At long last, the best films of 2019

*Saoirse Ronan in “Little Women.” (Photo courtesy Columbia Pictures)*

Every year at the cinema is good, but some, like 2019, truly stand out. This is my year in movies, listed mostly at random, as the titles came to mind -- which may be telling, my subconscious at work? -- then divided into two tiers. I’m already regretting what I haven’t included in this already-too-big list (“Atlantics,” “Waves” and “The Nightingale,” maybe), and what I still haven’t caught up with (“Under the Silver Lake,” “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” “Honey Boy,” “Knock Down the House”), but it’s time to finally let this baby out into the world.

Also, as recent months have seen my professional criticism expand a bit into television, I’ve tacked on three series that resonated greatly with me — and gave me an excuse to write about “Star Wars.”

“Parasite”

Upstairs. Upstairs, downstairs. Upstairs, downstairs, basement. Upstairs, downstairs, basement, sub-basement. Upstairs, downstairs, basement, sub-basement… then what? Bong Joon Ho is a singular director and gifted writer, but this story of class struggle -- about a financially downtrodden family slowly and sneakily integrating itself into an upper-upper-middle-class family’s posh life -- shows he’s an architect, too. Screenplay, characters and the main set piece (which may be the film’s true star) are arranged in visually, thematically and tonally telescoping layers. It’s funny, suspenseful and artful, but most importantly, it’s full-powered cinema. We’ll be talking about this one for years to come.

“Midsommar”

Ari Aster’s follow-up to “Hereditary” scared the living daylights out of me in broad daylight, which is where this story about college kids swept into an insane shiny-happy-people neo-Pagan-fundamentalist isolationist Swedish cult plays out it’s thoroughly disturbing hand. As the primary inductee to the Scandinavian batshittery, Florence Pugh is a fully committed revelation. I was riveted. Moral of the story: Normalizing psychotic behavior (BUT IT’S JUST CULTURAL DIFFERENCES, YOU KNOW) is the first brainwashy skid down a slippery slope leading to some deeply upsetting behavior involving a bear; ritual sex in front of a modest, but still relatively large, audience; a twirling, twirling, twirling dance into personal oblivion; and some good old-fashioned human sacrifice.

“Little Women”

I felt every moment of this film, and it was an absolute joy. Director Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the classic novel is so many things -- clear, pure, visually sumptuous, rigorously acted, earnest and emotionally vigorous. Saoirse Ronan anchors it with another pointedly relevant performance (see also “Brooklyn” and Gerwig’s “Lady Bird”), supported by bright bulbs in Emma Watson, Florence Pugh (a revelation, again), Timothee Chalamet, Chris Cooper and Laura Dern. Oh, and someone named Meryl Streep, remember her? It’s a portrait of complex women, of jubilance, and of grief. It’s magical in the way it feels heightened for drama, but also feels so much like life.

“Uncut Gems”

The Safdie Brothers follow up their 2017 knockout suspense-thriller “Good Time” (go watch it now; I’ll wait here patiently) with a Squishee that’s 100 percent syrup, caffeine injected directly into the heart, a jittery adrenaline drama that’s pure, uncut Essence of Panic. Here’s the kicker: the main character, New York jewelry dealer Howard Ratner, sows the seeds of his own precarious, nigh-debilitating tumult quite deliberately, being a gambling addict who keeps doubling down until you just can’t stand it anymore and want to kill him for involving you in the narrative even as a mere observer, and then you end up kind of loving him for his unwavering commitment to his own apparently imminent personal destruction and need to consistently challenge himself to do better, better, better, better and be bigger, bigger, the biggest. He’s an artist, and his medium is chaos. Here’s the other kicker: He’s played by Adam Sandler in the role of a lifetime. Give him the Oscar. Give him 20 Oscars. Give him every Oscar ever.

“Marriage Story”

Sometimes things just don’t work out. Why? How? Good Christ, if I knew, I’d bottle it, sell it and bury Jeff Bezos. Filmmaker Noah Baumbach doesn’t pretend to know either, and whittles an ornate, complex doomed-couple drama from the precariously brittle balsa of human relationships. Adam Driver is he, Scarlett Johansson is she, Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta are the divorce lawyers. It’s civil until it isn’t. It’s wrenching and heartbreaking and all the things you don’t ever want to experience but just might, despite everyone’s best and worst intentions. If you played the movie in reverse, it might be a glob of yucky, shitty brown oil paint magically separating into a gorgeous multicolored rainbow. But time being as it may, it plays forward, and all Driver and Johansson can do is perform with sublime vulnerability and assurance, trusting Baumbach’s impeccable writing will lead them down an invisible path through a fog through a forest through laughter and tears to something that feels like truth. Did I mention they have a kid? Dammit. Just -- dammit. (Read my review here.)

“Knives Out”

A classical murder mystery in 2019 is a tough sell (in my mind, anyway), but Rian Johnson is an ambitious filmmaker who knows how to leaven some delicious dough with bright notes of cultural criticism. On the surface, his ensemble is exquisitely chemical -- Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette and Chris Evans (as the year’s most convincing, heavily sweatered jackass) are the support beams in a family whose hypocrisy is filleted, encrusted and baked sumptuous in the wake of their rich patriarch’s (Christopher Plummer) untimely demise. Ana de Armas is the old man’s caretaker, a portrait of moral constancy with a sensitive gag reflex triggered by fibbers -- she’s an immigrant, notably -- and Daniel Craig plays a Deep South Hercule Poirot with a rolling mouthful of a Foghorn Leghorn drawl. This is rich broth, for sure. But Johnson’s film is conceived wily and smart, not just in its brilliant visual architecture or its ability to deftly defy expectations, but also in its satirical vivisection of American culture and politics.

“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”

If… if she… if she could only… just... get a good look at… her face. And when these two women finally lock eyes, the world could burn around them and it wouldn’t matter. This smoldering-to-searing romance is composed like a classical painting, luscious to look at, drawing us in to study its intricacy and divine its deep emotional well. It’s a lovely, quiet, poignantly feminist film that only dares raise its volume in the final scene, when it truly matters, when aching, yearning waves crash on lonely beaches, resounding in our broken hearts.

“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”

I’m not sure if I knew Quentin Tarantino was capable of breaking our hearts so completely by -- spoiler alert, you’ve been warned -- revisiting the idea of historical revisionism (see also: “Inglourious Basterds”) and giving Sharon Tate the happy ending she deserved. Like so many Tarantino films, “OUATIH” is so, so many things, but this, its heart, is true. Sure, his lovingly idiosyncratic riff on the classic “death of innocence” narrative of 1969 is stirring. As is his melancholy depiction of Hollywood’s turning point from square cinema to the artful progress of the ’70s, leaving behind obsolete men like those played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt. And the idea that change is pain and nostalgia can be crushingly funereal. But seeing a very pregnant Tate stroll out of the frame as the credits roll, walking into a fictional dream of a life in which her child was born and she gave the world more of her art… devastating. Just devastating.

“The Irishman”

If you’re hung up on the way the de-aging effects look and not noticing how they’re a profound veneer on Martin Scorsese’s shrewd and insightful probing of aged men looking back and forth and up and down and through their lives, finding heaps of complicity and business decisions and brutality and amoral brotherhood, but not a whole lot of love. Point: It absolutely makes thematic sense to digitally doctor the mugs of De Niro, Pesci and Pacino so they can play their characters in every point of their lives, because to cast others as younger versions undermines the entire idea of the film. The conversation about the fish and “it’s what it is” are the highlights of a tremendous script of uproarious digressions and circular gangsterspeak, and all of it is bullshit, just bullshit, when your own daughter shuts you out. It’s De Niro’s best work, it’s prime Pesci, it’s Scorsese at his best. It’s what it is. (Read my review here.)

“The Farewell”

The concept sounds like a cornball scenario in a broad comedy, but it’s heavily inspired by director/screenwriter Lulu Wang’s life: A tight Chinese family’s grandmother has terminal cancer, but her sister and children keep the truth from her, believing she’ll appreciate her final days more if she doesn’t know. The family stages a cousin’s phony wedding as a secret farewell for Grandma Nai Nai; her beloved granddaughter Billi, who immigrated to America with her parents when she was a child, fights the urge to reveal the truth and defy her family and culture. Awkwafina -- known for her profane rap songs and roles in “Ocean’s 8” and “Crazy Rich Asians” -- is a revelation as Billi, getting across the character’s struggles with her American sensibilities and her family’s external pressures. She anchors extraordinary ensemble work, and Zhao Shuzhen, playing Nai Nai, is a jewel.

“The Lighthouse”

Watching Willem Dafoe play a grizzled-guts lighthouse keeper in a verbal-psychological battle with new partner-in-geographic-isolation Robert Pattinson is -- well, I don’t want to say it’s a “delight,” considering how nutty this thing gets, but the hell with it. It’s DELIGHTFUL, because the script is rich, and the performances are rowdy, almost outright berserk. Dafoe wrestles his dialogue through an insane pirate cadence and a gullet full of tobacco, phlegm and gravel -- another brilliant performance for a career eccentric -- and Pattinson eventually catches up to his lunacy. Director Robert Eggers’ follow-up to “The VVitch” is tonally idiosyncratic, shot in suffocating black-and-white and in a tight, claustrophobic aspect ratio, barreling toward its conclusion with sickening inevitability, the sea and its mad mysteries smacking its lips in anticipation of devouring two more delicious wayward souls.

“Her Smell”

Like “The Beach Bum” and “Uncut Gems,” this fictional rock-bio is also anchored by a singular performance. Elisabeth Moss is Becky Something, a 1990something alt-rock grrl who’s cosmically off the rails, a riot in running makeup, loathsomely powertripping and drug-tripping until the people around her -- and we, the audience -- just can’t take her anymore. The film follows a sort-of “Behind the Music” arc, landing in an inevitable second-half rehab where Becky sings Bryan Adams’ “Heaven” to her daughter, a scene that recontextualizes a cheesy overplayed song into raw emotional profundity, leaving us a wreck of empathy praying hopeful for a broken soul.

“Honeyland”

The best documentary of 2019 is the one least like typical examples of the form. Directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov forego artificial commentary -- talking heads, narration, graphics -- for pure observation as they profile Macedonian beekeeper Hatidze Muratova, whose life consists of tending to her hives, peddling her wares and taking care of her ailing and elderly mother. She lives in a rural, isolated stone house with barely a window and nothing close to resembling electricity, life stripped to the bone. Seems simple enough, until a nomadic family pulls their battered travel trailer onto neighboring property, and the hapless patriarch thinks honey is easy money. I was so caught up in this riveting and authentic narrative, I barely noticed it wasn’t scripted.

“Booksmart”

This ecstatically funny film pairs Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein as high school seniors who realize they studied too much and didn’t screw around enough. So they jam all their latent delinquency into one night, the night before graduation, and it’s epic -- epic comedy, epic fun and an epic portrait of down-to-the-bone friendship.

TIER TWO

“Us”

Lupita Nyong’o is amazing, yes, always, but even more so here, because she plays mirror roles, one as a vulnerable mother haunted by a traumatic childhood experience, and the other as her doppelganger, one eye askew, righteously angry from a life spent underground, and possibly homicidal. The double is one among many emerging in revolt, and that’s where Jordan Peele’s follow-up to neo-classic “Get Out” gets sloppy. But Nyong’o is unforgettable, bringing the film to life, exhibiting range that isn’t just superficial, but two sides of a self, and maybe even of ourselves, of America’s caste-like layers of the comfortable and the disaffected. Her work lingers maleficent.

“Dolemite is My Name”

The second coming of the Eddie Murphnaissance hopefully wasn’t derailed too much by Oscar’s failure to nominate him for playing beloved inept filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore in this cheery biopic. More himself than he’s been since 2006’s “Dreamgirls,” Murphy characterizes the man with joy, color and complexity -- a meek soul with a profane movie and comedy persona, a gentleman on the streets but a madman in the sheets. The film frames him as a relentless optimist whose infectious enthusiasm turned “Dolemite” -- the “Plan 9 from Outer Space” of blacksploitation films -- from labor of love to bona-fide underground hit. That enthusiasm spills over from the screen to our souls. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film made even more so by Murphy’s vibrant return to form. (Read my review here.)

“Toy Story 4”

“Trash!” Forky is an absurdist symbol of existential despair, representative of the human soul’s idiotic wavering between excruciating self-awareness and the gullible earnestness of hope. He’s also hysterically funny. The solo Forky film should be written and directed by Werner Herzog. (Read my review here.)

“Avengers: Endgame”

I include this in the best-of-2019 list to prove that I’m not a snob. I’m a snob, yes, but I’m also not. Humans are complicated. OK, so the culmination of 22 Marvel movies is Captain America wielding Thor’s hammer, the mortal doing the impossible. Could’ve been worse. Probably couldn’t have been much better, either. (Read my review here.)

“The Beach Bum”

You’re either on filmmaker Harmony Korine’s lunatic wavelength or you’re not. Probably not. Move along, then, ye dogs. The rest of us will sup heavy on the loosey-goosey freewheeling whatever-man bullshit of Matthew McConaughey playing a permasauced, independently wealthy, deep-Florida wastoid poet who’s either so profoundly self-aware or un-self-aware that he’s absolutely his own trainwreck of a self at all times, the rest of the world be damned. This is McConaughey distilled to the purest of all goofy-ass madman McConaugheys.

“Apollo 11” and “The Edge of Democracy”

Two more documentaries clung tightly. Every second of “Apollo 11” is remarkable, not just for being a quiet middle finger in the faces of loony, it-was-faked conspiracy theorists. The film is wholly composed of never-before-seen archival footage unearthed in celebration of a stunning human achievement. Who knew this type of footage existed, and why didn’t anyone show it to us sooner? In severe contrast, “The Edge of Democracy” (full review) is filmmaker Petra Costa’s passionate and heartbreaking chronicle of Brazil’s spiral towards destructive totalitarianism, something Americans might sympathize with. (And since this film debuted, careless deforestation led to tragic, massive fires in the Amazon rainforest.) Costa pieces the story together like an embedded journalist exploiting an almost-familial angle, and taking a cutting op-ed point of view and a somber poet’s tone.

TV:

“The Mandalorian”

The stinging disappointment that was “The Rise of Skywalker” (in short: it’s not objectively bad but could’ve been much better; it’s by far the least of the new trilogy; the potential of Rey goes unfulfilled) was mollified by this Disney+ series, which is so very much the Leone/Kurosawa-style cinematic mythmaking that inspired George Lucas in the first place. And it’s on TV. Go figure. Don’t hold that against it -- showrunner Jon Favreau nails the visual and overall storytelling tone of the best of “Star Wars,” tosses in Werner Herzog, and blindsides us with Baby Yoda, which, if you don’t like him, you should be shoved into the sea and nibbled by jellyfish for eternity. It looks back, it looks forward, it’s entertaining -- and it surpasses expectations. Appointment viewing. More please, soon.

“Russian Doll”

What do you see when you look in the mirror? In this relentlessly funny, provocative, progressive and sagacious series, Natasha Lyonne -- creator, star and director all -- sees herself over and over and over and over again, trapped in a “Groundhog Day” time loop beginning with her 36th birthday party and ending whenever she dies. And dies. And dies. And dies again. And again. Puzzles must be solved; minds will be bent; analyses will be fraught and debated. Lyonne is irascible, vibrant, lively and many other plauditory adjectives. What a voice, what a voice, what a voice.

“Watchmen”

Showrunner David Lindelof shows he understands the eccentricity and moral ambiguity of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ benchmark 1986 comic book. The series is a direct sequel (tip: re-read, then watch) set in the current day, when occasional interdimensional-squid squalls remind us that we’re not alone in the universe (Well, not really. But you already knew that?) and America is a place of great racial tension and borderline-totalitarianism -- which is just Lindelof extrapolating just far enough on our own reality to make it realistic, and utterly terrifying. Regina King and Jean Smart are the extraordinary core of a great cast.