The 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel Little Women has won box office success plus plenty of critical acclaim and awards season honors, including Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Actress and Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay, Score, and Costume Design. But among all those Academy Awards honors, it’s the one notable snub that stands out. Missing from the list is a nomination for Greta Gerwig’s direction. This omission particularly stings because – in addition to the long history of female directors being overlooked in the category – it’s Ms. Gerwig’s superb directing work that stands out among all the other excellent elements of the film.
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This is the next entry in my ongoing 100 Essential Films series. If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here. Film number seven needs no introduction, really. It’s a movie that most of us know by heart and have seen dozens of times. It’s The Wizard of Oz. I’ve probably seen it a dozen or more times, but this viewing was certainly the closest attention I’ve ever paid in terms of theme and production detail. I tried my hardest not to simply be swept away to the magical land of Oz; that’s no easy feat, which you know if you love the movie as much as I do. Like every other film in the series so far, I borrowed a Blu-ray through intra-library loan. It was the 2013 release in commemoration of the film’s 75th anniversary. The transfer is gorgeous.
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James Mangold’s very manly and patriotic sportscar racing movie Ford v Ferrari is about as slick as big Hollywood blockbusters come. The director with credits as varied as 2001’s Kate & Leopold, the 2007 remake of the classic western 3:10 to Yuma, and not one, but two comic book franchise films about the X-Men’s Wolverine character has turned his craftsperson’s talents to the sports biopic. Ford v Ferrari feels like a movie we might have gotten 20, maybe even 30 years ago. And I mean that in a good, throwback sort of way.
The script – originally penned by Jason Keller and rewritten by screenwriting brothers Jez and John-Henry Butterworth – features, if memory serves, exactly one female speaking part. At one point, that character is reduced to sitting in a lawn chair as she watches our two manly-men heroes resolve their differences with an old-fashioned American fist fight. The rah-rah patriotism of the picture – which only ever flirts with outright jingoism – brings to mind something like Top Gun, but with race cars instead of fighter jets.
All that aside, Ford v Ferrari is also a damn good time at the movies. It’s a crowd-pleaser that offers unadulterated movie spectacle.
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The centerpiece of director Noah Baumbach’s searing Marriage Story is the kind of scene you might guess would be at the heart of any movie about a disintegrating marriage. It’s a fight. Husband Charlie and wife Nicole are in the bowels of the painful negotiations involving who gets what in the divorce, the most important of which is custody of their young son, Henry. The fight takes place in Charlie’s newly leased apartment; the apartment is a way to show the court that the New York theatre director is serious about being close to his son, who is staying with Nicole in Los Angeles.
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The contemplative, roving camera of Terrence Malick has been loosed upon the breathtaking beauty of Europe. But the grandeur of the sweeping vistas, open fields, and European architecture comes at a price. Malick’s film A Hidden Life begins in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II and ends in 1943, well before the horrors of that conflict ended. We see little of the war’s devastation, though, because A Hidden Life focuses on historical figure Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian man who refused to fight in Hitler’s army. The picture is a meditation on the price of resistance, for both Franz and those closest to him. It also wrestles with religion and draws parallels between the fervor of the German and Austrian people for Hitler’s cause and America’s current political climate. A Hidden Life does all this in Malick’s inimitable, transcendent elliptical style.
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Do not believe director J.J. Abrams when he tells you that his movie, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, isn’t a rebuke of the hard left turn that Rian Johnson took with his installment, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi. This last trilogy in The Skywalker Saga – which includes Episodes I-IX – gives the world what I think is the first ever rap-style beef between film directors, at least in blockbuster filmmaking.
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I was able to tease out a distinct theme in over half of the movies on my “best of” list this year. The theme is a grandness of scale. A lot of the movies on this list are telling big stories. Either the ambition of the characters or subjects is larger than life, as in number 5, or the cinematic scope of the filmmaker is immense, as in numbers 2, 3, and 4. Or, it’s a little bit of both, as in numbers 1 and 6.
Even the smaller films feel big and important in their own way (numbers 8 and 9).
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The most visceral cinematic experience of the year has arrived. Director Sam Mendes has used every technical flourish up his sleeve to conjure the astonishing World War I film 1917. If you were at all wowed by the virtuosity of the unbroken opening tracking shot of 2015’s Spectre – Mendes’s second James Bond outing – then 1917 won’t disappoint you. What Mendes achieved with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema in the first five minutes of Spectre, he manages to sustain for the entire 119-minute running time of 1917.
This time out, he’s working with Roger Deakins, master cinematographer and elder-statesperson of the profession. Deakins adds his gorgeous photography from films like No Country for Old Men and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to lithe, dumbfounding continuous camera movement. The combination makes 1917 an unforgettable piece of art.
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The North Texas Film Critics Association (NTFCA), of which I am a member, voted this month to honor the best films of 2019. As an organization, the NTFCA is proud to call attention to outstanding achievements in the craft of filmmaking. I consider movies to be not only entertainment, but in the best examples, they are also art. They teach us about the human condition. Here are the winners for each category in which we voted:
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With his longest film to date, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime saga The Irishman allows the legendary director room to stretch his creative talents in ways we’ve never seen, even from masterpieces like Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. You can feel in every frame the mastery over the art form that the nearly-octogenarian Scorsese commands from his half-century of making movies. The film also aches with a sense of remorse and regret which comes from its subject, mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran. Scorsese has always been interested in exploring the wages of his characters’ sins, but that’s even more acute here in The Irishman.
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Leave it to the comedic genius behind movies like What We Do in the Shadows and Thor: Ragnarok – to date, the wackiest (and funniest) departure from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s “house style” – to give us a Wes Anderson movie with Adolf Hitler as a supporting character. Apologies if that’s a bit reductive, but it’s too perfect a comparison not to make. Taika Waititi has established his own style and aesthetic in movies like Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, but in Jojo Rabbit, the Anderson comparisons are apt.
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I recently had the opportunity to speak with director Trey Edward Shults in anticipation of the release of his new film Waves. We had a brief, enjoyable conversation about what kind of storytelling interests him, as well as some of the technical aspects of his filmmaking. And don’t worry, I was sure to ask him what you’re all dying to know: whether he considers Marvel movies to be cinema or not.
Listen to interview podcast or read transcript...
As with the work of Barry Jenkins (Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) and Sean Baker (The Florida Project), director Trey Edward Shults has crafted one of the most touching, humanist films of its release year. Waves is a moving, tender, horrifying, human drama that showcases both the best and worst inclinations of our species. And, like the work of Terrence Malick, a mentor of Shults – he served in various capacities on three of Malick’s films – Waves has a lyrical poetry to it that elevates the picture above your average family drama (or melodrama). Shults’ sensibilities combine with a knock-out ensemble cast and an unsettling score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to make Waves one of the best films of the year.
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Much of the negative criticism for documentary filmmaker Errol Morris’s American Dharma is aimed at Morris not challenging his subject enough on his beliefs. Steve Bannon, the right-wing luminary and short-lived White House Chief Strategist to Donald Trump – just a few of Bannon’s many roles on the world stage – is allowed to present himself as a towering figure of great foresight and heroism, the critics claim. What these critics have forgotten (or possibly don’t know), is that direct confrontation isn’t Morris’s preferred mode of operation. He’s said as much in a recent interview about American Dharma:
“I don’t really believe in adversarial interviews. I don’t think you learn very much. You create a theater, a gladiatorial theater, which may be satisfying to an audience, but if the goal is to learn something that you don’t know, that’s not the way to go about doing it. In fact, it’s the way to destroy the possibility of ever hearing anything interesting or new. I guess I don’t believe in them.”
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You don’t just watch Sátántangó, Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s 7.5-hour paean to slow cinema. It seeps into your bones. At least, it seeped into mine.
Up until now, the movie was notoriously difficult to see. A flawless new 4K scan of the film, and imminent release on Blu-ray, will change that. Prior to 2019, the only home video release of the art film was a 2006 DVD by the Chicago non-profit cinema arts organization, Facets, which (I’ve been told) wasn’t the best transfer, and has now become all but impossible to find. So, with a beautiful transfer of it readily available, I suppose the only bragging rights left among cinephiles will be seeing all seven-and-a-half hours in one sitting in a theatrical setting.
I had the opportunity to do just that at Dallas’s historic Texas Theater, and the experience was exhilarating, transcendent, anger-inducing, exhausting, and ultimately very rewarding.
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The Park family aren’t bad people, per se. They’re just completely oblivious to anything and anyone that doesn’t involve them directly. Their obscene wealth allows them that luxury. So, late in Parasite – director Bong Joon-ho’s savage satire on class – when a heavy rain storm causes catastrophic flooding in poor neighborhoods, Mrs. Park, Yeon-kyo, can only perceive how it has affected her. The heavy rains have washed away the grime of the city, she says. In fact, it’s really a blessing. And besides, the next day has brought sunshine and a beautiful afternoon, perfect for celebrating her son Da-song’s birthday. She says this to one of her servants, a member of the Kim family, whose semi-basement apartment was devastated by the flood.
That moment offers a stinging observation, one among many, of how the rich move effortlessly through the world, while the less fortunate struggle to survive. Just like Snowpiercer, Bong’s 2013 dystopian take on class struggle, Parasite is as socially conscious as it is wildly entertaining. His use of virtuoso camera technique, dense structure, surprising plot twists, and pitch-black humor coalesce into an unforgettable piece of cinema.
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Kevin Smith has officially given up on his film career. One of the seminal figures responsible for turning the word “independent” into a noun to describe an entire American cinema movement in the early-to-mid 1990s now can’t be bothered to come up with actual titles for his movies. The comedian/writer/podcaster, whose real career is simply being Kevin Smith, isn’t even interested in making sequels anymore. Jay and Silent Bob Reboot isn’t a sequel to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. This isn’t Clerks III or Mallrats 2. In Smith’s own words – because he clearly doesn’t give a shit who knows how lazy he’s become – Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is “literally the same fucking movie all over again.”
And let me tell you, he ain’t kidding.
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It started with a Fresnel lens. If you’re wondering what that is, then we have something in common; so did I when I first read the term. For his second feature effort, The Lighthouse, director Robert Eggers knew he wanted the 19th century technology – developed specifically to make lighthouses visible by ships from farther away than was previously possible – as the centerpiece of his film. Just like with his directorial debut, the hypnotic 2015 film The Witch, Eggers was obsessed, and achieved, the most meticulous period accuracy for The Lighthouse. It seems blasphemous to use the word masterpiece so early in his career, but with his painstaking attention to detail, his eye for striking cinematic imagery, and his exploration of the human psyche, that’s just what Eggers has produced with both The Witch and now with The Lighthouse.
Set in the late 1890s and making use of sources like Herman Melville’s writings and actual lighthouse-keepers’ journals for its idiosyncratic dialog, Eggers hasn’t just re-created the time period with The Lighthouse. He’s brought it back from the dead.
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Both Paul and Gilligan do justice to the character and to Breaking Bad with El Camino. My only gripe with the film is that it doesn’t look particularly cinematic (which really stood out since I saw it in a theatrical exhibition setting). It looks – and mostly plays – like an extended episode of Breaking Bad, but when you’re talking about one of the best shows ever created, that’s hardly a complaint.
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“I’m the bad guy?” That’s the question Michael Douglas’s character, William Foster, asks in the final minutes of the movie Falling Down. Despite the fact that the movie, up until that point, solidly aligns itself with Foster’s point of view and his sick sense of vigilante justice, this one line of dialog suggests that Falling Down is a more self-aware movie than director Todd Phillips’s Joker. There’s never any question that Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck, who transforms himself over the course of this origin story into Batman’s greatest nemesis, is our champion.
And the movie seems to have no idea how disturbing that is.
The bleak, nihilistic Joker, which, by its final frames, leans into its fascism in a way that even the heavily reactionary Falling Down doesn’t, says a lot more about Phillips’s worldview than the character he is exploring.
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