The rules: Movies on my list had to open in my city of residence (Austin, TX) between January 1 and December 31, 2019, and I had to see them on a big screen. Sometimes, I break that rule for something really special. I break it this year. These are highly subjective, personal choices, so I use the word "favorite" instead of "best." I prefer movies that are a strange combination of music, photography, painting, theater, dream, and accidental time capsule (I'm using the loosest, broadest application of most of the nouns in this sentence). I like a good story, but I don't require one, and I hate movies that are just professionally photographed storytelling with no visual point of view. I'm more interested in a film's rhythm, structure, form, look, use of light and shadow, performance style or styles, approach to character, atmosphere, marginal detail, and POV, and its mysterious, ineffable qualities than its story, plot, events, etc., but I'm also a hopeless amateur when it comes to writing about these things.
Let's get to it. To paraphrase Queen's "Bicycle Race," superheroes were never my scene and I don't care about Star Wars, thus ensuring that no one is going to read this. God, I wish people still liked movies. I'm so lonely.
FAVORITES
3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
Jafar Panahi's latest, one of the handful of movies he's managed to complete and distribute even after the Iranian government banned him from making films for 20 years (he's a genius at finding loopholes and avoiding serious punishment), is a warm, complex, unpredictable road movie about a famous actress (Behnaz Jafari, playing herself) and her filmmaker friend (director Panahi, playing himself) traveling to a small village to find a teenage girl. The girl was an aspiring actress who dreamed of going to Tehran to study at the drama conservatory, but her family forbid it. She filmed her own suicide in response, and her friends emailed the footage to Jafari, greatly disturbing her. When some evidence arises suggesting the video was faked and the girl is still alive, Jafari convinces Panahi to drive her to the village and find out the truth. A third actress, an Iranian movie star before the Islamic Revolution but now living as a recluse in the village, becomes an important connecting thread for our characters, though you only see the exterior of her home and never meet her.
Panahi is a visually gifted filmmaker with an uncommonly empathetic understanding of human behavior. He notices tiny details that add up to a great deal. 3 Faces initially feels too light, too minor, but accumulates real power and feeling as it progresses, with some subtly transcendent images. Panahi's slightly gimmicky road-trip set-up gradually turns into a great movie about the routines, complexities, tensions, frustrations, comedy, and beauty of life in a small village.
Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)
One of the best-looking movies I watched this year, with one gorgeous, strange, powerful image after another. Actor Tao Zhao is a mesmerizing screen presence, and this movie gives her a lot to do. An epic love and crime story set over the course of 16 years, the movie makes room for long, languorous scenes, quick bursts of action, and many changes in setting and tone. It's not afraid to linger on an interesting moment or jump ahead abruptly. Stay on its wavelength and you'll be constantly rewarded. I saw it early in the year and can't remember many plot details, but images from it have never left my mind.
Atlantics (Mati Diop)
Atlantics either never opened theatrically in Austin or landed so briefly that I missed it, but I'm breaking my big-screen rule because it's such a great movie. It's streaming on Netflix as I type this, so please check it out. Diop, an actor who played one of the leads in one of my favorite Claire Denis movies, 35 Shots of Rum, has been making her own short films for the last several years, but Atlantics is her first full-length feature as writer/director. As you can probably tell if you've read any of my year-end posts, I love movies with tonal shifts that move in and out of different genres. Atlantics, set in a Dakar suburb near the ocean, begins as a social realist polemic about economic exploitation, then becomes, in alternating moments, a love story, a character study of a young woman, a police procedural whodunit, a supernatural thriller, and a meditative, slightly sinister reflection on the natural world. None of these elements overpower each other and are blended perfectly, and Mame Bineta Sane, in her first role, gives a complex, understated performance that ties it all together. Atlantics feels both ancient and new. Diop and Sane are the future.
Bleak Street (Arturo Ripstein)
Based on the bizarre 2009 true story of two aging sex workers in Mexico City who accidentally killed two popular little person luchadores (who were also twin brothers) by drugging their drinks with too high a dose during a robbery attempt, Bleak Street could have been a lurid slice of povertysploitation, but veteran director Ripstein, while not shying away from the strange and sensational elements, gives the material a balanced, multifaceted treatment. Ripstein's camera and compositions show an interconnected underworld of limited choice and opportunity, where bad decisions are sometimes the only decisions if you need to eat, and where every character is under competing pressures. The black and white cinematography is both harsh and beautiful, and stylistically, the film feels both contemporary and classic, reminding me of a stew of '40s and '50s American noir, Italian neorealism, '60s and '70s New German Cinema, early Fellini, mid-period Bunuel, and contemporary crime shows and reality TV.
Dark Waters (Todd Haynes)
On paper, Dark Waters is an odd, jarring choice for Todd Haynes, the restlessly experimental independent writer/director whose career includes Superstar, a stop-motion animation Karen Carpenter biopic using Barbie and Ken dolls; Poison, an anthology film about repressed sexuality and violence, with each of its three stories tackling a different genre (mockumentary, horror, and prison-set romantic drama); Safe, a Polanski-meets-Cronenberg blend of psychological and body horror about a wealthy homemaker who develops a mysterious illness that may or may not be in her head (the low hum just barely audible on the soundtrack contributes to the slowly creeping unease); Velvet Goldmine, a '70s glam-rock origin story that borrows its structure from Citizen Kane with characters not-so-loosely based on Iggy Pop and David Bowie and an intro and outro featuring Oscar Wilde and intergalactic signals (probably Haynes' least satisfying film, but I admire the hell out of its ambition); I'm Not There, a biopic of Bob Dylan the mythology, not the man, with six different actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing six different Bob Dylans; Wonderstruck, an art film for kids about two hearing-impaired children running away from home in two separate decades that alternates between black and white and vibrant color and approximations of silent film and '70s cinema; and three very different projects paying tribute to classic '40s and '50s women-centered Hollywood melodramas: the postmodern Douglas Sirk homage Far from Heaven, the noir-flavored HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, and the gorgeous and suspenseful romance Carol, adapted from Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt.
So, why is Haynes taking a director-for-hire job (from actor/producer Mark Ruffalo) on one of those based-on-a-true-story underdog-taking-on-injustice movies that are usually pretty mediocre and impersonal and corny and generic? Seconds into the film, about attorney Robert Bilott's Sisyphean decades-long effort to hold the DuPont corporation accountable, I relaxed. This is another Todd Haynes movie through and through, and a damn good one. Haynes incorporates the feel of '70s paranoid thrillers like All the President's Men, The Conversation, and The Parallax View with the creeping dread of Safe, the visually detailed connection of the interior spaces of workplaces and homes, inanimate objects, and landscapes with the characters' submerged but deeply felt emotions that he perfected with Carol, and the righteous political anger and desperation of the present moment. Haynes' eye is as sharp as ever, and in my favorite shot, he makes a suburban Benihana at night look like a desolate purgatorial outpost. If you're a Haynes fan on the fence about this one, go see it.
The Dead Don't Die (Jim Jarmusch)
Critics tended to classify Jarmusch's latest as either a regrettable misfire or a reasonably enjoyable minor effort, but I'm in that tiny group of yea-sayers who consider The Dead Don't Die a major work. (Richard Brody made an eloquent case for it in The New Yorker.) I understand the disappointment of audiences expecting a vibrant horror/comedy romp. Even though the film has funny jokes, appreciative visual nods to George Romero's living dead movies, and satisfying zombie makeup and splatter effects, it's a quiet, sorrowful film about the too-little, too-late response to climate change and encroaching fascism, with the only characters escaping mayhem the off-the-grid wildman in the woods who removed himself from society and the teenagers who say they have a safe place to hide and promptly disappear from the film. I agree with Brody that The Dead Don't Die is the 66-year-old Jarmusch's first "late" film. In its own weird way, it would make a fine double bill with Scorsese's The Irishman. Late-period veteran directors reassembling a greatest hits of the old team to somberly accept the dying of the light, with violence and humor and knowing commentary on their recognizable styles? Yeah, I'll stand by that. In The Dead Don't Die, that greatest-hits team includes Jarmusch vets both old and recent Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tom Waits, Chloe Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Rosie Perez, Tilda Swinton, Sara Driver, and Iggy Pop, as well as first-timers Danny Glover, Carol Kane, Caleb Landry Jones, Selena Gomez, and Sturgill Simpson. Besides what it says about where we're at now and the chemistry between Murray, Driver, and Sevigny as the town's law enforcement officers, I admired so many tiny moments. The way Driver says the word "ghouls." A shot of Murray, Sevigny, Driver, and Fessenden looking up at the sky at dusk next to a motel. The sad way everyone takes in the aftermath of terrible events at a diner. The gas station/comic book store/horror memorabilia shop. The surprisingly not annoying and often poignant acknowledgement by the characters that they are in a Jarmusch film. Everything with Tilda Swinton. I don't expect to convert anyone to my cause, but I don't share the conventional wisdom about this one.
First Love (Takashi Miike)
One of my favorite recent Miike films, this gangster/action/drama/suspense thriller/comedy/romance ball of energy never stops being exciting and stylistically unpredictable (a car chase scene turns into anime for a few minutes before switching back to live action, for example). First Love feels like a best-of-both-worlds collision of the weird, wild, tangent-loving Miike of the '90s and 2000s and the more controlled, patient, formally consistent filmmaker of recent years (though there is still plenty of weirdness in the latter).
High Life (Claire Denis)
Denis's first English-language film is the kind of science fiction I like: arty, weird, mildly sinister, sparse in dialogue, both visceral and cosmic, narratively fractured, existentially fatigued, more interested in atmosphere and mood than plot, not afraid of adult emotions and sexuality, and full of depressed humans floating in space. None of that saving the galaxy shit. I'm a massive Denis fan, but I was a little worried about her distinctive voice getting swallowed up by the film's large budget, American movie star lead (Robert Pattinson), and dialogue spoken in her non-native language. I was foolish to doubt her. She made the same kind of movie she always makes (though all her films are different from each other) -- a Claire Denis movie. Also, the scene featuring Juliette Binoche and a robotic sex chair rivals the car-sex-in-a-rainstorm scene from Orson Welles' The Other Side of the Wind in the pantheon of sex scenes that are visually sublime instead of ridiculous, boring, or exploitative.
The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard)
Godard's latest video art/essay film/moving collage/graceful collision of archaic and contemporary technologies requires a lot of exposure to his previous work (particularly Histoire(s) du cinema) if you don't want to feel like a caveman on a spaceship (I stole that phrase from comedian/musician/writer Dave Hill). Godard requires his viewers to make their own connections between images, recognize their sources, and navigate the sensory overload of onscreen text, sophisticated and layered sound design, his own cryptic narration, and the barrage of images (paintings, movie clips and stills, news broadcasts, TV shows, camcorder footage, book and magazine covers, images Godard shot himself) varying in picture quality and sometimes purposely degraded by repeated transfer from videotape to digital and digital to videotape. In a similar vein to Histoire(s) du cinema, the first part of The Image Book is an impression of the 20th century, with a majority of the images coming from the western canon of European and American film. Godard moves to the 21st century and the Middle East for The Image Book's longer second half, which I interpreted as a critique and self-critique of European and American ignorance of, antipathy toward, and disinterest in Arab countries, their films, and the images they create. Godard suggests (I think) that if humans and our impulse to make moving images can survive, the future of both is in the Middle East.
The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
I fell in love with this movie a few minutes into its three-and-a-half hours when Joe Pesci's Russell Bufalino argues with his wife Carrie (Kathrine Narducci) about when and where they will stop for smoke breaks on the long road trip they're about to take (Russell won't let anyone smoke in his car), and I never fell out of love. Scorsese's first film with frequent collaborators Pesci and Robert De Niro since 1995's Casino, Harvey Keitel since 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ, and Barry Primus since 1977's New York, New York, The Irishman is far more than fan service and one of the strangest, funniest, saddest, and most detail-packed gangster films ever. Yeah, the aging and de-aging CGI can look a little odd (though mostly it's fine), and, yeah, they never look quite as young as they're supposed to in the early flashback scenes, but none of that really matters. Movies are dream-spaces that make their own rules, and the story is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator who is often oblivious to the perspectives of friends and family, so the digital effects make perfect visual sense when applied to an old man placing himself in his own past through the distortions of memory. This is a late-career masterpiece, full of great moments and performances big and small (especially Pesci), and an absolute pleasure to get lost in. Scorsese's 2010s have seen him back in peak form, and I hope he has at least a couple more decades in him. (I hope that for the rest of us, too. God, what a world.)
Knife + Heart (Yann Gonzalez)
My favorite horror film of 2019, Knife + Heart pays spot-on visual tribute to '60s and '70s Italian horror movies and thrillers (particularly the giallo films of Argento, Bava, etc.) and '70s European softcore sex movies in the Radley Metzger vein. What makes it more than just a stylishly entertaining piece of retro cinema fetishism is Gonzalez's filtering of those films' primarily heterosexual gaze through a queer point of view, which changes the context and creates a pretty fascinating dialogue between observer and creator, and the related but separate role of the observer who becomes a creator. I love the way artistic influences can be absorbed and transformed into different contexts. Aside from all this, the film is scary as hell, beautiful to look at, and really weird, which are all qualities I enjoy in movies, and, except for the "scary as hell" part, life itself.
Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
Greta Gerwig avoids the overly cautious reverence and bloodless timidity of so many classic literature adaptations by shuffling the chronology of Louisa May Alcott's novel, creating poignant rhyming connections between scenes, and visually re-invigorating a story that's been told in film and television dozens of times. Every intricate piece (performance, cinematography, location, structure, composition, character and period detail, point of view) comes together so satisfyingly, and, like The Irishman, I got lost in its characters, textures, and atmosphere while feeling like I was in trustworthy hands. In a New York Times article, Gerwig provided an intriguing list of the film's visual and tonal inspirations: Alcott's letters and other novels, as well as scholarship about her; the paintings of Winslow Homer, Lilly Martin Spencer, Seymour Joseph Guy, and George P.A. Healy; Emily Dickinson's poems; and a great bunch of movies, the blend of which really does suggest the film's tone -- David Lean's Great Expectations, Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence, Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, Warren Beatty's Reds, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, and the musicals of Vincente Minnelli. She does great justice to these influences (at least the ones I'm familiar with), creating a personal work of art from such well-known and well-trod source material.
P.S. I have to mention the chatty elderly couple who sat behind my wife and me in the theater. When Bob Odenkirk appeared in the film's final third, the following exchange happened:
Husband, loudly: Call Saul.
Wife, also loudly: What?
Husband, emphatically: Call Saul!
Wife, just as emphatically: Whaaat?
Husband, even louder: That's Better Call Saul!
Wife: Oh.
Mountaintop (Bernard Shakey aka Neil Young)
I'm a Neil Young superfreak with all the records (even Everybody's Rockin'), but I would not recommend the majority of films Young has created under the name Bernard Shakey to anyone but the superfreakiest of Youngamaniacs. This is an exception. A fly-on-the-wall documentary about the recording sessions for Young and Crazy Horse's latest album, Colorado, Mountaintop is both a cinema-verite deep-dive into how a record gets made and a profane stoner comedy about grumpy old men. Young is not afraid to let an audience see him at his irritable, petulant, childish, pampered worst, and he's also not vain about his age. He understands the inherent visual comedy in a group of guys in their seventies making loud rock music, and the Horse's banter between themselves and constantly harried producer John Hanlon is frequently hilarious, particularly the who's-on-first miscommunication between Hanlon, Young, and Billy Talbot about what part of the song they want to hear in playback as they record backing vocals that snowballs into a blizzard of misunderstanding. Beset by numerous technical difficulties, constant irritations, and Hanlon's repeated poison oak flare-ups, Crazy Horse somehow manages to complete a pretty good record. Mountaintop is always funny, sometimes exasperating, and occasionally, when everything clicks into place musically, magic.
Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)
Parasite has been discussed, praised, critiqued, and classified as a movie with Important Things to say about late capitalism, economic inequality, and class conflict, but, except for the sharply detailed early scenes showing the family working various hustles and side gigs to stay afloat, I think his other films do a more interesting job of exploring the alienation, inequality, and hierarchical stratification of our kleptocratic times. I loved Parasite for simpler reasons. It's a damn good thriller with fascinatingly flawed and duplicitous characters played by great actors, incredible set design, a tensely moving camera, and a compelling story that keeps gradually twisting. I'm glad American audiences have responded so strongly, which will hopefully lead to other foreign films getting major distribution deals over here in green screen franchise land.
Pasolini (Abel Ferrara)
Finally turning up in a (far too limited) theatrical American release in 2019, Ferrara's 2014 anti-biopic of Italian film director, poet, novelist, journalist, and playwright Pier Paolo Pasolini avoids the terminal inessentiality of film's worst genre by focusing on a narrow window of time (in this case, November 2, 1975 -- Pasolini's last day on earth) and putting the weight and personality of Ferrara's own style and artistic point of view behind the material instead of the usual hagiographic Cliff's Notes bullshit. Willem Dafoe captures Pasolini's appearance, mannerisms, quiet intensity, contradictions and paradoxes, and zest for life, and Ferrara and Dafoe make the unusual but correct choice to have Dafoe speak in his own accent in English instead of an approximation of Italian. This may be initially jarring, especially since most of the cast members are native Italians, but my unprofessional opinion is that too many film accents are distracting stunts that get in the way of honesty and emotion. Dafoe is the right choice for what Ferrara is doing here. Pasolini alternates between the last day of the man's life (which begins with early morning edits on what would be his final film, Salo, and ends with his mysterious murder/assassination late that night) and Ferrara's interpretations of scenes from an unfinished Pasolini movie script (I am unclear whether this was a real Pasolini project or one imagined by Ferrara and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci). Unlike most biopics, Pasolini has a director with a real affinity for, and an artistic passion worthy of, his subject.
Peterloo (Mike Leigh)
I'm on the wrong side of conventional wisdom again. Despite a few champions, most critics have decided that Peterloo is a rare misfire for Mike Leigh. To quote Howard Ratner from the next movie on my list, "I disagree." Peterloo, a historical film about the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, in which the British Cavalry brutally charged a large working-class demonstration for parliamentary reform, is superficially a major departure for Leigh, who usually makes character-based contemporary comedy-dramas about the lives of everyday people with a wealth of behavioral detail. His film projects begin with Leigh picking a group of actors, who then come together for weeks of rehearsals in which they create their own characters and the relationships and history between them from improvisational exercises. Once the characters become solidly formed, Leigh goes away and writes a screenplay about them. It's a beautiful, unusual method that has been delivering one great film after another since 1971's Bleak Moments. Peterloo is only the third Leigh film with historical characters (the other two are Topsy-Turvy, about Gilbert and Sullivan writing The Mikado, and Mr. Turner, about the life of the painter J.M.W. Turner) and only the fourth set in the past (Vera Drake took place in the 1950s). Those films, though, had the same focus on human behavior and relationships, and they originated in the same improvisational, actors' workshop way as his other films. Peterloo, on the other hand, is a large-scale historical epic with a sprawling ensemble cast and scenes of military battles, large demonstrations, public speeches, political meetings, and the massacre itself. These are not things we usually see in a Mike Leigh movie, and they're not always a smooth fit. However, the film grows in depth and urgency as it progresses, and there are many quiet moments of personal detail nestled within the larger canvas. Leigh also creates an interesting narrative tension by mixing together heightened and naturalistic performances. He used similar techniques to great disruptive and comedic effect in Nuts in May and High Hopes, with comically uptight exaggerations interacting with nuanced, complicated characters. In Peterloo, Leigh is instead coming from a place of rage, sorrow, and defiance, and his working-class characters and their champions are complex, flawed, goodhearted people with tough but deeply felt lives and much at stake. Government and military officials are more negatively drawn (not a criticism), but still operate within a recognizably human framework of behavior. They made their moral choices. Royals and the aristocracy, however, are presented as horrifyingly grotesque caricatures -- decadent, idiotic, diseased-brain gluttons thoughtlessly creating misery and pain on a whim, safely shielded from self-reflection, empathy, unpleasant thoughts and views, and any consequences. I might have thought this portrayal too simplistic and obvious during my nascent film snobbery years in the '90s, but the last twenty years of global politics have changed my mind. This is a very good and fascinatingly imperfect movie.
Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie)
Technically a period piece (it's set in 2012), Uncut Gems feels like something new. A symphony of controlled chaos, noise, energy, color, profanity, and constant movement with the most complex sound design since recent Godard and an incredible, relentless score by Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never), Uncut Gems kept me in a simultaneous state of anxiety, aesthetic bliss, and life-affirming joy, which is an odd and exhilarating place to be. The Safdies and editor/co-writer Ronald Bronstein have created a floating, hallucinatory paradox of a movie that does a lot of things at once that should not be possible. I laughed at the critic who described the movie as "like cocaine on acid" until I saw it, and, you know what, that's still a goofy phrase, but it's accurate. The film manages to be both speedy and dreamy, loudmouthed and reflective, gritty and lysergically surreal, a relentlessly tense thriller about gambling addictions and a hilarious comedy about charismatic human tornados of chaos and a visual reverie and a tenderhearted human study where no one is really a villain (we all have our reasons, the movie continually shows us) and where we get to know everyone (even the peripheral characters) even though the pace rarely slows. There aren't many movies that show the same loving care toward the wife and the mistress, or the incurable gambler and the guys who will hurt him if he doesn't pay them back, though they also don't shy away from the consequences of every bad choice, the worst choices of all emanating from the rock of the title, a universe in itself. These guys are not filmmakers who look down on their characters. They're fully in the mix with all of them. I also love how they blend professional actors, people famous in other fields, aspiring newcomers, and nonprofessional locals with interesting faces and natural screen presences. What other movie could make such beautiful use of Adam Sandler, Eric Bogosian, Lakeith Stanfield, NBA player Kevin Garnett, clothing designer/photographer/painter/model/former dominatrix Julia Fox, singer The Weeknd, Idina Menzel, Judd Hirsch, journalist/songwriter/NY character Larry "Ratso" Sloman, John Amos, sports talk radio host Mike Francesa, construction worker Tommy Kominik, social media influencer/joke thief Josh Ostrovsky, Ronald Bronstein's family members Rodney and Steve Bronstein, rapper Ca$h Out, Garment District legend/dress designer/NY character/man with insane tan Wayne Diamond (his Instagram is highly recommended), rapper Trinidad James, carpenter/longshoreman Keith Williams Richards, and the voices of Tilda Swinton and Natasha Lyonne? And many others I'm probably forgetting? How is this not a trainwreck? It's so beautiful and scary. One of my favorite movies of the year and the decade and the possible decades to come.
Us (Jordan Peele)
The key line from Jordan Peele's Get Out ("By the way, I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could") was never far from my mind when reading white liberals' ecstatic reviews of that promising debut. It was a good movie (especially the scenes with Lakeith Stanfield and Betty Gabriel), but some of the massive praise seemed performative, like white critics were looking for a congratulatory back-pat, even as many of them had consistently ignored the work of other black filmmakers and continued to ignore that work after Get Out left theaters. And where are they now? Us was a popular hit, but it didn't get a fraction of the Oscar buzz or year-end hosannas of Get Out. I think it's a stronger movie that expands Peele's visual palette and range (his compositions are gorgeous, odd, graceful, and ambitious, and each image has real visceral punch), keeps the dread and momentum going for the entire running time, retains its strangeness and mystery even after the plot details and twists are revealed, and casts actors who each can knock two very different but connected performances out of the park (especially Lupita Nyong'o). Maybe the difference in critical response is that Get Out's political/historical subject matter sparks conversation about American white supremacy and what it's like for black Americans to live and survive within it while Us tends to inspire more personal, inward thoughts that are harder to pin down (I'm speaking in generalities here). Us is about, in part, the varieties of darkness within each of us, and the consequences of hiding and suppressing that darkness. It may not be as politically important or contain as much contemporary social relevance, but I think it has more mystery and will reward more repeat viewings. Then again, maybe I'm less implicated in Us than I am in Get Out and my preference for the former is a comfort thing. I hope that's not it.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
American Dharma (Errol Morris)
In the tradition of his McNamara and Rumsfeld interrogations, The Fog of War and The Unknown Known, Morris gives Steve Bannon enough rope to hang himself with, and Bannon reveals his true ethno-nationalist colors and mediocre mind while thinking he's coming across as some heroic blend of intellectual giant and working-class warrior-patriot saving the country from itself. My impression of Bannon is that he's an amoral chaos agent and empty soul who thinks he can step in as savior once the country is in flames, but he's too stupid to even understand his own favorite movies, clips and recreated sets of which are used here to explore his personal philosophies. Morris is fired up, both as interviewer and creator of images, and I think this film is more important evidence in understanding how we ended up in these dire straits. Would have made my favorites list, but spending a few hours with Bannon is not exactly a great time.
The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine)
Florida Man makes movie. I don't know if this is a work of art or an overflowing Dumpster or both, but I don't think those distinctions particularly matter here. Martin Lawrence, who was 10 years old when the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, plays a Vietnam vet/dolphin tour guide named Captain Wack. Snoop Dogg plays an R&B singer named Lingerie. Jimmy Buffett plays himself. It's no Trash Humpers, but I'm glad it exists.
A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick)
I couldn't connect with Malick's last three films despite their unique strangeness, but I thought his sometimes alienating and baffling recent style was put to better use in this narratively focused true story of a Christian pacifist Austrian farmer in the mountain village of St. Radegund, Franz Jagerstatter, who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler. The Austrian mountain geography and farmland are incredibly beautiful, and Malick gives them a holy grandeur far removed from picture-postcard prettiness. He's also good with the terrible spaces of the prisons where Franz is confined. August Diehl and Valerie Pachner as Franz and his wife Fanni have the right faces to convey the strength and vulnerability of a family who choose to do the right thing with no reward and no recognition. Though I don't wish to revisit its three hours anytime soon, I was moved by it, particularly the final epigraph and a comment from Fanni's father, "It's better to suffer injustice than to do injustice."
Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
A good movie, strongly performed and well-told. The leads are getting the attention, but I was more interested in the bursting-with-personality supporting cast, particularly Merrit Wever, Julie Hagerty, Ray Liotta, Laura Dern, Wallace Shawn, Robert Smigel, Dean Wareham, Tunde Adebimpe, Alan Alda, Rich Fulcher, and Martha Kelly. The kid was a mess, though. He was too old for a car seat, should have known how to read by now, and shouldn't have had so much trouble going to the bathroom. He was like 9 years old, fer chrissakes. Thank you for enjoying another edition of A Childless Man's Armchair Parenting of a Fictional Character.
Midsommar (Ari Aster)
Also a good movie, strongly performed and well-told. A bit too self-important and lacking in humor to match its inspirations, the great British folk-horror films of the '60s and '70s, but Aster did a good job in bringing out the inherent creepiness in the blandly attractive, interchangeable faces of today's young mainstream actors, Florence Pugh was great, and I have a soft spot for daylight horror.
The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent)
Kent's brutal followup to The Babadook is a very tough watch. Set in 1825 in the wilderness of Tasmania, Australia, the film includes scenes of graphic violence, rape, and the murder of a baby. These scenes are not meant as sensationalist shock exploitation, instead functioning as a direct, sorrowful, and unflinching stare at the moral consequences of building a value system out of colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. In the film's sharpest observation, the heroine Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict brutalized by her British captors, fails to extend empathy to or treat as an equal the Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) she hires. Despite years of abuse for being Irish and a woman, Clare can't see past her own whiteness to recognize Billy as an equal human being. This changes as the film progresses, but not in the corny life-lesson way of the centrist liberal message movie. Instead, it's a hard-earned and incomplete change. Clare and Billy have deep, lasting trauma that can never go away, and even as Clare finally begins to connect Billy's plight with her own, the two victims of British colonialism will never completely understand each other. Despite the brutality, The Nightingale also contains moments of great beauty, mystery, and stillness, and though I don't intend to endure the toughest parts of it a second time, I'm grateful to have seen it.
Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
Tarantino's films have a lot of traits that irritate me, his trademark dialogue started to smell funny around the time of Kill Bill, and he did Bruce Lee dirty, but his latest also contains some of my favorite moments of the year, including: Robert Richardson's burnished gold cinematography, a montage of neon signs lighting up at dusk, a cherry spinning around in a cocktail on an airplane tray as a shaft of sunlight pierces through the glass, Brad Pitt entering his Redford/Newman middle period, Pitt's Cliff Booth and Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton watching a Dalton-starring TV episode with running commentary throughout ("that guy's an asshole," etc.), Booth's trailer house behind the Van Nuys Drive-In, Margot Robbie's Sharon Tate buying a ticket for her own movie, scenes of Booth driving through the city with the radio blasting, Timothy Olyphant and DiCaprio on the Lancer set, and Tarantino's loving, wistful wish-fulfillment fantasy recreation of Los Angeles in 1969.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (Martin Scorsese)
Some of the best Dylan live footage ever, with one of his strangest and most electrifying bands, and an illuminating impression of the cultural in-between-ness of the mid-1970s. I loved this movie on its one-night-only theater screening, but watching it again on Netflix a few months later, I wasn't quite as impressed with the fictional mockumentary scripted interview parts of the film. What seemed a perfect way to capture Dylan's elusive prankster side on the first viewing came across as a stale joke on the second. Still, there is so much great stuff in this thing, and who knows what impression a third viewing will have?
DISAPPOINTMENTS AND UNIQUE PROBLEMS
Meeting Gorbachev (Werner Herzog & Andre Singer)
Entertaining and fascinating, Meeting Gorbachev is nevertheless too slight. Herzog loves Gorbachev the man too much to present a fuller, more critical view of Gorbachev the politician and leader.
The Mountain (Rick Alverson)
A cold, distancing film with an almost sickly color palette, The Mountain is not begging for an audience's love, and I respect that. I admired the composition of its shots, its performances, and its unusual approach to narrative, but I never felt connected to it, and I didn't understand it, emotionally or intellectually. I read an illuminating interview with Alverson where he explained several scenes and interpreted his film's meaning. That helped a lot, but if the movie had been either clearer or even more elliptical, I probably wouldn't have felt like I was being denied something.
Our Time (Carlos Reygadas)
This is a complex, beautiful, frustrating piece of art that I had a lot of thoughts about. Unfortunately, a few months ago, an assistant director accused Reygadas and Reygadas's wife, film editor Natalia Lopez (Lopez and Reygadas are also the film's stars), of sexual harassment and abuse. I hope it's not true. It probably is. Now I'm just tired and disappointed and will leave this one hanging here for now. Fuck. Reygadas is such an amazing filmmaker. I do think art stands on its own and belongs to the world once released into the world, and I don't need to approve of someone's behavior to engage with their work, but I also think abusers should be held accountable, and I don't want to support them financially while they're still in positions of power. Sometimes, I wish I knew nothing about anyone and just lived in a cave full of movies, music, books, food, and booze.
Where'd You Go, Bernadette (Richard Linklater)
This is the second Linklater movie in a row to disappoint me (he's so prolific that I'm not too worried yet), but I didn't think it was quite as bad as some of the more savage reviews would have you believe. Still, a movie where the audience is supposed to feel great empathy for the trials and tribulations of a comfortable, wealthy family who use their privilege and wealth to get their groove back is maybe not the best fit for 2019. I liked the film's pace and tone in the first half and appreciated its matter-of-fact depiction of depression and mental illness, but the second half was a bit too treacly and sentimental for my taste.
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