2018/2019 Movie List

40. This year my movie list contains the exact same number of movies as the year before - 39.  That seems like a weird coincidence.  Last year I decided that a top 40 list sounds a lot better than a top 39 list (except for here), so I used this spot to mention the Best Picture nominees that weren’t on my list, and I think I’ll continue that tradition.  Black Panther isn’t on the list, but only because it was a top 5 movie on last year’s list.  I didn’t see Bohemian Rhapsody yet, but I probably will this summer.  I love Rami Malek and I enjoy Queen’s music, so I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to see. Vice looked boring, and I don’t plan to see it unless someone convinces me it is more interesting than it looks. And The Favourite looks about as entertaining as watching paint dry. All the rest are ones that I saw this year, although my nominees would have looked a lot different.  Now onto the rest of the list.

39. You Were Never Really Here A vigilante movie starring Joaquin Phoenix, in which Joaquin Phoenix attacks bad people with a claw hammer.  Had this been a Liam Neeson vigilante movie (which at this point is really just all Liam Neeson movies) I would’ve known to stay away.  But since Joaquin Phoenix is a good actor, and this seemed like a serious movie, I decided to watch it.  There were worse movies that I watched this year, but none that left me questioning my life choices like this one.

38. Train to Busan How did I end up watching a Korean movie about a group of people on a train trying to avoid the zombie apocalypse? Well, it was around Halloween, and I Googled something like “Best Horror Movies” and a bunch of the ones you’d expect came up (side note - there is only one right answer to this query, and it stars Jack Nicholson).  But this movie also came up on the search results, and it was free on Netflix.  It turns out that this was not one of the best horror movies ever. 

37. The Killing of a Sacred Deer This movie was just weird.  Sometimes I love weird movies, but not when they are weird just to be weird.  It is directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the guy who directed The Lobster (super weird, but kind of enjoyable), and more recently, best picture nominee The Favourite.  The movie is about a young man that befriends a doctor (Collin Farrell), but then comes to blame the doctor for his father’s death, and essentially places a curse on the doctor’s family.  Lanthimos’ movies are the type of movies that critics love, but I don’t think many other people do.   I can’t imagine that anyone would walk away from this and actually say they enjoyed it.

36. Hold the Dark A Netflix movie with a solid cast (Geoffrey Wright, Alexander Skarsgard, Riley Keough) and a director that I really like (Jeremy Saulnier - Green Room and Blue Ruin).  Wright plays a wolf expert that comes to town to investigate a woman’s claim that wolves took and killed her son.  And it gets creepier from there. Despite the low ranking I actually thought this was an interesting movie, it was just so dark and unpleasant to watch.

35. Triple Frontier Another Netflix original film, directed by Mark Boal (the guy that wrote Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker), and starring Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaacs, and Charlie Hunman as former special forces soldiers that team up to pull a heist on a drug lord.  What could go wrong?  This wasn’t a bad movie.  I was mildly entertained, and I can’t point to any specific reason that I didn’t like it more, but I’ve found that this is how I feel about most Netflix movies.  The cast is good, the director might even be good.  It seems like it should be a good movie.  But the production just isn’t on the same level as a real movie, and it ends up feeling more like a TV movie than something you’d watch on the big screen.

34. A Simple Favor Anna Kendrick plays a single mom who befriends fellow mom Blake Lively when their kids play together at school.  They are a mismatched pair - Kendrick is a stay at home, play by the rules type who produces a video blog (I refuse to use the word vlog) and Lively is wealthy, confident, and slightly crazy socialite, but they bond over drinks and their children.  When Lively’s character mysteriously disappears, Kendrick sets out to investigate. For most of the movie it is trashy fun, but the last act goes totally off the rails and was just too much for me to recommend it.

33. Widows The premise: when three men are killed by the police after trying to pull off a heist, the man who the money belonged to finds their widows and lets them know that if they don’t get him back his money, he’s coming for them.  So the women decide to team up and pull off their own job to get the money.  Sounds mildly interesting, but I was especially intrigued when I saw that it was directed by Steve McQueen, whose last movie, 12 Days a Slave, won best picture and was my pick for best movie of the year in 2013.  Widows has some interesting moments, but it is clearly trying to not just be a heist movie, but also to say something about politics, money, and race. I didn’t really think it succeeded. If you want to watch a heist movie that is more than just a heist movie, you’d be much better off watching Spike Lee’s Inside Man.

32. Roma I’m sure this is actually a great movie.  It was nominated for best picture.  It won best foreign film. It looks beautiful, but it was also super boring.  I watched the first 45 minutes of it on Netflix and started to fall asleep.  I never felt compelled to watch the rest of it.

31. The Highwaymen Probably the best of the Netflix originals I watched this year.  Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner star as Texas Rangers called out of retirement to try to hunt down Bonnie and Clyde.  It has all the same issues that the other Netflix productions have, but it felt a little more suspenseful, and I’ve come to like almost anything that Woody Harrelson does.

30. Ready Player One I’ve never read the book, so I didn’t have any expectations going in to watching the movie.  I thought it was fine. I’ve heard lots of good things about the book, specifically that it is packed wall to wall with 80’s pop culture references and that it’s a fun futuristic adventure. For me the movie felt like a combination of about a hundred movies I’ve seen before, and while it was kind of fun, there was nothing particularly interesting or unique about it.

29. Sorry to Bother You Speaking of unique, Sorry to Bother You is definitely one of a kind.  LaKeith Stanfield plays an African American man that gets a job working at a call center.  When he learns to perfect his “white voice”, he becomes the top call salesman, and keeps getting promoted all the way to the top of the company.  For the first half of the movie, it seemed great - a funny take on race, class, and corporate power.  But then in the second half, the movie went from creative and funny to totally off the rails. By the time equi-sapiens became a major part of the plot, it had lost me.

28. Thor:Ragnarok While I enjoy the Thor character in the Avengers movies, I thought the first two Thor movies were pretty bad.  Probably my least favorite of the Marvel movies.  This one was a lot more fun.  I’ve gotten a bit burned out on superhero movies, so it took me a while to see this one, but it was good fun.

27. Hale County This Morning This Evening This movie earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary, but it is far from a typical documentary.  It is set in Hale County, Alabama, and shows the day to day lives of the black families living in the small town over the course of five years.  There is some dialogue, but it is mostly visual, and it is filmed with more of an artistic than a narrative perspective.  It was a bit slow at times for me, but overall it was beautiful and well worth watching.

26.  First Reformed When I heard about this movie I was intrigued: It is directed by Paul Schrader, the man who wrote Raging Bull and Taxi Driver.  It stars Ethan Hawke as a Catholic priest at a small church in upstate New York.  When the priest begins to meet with a young couple, he realizes the husband is deeply troubled, both by personal depression but also a sense of anger over what is happening to the environment.  The meetings lead Hawke’s character to question how he sees the world and his role in the church.  The acting is excellent throughout, and it is meant to be a disturbing movie, but I really hated the last 30 minutes of the film, and it was enough to taint what was an otherwise very interesting movie.  

25. Won't You Be My Neighbor I didn’t care for the Mr. Rogers show when I was a kid. I remember even when I was young enough to still be watching Sesame Street that I thought Mr. Rogers was boring and that show seemed too babyish.  Watching this documentary gave me a very different appreciation of the man and the TV show.  It is hard to imagine now, but this brought me back to a time when the only kids shows that were on TV were Saturday morning cartoons and whatever was on PBS. There was a lot more to what Mr. Rogers was doing with his show than I realized at the time. It turns out Mr. Rogers was an incredibly compassionate, kind, and thoughtful man. The world needs more Fred Rogers.  

24. Shazam This is a movie about a foster kid that becomes a superhero.  There’s nothing that creative or unique about it, but I saw it with my kids, and we all thought it was pretty fun.  

23. First Man Damien Chazelle is one of my favorite new directors. His first movie, Whiplash, was terrific, and he followed that up with La La Land, which I absolutely loved.  Earlier this year I was flipping through channels late at night and came across the last 30 minutes of La La Land and couldn’t tear myself away - the end of that movie is just amazing.  So my expectations for this one were super high.  Ryan Gosling stars as Neil Armstrong in the lead-up to the Apollo 11 moon landing.  I learned quite a few things about the Apollo missions, and had a new appreciation for what all of those astronauts did, but I can’t say I loved the movie.  Some of the characters, including Gosling (who I normally love) seemed a bit miscast to me, and it was a bit dull at points.  It never quite captured me like Chazelle’s earlier movies did. 

22. Arctic I love wilderness survival stories, both books and movies, and this is a compelling one.  Mads Mikkelson plays a man stranded in the arctic after a plane crash.  He has to decide if he’s better off trying to survive by waiting for a rescue or making the dangerous trek across the tundra to safety.  The movie, like the landscape, is stark.  Very little dialogue, no backstory or explanation of what’s happening, just a man trying to survive in the frozen wilderness. 

21. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Buster Scruggs showed up on Netflix in December as an anthology film directed by the Coen Brothers. The Coen brothers movies tend to be hit or miss for me - some of their movies like the Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men, True Grit, Raising Arizona, O Brother Where Art Thou, and Fargo are masterpieces, while others like Hail, Ceasar! and A Serious Man were duds in my book.  This fell somewhere in between.  It was originally filmed as 6 separate episodes of a Netflix series, but was eventually was released as just one movie.  I wish I had realized going in that the stories weren’t tied together in any way, other than being “Westerns” - I kept expecting there to be a scene that would eventually tie all these characters together.  Once I stopped waiting for a common thread to appear, I really enjoyed it. I loved a couple of the stories (The Gal Who Got Rattled was so great), but a couple of the others were just ok. Not top shelf Coen brother material, but still interesting.

20. Free Solo You know what’s crazy?  Climbing up the side of a mountain that looks like this:

You know what’s complete insane?  Doing that climb without a rope.  The formation is called El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, and it’s about 3,000 feet tall. It’s a climb only the best climbers can do with a rope. The guy in the picture is Alex Honnold, and Free Solo is the Best Documentary-winning story of how he climbed El Cap by himself without a rope. It’s hard to imagine anything more physically difficult in the world.

19. Sicario: Day of the Soldado The original Sicario is a grim but excellent tale of the drug war and the dirty tactics used to fight the cartels. It was a top 10 movie for me in 2015.  In the sequel, the twist is that cartels have begun smuggling terrorists across the border, and the same cast of characters is brought in to escalate the fight. It’s hard to find anyone to root for, but it is suspenseful and interesting enough to make it a worthwhile watch, if you can stomach the

violence.

18. Annihilation Annihilation is far from a perfect movie, but it is an ambitious and interesting science fiction movie, and I almost always tend to enjoy watching those. Natalie Portman, Tess Thompson and several other women set out on an expedition into “The Shimmer”, a mysterious and growing area along the coast that formed when a meteor struck the Earth several years earlier. It’s pretty trippy and I’m not sure I understood everything that was going on, but visually it is captivating and weird but interesting and suspenseful to watch.

17. Game Night A group of friends that has been getting together for years for a game night decides to take things up a notch by hosting a murder mystery night. When it turns out one of the group members has a shady past, the murder mystery becomes an actual kidnapping that they have to work together to solve. It’s a silly premise, but the lead couple is played by Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, who are perfect in their roles.  Jason Bateman in particular is funny in just about everything he does. As a side note, I think this was the only true comedy I watched this year. Why is it so hard for people to make a good comedy now? I think you have to go back to 2012 for 21 Jump Street or maybe even 2011 for Bridesmaids to find a true laugh-out-loud comedy.

16. Avengers:Endgame After Avengers: Infinity War I swore that I wasn’t going to see the next Avengers movie.  Infinity War was too long, ended without any kind of wrap-up, and half of the characters died, but we all knew that somehow they would end up coming back to life in this one (pretty easy to figure out since they were already filming movies starring some of the “dead” characters). But a couple of weeks after it came out, when I realized that out of 7.53 billion people on Earth, 7.52 billion of them had already seen Avengers, and then I started hearing people say it was one of the greatest movies ever, I decided I should just go see it.  It’s certainly not one of the best movies ever (not even the best superhero movie this year), and like the last couple of Avengers movies they try to stuff way too many characters into the film, but….overall I really enjoyed it.  I liked that the first part of the movie focused on fewer characters, and it was funny and fun throughout.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the movie-going experience for me was near the end there is a very dramatic and somewhat sad moment ( I won’t spoil it for those that haven’t seen it yet).  At that point a guy sitting a row behind me started absolutely sobbing.  Like it took him a good five minutes to finally catch his breath and settle down, and even at the end of the movie he was still taking deep breaths to calm down.  It was one of the most upset I’ve ever heard someone get at a movie, and definitely the most upset for a superhero movie.  So if you like tear-jerker superhero movies, this might be just the film for you!

15. Mission Impossible: Fallout The plot of this installment of the Mission Impossible series involves Tom Cruise and friends trying to recover plutonium cores that have been captured by a terrorist group intent on launching nuclear attacks around the world.  I had to look that up on Wikipedia to remember the plot, which should tell you about how memorable the story was. That’s beside the point.  The Mission Impossible movies are great action movies, and you get exactly what you are hoping for.  I think the MI movies have surpassed James Bond and Jason Bourne as the most fun and entertaining spy series being made today.

14. The Post This really should have been on my list last year, but I didn’t get around to seeing it until last summer.  It’s terrific.  Meryl Streep plays Katherine Graham, the first female publisher of a major newspaper, and Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, as they attempt to publish the Pentagon Papers, which expose decades of government coverup in the Vietnam War.  It’s a great journalism movie, along the lines of Spotlight, Good Night and Good Luck, and of course All the President’s Men.  Streep is especially good as Graham, who seems a bit unsteady at first when she inherits the role of publisher when her husband passes away, but finds her footing under difficult circumstances.  

13. Green Book Green Book was this year’s Best Picture winner, telling the story of musician Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and  his driver, Nick Vallelonga (Viggio Mortenson). It took me a while to get around to seeing Green Book, but I really enjoyed the story.  The best part is Mahershala Ali.  He’s now won Academy Awards for his role here and in Moonlight, and plays very different characters in each one.  Here is is a proud, brilliant musician intent on traveling and bringing his music to the South despite facing intense discrimination.  Ali brings complexity and dignity to his performance, and was well-deserving of the Academy Award.

12. Bad Times at the El Royal The El Royal is a once-glamorous hotel on the border of California and Nevada. One rainy night a priest (Jeff Bridges), a soul singer, two sisters, a traveling salesman (John Hamm), the hotel manager, and the spectacular Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth) all converge at the El Royal.  All seven of them have secrets they are searching for (or trying to bury).  The movie is a modern film noir extravaganza, with great supporting roles, but Bridges and Hemsworth truly embrace their seedy characters and turn this from a B movie into something you can’t take your eyes off.  

11. BlackkKlansman BlackkKlansman is the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African American detective in Colorado that infiltrates the KKK with the help of a Jewish detective, played by Adam Driver.  It’s a fascinating story, funny at times, tense at times, and also hard to believe.  Like almost everything Spike Lee makes, it’s interesting to watch, but this was probably the best movie he’s made in the last decade. One of the most powerful parts was at the end when Lee shows footage from the present day to remind us that this kind of hatred hasn’t gone away.

10. Lean On Pete Willy Vlautin is one of my favorite Oregon authors, not to mention a terrific songwriter in the band Richmond Fontaine.  Almost all of his books and songs are melancholy stories populated by characters that are going through hard times, and sometimes find hope in other damaged people.  His most recent book, Don’t Skip Out on Me is excellent, but the book that made me fall in love with his storytelling was Lean on Pete.  Lean on Pete is the story of a high school student living near Portland Meadows, scraping by despite a rough family situation. The boy finds work helping out with horses, and Lean on Pete is a not-very-good racehorse that he grows attached to as things at home go from bad to worse.  Like all of Vlautin’s stories, it is tragic, but there is beauty in the acts of kindness between broken people, and a hope that despite the brokenness, there are still people that will care for us. This is a faithful adaptation of a beautiful book.

9. A Quiet Place I thought this looked so stupid in the previews - monsters that hunt by sound, so people have to be totally quiet in order to survive - it just seemed like a totally contrived plot device.  But sometimes, if you make a really entertaining movie, even concepts like being on a bus that can’t go under 55 mph or it will explode, or monsters that hunt by sound, can work.  A Quiet Place was billed as a horror movie, but it is really more of a scary action movie, and it does everything right.  The movie has characters that you actually care about (John Krazinski and Emily Blount play the parents), as well as tense action scenes that build to an entertaining climax. 

8. The Little Drummer Girl I said earlier that the Mission Impossible series is currently the best thing going in spy movies, but it would be more accurate to refer to the Mission Impossible and James Bond series as spy action movies.  When it comes to stories that look more like real espionage, it’s hard to beat anything that was written by John LeCarre.  In 2014 A Most Wanted Man was one of Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s final roles and one of my top 10 films of the year, and in 2017 the miniseries The Night Manager starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie made my top 10 list because it was better than almost everything I saw on the big screen.  This year AMC released another miniseries based on a LeCarre novel, and it’s almost as good.  It’s directed by Park Chan-wook (director of the original Oldboy!), and has an excellent cast including Michael Shannon and Alexander Skarsgard, who play Jewish intelligence agents trying to find the Palestinian terrorists responsible for a bombing that killed a Jewish boy.  The real star is Florence Pugh, who plays Charlie, a British actress that gets drawn into the plot. The acting is great, the story is complex and smart, and for a tv series the production is spectacular - you could write an essay on the use of color in the movie.  Take the time to watch the first couple episodes and you’ll be hooked.

7. A Star is Born When Ally (Lady Gaga) marches on stage to sing Shallow with Jackson Maine (Bradley) I got goosebumps.  It was my favorite scene in any movie this year.  If you’re going to make a movie about music, the music needs to be good, and Shallow won an Academy Award and got a Grammy nomination for song of the year.  If you’re going to make a romantic movie, there has to be chemistry between the actors. Well, let’s just say the chemistry between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper was so good pretty much everyone in the world was convinced the two of them were having an affair. The acting is great, the music is great.  The story was captivating.  But…..man, I did not realize how heavy the ending of that movie was going to be.  I went with Jodie on a date night, and after the end of the movie I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach. I still loved the movie, but wow, that ending was not what I expected. 

6. Eighth Grade I can’t think of many movies that have better captured the awkwardness of middle school.  The list of great things about this movie starts with Elsie Fisher, who plays Kayla, a 13 year old finishing up her last year of middle school.  Fisher’s character is perfectly imperfect - awkward, sweet, wanting to fit in, annoyed by parents, still unsure of herself - she seems like a real middle schooler.

5. It In the past I wasn’t a big horror movie fan, but over the last couple of years there have been a number of horror movies that go far beyond slasher films; scary yes, but also really fun to watch. It is a lot more than just a horror movie.  It is scary, for sure, but the movie is really more about the group of kids that teams up to fight the evil that has emerged in their town. Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the clown is easily the scariest bad guy of the year.  The storm drain scene at the beginning of the movie is another of the year’s most memorable movie scenes. I can’t wait for Part 2 to come out in September.

4. Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse I am so tired of superhero movies that I really had no plans to see another spiderman movie.  Then I had about a half dozen people tell me this was awesome, so I rounded up the kids and took them to see it. Every one of us loved it.  What a creative, fun, beautiful-looking, amazing sounding take on a superhero movie.  This is different than any superhero movie you’ve ever seen, but in a good way.  The animation and music are so great - everything about the movie just feels cool.  If you’re in the same boat I was thinking that you’ve already seen every spiderman movie you’d ever want to see, put aside those preconceptions and just go check it out.  

3. Us My favorite thing about Jordan Peele’s movies is that they make you think.  About everything.  What is this movie actually about?  What does this movie mean? Why do the characters have those names? Why are they wearing those particular clothes? What did she mean by that particular line? What classic horror movie are they referencing there? Why is that music playing in this scene? What’s with the rabbits? Why Hands Across America? Why scissors? Yes, this is a horror movie that is scary and violent and confusing at times. But if you like stories filled with symbolism that make you think about what they are trying to say, then Jordan Peele’s films should be at the top of your list.

2. The Sisters Brothers Another of my favorite Oregon authors is Patrick DeWitt, and my favorite book of his is The Sisters Brothers, a violent, funny Western set in Oregon and California. This adaptation didn’t attract a lot of attention while it was in the theaters, but if you like Westerns at all I’d strongly encourage you to seek out this movie.  It has an A+ cast, starring Riz Ahmed as an inventor/prospector, Jake Gyllenhall as a man trying to track him down, and Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reiley playing ruthless bounty hunters Charlie and Eli Sisters, who are out to kill them both. This is not a blockbuster, but it is probably my favorite Western since True Grit in 2010.  Despite the violence and ruthlessness of the main characters, the movie has surprising heart and beauty. 

1. Leave No Trace In 2004, a couple jogging through Forest Park (a 5,000 acre wilderness within the city of Portland) found something unexpected: a 50 year old man and his 12 year old daughter living in the woods.  They had been living in Forest Park, living off the land for four years.  Leave No Trace is a beautiful adaptation of the story of the father and daughter living in the woods, and what happened to them after they were found. Leave No Trace was filmed in the Pacific Northwest, and the towering, damp forest gives the movie a strong sense of place.  Ben Foster is terrific as the dad, but I think my favorite acting in any movie this year was Thomasin McKenzie as the daughter. This movie is not a big Hollywood production, but it is quiet, thoughtful, heartbreaking, and beautiful - in short, it was my favorite movie of the year.