Best Movies of 2019 so far

[Chris Knipp]

Yes, you are absolutely right. A voiceover has to be done by a filmmaker who knows what she is doing. But that goes for everything, doesn't it? In the French New Wave, the voiceovers are a way of establishing a mood and a style, a chatty, intimate feeling. When they're just filling in explanation ("telling" instead of "showing) that is indeed lazy and - gives voiceovers a bad name! But they can be fine, and they have seemed to be coming back lately, being used by good filmmakers. Here is a list I just found (cheating, as usual) of good narrators of films:

Joe Gillis - SUNSET BULEVARD
Oh Dae-su - OLDBOY
Narrator - THE ROYAL TENEBAUMS
The Narrator - FIGHT CLUB
Travis Bickle - TAXI DRIVERS
Joel Barish - ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND

In the Nouvelle Vague the "voix-off" as they call it provides an autobiographical tone sometimes, and also has a literary effect. Two notable examples: Francois Truffaut's JULES ET JIM and Jean-Luc Godard and LE PETIT SOLDAT. Other flms with voiceovers (a more random, popular list):

A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (Kubrick)
BARRY LYNDON (Kubrick)
FOREST GUMP (Zemeckis)
GOODFELLAS (Scorsese)
CASINO (Scorsese)
APOCALPUYSE NOW (Coppola - three narrators)
AMELIE Jeuneet)
AMERICAN BEAUTY (Mendes)

Everything by Terrence Malick - you may get sick of it there, or feel he's entering into self-parody. But at his best, it's essential to the magical mood he weaves.

And a recent French film I like a lot that consciously evokes the Nouvelle Vague is Louis Garrel's A FAITHFUL MAN (L'HOMMME FIDÈLE), which has three different "voix-off" narrators, Abel (Garrel), Eve (Lily-Rose Depp) and Marianne (Laetitia Casta). The more the merrier! This way the film's not dominated by a single point of view.

[oscar jubis]

The experience of cinema changed a lot since my boyhood in the 60s and 70s(obvious opening line). Television was never as good as the best films and the best films were never half as good when broadcast in crudely edited, censored chunks and watched on crappy sets. It was easy to figure out what was released and when. It was easy to pretend one had seen the films that count, the ones that may have a claim to a place on any list of, say, the ten best. We watched movies in one theatrical sitting, in public, a social event that begins and ends at predictable times. If you missed something, and you always overlook something from the hyperexpressive, meaning-sprouting, audiovisual products of the cinema, then you had to wait until the next show and buy another ticket; no click-quick reprise; no reliving the moment. For me, the life changing technology was not the vhs in the late 70s but the dvd in the late 1990s, when I began to watch movies at home.

In the 2000s, I started to watch movies at home in better sets (while still going to theaters a couple times a week). I also studied cinema in graduate school, which deepened my interest in both film history and history through film. I started to work at the school's art cinema which gave me access to optimal projection. Now, about half the films I watch are films from the past 2-3 years, and the other half are older films, including silents. It takes me a while to watch enough films from a given year to offer a Top 10 list. I give these movies a lot of thought. I like to watch anything I list more than once, but this hasn't happened in many cases. I also have a longer list of the best 25 from the rest of the 2010s. Did I post it? Where would one do that? I am also motivated by the thought that there is so much production that some of the films one loves really need promotion in order not to be completely ignored or certainly under appreciated.

BEST CINEMA OF 2019

3 FACES
AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL
THE BEACH BUM
THE IMAGE BOOK
MARRIAGE STORY
LA FLOR
LITTLE WOMEN
THE SOUVENIR
SUNSET
TRANSIT

[tabuno]

oscar jubis has class. Talk about credible. He he writes he has substance behind it.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks Tab; I enjoyed reading your post about your best personal films, as you well put it. My aim is to hope that anyone reading this thread decides to watch a movie from my list of 10. Nonetheless, there is that "personal" aspect that you recognize that almost demands that I acknowledge that some will find La Flor way too long and inconclusive, The Image Book too ugly and intellectual, and The Beach Bum too silly and grotesque. I'm debating how to characterize the other films on my list. I guess someone might called them "middlebrow" or "middle-class"; certainly the other 7 films would and have, done better at "art cinemas" like the one where I work, or used to work.

So getting back to basics: I am writing because I keep running into films that are deserving of the kind of attention great films used to get back in my boyhood in the 60s and 70s. However, nowadays there is so much "content" available, on so many different platforms, in several media, that it's easier for great achievements to go practically ignored. So I take the opportunity to promote my 3 best personal films of 2018: The Other Side of the Wind, Zama, and A Bread Factory which has very wide appeal in my opinion, perhaps because it's American, and it has famous actors like Tyne Daly.

[Chris Knipp]

As you know, I spend most (but not all!) of my time watching newer films.

I'm glad that Joanna Hogg's THE SOUVENIR got wide US distribution and I learned about it and her and saw it on the big screen, then watched her three earlier films online.It looks like a forgot to see THE BEACH BUM. Maybe you will inspire me to watch it. I did see SPRING BREAKERS and put it in a list of favorites of hat year. I would not want to watch THE IMAGE BOOK. I have had my fill of late Godard at Lincoln Center in several NYFFs.

I didn't like SUNSET, though it's very interesting, an interesting failure. Strange. I saw it at the London FF with a friend. He agreed. SUN OF SAUL was a hard act to follow. TRANSIT I liked, also LITTLE WOMEN. MARRIAGE STORY is officially my favorite film of the year, simply because it gave me the most pleasure to watch.

I saw AN ELEPHANT SITTING STILL in ND/NF. I remember the experience. I also remember that Ed Lachman came, who had seen it in a European festival and couldn't wait to see it again, which impressed me. Working on movies all the time, he's still so enthusiastic about them. It's inspiring. I don't remember it as pleasurable but I remember it.

I had free online access to LA FLOR but I didn't get round to it. Maybe you should warn people that it is 13 and a half hours long. You talk about yourself, but you don't talk about these films. I didn't either, about my list, which is a shame. I didn't put as much into my list-making this year.

As for formats. Surely the life-changing format is to see a movie in a theater, with an attentive audience, and I did so decades before you. I would give VHS the edge over DVD's because with my best VCR, I could examine films frame-by-frame and backwards and forwards. Now the format that's dominant is online screening, Vimeo, and being sent so many screeners with links and passwords, which is so easy, or being to watch films instantly as one can watch great TV series (there was classy TV in the Fifties, by the way; it went downhill after that) like Mad Men or Babylon Berlin or The Crown or Succession or you name it, instantly online. But what we miss now, I do anyway, is the quality projection you speak of. My greatest experiences, but there have been many, have been watching all the movies I've seen at Lincoln Center at the Walter Reade Theater. The last one I saw was UNE FILLE FACILE/AN EASY GIRL in the Rendez-Vous in the Walter Reade Theater Thursday, March 12, when they told us afterward in the lobby that the rest of the series had been cancelled due to the pandemic.

I've seen MARRIAGE STORY, LITTLE WOMEN, THE SOUVENIR, AND TRANSIT twice.

[Chris Knipp]

I enjoyed reading tabuno's list of personal favorites too and his descriptions of them.

[oscar jubis]

One thing that interests me is how the movie experience has changed. It's easy for me to watch movies in a theater because I run one; and for me, Blu-rays are tax-exempted work tools. However, I'm interested in the film experience of someone not in my unique circumstances, and that means, as you say, online streaming. Now that I will be doing all my teaching online, at least in Summer and Fall semesters, I am thinking more seriously about how cinema changed ...is changing....as a result of changes in exhibition and reception, as a response to viewing in smaller screens by people who may regard watching as one task out of multiple, simultaneous tasks such as making a cup of coffee and monitoring text messages. Does the cinema seem smaller and more disposable in this era of plenty when cinema is, for a significant number of people, a solitary activity?

I did "talk about these films" a little. I said that I tend to divide the films I love that were released in 2019 into two groups. Films that "my audience" at the cinema watched or that I would program for them (an audience very similar to the average audience at art cinemas) and films I estimate this audience would not enjoy. I think it's interesting that the 3 of my Top 10 that I place in the latter category are the 3 you have not seen. However, The Image Book, La Flor, and The Beach Bum are to be found in the lists from Film Comment, etc., so that tells me others also find great value in them.
(What about "3 Faces"? IMdb gives a 2019 release date so I included it in the 2019 list. I'll have to check the 2018 version of this thread and see if it was listed for that year.) So I used two adjectives each to warn readers about their likely responses to these 3 movies. I think the other 7 movies I listed are the 7 movies I have watched that I would generally recommend and that is probably the biggest reason to write a post about movies: to encourage others to appreciate a few movies one regards as special achievements.

So, that's where my head is right now. I'm glad you have so much time to dedicate to cinema and to share what you learn with me and everyone else here and in other places. It's great you have been able to watch some of the best movies twice. This British film The Souvenir has a second part(let us know if you hear of a released date Chris) I had forgotten or did not know, when I watched it, the habit hidden by the love interest of the film student protagonist. This ignorance is important because the audience knows exactly and only what the protagonist knows, in this film, from beginning to end. What the viewer knows, when, and how this compares with what different characters know or don't know is often a most important narrative aspect (and not only in cinema, of course). Some of my favorite films provided restricted or partial knowledge of plot events and character traits. I think a great deal of the enjoyment of narrative, and most films we love are narratives, is in what the viewer feels and thinks about not knowing something we know is there to know. The grave and great emotional impact of The Souvenir on me derives from finding out two major revelations at the same moment as the protagonist and feeling this intimacy with her.

[oscar jubis]

One claim I brought up in the previous post involves the relationship between technological developments in terms of access, exhibition, and reception of movies and the movies themselves, their production or creation, the filmmaking. I wonder what readers think about the received wisdom (fact?) that the reduction in average shot length in feature films since the 1980s was mostly a response to the editing rhythms of music videos me and my MTV-addicted college friends devoured in that decade. Is there any doubt that the increase in fantasy films (or films involving fantasy sequences) has something to do with how special effects became easier and cheaper to produce in the digital era? Do you doubt that the smaller size of the screen in which people watch films has something to do with the popularity of shots in which only one person is prominent? The camera got closer because the screen got smaller, to get to the point. Is this of interest to our readership?