- Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller)
Composed out of unseen, 70mm archive footage, the experience of the 1969 moon landing is triumphantly restaged by documentarian Todd Miller. It is one of the most spectacular films of the year, a highly accomplished tribute to what collective, human passion can achieve.
- Varda by Agnès (Agnès Varda)
Varda by Agnès is maybe the smallest film on my list, whilst also the farewell salute of its director, Agnès Varda, who passed away shortly after its release. Comparable to its sibling, cine-autobiography The Beaches of Agnès (2008), her guided reflections are presented in a playful bricolage.
- Ad Astra (James Gray)
If the genre of science fiction repeatedly finds itself looking per aspera ad astra (“through hardships to the stars”), director James Gray returns the gaze, turning instead to the onlooker themselves. Ad Astra knowingly plays into the traditions and grammar of space opera, its quiet, poetic ambition looking to rival the grandeur of 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
- The Souvenir (Joanna Hogg)
Joanna Hogg crafts a detailed self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, an autobiographical retelling of amour fou, one that painfully comes apart with her own coming of age. The Souvenir also features an arresting, central duet from its two leads, Julie (Honour Swinton Byrne) and Anthony (Tom Burke).
- Rojo (Benjamín Naishtat)
Quietly invoking the small-town farces of the Coen Brothers, the cover-up of one man’s disappearance speaks to a wider, moral unravelling amongst pre-coup, 1970s Argentina. Rojo paints a society with bloody colours.
- 1917 (Sam Mendes)
1917 is a welcome comeback for its director, Sam Mendes, whose recent contributions to the James Bond franchise neutered any creative reach. Together with his regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, the two craft an immersive, single-take quest in the tradition of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) and Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972).
- If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk resumes the visions of his 2018, sophomore feature, Moonlight, a companion study in passion and longing. Jenkins’ work is remarkable for its aural landscape, texturing Nicholas Britell’s cello-laden score with soft, whispered voiceovers. A callback to the romantic odes of Wong Kar-wai and Douglas Sirk.
- Sunset (Lázló Nemes)
László Nemes’ follow-up to his Oscar-acclaimed debut, Son of Saul (2015), traffics the incendiary events preceding WW1. It is an otherworldly picture, one that captures the final, nightmarish scenes before the toppling of a society.
- Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach)
Marriage Story borrows from the Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979) crises of adults fighting a civil war over their marriage. Tuning elements of his filmography, Baumbach is again concerned with familial ties and the polished, New Yorker-esque shine of everyday people. Randy Newman’s animated soundtrack lends softness to the remains of the day.
- High Life (Claire Denis)
In a recent interview, Claire Denis recalled how on the set of Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) she endangered her life wading the Rio Grande: “I am a good swimmer but the [river] is much stronger than I am.” High Life engages with a similar, undaunted current, an elliptical space tale of convict youths and their bruising, scientific harvest.
- Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)
Commenting on The Smiths song ‘There Is A Light That Never Goes Out’, Russell Brand imagined Morrisey’s romantic ode as a tragedy of the boy staring at his bedroom ceiling, alone and uncertain. Eighth Grade continues such a narrative, adolescent struggles projected into the contemporary age of social media. One of the most soulful and endearing debuts of this year.
- The Irishman (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s The Irishman completes a trilogy of epic, decade-spanning works, beginning with Goodfellas (1990) and followed by Casino (1995). Unlike the previous two, The Irishman is a richer piece of cinema, working confidently within the style and conventions that Scorsese and his crew have refined throughout a lifetime.
- Border (Ali Abbasi)
Border is a post-Edenic pastoral. Tina (Eva Melander), a border officer in the Swedish countryside, belongs to an unseen subspecies, a modern Prometheus who is forced to reconsider her existence with the appearance of a stranger. Cronenbergian body-horror is married to an intelligent study of what it means to be an outsider.
- Monos (Alejandro Landes)
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies is lifted into the remote, Colombian mountainscape as a commune of teenage guerrillas awaits their mission above the clouds. Monos is an evident successor to the pandemoniums of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski (notably Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)), telling a story of visual and psychological complexity.
- Burning (Chang-dong Lee)
In the city of Paju, South Korea, a triangle of relations is formed – unemployed youth Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in), his schoolfriend, Hae-mi (Jeon Jong-seo), and the wolfish, Gatsby-esque figure of Ben (Steven Yeung). One day, Ben admits a private habit of pyromania, that every two months he burns down a greenhouse for “play”. Such ambiguities lie at the core of Lee’s patient thriller, unanswered questions that surround what it means to hold yourself responsible for your own violence.
