimpse of the cultural specificity of stoicism in China, through the content and conversations she chooses to put on display.
However, Wang is not here to reprimand this stoic culture, but rather show the complications of the idea of family, a family that has splintered off, rejecting the togetherness ideal that is used to maintain the lie they want to keep. Through silences, forced awkwardness, and still camera shots, we understand the lost in translation within Billi’s own family, both literally and metaphorically, with the only thing connecting them is the one thing they do not wish to confront, their grandma’s illness. It is awkward and painful, yet the feeling is all too relatable. But, Wang analyzes the guilt of not being there for your family gracefully, not blaming anyone in her family for the situation at hand or making the film into a dramatic East v. West showdown, but instead turning The Farewell into an introspection of oneself, questioning what she (or Billi) should be doing about this feeling of generational and familial distance. The Farewell reveals why films like these need to be continuously made. Despite the cultural specificity in which The Farewell works within, it provides us an oddly familiar tale, reminding us to embrace the eccentricities of family, because, in the end, they make us who we are.
You can read my full review of The Farewell here.