Top 10 Movies of 2019

here we are december is coming to a close and we're staring down the barrel of a new decade but before we pop the champagne and put on a pair of those dumb glasses let's take a look back at the past year and the films we loved in it these are our picks for the 10 best movies of 2019 [Music] there were a lot of good movies this year so we have to break it down by category let's start big this year on the blockbuster front we were most impressed by movies like john wick parabellum pushing its set

pieces to their most bombastically heightened conclusions and ford vs ferrari that would have been just a better than average biopic if it weren't for the rip-roaring driving scenes and don't tell anyone we said this but we actually love to lead a battle angel and we're sorry it bombed so bad we likely won't get to see another one however there's nothing quite so climactic as finishing off a decade with the capstone to the most expensive story ever told so for our first pick we've gotta go with

avengers in-game you know i keep telling everybody they should move on and grow some do but not us there is something to be said for the importance of sticking a landing and in a superhero comic book world where cheating death is no big deal endgame stands out by making death and finality matter there is a serious amount of runtime real estate dedicated to the breadth of our heroes experiences with grief and the confrontation for what feels like the very first time of their own limits as the fil

m follows their attempts to bring back half an entire universe snapped away they create a sense of scale national mourning and cost that elevates end game beyond all the previous marvel offerings if you grew up in the marvel era endgame asked you to say goodbye to characters you've known since you were a kid and no matter how you feel about comic book movies and whether they are or are not capital c cinema that matters on the other end of the spectrum we have our indies telling stories that feel

just as important with stakes that are just a little bit less universal this year we fell most in love with the raw honesty of the souvenir the subtle vulnerability of gloria bell the ballsy empathy of honeyboy and for our second pick the endless warmth of the farewell farewell is a home-cooked meal with grandma in cinematic form heart felt hilarious based on an absolutely bonkers premise that also just so happens to be actually real the love is palpable everywhere in lulu wang's breakout pictu

re the story follows aquafina's billy as her and her family head to china for a wedding that's really just a cover to see the family matriarch once more after she's diagnosed with a cancer that the family has decided not to tell her about a lesser story would have shoehorned in a generic romantic side plot and a lot more will they won't they spill the beans but the farewell knows exactly where its heart is somewhere amidst the marvelous chemistry between its hero and her delightful grandmother n

inai what about animation in 2019 well this year brought a fourth toy story that we didn't think we wanted but totally did a lushly animated klaus brutal colonialism and whimsical stop-motion clothing in this magnificent cake and our absolute favorite the delightfully bizarre i lost my body [Music] a boy loses his hand and i lost my body is the story of how he puts himself back together except instead of following the boy it follows his hand crawling its way back to him like a five-legged flesh

crab well sometimes other times it looks like a tiny little person and somehow you end up feeling for the strange little bugger him and his own are both and for a surprising amount most films in one way or another engage with our experience of sight quite a few engage equally with our experience of sound but it's a rare film that renders a sense of touch quite so cinematically as done here evoking sense memories so powerfully specific that you can almost feel them as you watch it's a point of vi

ew from which we've never seen a story before and it's completely impactful in the telling 2019 was yet another good year for exciting cinematic documentaries the capitalist culture clash of american factory the meta cinema of varda by agnes the magnificently time traveling restoration of they shall not grow old the powerful love amidst destruction of forsama the ever better ninth installation of 63 up but the one that really blew us back into our seats like five million pounds of rocket fuel ha

d to be apollo 11. nine ignition sequence start apollo 11 minds an enormous wealth of archival sources including some magnificent and previously undiscovered 70 millimeter footage to retell the story of the moon landing as if you were there it uses no narration no interviews and no recreation even the synthesizers used in the fantastically tense score were period accurate the story is told almost completely with recorded conversations between the astronauts and their mission controllers with ple

nty of screen time set aside to just marvel at the colossal scale of it all and in a year of visually impressive space movies that weren't quite our speed some with truly massive cgi budgets they still don't come near to feeling as awesome and monumental as what it was actually like when we put a man on the moon next up what made us laugh this year well certainly taika waititi's impossibly a reference jojo rabbit if there's a difficulty modifier for funny we think the hitler comedy is probably t

he highest but we also love the warmer friendlier tarantino of once upon a time in hollywood knives out is so well written it drives us nuts and it was good to see eddie murphy and j lo back in full form and dolomite is my name and hustlers however it was a freshman filmmaker with some relatively unknown actors that captured our hearts and our humor this year with our favorite 2019 comedy and fifth pick book smart name one person whose life was so much better because they broke a couple of rules

picasso that's he broke art rules name a person who broke a real rule rosa parks name another susan b anthony god damn it basically a female super bad complete with mclovin-esque sidekick actually kind of a couple two girls that played it safe in high school learned that as they were busy studying their classmates were partying and still managed to get into the ivs alongside them so they set out to get themselves into some good old-fashioned trouble before graduation script is hysterical and th

e two previously unknown leads make the dialogue crackle teen romance is handled with far more complexity than your usual sex comedy without ever sacrificing humor for its honesty it gets the emotions right and it's the hardest we laughed all year of course on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum we've got the tense and the scary there was a lot to like about the young yin self-confrontation of us dread in the sunlight of mitsumar and sea shanty insanity of the lighthouse but they just did

n't quite impress us like get out hereditary or the witch thrillers though were a different story joker was gorgeous with yet another performance that proves joaquin phoenix is an acting talent unlike anyone else uncut gems was maybe too good of a thriller seriously one of two reasons we're not picking it is because it nodded our stomach lining from start to finish like a two hour panic attack the other reason of course is that bong joon ho's parasite came out this year and just so happened to b

e the best thriller in a very long time [Laughter] parasite is truly unlike any movie we have ever seen before or since part comedy part thriller part social drama mixing and transitioning between its tones effortlessly and often bong joo ho is in full control of his craft and soaring and then there's the story an hour in you're trying to guess where the hell this could possibly be going but you can't it's impossible it always seems like there's 100 different satisfying ways he could take it at

every turn but he always seems to pick none of the above and do something even more interesting than you could have imagined in a world where people say silly things like there's really only seven stories and experienced viewers pride themselves on this savvy to see every twist and turn coming miles in advance parasite manages to make us feel like kids at the movie theater again truly in awe and wonder at what the silver screen has in store it wasn't just parasite though 2019 saw some of its mos

t interesting movies come from overseas and outside of hollywood from china ash is the purest white and especially long day's journey into night where god damn experiences while bakurau and manos hit hard from south america however this year we had two favorite foreign films and we loved them both so dearly we couldn't choose between them so they're getting our numbers three and four slots they are pedro almodovars pain and glory and celine shyama's portrait of a lady on fire but foreign in pain

and glory we see almodovar reach for new personal and autobiographical heights while his lifelong collaborator antonio banderas delivers a performance subtle and honest so far beyond what we had previously thought him capable it's the story of an aging director in madrid struggling with health and art turning to heroin in his 50s mending fences and then breaking them again and remembering his past the film is at its best when banderas shares the screen with his aging mother or with his former l

over and although neither episodes are very long that sort of seems like the point you love them so much you really wish they wouldn't go and then there's the final shot it's neither tragic heroic melodramatic nor flashy but there's a power in its simplicity that just broke us into tears there's less mystery surrounding the tears that flooded the theater after lady on fire's ending but they felt very much the same shama's quiet gentle masterpiece follows three women alone in an estate on an isol

ated island over the course of a week heloise is to wed against her wishes marianne is to paint her portrait also against heloise wishes and sophie the maid falls pregnant but doesn't want it the rest is simple they pass the time paint a portrait fall in love slowly and then very fast much of the movie is filled with silent looking regarding observing painting but god does shama fill each look and brushstroke with such meaning you never miss the dialogue because each quiet moment is so very full

and by the end the only thing you miss is exactly what you're supposed to finally closing out our list and our year we have our prestige dramas call them our best picture picks this year 1917 was an absolute rollercoaster ride of a story and the best possible deacons clap back at chivo for birdman waves was beautiful and emotional and sensitive in all the ways that we love little women was an absolute delight and proof positive that greta gerwig is just too good for this world and a hidden life

is as malicky a malek as he ever did malik but god damn that means there's a lot of beauty amidst his mess however this year we think nobody has gone as big as netflix and at serious expense they tackled love loss regret faith and mortality itself in two of the best movies of the year bombbox marriage story and scorsese's the irishman what's this oh jesus sorry you're served i feel like i'm in a dream we don't have a marriage anymore i know you don't want the disruption but you don't want to be

married not really but i don't want this there's been a change instead of uh going up right away we're gonna hang around tomorrow morning and then go up drive up nobody told jimmy that we were gonna be up in the morning i told you if i told you we're gonna be up in the morning what frankie we did all we could for the man marriage story sees baumbach channeling bergman and his own marriage to jennifer jason lee into a personal sometimes funny often devastating portrait of the parade of a thousan

d little heartbreaks that come with divorce the acting is just as good as everyone singing its praises says it is and the empathy for all involved is practically endless the whole thing is so clearly somebody's fault but nobody really seems to deserve the blame they're all doing their best and they hurt each other deeply in the process but beneath all this pain and the resentment it turns into over and over bombach finds an irrepressible compassion in his characters that gives us hope that it ma

y well be there in us as well then there's the irishman it may not be a movie for everyone but my god was it the movie for us you came in expecting another good fellas another casino another gangster story with rapid fire montage and a bunch of rolling stones cues and every talented italian-american actor there ever was and you get that for a little while until you look down and realize it's become something else entirely right beneath your feet because it's been 30 minutes since the last music

queue and suddenly you just feel so hollow and sad as if the best parts of your life are behind you but you still have so far to go and no way to turn back time and undo your mistakes no matter how hard you try it brings together the two most prominent trends of scorsese's career the criminal epic and the religious contemplation and seams them together in a beautiful alchemy that feels like his entire filmography has been building towards this very moment it's marty in conversation with himself

reevaluating all the fun he had with his lovable scoundrels shouldering the full weight of the remorse a life of crime really begets it aches with the heaviness of existence which is why it's one of our absolute favorites of the year so what do you think disagree with any of our picks did we leave out any of your favorite films of the year do you think that's because we didn't see them or just because we didn't like them we'll never tell let us know in the comments below and be sure to subscribe

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