Best Of First Half of 2019 | Films | Personal Favorites

The first six months of the year sometimes felt like the world was on fire. If not underwater. Literally. With record high temperatures world wide and biblical floods elsewhere. Mass shootings on a daily basis. And a political regression to the early fifties. In such times, I found salve in the comfort of movie theaters, when stepping in, no matter how briefly, into the lives of others on screen was distraction enough. So now is as good a time as any to list the better films that got released in the first half of 2019.

1. BOOKSMART (VOD: iTunes/Amazon)

Objectively smart, wickedly funny, and ultimately well meaning, this film will hold up as a classic of the American teen film genre.  Not since FRANCES HA have we seen a film take on, as its principal focus, the careful examination of the relationship between two female friends, an oft neglected topic. And start preparing to hear the name of Olivia Wilde at end-of-year Best Director discussions.  

2. GLORIA BELL  (VOD: iTunes/Amazon)

No film this year brought me greater delight at the simple joy of being alive than GLORIA BELL. Remaking his own celebrated 2013 Chilean film GLORIA, starring the indomitable Paulina Garcia, director Sebastian Lelio, fresh off his Best Foreign

Film Oscar win for A FANTASTIC WOMAN, teams with Julianne Moore for his English language debut in GLORIA BELL. This film chooses to watch, without judgment, a woman of a certain age post-divorce try to find her place in the world again. People always complain that the stalwarts like Streep and Moore and Close always grab all the attention, not leaving room for new actor recognition, but to watch Julianne Moore here, in a resplendent, unaffected, and open performance is to realize why the good actors deserve our continued respect.

3. US (VOD: iTunes/Amazon)

Jordan Peele’s sophomore feature lacks the elegantly clean plotting that made his first film, GET OUT, a breakout hit. This second film from Peele is messier and

bites off more than it can chew. But that doesn’t make it a lesser film, just a more ambitious one. Most of the film plays, and effectively so, as a thriller, even as a genre home invasion film. But in its last thirty minutes it digs deeper at what Peele had in mind with the film all along. A blistering attack on privilege, the price we pay for repressing our identity, and our cultural acceptance of elitism, US has one of its characters say in so many words that the film title refers to an unsteady “United States” and not the deceptive warmth of “us”. Is it that each one of us has an other hidden self, the truer person that we keep firmly subterranean. And what if all our other hidden selves were to get together. That we are even discussing these ideas is a testament to the vision of Jordan Peele. When can we see your next film, Mr Peele?

4. EVERYBODY KNOWS (streaming on Netflix)

A woman returns with her kids to her hometown in Spain for her sister’s wedding and her teenaged daughter goes missing on the night of the celebrations. This plays like a thriller, but only as a device to comment on the unknowable secrets that lurk within families. And the long-held resentments and past grudges that erupt when something bad happens. This is a melodrama in the best sense of the word, a fully satisfying moral dissection of family couched within a whodunit.  This is a Spanish language feature made by an Iranian director, set in Spain and features some of the best acting talent from Latin cinema. All one needs to say is that it stars Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Ricardo Darin. What more do you want from your cinema, especially coming from two-time winner of Best Foreign Film director Asghar Farhadi.  And as terrific as Cruz and Bardem (playing Cruz’s past lover) are in this film, it is Barbara Lennie who plays Bardem’s wife who should be included any year-end discussion of the best supporting performers in cinema. I wonder if there is a better film screening on Netflix right now.

5. MIDSOMMAR (back in theaters for the Director's cut with 30 additional minutes)

This film technically didn’t open until July 3^rd, but I saw it at a screening earlier in June, so I am including it on this list. How could I not. This is not a perfect film, and a few times comes dangerously close to buckling under its own heft. And I wanted the ending to hold more wonders, be more original (although the conclusion has a delighting sourness to it). But the film is constructed with so much wonder otherwise, and is so masterfully crafted, that I readily surrendered to where it took me. The film is about a group of friends who visit the rural home of their Swedish friend to attend the once-in-decades Midsommar festival, and soon start to realize that things there may not be as idyllic as they seem. The film circles around so many issues, (including a nicely haunting prologue featuring rising star Florence Hugh having to deal with sudden tragedy), that it is often difficult to identify the film’s primary thesis. But therein lies its strength because the road to its conclusion is so gleefully unpredictable.

6. ROCKETMAN (VOD: Amazon/ITunes)

Now here is how to make a biopic.  Of a musical genius, even while being constrained by the jerky, necessarily episodic nature of the storytelling. In its execution and in its joyful, surreal, and altogether delightful visual splendor of the musical pieces, the film goes to heights that completely eluded the overcelebrated BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY from last year. Unlike that film, ROCKETMAN has its lead sing his own songs (and he is mighty adept at it), the film covers a relatively short period of time (childhood through the early eighties) in the life of its protagonist, and most critically handles them with integrity.

7. PHOTOGRAPH (streaming on Amazon Prime)

As small as this film is, it gives so much. The director of the celebrated film THE

LUNCHBOX, has his next film that is set in India deal with the unlikely connection between two strangers who need each other more than each realizes. Wise, gentle and never kneeling to the unnecessary turnings of a plot, PHOTOGRAPH best of all is a movie about movies, and finds a way to pay wistful homage to a past Bollywood that will never be again. The film is also a marvel of acting, as the unimprovable Nawazuddin Siddiqui creates another indelible character of an everyman in India. Seek out this film, particularly since it is streaming on Amazon Prime now.

8. JOHN WICK 3 (VOD: iTunes/Amazon)

The John Wick films have become an unexpected paean to superlative action in cinema. And JOHN WICK 3 is no exception; the film is essentially a concatenation of hard-to-believe, how-did-they-do-that set pieces that frequently bring jaw to floor. How each successive film in the

series amps the ingenuity of the action is something to marvel at, even as the scripts widen the mythology of the world created by the first film. What is not something to marvel at is how Chad Stahelski, the man behind these films, feels the need to also unfortunately ramp up the violence in these films; look, I am fine with violence in cinema and it doesn’t usually bother me. But as many others have mentioned, if JOHN WICK 3 didn’t get an NC-17 rating for extreme violence, then no film ever will. Why this need to push the limits of the eye-gouging and bone-crunching; Stahelski should have confidence in his craft and understand that not everyone savors violence as entertainment.

9. GULLY BOY (streaming on Netflix)

A young man from the Mumbai slums dreams of becoming a rap artist. This is a film I should have had no interest in, and yet it totally captivated me, proving again

Roger Ebert’s assertion that it’s not what the film is about, but rather how it is about what it is about. Ranveer Singh, just coming off his gloriously deranged role in PADMAVAT, plays the title character with a mixture of resigned despair and cautiously germinating optimism. And Alia Bhat playing his girlfriend who does not take prisoners, very nearly steals the film. This is another winner from writer-director Zoya Akhtar.

10. THE DEAD DON’T DIE (VOD: iTunes/Amazon)

I am not routinely a fan of horror, but Jim Jarmusch’s droll, dry take on the zombie genre made me beam through the running time of THE DEAD DON’T DIE. Many found the film inconsequential, but I

resonated fully with the deadpan humor, and the film’s frequent forays into self-aware breaking of the third wall. Bill Murray has reached a mythical stature in cinema, but to see his line readings in this film is to realize why he earns that place. And with a ridiculously privileged cast that includes Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloe Sevigny and Alison Janney, this film is a breezy hoot.

Best of 2018 | Films | Personal Favorites

There were so many good films released in 2018, that to whittle them down to just ten seemed a betrayal. Isn't the point of these lists to bring recognition to the most adventurous, the most humane, the most risk-taking of films. So spread the wealth, I say. Recognize more. I have my top 15 films, and then a list of ten more to round up the top 25 of 2018. And I even cheated and placed more than one film in a ranking occasionally. Whatever it takes to shine a light on the better films.

Also as in past years, the films on my list are those that changed something within my emotional circuitry. 

1. THE FAVOURITE

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos throws battery acid at the British period piece genre. One woman has usurped the powers from the frail Queen Anne, and another is, at any cost, on her way up literally from the mud into the queen’s chambers. Director Lanthimos gleefully incorporates anachronistic costumes and music, and invents plot where there are historical gaps ,to create something deliciously nasty; I watched most of the film agape. The script, by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara lets each of the three female leads be conflicted and scheming, wary and hilarious, that is, altogether human.  

2. A QUIET PLACE

One measure of a better film is this: you come out after watching it and immediately wonder why no one thought to tell this story before. A QUIET PLACE has the simplest of premises: a family trying to survive in a future world ruled by aliens that hunt by sound. As far as visceral thrills go, no film this year did better.

3. SHOPLIFTERS

Ah, is there a more humanist filmmaker working today than Hirokazu Kore-eda. For more than a decade he has made films that refuse to make easy villains of any characters. He typically takes a story from the Japanese headlines, and compassionately examines how that might have come to be.

Like Kore-eda's criminally under-appreciated LIKE FATHER LIKE SON, this film too asks the viewer to reconsider the definition of ‘family’. The film is a grand showcase for its actors, including his long collaborator Kirin Kiki (who passed away soon after the release of the film) and the unimprovable Sakura Ando, who tackles, with a surplus of heart, what might be the most complex role of any in cinema this year.

4. ROMA

I have learned over the years that the single greatest deterrent to the enjoyment of a film is high expectations. By the time I saw ROMA it had already been hailed as the best this and best that. And yet, from the opening credits appearing over floor tiles

splashing with foamy water, to the film's quiet end, I was displaced. Displaced from my cinema seat to another time and place, at once silvery and unreal in glorious black-and-white photography and as invasively authentic as turning the pages of someone’s brittle, tissue spliced photo-album. Perhaps my reaction to the film owes much to the fact that I too grew up in the early seventies in a busy city, and under the full influence of many a generous domestic help. This film will hold up well to posterity.

5. LEAN ON PETE / THE RIDER / LEAVE NO TRACE

Most days in 2018 felt like the world was in a race to greater isolationism. And the one thing that we could use, more than anything else, was objective unconditional empathy. I was most grateful this year then for the triptych of films that were about individuals on the

fringes of society, those that we would rather not consider. Or worst, those we would prefer to actively ignore. All three films, excellent pieces of cinema each, are empathy generators asking us to re-examine the outsiders in our nation, outsiders by any definition: by way of economics, social standing, or geography.

6. BADHAAI HO (CONGRATULATIONS)

A man in his late twenties hesitates to introduce his affluent girlfriend to his rough-hewn family. Only to have his parents sheepishly announce to him instead that they are expecting a child. Another film would have taken this clever premise and made a soap opera out of it. But BADHAAI HO has no interest in tired plot gymnastics, or feckless humor. It takes its central conceit - the imminent arrival of a child to a couple of a certain age and authentically watches its impact on every member of the family and neighbors. And uses this to craft some of the wittiest writing this side of the Atlantic. What can I say: I laughed and I cried. How often can you say that.

7. WIDOWS

This is a heist film, but to call it so is severely reductive. Director Steve McQueen takes this genre and uses it to construct a dense labyrinth of characters set around contemporary Chicago to create something Shakespearean: layered, marked by shifting loyalties, and inevitably tragic. Make no mistake, it takes no small measure of brilliance to create what looks like a gangster heist film which is a deeply, consistently satisfying entertainer, while also deftly commenting on the state of race, class and political rot in contemporary urban America. The film starts with a con job gone spectacularly wrong, killing all involved, and proceeds with the mafia leaning on the widows of the dead men to recover the spoils; the women band together to pull off, as they say, one final heist. With this pedigree and this cast, this film should have been a flat out hit. That it isn’t is both a mystery and a tragedy.

8. SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

There is more gonzo creativity in this film than any other ten films released this year. Writer-director Boots Riley has so much contempt for the state of race relations in contemporary America, and so much righteous anger that he can barely contain in within each frame of his film. So he throws everything he has onto each scene. Some of it sticks, some of it doesn’t, but it is nothing less than giddying to see pure ideas thrown at the viewer at such rapid-fire pace. It is futile to try and explain the plot, except for the basic set-up: an out of work African American man who gets employed at a call center, quickly learns that he can be highly ascendant in this career by taking on a Caucasian voice. And then things go to poop, as they say. Gleefully surreal, nakedly bruising in its strife for social justice, and unbound by limits of reason or logic, the film takes off into a cloud of absurdist genius.

9. THE SISTERS BROTHERS

I do not usually gravitate toward Westerns. And yet here is another film that takes the outward shell of a genre and uses it to beautifully comment on human failings. This English language film, directed by a French filmmaker, based on a novel by a Canadian, and starring American and British actors is something to be experienced: funny, unexpectedly insightful, and wistfully tragic. The film is like a hybrid of HIGH NOON and IN BRUGES. And how can you pass up the opportunity to see John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed in peak form. There is a scene late in the film where the eponymous brothers arrive in 1850s San Francisco that is wonderfully realized and a marvel of Production Design. Best of all, there is a lot that remains to be unpeeled after having seen the film.

10. TULLY

This film is many things, but what has endeared it to me is that from the first scene of a mother softly brushing her son to calm him down to the very last, it seeks understanding. In cinema’s pursuit of taking on the most challenging and taboo of topics, it has often ignored one staring in the face of so many: the post-natal challenges of motherhood. In our fear of anything short of the glorification of the state of motherhood, the unpleasantness of it, the physical and psychic stress of it goes unmentioned. TULLY handles with authentic agency.

11. DISOBEDIENCE

Watch out for Chilean filmmaker Sebastian Celio, who has had an untarnished streak to date. He is beloved by arthouse movie fans and his A FANTASTIC WOMAN nabbed the Best Foreign Film Oscar last year. It won’t

be long before he becomes a household name, perhaps no sooner than the release in 2019 of GLORIA BELL, the English language remake of his GLORIA. But look no further for evidence of the magic of his craft than the woefully underappreciated DISOBEDIENCE. A woman (Rachel Weisz) returns to her orthodox Jewish London community upon news of the death of her father, the rabbi. Her return triggers a disruption within the insular world, not the least because of her renewed friendship with the wife (Rachel McAdams) of the expected new rabbi. Smart, brave, questioning and ultimately empathetic the film ponders on the impact of warring with tradition.

12. IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK

If films could create their own language. If the experience of the lesser other in society can

be rendered on screen. If the social issues of fifty years ago remain woefully relevant even now. If the colors and visual composition in a movie can take your breath away. If a decades old James Baldwin work can breathe and be breathy on celluloid. If the ache, and the burning seething heat of new love can be conjured up. Then one gets a film so perfectly composed, acted and brought to its inevitably artful end. Then we would get IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK.

13. MUSEO

Two men from relatively affluent families, afflicted with the usual discontent of youth, pulled off the biggest heist of artwork from a museum in Mexican history. They also thought that they could sell the spoils of their theft relatively easily to make money, even after the media blitz that

followed the robbery. Always ahead of the audience, this artful construction of the events, plays like a terrific thriller. It also is Evidence H in the case for how criminally underappreciated Gael Garcia Bernal remains in cinema.

14. 22 JULY

Not too long ago a man working for the Norwegian police opened fire on the streets of Norway, and then took a ferry up to an island off the city and systematically hunted and shot down children who were camping there. To make a film about a hate act is a high challenge, because it can come off wrong twenty seven ways: being too preachy, or heavy handed, or sentimental, or glib. Paul Greengrass uses his mastery of craft to retell this story with objectivity. And while the first part of the film deals with the actual events leading up to

those acts of domestic terrorism, the second half follows two individuals: the court-assigned lawyer to defend the shooter, and one of the teenagers who managed to survive the attack on the island and is under the pressure to speak at the shooter’s trial. This is a sobering, bracing, and ultimately hopeful film that is asking each of us to contemplate global terrorism.

15. FIRST MAN

Ah, this film filled me up. Based on the events in the life of Neil Armstrong leading up to the moon landing in 1969, many a viewer came away nonplussed, because they were unprepared for Armstrong to be a stoic, internally drawn lead character. But director Damian Chazelle lets Ryan Gosling play Armstrong as he was in real life, a person of few words, even while recognizing the perils with making this person the lead in his film. There have been plenty of films made about larger than life characters, it is time that we make more about those who are quieter, self-reflecting. I

marveled at the impossibly accurate and you-are-there depiction of the NASA efforts to get the first man to the moon. There have been other films made about the moon landing but none that made you experience it like here. The great wonder of FIRST MAN is how acutely it conveys the sheer odds that were against humans stepping on the moon. Particularly with the computational power available at the time which was less than what most of us have on our smartphones now. And the space shuttle itself being no more sturdy than a tin box. And yet we prevailed.

And the next ten films are:

16.   THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS
17.     PADDINGTON 2
18.   A SIMPLE FAVOR
19.     BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE
20.   ANDHADHUN (BLIND TUNE)
21.   HOTEL ARTEMIS
22.   CRAZY RICH ASIANS
23.   TU HAI MERA SUNDAY (YOU ARE MY SUNDAY)
24.   JULIET NAKED 
25.   PUZZLE