Top 10 of 2019

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*Click on the ‘Lists & Logs’ tab to see lists from previous years.

This list will be updated each time I see a film from 2019 (world premiere/imdb date) that is better than at least one of the films already on the list.

  1. Uncut Gems (Josh & Benny Safdie)
  2. Liberté (Albert Serra)
  3. The Giverny Document (Single Channel) (Ja’Tovia Gary)
  4. The Plagiarists (Peter Parlow)
  5. I Was at Home, But… (Angela Schanelec)
  6. Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
  7. About Endlessness (Roy Andersson)
  8. Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardennes)
  9. Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream (Frank Beauvais)
  10. Knives Out (Rian Johnson)

 

Polls Top 10 (Eligible titles [will] appear here.) (Note: I now include MUBI’s [and other VOD services’] streaming-only releases on this list.)

  1. Uncut Gems (2019, Josh & Benny Safdie)
  2. Climax (2018, Gaspar Noé)
  3. The Image Book (2018, Jean-Luc Godard)
  4. Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018, Bi Gan)
  5. The Plagiarists (2019, Peter Parlow)
  6. The Wandering Soap Opera (2017, Raúl Ruiz & Valeria Sarmiento)
  7. High Life (2018, Claire Denis)
  8. Our Time (2018, Carlos Reygadas)
  9. Black Mother (2018, Khalik Allah)
  10. Knives Out (2019, Rian Johnson)

 

My Top 10 Discoveries During 2019 (for first-time viewings of films made before 2000)

  1. Jackie Brown (1997, Quentin Tarantino)
  2. After Hours (1985, Martin Scorsese)
  3. Le Trou (1960, Jacques Becker)
  4. Morocco (1930, Josef von Sternberg)
  5. New York, New York (1977, Martin Scorsese)
  6. Out of the Present (1997, Andrei Ujică)
  7. Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Howard Hawks)
  8. The Eighties (1983, Chantal Akerman)
  9. Other Men’s Women (1931, William A. Wellman)
  10. Dishonored (1931, Josef von Sternberg)

 

Other 2019 films I’ve seen

  • Joan of Arc (Bruno Dumont) – 6.6
  • The Traitor (Marco Bellocchio) – 6.6
  • Atlantis (Valentyn Vasyanovych) – 6.6
  • Bird Island (Sergio da Costa & Maya Kosa) – 6.5
  • Gemini Man (Ang Lee) – 6.5
  • SaF05 (Charlotte Prodger) ~ 6.5
  • State Funeral (Sergei Loznitsa) – 6.5
  • Lux Æterna (Gaspar Noé) – 6.5
  • Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach) – 6.5
  • Tommaso (Abel Ferrara) – 6.5
  • Us (Jordan Peele) – 6.5
  • Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles) – 6.4
  • Light from Light (Paul Harrill) – 6.4
  • Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another (Jessica Sarah Rinland) – 6.4
  • Light of My Life (Casey Affleck) – 6.4
  • Parasite (Bong Joon-ho) – 6.4
  • A Voluntary Year (Ulrich Köhler & Henner Winckler) – 6.3
  • My Mexican Bretzel (Nuria Giménez) – 6.3
  • Vitalina Varela (Pedro Costa) – 6.3
  • The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg) – 6.3
  • MS Slavic 7 (Sofia Bohdanowicz & Deragh Campbell) ~ 6.2
  • A White, White Day (Hlynur Pálmason) – 6.2
  • Sibyl (Justine Triet) – 6.2
  • Collective (Alexander Nanau) – 6.2
  • Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Ōbayashi) – 6.2
  • Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov) – 6.2
  • Synonyms (Nadav Lapid) – 6.1
  • White Lie (Calvin Thomas & Yonah Lewis) – 6.1
  • The Dead Don’t Die (Jim Jarmusch) – 6.1
  • First Love (Takashi Miike) – 6.0
  • The Plastic House (Allison Chhorn) – 6.0
  • Anne at 13,000 Feet. (Kazik Radwanski) – 6.0
  • Joker (Todd Phillips) – 5.9
  • Where’d You Go, Bernadette (Richard Linklater) – 5.9
  • Heimat is a Space in Time (Thomas Heise) – 5.9
  • Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino) – 5.9
  • Little Joe (Jessica Hausner) – 5.9
  • Native Son (Rashid Johnson) – 5.9
  • The Hottest August (Brett Story) – 5.9
  • My Skin, Luminous (Gabino Rodríguez & Nicolas Pereda) – 5.8
  • Years of Construction (Heinz Emigholz) – 5.8
  • A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick) – 5.8
  • Living and Knowing You’re Alive (Alain Cavalier) – 5.8
  • To the Ends of the Earth (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) – 5.7
  • Family Romance, LLC. (Werner Herzog) – 5.7
  • A Rainy Day in New York (Woody Allen) – 5.7
  • Fire Will Come (Oliver Laxe) – 5.7
  • The Laundromat (Steven Soderbergh) – 5.7
  • Belonging (Burak Çevik) – 5.6
  • Ghost Tropic (Bas Devos) – 5.6
  • End of the Century (Lucio Castro) – 5.6
  • Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda) – 5.6
  • So Pretty (Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli) – 5.6
  • Zeus Machine. The Invincible (Nadia Ranocchi & David Zamagni) – 5.6
  • The Assistant (Kitty Green) – 5.5
  • Zombi Child (Bertrand Bonello) – 5.5
  • The Halt (Lav Diaz) – 5.5
  • Rocks (Sarah Gavron) – 5.5
  • Domino (Brian De Palma) – 5.5
  • Glass (M. Night Shyamalan) – 5.5
  • On a Magical Night (Christophe Honoré) – 5.5
  • Martin Eden (Pietro Marcello) – 5.4
  • The Vast of Night (Andrew Patterson) – 5.4
  • Atlantics (Mati Diop) – 5.4
  • Sunrise/Sunset (Jong Ougie Pak) – 5.4
  • The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (Karim Aïnouz) – 5.4
  • Oh Mercy (Arnaud Desplechin) – 5.4
  • The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers & Kathleen Hepburn) – 5.4
  • Ridge (John Skoog) – 5.4
  • Wilcox (Denis Côté) – 5.4
  • The Irishman (Martin Scorsese) – 5.3
  • Darks Waters (Todd Haynes) – 5.3
  • Three Summers (Sandra Kogut) – 5.3
  • The Whistlers (Corneliu Porumboiu) – 5.3
  • American Factory (Julia Reichert & Steven Bognar) – 5.3
  • The Truth (Hirokazu Kore-eda) – 5.3
  • A Girl Missing (Koji Fukada) – 5.2
  • Tlamess (Ala Eddine Slim) – 5.2
  • 143 Sahara Street (Hassen Ferhani) – 5.2
  • For the Money (Alejo Moguillansky) – 5.2
  • Krabi, 2562 (Ben Rivers & Anocha Suwichakornpong) – 5.2
  • Bull (Annie Silverstein) – 5.2
  • My Zoe (Julie Delpy) – 5.1
  • Seven Years in May (Affonso Uchoa) – 5.1
  • A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller) – 5.1
  • Dogs Don’t Wear Pants (Jukka-Pekka Valkeapää) – 5.1
  • Devil Between the Legs (Arturo Ripstein) – 5.1
  • Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodóvar) – 5.1
  • Sea of Lost Time (Gurvinder Singh) – 5.1
  • Alita: Battle Angel (Robert Rodriguez) – 5.1
  • That Cloud Never Left (Yashaswini Raghunandan) – 5.1
  • Cunningham (Alla Kovgan) – 5.0
  • Ouvertures (Louis Henderson & Olivier Marboeuf) – 5.0
  • Saturday Fiction (Lou Ye) – 5.0
  • I Lost My Body (Jérémy Clapin) – 5.0
  • High Flying Bird (Steven Soderbergh) – 4.9
  • Matthias and Maxime (Xavier Dolan) – 4.9
  • The Edge of Democracy (Petra Costa) – 4.9
  • Les Misérables (Ladj Ly) – 4.9
  • It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman) – 4.8
  • Proxima (Alice Winocour) – 4.8
  • Mektoub, My Love: Intermezzo (Abdellatif Kechiche) – 4.7
  • Midsommar (Ari Aster) – 4.7
  • Ema (Pablo Larraín) – 4.7
  • The Fever (Maya Da-Rin) – 4.6
  • The Moneychanger (Federico Veiroj) – 4.5
  • Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux) – 4.5
  • Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Celine Sciamma) – 4.4
  • The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers) – 4.4
  • Frankie (Ira Sachs) – 4.3
  • Sorry We Missed You (Ken Loach) – 4.3
  • The Wild Goose Lake (Diao Yinan) – 4.3
  • Movements of a Nearby Mountain (Sebastian Brameshuber) – 4.2
  • Wasp Network (Olivier Assayas) – 4.2
  • The Twentieth Century (Matthew Rankin) – 4.1
  • Un Film Dramatique (Éric Baudelaire) – 4.1
  • Summer in Changsha (Zu Feng) – 4.1
  • Ad Astra (James Gray) – 4.1
  • Endless Night (Eloy Enciso) – 4.0
  • The El Duce Tapes (Rodney Ascher & David Lawrence) – 4.0
  • Little Women (Greta Gerwig) – 3.9
  • Port Authority (Danielle Lessovitz) – 3.9
  • Wet Season (Anthony Chen) – 3.9
  • Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) – 3.7
  • The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino) – 3.0
  • Blood Quantum (Jeff Barnaby) – 2.9
  • The Beach Bum (Harmony Korine) – 2.4