Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

Discussions of specific films and franchises.
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Newsnayr
Joined: Wed Apr 01, 2015 12:54 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#51 Post by Newsnayr » Fri Apr 05, 2019 6:07 am

1. La Flor (Mariano Llinás)
2. Asako I & II (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
3. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan)
4. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
5. Transit (Christian Petzold)
6. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke)
7. Grass (Hong Sang-soo)
8. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
9. High Life (Claire Denis)
10. Her Smell (Alex Ross Perry)
Last edited by Newsnayr on Mon Nov 11, 2019 3:20 am, edited 4 times in total.

BrianB
Joined: Wed Feb 13, 2019 7:50 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#52 Post by BrianB » Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:29 am

1. Parasite
2. Donbass
3. La Flor
4. Midsommar
5. The Lighthouse
6. Pain and Glory
7. Waves
8. The Irishman
9. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
10. A Hidden Life
Last edited by BrianB on Thu Jan 07, 2021 10:48 am, edited 11 times in total.

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lzx
Joined: Sat Jul 19, 2014 7:27 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#53 Post by lzx » Wed May 01, 2019 2:34 am

  1. Ad Astra
  2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
  3. Long Day's Journey into Night
  4. Diamantino
  5. Transit
  6. Honeyland
  7. Pain and Glory
  8. Antigone
  9. Give Me Liberty
  10. End of the Century
Last edited by lzx on Fri Mar 20, 2020 3:47 pm, edited 3 times in total.

j99
Joined: Wed May 27, 2009 10:18 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#54 Post by j99 » Sat Jun 15, 2019 12:01 pm

01. Sunset (Laszlo Nemes)
02. High Life (Claire Denis)
03. Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
04. Midsommar (Ari Aster)
05. Birds Of Passage (Cristina Callego/Ciro Guerra)
06. Pain And Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
07. Out Of Blue (Carol Morley)
08. Amazing Grace (Alan Elliot/Sydney Pollack)
09. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
10. Bait (Mark Jenkin)
Last edited by j99 on Thu Jan 23, 2020 3:49 pm, edited 6 times in total.

Cde.
Joined: Sun Dec 02, 2007 6:56 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#55 Post by Cde. » Sat Jun 22, 2019 1:01 pm

1. Pain and Glory (Almodovar)
2. Parasite (Bong)
3. If Beale Street Could Talk (Jenkins)
4. So Long My Son (Wang)
5. The Nightingale (Kent)
6. Midnight Family (Lorentzen)
7. Synonyms (Lapid)
8. The Unknown Saint (Aljem)
9. The Souvenir (Hogg)
10. Under the Silver Lake (Mitchell)
Next: In Fabric (Strickland), Just Don't Think I'll Scream (Beauvois), Vox Lux (Corbet), Varda By Agnès (Varda), Dirty God (Polak), The Best of Dorien B (Blondé), The Great Pretender (Silver), Divine Love (Mascaro), Anthropocene (Baichwal, Burtynsky, de Pencier), Never Look Away (von Donnersmark)

Calvin
Joined: Sun Apr 10, 2011 11:12 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#56 Post by Calvin » Fri Jul 05, 2019 3:07 pm

The Irishman (Scorsese)
Pain and Glory (Almodovar)
The Souvenir (Hogg)
Parasite (Bong)
The Farewell (Wang)
High Life (Denis)
Apollo 11 (Miller)
Monos (Landes)
Marriage Story (Baumbach)
A Rainy Day in New York (Allen)
Last edited by Calvin on Mon Dec 09, 2019 1:24 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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menthymenthy
Joined: Sat Sep 13, 2008 3:11 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#57 Post by menthymenthy » Mon Aug 05, 2019 5:00 pm

1. Zombi Child (Bonello)
2. Liberté (Serra)
3. Die Kinder der Toten (Copper/Liska)
4. The Dead Don't Die (Jarmusch)
5. Knives and Skin (Reeder)

6. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (Tarantino)
7. Marriage Story (Baumbach)
8. Years of Construction (Emigholz)
9. Beanpole (Balagov)
10. The Beach Bum (Korine)
Last edited by menthymenthy on Thu Dec 12, 2019 8:53 am, edited 2 times in total.

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zedz
Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#58 Post by zedz » Sun Aug 11, 2019 7:03 pm

On my first pass, I had a bunch of animated shorts vying for inclusion here and in the supplementary list, so I decided to extract those and do a separate animation top ten later on. Everything is in rough, mutable order of preference.

Ten Best:

La Flor (Mariano Llinás) – A brilliant, multi-faceted experiment with narrative that was hugely entertaining from the earnest opening director’s notes to the majestic forty-minute closing credits. So much great storytelling and delightful reflexive and structural gags (some are momentary; some take ten or more hours from set-up to pay-off). There’s a Cronenbergian sci-fi conspiracy; cheesy horror; experimental cinema; an awesome, intricate five-hour globe-trotting spy movie; a Godard film (if Godard were smarter and funnier); musical duels . . . I could have happily sat through another fourteen hours of this stuff.

Genesis (Philippe Lesage) – Like the director’s previous Les Démons, this is a scarily perceptive study of the perils and joys of youth. What he does at the end of the film is so audacious that I can’t even talk obliquely about it without spoiling it, and I can’t even think about it without smiling.

Song Without a Name (Melina Léon) – An intense, black and white Peruvian debut that has much of the narrative depth and formal classicism of Lav Diaz. The film’s dramatic hook could have (and probably already has, in a lesser film) yielded dreary heart-in-the-right-place melodrama, but Léon instead uses it as a window into a more wide-ranging examination of the bad old days which are always with us.

Up the Mountain (Zhang Yang) – How, in 2019, does one reinvigorate an antique medium? Zhang Yang flips the academy ratio on its side and comes up with one ravishing and surprising composition after another. The film is a semi-documentary study of the lives of folk painters in a Chinese village (it’s a lightly scripted drama enacted by local people), and the 3:4 aspect ratio echoes the framing of most of their paintings. Thus the film’s (gorgeous) landscapes evoke Eastern pictorial traditions rather than the default Western landscapes of cinema that we’ve been seeing for 120 years.

Koko-Di Koko-Da (Johannes Nyholm) – Can you remember the last time you saw a truly original horror movie? This Scandinavian puzzle-box managed to outdo even In Fabric in that respect by taking one of the most tired clichés of the modern horror movie and turning it into the entire structure of a film. The film has a queasy comic tone punctuated with moments of despair and cruelty that helps sustain its nightmarish momentum. The film’s structural gimmick is so strong and engaging that any kind of resolution would be anti-climactic, but that’s the price of admission to this kind of cinematic ride.

Long Day’s Journey into Night (Bi Gan) – Already discussed in its dedicated thread.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma) – A period drama that is so intensely still and quiet that its two big musical set pieces are genuinely overwhelming. Impeccable filmmaking from start to finish.

Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe) – Probably the best opening sequence I’ll see this year. I would love to see a monster movie that began so effectively. In the middle there’s a nicely observed drama about an arsonist returning to his small village after his release from jail, and the final third is largely occupied with the bravura action sequence promised in the title. It’s a relatively simple film all in all, but Laxe’s filmmaking chops are really impressive.

Our Time (Carlos Reygadas) - Commented on in its dedicated thread. (Late addition)

Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov) – Good old-fashioned Russian grimness set in post-WWII Leningrad. Two women bound by circumstance and tragedy struggle to lead decent lives. Excellent sound design (we begin the film in the middle of the lead character’s seizure) and a distinctive look that mixes yellow light with deep signature greens. (Moved up from the top of my supplementary list because of the way it persisted in my memory.)

Ten More Too Good to Miss (Plus one, due to juggling):

Bacurau (Kleber Mendonca Filho / Juliano Dornelles) – When it comes to South American arthouse directors tackling genre material, Mariano Llinás takes the cake this year (and probably for many years hence), but this mixture of dystopian science-fiction, survivalist thriller and splatter movie is an amazing artefact in its own right. The filmmakers invest concepts that could, and have, fuelled the sleaziest of pulp and treats them with seriousness, imposing them on a fully realized community and teasing out their inherent political subtexts. At the same time, they deliver the requisite pulp thrills by the bucketload.

Non-Fiction (Olivier Assayas) – Yeah, it’s talky, but Assayas’s nifty trick with this film is that beneath the veneer of garrulous erudition is a complex, fully realized relationship drama, going on in the actors performances even as they’re talking about anything else. And Assayas’s gift for pacing and eye for performance keep the whole film moving lightly and briskly.

Angelo (Markus Schleinzer) – Something of a cousin to Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The director of Michael finally returns with his second film, a pitiless portrait of an African child raised in 18th century Vienna as a curiosity, or walking allegory, or pet. He ultimately attains his independence and . . . Meticulous, austere, with a gentle use of anachronism that seems derived from Straub / Huillet.

Carmine Street Guitars (Ron Mann) – One of those films you choose as a gap-filler in your festival schedule but which turns out to be a gem. This is a lightly dramatized documentary about a Greenwich Village guitar shop. The lovely proprietor, Rick Kelly, fashions guitars out of salvaged wood from old New York buildings, and an array of music luminaries drop by to chat. A tremendously warm and engaging film (from an idea by Jim Jarmusch, who appears as a customer).

Aquarela (Victor Kossakovsky) – Not as great as Kossakovsky’s previous Vivan las Antipodas!, but magnificent nevertheless. The idea this time is the power of water, which we follow from the treacherous melting ice in the Artic (basically a short documentary on how to salvage a car that crashes through thin ice), to raging seas and storms, to Angel Falls. Sensory overload abounds, and there’s a common denominator of the impact of climate change unstated throughout.

Nina Wu (Midi Z) – A bracing head trip of a film that leaves us unmoored in terms of knowing what is real and what isn’t from moment to moment, but which works because it has a steely emotional coherence throughout. Nina, a struggling actress, lands the lead role in a slightly sleazy film, but her subsequent fame arouses memories of the people she left behind and the furious envy of a rival starlet, who seems to know more about what’s going on behind the scenes than Nina does. A Lynchian nightmare for our times. There is a solution to the narrative conundrums this film throws in our faces, but it’s a bleak one.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross) – A beguiling mixture of the banal and the visionary, shot under the sign of Weerasethakul. The lives of a black family in Alabama are documented in a lightly experimental mode (with pretentious intertitles that are at times self-mocking) that neither aggrandizes nor sentimentalizes the subjects. It’s quite a high-wire act, but I was sold.

The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan) – Great-looking noirish thriller with some beautifully staged action set pieces.

In Fabric (Peter Strickland) – Could have been simply silly, but Strickland’s complete stylistic vision for the film (and strategic borrowings from the Brothers Quay) make this genuinely unnerving and genuinely hilarious. In the first part, Marianne Jean-Baptiste gives a superb performance that provides a necessary anchor in reality. Consequently, the second story loses its moorings a little, but has enough bizarre gags to keep the momentum going.

Les Miserables (Ladj Ly) - Kind of a more incendiary Parisian version of The Wire, but that’s no bad thing. As a first feature, this is a tremendous achievement, juggling a large cast and a wide range of moods and exhibiting a sophisticated sense of space and geography.

High Life (Claire Denis) – Superb filmmaking on all fronts, but I missed the intimacy and sensuality of Agnes Godard. Yorick Le Saux is no slouch, and the film looks fabulous, but I can only imagine what Godard would have brought to several key sequences. As it is, this is a fascinating and original take on the science fiction genre, and more evidence that Denis is not only one of the greatest working directors, but one of the least complacent.


Five Bad Films:

Seventy-plus features later, there were plenty of really good films that were ultimately disappointing for one reason or another (such as the new Poromboiu and Suleiman), but only a handful of genuine duds. So, in the interest of a public health warning:

Who You Think I Am (Safy Nebbou) – Glib, modish French drama. Apparently it’s easy to deceive people with fake online personae. Who'da thunk it? Binoche does what she can with a dumb script. Notable for featuring a psychiatrist who’s even more brazenly unprofessional than Justine Triet’s Sybil (a much better film that thematically falls somewhere between Non-Fiction and this potboiler): a plot twist (spoiler, if you can be bothered) depends on a shrink discussing her client’s therapy with one of the client’s ex-boyfriends. Yikes!

The Day Shall Come (Chris Morris) – Morris is a genius in certain contexts, but his limitations really come home to roost in this mess. Although fitfully funny (but not funny enough), it’s hard to make a satire work when every last character is an idiot. Ianucci had a gift for verisimilitude that balanced Morris’s take-no-prisoners approach work beautifully on The Day Today, and in The Thick of It this manifested as a complex cast of characters, with differing levels of intelligence, competence and good or ill will, even if they were all ultimately caricatures. In this film, there’s no such nuance, and so you don’t really care what happens to anybody. This could be fine if Morris were happy to just work on a joke-by-joke basis, but he tries to pull a switcheroo into poignancy / genuine outrage at the end of the film that is grotesquely misconceived.

Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach) – In which I am reminded why I should stop going to see Ken Loach films. Maybe it’s Paul Laverty’s fault, but this is such a transparently contrived ‘tragedy’ that I couldn’t care less about the plight of the characters. They make every possible bad decision they can to ensure their tidy fate, and approach the big bad world with unbelievably wide-eyed naivety. We’re even expected to feel sorry for the arsehole teenage son. Moral of the story (spoiler?): if dad had run him over with his new van in the first act, everything would have turned out just fine. The most telling scene is when the big baddy is given a long speech to explain his motivations and comes off as even more of a pantomime villain. The two leads do fine work with what they’re given, but everyone else is a cipher.

One Child Nation (Nanfu Wang / Jialing Zhang) – A great, but hardly surprising, subject for a documentary – the dark underside of China’s “one child” policy – but this is possibly the most irritating and self-aggrandizing way to approach it. Nanfu Wang makes it all about her, her family history (although she wasn’t from a single child family and they weren’t subject to the abuses documented in the film), and her new status as a mother (which apparently gives her a special insight into human rights abuses). It’s frustrating that such a strong subject has now been spoiled for better filmmakers. Hilla Medalia and Shosh Shlam’s Leftover Women is a much better film on an obliquely related topic.
Last edited by zedz on Mon Jan 06, 2020 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Clarence
Joined: Fri Jun 24, 2016 1:18 am
Location: Orlando, FL

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#59 Post by Clarence » Mon Oct 28, 2019 11:10 am

01. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
02. Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino)
03. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie)
04. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)
05. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho)
06. I Heard You Paint Houses (Martin Scorsese)
07. Little Women (Gerwig)
08. Knives Out (Rian Johnson)
09. Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller)
10. Waves (Trey Edward Shults)

Honorable Mentions:

- The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
Last edited by Clarence on Sat Feb 22, 2020 11:26 pm, edited 11 times in total.

Nasir007
Joined: Sat May 25, 2019 11:58 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#60 Post by Nasir007 » Sun Dec 01, 2019 11:15 pm

I will attempt a first Top 10 for 2019

1. Parasite (Bong Joon Ho)
2. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar)
3. Synonyms (Nadav Lapid)
4. Asako I & II (Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
5. The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio)
6. The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers)
7. Transit (Christian Petzold)
8. 3 Faces (Jafar Panahi)
9. Diamantino (Gabriel Abrantes & Daniel Schmidt)
10. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Céline Sciamma)

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dda1996a
Joined: Tue Oct 27, 2015 6:14 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#61 Post by dda1996a » Fri Dec 06, 2019 6:28 pm

2019:
Beanpole
Long Day's Journey into Night
Our Time
Married Story
Young Ahmed
Light of my Life
Parasite
It Must Be Heaven
The Irishman
Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood

Decade:
1. Tree of Life
2. Paterson
3. It's Such a Beautiful Day
4. A Separation
5. Social Network
6. Phantom Thread
7. Her
8. Princess Kaguya
9. Stray Dogs
10. Nocturama

yoshimori
Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 2:03 am
Location: LA CA

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#62 Post by yoshimori » Thu Dec 12, 2019 2:36 pm

Been doing some pre-post-pandemic clean-up. Now've watched just shy of 200 movies from 2019. So

2019 [updated 8-2022]:

1. Yerzhanov, A Dark, Dark Man
2. Fukada, A Girl Missing
3. Triet, Sibyl

then

4. Dupieux, Deerskin
5. Larrain, Ema
6. Devos, Hellhole
7. Hausner, Little Joe
8. Mike, First Love
9. Lou, Saturday Fiction
10. Diao, Wild Goose Lake

Also Bonello, Zombi Child; Lanthimos, "Mimic"; Noé, "Lux Aeterna"

2010s:

It's Such a Beautiful Day (Hertzfeldt 2012) [+ "World of Tomorrow" 1 (2015) and 2 (2017)]
The Kirishima Thing (Yoshida 2012)
Under the Skin (Glazer 2013)
P-047 (Jaturanrasmee 2011)
A Dark, Dark Man (Yerzhanov, 2019)
Upstream Color (Carruth 2013)
Only God Forgives (Refn 2013)
Wuthering Heights (Arnold 2011)
White Night (Leesong 2012)
Black Coal, Thin Ice (Diao 2014)

HM: P'tit Quinquin, Moonrise Kingdom, Isle of Dogs, Lily Lane, Blind Massage, In Fabric, Beautiful Planet, Romance Joe, Post Tenebras Lux
Last edited by yoshimori on Thu Aug 25, 2022 6:11 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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Ribs
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2014 1:14 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#63 Post by Ribs » Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:47 pm

01 Little Women
02 A Hidden Life
03 Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
04 The Irishman
05 Uncut Gems
06 Transit
07 Sorry Angel
08 1917
09 Portrait of a Lady on Fire
10 Varda by Agnès

(This is the first year ever that I’ve actually seen absolutely everything I want to see before the end of the year, which is somewhat refreshing for doing these)

Mooney
Joined: Fri Jul 01, 2011 10:32 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#64 Post by Mooney » Fri Jan 03, 2020 6:26 pm

1. Ash is Purest White
2. Parasite
3. Waves
4. Uncut Gems
5. Transit
6. Ad Astra
7. The Irishman
8. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
9. A Hidden Life
10. Pain and Glory

neal
Joined: Fri Dec 02, 2005 11:44 pm
Location: NY, USA

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#65 Post by neal » Fri Jan 03, 2020 11:38 pm

1. Parasite
2. Her Smell
3. Uncut Gems
4. Booksmart
5. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
6. The Lighthouse
7. Sword of Trust
8. Knives Out
9. Joker
10. Toy Story 4

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Sonmi451
Joined: Fri Nov 02, 2012 2:07 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#66 Post by Sonmi451 » Wed Jan 08, 2020 4:59 am

1. Uncut Gems
2. High Life
3. Waves
4. Dogman
5. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
6. Our Time
7. Joker
8. Monos
9. Midsommar
10. Long Day's Journey Into Night

Also liked: Ford v Ferrari, Knives Out, Dark Waters, Luce, Ad Astra, True History of the Kelly Gang, Marriage Story, The Dead Don't Die, Beach Bum
Disappointing: The Irishman ... The Lighthouse, Parasite
Last edited by Sonmi451 on Sun Feb 09, 2020 11:47 pm, edited 4 times in total.

PsychoWalrus
Joined: Sun Jun 02, 2013 10:38 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#67 Post by PsychoWalrus » Wed Jan 08, 2020 8:56 am

2019
1. The Irishman
2. Parasite
3. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood
4. Uncut Gems
5. Knives Out
6. Pain and Glory
7. The Lighthouse
8. Marriage Story
9. Toy Story 4
10. Us

Decade
1 Uncle Boonmee who Can Recall His Past Lives
2 Twin Peaks: The Return
3 The Irishman
4 The Grand Budapest Hotel
5 The Assassin
6 Call Me by Your Name
7 Inside Out
8 The Wind Rises
9 The Turin Horse
10 Burning
11 Phantom Thread
12 The Wolf of Wall Street
13 Shoplifters
14 Parasite
15 Stranger by the Lake
16 Cemetery of Splendor
17 Mad Max: Fury Road
18 Mission Impossible: Fallout
19 Lady Bird
20 Faces Places
21 Moonrise Kingdom
22 Frances Ha
23 Toy Story 3
24 Carol
25 A Separation 
26 The Tree of Life
27 Bridesmaids
28 Certified Copy
29 Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
30 Toni Erdmann

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ng4996
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Location: Missoula, MT

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#68 Post by ng4996 » Fri Jan 31, 2020 8:54 pm

1. Pain & Glory
2. Parasite
3. Little Women
4. Atlantics
5. The Irishman
6. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
7. The Lighthouse
8. Uncut Gems
9. High Life
10. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

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ianthemovie
Joined: Sat Apr 18, 2009 10:51 am
Location: Boston, MA
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Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#69 Post by ianthemovie » Mon Feb 10, 2020 5:02 pm

1. Marriage Story - A domestic epic, big in scope but embroidered with subtle detail, told through wonderful long sequences that unfold without ever seeming rushed. The performances are all incredible. I know some people seem divided on Driver's song but it moved me to tears. It was a pleasure to see Johansson rescued from the MCU and given a part with real dialogue and emotional range. This is one of Baumbach's best films. Funnier than expected, too.

2. Parasite - I found Okja and Snowpiercer enjoyable but too pat and simplistic, so I was pleasantly surprised by this, which deals more complexly with the class issue and feels like a throwback to the dark comedies of Bong's early career like Barking Dogs (it even borrows/revises a key plot point from that film). Seeing this with a packed crowd at NYFF was a sheer delight with the audience actually breaking out in applause during the film. It's as masterful an exercise in "playing the audience like a piano" as any since Hitchcock.

3. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - A brilliant stunt and, with Inglourious Basterds, a fascinating film about the uses, and the limits, of cinematic fantasy.

4. The Irishman - It doesn’t have the young-man’s energy of Scorsese's other mob films, which are now twenty-five and thirty years old. It has something else—the weight and the expansiveness of age. Pacino gives the juiciest and most flamboyant of the film’s embarrassment of rich performances. A movie preoccupied with the thought of coming to the end of the line of a friendship, a career, a life.

5. The Lighthouse - In the end credits Eggers cites archival documents and the fiction of Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett (!) as influences on the screenplay, and there is definitely something of Melville’s mordant sense of humor at play here, though I would say the movie has more in common with the plays of Samuel Beckett—the absurdist pitch, the blighted setting, the characters who are bound together by exasperation and need, the inescapable material nastiness of their bodies (lots of pissing, farting, and masturbation here), the dialogue that is at times florid and rhetorical and at other times devolves into nonsensical jabber. (Dafoe has at least two tour-de-force speeches that furl and crash like ocean waves; Pattinson has a travesty of one, as his character tries, and hilariously fails, to imitate his colleague’s way with words.) The two performances—ferocious, rowdy, cackling, scenery-chewing, mouth-foaming—clue us in to the tone of the film, which is both funny and horrific, a black comedy outfitted with touches of the grotesque and the spooky. A vastly superior film to Eggers' The Witch because it has a sense of humor that that film lacked.

6. Uncut Gems - Loud, assaultive, abrasive, unpleasant, scarily funny, a two-hour-long anxiety attack of a movie. Up until now I’ve found myself allergic to the Safdie Brothers and their own willful noxiousness, but this is so lively, weird, and propulsive that I couldn’t help but be won over by it. Also a great sleazy-New-York movie in the tradition of Friedkin to which I was tipped off from the moment I saw the opening-credits font.

7. Midsommar - It moves at a stately, inexorable pace, like a predatory fish steadily but serenely barreling through the water towards a target. And it builds to a hellish crescendo of a finale, one that is both horrifying and a little bit bonkers. A much surer-footed film than Hereditary.

8. The Nightingale - The plot of this suggests an Aussie-feminist version of The Revenant, and it a similar visceral intensity, as our heroine slogs through mud and blood to catch up to the men who took her for dead. It arguably does The Revenant one better by positioning its saga of frontier justice within a criss-crossed web of race, gender, and colonialism. A brutal sit but I for one admired its relentlessness and its crudity which reminded me of a folk tale or ballad.

9. High Life - I saw this back in the fall of 2019 right after seeing First Man and it would be hard to imagine two different approaches to the space movie. High Life drips and seeps with corporeal detritus—urine, semen, menstrual blood. Its tone is exploratory rather than rhetorical and its approach is poetic rather than rational. Challenging, weird, and sexy.

10. Atlantics - I loved the beautiful texture of this, shimmery and hypnotic, which shows the influence both of Diop’s uncle (Djibril Diop Mambety) and of Claire Denis, with whom Diop has previously collaborated. The movie’s ambiguities are subtle at the same time that it tells a story that’s satisfyingly familiar, even simple, one in which the dead return to the world of the living in order to take care of unfinished business.

Balthazar
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2004 2:25 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#70 Post by Balthazar » Mon Feb 10, 2020 7:07 pm

1. La Flor
2. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
3. Atlantics
4. Deerskin
5. High Life
6. The Wild Goose Lake
7. Beanpole
8. The Chambermaid
9. The Irishman
10. Parasite

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Lemmy Caution
Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 3:26 am
Location: East of Shanghai

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#71 Post by Lemmy Caution » Sat Mar 21, 2020 7:48 pm

Liked:
1. Jo Jo Rabbit
2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
3. Lighthouse
4. American Factory

Fine Enough:
5. Yesterday
6. The Best of Enemies
7. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood

Okay-ish:
8. Rocketman
9. Greta
10. Under the Silver Lake
11. Stockholm
__________________________________________

Disliked:
5. Motherless Brooklyn
4. Uncut Gems
3. A Simple Favor
2. A Star is Born
1. High Life (Claire Denis)

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Cremildo
Joined: Sun Jan 22, 2012 8:19 pm
Location: Brazil
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Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#72 Post by Cremildo » Sat Mar 21, 2020 8:15 pm

01. Sorry We Missed You
02. Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood
03. The Irishman
04. Motherless Brooklyn
05. Little Women
06. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
07. Glass
08. Invisible Life
09. Ford v Ferrari
10. Uncut Gems

(I'll be editing this for a while; there are some important films left to see.)

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Toland's Mitchell
Joined: Sun Nov 10, 2019 2:42 pm

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#73 Post by Toland's Mitchell » Sun Mar 29, 2020 4:38 pm

(alphabetical)

The Art of Self-Defense
Atlantics
Honeyland
Klaus
Knives Out
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Pain and Glory/Dolor y gloria
Parasite
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Uncut Gems

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Mothravka
Joined: Mon Oct 15, 2018 4:36 am

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#74 Post by Mothravka » Fri Aug 14, 2020 3:49 am

1. Lapü (Juan Pablo Polanco & César Alejandro Jaimes)
2. This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection (Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese)
3. Belonging (Burak Çevik)
4. Aether (Rûken Tekeş)
5. Zumiriki (Oskar Alegria)
6. Endless Night (Eloy Enciso)
7. Alva (Ico Costa)
8. Death Will Come and Shall Have Your Eyes (José Luis Torres Leiva)
9. That Cloud Never Left (Yashaswini Raghunandan)
10. Inland (Juan Palacios)

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Timec
Spencer Tracy had it coming
Joined: Thu Nov 25, 2004 1:16 pm
Location: Elsewhere

Re: Dynamic Top Tens of 2019

#75 Post by Timec » Fri Sep 18, 2020 9:16 am

01. A Hidden Life
02. 1917
03. The Lighthouse
04. Ad Astra
05. Corpus Christi
06. And Then We Danced
07. Pain and Glory
08. Little Women
09. Jojo Rabbit
10. A White, White Day

RUNNERS-UP: Bacurau / Happy Death Day 2 U / Joker / Marriage Story / Parasite / Portrait of a Lady on Fire

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