F I L M
The Best AND Worst Movies of 2019 The Last Top 10 List from Last Year You’ll Need by Ryan Syrek
I
feel like a broken record, which is such a dated reference. I feel like a glitch in the cloud? A repetitive autocorrect? Our hellishly redundant news cycle? Whatever. The point is that every year I have to explain why my annual best/worst movies list hits later than almost all others. Short answer: A monthly print deadline and the fact that studios simply don’t care about the opinion of Midwestern critics. “The year’s best films” often arrive here in the beginning of the next year, which irritatingly twists my giblets. I’m just saying — given the objectively awful awards nominations and winners
10 Best
Films of 2019 The following half-dozen flirted with my top 10 but never quite fell all the way in love. Kisses though!
I usually list my worst films of the year before the best films, but since my naughty list is likely to make many folks
• Wild Rose • 1917 • Spider-Man: Far From Home • The Lego Movie: Part 2 • Fast Color
10.) Uncut Gems The thing I’ve said the most about this movie: “It’s one of the best movies of the year. You’ll probably hate it.” This nightmarishly unpleasant urban fable about a degenerate gambler/manchild,
February 2020
go Bonkers McBonkface, I’m gonna save that for later. A spoonful of sugar helps my judgmental medicine go down.
At any rate, not a lot of caveats this year, in that I saw pretty much everything I was “supposed” to see aside from Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Clemency and Les Misérables, which still haven’t opened here. Hopefully, by the time they do we Midwestern reviewers will have learned how to read “subtitles,” whatever those are.
• Frozen II
The
48
thus far, maybe it’s time to rethink ignoring 90% of the country when building a critical cultural consensus.
This is an image from the year’s best movie, and I’m betting you probably still don’t know which movie I’m talking about!
played by Adam Sandler, is pure movie magic. People always assume that phrase —“movie magic”—is a happy thing. This is more cinematic Necronomicon than a boop from Glenda, the good witch. The best art provokes a reaction, and I sure reacted all over the place to this one.
9.) Knives Out Writer/director Rian Johnson’s saucy Agatha Christie-riff is a delightful whiff of murder mystery and light social commentary. Anchored by the aggressively amusing
accent employed by Daniel Craig, it takes itself just the right amount of serious and doesn’t cheat at all in revealing the “who” in the “whodunit.” Its success is proof that movies need not be sequels nor based on existing intellectual property to be a hit. They just gotta be, you know, good.
8.) Us Writer/director Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out may be better than Get Out. “Get out!” you may be thinking, but it’s true! A twisted tale of doppelgangers and
