The 10 best films of 2019

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Harry Fletcher24 December 2019

What will 2019 be remembered for in the world of film? An Oscar win for the saccharine and problematic Green Book? Perhaps. Some of the highest box office receipts of all time, with seven movies taking more than $1bn (£730m) worldwide? Maybe. The disappointing final instalment of the Star Wars franchise and the hair-ball regurgitating mess that was Cats? Almost certainly.

Film fans will also look back at 2019 as the year Disney ate itself – the studio remade three of its classic animations in live action, and a list of sequels longer than Dumbo’s trunk. The studio’s success at the box office didn’t always translate with critics, with the technically sublime but unnecessary Lion King, Aladdin and the hitherto mentioned Dumbo getting their fair share of flak.

Thankfully the year saw plenty of brilliant filmmaking too. But while we think about the best films of the past 12 months, it’s also worth thinking about what cinema means in 2019 – the very notion is something of a loose concept, especially when some of the most popular and acclaimed movies of the year weren’t screening in theatres at all. Netflix’s The Irishman and Marriage Story marked major steps up for the streaming giant, with the platform reaping the rewards of handing over creative control to auteurs Martin Scorsese and Noah Baumbach.

They’re two of the films we’ve included in our list of our 10 favourite movies of the year, but there isn’t room for everything of course. Plenty of films deserve honourable mentions; Knives Out was a fresh take on the tropes and twists of Miss Marple, Rocketman was an intimate and candid look at the private life of a global superstar and Once Upon A Time in Hollywood took audiences on a blood and bourbon-stained tour of 60s LA, with Quentin Tarantino taking his own inimitable look at the death of hippy culture in the US.

Elsewhere, Ready Or Not was everything a fun, bloodthirsty modern horror should be. Only You was a knotty love story, with two riveting performances from Laia Costa and Josh O’Connor, and featured one of the best uses of an Elvis Costello song ever put to film. The Souvenir, Burning, Pain & Glory and the unforgettable Monos were all exceptional works, too. Ridiculous though it was, the adrenaline-inducing John Wick 3 also deserves singling out for some unforgettable action sequences, including a fight in a knife store and a library sequence brutal enough to put you off reading forever.

Note that we haven’t included the likes of the highly-anticipated Little Women adaptation and A Hidden Life, as they’re all still to be released at the time of publishing. While the reviews are out for 1917, and it’s released in December in the US, we’ll have to wait until 2020 to see Sam Mendes’s war epic in the UK too. Parasite – tipped for success after winning the Palme d’Or – is out in February too. Oh, and we’re not counting the brilliant The Favourite either, as it was released in the UK last year on December 28.

With that in mind, here are our picks of the best films of 2019.

10. The Farewell

“Hilarious, sad, uplifting” is how the Evening Standard’s critic Charlotte O’Sullivan summed up The Farewell, which is being tipped for success at the Oscars this February. The comedy drama follows 30-year-old New Yorker Billi (Awkwafina), whose family are keeping her terminally ill grandmother (Zhao Shuzhen) in the dark about her illness. It’s a fascinating, poignant and deeply moving story of family, mortality and self-doubt, and one not to be missed. “The Farewell (made for $3m) is widely expected to win Golden Globes and Oscars,” O’Sullivan wrote. “When it does, Hong Lu will probably have to be dragged on stage. I can’t wait to see her beautiful face.”

9. Avengers: Endgame

“The first truly great superhero movie,” was the way the Standard’s Matthew Norman described this, the most critically acclaimed Marvel movie ever and one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Endgame saw the culmination of divergent strands of Marvel’s Phase Three, dealing effortlessly with the weight of expectation, clarifying character storylines beautifully and delivering something that satisfied pretty much everyone – no mean feat, given the size of the fandom and the demands it places on the studio as viewers. It was one of the most impressive cinematic achievements of the year.

8. If Beale Street Could Talk

Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to the majestic and much-acclaimed Moonlight was released just weeks before the 2019 Oscars in the UK – just enough time to pick up Oscar nods for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Score, while Regina King scooped Best Supporting Actress for her powerful turn as Sharon Rivers. Matthew Norman hailed Beale Street as a poetic film that “takes you deep into the bones of the black American experience’, calling it “silkily reverential and achingly poignant”. It’s a stunning work, that cements Jenkins’ status as one of the finest filmmakers of his generation.

7. Midsommar

Ari Aster followed up 2018 horror hit Hereditary with Midsommar, which Charlotte O’Sullivan declared “the feel-mad movie of the decade”. Florence Pugh gives her strongest performance yet as post-grad student Dani, a woman dealing with unimaginable past trauma and floundering in an unhappy relationship, who travels to a mysterious pagan commune in Sweden. The “incredibly funny, strange and tense” movie is certainly one of the most memorable releases of 2019, with some of the most disturbing sequences put to screen in recent years. “Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary is another morbid masterpiece, full of electrifying performances, dialogue and camerawork,” O’Sullivan wrote. “It encourages us to rethink suicide, euthanasia, mental illness and the atomised nature of urban existence.”

6. Booksmart

Olivia Wilde stepped behind the camera this year for her debut Booksmart, an inspired comedy and coming-of-age movie that proved one of the funniest releases of the year. Telling the story of swots Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), the film follows them as they look to enjoy themselves at high school before it’s too late. Charlotte O’Sullivan called it “original and funny,” and it also indicated that Hollywood’s attitudes toward LGBTQ+ characters is changing for the better, a small but welcome step. A gay woman’s story, Booksmart offers a realistic and relatable take on queer lives and relationships – the kind of which you’d struggle to find in hit comedies not long ago.

“The script is full of twists,” O’Sullivan wrote in her five-star review. Molly and Amy snigger at weird rich kid Gigi (Billie Lourd). It takes a while to realise we’re not meant to applaud their lack of empathy. Booksmart explores how mean nerdy girls can be.”

5. Us

It’s been a relatively lean year for horror, truth be told – for every gem, like the Irish independent film The Hole in the Ground and Ueda Shin’ichirô’s One Cut of the Dead, there were plenty of disappointments, with the sequels It Chapter Two and comedy horror sequel Zombieland: Double Tap falling flat. But Jordan Peele’s Us is a taut thrill ride of a film, focused on a nightmarish vision of the world where a family are attacked by doubles of themselves and forced to flee from enemies who appear to know their every move.

There are plenty of Easter eggs to find in the allusions to 80s pop culture – there’s a terrifying nod to 1986 cultural event Hands Across America – as well as riffs on classic slasher cinema and musings on the demons inside us all. Lupita NYong’o’s performance is a marvel, and the film also gave us the killer remix of I Got 5 On It – the soundtrack moment of the year. The Standard’s Matthew Norman called it a “richly intriguing riot of imagery and ideas that demands to be rewatched again and again…. Though he touches lightly on the biblical, Peele offers a compellingly novel vision of hell. To him, unlike Sartre, it isn’t other people. It’s us.”

4. The Irishman

No-one makes mob movies quite like Scorsese. This time round, he got the old band back together (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci are all terrific) to tell the tale of Frank Sheeran, a character at the heart of the disappearance of union leader Jimmy Hoffa. The sprawling story was told over a bum-numbing three hours and 30 minutes, but the film never lost its urgency or vitality.

Scorsese’s comments about Marvel movies overshadowed things to an extent, and the film’s de-ageing technology was enough to put some people off, but it was a price worth paying to have all three powerhouse performers breathe life into the narrative over the span of five decades.

David Sexton praised the movie in his five-star review, writing: “Just to be in the world of such expert film-making, in which every camera angle and movement has intent, every piece of music adds meaning (strange nobody else manages this so well, not even Tarantino), every face is expressive of a world, is a complete sensual pleasure. The interaction between de Niro and Pacino, in one of his finest ever performances, is unmissable. And it’s frequently shockingly funny, too.”

3. Eighth Grade

Comedian-turned-director Bo Burnham’s early days as a YouTuber were put to good use in the fantastically observed Eighth Grade – one of the most remarkable debuts of recent years. The film, which was released in the US back in 2018 but arrived in UK cinemas this April, followed shy and anxious Kayla, who spends her school days alone, before going home to post videos about how to be popular. The pressure social media places on children growing up in the Generation Z has never been better articulated. But like the best coming-of-age movies, Eighth Grade manages to make the troubles and angst of its protagonist truly universal and recognisable.

It’s a beautiful film that transcends time and place to appeal to everyone – even those who’ve never posted a selfie in their life. “Eighth Grade is a masterpiece,” wrote Charlotte O’Sullivan. “It takes forever for Kayla to love herself but if you know what’s good for you, you’ll adore her from the get-go."

2. Marriage Story

One of the most striking things about Marriage Story – which follows a couple going through a demoralising and dehumanising divorce process – is just how funny it is. There are moments of searing comedy and beautiful dialogue which come out of nowhere to counterbalance the relentless, grinding sadness of the breakdown of a relationship.

It’s Noah Baumbach finest film to date, simply but beautifully shot by cinematographer Robbie Ryan. It’s the performances, though, which made the movie such an affecting experience. Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver manage to bring their frailties and flaws to the fore, crucially while remaining essentially likeable people. Laura Dern and Ray Liotta’s performances as the street-fighting lawyers Nora Fanshaw and Jay Marotta are enjoyable if a little ‘pantomime villain’. Merritt Wever, though, is joyous as Nicole’s mother and there is a fantastic performance from young star Azhy Robert, as the son stuck in the middle of two warring factions.

The film’s release on Netflix led to instant meme-ification and overly simplistic “whose side are you on?” debates – but really it was a lot more complex and thoughtful than all that. The Standard’s critic David Sexton was full of praise in his five-star review, saying: “This is expert, deeply felt film-making... its talkativeness and staginess powered along by a killer score from Randy Newman, and fluid camerawork from Robbie Ryan, so good at transmuting theatricality into actual cinema.”

1. Joker

Before the staggering achievement of Joker, Todd Phillips was best known for his work on the Hangover series. They might seem like odd companion pieces, but the connection makes perfect sense – Joker has all the nihilism and crippling cynicism of The Hangover, only this time without the laughs.

This Batman villain origin story is a knotty, unhinged character study focusing on Arthur Fleck, a hopeless stand-up comedian down and out on the streets of Gotham. Joaquin Phoenix gives one of the most remarkable performances of his career, bringing a creepiness and pitiable quality and giving just a slither of humanity to an ostensibly loathsome character. It’s one of the most physical turns of his career too, conveying meaning through balletic dance in one memorable scene – he lost 52lbs for the role too, and his ribs poke through his chest unerringly throughout.

Joker’s critical reception has been interesting to say the least. It was lauded on the festival circuit, before facing a backlash due to its violent content and use of Gary Glitter on the soundtrack. Phoenix even walked out of an interview when asked about the film’s graphic violence – but it didn’t stop the film grossing more than $1b (£760m) worldwide. It’s true that there are moments of almost unendurable violence, which makes for a visceral watch, and a nastiness at its very core. It’s also textural film – we smell the trash piling high in Gotham and the super rats the size of dogs in among them, and we feel the cheap upholstery of Fleck’s tiny apartment.

It’s deeply indebted to the Scorsese movies of the 70s. There’s echoes of Taxi Driver throughout, while Fleck’s obsession with comedian Murray Franklin (played by Robert De Niro, no less) is an affectionate nod to the King of Comedy. But it’s more than just a string of old film references and riffs on Batman iconography. “It's a total physical inhabitation and one of the most alarming portraits of psychosis ever put on the screen,” David Sexton wrote about Phoenix in his five-star review from Venice Film Festival, “quite deliberately out De Niro-ing the young Robert De Niro.” Praise indeed.

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