Happy Holidays! Here is my year-end Top Ten list: Best Movies of 2019.
OUT NOW
- The masterpiece Parasite explores social inequity, first with hilarious comedy, then evolving into suspense and finally a shocking statement of the real societal stakes. This is one of the decade’s best films.
- Adam Driver and Scarlett Johannson are brilliant in Noah Baumbach’s career-topping Marriage Story. A superb screenplay, superbly acted, Marriage Story balances tragedy and comedy with uncommon success. Marriage Story is playing in just a couple Bay Area theaters and is now streaming on Netflix.
- Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic The Irishman is tremendous, and features performances by Al Pacino and Joe Pesci that are epic, too. It’s both in theaters and streaming on Netflix.
- Rian Johnson’s Knives Out turns a drawing room murder mystery into awickedly funny send-up of totally unjustified entitlement.
- Filmmaker Taika Waititi takes on hatred in his often outrageous satire Jojo Rabbit. I saw Jojo Rabbit at the Mill Valley Film Festival, where the audience ROARED with laughter.
- In his Pain and Glory, master filmmaker Pedro Almodovar invites us into the most personal aspects of his own life, illuminated by Antonio Banderas’ career-topping performance.
ON VIDEO
My Streams of the Week are the six Best Movies of 2019 – So Far that are already available to stream. This week, I’m featuring Amazing Grace : pure, sanctified Aretha. Amazing Grace can be streamed on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play; the DVD can be rented from Redbox.
Plus I just wrote about Ash Is Purest White: a survivor’s journey. Actress Tao Zhao’s tour de force performance powers this portrait of an unforgettable woman surviving betrayal, the crime world and the tidal waves of change in modern China, all embedded in writer-director Zhangke Jia’s gangster neo-noir. It’s also on my Top Ten and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.
ON TV
Once again, Turner Classic Movies is giving us a wonderful New Year’s Eve present – an all-day Thin Man marathon. William Powell and Myrna Loy are cinema’s favorite movie couple for a reason – just settle in and watch Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man and its sequels do what they do best – banter, canoodle, solve crimes and, of course, tipple.
