Top 10 movies for the year
Because I have about nine jobs, I managed to miss pretty much the entire film festival this year. But of the non-festival-only films of 2019, these 10 were my favourites.
Apollo 11
Was there anything new to say about the first moon landing? Yes. It turns out there was. Apollo 11 took the familiar beats of the triumph and made them fresh.
Bellbird
In a lean year for the locals, writer and director Hamish Bennett’s debut Bellbird was a standout. The film is a modest yarn about two men, a father and son, struggling to find a way to communicate after the only woman in their lives has died. Marshall Napier, Cohen Holloway and Rachel House took the leads.
Bellbird was a sweet, poignant, achingly well-written and quite beautiful film. It tells its story with a minimum of fuss and dialogue, but still leaves nothing uncertain.
It was funny when it needed to be, but never backed off from tragedy and loss.
Crawl
There will always be a soft spot in my heart you could lose your boot in for a daft, but well played, monster movie, whether it’s Deep Blue Sea, Lake Placid or The Shallows. This year, Crawl joined the list. We’re in Florida, there’s a flood, now there’s alligators in the house. What more do you need to know?
Gloria Bell
English language remakes of already good films are usually a let down. But there are exceptions.
Sebastian Lelio’s Los Angeles-set redo of his own 2013
Gloria, lost the political parable buried within the Chilean original, but gained Julianne Moore and John Turturro as the leads. More people should have seen it. Those who did, loved it.
John Wick 3: Parabellum
With a less likeable lead than Keanu Reeves, this series would be bordering on obnoxious, but Reeves makes it work with a mixture of humility and charisma that no-one else I know of can match.
The John Wick franchise is a violent video game brought to life. But perfectly. More please.
Jojo Rabbit
I still wonder how Taika Waititi made this work. A comedy, set during the last days of World War II, about a mother and son who are hiding a young Jewish woman in their home. With Hitler appearing as the boy’s imaginary friend? It could have been Life Is
Beautiful-level awful. But Jojo Rabbit danced a perfect line between pathos, tragedy and joy. And that town square revelation was as perfectly designed as any scene in any film ever needed to be. Three viewings in, I’m still noticing new details.
Joker
It’s not the Taxi Driver or King of Comedy-level masterpiece a few people are calling it. But to take any two-dimensional comic-book character and make a mature and watchable movie from them is a hell of an achievement.
Joker also sets a very high bar for the coming Batman reboot. For which we should all be grateful.
Parasite
If there’s a more adaptable and admirable film-maker in the world than Bong Joon Ho, I’d love to know who it is.
From creature-feature breakout
The Host to the dystopian and wildly kinetic Snowpiercer and the
even-Netflix-sometimes-get-it-right
Okja, Bong hasn’t put a foot wrong across any genre he’s had a crack at. But this year’s Parasite is his crowning glory, so far.
The film is a dark comedy/ thriller, following one Seoul family’s benign invasion of another.
And then the twist arrives.
Parasite is one of the decade’s defining films.
Toy Story 4
I didn’t even want to see Toy
Story 4. I’ll tell anyone who listens – after a beer – that the first three
Toy Story movies comprise the greatest film trilogy ever made.
And yes, I am including bloody Lord of the Rings in that. And now they’re going to ruin it all with a tacked-on fourth movie?
But, Toy Story 4 turned out to be a peach, with a fresh tale to tell and new characters to introduce. Plus, Keanu, again.
Us
After Get Out, expectations for Jordan Peele’s second feature were huge. And he delivered. Us was a bleak, bloody, frightening and funny fable of race, otherness and what passes for success in a statusobsessed society. Us rewarded a second viewing. However, the more you knew of 1980s American pop culture, the better.
I’m also very glad I saw Vai, Wild Rose, Marriage Story, Avengers: Endgame, Greta, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Anne Frank: Parallel Lives and Ford v Ferrari. Plus, the films I will remember just after I hit ‘‘send’’ on this column. As always.