Filmic Forays - Top Ten Films of 2019

Here it is - my final and favourite post of the year, the one where I get to indulge my filmic passions and talk effusively about what really turned me on (cinematically speaking) over the twelve months just past. As usual there are a few qualifiers re my choices...

The list is based on films released in the UK during 2019 and therefore can't include titles like 1917, The Lighthouse and Parasite. Plus I haven't seen any of those, which doesn't help at all. It also means that I may include a few picks that had a 2018 release in other territories, but which landed here in the year currently concluding and are no less deserving of my love.

Speaking of films I haven't seen, those include such highly regarded releases as The Farewell, The Peanut Butter Falcon and The Last Black Man in San Francisco. So if/when I catch up with any of those, I'll let you know my thoughts and whether they might have made the top-list. Just don't expect me to re-order everything. That simply ain't gonna happen, because - you know - time. 

Finally let me make clear that these are my favourite films of 2019, I'm not making any big statement about which are the most worthy or best. There will be movies that stunned me through sheer technical achievement and those that appealed to me emotionally in a way that others generally don't. So if you agree with my choices, good. If not, well that's the joy of subjective experience. Don't berate me for what I love. Allow me my choices and embrace your own. Okay - prior to the Top Ten, here are my now traditional Honourable Mention Awards (with a couple of Dishonourables thrown in):

Most Singalongable Movie: Rocketman (I really hope my singing was inaudible.)

Best Bromance: Runner-up - Green Book; Winner - Stan and Ollie

Film I Liked More Than Everyone Else: Tolkien

Film Everyone Else Liked More Than Me: Ad Astra

Daftest Film That Still Succeeded In Being Fun: Crawl

Biggest Disappointment of the Year: Runner-up - IT Chapter Two (there were moments to love, just not enough of them); 'Winner' - Godzilla: King of the Monsters (just plain feckin' awful).

Best Film That Managed to be Both an Adaptation of a Sequel Novel and a Sequel to an Adaptation of the Original Novel that Departed Radically from that Novel (anyone follow that?): Doctor Sleep 

Comedy That Deserved a Bigger Audience: Runner-Up - Long Shot; Winner - Booksmart

Purest Live-Action Adventure Fun: Runner-Up: - Spider-Man: Far From Home; Winner - Shazam!

The Filmic Forays Low Expectations Award for a Film that was Massively Better Than I'd Expected: Jumanji: The Next Level (a sequel to a sequel that might easily have been a tedious cash-grab but wasn't).

Best Belter of a Performance by Someone who Should be a BONA-FIDE INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR This Time Next Year: Jessie Buckley in Wild Rose

Best Arrival of Someone who now IS a BONA-FIDE INTERNATIONAL SUPERSTAR: Florence Pugh in Fighting With My Family and two others, more of which later. 

Best Reminder That Someone Can Really Act (in a Movie that was Pretty Damn Great Too): Jennifer Lopez in Hustlers

Best Film That Can't Really Be Considered for My Top Ten as it had a Limited UK Release on December 31st 2018 so I'm Sneaking It In as a Kind of Unofficialy Eleventh Top Ten Entry - Deal With It, It's My Blog My Rules: The Favourite (a work of insane genius.)

Right, we're almost there - the most difficult end-of-year Top Ten I've had to compile since Filmic Forays began. I mean I've seen around twenty films (some already mentioned), any of which would have graced the final list quite beautifully. Plus there are a handful which might well rise further in my estimation on future viewings, causing me regret that I haven't put them there. Titles that spring to mind are:

Beautiful Boy (gorgeous, dreamlike and heartbreaking, plus it was formidably well-acted by both Timothee Chalamet and Steve Carell)

Us (can't reconcile myself to the ending of Jordan Peele's Get Out follow-up, but so much about this surreal horror was magnificent)

Official Secrets (as good a political thriller as there's been in a long time with Keira Knighley being terrific, while in terms of subject this film really matters)

Ford v Ferrari (I don't watch motor sports, but I'd watch this movie over and over and then a few times more)

Marriage Story (it pains me not to include this one, it's so damn authentic)

Little Women (including the second of those Florence Pugh performances; if anything, this omission pains me even more than the previous one - this list-making business is tough)

Good. My conscience is clear. Pretty much. Here in a somewhat contrived ascending order is my Top Ten. Brace yourself. There's no going back.

10. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

A lot of John Wickianados claim that JW2 is the optimum expression of Wickness. However Chapter 3 took the premise of international assassins, safe-house 'hotels' and arcane rituals and kicked its walls out. Wick went truly global, with our (anti?)hero trekking through desert and city alike in search of an 'out' from the murderous lifestyle he thought he'd abandonded. From its 'on-the-run' opening (a direct follow-on from 2's massive cliffhanger), this film is sustained adrenalin. Its ultra-violent martial arts sequences are more outrageous than before, its visuals more glossily stylised and its entire cinematic world more vividly realised than fans could have dared hope. The ending and the tickets sales both ensure a John Wick: Chapter 4. I for one am not complaining.

9. Can You Ever Forgive Me?

 

This Oscar-nominated drama got rightfully bigged up for great central performances from Melissa McCarthy and Richard E. Grant. However everything about it matches their beautiful work. The quirky-but-true tale of biographer turned literary plaigerist Lee Israel and her louche partner-in-crime Jack Hock boasts a screenplay that's bitingly witty, along with unfussy but smart direction by Marielle Heller. This is no big splashy blockbuster; it's a painstakingly honed little gem of a film that I loved at every point. Heller's follow-up A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood has yet to open in the UK, but I can't wait to see what she's forged using the creative input of a certain Tom Hanks.

8. Toy Story 4

I thought it was a bad idea - Pixar upping their Toy Story output to four. Why risk sullying the legacy of a perfect trilogy with what could only be an inferior add-on? Well the makers proved me wrong in style. 4 leaves the trilogy intact and gives us instead the further soul-searching adventures of Woody. What begins with a spork's existential crisis takes us into the external world of abandoned toys and a shadowy antiques shop inhabited by a sweet-sinister dolly and her coterie of macabre ventriloquist dummies. The old gang have significant roles to play, but this is more about Woody's new friends - and what a varied and entertaining bunch they prove to be. (Duck and Bunny and Duke Caboom are stand-outs.) This is not only as good as the other Toy Story entries, it's the funniest and most philosophical of the bunch. And it'll still cause a tear or two.

7. Knives Out

A couple walked out early from Knives Out - so one of the attendants at my local Odeon cinema told me - saying it was just an Agatha Christie 'rip-off'. They clearly hadn't given the film much time to unravel, as this Christie homage spends about twenty minutes underscoring all the tropes of the famous crime-writer's work (rambling mansion, slippery cast of suspects, eccentrically brilliant detective), before upending all we've been banking on and doing the story its own brilliant way. Rian Johnson's screenplay is as funny as it is devious, his direction makes the most of the lavish production design and his cast play their (frequently grotesque) characters like the gifts they are. As for the protagonist, that's one of the year's most endearing film creations and not who you'd expect. This is a glorious confection of a movie with some added political bite. That silly couple missed a treat.

6. The Irishman

Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour mobster epic is a serious viewing commitment, but it's totally worth it. Why is Marty revisiting the world of organised crime so thoroughly documented in Goodfellas and Casino? Well because he has a great true story to tell - that of mob hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), who may or may not have been involved in the disappearance of celebrated ex union boss Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Yes - that is the two American acting greats spending extended screen time together, but it's also Joe Pesci playing a whole other kind of dangerous to his Tommy DeVito Goodfellas character, it's a narrative both sprawling and intimate, it's a fiercely intelligent screenplay by Steve 'Schindler's List' Zaillian and it's Scorsese bringing all his mighty film-making powers to bear on a world no other film-maker knows so well. But what does it have to offer emotionally that's new? Poignancy. Loneliness. Regret. And those elements, more than anything, are what gets it firmly in my Top Ten.

5. Joker

Not just another comic-book movie, Joker now stands with 2017's Logan as a film that expands the genre beyond recognition. Demonstrating more in common with early Scorsese than The Dark Knight, this villain origins story is a dark and twisted yet at points deeply moving character study of a societal misfit who gets pushed deep into psychosis. I could rave about the period production design and vivid colour correction, the daring narrative twists and confrontational political themes, but let's face it - everyone remembers the film chiefly due to Joaquin Phoenix' Joker-in-the-making. As downtrodden professional clown Arthur Fleck, a walking grab-bag of dysfunctionalities, he delivers - and let's not understate this - one of the great film performances of the decade currently concluding. I've only watched Joker once and have a feeling that repeat viewings might have pushed it up this list. It's a disturbing miracle of a movie.

4. Midsommar

Speaking of 'disturbing'... Ari Aster's 2018 supernatural horror Hereditary was an extended exercise in dread that lost some of its audience, me included, in the final demented act. Midsommar, however, held me in its shudder-inducing clutches till the final shocking moments. On one level it's a contemporary retelling of The Wicker Man, a sunlit Scandinavian cult supplying all the creepiness of the 1973 film's murderous Scottish islanders. Going deeper it's about both relationship dysfunction and grief therapy, both experienced in no uncertain measure by central character Dani (played by Florence 'I'm-having-one-hell-of-a-good-year' Pugh). Simultaneously one of the 2019's most aesthetically gorgeous movies and one of its most unsettling, Midsommar left me with a bizarre combination of emotions that I could scarcely unpick without spoiling all. It's both beautiful and appalling and I'll gladly be harrowed by it all over again.

3. Avengers: Endgame

I know some people find comic hero films a turn-off (Martin Scorsese is notable among them), but if you haven't been following Marvel's Cinematic Universe over the past twelve years, then this is the glorious payoff on which you've missed out. Avengers: Endgame could have been one vast superhero smash-em-up. Following on from the catastrophic final twist of Infinity War, however, it's structured into three distinct and very different acts. The first is all about absorbing loss, while slowly and painfully regrouping. The second is a complex, multi-stranded mission involving time-travel and the revisiting of iconic MCU moments. And the final act - well that is one vast superhero smash-em-up, but delivered with verve, style and a the kind of fan service that's been earned over a decade. Plus it included a hug that made me grin and cry at the same time. So I'm a geek - shoot me. This is escapist cinema at its best. 

2. If Beale Street Could Talk

My favourite film of 2017 was Moonlight by Barry Jenkins. Happily - oh so happily - it wasn't a one-off. Adapted from James Baldwin's 1974 novel of love and racial injustice, If Beale Street Could Talk is beautiful on multiple levels - its words, its score, its visual poetry, the tenderness of its central characters... But it also brims with anger and is utterly unflinching in its critique of American social justice or the lack thereof. At its heart is the most touching love story of the year - childhood sweethearts Tish and Fonny, who refuse to buckle under pressure of a terrible miscarriage of justice, however star-crossed their romance seems to be. Kiki Layne and Stephan James are sublime in the leads, but it's Regina King as Tish's mother, who will reach gently into your chest cavity and extract your still-beating heart. Jenkins is currently working on TV drama The Underground Railroad. I will be there, watching every unmissable second.

1. Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood

And it's a controversial Number One. Quentin Tarantino's ninth film is my favourite of the year. I'm no knee-jerk QT-worshipper, so this came as a surprise foremost to me. The movie is all about hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio's struggling actor Rick and his stunt-double/ best pal Cliff in late-60s Los Angeles - you know, the way we did with Jules and Vincent in Pulp Fiction, only in this new movie it's for most of the damn runtime. Thing is, it works amazingly well. The immersion in time and place is so complete, so vivid, so remarkable in its detail, that Once Upon a Time... enthralls from the opening moment and never lets up. Rick and Cliff are both flawed but intensely magnetic protagonists - a hoot to watch when together, and no less absorbing when pursuing their own adventures. The sequence where Rick attempts to nail his performance in a TV pilot episode had me rivited like no other in 2019. As for the Sharon Tate sub-plot, that cast an air of foreboding over the whole story, only to be resolved in a way that was - well - either shocking and exploitative, or wildly cathartic (or all of it together), depending on individual response. That scene is one part of a whole - and as a whole, I unabashedly loved this film.

And there we have it - my chief sources of filmic delight in this final year of the Twenty-Teenies (or whatever we'll be calling them looking back). With the struggle I had paring them down to a final Ten, it's turned out to be pretty vintage. Will our movie screens provide similar riches in 2020, or will we be fleeing evermore into the bosom of Netflix for our fix of quality movies? I may well write a feature about that - and if I do, there'll be a link HERE. (If I haven't, there won't be.) Annnyway...

For now, Happy New Year and equally Happy New Watching. A fresh decade beckons. It's going to be a whole new ride.