Our critics' top-ten lists celebrate the latest Tarantino, a South Korean black comedy, and the return of Eddie Murphy
A year on the big screen featured Brad Pitt, Little Women, Adam Sandler, Parasite, Robert De Niro, and The Farewell. Photo: Vulture and Courtesy of Studios The year 2019 felt like one massive screen from which we couldn’t turn away. It wasn’t just that there was so much to watch, it was that there was so much that it seemed like we should be watching: Amid it all, hundreds of movies flickered too quickly through theaters and platforms.
7. Honeyland Disney princesses should bow before Hatidze Muratova, the roughhewn Turkish woman who presides over a fragile ecosystem of bees in an isolated, windswept Macedonian valley in Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov’s transporting documentary. Her connection to this vanishing world seems inversely proportional to her estrangement from humankind, and her loneliness acquires the luminousness of myth. A magnificent work.
3. Diane Critic, documentarian, and festival director Kent Jones’s first fiction film centers on the exquisitely expressive Mary Kay Place as a compulsive do-gooder out to expiate her sins while everyone in her little town is either dying or on the brink . This naturalistic drama with the odd expressionist flourish is a candidate for the most depressing ever made, but once you accept its un-transcendent, death-centric baseline, it’s strangely exhilarating.
8. Under the Silver Lake There is a moment, late in David Robert Mitchell’s Los Angeles neo-noir, when you understand that what you’ve been watching hasn’t actually been a surreal conspiracy drama after all but a portrait of someone who’s totally adrift after a heartbreak. Sam , a down-and-out 30-something on the verge of getting kicked out of his apartment, turns amateur sleuth after his new neighbor, Sarah , disappears in the night.
4. The Farewell Midway through The Farewell, Billi gets chastised by her uncle for wanting to tell her grandmother the secret that the family has been keeping — that the matriarch has a terminal illness and that they’ve gathered to say good-bye. “You think one’s life belongs to oneself,” he tells her. “But that’s the difference between the East and the West. In the East, a person’s life is part of a whole.” It’s a totally gutting moment, a declaration of Billi’s fundamental foreignness.
9. The Irishman The Twitter dickheads still upset at Martin Scorsese for belittling their beloved corporate costumed-superhero franchises do make one legitimate observation: Scorsese has gone to an all-too-familiar well for his latest. Indeed, that’s the point of The Irishman, which seems to be in poignant conversation with some of the director’s earlier films, exploding the romantic myth of gangsterism that some of those works trafficked in.
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