The best films I saw: 2019 edition
I watched a lot of mediocre and objectively-pretty-bad movies this year. So much so that I don’t think I can get to a list that’s thirty items’ long (as I did in 2018 and 2017). That said, I watched some pretty wonderful things:
- James Benning: American Dreams (Lost and Found), 1984
- Sofia Bohdanowicz, Deragh Campbell: MS Slavic 7, 2019
- Virgil Vernier: Mercuriales, 2014
- Bong Joon-Ho: Memories of Murder, 2003
- Paweł Pawlikowski: Cold War, 2018
- Kazuhiro Sôda: Campaign, 2007
- Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 2010
- Ricky D’Ambrose: Notes on an Appearance, 2018
- Agnès Varda: Le Bonheur, 1965
- Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Véréna Paravel: Leviathan, 2012
- Nathan Silver: Stinking Heaven, 2015
- Sofia Bohdanowicz: Veslemoy’s Song, 2018
- Manbiki Kazoku: Shoplifters, 2018
- Toshio Matsumoto: Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969
- Robert Hamilton: The Five Finger Splash, 2019 🎥
- Rodrigo Sorogoyen: The Realm, 2018
- Ethan Coen, Joel Coen: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, 2019
- Noah Baumbach: Marriage Story, 2019
- Bong Joon-Ho: Parasite, 2019
- Ryan Ermacora, Jessica Johnson: Labour/Leisure, 2019
Due to this feeling incomplete to me, here are some non-movie things that might have made this list in the parallel universe:
- Mindhunter (season two)
- Watchmen
- Jane Campion, Gerard Lee, and Garth Davis’ Top of the Lake (season one)
- Nicholas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young