I referred to last year as a cracker year. So if last year was a Double Happy, this year’s a Thunderbolt! My fellow Gen-X New Zealanders will know what I mean.
I’m very happy that I managed to review all of the movies that really tickled my fancy. However, as we hit the very end of the year there were a few movies released during the hectic festive season which I didn’t get to seeing in the cinema, or even the time to watch on the small screen.
2019 was definitely the first proper year of streaming content being considered alongside the cinema experience. The two mini-series that stood out head and shoulders for me were Nicolas Winding Refn’s hugely indulgent, but utterly mesmerising Too Old To Die Young (a second season was intended, but Refn wasn’t given the green light, so it pretty much becomes a stand-alone 10-episode movie). The other much more concise, superbly written, acted, and directed, was the story of Fosse/Verdon, with Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams delivering career performances. I’m sure Chernobyl would’ve been in my top three, but alas, it continues to elude me …
It was a year of fabulous documentaries too; Friedkin Uncut, Memory: The Origins Of Alien, Fuck You All: The Uwe Boll Story, What She Said: The Art Of Pauline Kael, Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, Underground Inc: The Rise & Fall Of Alternative Rock, and the long lost Aretha Franklin concert film, Amazing Grace. But one extraordinary piece of restoration and editing features in my top three for the year …
As per usual, the darker colours illuminated my predilections and aesthetics. Black comedies were strong this year, as was smaller budget independent filmmaking, and women dominated my favourite performances.
For a second time this decade a vampire flick climbed out on top. But to be honest, it was hard ranking the top five, they were all worthy of my top spot.
So, here we go, my twenty favourite movies released in Australia during 2019, plus honourable mentions.
BLISS
Bliss is one of the most fierce horror movies dealing with bloodlust I’ve seen in many moons. A study of desperation and addiction, of the inexorable bind of emotional fragility and creative genius, channeled as a phantasmagorical descent into madness, gritty and filthy, drenched and sodden with sweat and blood. A blistering performance from Dora Madison who utterly owns her character, foul-mouthed and sassy, vulnerable and alone, itching, scratching, tearing, gouging, gulping blood, screaming for life. Bliss is sexy and uninhibited, yet shackled and depraved. It is a perfect little nightmare for those that seek pure horror cinema of an unbridled, transgressive nature.
BRAID
Delving deep into the realms of fantasy and illusion from narratives gone by, writer/director Mitzi Peirone has fashioned an exquisite-looking study of fractured identities, unreliable memories, and desperate remedies, a danse macabre. Indeed, an oneirdynia of voluptuous abandon and violent repercussion told with a masterful control of the elements, a la 60s and 70s cinema; the paranoia/madness of Repulsion and The Tenant, the deception and duplicity of The Ballad of Tam Lin, the exotic allure and sensuality of Daughters of Darkness, the Gothic textures and unhinged logic of Suspiria and Inferno, the chaos and fetishism of Daisies. It’s a melting pot of cinema magic.
APOLLO 11
Seriously, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more thrilling movie from this year. That director Todd Miller has made a documentary that we all know the ending of, yet operates and resonates more effectively than most dramas or thrillers is a brilliant achievement. Much of this is due to the judicious and expert editing, but also the punctuation of Matt Morton’s fantastic electronic and percussive score, and, of course, that beautifully restored archival film footage. Apollo 11 is the perfect time capsule, the ultimate date stamp.
JOKER
Joker is an extraordinary film, a powerful and compelling drama, a nightmare movie for the now and here. Superbly filmed, with Joaquin Phoenix delivering a career performance, director Todd Phillips stays close to the character, he’s in almost every scene, we watch him brood and lurk, we watch him fidget and slow dance, oh yes, the dancing. It’s creepy and morbidly mesmerising, like a train wreck in slow motion. Joker is confronting and disturbing, yet there’s the darkest kernel of comedy lurking in the bowels, like a kidney stone.
ALICE
Alice is a truly wonderful film. An amazing example of a taut screenplay that doesn’t feel over-written, perfectly cast and given excellent direction, with production values that fit like hand in glove. An absolutely brilliant performance from Piponnier who totally owns the movie. But superb work from Boreham, who provides a wonderful sassiness, and perfect contrast to Alice’s rigidity and earnestness. Alice is the kind of narrative that could easily have felt like a play being filmed, but never once suffers from that kind of staged unreality. In fact, there is a real sense of docu-drama to the film.
FRANCES FERGUSON
In what is probably my favourite performance for the year, Kaley Wheless plays the titular character in this dry-as-a-bone satire on small-town prejudice and disaffection. Indie director Bob Byington has fashioned a fascinating and very funny narrative, developed with Wheless, and penned by Scott King. The cast are uniformly excellent, but it’s Wheless and her subtle, almost deadpan reactions to everything that cements this film into something special. I didn’t want it to end, I loved peering into this quirky window, and I was so keen to keep following Frans’ curious journey through her home life, the school, court, prison, community service, group therapy sessions, and the immediate beyond.
ANIMALS
Sophie Hyde’s adaptation of the novel by Emma Jane Unsworth is a beautiful slice of life. The resemblance to Withnail and I can’t be ignored, but from a female perspective. The central performance from Holliday Grainger is terrific, and one of my faves for the year, but all the acting is top notch, and the dialogue bristles with loose precision. A movie that captures those delicate moments between the moments, that reckless confidence and awkward naivety that follows some of us well into adulthood.
GREENER GRASS
Imagine if David Lynch and John Waters had got stoned and written and directed a mash-up of Square Pegs and Soap. This is a comedy of manners painted in cartoon-rich pastels, yet the tongue in cheek is black as soot. It’s a satire sharper than a bread knife, a parody of prime time domesticity, informercials, and self-help books. It’s an Acquired Taste, but joint writers/directors/stars Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Luebbe have created an absurdist masterpiece that skilfully eviscerates with astute comic chutzpah the trappings that have made their daytime/primetime shows the butt of the joke over and over.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, COLIN BURSTEAD
Ben Wheatley is one of my favourite contemporary directors. With his latest he employs the darkly humorous hand to great effect, taking a fantastic ensemble cast and letting them have a right old go at each other. You could refer to this as Festen In England, as it takes place on the year’s most anticipated let’s-get-plastered-day-and-night, almost entirely in one location, and features the extended relations in full attack and defence mode. Terrific, very funny stuff.
A GOOD WOMAN IS HARD TO FIND
One of those small, character-driven films. Superbly written and directed, with stand-out performances from Sarah Bolger and Andrew Simpson, director Abner Pastoll doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead plays the genre tropes with consummate skill and still bringing a fresh edge. With Scorsese-calibre violence, and a taut level of suspense, there hasn’t been a crime drama/thriller flick this confident, resonant, and dark since Dead Man’s Shoes.
VOX LUX
For his second feature actor-turned-director Corbet delivers an enigmatic, curious fictional biopic that works like an adaptation of a non-existent novel. It’s a compelling, intriguing tale of struggle and perseverance, of human frailty, and familial bonds. The movie has cult favourite written all over it, from its intense melodrama, ramblings, and wayward angst, through to its extended concert performance at movie’s end, and Natalie Portman delivers yet another career performance.
TONE-DEAF
Writer/director Richard Bates Jr returns with his fourth feature, and it’s another doozy. The dark comedic elements are firmly in place, as is the deliberately over-the-top use of sound design and some truly jarring imagery. This is one hell of a satire on generational dissatisfaction. With his striking visual flair, rebel attitude to conventions, a gift for witty dialogue, and penchant for shock imagery Bates keeps things in check for awhile, allowing his two leading actors to really work their magic.
THUNDER ROAD
One of the year’s true delights, essential viewing for anyone who has struggled with grief, struggled with the role of parent and provider, struggled with recognition, struggled with connection to those they love, and those they might have lost. Struggled with always having to put on the happy face. Thunder Road will provide the perfect emotional release. Writer/director/star Jim Cummings’s take on life’s wee ironies, the delicacies of maintaining relationships, his insightful window into the soul is very impressive. Jim Arnaud is one of the most complex and rewarding characters I’ve seen in a long while; awkward and at times pathetic, but tenacious, compassionate, and utterly endearing.
ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD
Hollywood is Tarantino’s most relaxed movie since Jackie Brown, and in many ways, it’s his most endearing, most personable, probably his funniest. Pitt and DiCaprio give terrific performances, a natural chemistry, with DiCaprio’s improvised meltdown in his studio trailer an hilarious highlight. It’s a languid, incidental ride through vintage Hollywood, seen through rose-coloured glasses, with all the trimmings and trappings. Reckon it’ll age like a fine tequila.
ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
One of the surprises of the year, in terms of blockbuster movies. James Cameron’s other pet project was eventually put in the hands of director Robert Rodriguez, who did a sterling job at merging the intense visceral action and emotional core of this stunningly designed and executed cyberpunk Manga adaptation. Darker in tone, and much more violent than audiences were anticipating, with a great central performance - albeit mostly voice - from young Rosa Salazar. Solid support cast too. Fingers and toes crossed they make the hugely anticipated sequel.
DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE
Dragged Across Concrete is not just about police brutality, racism and sexism also rear their nasty heads. The insidiousness of prejudice, the mechanics of corrupt masculinity and bravado. This is a world seemingly without hope, and director Craig S. Zahler relishes the darkness before the dawn. But what makes the film so much more interesting than most of the other crime thrillers that attempt similar narratives is Zahler injects a palpable sense of menace and impending doom, right from the beginning, and he sustains that tension, an implicit violence, through the course of the movie, releasing it a few times in sudden, shocking punctuations of explicit violence.
THE BEACH BUM
Harmony Korine’s latest indulgence feels like it dated his previous flick, Spring Breakers. It has a similarly lush and charismatic feel. The cinema verité stylistic he’s employed on all his films is in firm position here. There’s no plot, it’s all fabricated, but much of it feels like a documentary. Featuring a huge cast of support players in small roles, I was totally disarmed and completely immersed. French cinematographer extraordinaire Benoît Debire has captured Matt McConaughy’s Moondog and company’s antics in stunning light and colour, while editor Douglas Crise would’ve had his work cut out for him, and he does a fabulous job.
COME TO DADDY
Come to Daddy feels pulled from the pages of an unknown pulpy paperback fished out at a garage sale and savoured like rare and precious booty. Come To Daddy is more than just a strange tale of a boy and his dad; it’s an emotionally resonant portrait of loneliness and the anxiety of confrontation. It’s the age-old dilemma of trying to reconnect with the past, picking the scabs off old wounds. It’s also about the fear of the unknown. It delicately balances a sense of mystery and menace with the shackles of crime and punishment. It’s a gloriously unctuous stew, as compelling in its poignancy as it is fetid in its detail.
HOMEWRECKER
This is a blackly comic pearler. The emphasis is on the contrasting personalities, a delicate, finely-tuned character study at play, and one of those delicious ones that descends into ugly territory indeed, yet still remains a comedy at dark heart. Whilst a nod to the shenanigans of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it’s also lifts from the psycho-drama and thrills of movies such as Single White Female and Fatal Attraction. A disquieting dig at fidelity and loneliness, sporting a cracker of a script, which feels partially improvised. Alex Essoe and Precious Chong deliver terrific performances. The escalation is a mischievous joy to watch.
ALBANIAN GANGSTER
Only his second feature, but Matthew A. Brown has the command of a seasoned filmmaker. Like his debut, Julia, Albanian Gangster is another powerful hybrid; part brooding character study, part slow-burn, pared-back thriller, and it rewards through its dramatic intensity, its ugly truthfulness; that gangland honour is steeped in brutal vengeance, always and forever. Combined with a mostly non-professional cast, the movie has a strong sense of realism. It’s what lifts the movie into something that feels authentic, that resonates, as if you’re watching a gripping documentary, rather than a crime drama.
Honourable mentions: Border, Arctic, Destroyer, Werewolf, Parasite, Ad Astra, Knives Out, Dogs Don’t Wear Pants, The House That Jack Built.
And special nod to a couple of stand out family movie sequels: The LEGO Movie: The Second Part and Toy Story 4.