Best of the 2010s - 2019 - Parasite

Of course this is going to be my favourite movie of the year. If you've heard me on the Movie Bears Podcast episode I was on for Fantastic Fest (linked here), you'll have heard me go thorougly excitable about this (around the 1:17:00 mark to 1:19:00 or so). It just is that damn good. And if you haven't seen it, I'm not going to tell you why beyond that, yes, this deserved to win the Palme D'Or. And it deserves to win ... pretty much anything on offer. It's griping, stunning, clever, twisted, hilarious, scary, and completely engrossing. If you haven't seen it yet ... well, get to it whenever you can.

Top 10 films of 2019

In alphabetical order because I don't particularly want to sort them (although I'll be posting a favourite film of 2019 separately for the decade exercise so... there's a favourite and then there's 9 second places). It's based on Australian release dates and doesn't include anything that only got released as streaming (though one of these got only a cursory Melbourne/Sydney cinema release).

Border - a romance, a horror story, a thriller and a creature-feature, all in one - poignant and strange and touching, this Swedish film about a customs agent with a special ability to sniff out contraband, and what happens when she makes some discoveries about herself, didn't get a particularly wide release (though it's available on SBS on Demand), but it's worth tracking down.

Burning - another romance/thriller, this time Korean, as a three-sided relationship develops increasing paranoia as a disappearance leads to increased tension. All three leads are compelling, and there's a skillful mix of music, performances and shooting that builds all the way through to a stunning finale.

Eighth Grade - this was the first movie I saw in Australian cinemas this year, and it stuck with me throughout. It's a rare case of a teen movie that is very recognisably about contemporary teens, not just a middle aged screenwriter applying their own teenagehood to modern performers. Elsie Fisher as the lead is touching and hilarious and heartbreaking as a girl just on the verge of hitting the senior years of high school, trying to find her way in a world where social media seems all important and finding her place seems incredibly difficult. 

Hustlers - There's a lot of fairly trashy movies about the exotic dance world - but this beats the rest of them by virtue of actually having a plot and a point to it, along with some great performances. In a cast where all the important characters are female, it rarely caters to the male gaze except to look at the ways it can be manipulated by cunning women. Jennifer Lopez issues a big reminder why she's a skilled performer when the right role comes along and owns large chunks of the screen, but there's a great array of talent here.

Knives Out - A great examination of the standard country-house murder mystery, with more than a couple of twists. The thoroughly loaded cast of great talents includes a couple who are basically there to be red-herrings (which is standard in the model), but there's also some great non-standard surprises on the way to a thoroughly satisfying ending, all the way through to the final shot.

Marriage Story - Scenes from a disintegrating marriage as a couple prepare for their divorce, which seems to be going so simply until the lawyers get involved - as both find that the dissatisfactions they've been burying begin to bubble to the surface. I've seen some argue that it's one-sided but to me we get a clear understanding why both sides do what they do - and why it gets so brutally hurtful as both find themselves unable to compromise for the sake of the other.

Parasite - If you haven't been told yet that this is awesome ... it is. It's a clever modern thriller as a poor Seoul family catch a break when the son manages to con his way into becoming a tutor for the daughter of a rich family - and I really shouldn't go much further because this is a film that twists, twists again, pulls the rug out from under you, wraps you up in the rug then rolls you right down the hill before finally setting the rug on fire. There's astonishingly tense sequences here, many with minimal dialogue, as people get into more and more desperate plights. It's a triumph.

Us - Yeah, I loved this. No, it's not strictly realistic, but I don't think it's aiming to be - there's a very definite allegory of the underclass being pushed here, of how western society kinda relies on someone else suffering to keep itself running, and about what might be coming to stop it - and it's beautifully and terrifyingly executed, both in performance (particularly Lupita N'yongo) and in production.

Who You Think I Am - a tension builder from France as Juliette Binoche plays a divorcee whose online affair becomes increasingly obsessional. A key quote here is "Social media is both the shipwreck and the liferaft" and, here the simple human desire to connect is twisted again and again in ways that are engrossing to behold.

Woman at War - An icelandic souffle of a film, as an environmental activist carries out strikes against an aluminum factory - much of the film is devoted to those missions in the gorgeous Icelandic countryside, to an engrossing klezmer score, it's a great example of deadpan thrills mixed with exceptional charm, particularly the wonderfully stoic performance of Halldora Geirharosdottir. 

The Truth

A thoroughly middling exercise in Frenchy Ennui and stories about actresses, mothers and daughters, this has one or two decent moments when Deneuve and Binoche are sparring, but it never really cuts particularly close to the bone - none of the long-standing family resentments really seem particularly high stakes. Instead it's about 100 minutes of people being mildly snippy with each other. There is a good turtle, though.

Jumanji - The Next Level

A pretty worthwhile follow up to the reboot from a few years ago, with some clever variations. One of the variations means that Karen Gillan gets to be de-facto lead for most of the first chunk of the film, which is incredibly enjoyable, and the remaining returning three bigger names get to have some nice twists on their character. The addition of Awkwifina is very welcome, and Rory McCann is suitably menacing as a minimally characterised bad guy. If the ending is a little too sequel-confident for its own good, it's still not a bad way to keep things rolling.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire

I understand the acclaim for this and I liked a fair chunk of it once it got going but .. .gosh there's a lot of long pauses in the dialogue and maybe not as much significance in the long stares as the filmmmakers might like to think.  It comes together reasonably well, and I think the passion between the two leads burns when it's set alight, but gosh it takes a while to get kindling.

Sorry We Missed You

This is merely "very strong" rather than "transcendentally wonderful" like Ken Loach's "I Daniel Blake" was - I think it might be the storyline with the son in it that gave me pause here, as he's mostly an irredeemable little shit and you can't really blame capitalism for him the way you can for everybody else in the film. But there's a strong sense of build from about halfway here, with things getting more and more out of control for a family where both parents are tied to contracted work that demands more and more of them and gives less and less. Loach is a powerhouse director and Paul Laverty knows exactly the kind of stuff to write for him.

Frozen 2

A pretty solid follow up, carefully picking up some of the dangling threads from the first one in a film just as unafraid to go big emotive musical when it needs to. It's got a mix of epic and personal, as our returning cast go into the woods north of Arundell to resolve old secrets and discover new ones. No, there's no songs quite as earwormy as "Let it Go" (although "into the unknown" tries very hard to get there), but there are gorgeous visuals and some gentle maturing of the characters (and, to be honest, Elsa gets a lot more time to be explored as a character in this one, rather than just an object to be chased who has a big song). Should satisfy fans of the original nicely

Black Christmas

This is kinda in the "good intentions but execution is a little wobbly" school of horror movies. A campus-set yuletide story as a sorority who's been defending a member who has recently been assaulted by a frat bro is suddenly overwhelmed by attacks from strange masked figures, this always feels a bit muted - there's a couple of good ideas and some reasonable performances here, but it's never quite clear whether it wants to take the ideas seriously or go for broke into a broad ranging over the top parody. And given where this goes, broader would have been better. Still I didn't entirely loathe it.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

This is probably the definition of a mixed bag - there's moments which work brilliantly and there's moments where I am not entirely sold. In particular the opening (for a movie that's two and a half hours, there's a lot of elements here that feel squished for time), and some of the fan-service moments. But at the same time ... it's Star Wars. And it is a conclusion to the saga. And it has great character moments, and strange creatures, and strange moments of grace and beauty. So ... this is probably an interim score.

The Good Liar

This is kinda enjoyable in the way that watching good actors in a film that doesn't quite hold together can be - both Mirren and McKellen have done far better work, but they're enjoyable to watch together in a mild kind of cat and mouse thriller. It's slightly oddly placed for audiences - the lead pair lead to an audience of the older-biddies, but McKellen drops by a strip club early in the film for a couple of gratuitous bare boobies, and there's also a reasonable amount of high-level swearing for no particular reason other than, presumably, to push the rating up to an MA. Some of the twists border on the slightly unbelievable, and in some ways casting Mirren means that you're never quite going to buy her as a patsy - you're pre-clued in that she has to have something more going on. Still, it's one of those "it just about does the job of being vaguely worth the time but unmemorable afterwards" films.

The Two Popes

Telling the story of the historical moment when the transition between Pope Benedict and Pope Francis happened, this is an intriguing look at two men whose lives are wrapped up in spirituality and in politics, whether they like it or not. For much of its length, it's almost a play, with the two in constant dialogue as the Argentinian Cardinal Bergolio visits Pope Benedict planning to resign, only for their conversation to twist again and again, as they talk about everything from soccer and Kommissinar Rex to notions of sin, poverty and their guilts. Director Fernando Merilles opens it up by moving us around Benedict's various domiciles, taking us on a deep dive historically into Bergolio's background, and top-and-tailing with two papal elections, with writer Anthony McCarten providing a lot of fairly sharp dialogue to go with the visuals. It's quite satisfying to watch two actors of the calibre of Jonathan Pryce and Anthony Hopkins going head to head - both playing somewhat differently (Pryce brings an open emotionality and a sweetness (and a reasonable Argentinian accent), Hopkins closed and sly and inqusitive (and not particularly bothering to sound Austrian)). It's surprisingly funny and gets under your skin in a way you probably aren't expecting and, as a non-catholic, I enjoyed myself hugely.

Best of the 2010s - 2018 - The Shape of Water

Another of the "I've already reviewed this on this blog" movies (linked at this link here). This is, I suppose, the official "oh, the Academy awards are not completely full of it the way I like to pretend they are" film, because dammit I love this film, a beautiful story of two outsiders finding each other, and finding people around them who protect them. Having said that, the Academy awards of course are complete bullshit for not awarding Richard Jenkins for this, because dammit he utterly broke my heart here. I said at the time this is definately Guillermo del Toro's best English language film and possibly his best overall, but I'd first have to rewatch this, "Pan's Labyrinth" and "Devil's BAckbone" next to each other, and then possibly die from an overdoes of movie perfection. But it'd be a good death. 

Best of the 2010s - 2017 - The Florida Project

This one I've already reviewed on the blog (at this here link here) but it's worthwhile talking about again as an extraordinarily piece, mixing elements of doco and drama in director Sean Baker's inimitable style mixing professional and non-professional actors in a piece about people living on the edge of poverty and sometimes falling over, against the background of the ultimate in American leisure. It's beautiful and sad and funny and outraging. Willem Dafoe slips into the cast mix as naturally as every other performer, and this builds to a climax both hopeful and devastating in the temporary nature of the joy it provides.

Best of the 2010s – 2016 - Hunt for the Wilderpeople

This was my introduction to what Taika Waititi can do – his mix of poignancy and humour, with surprising moments of visual flair. It’s the story of Ricky Baker (Julian Dennison), a boy who doesn’t quite fit in, rejected by most of his foster homes. Finding warmth and acceptance with Bella (Rima Te Wiata), albeit slightly less with her husband Hec (Sam Neill), he’s then shattered when Bella dies, and flees into the bush. Hec follows but injures himself, and the two have to find their way back out, in the meantime realising their bond.   It’s simultaneously a small scale story of a boy and a man finding a reluctant kind of family, and an epic road movie as the two trek across New Zealand. And it’s a warm comedy with an underpinning of connections lost and found again.  It also has the shoulda-been-an-academy-award-winning “Ricky Baker” song, and is one of those films that lugged my jaded self into a sense of warmth and adoration. 

Ford v Ferrari

This is in many ways a meat-and-potatoes "Dad" movie - two guys get together to achieve something historic during the 1960s, the only female character of note is one of those men's wife who's job is to stay home and react while her man goes out and does things (possibly with a "you shouldn't be doing these things" speech somewhere along the line), there's some tertiary figures blocking them from making their achievement, and the climax is them finally making that historic achievement. It's a very familiar formula by now.

The thing is, though, that it can still work, and here it works pretty damn well. I am usually bored shitless by car racing and it's a tribute to the craft of this film that I wasn't bored by this - there's enough twists and turns of the narrative to keep hold through a two and a half hour running time. And both Damon and Bale as the two men in question are at peak performance - Bale hasn't had this much fun in a role in years. There's an obvious subtext here about the relationship between two men looking to innovate and the Ford Motor Company's preference for production line success, and it's not exactly difficult to extrapolate it. And in supporting roles there's strong work from Tracy Letts and Jon Benthal as the Ford execs, and, dammit even Caitriona Balfe (who, to be fair, has a somewhat better wife-role than a lot of the ones in films like these - the relationship between her and Bale actually feels real and lived in, rather than just a dramatic device).

For a film I was expecting to be vaguely adequate, this exceeded my expectations quite a lot.

Judy and Punch

In any given year, it sometimes becomes inevitable that films become paired together, and for various reasons, "Judy and Punch" made me think of it as a companion piece for "The Nightingale" (both Australian, both vaguely historical, both featuring violence against women and children, both directed by women and featuring Damon Herriman). But this is somewhat different tonally - more in the territory of dark fantasy/comedy,  the historical era is deliberately undefined, and what we get is largely in the territory of an interrogation of the traditional Punch and Judy show and the dubious morals that lie beneath it. Wasikowska and Herriman both give great performances (Wasikowska with an emerging righteous anger, and Herriman with a weasel-esque cunning), and writer/director Mirrah Folkes manages a tricky tone that manages to take the subject matter seriously while still keeping eccentric and dark comedy. It's a fascinating piece that is worth catching.

Marriage Story

This is the acting powerhouse to beat this awards season - telling the story of a couple who are divorcing and how their best intentions to keep things gentle and well mannered for the sake of raising their kid together slowly fall apart as the things that broke them up in the first place start to bubble over. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson are both simply outstanding as the couple in question, as they start to delve deeper into their desires and their emotional fragility, and tear into both themselves and each other. As the various lawyers,  Laura Dern, Alan Alda and Ray Liotta all have great moments to shine, and there's terrific support particularly from Julie Hagerty as Johhansson's mother. If I wanted to issue minor criticisms it would be that Randy Newman's score is occasionally a little intrusive, and the representation of New York's avant-garde theatre community is a little odd, but ... this comes together so well it feels petty to bitch.

Charlie's Angels

This is kinda disappointing - as someone who really liked the first "Charlie's Angels" film and thought the second had its moments, this kinda falls flat. It largely has to do with script and direction here - things just generally fail to be fun and frivolous, and there's way too many plot complications and comedy-that-doesn't-quite work. Kristen Stewart does pretty damn well here (there's a whole separate movie here which is basically "Finally Kristen Stewart gets to have fun") and as the other two Naomi Scott and Ella Balinska have their occasional moments (Scott as a tech-nerd pulled into helping the angels when her company's project turns out to have evil consequences, Balinska as the serious-minded ex-MI6 agent), but the film generally fails to take advantage of the three women getting to play together as a team - the plot setup has them as a team coming together over the course of the mission rather than as the well-oiled team we remember from previous entries, and there's never really a moment that they snap into place and become something solid, so their team bond is more something we're told is happening than something we can see. It's proof that making a fun bouncy piece of nonsense is harder than it looks.

The Irishman

This is a case of a film where it's reasonable but it could be so much more if it just was tighter or better focused. This isn't a film in a hurry to get anywhere which is ... fine, but it does mean we get a lot of conversations that are rather circular (actually, a few of them feel like bad improv class where nobody's quite ready to call "Scene"). DeNiro's been an actor who's been somewhat uninspired for roughly a decade, and this is him in clumping mode. There's stronger support from Pesci (who plays in a quieter mode than his 90s heyday but is quite good at quiet menace), Pacino (who is, admittedly, slightly in scenery-eating mode as Jimmy Hoffa, but he does at least bring the film to life when it's getting a bit aimless), and, surprisingly, Ray Romano (who's very good at shifty-lawyering). There's some strong scene-to-scene work here but there's also an overload of gangster-plots-and-counterplots which aren't all particularly clearly presented, and there's an overlong anti-climax after this reaches the point where we were all expecting this to go. Also the anti-climax does feature some of the weirdest casting, including a small role for Action Bronson, and a priest being played by a priest which explains why he's so awkward with his dialogue. Honestly, the main reason to see this in a cinema rather than wait for Netflix is that the cinema seating will probably keep you paying attention to the screen rather than allowing you to zone out. Having said all that ... this is not a bad film, it's just an indulgent film and Scorcese has done better, fairly recently.

Doctor Sleep

For a movie that doesn't entirely have a sensible reason to exist and has a plot setup that is kinda odd, this is quite reasonable. And I'm aware that probably comes as slightly lefthanded praise, but ... this isn't really any sensible kind of sequel to "The Shining", so much as a "Stephen King wanted to write a novel about a psychic kid and the older psychic who mentors her in battle with other evil psychics, and realised he already had a psychic kid from a previous novel thirty odd years back". Mike Flanagan's film does an interesting job of managing to combine the concerns of the sequel novel, the original novel AND the very much altered film that Stanley Kubrick did of the original novel to make something that, if it doesn't exactly have the depth of the original, does surprisingly well. It's definitely nice to have Rebecca Ferguson as a very active villain after she spent most of "The Kid Who Would be King" stuck in a tree, and there's striking visuals that are all this film's own work in the middle third. There is a weird stoppy-starty energy in the first third before the various plot strands come together, but once this hits the ground it does it running and works pretty well.

The Report

The story of how the senate committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program was put together and released does not, necessarily, sound like the stuff of cinematic dreams, so much as a CSPAN marathon for those seeking a good snooze. But for those of us with a politically wonkish bent, or if you realise this is about the CIA's torture of prisoners, it suddenly becomes a fair bit more interesting, and helps to explore a fair chunk of how the last two decades of international policy have gone down.

It is still mostly a bunch of men and women sitting in rooms talking about documents for a fair chunk of time (though there are flashbacks to show some of the more egregious moves made during the torture program - not graphic, but effective) - but fortunately this is an interesting bunch of people. Adam Driver's career civil servant drawn more and more into his work as he first prepares then has to defend the report; Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein, head of the committee trying to release it; and a fine set of supporting actors as well. This is probably not going to be everybody's cup of tea - it is very much a "how the sausage is made" approach to political maneuverings and that's not for everyone. But for those of you who are into it, this is definitely something to delve into.

Best of the 2010s – 2015 – The Dressmaker

Two of the best female performances of the decade (Kate Winslet and Judy Davis) in a film that smashes genres together with ruthless abandon, this kinda delighted me. I understand the objections people have to it (there’s some, ahem, very exaggerated performances around Winslet and Davis), and a third-act twist definitely pulls the rug out from under its audience in a way that won’t necessarily make this a crowd pleaser. But the combination of great frocks and ruthless vengeance is utterly up my alley, with writer-director Jocelyn Moorehouse absolutely achieving her aim of making, as she put it, “Unforgiven with a sewing machine”. It teeters on the edge between deliciously camp melodrama and ridiculous stupidity, and for me it triumphs – though this is the kinda tightrope where I can imagine plenty loathing it (well, I don’t need to imagine it, I’ve read the alternate opinions, and … well, for me they just plain don’t get it or don’t want to get it.