IT'S A WRAP: MOVIES of 2019

For whatever reason, I fell behind on my movie viewing in 2019. I missed a lot of the most lauded mainstream movies, and I'm still too cranky to settle for watching big movies that barely appear in theaters at all on a home screen.


However, among the often small, weird and/or esoteric movies I did see, I have a few favorites. I wasn't quite able to stretch my list into the traditional Top Ten, and I certainly can't claim that these were in any way the Best of 2019. But if you're looking for something to stream on a cold winter's night, here are a few suggestions!


(FUN FACT: Five out of my eight favorites were directed by women! Wouldn't it be nice to see any of them appear among this year's Oscar nominees when they're announced tomorrow? If only. . . )



PAIN AND GLORY Pedro Almodovar directs this wonderful, semi-autobiographical movie about a Spanish filmmaker, looking back on his own life and career, and the people and events that shaped and inspired him. It's my favorite movie of the year! It may not look like much plot-wise, but the experience of watching this movie unfold onscreen is rapturous. And star Antonio Banderas is riveting in every single frame — you can’t take your eyes off him!

 
YESTERDAY In Danny Boyle's audacious what-if movie, The Beatles have disappeared from the collective memory of everyone except a struggling singer-songwriter named Jack (an engaging Himesh Patel) who finds himself poised to plunder their entire song catalogue. Detractors complain the movie misunderstands what made the Beatles popular, claiming as false “meritocracy” the notion that the songwriting would be hugely successful on its own, separated from the context of the band’s individual personalities and their era.

But here's why I (still) believe in Yesterday: It's not that the songs themselves are supposed to be the best ever written (although you could certainly make a case for some of them), but that there are so many of them, in so many diverse styles, that Jack is able to produce on the spot. The movie creates its own context for Jack’s popularity, a modest young person of color who produces song after song after song, seemingly out of the blue. That’s how he captures the public imagination — in much the same way the working-class lads from industrial Liverpool did with their cheeky attitude and funny haircuts, once upon a time. Boyle turns it into a sly morality play about fame, honor, and sacrifice, with a 4/4 beat and a larky sense of fun.

HARRIET Maybe the times have finally caught up to the amazing life of Harriet Tubman, a real-life superhero who fought for justice and won major victories in her lifelong battle to end slavery in the American South. An escaped slave herself, she led many others to freedom in the North, via the Underground Railroad, armed with little more than raw courage, and a flintlock pistol. Filmmaker Kasi Lemmons explores the woman behind the historical footnote, played with bristly moral conviction by Cynthia Erivo.

SWORD OF TRUST An aging hipster confronts the dark heart of extreme Southern yahooism in Lynn Shelton's very funny culture-clash comedy. Marc Maron is all dry wit and scruffy sarcasm as a pawn shop owner tasked to sell a Civil War sword that supposedly "proves" the Confederacy won the war. The twisty little surprises of the plot are delicious to discover along the way, and the sharp, funny conversations (largely improvised) had me laughing out loud.

THE MUSTANG Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre spins a tale of wild horses, regret, and redemption set in a high-security prison complex out in the middle of the Nevada desert. As part of their rehab, certain inmates are chosen to break and train wild mustangs for auction, and Matthias Schoenaerts delivers a towering, if taciturn performance (it's all in his eyes) as a prisoner who learns tenderness by bonding with his animal.

RAISE HELL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MOLLY IVINS Unusual enough as a progressive in Texas, smart, savagely funny political journalist Molly Ivins stood six feet tall. Not gifted with conventional proportions, she felt entitled to hold outsized opinions expressed with outsized gusto. There's plenty to laugh at — and get riled up over — in this Janice Engel documentary, celebrating all the hell Ivins raised as a pioneering woman in a world and profession run by good ole boys. Through documentary footage, Ivins tells much of her own story in her own words, and it's the particular zing of her voice that makes this movie so irresistible.

WAVES This gripping domestic drama from Trey Edward Shults encompasses euphoria, tragedy, and every conceivable emotion in between depicting a middle-class black family in South Florida sliding in and out of crisis. Some incidents seem torn from screaming headlines, yet Shults humanizes everything with careful attention to the personal relationships that guide our lives — between parents and children, between siblings, and between couples, both young and long-established.

LITTLE WOMEN In her entertaining, feminist update of the beloved novel, filmmaker Greta Gerwig combines the adventures of Louisa May Alcott's fictional March sisters with the journey of Alcott herself in getting her story published. Through Alcott's surrogate, Jo (Saoirse Ronan, who is absolutely wonderful), Gerwig inserts the author's early writing career and her tribulations with her patronizing male publisher. Timothée Chalamet is coltish, handsome, and mischievous as Laurie, and if the elliptical time frame becomes confusing toward the end, the movie exudes exuberant and heartfelt goodwill, building to a satisfying girl-power crescendo that surely would have pleased Alcott herself.

HIS REIGN IN SPAIN

Banderas and Almodovar, team up for rapturous memoir, Pain And Glory

In Pain And Glory, Antonio Banderas plays a famous Spanish director working on a new film project. "Is it a comedy or a tragedy?" someone asks him. Banderas gazes back. "I don't know," he replies, with thoughtful sincerity.

You might as well ask the same question about life, and get the same answer — at least, life as portrayed in all its tenderness, irony, disappointments, and absurdity in this wonderful new movie from Pedro Almodovar. As the filmmaker onscreen looks back on his own life and work in this semi-autobiographical story, so does Almodovar, behind the camera, examine the people and events that shaped and inspired him as a creative artist — and as a human being.

Of course, a filmmaker tells a story about a filmmaker, and you think Fellini and 81/2. But Pain and Glory is less about what sparks artistic imagination than about the ways we find to get through life, day by day. Almodovar offers very little action, but plenty of talk and lingering close-ups, resonant with feeling.

It may not look like much, plot-wise, but the experience of watching this movie unfold onscreen is rapturous.

Etxiandia and Banderas: mellowed animosity

Bandera's stars as Salvador Mallow, a Spanish filmmaker with an international reputation. His most famous movie is being honored on the 30th anniversary of its release, and Salvador is invited to speak at a special screening in Madrid, along with the film's star, Alberto Cresco (Asier Etxeandia).

When Salvador visits Alberto to discuss it, he gets a cool reception, having publicly denounced Alberto's performance back in the day, but time has mellowed their animosity (if not Salvador's opinion), and they decide to do the appearance.

But time has been less benevolent to Salvador in other ways. His body is in decline from a variety of chronic ailments (laid out for the viewer in a series of jazzy graphics of human anatomy, spinal formation, blood vessels, and neuro pathways), to the point that he's in more constant pain than his daily cocktail of painkillers can relieve.

Cruz: salt of the earth

Something he's not yet tried is Alberto's favorite painkiller — heroin — and the few moments of pain-free bliss it provides quickly adds addiction to Salvador's list of maladies.

But this isn't a movie about drugs. Salvador's heroin reveries are another excuse for flashbacks to Salvador's childhood in the countryside with the salt-of-the-earth mother he adored, Jacinta (Penelope Cruz, marvelous, as always). Stoic and subdued by pain for so long that he's been unable to work, Salvador's memories finally uncork his creative drive and he starts writing again.


When Alberto finds and performs a monologue Salvador has written about his youth, an old flame (possibly the love of his life), Federico (Leonardo Sbaraglia), arrives on his doorstep for a brief, bittersweet reunion. And there are some lovely scenes of the elderly Jacinta (longtime Almodovar stalwart Julieta Serrano), living in Salvador's posh flat toward the end of her life, gently confessing to her devoted son her disappointment over some of the choices he's made.

At the heart of it all is Antonio Banderas, whose best movies as a young actor were his Spanish-language collaborations with Almodovar, his mentor, before Hollywood tried to typecast him as a conventional "Latin lover." Reunited with Almodovar in the excellent The Skin I Live In in 2011, Banderas is riveting in every frame of Pain and Glory, not by doing anything showy or actorish, but in his profound and wistful quiet.

Whether he's making a sly, impish remark, or expressing in his eyes alone all that's left unsaid with his former lover or his aging mother, this movie belongs to Banderas. You can't take your eyes off him.

Comedy or tragedy? You can't possibly know from one day to the next while you're living it, Almodovar suggests. At least he has the grace — not to mention the nerve — to keep exploring the question.

FRIENDLY SKIES

Almodóvar turns airborne disaster into frothy comedy in 'I'm So Excited'

Who else but Pedro Almodóvar could take a standard disaster movie premise and turn it into a frothy, candy-colored comedy? But the merry Mexican maestro carries it off with delicious, subversive aplomb in his new film, I'm So Excited, which dares to ask the question: how would you choose to live your last hour of life?

In the Almodóvar universe, the answer involves cocktails, plenty of sex, and a disco beat.

There has always been a fine line between farce and melodrama, in Almodóvar's films, where reckless human passions intersect in unexpected, often ironic ways. But while Excited has one of his more dire set-ups—a commercial airliner bound from Spain to Mexico City experiences equipment failure as the flight crew searches for a place to make an emergency landing—this is a return to pure comedy for the filmmaker.

Cecilia Roth

Sure, sex, drugs, murder, and betrayal figure in the entwining stories that make up the plot, but the mood is light, even boisterous throughout.

Chief Steward Jossera (Javier Cámara), and his First Class cabin crew (Raúl Arévalo  and Carlos Areces) serve as both a bawdy Greek chorus of observers and the eye of the storm, a zany trio mixing vats of mescaline-laced mimosas and kibitzing as the other passengers' stories unfold.

Almodóvar selected his cast mostly from his stock company of recurring players, in what must have been a party for all involved. The fabulous Cecilia Roth makes her seventh appearance with the filmmaker (she was in his very first feature, back in 1980).

Cámara starred as the compassionate orderly in Almodóvar's brilliant Talk To Her.

The dialogue is fast and funny even as the situation deteriorates. In the comic centerpiece, the three stewards perform a perfectly choreographed lip-synch routine to the Pointer Sisters tune that gives the film its title—complete with aerial shots a la Busby Berkeley. (Read more)

Raúl Arévalo,  Carlos Areces and Javier Cámara are SO excited!

MAD LOVE

There are moments when Pedro Almodóvar's new movie, The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) will make you squirm. It has sex and violence—often at the same time—and some very strange relationships, perverse even by Almodóvar standards. In terms of storyline, it's a weird mix of Pygmalion and Frankenstein, with echoes of vintage mad scientist horror movies from the '30s to the '50s. (You could even make a case for this film paying a sort of bizarre homage to my favorite grade-Z '50s horror movie, The Head That Wouldn't Die).

But this is one of those rare movies that gets better and better in retrospect, as the viewer begins to appreciate the scope and intensity of its themes. Very loosely based on the hard-boiled novel, "Tarantula," by the late French author Thierry Jonquet, it becomes, in Almodóvar's expert hands, an outrageous, yet smart and compelling meditation on gender and identity, and how much each depends on the other. Almodóvar asks: what makes us who we are inside? Is it how we look, the surface or skin on the outside? Or is there some unassailable core of identity that determines one's selfhood, no matter what?

These questions come whipped up into a typically lush and spicy Almodóvar cocktail of sex, obsession, gunplay, haunting secrets, merging personas, dubious parentage, and maternal devotion. At the center of it all is Antonio Banderas, making a welcome return to the Spanish auteur's stable of players after a 21-year hiatus.

(Read more)