Jacob's Top 15 (and super late) Favorite Films of 2019

Boy, this is kind of embarrassing to even write.

My year in 2019 movies was bizarre (though, at the rate 2020 is going, it’s by definition not as bizarre as what we’re living through right now). I told myself I’d go out and see even more movies than normal, and there were TONS of contenders, especially in the independent film scene (the blockbuster film scene… Not so much, with one major exception).

And yet, like all of the other lists I’ve written, I’ll start with the films I meant to get around to seeing that I simply didn’t. and considering that this list is literally months late at this point, I’ll get to these movies eventually:

• 1917

• An Elephant Sitting Still

• Ash is Purest White

• Atlantics

• A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

• Dark Waters

• Doctor Sleep

• The Farewell

• Ford V Ferrari

• Her Smell

• Honey Boy

• I Lost My Body

• Jojo Rabbit

• Just Mercy

• Last Black Man in San Francisco

• Long Day’s Journey Into Night

• Marriage Story

• The Nightingale

• Pain & Glory

• Portrait of a Lady on Fire

• Transit

…and honestly, I’m probably forgetting other movies I forgot to get around to.

2019 was a shockingly crowded year full of some really fascinating movies, and building this list without seeing many of the films above combined with what I actually managed to see has resulted in what might be the most bizarre Top 15 List I’ve ever written. As you can plainly see, I missed out on several Best Picture nominees, tons of critical darlings from across the world, and a couple of films from some of my new favorite directors of the 2010s.

All of that being said, I am (mostly) proud of this list. It’s filled with movies I really enjoyed, and if I’m being totally honest, I highly doubt any of the movies above would have replaced my number one choice for the year (if you know me personally, you already know exactly what it is).

As always, this is a “Top 15” list because I like to think of slots 11-15 as my honorable mentions, and my top 5 as my absolute favorite movies of the year. Most importantly, it’s my list, and so I will do as I wish.

Without further ado:

15. Amazing Grace

Every year, my 15th slot is dedicated to a film that’s usually wildly different from the rest of the movies that follow on the list. And that certainly holds true this year with Amazing Grace, an Aretha Franklin concert film finally released in 2019.

Now, obviously, if you know nothing about Amazing Grace’s history (which, I did not beforehand), the idea of a posthumous concert film for one of the greatest American singers of all time might seem bizarre, but that’s only half of how bizarre this really is. Originally filmed in 1972, Amazing Grace documented the recording process of Aretha Franklin’s legendary album of the same name, but due to a major technical SNAFU, the sound recorded and the footage couldn’t be synced up with analog technology.

But in the digital era, the work has been done, and whether you know Franklin’s albums inside and out or you’re a newbie like I was, it’s hard not to get deeply invested in the gorgeous music here. For fans of concert films, you need to check this one out.

14. In Fabric

I’m surprised by how much I think about In Fabric, especially because the most accurate designation I can assign to it is “arthouse-horror-comedy,” a label that sounds absolutely insufferable. I imagine for some people, it totally is, but for me, it’s a true oddball of a film that I kind of love. It’s way too long for its own good, and some of its indulgences definitely keep it from climbing up the list, but its deadpan humor, some fantastic performances, stunning retro music, and undeniably sumptuous cinematography make it worth a try.

Assuming you can get down with late-1960s/1970s style homages, which this film practically satisfies itself with (and, in at least one scene, satisfies itself quite literally in bizarrely graphic detail, and not gory detail either).

13. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum

The John Wick movies are now officially a brand. While the first film was a shocking indie success that took the action movie world by storm, its successors are unmistakably different in scope and tone. The first John Wick felt like a peek into a strange and unknowable world of assassins, filled with about 50 headshots. The sequels have tried to explain that world of assassins in more detail, and the attempts at expanding the lore have had some solid (but definitely imperfect) results.

But what’s gotten undeniably better is that we’re basically up to 100 headshots a movie at this point. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum thankfully mixes up the gunplay with what I can only describe as “Jackie Chan weapon improvisations but with an R-rating,” and once the first kill happens (and I won’t dare spoil what the weapon of choice ends up being), it’s clear that these movies still have plenty of fresh action ideas. Hopefully, the inevitable sequel can keep things fresh, but I do wish this was higher up the list.

(Cast Iko Uwais in the sequel, it needs to happen, you already have Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman in there, and while we’re talking about bringing in Raid stars, Joe Taslim and Julie Estell should pop up at some point too.)

12. Knives Out

The single biggest success of Knives Out is how it redefines what a “whodunnit” mystery can be right out of the gate. Without giving up the coolest inversion this film has, Knives Out’s mystery isn’t that hard to solve. In theory, that is. The movie reveals some pretty key details in the first 20 minutes, but a whole other mystery quickly builds on top of that in some truly clever ways. Combine that with a killer ensemble cast with a couple of my favorite actors ever (along with a killer final shot), and you have a movie that’s damn good.

However, it just didn’t stick with me the way other movies in 2019 did. I know this is a pretty beloved film, and I’m glad people loved it, but I’ve forgotten a lot of it by now, and I’m not super keen on revisiting it (though, I will happily show up to a sequel to see Benoit Blanc solve more mysteries).

11. Color Out of Space

If it weren’t for a couple of things in this movie, it could have easily missed my Top 15 list. There are things in this movie that work against it, and pretty constantly too. The characters are deeply flawed in ways that aren’t very endearing, some of the dialogue (and performances) are a bit clunky, and it definitely borrows some imagery from other horror films.

But Color Out of Space’s many idiosyncrasies begin to line up and take this movie a whole other level. This is basically the modern version of a Stuart Gordon film (more in the vein of From Beyond than Re-Animator), and there’s just enough here to elevate this into my list. The Colin Stetson score is absolutely fantastic, Nicolas Cage is as batshit as ever (with possibly the best deliver of “What the fuck are you talking about?” that I’ve heard in a movie in a while), and an uncompromising attitude during its 3rd act.

And Tommy Chong gets a really cool role in this, which is a surprising thing to write.

10. Monos

I think I can sum up the basic plot of Monos pretty easily: Imagine if you combined Lord of the Flies with Apocalypse Now, made in Colombia. And that’s a pretty literal description to, a pig’s head is mounted on a spike about halfway through this nightmarish odyssey. Any movie about child soldiers is going to have some rough material, but Monos leans into primal instincts and atmosphere at every turn.

The score by Mica Levi does a lot of heavy lifting, but the cinematography captures imagery on a mountain that… I’m not even exaggerating, but the imagery is unlike anything I’ve seen in a narrative film. It’s the kind of shots you’d expect to find in a Ron Fricke film like Samsara, or a Godfrey Reggio film like Koyaanisqatsi, not a war film. This movie is a lean mean gut punch, and goddamn is it memorable.

9. Us

Let me start this entry by saying this:

If this movie had a better ending, it would be significantly higher than it is.

Us’s ending isn’t terrible. It’s not even that bad. But when you know it’s from the man who made Get Out, my literal favorite film of 2017, it’s undeniably a step-down. However, it’s not a huge step-down, and there’s some absolutely fantastic stuff to pick apart in this film. Chiefly, Lupita Nyong’o’s performance is one of the best of the entire year, a literal dual performance the likes of which the horror genre hasn’t seen in a while.

Which is why it’s unfortunate that the story feels a bit more rushed this time around, but there’s one thing that has improved since Get Out: The pure horror stuff. Jordan Peele basically uses Us to show off that he can do more than cerebral horror, staging not only one of the best home invasion scenes of 2019, but two of them (and one of them has two all-time great needle drops). The physical work here to make these sequences visceral is fantastic, and there’s at least one last-minute escape/kill in this movie that’s as brutal as it is satisfying.

Overall, it’s still damn good, and worthy of admiration, just not quite as much as what came before.

8. Dolemite is My Name

Well, this is just a lovely surprise. I didn’t know that the return of Eddie Murphy would be this great, and this interesting too. The Dolemite films are not the kind of thing you’d usually get a budget to make a film about, but not only did Eddie Murphy get it done, but he also got the screenwriters of Ed Wood, the director of Hustle & Flow, and pretty much every great black actor in Hollywood to make it right.

It’s hard not to love this movie and the characters in it. While Murphy is very entertaining playing the real-life figure Rudy Ray Moore, the larger the cast gets, the better the movie gets. The ensemble is top-notch, and gets REALLY good when Da’Vine Joy Randolph shows up Lady Reed, and gets even better when Welsey Snipes shows up as D’Urville Martin. There are so many other actors that pop up in this film, some of them definitely playing against type (Wesley Snipes and Keegan-Michael Key in particular), and it’s fun to see this oddball entry in exploitation films get turned into a feelgood movie. It’s a total blast.

7. Avengers: Endgame

Besides John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, this is effectively the only other blockbuster movie on my list this year. The truth is, a lot of the ones I saw I didn’t particularly like, and it sure didn’t help those movies that Avengers: Endgame came out at all. I liked Infinity War well enough, but Endgame takes some shockingly big swings, all while pulling off ten years' worth of catharsis.

I’ve complained in recent years about the Marvel movies beginning to feel the same, but the finale of this movie is the crystalized perfection of why cinematic universes are here to stay in one form or another. I’ve never quite reacted at a movie in a theater like this before, I couldn’t help just cheering and staring in awe at this movie’s madness. It’s basically a three-hour-long victory lap for pulling off one of the most ambitious experiments Hollywood has ever attempted, and if you ask me, it’s a huge success.

But… I don’t know if I care about these movies anymore. I still haven’t seen Spider-Man: Far From Home, and I doubt I will. I saw Iron Man back when I was in 7th grade. It was the same summer The Dark Knight came out. I’ve been watching these movies in theaters for the last eleven years, and this is all I really needed from them if they were going to last this long. This movie was worth those eleven years, but I don’t really feel like putting in many more.

6. Uncut Gems

Good Time is among my favorite movies of the 2010s, and while I like that movie more than this, Uncut Gems totally and completely shreds almost any other movie of its type. The Safdie Brothers have basically refined the “NY conman scumbug” movie into a science, and this particular formula plugs Adam Sandler into the absolutely gonzo world of diamond broking in New York, and the results are as painful as they are stunning.

With some fantastic composer work from Daniel Lopatin, one of Adam Sandler’s best performances to date, and some truly amazing work from the supporting cast (which includes real basketball player Kevin Garnett playing himself, who is legitimately a good actor, which is just weird), Uncut Gems is pretty damn great. The movie withholds information a bit too much for its own good, but some of the character reveals here are really surprising and tense. At the very least, it proves the Safdie Brothers are (thankfully) not going anywhere.

(Oh, and it goes without saying, Adam Sandler was absolutely robbed of an Oscar nomination, I know I’m months late but I’m still mad.)

5. Little Women

This, by far, is the most surprising entry on this list for myself. I did not go into this film thinking I’d enjoy it much. I like Greta Gerwig’s writing and directing up to this point, but I’ve never really been a fan of period piece films. They tend to be pretty bland and lifeless, often feeling stuffy and too proper for my tastes. Which is why Little Women is so astonishingly great, it’s the complete opposite of stuffy and proper, opting for energy and life with every moment.

I will confess that I’ve never read the book Little Women, so I didn’t see much of the story coming, especially with the parallel-timeline structure in this film. What could have been a pretty needless structure is wielded with perfect precision, and with joyous (and absolutely devastating) results. The acting is across the board great (standouts being Saoirse Ronan and Laura Dern, don’t worry, the other actress you’re thinking of will be mentioned in another movie later on), the staging of actors in the frame is as close to perfect as any director, and the writing is razor-sharp.

I wholeheartedly love this movie, but if there’s one element I’d like to highlight, it’s the performance from Chris Cooper as Mr. Laurence. Chris Cooper has a tendency to play villains, and since I was unfamiliar with the book, I had no idea whether Mr. Laurence was good or not. Not only is the character a good man, but Chris Cooper brings a vulnerable performance that yanked tears out of my eyes. I let out a sudden sob when this man uttered a single line, and I can’t think of another movie that did that to me this year.

4. The Irishman

I was expecting to like The Irishman a fair amount, but I didn’t expect it to take over my thoughts for about a month. Martin Scorcese is one of those filmmakers whose work is bound to anyone who loves film, but what I find most fascinating are Scorcese’s “B-side” films, the ones that don’t fit into people’s public perception of what he makes. I love The Last Temptation of Christ. I love The Aviator. I love The King of Comedy (which is why a certain 2019 film is absent from this list entirely). Obviously, films like Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, and The Wolf of Wall Street are all great, but his stranger films tend to draw me in.

That’s the closest to an explanation I have for why The Irishman really sticks with me. It feels like the film that bridges Scorcese’s entire library of work up to this point, the area between his classic films and his odder experiments. The Irishman has the hallmarks of Goodfellas and Casino, but it’s noticeably more muted across the board, visually and tone-wise. It’s the grim descent into the mob world that acts as a total condemnation that the gangster genre can use more of (yes, I’m well aware that everyone in Goodfellas and Casino gets punished in one way or another, but the lead characters of those films seem to miss those days, and Frank Sheeran is a bit more complicated than that).

It feels like so much of the conversation about this movie mutated into conversations about runtimes and digital effects, but all I want to talk about are the quiet moments of sadness, punctuated by the occasional act of completely unglorified and impersonal violence. It’s an American epic from one of the greatest American filmmakers in history, and it’s a great one at that.

3. Climax

If there’s any movie on this list that I absolutely adore that’s also made me second-guess my instincts in terms of film critique and appreciation, this is the one. On paper, I should absolutely hate this movie, a brutal exercise in excessively awful things happening to a cast of mostly non-actors filmed across a single large set without a script (literally, this movie had an outline that was a few pages longs, and was shot in less than a month, and edited almost as quickly). On top of that, it’s from notorious provocateur Gaspar Noé, whose movies have admittedly mixed results.

It turns out that if you combine 90s dance music with Noé’s hyper-technical style, you get a movie that has firmly planted itself in the center of my brain. This is a gorgeous nightmare that I’ve never gotten tired of revisiting, and while many of the performers are literal amateurs, they’re pretty decent, and Sofia Boutella is channeling her inner-Isabelle Adjani for the entire second half of the movie with horrific results.

Above all else is the dance choreography, which is simply the best of its kind. Captured in incredible long takes, Climax is just gorgeous to behold every time these characters hit the dance floor, and I’m not exaggerating when I say two of the major dance setpieces in this film are among my favorite scenes of 2019.

2. Midsommar

If you’re wondering why I didn’t mention Florence Pugh when I was talking about Little Women, this is why. It’s not that she’s bad in Little Women, in fact, she’s fantastic in that movie. It’s just that Midsommar is arguably her best performance to date, channeling pain, suffering, and grief on the most human level I’ve seen from an actress in a long time. When I finally wrote a review for this movie, I compared Florence Pugh in Midsommar to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby in terms of iconic horror performances, and I will continue to use that comparison.

Pugh is the actor centerpiece, but Ari Aster has surrounded her with the most horrific fairy tale in modern horror. Even calling Midsommar a horror film purely feels strange, and not in some nonsensical “elevated horror” label kind of way. It draws from inspirations as highbrow as absurdist plays, as lowbrow as a college European road trip scum-fest, and dips into Herschell Gordon Lewis territory before you get to the now-infamous finale. It’s characters run the gamut of intellectual bookworms to a horny jackass who hits his vape pen in about every other scene.

Ari Aster is quickly becoming one of modern filmmaking’s most interesting directors because he’s making films that aren’t just designed to be uncomfortable, but uncomfortable in ways that are deeply relatable, no matter how absurd the events are that remind you of your own relationships, friendships, and awful drug stories (I know that’s all very specific, but hey, I’ve been down all of those roads in one way or another). In just about any other year, this would be my favorite movie.

Except that one of the best filmmakers in the world decided to close out the 2010s on a film that will help to define this entire decade.

1. Parasite

I tend to know if a movie is going to be my favorite film of the year by roughly the second viewing. It lets you meet the film on its own terms, really dive into the technical decisions that have been made, and get a good feel for what the film is attempting.

On my first viewing of Parasite at Fantastic Fest, it immediately became my favorite movie of the year. The only question that remained for the second viewing was if I was just hyping it up even more because I’d seen it at a film festival early. My second viewing not only confirmed Parasite as my favorite film of 2019, but it also entered the running for my favorite films of the entire 2010s.

I don’t know what else I could even write about this movie that I haven’t been shouting at friends for literally about six months since I originally saw it. Bong Joon Ho doesn’t need to prove himself in any way when he’s a director that has Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother, and Snowpiercer all under his belt, but Parasite still feels like an achievement on his part. Not just because it walked away with multiple Academy Awards (including Best Picture, which is something I never thought I’d write about a South Korean film, but always dreamed I would), but because he made the definitive class warfare film of our time.

Parasite didn’t just clean up awards shows in the U.S., it cleaned up across the entire world. Multiple European nations, the U.S., and more all showered everything they could give away to this film because it truly transcends borders. We all recognize the inequality in our own nations internationally, and Parasite speaks to those divides in a way that almost no other film has in years. It speaks to those things without being stuffy either, opting for something like a conman film combined with a farce combined with a brutal thriller. It juggles so many ideas, themes, and characters, and never really drops the ball on any of them.

Great entertainment can be the ground for great discussion and consideration, and if anyone ever tries to convince you otherwise, let Parasite be your champion. It’s certainly mine, and it’s far and away my favorite film of 2019.