The 50 best films of 2019 in the US: 41-50
41 Apollo 11
A front row seat for the moon landings? Few could resist this astonishing documentary featuring previously unseen footage, released for the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s lunar walk. Read the full review.
42 Ray & Liz
Richard Billingham mined his own family for this bleak debut, capturing the claustrophobic loneliness of a couple cut off from everyone, including each other. Read the full review.
43 Us
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out was a less obvious slam-dunk, but still an immensely skilful doppelganger satire with a gobstopping central turn from Lupita Nyong’o. Read the full review.
44
Eddie Murphy’s glorious return is the richly entertaining tale of cult 70s blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore’s rise from nightclub standup to the movies. Read the full review.
45 The Image Book
Jean-Luc Godard’s latest essay film is a crazed mosaic with power and vitality of a horror movie and all the delight and joie de vivre of the French legend’s finest work. Read the full review.
46 Rojo
Benjamín
Naishtat’s satire, set before the coup that installed a military junta in Argentina, is an enraging – and informative – parable of iniquity about the fate of the disappeared. Read the full review.
47 Ad Astra
Brad Pitt goes intergalactic in search of long-lost dad Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s thrilling Freudian mashup of Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read the full review.
48 Atlantics
Mati Diop’s supernatural debut forces young Senegalese lovers to choose between love, duty and servitude, then adds a surreal twist. Read the full review.
49 The Nightingale
Jennifer Kent follows up The Babadook with some real-life monsters: the men who ran Tasmania’s penal colonies in the 1820s – one of whom gets some grisly, if just, comeuppance in this gothic thriller. Read the full review.
50 Bombshell
A touch too on the button but still full of poise and acid, this is the story of how Megyn Kelly (Charlize Theron, sporting exemplary prosthetics), Gretchen Kelly (Nicole Kidman) and a newcomer played by Margot Robbie toppled Fox News boss and sex pest Roger Ailes (John Lithgow).