YEAR-IN-REVIEW 2019

For most of the duration of 2019 I thought it wasn’t a really good year for movies (not that the rest of 2019 was all that great in comparison, but we don’t need to get too deep into that). Some of my most anticipated movies of the year ended up being my biggest disappointments, like Us (a prime example of how a movie can become a whole lot less exciting once you start explaining what should be left to the imagination), Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (I honestly feel like this is Tarantino’s worst movie, until now at least) or Border (I still don’t understand how a movie this odd could feel so conventional in the way it builds its story). Several movies I was patiently awaiting ended up not coming out this year, or at least not outside of the festival circuit, like Fabrice Du Welz’ Adoration or Paul Verhoeven’s Benedetta, which got postponed for the second year in a row.  

I also attended the second edition of the Brussels International Film Festival this summer, but wound up feeling mostly neutral about the majority of films I saw there, aside from a few exceptions I will go into later. The movies weren’t particularly bad, they weren’t particularly good, they were just there, and I forgot about them almost immediately. Not a fun place to be in, I can tell you, I prefer having a passionate hatred for something rather than feeling nothing at all. At least when it comes to animosity, you are left with something to think (and write) about. 

I usually like to have at least one popcorn or action movie in my top 10 every year, so I can prove to my friends that I’m not a completely joyless film snob. I initially hoped John Wick 3 would fulfill that purpose for me this time around, but I ended up being rather disappointed by that installment in a series I otherwise love, despite it giving us one of the greatest fight sequences of the entire franchise. But then I also need to admit that I haven’t seen most of what the multiplex had to offer this year, because barely anything really piqued my interest. So, who knows, perhaps Terminator: Dark Fate or Frozen 2 would've cracked the list if I actually went out of my way and saw them.

  

It should be noted that, because I live in Belgium, I haven’t seen a lot of the movies everyone is going crazy about this year, for the simple reason that they didn’t got released in my country in 2019. Therefore, the way I experienced the past year is already different than that of most, so calling it a bad year for movies would be unfair and simply untrue. Perhaps there weren’t a lot of movies this year that meant something personal to me, yet there was a lot of interesting cinema scattered over the year, if you knew where to look. I steadily left my cinematic comfort zone this year, branching out over a wide range of genres and countries. Which is why my list of favorites this year is noticeably more arthouse-heavy than in the years prior.  

So, let’s get on with my favorites of the year, won’t we? 

The Top 10 of 2019

  

As always, an important disclaimer, I follow Belgian release dates for this list. Most of the times, they don’t differ too much from when they get released around the rest of the world, but occasionally you will have the odd one out that will make you go “wait a minute, didn’t that one come out in 2018?”. Yes, for you it did, but not for me.  

10. The Lighthouse 

Robert Egger’s highly anticipated follow-up to his 2015 debut feature The Witch does not disappoint, in fact I believe it even surpasses its predecessor in many ways, though The Lighthouse is by no means a perfect film. I found it to be a somewhat frustrating watch at first, repetitive almost, where a lot of the confrontations between Dafoe’s and Pattinson’s characters just felt like variations of the same conflicts. It took me a while before I could fully embrace this concept of a lost in time purgatory it was going for, but I found it ultimately to be highly rewarding 

There is a level of uncertainty while watching this movie. The real and unreal are shot indistinguishably so that you’re only left to guess which one is which, you get so obsessed with all these small little details the movie is layered with until you just give in to the primal madness it has to offer. At the end of it you become just as loopy as the movie’s main (and in fact only) characters. 

In the end, I don’t know if The Lighthouse really amounts to much, in many ways it feels like empty yet cool arthouse posturing, but it does deliver a certain sensory experience that we get far too few of in theaters lately, which is why I’m willing to give it the number 10 spot on this list, it offers something I don’t see too often and will stay with me. 

 

9. So Long, My Son 

  

This 3-hour epic of a movie tells the story of several people who experienced long-lasting damage because of China’s decades-long one-child-policy, but mostly focuses on the couple Yaojun Liu (Jingchun Wang) and Liyun Wang (Mei Yong), who lost their only son in a drowning accident. It shatters their life, and every personal relationship they have. Director Xiaoshuai Wang tells this story in a non-linear structure, throwing us from one emotional state into another, spread over several decades. Yet he doesn’t rely too much on big, Oscar-stealing emotional outburst, it’s what is left unspoken that lingers on, like all of this is too painful to dwell over. Especially Jingchun Wang conveys this notion of repressed sorrow perfectly, in what is definitely one of the finest, and sadly most under-discussed, performances of the year. But everyone in this gives a very natural and empathy-generating performance, selling the somewhat contrived plot developments that occasionally occur. That the story is presented in such a restrained, neutral style, makes it able to hold back some of its more blatantly melodramatic tendencies.  

Unfortunately, the movie suffers from the Return of the King-syndrome: it just keeps on ending. It tries too hard to wrap everything up rather neatly, it somewhat lessens the powerful impact of everything that came before. Its nearly desperate attempt to add some closure for these characters almost rings false. Yet, it can’t be denied that the movie as a whole is just an emotional sucker punch, making you want to sit a little while longer in the dark empty theater once the credits start to roll. 

 

8. Sunset

Laszlo Nemes follow-up to his widely praised and award-winning debut film, Son of Saul, certainly lives up to the reputation of its predecessor, and on a good day I might even call it the better movie of the two, though that might just be because I saw this one in the theater and I didn’t have that experience with Son of Saul. Set in Budapest, at that time considered to be “the heart of Europe”, on the eve of World War I, 20-year-old Irisz Leiter arrives in the Hungarian capital after spending most of her youth in an orphanage, hoping to find employment in the legendary hat store that used to belong to her late parents. Not everyone is initially happy to see her, and soon she discovers how her family history didn’t exactly play out the way it was always told to her.  

Nemes continues the style and tone he already established in his previous movie, where the camera, and therefore the audience, is constantly breathing down the protagonist’s neck, permanently amping up the tension, until all the anxiety becomes plainly suffocating. You could almost call it a horror movie in that sense. 

Unlike most Hollywood movies, Nemes doesn’t hold the audience’s hand while the story unfolds, rather throws them in at the deep end without offering any kind of context or guidance. He portrays the time period and its environment as a living and breathing world, as if you as a viewer are actually living it instead of reading about it in a book. History as an experience, not a dull, dead object you can safely study and observe in a museum. 

7. Sophia Antipolis 

I usually hate it when critics use certain phrases along the lines of “The perfect movie for the Trump Era!”, which more often than not just means that a certain movie vaguely resembles a specific contemporary issue that is in fact a lot more timeless than would be convenient to acknowledge (like with The Post) or even worse, shows a deep misunderstanding of the current moment and what the movie itself is actually talking about (like with Get Out). Just so you know that I’m rather hesitant to say that I thought Sophia Antipolis “spoke to our times”. Writing that sentence alone makes me feel embarrassed in fact. But I truly believe Virgil Vernier’s latest captures the collective feeling that humanity, and the world it’s inhabiting, is on the wrong track and perhaps might come to an end one of these days. It’s a feeling that is shared by the furthest of both the left and the right, though all of them have different reasons for thinking so and deeply contrasting ideas about what might be the best possible solutions.

It’s one of the few things the characters in Sophia Antipolis have in common, this thought that civilization is coming to an end, to some capacity at least. Some believe that we're heading off into a literal apocalypse, others are talking about a moral downfall of society rather, and for a few it’s their own personal world that is going to collapse. How to deal with this sense of fatalism is different for all of them. Some of them join a cult, other characters resort to vigilantism. Perhaps they want to save the world they laid to waste or are they just trying to have a good deed to their names when the Judgment Day comes? Do they want to save other people or most of all themselves? The movie doesn’t provide a cut-clear answer and prefers to just observe these characters and the world they inhabit, without clearly judging any of them. 

Sophia Antipolis is a very dreamy movie, which is not the same as dreamlike. It is clearly rooted in reality, the titular Sophia Antipolis is in fact a real place in France, but also seems to exist in this kind of waking state. All of it feels like a distant dream, yet there is a certain sense of naturalism to the story and the performances, which are all delivered by non-professional actors. This is probably the kind of movie where, when people get a chance to see it, they might think I’m crazy for considering it one of the 10 best movies of the year but I found it to be a unique experience, both comforting and discerning, and it has only creeped up on me as time went on. 

6. I Lost My Body 

A severed hand escapes from a morgue so he can reconcile with his lost body. It’s a rather bizarre premise that becomes unexpectedly moving and completely enthralling in Jérémy Clapin’s debut feature. Animated movies this decade have already made us care for a bunch of children’s toys, a giant red turtle, and even a simple stick figure, so it should come to no surprise that the medium can make us empathize with a deposed limb. I swear I’m not lying when I say that seeing that chopped off hand’s odyssey through the slums of Paris, fighting his way through all possible dangers, is the tensest theatrical experience I had in all 2019. I was legitimately biting my finger nails during those moments, and I wasn’t the only person in the theater with that response. Roger Ebert was right; movies truly are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.

  

Of course, the hand isn’t only character in the movie, the titular “body” it belongs to plays a pretty important part as well. That body is Naoufel, a young guy who was kind of jinxed from the get-go. After losing both his parents in a car accident at a very young age, he emigrates from Morocco to France where he grows up with his uncaring uncle and his jock cousin. He works as a pizza delivery guy in Paris, a job he won’t be keeping for long since he always shows up late, when one night he “meets” customer Gabrielle, who he thinks he has some connection with, despite only talking to her through an intercom. This encounter gives him an incentive to take his life in another direction, and he will do everything he can to meet her again.  

Naoufel is a nice diversion of the “loveable loser” archetype that usually dominates the animated film genre, because he can be somewhat of a dick, doesn’t always have a clear sense of what is appropriate and what not, and his romantic endeavors are quite creepy when you think about it clearly, which the movie does call him out on in fact. If you want, you can look at I Lost My Body as a sort of coming-of-age tale of a young man trying to find himself, illustrated by a limb literally having to find the body it belongs to. The movie is based on a novel called Happy Hand, written by co-screenwriter of Amélie, Guillaume Laurant, who described his own story as “an eastern fairy tale à la française about two lives that are connected to each other but are separated from each other by fate and reconcile after going their own parallel ways”. He did a far better job than I did, and needed far fewer words. 

6. The Irishman 

Scorsese’s latest is one of those movies that has really been talked to death only a few weeks after its release, and most of what has been said about it wasn’t really worth hearing in the first place. It’s a great movie that has been diminished by a seemingly unending supply of unfunny memes and hot takes by people who were clearly not willing to engage with the work in any kind of good faith, leaving the actual fans of the movie to become its apologists, having to overpraise every aspect of it just to somewhat overpower the noise of all the ill-informed opinions out there.

The Irishman isn’t a perfect movie. It didn’t even make this list after my initial viewing of it. But the second time I watched it, disconnected from any prior expectations I might’ve had, it hit me like a wall of bricks. Any objections I had towards the first half of the movie didn’t really matter anymore. Its central themes of regret and irrevocability were already apparent on the first viewing, but it was only upon this re-watch that it all clicked for me the way it should.

The Irishman feels kind of like a farewell of these greats. I'm fully aware this is not the last movie Scorsese, De Niro, Pacino or Keitel will ever make (I'm not sure about Pesci though). But this is most likely the last time they're all together in the same picture, and soon, we will have to say goodbye to them for good. And I'm not sure if I'm ready to let go off these people whose art has meant so much to me. 

I have never cried because of a celebrity dying. I'm not about that. But there is always a certain sense of sadness upon the realization that I will never see any new work by these artists once they passed away. Once they’re gone, a certain era of filmmaking will go with them as well, and the fact that this last reunion is a Netflix Original, only cements that fact. Just like Frank Sheeran, I have difficulties with things being so final.  

4. The Beach Bum 

Harmony Korine’s latest is deeply hilarious and seemingly goes nowhere in between. The trailer gave me the impression of a certain kind of redemption story, where Moondog (Matthew McConaughey) finds some sort of spiritual awakening and is able to better his life once cut off of his seemingly unending supply of money, drugs, women and alcohol. That is not the case. The Beach Bum finds most of its humor in showing the sheer decadence of these rich, privileged people that inhabit this surreal hangover of a movie. Moondog in this movie is a textbook example of someone failing upwards, who, when he goes on his illustrious odyssey through the realms of Miami, learns nothing in the process, does whatever the fuck he wants, and eventually gets rewarded for this. Moondog is like a cute, untrained puppy, the kind that people applaud because he only pooped on the stone floor instead of the expensive carpet. Korine seems to suggests that if you’re rich and confident enough of your own genius, people will tolerate everything you do and even praise you for it. He’s probably right about that.

This might sound like I was somewhat offended by this movie, which I certainly am not. In fact, I ended leaving the theater with some kind of admiration for the extravagant lead character. I envy how he has seemingly found peace in this crazy, empty world, only allowing whatever brings him joy into his own personal bubble. "I’m a reverse paranoid. I’m quite certain the world is conspiring to make me happy." he says with a smile. Can you even imagine ever having such a carefree attitude towards everything in life? You could almost call The Beach Bum a perverse kind of feel good movie. It’s also so goddamn funny. 

3. Parasite

This is one of the most widely lauded, awarded and discussed movies of the year, to the point that even my grandmother, who is otherwise completely oblivious when it comes to contemporary cinema, had heard of this South-Korean movie that just hit theaters. Singing its praises almost seems unnecessary and perhaps even somewhat blasé. But it can’t be denied that Parasite was probably the most fun I’ve experienced in a theater with a 2019 movie. 

Bong Joon-Ho doesn't share his voice through style as much as he does through his use of tone. Precise yet unafraid, he takes gigantic leaps with this story that in the hands of a less masterful filmmaker would render the entire movie as ridiculous. He keeps setting up narrative expectations, then simultaneously meeting them and undermining them. It’s quite a feat.

Bong ditches the science fiction elements that have defined his most recent work for something more grounded, without losing any of his eccentricity however, I would even go as far as saying that Parasite is a war more entertaining movie than both Snowpiercer and Okja were, while being a far more clever critique on class warfare as well. Despite all the praise he and his movie already received, I honestly think that Bong doesn’t get enough credit for the nuance it brings to this tale of class-struggle, which is far less simplistic than most people would like you to believe. There isn’t as clear a moral division between right and wrong as there was in a movie like Snowpiercer, and the movie becomes all the more interesting for it. 

2. The Favourite

Yorgos Lanthimos is one of those incredibly rare, “non-English” arthouse directors who not only survived their transition to the language of the Bard, but arguably started making his best work from that point on. The Lobster is one of my favorite movies of this decade, a cold, absurdist masterpiece, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer is almost at the same level, both profoundly hilarious as deeply unsettling, my ideal kind of horror comedy. The Favourite is a bit more mainstream than anything he has made before, especially compared to his early Greek ones, being basically a work-for-hire this time around, his first time directing someone else’s script, one that has been shopped around since 1998 no less, but still undeniably carries the signature of the Greek director. Where in his previous movies characters acted like aliens impersonating what they perceived human beings were like, this feels much more grounded and is even based on real life events, yet that doesn’t mean Lanthimos typical sadistic sense of humor is lacking, far from it. And there were never any more perfect “victims” for his trademark sardonic approach than the 18th Century monarch Queen Anne and her confidants.

Olivia Colman's Queen Anne is an ill-tempered ruler who, not unlike certain notable contemporary celebrities, was raised in a little bubble. As such, she never had to actually care for herself, or others for that matter, and her emotional maturity is that of a petulant teenage girl at her best and that of a whimpering toddler at her worst. This makes her the perfect pawn to be manipulated by Rachel Weisz’ Lady Sarah and later in the movie Emma Stone’s Abigail, who both use friendship and sex to gain that what they perceive is their natural birth right. Several power dynamics are being played out throughout the movie until everyone is left unsatisfied, even those who obtained what they thought they wanted.

Breaking through the usual mold of stuffiness and dusty use of language that customarily dominates the award-appropriate period-piece dramas, The Favourite is vulgar and explosive, featuring vomiting aristocrats and indoor duck hunting. It is Downtown Abbey meets Jersey Shore. The movie is so undeniable modern in its approach, it makes what would otherwise be basically award-bait material feel actually dangerous. Lanthimos keeps challenging his inner Peter Greenaway, and I couldn’t be happier about it. 

1. High Life 

Claire Denis’ latest was undeniably my favorite movie I saw all year, it has been sitting comfortable in that position since I saw it originally back in March, but I have been dreading to write anything about it for almost the entire year. It’s unbelievably difficult to find the right words to describe what it is I love about this movie. 

There are movies that move you, movies that make you laugh, movies that fright you but the kind of movies I prefer are the ones that leave you in awe. The kind of movies that show you something you haven’t seen before or that make you feel something that you have never experienced before, even if you can’t define what that is exactly. There is stuff in High Life that didn’t exactly work for me entirely, but the majority of it is such an overwhelming, sensory experience that has stuck with me for almost the entire year. 

The plot of High Life jumps back and forth all the time, from Monte (Robert Pattinson) his life back on earth to his life as a crew member of a spaceship on what is basically a suicide mission to extract energy from a black hole. Everyone involved is a criminal sentenced to death, who all opted serve their time and most likely die in space instead of the death penalty, presumably for the sake of serving some kind of greater good, even though the chances of their mission succeeding are negligibly small. There is also a small side project going on with Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche) who uses all “prisoners” as guinea pigs to see if it is possible to conceive a child in space. Sexual intercourse between the subjects is prohibited however.  

The movie is book-ended by two large segments of Monte and his baby daughter, or so we assume initially, when they are both the last remaining survivors of this undertaking. Every night, Monte has to send out his report to the authorities back at earth. When he does that, the ship will expend his energy supply for another 24 hours, until he is obligated to repeat all of this the following night just so he can survive the day after that. Because his ship is so far removed from the base at home, his messages only reach those in power with a 3-year delay. The whole ordeal is basically useless, but Monte does everything he can to remain alive, even if it is just to postpone his death one day at a time. Being a parent can alter your priorities on staying alive. 

Claire Denis carefully captures this sensation of slowly running out of oxygen until the very last second. It makes its closing image feel like both an immense relief and somewhat of a defeat.

No year-in-review is complete however without some honorable mentions. Because of that, here is a list of 10 other titles that are also worth your time:

• The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg) 

This movie could’ve probably made my top 10 if I saw it a second time, now it has to settle with the unofficial eleventh spot. It’s a frustrating, delicate movie that definitely creeps up on you. 

• Bacurau (Juliano Dornelles & Kleber Mendonça Filho) 

A cerebral arthouse film that at its heart is in fact a full-blooded exploitation flick. Perhaps it tries a little bit too hard to appeal to a western audience, but it is really impressive in how the movie is able to make certain genre tropes feel fresh and unique again.  

• Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach) 

A dire indictment of how capitalism will fuck you over, take away all your strength and energy and eventually leaves you beaten up on the sidewalk, with piss all over you. A typical day in the life of Ken Loach. 

• In Fabric (Peter Strickland) 

Funny, pretentious, gorgeous to look at, with a great atmosphere, the kind of horror movies I really enjoy. Probably would’ve made my top 10 if it were solely focused on Marianne Jean-Baptiste's character. 

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma) 

Besides Parasite, this is probably the other most acclaimed movie of the year. I’m probably somewhat underrating this one, I think it got so overhyped with me to the extent that there was no way it could ever live up to that level of anticipation. 

• Minding the Gap (Bing Liu) 

Everything about this movie is very personal to the filmmaker himself, which is why it is so captivating in the first place, but on certain aspects he seems almost too close to what he is portraying, and his blindsides to some of it become obvious. Still a rather moving and heartfelt documentary. 

• Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham) 

Perhaps a bit trope-heavy, but we rarely ever get a high school movie these days that truly gets today’s youth and doesn’t feel like a middle-aged man’s sexed-up fantasy of what highschoolers are like nowadays. 

• Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham) 

Well-known photographer and artist Richard Billingham seemingly build a time machine to transport us back to his own rotten childhood during Thatcher-era Britain. A blackly comedic and rather poignant slice-of-life story that might appeal to the fans of Terrence Davies’ The Long Day Closes. 

• Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke) 

A humanistic gangster drama set against the ever-changing landscape of contemporary China. Zhào Tāo is absolutely magnetic in the leading role. 

• Supa Modo (Likarion Wainaina) 

Cute without being cutesy. Supa Modo avoids coming across as sappy or corny by being completely earnest, which is why it will affect adults just as much as it will children, perhaps even more so. 

 

And because I always enjoy myself more when watching and discovering cinema from the past, here are 25 older movies that I watched for the first time in 2019 that I absolutely loved. Seasoned film lovers will already have watched most if not all of the movies mentioned here, I guess I’m just late to the party. 

The titles are in alphabetical order because I didn’t really feel like ranking them. My absolute favorite discovery out of all of these however is undoubtedly Dog Day Afternoon. One of those rare, undeniably perfect movies where I wouldn’t want to change a thing, not even the smallest line delivery.

  

• A Man Escaped (1956, Robert Bresson)
• Bringing out the Dead (1999, Martin Scorsese)
•  Days of Being Wild (1990, Wong Kar-Wai)
• Dog Day Afternoon (1975, Sidney Lumet)
• Full Contact (1992, Ringo Lam)
• In the Mood for Love (2000, Wong Kar-Wai)
• Memories of Murder (2003, Bong Joon-Ho)
•  My Man Godfrey (1936, Gregory La Cava)
•  Opening Night (1977, John Cassavetes)
• Peeping Tom (1960, Michael Powell)
• Point Blank (1967, John Boorman)
• Robin and Marian (1976, Richard Lester)
• Simple Men (1992, Hal Hartley)
• Sonatine (1993, Takeshi Kitano)
•  Sunrise (1927, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau)
• The Big Heat (1953, Fritz Lang)
• The Devils (1971, Ken Russell)
• The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, John Cassavetes)
• The Last Detail (1973, Hal Ashby)
• The Masque of the Red Death (1964, Roger Corman)
• The Shop Around the Corner (1940, Ernst Lubitsch)
• The Thing (1982, John Carpenter)
• The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)
• Trust (1990, Hal Hartley)
• Vampyr (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer)

And I wish you all the best of luck in 2020