15. Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller, 2019)
Composed out of unseen, 70mm archive footage, the experience of the 1969 moon landing is triumphantly restaged by documentarian Todd Miller. It is one of the most spectacular films of the year, a highly accomplished tribute to what collective, human passion can achieve.
14. Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2019)
Varda by Agnès is maybe the smallest film on my list, whilst also the farewell salute of its director, Agnès Varda, who passed away shortly after its release. Varda revisits her life in cinema through a series of guided reflections. Comparable to its sibling, cine-autobiography The Beaches of Agnès (2008), her goodbye comments are presented in bricolage, a playful gleaning of her memories and experience.
13. Ad Astra (James Gray, 2019)
If the genre of science fiction repeatedly finds itself looking per aspera ad astra – from Latin, “through hardships to the stars” – director James Gray returns the gaze, turning instead to the onlooker themselves. Brad Pitt continues his year of acclaimed roles with Major Roy McBride, whose career in astronomics is bound with the legacy of his absent father. Ad Astra knowingly plays into the traditions and grammar of space opera, its quiet, poetic ambition looking to rival the grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
12. The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg, 2019)
Voted by the Sight and Sound magazine as their film of the year, The Souvenir features lower down on my list, despite featuring an arresting, central duet from its two leads, Julie (Honour Swinton Byrne) and Anthony (Tom Burke, next to star in David Fincher’s latest release). Joanna Hogg crafts a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, an autobiographical retelling of amour fou, one that painfully comes apart with her own coming of age.
11. Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat, 2018)
Nearing the end of Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo, a solar eclipse floods the provincial landscape a blood-orange red. It remains for a few minutes, before being wiped away. Quietly invoking the small-town farces of the Coen Brothers, the cover-up of one man’s disappearance speaks to a wider, moral malaise amongst pre-coup, 1970s Argentina. Naishtat’s portrait of a society unravelling at the seams.
10. 1917 (Sam Mendes, 2019)
1917 is a welcome comeback for its director, Sam Mendes, whose recent contributions to the James Bond franchise (both Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015)) neutered any creative reach. Together with his regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, the two craft an immersive, single-take quest, a survivalist story in the tradition of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972).
9. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, 2018)
Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk resumes the cinematic visions of his 2018, sophomore feature, Moonlight, a companion study in passion and longing. Jenkins’ work is remarkable for its aural landscape, texturing Nicholas Britell’s cello-laden score with soft, whispered voiceovers. A callback to the romantic odes of Wong Kar-wai and Douglas Sirk.
8. Sunset (Lázló Nemes, 2018)
László Nemes’ follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed debut, Son of Saul (2015), traffics the incendiary events preceding the start of WW1. It is an otherworldly picture, one that captures the final, nightmarish scenes before the toppling of a society.
7. Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach, 2019)
Marriage Story borrows from the Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) crises of adults fighting a civil war over their marriage. Tuning elements of his prior filmography, Baumbach is again concerned with familial ties and the polished, New Yorker-esque shine of everyday people. Randy Newman’s animated soundtrack lends softness to the remains of the day. Marriage Story deserves all the praise it has inevitably received, especially for the understated performance of Johansson, whose sunshine personality battles against the encroaching reality of divorce.
6. High Life (Claire Denis, 2018)
In a recent interview for A24, Claire Denis recalled how on the set of Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) she endangered her life wading the Rio Grande: “I am a good swimmer but the [river] […] is much stronger than I am.” High Life engages with a similar, undaunted current, an elliptical space tale of convict youths and their scientific harvest. Looking to Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) as genre touchstones, sexual politics are mingled with the unforgiving, bruising ambitions of science.
5. Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham, 2018)
Commenting on The Smiths song ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, Russell Brand imagined Morrisey’s romantic ode as a tragedy of the boy staring at his bedroom ceiling and feeling the weight of the world upon his shoulders. Eighth Grade continues such a narrative, adolescent struggles projected into the contemporary age of social media. Burnham crafts one of the most soulful and endearing debuts to be released this year.
4. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman completes a trilogy of epic, decade-spanning works, beginning with Goodfellas (1990) and followed by Casino (1995). Unlike the previous two, The Irishman is a richer piece of cinema, working confidently within the style and conventions that Scorsese and his crew have refined throughout a lifetime. Compelling both in substance and scale, The Irishman delivers an unglamourised interpretation of the mafia and its devastating, broken legacy.
3. Border (Ali Abbasi, 2018)
Border is a post-Edenic pastoral, a story of an unseen, sub-population who live amongst the general public. Tina (Eva Melander), a border officer in the Swedish countryside, belongs to such a species, a modern Prometheus who is forced to reconsider her existence with the appearance of Vore (Ero Milonoff), a fellow troll. Cronenbergian body-horror is married to an intelligent study of what it means to exist as an outsider.
2. Monos (Alejandro Landes, 2019)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is lifted into the remote, Columbia mountainscapes, as a commune of teenage guerrillas awaits their mission above the clouds. Slowly distancing themselves from their group leader, the gun-wielding band descend into the humidity of the jungle, abandoning the script of their previous existence for the chemical trip of independence. Monos is an evident successor to the messy pandemoniums of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (most notably, the 1972 release Aguirre, the Wrath of God), telling a story of visual and psychological complexity.
1. Burning (Chang-dong Lee, 2018)
In the city of Paju, South Korea, a triangle of relations is formed – unemployed youth Lee Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), his old schoolfriend, Shin Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and the wolfish, Gatsby-esque figure of Ben (Steven Yeung). One day, Ben admits a private habit of pyromania, that every two months he burns down a greenhouse for his own “play”. Such ambiguities lie at the core of Chang-dong Lee’s patient thriller, unanswered questions that surround what it means to live and hold yourself responsible for your own violence. Adapted from a short story, ‘Barn Burning’, by Haruki Murakami, Burning is a fascinating study in masculinity and consequence.
Other honourable mentions include:
Yorgos Lanthimos’ period comedy The Favourite (2018); the surrealist documentary Island of the Hungry Ghosts (Gabrielle Brady, 2018); Jordan Peele’s second horror project, Us (2019); another dramatization of the life of Vincent van Gogh, At Eternity’s Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2018); Jacques Audiard’s brilliant western, The Sisters Brothers (2018); the dance moodscape, Madeline’s Madeline (Josephine Decker, 2018); Nicole Kidman with extensive facial disfiguration in Destroyer (Karyn Kusama, 2018); Almodovar’s complaint about late age, Pain and Glory (2019); Steven Soderbergh’s iPhone-filmed triumph, High Flying Bird (2019); Werner Herzog’s latest oddball documentary, Meeting Gorbachev (2019); Truman Show-esque, French comedy, La Belle Epoque (Nicolas Bedos, 2019); Shia LaBeouf reflecting honestly on his life, Honey Boy (Alma Har’el, 2019); Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary, Midsommar (2019); and finally, Greta Gerwig’s triumphant Little Women (2019).
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