2019 in Movies

Daniel Craig as private detective Benoit Blanc in Knives Out

Back in the spring I looked ahead to the scheduled summer releases and realized that, with one or two exceptions, I wasn’t looking forward to anything. If, like me, you’re almost totally burned out on Marvel, the summer of 2019 was a bust, and I was beginning to think that 2019 would be another lean year for movies the way last year was. But, lo and behold, after some solid stuff in the spring and a dry spell during the summer—which I used to write the rough draft of my next novel anyway—fall and early winter turned out to be delightful. It ended up being hard to choose what to include here. It was a good year for movies—at least for me.

Two notes before I launch into my favorites of the year:

• First, this is a list of favorites. I might give some opinions on superlatives below—best acting, best made, etc.—but I’m mostly assessing these movies as favorites, as the movies I either most enjoyed or got the most out of, not necessarily making claims about which are the best of the year.

• Second, I’ve actually written about several of these movies before on this blog, so for any film for which I’ve already written a review, I’ve kept my recap here short and included a link to the full review elsewhere.

So here, in roughly ascending order, are my seven favorite movies of the last year:

Richard Jewell

Paul Walter Hauser as Richard Jewell

I remember the to-do surrounding the 1996 Atlanta Olympics quite vividly. The logo and obligatory weird mascot were everywhere, the torch passed through my hometown on its way to Atlanta, and my family watched the opening ceremonies and as many of the events as we could. I also remember the bombing.

Richard Jewell narrowly focuses on the title character and what happened to him as he worked security over the first few days of the Olympics. Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a former security guard and sheriff’s deputy, hopes to get back into law enforcement if he can do well enough with his gig doing security at a concert venue in Olympic Park. Clint Eastwood, directing from a script by Billy Ray, carefully reconstructs the events of these first few days, and the scenes surrounding the bombing are tense and shocking. Jewell’s role in saving lives is made clear and the media adulation that unexpectedly envelops him for a few days is made bittersweet by what we know is coming. Especially poignant is the pride Jewell’s mother Bobi (Kathy Bates) takes in her boy.

The bulk of the film follows the FBI’s bumbling investigation into Jewell following a tip from a former employer, the leak to the media via AJC reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), and the vicious trial-by-media that ruined Jewell’s life for months as newspapers and TV networks dogpiled him. Jewell fights back by calling on lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) and the two form a testy friendship as Jewell tries to understand what’s happening to him and Bryant tries to keep Jewell, a believer in law and order who “was raised to respect authority,” from being so obliging to the FBI, who are using his attempts to be forthcoming to railroad him.

The film is full of good performances. Sam Rockwell, good in everything he’s ever been in, is a standout as Bryant. Kathy Bates is excellent as Bobi Jewell, an authentic and sympathetic portrayal of an ordinary Southern woman unprepared to live under the scrutiny of both the media and the federal government, unable to comprehend the callousness of both and the injustice being done to her son. But the best performance in the film is Hauser as Jewell. Hauser is 100% authentic. His accent, the cadence of his speech, his understated sense of humor, his posture as he stands or sits—all are dead-on, as is his attitude toward the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, best described as a worshipful camaraderie that takes a severe hit by the end of the film. I know people just like this. It’s outstanding, and while Hauser’s isn’t the flashiest performance of the year—for that, see below—it’s certainly among the best precisely because it’s so real.

Richard Jewell, we realize toward the end of the movie, bewilders the powerful because he’s a man without an angle. He did what he did because it was his job and he wanted to help people. The tragedy is that the powerful in our world—the feds, the media—can’t understand this kind of goodness. For that reason alone, Richard Jewell is an important movie to watch and a fitting tribute to a decent man.

The Highwaymen

Kevin Costner as a weary Frank hamer in The Highwaymen

The Highwaymen inverts the usual retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde story by focusing on the lawmen who tracked down and killed them rather than the bandits themselves. More a police procedural than an action movie, the film follows aging Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault as they are specially deputized to deal with Bonnie and Clyde’s unique style of interstate violence. The two lawmen, relics of the not-quite-vanished age of the frontier, doggedly track the crooks up and down the highways of Texas, Oklahoma, and finally Louisiana, always traveling in the wake of their thefts and murders. Their frustration and the toll of life on the road mounts, and when we reach the final confrontation on a lonesome road in the piney woods of Louisiana (shot in the actual location, dressed by the set designers to its 1930s appearance), the expertly heightened tension is almost unbearable.

Directed by John Lee Hancock (who directed the underappreciated masterpiece The Alamo) and starring Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson, both excellent as the taciturn Hamer and the damaged and worn out Gault, this is a handsomely mounted, well acted, atmospheric drama that rightly depicts Bonnie and Clyde as destructive thugs without glorifying the means used to take them down. Indeed, the film is comfortable allowing some ambiguity—at least among the characters—about the nature of law enforcement, crime, and personal responsibility, and ends not on a note of triumph but of resignation. It’s almost worth watching just for its wordless final scenes, an eloquent condemnation not of criminality but of celebrity worship. It’s great.

My friend Coyle Neal of The City of Man Podcast and I recorded an episode about The Highwaymen after it came out in the spring. It was a fun discussion. You can read a few notes about that, and listen to the episode, here.

Knives Out

Daniel Craig and Ana de armas investigate foul play in Knives Out

A carefully plotted murder mystery with a colorful cast of characters and a good dose of humor, Knives Out is the most fun I had at the movies this year.

After elderly mystery-thriller writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found with his throat cut the morning after his birthday party, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) arrives to consult with the police to find the murderer. Murder? A straightforward interpretation of the death scene would indicate suicide. But Blanc is convinced otherwise after interviewing the many members of Thrombey’s self-serving and duplicitous family and enlists Thrombey’s personal nurse, Marta (Ana de Armas), to help him untangle what happened that night.

Knives Out owes a lot to the mysteries of writers like Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, with a stately house full of despicable characters, one of whom must have done it, dedicated but unimaginative traditional cops, and a private detective with keen insight and… eccentricities. The setting, a real house in rural Massachusetts, is interesting and the characters are all wonderfully played. Plummer is good in flashback scenes and Ana de Armas brings a freshness and innocent goodness to Marta that serves as a striking contrast to the various members of the Thrombey family. Daniel Craig is especially good as Blanc, affecting a Southern accent that one suspects Blanc might be overplaying as a bit of investigative sleight of hand. Among the family, Michael Shannon as Harlan’s publisher son and Toni Collette as a dippy “influencer” type and natural health nut are standouts, as is Chris Evans, arriving late as the purported black sheep of a family where the whole flock is already pretty black. Everyone is just slightly over the top, which is part of what makes the movie fun instead of being a slog through a bunch of miserable suspects (compare another mystery in which Christopher Plummer plays a weary patriarch and Daniel Craig the detective, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo).

I don’t want to give anything away because the film is well constructed to supply surprises. I went in cold, not knowing much about the movie and not really interested given director Rian Johnson’s reputation following The Last Jedi. But my wife and I heard enough good things about it via word of mouth that we gave it a shot for date night and had a blast.

Midway

The USS Enterprise under fire in Midway

Midway emerged as an unintentional star of my blog in the second half of the year, as my notes and worries about the first trailer got a lot of traffic and my eventual review was one of the most popular posts this month.

Because of the trailer I went to see Midway reluctantly but was almost totally won over. It’s not a perfect movie by any means, but it does what it sets out to do and—what was important to me—respects the real men who fought at Midway. It provides a solid overview of the events between Pearl Harbor and Midway—roughly the first six months of American involvement in World War II—and capably and vividly dramatizes the stakes, both militarily and personally, for the men involved, as well as what it took to rise to the occasion and fight back. It has some overacting, weak dialogue, and dodgy special effects, but the things I hope to see in a historical film are all there. It’s worth your time.

You can read my full review of Midway, written to coincide with Pearl Harbor Day a few weeks ago, here.

Joker

Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck in Joker

Now that the pearl-clutching fainting couch furor over Joker has proven to be overblown, I hope people can untwist their knickers and revisit and reassess it. This movie deeply impressed me, and after I saw it I spent the next several days mulling it over. Joker is not an enjoyable or fun superhero romp—this is no popcorn movie. But Joaquin Phoenix gives the best performance of the year in the title role and the film built around him is a carefully and sharply constructed character study.

Joker offers another origin story for Batman’s archenemy, a man who has no certain or canonical past, a point exploited by Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. Here, the Joker begins as Arthur Fleck, a man with severe mental problems who has been turned out by the system due to budget cuts, an issue that will recur before the film is over. He works a humiliating job as a clown for hire to take care of his mother, an invalid with—we will learn later, if we don’t infer it before then—even worse mental problems than Arthur’s. Weak, ineffectual, and above all pathetic, Arthur deplores the ugliness of Gotham City and its people but recognizes himself as an utter nullity. Then a chance encounter on the subway gives him a taste of the influence and power to be had from using violence to inspire terror, and we watch this put upon, seemingly gentle man turn toward and embrace the ugliness. The film begins with Arthur crying over the world; it ends with him laughing as that world burns.

There’s a lot to admire in Joker, but it does have its weaknesses. Some of its themes are pretty obvious if not clumsy, especially where mental health and the class conflict within Gotham is concerned, the series of humiliations Arthur endures sometimes feels as though it’s on autopilot, and I never quite believed Robert De Niro as the Carson-like late show host who is first Arthur’s idol and then his nemesis. The film also develops a subplot surrounding Arthur’s mysterious parentage—his mother tells him that he is the illegitimate son of Thomas Wayne, which would make him and Bruce half-brothers—that, while building to an important payoff, drags because the truth never feels in doubt.

But the film’s technical aspects, especially its cinematography and set design, are spectacular in their grime and bleakness, and this careful attention to the reality in which Joker takes place—an early ‘80s Gotham City modeled on the collapsing late ‘70s New York City—makes the violence feel that much more shocking and disturbing. Only a handful of people die in Joker, and none of them is thrilling or exciting and all feel like unalterable, irrevocable acts. (Compare the violence in any of the Avengers movies.) Furthermore, there a lot of nice touches in the details, such as Arthur’s poorly conceived clown makeup (I learn from reading about John Wayne Gacy that professional clowns frown upon—sorry—sharp corners for their painted smiles; the sharp angles make them look sinister). Hildur Guðnadóttir’s droning string score also adds to both the grind of living in Gotham and the dread and tension that build up through the second half of the film.

But the standout, what makes Joker so excellent, is Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. Arthur’s transformation from a man who can barely muster enough strength to pull a coherent sentence together to someone embracing meaningless violence is only believable because of him. “I don’t believe in anything,” Arthur says at the end of the film, not as a declaration but as an explanation. He smiles as he says it, and through Phoenix we see how he reached this point. In any other hands this would have gone wrong. He’s the reason to see this movie, and the reason it works.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Leonardo diCaprio as rick dalton and brad pitt as cliff booth In once upon a time in hollywood

Here’s a strange circumstance: me enjoying and commending a Quentin Tarantino movie. I’ve had a love-hate relationship with his movies since I first saw Reservoir Dogs in college, and while I liked Inglourious Basterds with some reservations and grudgingly admired the craftsmanship and humor of Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, to my surprise, totally won me over.

I won’t get into the plot, but the film follows fading Hollywood star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman-turned-gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) across a few days in the spring and late summer of 1969. Dalton, desperate not to become a has-been, is struggling to remember his lines as the baddie in the pilot of a TV Western and Cliff, out and about on a variety of errands, has a series of run-ins with a creepy hippie girl and her “family” of cronies. The hippies turn out to be the Manson Family and Dalton, we see, is the next door neighbor of Roman Polanski and his luminous wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), whom we see in occasional cutaways as she drives around Hollywood, sits in on a screening of one of her own movies, and parties with friends.

There are plot-driven stories and character-driven stories, and while I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fits within the latter category, it’s also a uniquely setting-driven story. I haven’t seen a time and place this lovingly recreated since Zodiac—which, interestingly, begins at exactly the same cultural moment, just farther north in California. Tarantino’s Hollywood is beautiful, vibrant, but it’s also deeply historical—everywhere beneath the glossy present of 1969 are relics of what was and the slowly cohering image of what will be. Rick and Cliff are poised precisely at this point of balance, burdened not with the past—those were unapologetically the glory days, now patinaed and given over to hippie squatters—but with an uncertain future.

This is probably the best made movie of the year—gorgeously shot on film by Robert Richardson, with beautiful and intricately detailed sets and costumes that vividly evoke the era without wallowing in a cartoon version of it. The performances are all outstanding, even down to the bit players, for whom Tarantino shows affection, and this is the first Tarantino script where I didn’t feel like it was grossly overindulgent. The film is long, it lingers, lets us stew in the Hollywood of 1969, but it’s all exactly right. It doesn’t whip us along from one plot point to the next but is the first film in a while that just allows us to live in a scene. By the time the film ended I felt like I knew this place and these people.

Without spoiling anything, I did want to nod to the film’s ending, which rewrites history in a way Tarantino has done a couple times now. But where I felt the ending of Inglourious Basterds, for example, trivialized some of the events involved, the ending of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really made me think and reflect. I finished the film mourning real loss and grateful for the mysterious gift of life. I don’t think I can say anything more without giving it all away, but to finish a Tarantino film with this kind of uplift, catharsis, and affirmation of the good and the beautiful was a revelation.

Tarantino claims he’s done after his tenth movie. Let’s hope it’s another as good as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

1917

George MacKay ventures into no-man’s-land in 1917

I’m grateful I got to see 1917, as it only enters wide release in January. The film, set during World War I and directed by Sam Mendes, follows two ordinary English infantrymen on a mission through no-man’s-land and the abandoned German front lines to deliver an important message. This seemingly simple story is told in one fluid, non-stop shot that takes the viewer with the men into some of the most dreadful and dangerous conditions soldiers have ever had to endure. This technique keeps us that their level, down in the muck, reminds us that these men had to walk almost everywhere they went, and creates a heavy sense of dread as the men encounter new dangers—they can’t escape and the camera won’t look away. We’re in this together.

1917 is my favorite film of the year. It’s well acted and technically excellent and involves the viewer like few other war films I’ve seen. Its depiction of life on the Western Front is dreadfully real and offers a two-hour journey into this terrible lost world that should shock and move. It’s brilliantly done. See if it you can.

There’s a lot more to say about this film, but I’ve already written quite a lot about it. You can read my full review of 1917 here.

Honorable mentions

• Tolkien—An okay-ish but enjoyable dramatization of some of JRR Tolkien’s formative years that takes some serious liberties with the truth in order to force this real, unique man into a Hollywood mold. You can read my full review of Tolkien here.

• Downton Abbey—Essentially a jumbo-sized episode of the show with slightly slicker cinematography and a larger budget for extras, Downton Abbey was an enjoyable trip back to this world and these characters. You can read my full review of Downton Abbey here.

• Toy Story 4—A fun, poignant followup to the first three that takes the characters in some interesting new directions.

• Ad Astra—A thought-provoking and beautifully shot film with a small but very good cast—the standout being Tommy Lee Jones as Brad Pitt’s deranged or fanatical astronaut father—that just dragged for significant stretches.

• Shazam!—One of the most flat-out enjoyable movies I saw this year, a straightforwardly comedic superhero movie with a fun premise and a winsome lead performance by Zachary Levi.

• Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker—I didn’t intend to write anything to contribute to the current Star Wars poo typhoon, but I did want to mention that I’d seen this. It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as I’d heard, and I mostly enjoyed it until it began collapsing under the weight of its own nostalgia in the last third or so. Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, and Oscar Isaac are excellent, the main reason any of these films have held together, and I wish they’d been better served by the scripts thrown together by the committees at Disney over the last several years.

Special mentions

Eero Aho as Antti Rokka In Tuntematon Sotilas

I wanted to make special mention of one film and two outstanding documentaries I saw this year. I mention the film separately because it technically came out two years ago but only became available in the US in March. That film is Tuntematon sotilas or Unknown Soldier, a Finnish film about a company of soldiers fighting Soviet Russia in the Continuation War. Adapted from the novel by Väinö Linna, Unknown Soldier is excellent, one of the best war films in recent memory. You can read my full review of Unknown Soldier, which I posted to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Winter War, here.

The first documentary I want to mention is They Shall Not Grow Old, directed by Peter Jackson. This documentary, which offers a window into the experience of British soldiers on the Western Front in World War I, was assembled from hundreds of hours of footage and oral history interviews in the archives of the Imperial War Museum. Much has been made of Jackson’s “restoration” of the footage—he and his team slowed and stabilized the jerky silent footage, digitally removed a lot of grain, damage, or other artifacts, and colorized it—but it’s not a restoration per se. This footage hasn’t been restored to its original condition. Far from it. But it has been manipulated in such a way as to remove some barriers to a modern viewer’s understanding of what they are seeing, and that's a good thing.

The best aspects of the film, however, are probably auditory. First, Jackson’s foley artists provided ambient sound effects and professional lipreaders provided dialogue for footage that has, for a hundred years, recorded only the silent mouthing of long dead men. This alone makes the footage come to life in a way that startled me when I saw it. Second, every bit of narration in the film comes from a montage of real World War I veterans talking about their experiences, with no modern narrator or talking heads getting in the way. It’s excellent, and profoundly moving. You can read my full review of They Shall Not Grow Old here.

The second documentary is Apollo 11, which came out to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing. Like They Shall Not Grow Old, Apollo 11 avoids narrators and talking head interviewees. Instead, it very carefully sticks to contemporary film and television footage to tell the story of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’s flight to the moon. The story is told in its editing, with the men who participated allowed to lead us through the story themselves, and the rich variety of footage used—launch preparations on Cape Canaveral, the team in mission control, the thousands of people packing the beach to watch the launch, the astronauts inside the command module and on the surface of the moon—gives us a sweeping look at the event that was the moon landing.

Especially noteworthy is Apollo 11’s use of some previously unreleased archival footage shot on 65mm film, giving sections of the documentary an astonishingly sharp clarity. It looks like it was shot yesterday, and when Armstrong or Aldin look into the camera you feel who these men were as men in a way that the scratchy footage used and reused for years on TV never could. It’s excellent, the best documentary on the Apollo program I’ve ever seen.

2019 films I missed but hope to catch in the new year:

• Avengers: Endgame—Yes, I’m burned out, and I have zero interest in Captain Marvel, but I do want to see the (sort of) end of this story. I’ll see it as soon as I can muster the energy to tap this on the screen at Redbox.

• The Irishman—Martin Scorsese’s much talked about return to the crime genre. I’m especially intrigued by the nonlinear structure and the extensive—and widely praised—use of digital de-aging technology to span the decades.

• Ford v Ferrari—The first trailer sold me. I don’t know much about cars or auto racing, especially the high-performance European variety, but this looks immensely entertaining and I do love a good car chase.

• Midsommar and The Lighthouse—Horror films that are long on mood and atmosphere. I’m especially interested in The Lighthouse, Robert Eggers’s followup to The Witch, one of the most engrossing and eerie historical films I’ve seen in years.

• The Peanut Butter Falcon—A widely praised and sweet looking coming-of-age story about a Down syndrome boy escaping his prison-like care facility and learning independence and manhood from an unlikely mentor.

• Unplanned—Based on the story of former Planned Parenthood clinic director Abby Johnson and her turn from abortion to the pro-life movement. My friends at the Front Porch Show interviewed one of the stars.

• A Hidden Life—Terrence Malick’s biographical film about Franz Jäggerstätter, an Austrian conscientious objector who was executed by the Nazis. It looks amazing. Here Kyle Smith compares it to A Man For All Seasons. Alan Jacobs writes of its portrayal of the mysteries of faith and courage here.

Looking ahead

2020 has some promising titles. I look forward to Greyhound, Tom Hanks’s adaptation of my favorite novel of last year; the latest Bond film, No Time to Die; Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, which seems to involve crime and reversing the flow of time, because it’s a Christopher Nolan movie; Kenneth Branagh’s second Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which was teased at the end of his Murder on the Orient Express; and Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the weighty Dune, which I read for the first time this year. There’s probably plenty more, but these are the handful I’m most interested in right now.

I hope y’all enjoyed this year’s movies as much as I did, and, more importantly, I hope that y’all had a good year and that the coming year is full of promise and blessing. Thanks for reading, and happy New Year!