The Best New-to-Me Movies of 2019
“Take something you love, tell people about it, bring together people who share your love, and help make it better. Ultimately, you’ll have more of whatever you love for yourself and for the world.” – Julius Schwartz
Another year, another excuse to make a list – a favorite activity since childhood, albeit a meaningless one. This is a list of the best movies I saw in 2019 that were new-to-me – could’ve been released this year, could’ve been from the silent era, could’ve been from anytime in between – as well as some performances I especially liked, a sack full of honorable mentions, and various scattered thoughts. If your favorites from the year past aren’t on here, don’t take it personally! In all likelihood, I just haven’t seen whatever you really loved. (The list of 2019 films I haven’t seen yet includes “The Last Black Man in San Francisco”, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”, “Pain & Glory”, “The Souvenir”, “The Lighthouse”, “A Hidden Life”, “High Life”, “1917”, “Synonyms”, “Waves”, “Honey Boy”, “Booksmart”, “Her Smell”, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, “Hustlers”, “Dolemite is My Name”…contrary to the belief of some of my friends, I do have to sleep once in a while.)
Seeing a great movie for the first time can feel a bit like falling in love. Here’s a catalogue of all the times I fell in love this year.
1. All That Jazz (1979, d. Bob Fosse)
“It’s showtime, folks!”
Cinematic autobiography is a high wire act. Bob Fosse clearly knew how precarious it was – hell, he opens his 1979 masterwork with, among other kaleidoscopic images, a fantasy of his “hero”, Joe Gideon, tumbling off a hire wire. But “All That Jazz” not only doesn’t try to run away from fusing autobiographical truth with fiction, it revels in it. Perhaps Fosse’s romantic partner (and, here, female lead) Ann Reinking was telling the truth when she claimed that Fosse and Joe Gideon didn’t really have much in common; but Fosse must’ve known that people would make assumptions, and leans into the similarities (surface though they may be). Like Gideon, Fosse began as a teenager dancer in the seediest sections of show business, sharing stage time with over the hill strippers; like Gideon, Fosse eventually transitioned into one of the most infamous choreographers in Broadway and screen history, developing a style that was both lionized and pilloried (“I think we just lost the family audience…” a mortified producer mutters while watching Gideon’s staging of a steamy dance number); and like Gideon, Fosse’s lifestyle defined burning the candle at both ends – directing a Broadway show at the same time he was editing a film (“Chicago” and “Lenny” respectively, in Fosse’s case), being serially unfaithful to his wives and romantic partners (“I just wish you weren’t so generous with your cock”, Gideon’s girlfriend Katie tells him mournfully), smoking and drinking as though willing himself toward an early grave. No wonder Fosse – like Gideon – suffered a massive heart attack and required open heart surgery; the whole idea for “All That Jazz” was apparently suggested to Fosse by Shirley MacLaine, who visited him in the hospital and told him his health scare might make for a good movie. Joe Gideon is, in a sense, that hoariest of clichés, the “troubled genius”, but part of the brilliance of “All That Jazz” is that it refuses to soft pedal Joe Gideon’s negative qualities – his ego, his selfishness, his hedonism – at the same time it shows his brilliance; Joe Gideon’s talent doesn’t excuse his bad behavior and egotism, it actually makes them seem pettier and worse. (This is arguably the performance of Roy Scheider’s career – he’s absolutely dazzling.) “All That Jazz”, a bit like last year’s finally completed Orson Welles masterwork “The Other Side of the Wind”, is fascinating in part because it seems to act as a kind of running commentary on itself – Joe Gideon comments on his own life as though he’s an univolved (and unimpressed) critic, giving himself shit for thinking he’s such a genius and poking fun at his critics and admitting that maybe they’re right and confessing his vulnerability and taking it back in the same breath…and maybe allowing Fosse to do all those things, too. But if all that “All That Jazz” had to offer was funhouse reflections of Fosse, it would be an echo chamber, albeit a fascinating one; instead, it goes beyond that, to become maybe the most entertaining and compulsively watchable (and re-watchable…and re-watchable…and re-watchable) movie ever made about a lousy no good sunovabitch. Part backstage comedy, part dazzling musical, part painful personal confession (“At least I won’t have to lie to you anymore…!”), part rumination on mortality (I keep thinking about Richard Linklater’s quip that Fosse made more “last films” than any other director), “All That Jazz” is a film about the lack of control – no matter how hard he tries to stage manage, rewrite, re-edit and re-choreograph his own life, death is still going to level Joe Gideon, ego be damned – made with a level of control of craft that is humbling. Whispmart shifts in tone, dazzling displays of choreography (the opening pseudo-dance-pseudo-documentary sequence set to George Benson’s “On Broadway” is better than most full movies I saw this year), brilliant editorial juxtapositions (few Oscar wins have been more richly deserved than Alan Heim’s for best editing)…“All That Jazz” was one of the first films I watched in 2019, and it knocked me flat on my ass, with certain moments, certain images, certain cuts (the “waking up montage” of an increasingly skeletal Gideon trying to revv himself up to Vivaldi; Joe directing himself thru his own death scenes; Ben Vereen’s grinning catapult into camera) burning themselves into my retinas. It’s a heartbreaking movie, but an exhilarating one – nobody should be able to pull off this kind of high wire act and make it look this easy, while at the same time telling you how damn hard it is.
2. O.J.: Made in America (2016, d. Ezra Edelman)
“One day, everybody’s gonna know everything that you’ve done, man.”
Yes, I’m late to the party, and yes, it’s as incredible as everybody says. (And yes, I guess this is sort of cheating, since it was technically a television film, but it won an Oscar, so you’ll just have to deal.) Much more than a rote recitation of the facts of the Nicole Brown and Ron Goodman murder trial – although the documentary does go through, in painstaking detail, that giant media circus – Ezra Edelman’s frankly staggering documentary is a portrait of a time and a place, and the strange intersection of various factors – racial, political, multimedia – that led to the very particular “moment” that was O.J. Simpson’s acquittal. Outside of Christopher Darden and Simpson himself, virtually all the major players appear to have spoken to Edelman’s cameras, and their forthrightness is often stunning: special mention should be made of defense lawyer Carl Douglas, whose blunt statements hit with the force of a stand up comedy act (if Simpson had faced a Latino jury, “we would’ve had a picture of him wearing a sombrero! There woulda been a mariachi band out front! We woulda had a piñata at the upper staircase!”) and juror Carrie Bess, who is stunningly candid in admitting (as everyone had so long assumed) that O.J.’s acquittal was, in essence, payback for Rodney King (“We had to go home. That’s all I got to say”). Some of it is funny, some of it is deeply, painfully sad, all of it is riveting. I intended to watch an episode a night, and burned through it in two days.
3. The King of Comedy (1982, d. Martin Scorsese)
“You’ve got to start at the bottom.”
“I know. That’s where I am, at the bottom.”
“You want to be a filmmaker, you want to be an actor…it’s palpable, it’s there, it’s tangible…the fantasy is real.” That’s Martin Scorsese in Richard Schickel’s documentary “Scorsese on Scorsese”, speaking to the compulsion that drives “The King of Comedy”, and its central figure, Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), who idolizes Carson-esque nightly host Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis, superb) and dreams of himself becoming a world famous comedian and talk show host himself. Why exactly Rupert has this deep need is never specified – the childhood trauma he references in his act seems to be all stagecraft, and it honestly feels as though he’s more interested in being a famous stand up than in actually performing stand up. Scorsese and DeNiro’s earlier collaboration “Taxi Driver” has ended up being one of the most prescient American movies ever made – the internet is so full of Travis Bickles, sad, angry white boys who feel impotent and powerless – and “King of Comedy” perhaps speaks even more directly to our time, and our obsession with fame. Just…fame. Not fame for anything, not as a byproduct of accomplishment, but as an end unto itself. (In his spare time, Rupert collects autographs of the rich and famous – he has, of course, already included his own autograph in his little booklet: “In a few weeks, everyone is gonna want it!”) The film also predicts what we would now describe as “cringe comedy”. Rupert Pupkin isn’t a psychopath, isn’t an obvous raging looney; he’s not even that unfunny. (One of the most brilliant aspects of the film is that when we finally get to see Rupert perform, he’s really not bad; not good, per se, but he’s no worse than 75% of comedians I’ve seen getting their big break on “The Tonight Show”). He’s just…uncomfortable. He doesn’t recognize when he’s being rude, or perhaps refuses to recognize. He annoys a poor waitress he went to school with (Dianne Abbot is really good here, her patient, beleaguered expression an avatar for all the women throughout history who have had to just put up with deeply mediocre white men), belittles Shelley Hack’s more-than-reasonable late night assistant (“I don’t have faith in your judgment”), and just generally carries himself with completely unearned superiority, acting as though he’s not one of the sycophantic hangers-on grasping at Jerry as he tries to escape into his limousine. (The condescension with which he treats Sandra Bernhard’s fellow Jerry stalker Masha, who’s really not any crazier than he is, is very telling; the main title image of the movie – Rupert’s face peeking thru a limousine window, Masha’s frenzied hands pressed up against the same window – is, I suppose, a reflection of how Rupert wants to see himself.) He harasses poor Jerry Langford, assuming that a polite but disinterested conversation means they have a “relationship”, showing up at Jerry’s country house as though he’s an invited guest, and finally kidnapping Jerry using a prop gun…and acting like Jerry is the guilty party in all this. (“Friendship is a two way street.”) “The King of Comedy” must be a nightmare picture for anyone with social anxiety – it’s basically 110 minutes of Rupert Pupkin inserting himself into situations where he’s not wanted, while people who don’t want to talk to him smile politely as he natters on and on and on, and the film is hilarious and painful in equal measure. (Scorsese said that the shooting was a nightmare, because he found the character so grating and unpleasant.) Rupert’s grand comedy career may be only a fantasy, but to him the fantasy is real. “Better to be king for a night than schmuck for a lifetime,” Rupert says when he finally gets his chance to appear on Jerry’s show. Maybe he doesn’t realize you can be both.
4. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019, d. Quentin Tarantino)
“When you come to the end of the line with a buddy who is more than a brother and a little less than a wife, getting blind drunk together is really the only way to say farewell.”
It’s the vibe, man. Part of the reason I ended up seeing “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” three times theatrically was that it was a dire summer movie season and there wasn’t much else that excited me, but the lure of air conditioning and a night out can only take you so far. “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” purrs with the confidence of a beautifully engineered automobile, roaring down Los Angeles free ways over the course of a long August afternoon. (I hate driving as a rule, but I spent a big chunk of the summer cruising around listening to Los Bravos and Roy Head under the influence of this movie – it’s one of the few films that’s ever made driving look attractive to me – hell, it’s one of the few times Hollywood has ever looked attractive to me.) Turns out Tarantino wasn’t kidding with his comparisons to Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma”; like that film, “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is a memory piece, a film about an intangible time drawn from tangible details. The film focuses in on three days in the lives of its three central characters: former TV cowboy Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), hungover as hell, struggles through a day stint as the villain on a TV Western pilot; Dalton’s enigmatic stuntman/driver/gofer Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) comes into contact with the Manson family and has a spooky encounter at Spahn Movie Ranch; and up and coming leading lady Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), doing errands on her day off, sits in on a public screening of one of her films, the Dean Martin led “The Wrecking Crew”. That’s really it for plot – the focus, as I said, is on the tangible details: watching Cliff Booth drive back to his shitbox trailer behind a Van Nuys drive in and feed his pitbull Brandy; watching Sharon Tate’s small smile of pleasure as she hears the sparse theater crowd applauding her karate moves; the simultaneously hilarious and deeply touching moment when Rick is moved to tears by his eight year old co-star (Julia Butters, superb) telling him that a take was “the best acting I’ve ever seen in my whole life”…Tarantino has been one of American film’s great fetishists since he burst on the scene in the mid-‘90s – he loves food and guns and cars and profanity and yeah, feet, and he loves film stocks and needle drops and movie minutiae and forgotten B-sides and forgotten B-actors – but he’s finally made an entire film built around the sensory experience of rummaging around in his fevered brain. That “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” has little to no plot is a feature, not a bug; it allows the movie to get out of the way of its characters, who became – for me at least – some of the best of Tarantino’s oeuvre. Rick Dalton (almost a parody of masculinity in crisis, his macho tirades and xenophobia masking deep insecurities) and Cliff Booth (equal parts super cool and very, very scary, like a character out of a James Ellroy novel) feel like real people to me, in no small part because of how much unfettered time I get to spend with them. (It doesn’t hurt that Tarantino’s leading men are doing maybe the best work of their career: DiCaprio builds on the promise of “Wolf of Wall Street” and proves conclusively that nobody does petulant man baby meltdowns better than him, and Pitt’s laid back charisma is put to lethal use.) There are aspects of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” that even after repeated viewings haven’t entirely settled for me; I’m not sure if I’m entirely satisfied with the way Sharon Tate sort of floats passively through the movie, sweet and charming as she is (Rick and Cliff both get little mini stories, whereas Sharon just sort of glides around like a gilded symbol); I’m also not sure that the film’s bloody climax entirely meshes with the rest of the film – it almost feels like Tarantino capitulating to the kind of movie he’s expected to make, rather than the movie he’s been making for the prior two hours. But I’m not rejecting the film because of these quibbles; they instead makes the film more interesting to me – something I keep having to wrestle with, go over in my head, ponder, argue with. And at the end of the day, it’s the vibe. I want to live in this world, drink in the California sunlight, hear the electric sizzle of neon marquees springing to life, drink beer with my buddy while watching his FBI guest stint on TV…these sensations make me feel happy, but also a little sad. The power of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” is that it’s as much a melancholy reverie as it is a nostalgic celebration. As Jesse Crall put it, whereas “Inglourious Basterds” rewrote history, this movie is in DIALOGUE with history, and that makes it maybe the most touching film of Tarantino’s career.
5. The Irishman (2019, d. Martin Scorsese)
“It’s what it is.”
That phrase is repeated throughout “The Irishman”, sometimes with humorous convolutions (as when Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa tries to explain to a befuddled Stephen Graham’s Tony Pro the difference between extortion and fraud), sometimes with real menace, and it ultimately hangs over the entirety of the drama with thundering sadness. “The Irishman” (or “I Heard You Paint Houses”, as the film’s credits seem to call it) is of course a reunion picture, with longtime collaborators Martin Scorsese, Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel (as well as Scorsese newcomer Al Pacino) returning to the genre that helped make them famous in the first place – it’s a sweeping mob epic, spanning some fifty years, involving union politics and the Kennedys and the Bay of Pigs debacle and the disappearance of one James Riddle Hoffa. But par for the course with Scorsese, “The Irishman” is as much a subversion of expectations as a fulfillment of them. Scorsese’s father Charles once sagely noted that the entire running time of “The Age of Innocence” was basically just there to set up the picture’s devastating final half hour, and Scorsese, screenwriter Steven Zailian and editor Thelma Schoomaker pull off a similar trick here. For all the murders and scheming and mob double speak that goes on during “The Irishman”’s lengthy but never slack three and a half hour run time (two sequences – the killing of “Crazy Joe” Gallo in Little Italy, and a queasily hypnotic sequence involving a car ride to and from an innocent looking Detroit suburb – are among the best things Scorsese and Schoonmaker have ever done), this picture is all, arguably, really about the final half hour stretch, when DeNiro’s aging hitman Frank Sheeran finally has to look back on a life spent as, in Glenn Kenny’s words, “a cipher”, and realize how hollow it all was. The whole picture has a funereal tone, helped both by the subtitles that announce to us how many of our extensive cast meet truly gruesome fates (“Sooner or later, everybody put here has a date when he’s gonna go…”) and by the long history of the genre that is implicit in casting such remarkable veterans of that genre, and by using the much mooted “de-aging” technology to make them appear younger. (My take: the digital youthification is occasionally uncanny, but not enough to derail the movie, and as David Cairns put it, “casting an older actor and making him younger tells us what the film’s priorities are: having a 100% real old De Niro is more important than having a 100% real young De Niro.”) What is perhaps most chilling is the banality of it all; killing for Frank Sheeran is just a job, no different than humping over hills in Sicily during his army service or driving a meat truck. It’s as though somebody centered a movie around one of the hardened killers Frank Vincent played in earlier Scorsese mob pics, the silent guys who stood in the corner of the room and waited for a look from the boss to tell them whose head they had to smash in. Far from the rote recycling of genre tropes many feared, Scorsese and co. have come to bury the genre; Sheeran, once a fearsome, hulking killer, is finally reduced to a sick, hobbling old man, abandoned by his family, aware in a vague sense that he should have regrets, but not self aware enough to understand why – he’s too passive to be truly haunted by his sins. (“Water under the dam.”) Life slips away, and you can’t turn back the clock, and at a certain point you’re left only with regrets. It’s what it is.
6. Eyes Without a Face (1960, d. Georges Franju)
“My face frightens me. My mask frightens me even more.”
A carnival waltz plays – slightly off kilter, bouncy but threatening – as Roger Ebert wrote of Anton Karas’ score for “The Third Man”, “jaunty but without joy, like whistling in the dark”. Stark, barren trees scroll past, as though on a revolving Zoetrope, against a black country background. A mysterious woman (Alida Valli – one of the stars of “The Third Man”, oddly enough) is driving, rather frantically, with a dead body propped up in her back seat; with stoic professionalism, she dumps the body in a river. This could be the set-up for an arresting – if formulaic – B-movie; it instead is just the enticement to a much richer work. In much the same way that the mad doctor/surgeon Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brassuer) and his assistant Louise (Valli) lure innocent young women to their doom through the promise of creature comforts, “Eyes Without a Face” lures us in with the promise of something trashy, before flowering into something tragic, even poetic. Dr. Genessier’s daughter, Christiane (Edith Scob, giving a brilliant physical performance), has been horribly disfigured in an automobile accident; her face is so destroyed that she spends her days hidden away in her father’s country estate, wearing a porcelain doll-like mask (Tim Burton and Sam Hamm referenced the look of that mask in their 1989 “Batman”), while her father and his loyal assistant kidnap beautiful young women, hoping to transplant their faces onto Christine. But each attempt fails…and fails…and fails. There’s something of a dark fairy tale here – dark in the Grimm’s fairy tale sense, stories that reach down into the darkest, scariest recesses of our subconscious, playing notes we didn’t know were there. The plot of “Eyes Without a Face” is patently ludicrous, and could probably lead to a pretty enjoyable and lurid yarn if given, say, the Hammer treatment (when Pedro Almodovar more-or-less remade this movie as the terrific “The Skin I Live In”, he had more fun with the premise, taking it to wilder, more Almodovarian extremes). But Franju, who began as a documentarian, regards the story stoically, levelly, shooting even scenes of great horror in a matter of fact manner, refusing to look away or to soften the blow. (Even in an era of increased cinematic bloodletting, “Eyes Without a Face”’s infamous surgical set piece remains shocking; Franju puts his prior experience making a documentary about the horrors of a slaughterhouse to good, unflinching use here.) This is a story of imprisonment, both physically and emotionally. Christiane is as much a victim of her father’s desire to play God as any of the women he and his mad assistant kill; she’s like a sad, wilting bird inside a cage (the movie draws parallels between the physically and emotionally arrested daughter Genessier claims to love, and the test animals he abuses and keeps imprisoned beneath his castle). One’s memories of “Eyes Without a Face” are ultimately tinged with sadness for Christiane, the maiden in the tower who can no longer communicate with her lost suitor, who is idolized but not understood by her captors, and who will have to free herself, spiritually if not physically, from her imprisonment.
7. Two Days, One Night (2014, d. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
“I wish that was me.”
“Who?”
“That bird singing.”
The title almost makes it sound like a documentary, and the premise is exceedingly simple: Sandra Bya (Cotillard) has been told, following a leave of absence brought on by severe depression, that she is to be let go from her job – an economic calamity for herself and her family. In order to keep her job, she needs to convince her co-workers to change their minds – if Sandra is to be kept on, her co-workers will have to give up a 1,000 euro bonus they’ve been promised once she’s cut from the payroll. So Sandra spends her weekend traveling to the homes of her co-workers, asking them – begging them – to support her. Not in a pleading, melodramatic way; this isn’t a Hollywood “message” film, and Sandra isn’t practicing her Oscar speech. She’s scared, exhausted, and mortified about the prospect of having to essentially prostrate herself in front of people who need the money as badly as she does; as terrified as she is about losing the job, she seems equally embarrassed to be bothering people in the middle of their days, in the middle of their lives. (The way her husband Manu (Fabrizio Rongione) insists on driving her from house to house sometimes feels heroically supportive, and sometimes abusive and invasive – can’t he let it rest…? Does she have to humiliate herself more than she already has…?) Some of Sandra’s co-workers are sympathetic; some refuse to speak to her; some are rude, or blithely unaware of how inconsiderate they sound; and some have good reasons for not backing her – because their own jobs might be at risk, because they have their own financial hardships, because their children need the money as badly as Sandra’s children do. (“It’ll be a disaster for me if the majority backs you, but I hope for your sake they do,” one teary eyed co-worker tells her.) “Two Days, One Night” is on one level a leftist parable – the movie can be read as a neat morality play about how capitalism inevitably builds walls and wedges between people who have much more in common with each other than with the bosses who exploit them - but it never feels strident or preachy. Partly that’s because of the nimble, delicate touch of writer/directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne; I’m normally driven up the wall by “faux documentary” methods, but the hand held camerawork and observational approach is put to brilliant use here, preventing the movie from becoming sentimental, allowing most scenes to play in one continuous, increasingly devastating shot, with nowhere to escape to. And partly it’s because of Marion Cotillard. It’s about her face, and her eyes; the Dardennes and cinematographer Alain Marcoen shoot her like Falconetti in “The Passion of Joan of Arc”, their camera often holding her in unsparing, unflinching close-ups, the smallest change in expression registering with the force of an atom bomb. It’s about her body language – weary, weighed down, sometimes seized with inexplicable panic, sometimes crumpled by pressures. Movies don’t always handle depression well – depressed people in movies spend a lot of time crying, or screaming, or shouting exposition about how terrible they feel; Sandra’s depression mostly consists of locking herself in the bathroom and not wanting to get out of bed and struggling not to cry in front of her children and facing the world with an empty, thousand yard stare of desperation, and Cotillard embodies all these elements so subtly and beautifully that in the most profound sense, we become Sandra, feel everything she’s feeling, while at the same time admiring her courage, her perseverance, her unexpected reserves of strength and dignity. For lower to middle class people, losing a job, facing the ridicule of your co-workers, having to beg something from a supervisor – these are as devastating as a world ending meteor, or an apocalypse. Facing them requires the deepest form of bravery. Sandra Bya is more incredible than any superhero I saw at a multiplex this year.
8. Rififi (1955, d. Jules Dassin)
“I liked you. I really liked you, Macaroni. But you know the rules.”
Jules Dassin was thought of as a European director (I had a film professor who insisted he was a Frenchman), but he was actually born in Middletown, Connecticut. No doubt the confusion came from the “Transatlantic” nature of his CV; after working for about ten years as a Hollywood studio director, helming a series of noir classics (“Brute Force”, 1947; “The Naked City”, 1948; “Thieves’ Highway”, 1949; “Night and the City”, 1950 – all essential works), he fled the blacklist, and would spend the next thirty years directing French, Italian and Greek films, with occasional (mostly low budget) sojourns back to his country of origin. (In 1966 he married the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, with whom he often worked.) “Rififi” has become his most famous and oft-cited film, and stands at the precipice between the two parts of his career – summing up and crystalizing aspects of the earlier crime films, while also moving Dassin into the international sphere. The story is simple: four crooks cook up a plan to rob a notable Parisian jeweler, and in the time tested manner of the heist film, we watch them plan their robbery to the minutest detail, execute the robbery, and then get hunted down both by the police and by rival criminal elements. (Fascinating that unlike many heist films, where greed turns the crooks against each other, here it is larger forces that crush our band of crooks; fascinating too that in his first film after fleeing the blacklist, Dassin himself would play a gang member who is tortured into revealing information about his partners – into betraying his comrades.) There had been heist movies prior to “Rififi” (“The Asphalt Jungle” chief among them), but “Rififi” really crystalized the form, in many ways setting the template that most subsequent heist movies have followed or riffed on or stolen wholesale. (Its most famous set piece — the dazzling, half hour long heist sequence, virtually silent, nail bitingly tense — drew spontaneous applause from the audience I saw the film with.) In other ways, “Rififi” looks forward; at around the same time Jean-Pierre Melville was helping to reinvent the French crime drama, “Rififi” plays similar games, essentially laying out the road map for what the enfant terribles of the French New Wave would do to American genre conventions. There’s more focus on minute detail than in most American crime films (according to Dassin, Mexican crooks actually watched the film as a template for how to carry out their own robberies); and unlike American crime films of the period, where even most noir heroes had to be basically likable, the French and Italian crooks of “Rififi”’s underworld are allowed to be bastards — interesting, well observed bastards, but bastards nonetheless. An early scene where Jean Servais’ gang ringleader, “Tony the Stephanois”, gets even with an unfaithful former flame is still shocking in its matter of fact brutality. (Servais is absolutely superb here; an aging crook just back from a five year jail sentence, weighed down by the knowledge that he perhaps has only one more job left in him, he is simultaneously shrewdly cunning and deeply vulnerable, a sharp mind trapped inside an increasingly frail body, and Servais’ face is a roadmap of years of hardship, as instantly iconic a noir visage as Bogart or Eddie Constantine.) Most good movies are lucky if they have one or two clever touches; “Rififi” feels like a movie built entirely out of clever touches – the documentary details of real Paris operating in and around a movie underworld, the patience with which our gang of crooks figure out an ingenious way of quieting a noisy safe alarm, the ballet slippers that Dassin’s safecracker wears on the job, the beautiful sequence where we watch a nightclub band rehearse for a night’s performance…these grace notes make “Rififi” noir nirvana.
9. Straight Time (1978, d. Ulu Grosbard)
“Why can’t I go with you?”
“’Cause I’m gonna get caught.”
Max Dembo (Dustin Hoffman) gets out of jail, having served six years for armed robbery, and tells his parole officer (M. Emmet Walsh, in magnificently slimy mode) that “I just wanna be like everybody else. I just want a decent job, I want a decent place to live, I want somebody to love me, I want some clothes on my back…have some self respect”. He and the parole officer spar, but Dembo eats his pride and gets some leeway. He bets Jenny (Theresa Russell), a young woman at a job placement office, that if he can get a job at a canning factory, she’ll have dinner with him, and he gets both the job and the date; he visits an old prison buddy, Willy (Gary Busey, understated and touching) and is politely but firmly told by Willy’s wife (a young Kathy Bates) that “your being around here is kinda bad timing for us…Willy’s been doin’ real good…I just don’t think it’s good that he see you right now. Y’know what I mean?…I just think it’s better that he doesn’t get around other influences and stuff…” “Straight Time”, adapted from Eddie Bunker’s novel “No Beast So Fierce”, opens with the quiet, steady rhythms of a documentary; we spend a lot of time in the first hour just watching – watching Dembo adjust to the world around him (“out here, it’s what you got in your pocket…on the inside, it’s only what you are,” he tells Jenny, not sure how to act on a date with a pretty girl), watching him make small gains and victories – so that when the worm does turn midway thru the picture, and Max returns to his life of crime, it has real weight – a heist movie has suddenly invaded what had been a character drama. Max, we realize, is essentially a junkie – as much as Busey’s heroin addict – but his particular fix and fixation is crime, and when he relapses, he really relapses, pulling off a string of increasingly dangerous and foolhardy crimes, sometimes by himself, sometimes in conjunction with an old partner (Harry Dean Stanton – God, I miss faces like his on the screen, and I love a movie that leaves time and space for Harry Dean Stanton to play the guitar), as if daring the universe to catch or kill him. “Straight Time” is on the surface a fairly standard heist tale – crook gets out of jail, tries to go straight, finally goes back to his old ways – given unexpected depth by its unhurried pace; by the time he goes back to his life of crime, Max is a real person to us, an idiosyncratic individual, not just a crime movie cliché. This is one of Hoffman’s best performances – he completely disappears into Dembo, a hard case who desperately wants to be given a chance to be gentle. (Hoffman initially intended to direct the picture himself, before finding the strain of acting and directing too great and turning the reins over to friend Ulu Grosbard, who handles the chore with remarkable understated skill.) The idiosyncrasies of Max’s character also make the ending actually tragic, in a way few crime films manage – as we watch Max drive off into the desert, a lifetime of mugshots superimposed over the image, we see a man who can never stop running. Some movies announce their greatness to you immediately; others linger, like traces of smoke, and refuse to go away. I think a lot about Max Dembo, and that open road. “Why can’t I go with you?” Jenny asks him; “’Cause I’m gonna get caught,” he tells her. But when? And where? Does he really even care?
10. Dazed and Confused (1993, d. Richard Linklater)
“What’re you lookin’ at? Wipe that face off your head, bitch!”
Along with Tarantino’s latest, the other great “hang out” movie I watched this year, and maybe the only film I’ve ever seen to truly earn its comparisons to “American Graffiti”. Set on the last day of the school year in 1976 in Baytown, Texas – a day when all the kids and most of the teachers are basically just twiddling their thumbs waiting for the school day to end so they can go cruising, hang out, party, score some grass and maybe fall in love – “Dazed and Confused” doesn’t so much introduce us to characters as drop us into an ecosystem and let us explore it. In the beginning I was a little befuddled by the sheer number of names and faces coming at me; by the end I felt like I could probably find my own locker at the end of the hall. The film brought back my memory of high school and adolescence in a real, visceral, profound way; even if I never did any of the crazy (or even not so crazy) things these kids did, I remember how illicit sneaking onto the football field at night could feel; I remember cliques and social groups being more porous than most movies depict them (the way that Jason London’s Randall Floyd can float between basically every social group – nerds, stoners, jocks – without it being commented upon feels much more real to me than the easy stratification of John Hughes’ Breakfast Club); I remember how small the world was – your school, the local fast food joints, your friend’s houses, the gas station – and how that was both smothering and soothing. (Maybe that’s why so many – not all – people pine for their high school days…? The world seemed simpler. Sometimes uglier, sometimes meaner, but simpler just the same.) “Dazed and Confused” gave me a contact high, and the most honest and unsentimental kind of nostalgia. It made me want to listen to (now) classic rock really loud in my car (I wouldn’t generally put on most of the songs from this soundtrack left to my own devices, but yes, indeed, sometimes it does feel good to crank “Slow Ride” as you drive toward the sunrise). It made me like the people I met over the course of my night in Baytown – I was particularly fond of Randall; and Mike Newhouse (Adam Goldberg), the intellectual who secretly envies the jocks and tough guys he could outthink any day of the week; and Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), who is exactly the kind of overgrown frat boy a 15-17 year old boy idolizes, and a 25-30 year old man realizes is a lot skeevier and creepier than you thought at the time. And perhaps most of all, it reminded me viscerally of that strange period of time when some teenagers look like full grown adults (and are starting to gain the responsibilities of adulthood with none of its attendant wisdom), some teenagers look like children (and want desperately not to be), and yet they’re all in the same soup together. I wanted to hug Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins) and Sabrina Davis (Christin Hinojosa), who are both just on the cusp of entering high school, and have no idea what they’re in for. I think they’ll make it to the other side alright. I hope they do.
BEST ACTOR - Roy Scheider, “All That Jazz”
A magnificent performance in one of the great movies of the seventies. Joe Gideon is needy, prideful, insecure, unstoppable and utterly vulnerable, his massive ego a smokescreen for bottomless insecurity (“Michael Graham is a very tall man…”); and Scheider makes all those contradictions sing.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Robert DeNiro in “The Irishman” and “The King of Comedy”; Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”; Dustin Hoffman in “Straight Time”; Adam Sandler in “Uncut Gems”.
BEST ACTRESS - Lupita N’yongo, “Us”; Florence Pugh, “Midsommar”
Two of the year’s most notable horror films produced two of its most towering female performances: Lupita N’yongo got to rip, tear and shred thru “Us”, playing (as Bob Chipman noted) both the Alien and Ellen Ripley in one movie, and Florence Pugh had a breakout year in no small part because of how absolutely fearless her work was in “Midsommar” (her final close-up is one of the most jaw droppingly audacious movie moments of 2019).
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Ana de Armas in “Knives Out”; Awkwafina in “The Farewell”; Marion Cotillard in “Two Days, One Night”; Scarlett Johansson in “Marriage Story”.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR – Joe Pesci, “The Irishman”
God bless Martin Scorsese – and I guess more specifically Robert DeNiro – for badgering Joe Pesci into coming out of retirement to give what honestly might be his greatest performance. It goes beyond the surface thrill of seeing famous movie hothead Joe Pesci play the quietest, coolest character of his career; Pesci is note perfect every second he’s on screen, investing Russell Buffalino with both visceral menace and unexpected pathos. (“This is the good grape juice,” has broken my heart every time I’ve seen the film, as has “I chose us over him. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em.”)
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Tim Curry in “Legend”; Timothy Dalton in “Hot Fuzz”; Philip Seymour Hoffman/William H. Macy/John C. Reilly in “Boogie Nights”; Jerry Lewis in “The King of Comedy”.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS – Annie Potts, “Texasville”
Peter Bogdanovich’s lovely, wily, underrated sequel to “The Last Picture Show” (would somebody please reconstruct/reissue the director’s cut on home video before Bogdanovich dies…?) may be about Duane Jackson (Jeff Bridges) and Jacy Farrow’s (Cybill Shepherd) budding maybe-or-maybe-not romance, but the picture belongs to Annie Potts as Duane’s wife, Karla Jackson, who has an admirable habit of blowing through scenes like a tornado and leaving delightful, quotable destruction in her wake (“You ought not to leave me alone on days like this. I can’t even get drunk. The faster I drink, the faster things happen to sober me up!”). Karla is one of Larry McMurtry’s great creations, Annie Potts is a treasure, and it’s a joy watching her barnstorm through a movie and steal every second of screen time she has.
HONORABLE MENTIONS: Sandra Bernhard in “The King of Comedy”; Julia Butters in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”; Lucy Gallina, “The Irishman”; Diana Lin/Zhao Shuzhen in “The Farewell”; Julianne Moore in “Boogie Nights”; Florence Pugh in “Little Women”
BEST SHORT FILM
“Let the Blonde Sing” (2019, d. Rachel Knoll) Lovely documentary portrait of Beverly Sue Waltz, a bartender and singer working at the only bar open year-round in Alaska. Viewable here.
BEST ANIMATED FILM
“Akira” (1988, d. Katsuhiro Otomo) Some movies are just an overwhelming sensory experience. Never have I so regretted not speaking Japanese, as it meant my eyes kept having to jump back to the bottom of the screen to feverishly read the subtitles, before they could jump back up to try to soak in more sights, more visions, more wonders…Pure movie going bliss, that in its size and scope puts most Hollywood mega productions to shame.
FAVORITE SCORES OF THE YEAR
1. John Barry, “Petulia”
2. Jerry Goldsmith, “Legend”
3. Bernard Herrmann, “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”
4. Krzysztof Komeda, “The Fearless Vampire Killers”
5. Gordon Parks, “Shaft’s Big Score”
HONORABLE MENTIONS
BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1965, d. Mario Bava) I’d taken a couple of runs at Bava’s work before, but this is the first of his films I’ve seen that really, fully clicked for me, and boy did it click; I said “F_ck, this is great!” out loud at least twice during the opening half hour. As with the best of Dario Argento’s work, a clear demonstration of the premise that Death Can Be Beautiful.
BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997, d. Paul Thomas Anderson) Hipster-ish thing to say, but I kinda prefer early, coked up, “I can be Altman and Scorsese at the same time!” Paul Thomas Anderson. A fabulously entertaining saga of outsize personalities, with too many great performances to mention here.
CARNAL KNOWLEDGE (1971, d. Mike Nichols) One of two films I saw this year from terrific Jules Feiffer screenplays. An intimate epic detailing, in darkly funny detail, the horrible toll “toxic masculinity” takes, and the boiling insecurity it springs from.
THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927, d. Paul Leni) A great creepy funhouse of a movie, equal parts silly and scary. Delightful.
DAY OF THE DEAD (1985, d. George A. Romero) People don’t like this, huh…? I thought it was terrific – easily up to the standard of the prior two “Dead” pictures – and Tom Savini’s work is unimpeachable.
THE DEVIL’S BACKBONE (2001, d. Guillermo del Toro) Beautiful and haunting.
ELEVATOR TO THE GALLOWS (1958, d. Louis Malle) I really like the New Wave’s particular slant on film noir – respectful without being reverent, kidding without quite becoming mocking.
THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS (1967, d. Roman Polasnki) Not quite a horror film, not quite a spoof, but somewhere in between – a sort of life action cartoon. Great score, and man, is it beautiful.
THE HANDMAIDEN (2016, d. Park Chan-wook) Ingenious and sumptuous.
HANDPRINTS (2019, d. Jennnifer Mochinski) Taut and terrific.
HARD BOILED (1992, d. John Woo) A step below “The Killer” for me, but probably more ambitious and technically accomplished than that film; every scene feels like John Woo striving to top himself, to dizzying, sometimes hilarious, often exhilarating effect.
THE HAUNTED PALACE (1963, d. Roger Corman) The Corman/Price Poe cycle has been the gift that keeps giving for the past few years – I’ve yet to see one I didn’t like. (And yes, I know, technically this is a Lovecraft adaptation with a Poe title grafted on.) This one’s near the top of the heap IMO, with a great dual performance by Price, playing both hero and villain in one.
HOLLYWOOD (1980, d. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill) Brownlow and Gill’s 13 part documentary series is still the high water mark for retrospectives on Hollywood’s silent era. Can somebody please get the legal issues sorted out and re-release this on DVD…?!
HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (1942, d. Bob Clampett) Clampett almost gives Chuck Jones a run for his money in the “animated Dr. Seuss adaptation” sweepstakes – no small feat.
THE INSIDER (1999, d. Michael Mann) Right up there with “All the President’s Men” and “Zodiac” in the “I love watching men in rooms discuss minutae” sweepstakes.
THE LEOPARD MAN (1943, d. Jacques Tourneur) Second only to “I Walked With a Zombie” among the Lewton horror pictures for me, and really, viscerally scary in a way the other Lewton pictures aren’t.
LITTLE MURDERS (1971, d. Alan Arkin) The other terrific black comedy from a Jules Feiffer screenplay I saw this year – deeply, painfully, woundingly funny.
LONE STAR (1996, d. John Sayles) “Fuck the Alamo”. MAN, does this feel prescient – or perhaps timely…? As Raymond De Felitta said, it feels like it should’ve been adapted from a novel, so deep are its complexities and so nuanced are its characters.
LORENA (2019, d. Joshua Rofe) Heartbreaking.
MARRIAGE STORY (2019, d. Noah Baumbach) I’m in awe of that thing Noah Baumbach is able to do, where he’ll insert a completely unexpected laugh in the middle of a deeply painful scene without diminishing how painful said scene is. Also, God damn was Scarlett Johansson good in this and “Jo Jo Rabbit” this year.
MIDSOMMAR (2019, d. Ari Aster) Ari Aster’s pretty good at this, huh…?
THE NAKED KISS (1964, d. Samuel Fuller) Sam Fuller Does Not Pull His Punches, Part One: a melodrama about the rotten core beneath the shiny American apple, done in full tabloid prose style. Constance Towers is great.
NIGHTFALL (1957, d. Jacques Tourneur) Kinda fumbles its climax, but up til then, a taut, often beautiful noir romance. Aldo Ray and Anne Bancroft are touching as the leads, and Brian Keith and Rudy Bond make for one of the scariest double acts in noir history.
NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (2005, d. Martin Scorsese) An engrossing deep dive into the first, blazing period of Dylan’s career, and a portrait of the folk music scene of the early 1960s. Remarkable how Dylan, when being interviewed, manages to be both very forthcoming and utterly opaque at the same time.
NOW HEAR THIS (1962, d. Chuck Jones, Maurice Noble) I am firmly pro-Maurice Noble, and pro-his influence pushing Chuck Jones in weirder and weirder directions.
PARASITE (2019, d. Bong Joon-ho) As good as everybody said.
PORKY’S PREVIEW (1941, d. Tex Avery) Avery doing basically the same deconstructionist schtick “Family Guy” would do years later, and doing it funnier.
THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985, d. Woody Allen) There’s a wonderful writing expression I heard once: “squeezing the lemon” – i.e. managing to wring every drop of drama/comedy/etc. out of an idea. This one absolutely squeezes the lemon – an inspired premise (Mia Farrow is a depression era waitress who escapes her painful everyday reality by going to the movies; one day a dashing, heroic character from one of her favorites walks out of the screen to romance her) is spun off into all its possible permutations. Pure moviegoing bliss, and a great showcase for Jeff Daniels as the besotted leading man.
THE RIGHT STUFF (1983, d. Philip Kaufman) “Is that a man?” “You’re damn right it is!” I’m a sucker for space movies; astronauts and pilots are mythic figures to me. That said, the most inspiring moment of this is probably when John Glen (Ed Harris) unhesitatingly sticks up for his wife.
SECONDS (1966, d. John Frankenheimer) A waking nightmare.
THE SET-UP (1949, d. Robert Wise) Sort of a hipster-ish thing to say (again), but I honestly think the best period of Robert Wise’s career were the early years when he was directing beautifully constructed B-pictures for RKO. This is another taut masterwork with nary an ounce of fat.
THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1958, d. Nathan Juran) My first Harryhausen! For all of the effects laden blockbusters I sat through this year – some of which I liked more, some of which I liked less – this was the picture that transported me and made me feel like a kid again. Bernard Herrmann’s score was my favorite of the year. Pure magic.
SLAP SHOT (1977, d. George Roy Hill) “Dunlop, you suck cock!” “All I can get!”
SMILE (1975, d. Michael Ritchie) As much as people seem to idolize certain macho/violent aspects of ‘70s cinema, it’s movies like this that I think of whenever I get longwinded about how “they don’t make movies like they did in the ‘70s”. Par for the course with Ritchie’s best work, this is full of perfect moments of human observation, my favorite perhaps being the look on Joan Prather’s face during the climax, when we (and perhaps she) realize, for the first time, just how much she wants to win this ridiculous beauty contest.
SOMETIMES, I THINK ABOUT DYING (2019, d. Stefanie Abel Horowitz) A beautiful, delicate portrait of depression.
THE STEEL HELMET (1951, d. Sam Fuller) Sam Fuller Does Not Pull His Punches, Part Two: Fuller refuses to sentimentalize war, and his movie doesn’t make easy moral judgments about it. Equal parts entertaining and brutal.
THEY LIVE (1988, d. John Carpenter) A worthy, paranoid follow-up to “The Thing”, where the invaders have already won. Ludicrously entertaining, sadly timely.
THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD (2018, d. Peter Jackson) A “gimmick” movie, I suppose, but it’s a pretty effective gimmick – archival footage comes to life in a new, illuminating way.
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD (1940, d. Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan) Still delightful.
TOY STORY 4 (2019, d. Josh Cooley) I’m as surprised and relieved as anyone that they didn’t drop the ball. But seriously, Pixar? Quit here. Quit pressing your luck.
25TH HOUR (2002, d. Spike Lee) There’s a special magic that happens when you see a movie, and the characters are so real you not only want to know what happens to them after the drama, you need to know. That’s how I feel about all the people in “25th Hour”, but Monty Brogan (Edward Norton) in particular. What’s gonna happen to him when he gets out…? Is prison gonna destroy him like his friends fear…?
UNCUT GEMS (2019, d. Benny and Josh Safdie) It’s a tiresome cliché to say you were “on the edge of your seat”. But I literally found myself leaning forward in my reclining theater seat, clutching the arm wrests, nervously twitching. Strong stuff, with heavy Friedkin vibes.
VAMPYR (1932, d. Carl Theodor Dreyer) It’s a tiresome cliché (again) to refer to certain horror films as “dreamlike”, but I don’t have a better descriptor – it’s hallucinatory and eerie and hypnotic and beautiful.
VARDA BY AGNES (2019, d. Agnes Varda) Simultaneously a beautiful swan song and a lovely introduction to a master’s work. There are some filmmakers whose work one enjoys because one likes their company. That’s perhaps truer of Varda than anyone.
WHAT PRICE HOLLYWOOD (1932, d. George Cukor) Let the record show that George Cukor in fact directed both of the best versions of “A Star is Born”. (With special deference due, of course, to Slavko Vorkapich and his dazzling montage sequence.)
WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF (1966, d. Mike Nichols) Still tough enough (and funny enough) to flay skin off bone.
THE WICKER MAN (1973, d. Robin Hardy) As much a musical as it is a horror film. I would happily watch a documentary about this odd, cloistered little community.
So what’d I miss…? - C.B.