My Favorite Films of 2019 and 2020

Over the last twelve years, it’s been an annual tradition for me to post my favorite ten films of the year. However, at the end of 2019, I opted to post a ‘Best of the Decade’ list instead, which seemed appropriate given that my top two films (The Irishman and Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood) were both released in 2019. But I never followed up with my remaining favorites from that excellent year in cinema, nor did I post my favorites from 2020.

And so, as I prepare my Best of 2021 list, I thought I’d first offer a belated run-down of my favorite films from the prior two years.

I’ll start with 2020, which was no ordinary year. Given the global shutdown in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s amazing that so many excellent films actually saw the light of day. In terms of risk-based activities, going to the cinema seemed like one of the safest during the pandemic – more often than not, there wouldn’t be anyone else in the cinema. A private theater experience for a fully-masked individual? That’s a heck of a lot safer than eating in a restaurant. With that in mind, I was able to see nine of my top eleven films in cinemas (the outliers being Da Five Bloods and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which did not receive theatrical releases). Here they are:

1. Mank (David Fincher)

David Fincher’s Mank is a masterful film, albeit one aimed at a fairly niche audience – an interest in the early days of American cinema is more or less required to enjoy the movie. If that’s your cup of tea, here is a film that adeptly navigates the complexities of 1930s Hollywood studio hierarchy and the conflicting political affiliations within it, seemingly without dumbing anything down for the audience. Mank may be dense, with film and historical references coming at us fast and furiously, but Fincher trusts that attentive audiences are up for the game.

Mank is one of the more inventive biopics of recent years, focusing on Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, or ‘Mank’ (Gary Oldman), who was a key creative force (both credited and uncredited) behind many of Hollywood’s earliest successes, including The Wizard of Oz (1939). Fincher’s film is primarily concerned with Mankiewicz’s screenplay for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and the factors that led to Mank writing a script not-too-loosely based on the life of his one-time friend, the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance).

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the film’s interest in 1934 California gubernatorial candidate (and noted author) Upton Sinclair. As depicted here, studio executives (including Irving Thalberg and Louis B. Mayer) enlisted screenwriters to create propagandist films intended to besmirch Sinclair’s reputation. Mank’s colleague Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), one of the enlisted writers, commits suicide upon realizing his work swindled voters and influenced the outcome of an election.

This illuminating thread takes some time to rear its head - the movie initially concerns itself with Mank’s boozy, witty presence at parties, particularly those held by Hearst. He doesn’t take anything too seriously, and his quips (which are unquestionably more well-informed than those of his wealthy friends) make him everyone’s favorite dinner guest. When Hearst and Mayer bemoan Sinclair, Mank dryly defends the man and his views – but you get the sense he doesn’t really have a dog in the fight.

That is until about midway through the film, when Mank happens to catch Sinclair speaking to prospective voters while exiting the Biltmore Hotel. In this scene, you can see Mank become serious in his admiration of the man (incidentally, the brief glimpse of Sinclair’s rally is the first and last time we see blue-collar, working class people in Mank – it’s a world far removed from the insular society of show business).

On first viewing, I was so entertained by the liveliness, vivacity and energy of the movie that I was caught off guard by the moral quandary in which Mank finds himself mid-picture. His discovery of how Hollywood uses his fellow screenwriters as propagandists is deeply disturbing to him, and his initial way of rebelling is by engaging in a drunken tirade against Hearst (who is alleged to have financed the newsreels) and Mayer. But then, in a brilliant sequence near the film’s end, his boozy haranguing of the powers-that-be is intercut with a more focused and channeled act of rebellion – getting his name on the Citizen Kane script (which implicates Hearst) and restoring his dignity. This complex reckoning with the role one plays in the entertainment industry elevates Mank above a mere “making of Citizen Kane” movie.

One of the most stunning set pieces in the film is the 1934 Election Eve party at the Trocadero Nightclub. In this scene, we see everything Mank detests about Hollywood – the meaningless pageantry, the snobby conservative elites, the lecherous old men lusting after cigarette girls. Ultimately, the screenplay for Citizen Kane becomes his vessel of finally speaking truth to power, of finally writing a script that means something to him and says something about the industry he’s had to put up with. You can feel Fincher enjoying the opportunity to make a movie showcasing the ugly side of Hollywood – an unattractive, dream-crushing machine that manufactures deceptive images.

There's another particularly memorable scene mid-movie in which we get our first glimpse at another dimension of Mank. When his beleaguered secretary Rita (Lily Collins) expresses her frustration with her boss’s constant drinking to his German housekeeper Fräulein Frieda (Monika Gossmann), Frieda reveals that Mank helped her family get out of Germany to escape the Nazis. It turns out there’s a kindness beneath his blubbery exterior – Mank may be a court jester, but he has a conscience and morality that complement his keen intellect. And he may be in a drunken stupor during his time in San Simeon, but he’s wrestling with his internal demons and crafting a piece of art his way.

Now – how much of this film is historically accurate in terms of Mank writing Citizen Kane to get back at Hearst for the Sinclair newsreels? According to folks who know their history, it didn’t exactly go down like that. But, to quote Roger Ebert’s review of Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), historians want facts, whereas a cinemagoer wants “moods, tones, fears, imaginings, whims, speculations, nightmares.” In short, Ebert argues, “fact belongs in print,” while “films are about emotions.” I don’t really care if Mank accurately depicts Mank’s motives for writing Citizen Kane – I care about the story, and here, it’s effectively told.

Mank deservedly won Best Cinematography at last year’s Oscars, and what I appreciate about the look of the film is that, despite being shot in black-and-white and having the occasional “cigarette burn,” it doesn’t particularly look like a film of that era. Its digital crispness and widescreen aspect ratio are unmistakably the work of Fincher, and it gives Mank a different quality, one that better fits the film’s rancid examination of Hollywood. It’s a tribute, no doubt, but an acidic one, ready to forgo nostalgia in favor of exploring the seedy underbelly of this culture. In that sense, it looks and feels like a film of our modern era, doing something interesting with its black-and-white aesthetic as opposed to simply paying homage.

I realize Mank isn’t as beloved as some of David Fincher’s other work, but to me, it’s one of his best films, and easily the most memorable movie I saw in 2020.

2. The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino)

The Climb offers some of the most inventive camerawork (courtesy of superstar cinematographer Zach Kuperstein) I’ve ever seen. The impressive long takes (with masterful blocking of actors by director/ star Michael Angelo Covino) are 100% motivated by story - not just showcasing the massive talent of this ensemble, but getting us caught up in the emotions and sudden whims of these characters.

This years-spanning story of male friendship is, I’ll admit, the kind of film I was aiming to make (on a micro level) with my movie Jack and Lucas Go to a Wedding. The picture marks the arrival of a major new American filmmaker, and I’m so proud to know the cinematographer who brought it all home.

3. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin)

The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a riveting dramatization of a courtroom showdown between impassioned protestors and a government hellbent on stifling dissent and militarizing the police. Aaron Sorkin and Netflix absolutely released this movie at the right time, just weeks before the presidential election. It’s hard to pick a standout from the ensemble cast - Mark Rylance, Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella and an always-welcome Michael Keaton (seriously, can he have a role in every movie?) give mesmerizing performances.

4. Promising Young Woman (Emerald Fennell)

Promising Young Woman is a scorcher of a movie - a haunting, wickedly funny, deceptively complex and relentlessly entertaining feature debut from Emerald Fennell. Carey Mulligan gave one of my favorite screen performances of 2020, in a film that weaponizes its candy-colored aesthetic to get at something deeply unsettling about our current climate.

5. Tenet (Christopher Nolan)

Okay, this is a long one. It’s hard to write about Christopher Nolan’s Tenet without acknowledging the circumstances under which it was released. While nearly every other planned theatrical release over the six months prior to Tenet’s opening was pushed back or tossed into the streaming abyss, Nolan stood firm on his mission to open this film in cinemas (which is no surprise – Nolan, like his contemporaries Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, has always championed the theatrical experience and opted to shoot on large-format film). As a result, Tenet became something of a symbol.

What was so delightful about Tenet ostensibly being the film to bring moviegoers back to the cinema is just how dense, strange and not easily digestible the movie is. Don’t get me wrong – Tenet is not an art-house picture that confounded the masses. This is a wildly entertaining thriller with more impressive action set pieces than any film in recent memory – but it also takes you down a heady rabbit hole of quantum physics.

To put it simply, with Tenet, the director has gone full-Nolan. Seeing that audiences were up to the challenge of grappling with the high concept world-building of Inception (2010) and Interstellar (2014), Nolan ups the ante here and asks us to rise to the occasion. And we do, because the intricacy and puzzle-like nature of his films is part of their appeal.

John David Washington stars as The Protagonist, a CIA agent who is thrust into a covert operation to stop Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a Russian arms dealer, from acquiring world-threatening artifacts through time inversion. What’s inversion? Well, the CIA is discovering objects – primarily bullets – that are moving backward through time. They believe they’re looking at debris from an oncoming disaster caused by Sator, who has access to a Turnstile machine that allows him to move back through time and acquire these artifacts.

The wizardry of every sequence in this film is breathtaking, but it’s once The Protagonist and his associate, Neil (an excellent Robert Pattinson), go through the Turnstile machine and start moving backward through time that Tenet truly takes off in a stunningly original direction. Frankly, the spectacle of watching these characters plow forward in a world in which everything else is moving in reverse (from their perspective) is overwhelming on the senses.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand everything. I certainly didn’t (though when pieces of information that initially befuddled me suddenly clicked into place later in the film, I felt rewarded). But I left the cinema exhilarated because I knew I had felt and experienced something monumental. Part of that was simply the experience of seeing Tenet on the big screen (I don’t care how sophisticated one’s home cinema set-up is – a movie always has a greater power and impact in a darkened cinema). But it also has to do with the fact that Tenet is so immersive. I found myself so caught up in the emotional trajectory and narrative momentum that I was happy to let questions go unanswered.

If Tenet sounds like it causes a headache, don’t worry – it’s also very fun. The playful comradery between Washington and Pattinson is delightful, and the wonderful Elizabeth Debicki, who plays Sator’s wife Kat, grounds the film whenever it risks getting caught up in the plot mechanizations. There’s even a welcome appearance by Nolan’s lucky charm, Sir Michael Caine. Tenet also shares with Inception a giddy fascination with heists, and boy do we get our money’s worth of them in this movie.

The things that people don’t like about Nolan’s films – namely, the dialogue-heavy explaining of concepts and ideas – are here in spades. Personally, I love these qualities. If I may sidetrack for a moment, the same year that Nolan released Interstellar, we also got the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. Despite being about one of the most lauded physicists of all time, The Theory of Everything doesn’t really try to explain Hawking’s work or why it was important. The film sprinkles in a few shots of equations written on chalkboards, and then basically says, “Trust us, he’s a genius.” Meanwhile, Nolan attempts to explain to us how black holes work within the typically risk-averse confines of a Hollywood blockbuster. I may not have understood everything in Interstellar, but at least the filmmaker was treating me like an adult and engaging me with the scientific content of the film. He achieves the same thing with Tenet.

Many people lauded Nolan’s last movie, Dunkirk (2017), as being one of his finest films because of its lack of exposition – it was a purely cinematic story told through visuals. Having proven he can direct a tightly-structured, straightforward narrative (though he still made Dunkirk into a high-concept film about time, thematically uniting it with his other work), it almost feels like Tenet is his return to doing the kind of film that he was born to make – wildly ambitious, unabashedly intricate and pushing the boundaries of what we expect from conventional entertainment.

I’m fascinated by filmmakers who, rather than back away from the style that both defines them and earns them detractors, go even further with their sensibilities. I’m thinking of directors like Wes Anderson, whose interest in artifice intensifies with each new film, or Terrence Malick, who continues to experiment with cinema as a form of poetry. With Tenet, Nolan has crafted a gigantic piece of entertainment in which he further expands upon his fascination with time. We’re lucky enough to get invited along to the party.

I’ll stop here to offer a quick note on the theatrical experience in the age of COVID-19. This was written in September of 2020, just after the release of Tenet, so the specifics here refer to the mandates and protocols in place at that time.

As I sat watching Tenet at the Regal Gateway & IMAX Theatre, spaced comfortably apart from my fellow cinemagoers, I thought to myself – the cinema experience isn’t going anywhere. Or, to put it more bluntly, we can’t let it.

I would never be presumptuous enough to tell people what they should feel safe or unsafe doing – that’s for you to decide (obviously, if you feel unwell or have been around someone feeling unwell, don’t go to the cinema). I can only speak to my personal experience, and for what it’s worth, I felt safe. Yes, I’d prefer it if the concession stands were not open (I don’t understand how you enforce the mask mandate if someone decides to eat the entire film), but I recognize that’s how cinemas make most of their money.

As an incredibly obsessive-compulsive person who wore a mask and gloves on the New York City subway several weeks before the city shut down (and received some perplexed stares in the process), I’ve always taken the virus very seriously. Because cinema is such an important part of my life, I tried to find the safest way possible to return once cinemas re-opened.

Right now, cinemas in Austin are allowed to operate at no more than 50% capacity. In most theaters, the two seats to your left and right are blocked off once you purchase your seat (or group of seats). For extra precaution, I picked a showtime in the mid-afternoon (to avoid crowds), purchased seats near the back of the auditorium, and had two friends (who I knew had been social-distancing) join me. Because we each bought our own tickets separately, we sat a few seats apart from one another and had almost the whole row to ourselves. The rows in front of us and behind us were blocked off. This may sound like a lot of trouble. Was it worth it? To this cinephile, yes.

Austin has a storied history of great cinemas. Not all of them are open yet, but I suspect most of them will re-open their doors within the next few months. In addition to the Regal Cinemas (my favorite of which is the Regal Arbor at Great Hills, which has long screened a diverse line-up of intelligent new releases), there's also the unique experience of the Alamo Drafthouse cinemas, where the enthusiasm of moviegoing is contagious. We have the historic Paramount Theatre, the downtown Violet Crown Cinema, the IMAX screen at the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, the non-profit AFS Cinema and its dedicated film community, and the AMC Barton Creek Square cinema. These are cultural institutions we can't afford to lose. They are the life and blood of this city, as much as any music venue or restaurant. I’m excited for them to return in the safest way manageable, and if you feel safe and comfortable going (and take on the precautions and responsibilities that come with spending time in a public space), now is a great time to support them.

All right, back to the list.

6. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee)

Spike Lee's Da 5 Bloods is a thrilling, meditative and stunning film from one of my favorite filmmakers. I'm someone who adores even the less-than-praised Lee films (Red Hook Summer, Miracle at St. Anna and, yes, Oldboy), but I can say without qualification that his last three joints (Chi-Raq, BlacKkKlansman and Da 5 Bloods) are among his strongest.

His movies are alive and bursting at the seams with ideas, and here, he gives four incredibly talented actors (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Norm Lewis) the opportunity to showcase their range as haunted Vietnam veterans questioning their service for a country that doesn't fight for them. That Da 5 Bloods is two-and-a-half hours long and allows us to spend unhurried time with these men makes me love it even more.

The film imaginatively transitions between aspect ratios as our four leads travel back to Vietnam in search of the remains of their squad leader, Stormin' Norman (Chadwick Boseman) - and, more importantly, the stash of gold they discovered and buried fifty years ago. Interestingly, in the 1960s flashback sequences, our leads are not played by younger actors, but instead by Lindo, Peters, Whitlock Jr. and Lewis. The choice feels right - the war has never left these men, and as they return and relive the terrors of their experience, the flashbacks almost play as reenactments.

Paul, portrayed magnificently by Lindo, is one of the best and most complex characters in Lee's rich filmography. Particularly as the film enters its second half and Paul starts to unravel, we're exposed to so many layers to the character. Here is a man who reacts precisely and urgently to successfully save his son from a land mine detonation (we see here what made him an excellent soldier), and then, only minutes later, disowns his son and threatens a group of strangers attempting to help. His direct-camera address near the end of the film is a portal into a tortured mind - the wounded don't always heal, and Da 5 Bloods is a moving tribute to those scarred souls.

7. News of the World (Paul Greengrass)

Paul Greengrass’s News of the World is exactly the kind of distinguished Hollywood film audiences normally flock to on Christmas Day. Even as most studios pushed their 2020 holiday prestige pictures back to 2021, Universal Pictures admirably gave theaters a gorgeously cinematic attraction, starring none other than America’s preeminent leading man, Tom Hanks. Here, Hanks re-teams with his Captain Phillips director Greengrass for an adaptation of Paulette Jiles’s novel.

Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) is a Civil War veteran travelling through North Texas in 1870. His profession is an unusual one – he ventures from town-to-town and reads aloud from newspapers all across the country. While riding out of Wichita Falls, he comes across a lost German girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), who only speaks Kiowa. Reading through the travel manifest of her African-American escort (who has been hanged, presumably by neo-Confederates), Kidd gathers that Johanna was kidnapped by Native Americans several years prior, and having now been rescued, was being transported to her aunt and uncle in Castroville.

Thus begins Kidd’s journey to return Johanna to her family – which isn’t an easy one, considering that Johanna is a deeply traumatized and rambunctious child (she’s witnessed the brutal murders of both her birth parents and her Native American captors-turned-family). Kidd recognizes Johanna as a terrified child caught between worlds, and the sensitivity he shows her in the face of such an unforgiving country is touching.

Although the film’s primary focus is the relationship between Kidd and Johanna, News of the World tackles quite a bit more. The movie is quite perceptive about the tensions in the South following the Civil War – in every town, armed Union soldiers are seen hovering behind the townspeople, ready to squash any attempted uprising.

Kidd may have fought for the Texas infantry, but, unlike many of his fellow Texans, he’s dutifully accepted the fact that the South lost. Hanks imbues the character with such intelligence that we don’t have to be told that this man doesn’t much care for what the Confederacy stood for – rather than give in to Southern resentment about the outcome of the war, Kidd is attempting to unite a divided nation by making his fellow Southerners aware of their commonalities with Northerners. This is never more apparent than in an extraordinary mid-film sequence, in which Kidd and Johanna stumble upon a backwoods community led by the nefarious demagogue Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), who uses the townsfolk as his personal laborers.

The situation gets particularly tense when Farley hands Kidd his local news bulletin (full of sensationalist lies) and asks him to read it aloud to a mob of laborers who have bought into Farley’s delusions of grandeur. Kidd faces a tough decision here. Throughout the film, he’s faced with the thankless task of simultaneously appeasing embittered white Southerners and offering these same people a glimpse into other worlds. Watching Hanks’s face in this scene, you can see his temptation to light the fraudulent news bulletin on fire and call out Farley in front of the whole town.

What’s ultimately so moving about the way Kidd handles the situation is that he doesn’t engage with the xenophobic and hate-mongering beliefs found in the news bulletin, but instead appeals to the laborer’s better angels – by sharing a story from Pennsylvania about coal-miners who rose up and fought back against poor working conditions. The parallel is more than obvious, and a fight breaks out in the crowd as the laborers begin to question and push back against Farley’s demagoguery.

This is when News of the World best articulates the nobility of what Jefferson Kyle Kidd does – he tells the truth. He recognizes the monumental rift between the North and South, and seeks to assert a common truth and set of facts that both sides can agree on. There’s nothing more dangerous than two groups of people within one country living in separate realities, and it’s here that News of the World joins The Trial of the Chicago 7 as a period film with unmistakable relevance to our times.

With its western milieu, News of the World may not be immediately identifiable as a Paul Greengrass picture – that is, until a mid-film shootout, in which the director’s penchant for staging thrilling and uneasy action scenes reveals itself. This heart-stopping gunfight is as tense as anything Greengrass has ever filmed, and it’s also an excellent demonstration of character-building through action. As Kidd fights back against criminals attempting to kidnap Johanna, the young girl sees the lengths to which he’ll go to protect her. In turn, Johanna aids Kidd by using her ingenuity to make more bullets for Kidd’s gun. The shootout ultimately serves as an elegant way to bring these two characters closer together.

News of the World is unique in that its biggest set pieces occur over the course of the second act. By the time Kidd arrives in Castroville to deliver Johanna to her aunt and uncle, Greengrass adopts a more introspective tone, as both Kidd and Johanna face the ghosts of their pasts. The third act doesn’t so much seek to thrill as it does reflect, and it’s a really strong choice for such a richly emotional movie.

As a side note – what does Tom Hanks have to do to get nominated for an Oscar? Folks almost seem to take for granted how good he is. Perhaps it’s because his performances are rarely showy and don’t rely on gimmicks. His only nomination in the last twenty years was for 2019’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in which he played Mr. Rogers. Is that what it takes? For him to play a recognizable real-life person? No matter. The legacy of Hanks’s work speaks for itself, and his often-overlooked performances over the last decade (Captain Phillips, Saving Mr. Banks, Bridge of Spies, Sully, The Post) are astonishing. In a career full of great roles, his sensitive performance in News of the World is one of his best.

8. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder)

Sound of Metal is such a wonderful film about, among other things, the difficulty of sitting alone in a room and having to live with your racing thoughts. It’s also a deeply moving recovery film, in which our protagonist has to learn to live with what he can’t rise above. Paul Raci, as the head of a rehab for the hearing-impaired community, gives a beautiful speech about the power of stillness. Riz Ahmed’s Ruben looks for a way to overcome his hearing loss - a surgical procedure, a modified form of drumming, a return to normal. But it’s not until he can abandon the idea of getting his old life back and simply sit with the stillness that he can find some measure of tranquility. Easier said than done.

Darius Marder directs the hell out of this - the sound perspective shifts are instrumental to our understanding of Ruben’s experience, and in an age when so many movies are obscenely loud, it’s wonderfully jarring to watch a movie so willing to embrace silence.

9. One Night in Miami… (Regina King)

Regina King’s directorial debut is truly absorbing and impeccably written. Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown are brought to vivid life by Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Leslie Odom Jr. and Aldis Hodge.

It irks me when people dismiss a play adaptation as “stagy” simply because it only has a few locations - when in fact many of these films are helmed by directors who know how to block a scene and make dynamic use out of a small space (look no further than any play-to-film adaptation by Sidney Lumet or Mike Nichols). After getting so accustomed to “naturalistic” filmmaking in which the actors aren’t even asked to move, it’s almost startling to watch a film like One Night in Miami…, where each scene crackles with energy as King finds a way to keep the actors and camera in perfect rhythm with each other.

10. TIE: I’m Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman) and The Father (Florian Zeller)

I normally try to avoid ties, but I couldn’t pick a favorite between these two films, both of which brilliantly deal with memory, reality versus fantasy, and hallucinations.

I walked away from I’m Thinking of Ending Things with a very specific interpretation, and then, upon reading Charlie Kaufman’s guide to the film published by IndieWire (as well as details from Iain Reid’s book), I realized I was pretty far off. And yet that doesn’t even remotely take away from my reading of the film - in fact, it enhances it. Below are unfiltered thoughts from my first viewing, which undoubtedly contain spoilers.

Lucy (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons) have been dating for an indeterminate period of time. They’re on a road trip to meet his parents, and though Lucy feels close to Jake and perhaps even loves him, she’s already thinking of ending things. Even before their courtship ends (if it actually ever does), it has the feeling of a relationship that almost was more, and yet simultaneously lasted for eternity. Time shifts in mysterious ways, clouding Lucy’s memory.

Everyone fantasizes about the future. When Lucy arrives at Jake’s boyhood house, she can’t help but imagine what a life with Jake and his family would look like. In a house full of childhood memories, we begin to question - whose memories are we seeing? Are they those of Jake’s family, or are we seeing Lucy’s imagined future in which she is a part of the family and watches his parents grow old and sick? (I’m assuming here, of course, that Lucy actually exists, which is something both Kaufman and the novel dispute).

On their way back from his parents’ house, Jake and Lucy have a conversation that feels so uncomfortably real in terms of how couples talk. They start with differing opinions on A Woman Under the Influence (1974), and just as it risks becoming an all-out argument, the tone shifts and they playfully recall an ice cream jingle. In the midst of the frivolity, Lucy makes a joke about Jake’s mother that he takes the wrong way, bringing the conversation back to a tense place. It almost doesn’t matter if Lucy is real at this point. The complications of their relationship play out in a believable and unnerving way.

I was particularly interested in the film’s concern with pop culture and movies. There are times when it seems the characters are confused about whether they’re actually living in a movie (or, perhaps in Lucy’s case, Jake’s imagination). There are times, too, when the film struck me as being about dementia - someone (perhaps our elderly janitor, who may very well be Jake) lost in snippets of half-remembered conversations. Do these memories come from a movie, or were they even had at all?

I finally settled on the idea that some of us so thoroughly enmesh ourselves with pop culture that, eventually, our personal story is mutated into memories from a movie, no longer resembling what actually happened to us. Jake’s ending speech at his former high school is taken line-for-line from the ending to A Beautiful Mind (2001) - we’re literally looking at a scene from a studio film.

I can’t wait to watch the film again, particularly with the understanding that Lucy is a fantasy in Jake’s mind (who nevertheless fights back against being a fantasy).

Florian Zeller’s The Father is a deliberately disorienting experience. It’s one of the first films about Alzheimer’s I’ve seen that’s told purely from the perspective of the person living with the disease - in this case, Anthony (Anthony Hopkins, who, let’s not kid ourselves, deserved that Oscar). The movie, which at times plays like a subdued thriller, brilliantly toes the line between keeping the audience as confused as Anthony, while sometimes stepping back and contextualizing his confusion through the eyes of his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). There’s a particularly interesting moment, in fact, where I’m not certain if we’re seeing Anthony’s hallucination or Anne’s (which connects the movie, in a way, to another play-to-film adaptation starring Hopkins - John Madden’s Proof, in which Hopkins’ declining mental capacity is more exclusively viewed through the lens of his daughter).

I was thrilled that the film received an Oscar nomination for its production design, which is endlessly inventive and gives the film an almost Polanski-like sense of claustrophobia and dislocation. Like Repulsion (1965), this is a largely interior drama that’s nonetheless using every cinematic tool at its disposal.

Incidentally, The Father also marked my 30th trip to the cinema since the pandemic began (again at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar - God bless them for continuing to keep things safe and sanitary throughout this hellish time).

And now I’ll move on to my ten favorite films of 2019. You can find reviews for the first two titles in my Best of the Decade post from early 2020.

1. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)

2. Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)

3. Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story hits hard. The scenes in this film - full of immense tenderness, searingly raw arguments and heartbreaking exchanges - have replayed themselves in my mind constantly over the last two years. We may only be privy to the end of Charlie (Adam Driver) and Nicole’s (Scarlett Johannson) marriage, but we feel the rich emotional history of what this couple has experienced together. We understand their love.

The day I saw this film was a particularly rough one, with the movie speaking to anxieties and fears preoccupying my mind at the time. The whole thing felt a little close and painful, and I haven’t been able to watch Marriage Story again since it was released. I mean that as a high compliment.

4. Ad Astra (James Gray)

I dreamt of my late father the night after first seeing James Gray’s Ad Astra, which I suspected would happen as soon as I walked out of the cinema. I’ve had a reoccurring dream for years, in which my father is discovered to be alive, and it’s always something new that kept him away, necessitating a cover-up story. Our protagonist in Ad Astra, Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), experiences this same thing in a real-life scenario – albeit on a larger and more cosmic scale. His father, Dr. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), was a renowned astronaut who travelled to the edge of our solar system in an obsessive search for intelligent life. He disappeared near Neptune decades ago, along with other crew members of the Lima Project, and has since been presumed dead.

Despite his father’s absence creating a significant void in his life, Roy nevertheless followed in Clifford’s footsteps, becoming a respected astronaut whose heart rate has famously never risen above 80 beats per minute. This serves him well in outer space (particularly in a thrilling early sequence, in which Roy free falls through Earth’s atmosphere), but less so in his personal relationships, where he is distant and removed. He keeps his emotions so locked away that his marriage to Eve (Liv Tyler) has completely dissipated.

As the film opens, Earth is experiencing power surges originating from the far corner of the solar system, and with each surge, there is an increasing human death toll. The U.S. Space Command suspects the surges are coming from the remains of the Lima Project near Neptune, and they send Roy on a mission to Mars, where he will record a message to his father in an effort to stop the surges.

The world building in Ad Astra is astonishing from the beginning. I was particularly struck by the way in which God seems more present and religion more on the minds of astronauts in this near future, as they roam the galaxy and find no evidence of intelligent life. It’s just us out there, and we have to reckon with our loneliness. There’s also the commercialization of the Moon, where all of Earth’s problems have followed – fighting for territory, globalization, class hierarchy. There’s a particularly unsettling chase sequence in which Moon raiders surround Roy’s convoy, and the chaotic shootout that follows is nerve-wracking in its quietness. Ad Astra offers such a beautifully uncommon view of outer space – I’d almost compare it to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), but it’s a little less cerebral than that film, and, as is Gray’s specialty, more focused on the human element.

As with all of Gray’s films, Ad Astra reveals what it’s truly about slowly and powerfully. The film’s midpoint arrives on Mars, as Roy makes numerous attempts to contact his father under the supervision of SpaceCom. Finally, after withholding his emotions and remaining calm for the entire first half of the film, Roy breaks down and lets his feelings show, telling his dad he’d really love to see him again. It’s this genuine display of emotion that finally elicits a response from Clifford, but Roy is now deemed unsuitable for further space travel because of his rising heart rate and uncontrolled emotions. In effect, SpaceCom was using Roy to get in touch with Clifford, and now that they’ve successfully reached him, they’re sending Roy back to Earth, and shuttling a spacecraft full of nuclear explosives to Neptune to end the surges.

There are shades of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) throughout this section of Ad Astra, as Roy comes to understand that his father may have gone mad and murdered other astronauts on his quest for intelligent life (Gray’s previous film, the extraordinary The Lost City of Z, also dealt with the structure and thematic ideas of Coppola’s film). In an effort to get onboard the spacecraft headed to Neptune, Roy nearly commits the same crimes as his father, albeit unwittingly. On his journey to Neptune, Roy reckons with his actions, both in space and on Earth. Roy’s childhood memories are intercut with the long voyage itself, and we’re treated to a more abstract and fragmented style of filmmaking (including a memorable shot of Roy recoiling when Eve tries to touch him – clearly an instinct he learned from his father).

When Roy finally reaches Neptune and sees his father for the first time in nearly thirty years, he’s able to see the difference between them. Clifford is obsessed with pressing on further, whereas Roy looks forward to returning home and ending his long isolation in space.

The scenes here between Pitt and Jones are so tender. Watch how gently Roy suits up his father as they prepare to leave the Lima Project ruins. Despite Clifford abandoning his family and committing atrocities against his fellow astronauts, Roy still loves him. When Clifford admits that all of his attempts to find intelligent life have failed, Roy offers the film’s most poignant line: “Now we know – we’re all we’ve got.” It’s as powerful a moment as anything in Gray’s stunning filmography, including the gut-wrenching final moments of The Immigrant (2014) and Two Lovers (2009). It’s here that I was the most reminded of my father – it was like watching a strange encounter from my dreams come to life. Why did you leave? Why did everyone tell me you were dead? What have you been searching for all these years?

Ad Astra is astonishingly beautiful and unlike any space film I’ve ever seen – nerve-wrackingly experiential, visually abstract and deeply emotional. Watching the film a second time (in Lincoln Square’s IMAX cinema), I was amazed by Gray’s intimate storytelling playing out on such a large canvas. Pitt’s extraordinary performance comes on the heels of his career-best work in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… in Hollywood earlier in 2019. These two films, along with decades of masterful performances (The Tree of Life, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Moneyball), cement Pitt’s legacy as one of the best actors alive. Gray’s sincerity as a filmmaker and Pitt’s heartfelt work made Ad Astra one of 2019’s best and most cinematic films.

5. Jojo Rabbit (Taika Waititi)

Writer, director and actor Taika Waititi has blazed a trail of original filmmaking over the last ten years, yielding such idiosyncratic and hilarious films as Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). Shortly after the success of those films, Marvel hired him to infuse some liveliness into Thor: Ragnarok (2017). With Jojo Rabbit, Waititi thankfully returned to making his own unique creations – only this time, he had the clout to work on a much larger scale (and with more prominent actors than ever before).

Jojo Rabbit focuses on a young boy, Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis), growing up in Nazi Germany. Jojo’s peers frequently pick on him, and, after an accident at Nazi boot camp involving a grenade, he’s left alone much of the time with his imaginary friend, Adolf. Yes, it’s that Adolf – but as conceptualized by a twelve-year-old boy and played by Waititi, who is Jewish.

The premise is so fascinatingly bizarre that the film immediately demands your attention, and luckily, Waititi has a lot on his mind here. By telling the story from the perspective of a child, the filmmaker illustrates how a young person can grow up in a hateful environment and simply not know anything beyond his limited worldview. It’s a useful tool for empathy – nobody thinks they’re growing up in a place like Nazi Germany if that’s all they’ve ever known. The film goes even deeper when Jojo discovers his mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), is hiding a young Jewish girl, Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie, so extraordinary in Leave No Trace), in their house.

While Waititi’s imaginary Hitler provides much of the film’s dark comedy, the most moving scenes are between Jojo and Elsa. As Elsa challenges Jojo’s preconceptions about Jewish people (and Jojo demonstrates true empathy and compassion, confirming his mother and Elsa’s suspicions that there is no real Nazi within him), an intimacy forms between the two characters. Davis and McKenzie are incredible in this film – rarely have I been so moved and mesmerized by long scenes performed entirely by two child actors.

Jojo Rabbit is also a wonderful film about the bond between mother and son. Jojo and Rosie’s scenes together are so tender and sweet, and the film beautifully acknowledges that while Jojo is running around with imaginary heroes in his head, his mother is actively working to make the world a better place and raise a son who has so much more to offer than simply blindly following the status quo in Nazi Germany.

A film like Jojo Rabbit takes a very skilled director to pull off tonally, and Waititi masterfully finds a balance between uneasy comedy and deeply felt human drama. There’s nothing funny about Nazism, but there is significant power in watching a child’s vision of his hero crumble before his eyes, giving way to a deeper and more compassionate understanding of the world.

Jojo Rabbit is an ambitious, funny and ultimately very moving film, with excellent performances from everyone involved, including the great Sam Rockwell (as a bumbling, ineffective Nazi who reveals multitudes by the end). I must also admit that I have rarely been so affected by a film’s ending. As David Bowie wails his German rendition of Heroes on the soundtrack, Jojo and Elsa share a moment that is so sublimely perfect that I found myself believing in the transcendent power of cinema.

6. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (Martin Scorsese)

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese is a film you live in - it rambles and flows along like a glorious road trip, much like the ramshackle tour of off-the-beaten path locales Dylan conceptualized and embarked upon in America’s bicentennial year. Like the walkin’ contradiction of Dylan himself, the documentary is partly truth and partly fiction. At this point - when certain events are often misremembered by these legends of the 1970s (as Dylan himself admits in the film’s opening) - why not make some things up? It feels completely in the spirit of Dylan’s music.

The characters in this rolling roadshow are as memorable as they come, and they each play a crucial role in the circus (I was particularly moved by the trajectory of Allen Ginsberg). Sam Shepard, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blakley - I mean, who wouldn’t want to hang out with this ensemble?

And what can I say about the music? It is extraordinary. I love the way in which Dylan and Joan Baez start performing a song together before the curtain even rises. In perhaps the most touching moment of the film, a young woman breaks down in tears as the Revue ends and the lights rise. As always, Scorsese understands the power of silence - as we observe the effect Dylan’s music has on this woman, only the faintest crowd murmur is audible.

Scorsese and Dylan have pulled off a magic act with this movie. Rolling Thunder Revue is less of a straightforward narrative concerning Dylan’s life (a la Scorsese’s masterful No Direction Home: Bob Dylan) and more of a coda to The Last Waltz (or, chronologically speaking, a prelude).

Even in the most well-crafted documentaries, I’m often aware of the overlying narrative thread, as one subject is tied to another in a rather neat and tidy way. I never experience this with Scorsese’s documentaries. They flow so naturally, and I’m simply swept up in the experience of his subject. I can’t wait to hop in the van for another ride.

7. Under the Silver Lake (David Robert Mitchell)

David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake is inventive, fascinating, mysterious and endlessly rewatchable. It’s perhaps the greatest buried theatrical release since Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (2011), and I might have missed it entirely if it weren’t for my friend Mike Cheslik’s recommendation.

This is a rather difficult film to describe, but if you like Los Angeles-set shaggy dog detective stories, conspiracy theories, a loose and wild Andrew Garfield, plentiful helpings of R.E.M., varied tones (this thing swings from funny to downright scary without blinking an eye) and a dash of Thomas Pynchon – then Under the Silver Lake might be the movie for you. Let me put it this way – I rented this film on Amazon and adored it so much that I found the one theater still playing it (Village East Cinema) and saw it on the big screen the following weekend.

8. Richard Jewell (Clint Eastwood)

Richard Jewell is my favorite Clint Eastwood movie since the underappreciated J. Edgar (2011), which also dealt with the flaws of the FBI and law enforcement. The film continues Eastwood’s fascination with heroism, and in particular the personal toll on perceived heroes held under a microscope (in this case, a hero turned suspect). You can find this thematic concern in Flags of Our Fathers (2006), American Sniper (2014) and Sully (2016) - but it’s never been dramatized more sharply than it is here.

Eastwood's film is a powerful examination of a false accusation - one perpetuated relentlessly by the media and the United States government. Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), a security guard and aspiring law enforcement professional, did not plant a backpack with explosives at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which resulted in a detonation and the death of two people. He actually saved countless lives - but that didn’t stop the government and media from ruining his reputation and slandering his name.

The film wisely doesn’t make Jewell seem perfect - he’s an unabashed gun lover, has a bit of a weird past, lives with his mother, and has delusions of becoming a big-time police officer - so he’s an easy target for the media and government to scapegoat for the bombing. I’ve never seen a protagonist quite like Jewell - someone constantly cooperating with the very people who are actively trying to frame him, even when his lawyer (Sam Rockwell) tells him to keep his mouth shut. Jewell sincerely believes he’s one of them, and that these law enforcement officials are just doing their jobs. “They’ve gotta clear me,” he says – after all, these guys are on his side, right? But Jewell’s character arc involves him realizing that law enforcement may not be the virtuous higher calling to which he has long aspired.

His mother, Bobbi (Kathy Bates), realizes this sooner than he does. She loves watching Tom Brokaw on television, and then suddenly Brokaw is saying untruths about her son in the wake of the bombing. You think these people are your friends - until they come after you. She’s humiliated when the FBI raids her house, seizing everything from her Tupperware to her underwear. But Jewell is just sitting there on the couch, accepting all of it, offering to help the people he thinks are his colleagues.

The FBI and media smear this man in the most public way possible, but then when it’s time to retract the smears after no evidence is found, they do it quietly. No Tom Brokaw. No front page headlines. There are only small victories. Bobbi gets her Tupperware back.

The last shot of Richard Jewell is downright haunting. “Look at you,” Rockwell says, as we close in on Jewell. His reaction isn’t one of nodding certainty, but of uneasy existence, knowing the powers-that-be could come for him at any time. Jewell died only a few years later.

There is so much to admire about the filmmaking here - the opening Atlanta bombing set piece is such a great, well-choreographed sequence (much like the plane landing in Sully). Eastwood continues to examine the way traditional expectations of heroism bear down on ordinary men, and Richard Jewell is another fascinating assessment and complication of the director’s past work and the role even he has symbolized in American culture.

9. Ford v Ferrari (James Mangold)

James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari is a thrilling film - one that pulses with life and exuberance. The racetrack scenes are incredibly choreographed and filmed, but the movie excels because it’s primarily about people, not cars.

In a way, Ford v Ferrari almost seems like a well-calibrated metaphor for the making of a motion picture. There are the suits (Henry Ford II) who run the studio; the producer/ middle man who understands both the logistics and the artistry of the endeavor (Carroll Shelby, as played by the always excellent Matt Damon); and the visionary director, or driver, of the project (Ken Miles, played with extraordinary charisma by Christian Bale).

Without spoiling anything, I was particularly moved by the film’s last shot, which suggests that these are men who bury their emotions within their passion for driving. In the final scene, Shelby addresses a devastating incident in his own way, and then zooms out of frame. Mangold is wise to include this scene, which serves as an acknowledgment on the film’s part that these men continued to face uphill battles well after their victory at Le Mans.

10. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie)

The year of Scorsese culminated in his executive-producing an exhilarating piece of madman filmmaking by Josh and Benny Safdie.

It’s hard not to get caught up in the manic energy of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a Diamond District jeweler who thrives on chaos. The last sequence of Uncut Gems shows us a wild man unleashed in his purest form - exploding with unbridled joy and coasting on adrenaline, as he rides the highs and lows of a too-close-for-comfort NBA game. As far as I’m concerned, Howard gets the happy ending he wants. This is how he wins.

Of course, both 2019 and 2020 offered way more than ten excellent films, so here’s fifteen more great movies for both years:

The Rest of the Best - 2019

11. Motherless Brooklyn (Edward Norton)
12. Knives Out (Rian Johnson)
13. 1917 (Sam Mendes)
14. Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler)
15. Western Stars (Bruce Springsteen, Thom Zimny)
16. Joker (Todd Phillips)
17. Little Women (Greta Gerwig)
18. Diane (Kent Jones)
19. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
20. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar)
21. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot)
22. Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Richard Linklater)
23. The Art of Self-Defense (Riley Stearns)
24. Lake Michigan Monster (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews)
25. Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha)

The Rest of the Best – 2020

11. On the Rocks (Sofia Coppola)
12. Bad Education (Cory Finley)
13. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung)

14. Bruce Springsteen’s Letter to You (Thom Zimny)
15. David Byrne’s American Utopia (Spike Lee)
16. The Nest (Sean Durkin)
17. Kajillionaire (Miranda July)
18. The Last Shift (Andrew Cohn)
19. Pieces of a Woman (Kornel Mundruczo)
20. A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen)
21. The Personal History of David Copperfield (Armando Iannucci)
22. Never Rarely Sometimes Always (Eliza Hittman)
23. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow)
24. Come As You Are (Richard Wong)
25. Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King)