26. Good Boys – Kids + cuss words + Stephen Merchant playing a pervert = lots of laughs

25. The Art of Self-Defense – This dead-pan, pitch-black “comedy” is sort of like if Wes Anderson made Fight Club.

24. Brittany Runs a Marathon – Jillian Bell is usually one of the best parts of any movie she’s in. In Brittany Runs a Marathon she finally gets to play the lead, as a woman named Brittany who tries to get her life together by, well, running a marathon.

23. Us – I loved Us, and thought it was better than Jordan Peele’s breakout/debut hit Get Out, right up until the finale’s nonsensical explanation for all that had occurred prior. Even so, the movie’s still loaded with great imagery and set pieces, and a superb performance by Lupita Nyong’o.

22. Bombshell – A slick, sharp, tightly scripted, super icky exposé of the toxic workplace that was (is?) Fox News.

21. John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum – I was surprised and delighted to see John Wick‘s third chapter more than make up for the dud (in my mind) that was John Wick 2. A fight in an antique knife store? Check. A skirmish in some stables where guys get their heads kicked in by horses? Yep. How about an intricately choreographed battle with a couple of super dogs? Oh yeah, it’s got that, too, and then some.

20. Peanut Butter Falcon – Every frame of this immensely enjoyable movie – which is about two men on the lamb, one of who has Down syndrome and has escaped from a care facility because he wants to be a pro wrestler – pulses with an enormous heart. Plus, it’s got cameos by Jake “The Snake” Roberts and Mick Foley.

19. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World – The hidden world (i.e., the land of the dragons) sequence in this third installment of the How to Train Your Dragon franchise may just be the single most beautiful sequence – animated or otherwise – I watched this year. Toothless the Night Fury continues to be one of the most perfectly designed creations.

18. Honeyland – The serene and simple existence of a solitary bee keeper, who lives with her invalid mother in a rustic mountain village in the Balkans, is upended when a nomadic family moves in next door. This might not sound like the most compelling of stories, but as this remarkable documentary proves, there really is nothing more dramatic than real life.

17. Ford v Ferrari – Big-budget, technically astounding, wide-screen Hollywood filmmaking in which Matt Damon and Christian Bale are both clearly having a ball.

16. Knives Out – Rian Johnson serves up a delicious, twisty whodunit. Even Daniel Craig seems to be enjoying himself, possibly because he got to say maybe the best line of 2019, when he refers to one character as “the Nazi child masturbating in the bathroom.”

15. Dolemite Is My Name – Eddie Murphy is probably one of the top five most charismatic movie stars ever (in my lifetime, at least). Unfortunately, he’s been in the cinematic doldrums for almost 20 years. With Dolemite Is My Name, however, he’s finally back in full-force, in a role that takes full advantage of his ineffable energy and charm.

14. Toy Story 4 – Fourth movies in a franchise are not supposed to be good, let alone great. And yet, much to my delight and surprise, that’s exactly how I’d categorize this beautifully melancholic, gorgeously animated third Toy Story sequel. The always stellar Pixar character development is also on point with Tony Hale’s Forky and Keanu Reeves’s Duke Caboom.

13. Wild Rose – Just like the country music the titular down-on-her-luck Glaswegian lead character dreams of singing in Nashville, every scene of the Rocky-like Wild Rose throbs with raw, unapologetically intense emotion.

12. Queen & Slim – A black couple on an unsuccessful first date kill a racist white cop in self defense, so begins this expertly directed, smartly written contemporary Thelma & Louise-esque tale of (eventual) lovers on the run.

11. The Last Black Man in San Francisco – Ostensibly, this is about a black man who’s trying to reclaim his beautiful family house in gentrified San Francisco. This description, however, doesn’t come close to capturing this sui generis debut from writer/director Joe Talbot.

10. Dragged Across Concrete – With this tale of two suspended cops (played by Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn) who decide to rob some criminals, S. Craig Zoller confirms that he’s currently the master purveyor of gritty, grisly, bloody pulp.

9. Long Shot – This is easily the funniest movie I saw in 2019. The chemistry between Seth Rogen and the never-not-superb Charlize Theron (seriously, has she ever turned in even a mediocre performance?) is great, and the balance between r-rated humour and romance is perfect. This movie made me both laugh and smile a whole lot.

8. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – As great as Mr. Rogers was, I didn’t have much interest in watching a bio-pic about him, especially having already seen the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Clearly, the filmmakers behind A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shared my sentiments, since the movie they created is far from a biography. In fact, Tom Hanks’s Fred Rogers is really a supporting character, as the central drama wisely focuses around Matthew Rhys’s Lloyd Vogler, an emotionally damaged journalist tasked with writing a profile of the famous children’s TV star. I got a little teary eyed multiple times during this magnificently heart-felt movie.

7. Midsommar – The consistency of tone, plus the ever increasing feeling of dread, on display in Ari Aster’s sophomore feature is incredible. This relationship horror movie, which is about a group of friends who attend a creepy summer pagan festival in rural Sweden, gripped me in a bear hug of anxiety from frame one, and then just kept squeezing me tighter and tighter.

6. Under the Silver Lake – Under the Silver Lake – which follows Andrew Garfield’s lay-about, behind-on-his-rent slacker who falls down a conspiracy rabbit hole when he embarks on a quest to find a mysterious woman who’s disappeared – is what I’d call a kitchen-sink movie, in that it’s clearly made by a filmmaker who’s taken full advantage of the carte blanche he’s been afforded and has consequently thrown everything, including the kitchen sink, into his creation. It’s filled with weird, unnecessary tangents that are seemingly intended to satisfy only the indulgent whims of its creator, and I loved every weird, meandering moment.

5. Ad Astra – I’d heard a fair amount of not-so-great buzz about this movie, so I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I liked it. The plot centers around Brad Pitt’s astronaut character who’s been tasked to re-connect with his father who’s supposedly disappeared 15 years earlier on a deep-space mission to Neptune. The world building here is remarkable, as is each gorgeously composed and detailed shot.

4. The Irishman – I was as unsurprised by how much I enjoyed Martin Scorsese’s latest as I was surprised that I liked Ad Astra. I mean, how could a three-plus hour Scorsese mob movie written by Steven Zaillian that stars Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci not be terrific? Unlike most bio-pics, which often end up feeling like a greatest-hits compilation, this movie takes the time (or, more accurately, was given the time, thanks to Netflix, its benefactor) to allow all of its scenes to breathe, effectively creating the sense that, by the end, you’ve truly been witness to a man’s life.

3. Parasite – Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite, his best since Memories of Murder, is essentially a five-act movie. Every time you think you’ve got it figured it, it reveals a new plot thread, sometimes switching genres altogether. This is one of those movies best served cold, in that you really don’t want to know anything before viewing, so the only other thing I’ll say is that I’m still haunted by its final moments.

2. A Hidden Life – This is another movie for which my expectations had been significantly lowered because of the less-than-enthusiastic word-of-mouth. Some had said this true story about an Austrian conscientious objector during WWII was a return to form for Terrence Malick, while others dismissed it as just more of his same old, increasingly inaccessible shtick. Thankfully, at least to me, A Hidden Life has a strong narrative through-line, which, in this regard, makes it closer to his first four movies (Badlands, Days of Heaven, his masterpiece The Thin Red Line, and The New World). Filled with sometimes unbearably beautiful photography that captures everything from quotidian rural life to majestic alpine scenery, this is a profound work from one of the cinema’s greatest filmmakers.

1. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood – The sheer amount of entertainment Quentin Tarantino packed into 161-minutes is kind of staggering. Everything from Brad Pitt fighting Bruce Lee, to DiCaprio’s TV monologue, to the bit at the Spahn Ranch, to the sequence of the neon lights being turned on in Hollywood, to that crazy ass violent, go-for-broke finale, is an instant classic. To top it off, it was all captured on stunning 35mm by the great Rob Richardson.