The Top Ten Movies I Watched in 2019

A mixture of new and classic, narrative and documentary, here is my list of the Top Ten Movies I Watched in 2019 (listed alphabetically):

American Factory (2019). Julia Richert and Steven Bognar provide a fantastic look at a clash of cultures and how that affects the American workplace in the post-industrial era; this documentary is much better and more powerful than its understated title would suggest - it's full of drama, conflict, surprises, ideas, and just plain weirdness.

Bitter Rice (1949). Giuseppe De Santis's movie, about the women who work at the annual rice harvest and planting in the wet fields in northern Italy, is a classic in every sense. It stands up to anything else from its era as both a social document and a powerful drama (or melodrama).

A Brighter Summer Day (1991). This terrific movie by the late Taiwanese director Edward Yang examines the lives of several teenagers in Taiwan in 1960, about 10 years after their families fled  mainland China and Mao's revolution to settle in Formosa. Today, Yang would probably have developed this 4-hour movie as a mini-series.(Bonus points: Check out Yang's even greater movie, Yi Yi)

Cold War (2018). Pawel Pawlikowsky's film from Poland is a great story of doomed lovers and their tempestuous relationship that plays out in a series of episodes across a 20-year time span; we see the struggles to build a life and a career in music and to be true to one's self not just against a wave of commercial pressures but against political pressures that can shut you off completely - or lock you up.

Il Posto (1961). This Italian (Milanese) film, written and directed by Ermanno Olmi, is another one of the somewhat unappreciated neo-realist works (this one filmed with no professional actors) that made Italian postwar cinema so great, tells of a teenage boy in a working-class family pressured to apply for a coveted white-collar job in a large unnamed company - a job he doesn't really want.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (2018). This highly inventive, contemporary-LA take on Shakespeare by writer-director Casey Wilder Mott is eccentric and fast-paced, as much fun to watch as just about any production of a Shakespeare comedy that I've seen on film.

Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood (2019). Quentin Tarantino's 1969-set film is, among other things, a whole lot of fun to watch, start to finish: a really good "buddy movie" starring two industry mega-stars, with DeCaprio as a nearly washed up star in TV Westerns and Pitt as his driver and gopher; a send-up of many mid-century movie styles and trends; and a really cool inside look at the process of movie-making, and who's not interested in that?

Ordet (1955). This film, set on a small Danish farm in 1925, is strange even for Carl Th. Dreyer: long close-ups, many slow panning shots, mannered and extremely slow and deliberate dialog, beautiful lighting so that each shot could be a still or portrait in the style of a Rembrandt or Vermeer, and unforgettable segments such as the botched delivery scene and the weirdness of a young man who wanders in and out of various scenes murmuring scripture. (Bonus points: Compare with Dreyer's Day of Wrath)

Three Identical Strangers (2018). Tim Wardle's documentary starts off as if it's going to be a feel-good story about triplets separated at (actually, six months after) birth who discover one another through a series of chance encounters when they're about 20 years old, but this movie gets darker and darker and becomes a serious examination of medical ethics, as we learn that the three boys, unbeknownst to them, had been part of a vast (and as yet unpublished) medical experiment.

Tokyo Story(1953). It's pretty much impossible to over-praise Yasujiro Ozu's film, a seemingly simple tale about an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children, in what perhaps will be their last such visit; despite the father's flaws and mis-doings, it's impossible not to feel empathy for this couple, who are treated abominably by their children (an indication of the seismic shifts taking place in postwar family life) and truly welcomed only by their war-widowed daughter-in-law, who is both saintly and deeply troubled. (Bonus points: See Ozu's final film, Late Autumn)