Suffice it to say, those who know me, know the real reasons I haven't been able to write as much as I would like, but for those who don't, all I can say is that it's been tough-going lately, both financially and in terms of my overall health. But I'm hanging in there, and hope to get back up to speed soon. Thanks for the well wishes via social media, and all your support. Now, on with the show...
The following is a list of my favorite movies of 2019, at least in terms of the movies I've seen to date. No man is an island, so I've yet to see a lot of films I'd like to, but something good did come out of the delay in this article, as I saw a few more movies I wouldn't have been able to include otherwise. As I mentioned, I may do another list about midway through the year that includes the movies I haven't seen yet, but until then, here are the best of the bunch that I have seen.
Last year, I listed the films I hadn't seen as of yet, but it makes more sense to list the ones I have seen, so here goes. If it isn't on this list, I haven't seen it yet, which means it won't be on the main list, either, obviously. I may have also accidentally skipped some films that were straight-to-video or streaming, but if I saw them, I likely reviewed them, so check out my past reviews- most of the recent ones are collected in the "Movie Round-Up: Quick Cuts" banner. You can search specific films, old or new, in the "Search" box on the top right of any given page.
Films I saw from 2019 (Click on the titles for links to my original reviews- if there isn't one, I didn't do it yet)
Escape Room, The Upside, Glass, Miss Bala, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, The Prodigy, Happy Death Day 2U, Fighting with My Family, Greta, Captain Marvel, Nancy Drew & The Hidden Staircase, Us, The Dirt, Dumbo, The Beach Bum, Shazam!, Pet Sematary, Hellboy, The Curse of La Llorona, Under the Silver Lake, Avengers: Endgame, Uglydolls, Detective Pikachu, Aladdin, Brightburn, Booksmart, The Poison Rose, Parasite, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Rocketman, Ma, The Secret Life of Pets 2, The Dead Don't Die, Toy Story 4, Domino, Anna, Annabelle Comes Home, Spider-Man: Far From Home, Midsommar, Crawl, The Lion King, Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood, Hobbs & Shaw, The Kitchen, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, Good Boys, Ready or Not, Vault, It: Chapter 2, Hustlers, Three from Hell, Joker, Jay & Silent Bob Reboot, The Irishman, Noelle and Knives Out.
Okay, that takes care of that. Let's get into the main list. I've split it into two parts, so that the article doesn't go on too long. If there is already a review by me for it, you can click on the highlighted title to get to it. I've kept the entries short for the ones I've already reviewed, for obvious reasons. I'll be counting down in reverse order, to my favorite of the year. Let's get started...
15. Ready or Not
Newlywed bride Grace (Samara Weaving, Mayhem, The Babysitter) has just married into a rich family, when she soon discovers that this particular clan puts the "crazy" into their title the old-fashioned way. As in, every time anyone gets married, their spouse has to participate in a time-honored family tradition: playing a game at the strike of midnight on their wedding day.
More often than not, it's something innocuous, like checkers or Old Maid or the like. But every once in a while, the game turns deadly when the spouse in question draws the game of "Hide and Seek." Only in this version of the game, if the family finds you, you're killed. And, so the legend goes, if the spouse is able to evade the family the entire night and survive until dawn, then the family themselves are killed.
While some, like Grace's husband, Alex (Mark O'Brien, Arrival, The Darkest Minds) and his brother, Daniel (Adam Brody, The O.C., Jennifer's Body), think the legend is utter hogwash, others, like their father, Tony (Henry Czerny, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, TV's Revenge) and his sister, Helene (Nicky Guadagni, Cube, Silent Hill) swear by it, and claim that unspeakable things will happen to them if they fail in their task.
Somewhere in the middle are mom Becky (Andie MacDowell, Groundhog Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral), Emilie (Melanie Scrofano, Saw VI, Wynonna Earp), Daniel and Alex's drug-addled sister, and Fitch (Kristian Bruun, Orphan Black), her husband. Backing up the game wholeheartedly are Charity (Elyse Levesque, The Originals), Daniel's cold-blooded wife, and Stevens (John Ralston, TV's Flash Gordon and Bitten), the VERY loyal family butler.
Needless to say, things don't go as smoothly as planned, with some trying to help poor Grace, while others are simply too incompetent to get the job done. Along the way, there are casualties, of course, this being a horror film and all- hint: the staff don't fare too well. But who will be left standing, come the dawn- if anyone? You'll just have to see for yourself, in this nifty black comedy/horror flick.
The end result is like You're Next, if the main female protagonist was decidedly less competent, with a healthy dose of the classic short story, "The Most Dangerous Game" for good measure. For those unfamiliar with the latter, it revolves around a wealthy man that decides to go after a more clever sort of prey than animals: man. It's been adapted and ripped off a billion times since, so if that sounds familiar, that would be why (i.e. Hard Target, Surviving the Game).
Weaving is shaping up to be a solid Scream Queen in-the-making, this being her third horror flick, along with appearances in the TV show Ash vs. The Evil Dead and in the spooky, surreal miniseries Picnic at Hanging Rock. Her latest, Guns Akimbo, from the director of the cult horror fave Deathgasm, looks promising, and she also has a role in the Bill & Ted reboot Face the Music and the Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story, Scream Queens) Netflix series, Hollywood. She also made my list of favorite rising starlets, for whatever that's worth- read more about that here. She's pretty great in this, too.
The film is the latest from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (the horror anthologies, V/H/S & Southbound; Devil's Due), and was written by Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy (TV's Castle Rock, Stan Against Evil). It's smarter than the average horror flick, with solid character development and some nice plotting that extends things in a believable way that doesn't just confine the events to the indoors, as one might expect.
Grace is a great character, who isn't superhuman, but simply resourceful and quick on her feet. The movie itself is a real keeper, and would make for a good double feature with Knives Out, which also deals with the dynamics between the rich and those less fortunate. As such, it's a great distillation of the times we live in, where the gap between the haves and the have-nots has never been wider. You can't help but root for Grace, as she scrambles to evade a seemingly inevitable fate. It's definitely one of my faves of the year, bar none.
14. Fighting with My Family
Rising star Florence Pugh was killing it last year, bagging herself her first Oscar nod for Little Women, which I haven't seen as of yet, but I've no reason to doubt she crushed it, being as how she'd already delivered an award-worthy performance in the horror flick Midsommar, if they actually gave awards to films like that. She also kicked off the year with this somewhat overlooked flick, which detailed the true story of WWE wrestler Paige with lots of heart and even more laughs.
Written and directed by OG The Office vet Stephen Merchant, who also co-produced with Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (who has a brief cameo, as does Merchant) and a few others, the film is a fun movie that also deals with the struggle between the haves and the have nots, particularly as it pertains to making it in the world. So many people are waiting for that big break that never comes- in this film, it happens for one sibling but not the other, making it all the more heart-wrenching, especially when she nearly gives up because of feeling like she doesn't deserve it as much.
Ultimately, though, as you might have guessed from the title, it's about the endurance of families- both real and extended (in this case, the WWE)- and how they may fuss and fight, but when all is said and done, they're there for you, at least if you let them in and allow them to do it. Sometimes we might resist, but like it or not, a family's a family, and even when it doesn't seem like it at times, they've got your back.
That's a great message, least of all in a time in which it seems even families are being torn apart by all the division in our current political climate. Why can't we all get along, indeed. In Fighting, this family doesn't always get along, but they're always there when they're needed- and we could all learn a thing or two from that.
13. Brightburn
Then again, there's a point where you have to know when to say when. Brightburn is a retelling of the Superman mythos, only if said alien wasn't playing for our team. What if, this film posits, after a certain age, that alien simply went bad? Like, really bad. As in, started killing people left and right, and wreaking general havoc all over the place, even turning against his own family.
Well, sort of. Basically, a childless couple is astonished one night to see something crashing out of the sky into their backyard. Turns out it's a spaceship containing what looks to be an ordinary infant- emphasis on "looks to be." The two, who have been struggling to have a child themselves, opt to hide said spaceship in their barn, and keep and raise the child as their own. Though the child is prenaturally smart, otherwise, he's relatively normal- at least until he hits a certain age.
At that point, the spaceship starts transmitting signals, which cause him to start behaving strangely, doing things that he doesn't remember later on. Things get progressively worse, and eventually, deadly. Do the couple stand by their adopted son, or try to stop him before things get even worse? Perhaps needless to say, this being a horror film, things definitely get worse, and in spectacularly over-the-top fashion.
The end result is basically an inverted superhero origin story, but one in which the hero ultimately opts to become a villain instead. It may not be for everyone, but I really appreciated this clever twist on the quickly growing stale superhero subgenre. It helps that the movie has a perverse sense of humor, no doubt in part due to the involvement of the Gunn brothers, of Guardians of the Galaxy fame.
But this one is strictly for the adults, and features some fantastic gore to boot, for those of us who miss James Gunn's more horrific efforts, like the Dawn of the Dead remake (which he wrote) and Slither (which he wrote and directed, and also features this film's star, Elizabeth Banks). I just loved it, and even if you're sick to death of superhero flicks, you might just appreciate this one, which actually does manage to do something different with it.
12. The Lion King
I probably would have ranked this one higher, had it not been a remake- but what a remake it is! Featuring the astonishing visuals that Disney pioneered in director Jon Favreau's Jungle Book- only even more impressively done, as there isn't a human in sight in this one- The Lion King is everything a live-action remake (sort of, given the circumstances) of an animated film should be, and then some.
I heard some grumbling about the whole "uncanny valley" thing with the animals in question, but I didn't have that problem with this one. The Polar Express this is not. It might be a slight stretch to say that I completely forgot I was watching CGI- after all, animals aren't known for talking, much less their vocal stylings- but damned if I wasn't impressed. You might not forget what you're watching isn't "real," per se, but you sure enough get wrapped up in it, regardless- or at least I was.
Even cooler for me personally was how it magically took me back to my childhood. I was never a big Star Wars person, so when The Force Awakens inspired a lot of similar type fan-worship, I didn't have the same experience, as I didn't see those films in the theaters as a kid. But I did see the original Lion King and loved it, and this completely took me back to that sense of wonder and awe in a big way. My jaw nearly dropped with that opening scene alone- the much-heralded "Circle of Life" scene- and honestly, I was never less than enraptured all the way through.
I'll allow that I'm a big Disney fan, and always have been, so other people's mileage may vary when it comes to stuff like this. But as a hallmark of how far we've come, special effects-wise, boy is it an impressive achievement, no matter how you feel about Disney, or their recent determination to remake almost every classic film they've ever done. (Not gonna lie- looking forward to The Little Mermaid.) Whatever the case, it was easily one of my most memorable trips to the movies of the year, bar none, so onto the list it goes.
11. Glass
Unbreakable has always been one of my favorite M. Night Shyamalan flicks, if not my favorite, period, so it sucked when it seemed like it was destined to be a one-off. Then came Split, the sequel-you-didn't-know-was-a-sequel until the last few minutes of the film, which featured Bruce Willis reprising his character from Unbreakable, seemingly setting up a third film in the series.
Fortunately, we didn't have to wait as long for the follow-up. Glass brings together most of the characters from the previous films, including the titular Samuel L. Jackson character, Bruce Willis as the superhuman David Dunn and Spencer Treat Clark as his son, Joseph, from Unbreakable; and James McAvoy as Kevin Wendell Crumb (and many others) and Anya Taylor-Joy as Casey Cooke, from Split.
It takes place mere weeks from the last installment, as Dunn springs into action to try and track down and defeat Crumb, aka "The Horde," on account of his many personalities, including "The Beast," a seemingly unstoppable killing machine that is also superhuman. Dunn's in the process of confronting "The Beast" when both are captured by Dr. Ellie Staple (newcomer to the fold, Sarah Paulson, of American Horror Story fame), a psychiatrist that treats people who think they are superheroes- or supervillains, for that matter.
Staple already has Glass in her custody, and the others are taken to Raven Hill Institute to collectively be studied and convinced that they are simply suffering from a psychotic disorder. Of course, we know better- and so do they, more or less, though Staple comes close to convincing the newcomers otherwise.
Glass isn't buying it, though, and upon becoming aware of the presence of Crumb and Dunn, sets into motion a plan to get them all out of there to wreak havoc once again, by joining forces with Crumb and setting up Dunn to try and stop them in a proper superhuman showdown.
While the set-up did admittedly promise a big action set-piece at the end, and deliver something else quite different from what I think many were expecting, there's something to be said for Shyamalan showing restraint, and keeping things focused on the main characters at hand, rather than going for the typical superhero spectacle. I get that some people were disappointed by this aspect of the story, but I think that this one will, like its predecessors, be one that is appreciated more on down the line.
Of course, M. Night being M. Night, it wouldn't be him without a final twist and this one has a doozy- as one character puts it: "This was an origin story the whole time." This, of course, leaves open the possibility for more sequels, though Shyamalan has said he's not interested in building a franchise, so we'll see. As it stands, it's a worthy successor to the previous two entries in my book, and I think it will grow on some people that were initially disappointed by it.
The key to "getting" the movie is simply recognizing that it's not an action film or a superhero film so much as it's a character study. Shyamalan isn't interested in over-the-top action or elaborate battles- these play out more as afterthoughts in the grand scheme of things.
As ever, he's all about the characters and how they grow and what their respective fates are. If you think about the three films as one collective whole, all telling parts of the same story, like a miniseries, I think you'll dig it more. So, forget the critics and take the ride: it's well-worth it in my book. And, yes, that includes the game-changing twist. It's basically the thinking man's (or woman's) superhero flick.
Well, that about does it for Part One. Join me soon for Part Two, as soon as I can get it out there! 😉
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