The most important movies of 2019

Posted on January 10, 2020 by reelentropy

Annual top 10 lists are dumb and arbitrary and I hate them, even as I’ve started doing them. We can do better here. Instead of a static list of 10 favorites, 10 peanuts with which to pack the year away forever, let’s put together a list of the movies that we’ll carry with us into the future.

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‘1917’ is an idea so grand it couldn’t be ruined

Posted on January 9, 2020 by reelentropy

M A J E S T I C ! Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

10/10 1917 is a one-take World War I movie. Great idea. All movies should be built from of ideas this great. Spectacular work. Bravo. No notes.

April 6, 1917, the day the U.S. officially enters the Great War, Eastern France- After months of brutal, tooth-and-claw trench warfare, the Germans have retreated nine miles to the Hindenburg Line. Col. Mackenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) is set for a full-scale attack at dawn, thinking he’ll be charging at a retreating army, but aerial intelligence indicates the new line is even more heavily fortified and Mackenzie’s men will be running headlong into their own slaughter. With the phone lines cut and no other way of getting this intelligence to the front, Gen. Erinmore (Colin Firth) sends lance corporals William Schofield and Tom Blake (George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) across No Man’s Land to hand-deliver orders calling off the attack with the lives of 1,600 men hanging in the balance.

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‘Hidden Life’ refines Malick’s technique into something accessible

Posted on January 8, 2020 by reelentropy

“…For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs” –George Eliot. Images courtesy Fox Searchlight Pictures.

8/10 For years, writer/director Terrence Malick has defined the inaccessible, nose-raising arthouse film, exactly the kind of self-important, self-satirical movie mainstream audiences think of when they think about movies they don’t want to watch. A Hidden Life does nothing to change that, but it’s a wonderful application of his process. 

St. Radegund, Nazi Austria- Austrian peasant Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl) tends the farm he’s lived on all his life. After the Anschluß, he is conscripted into the Wehrmacht, but cannot serve because he refuses to swear personal loyalty to Adolf Hitler. As a farmer, he is exempted from service for a period of years, but is eventually called into active duty. In 1943, he was convicted by military tribunal and executed for sedition against a country and an army that he did not willingly join. He was declared a martyr and beatified by the Catholic Church in 2007.

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Sandler’s sweaty, slimy fever dream ‘Uncut Gems’

Posted on January 8, 2020 by reelentropy

Sandler’s transformative performance is actually the biggest point of detraction for Uncut Gems — apparently, a mass block of viewers have come into this movie hoping for something similar to his notoriously bad Netflix movies and they’re complaining on Rotten Tomatoes. Check it out, it’s wild. Images courtesy A24.

9/10 The opening shot of Uncut Gems is a long push. First, we go deep into a raw black opal, a cousin of which will become central to the plot, seeing, as they say you can, the entire universe in its crevices. But then those crevices turn fleshy and this same shot begins to pull out, and you realize all at once that it’s become the screen of the lead character’s colonoscopy.

That’s where Uncut Gems starts, literally up Adam Sandler’s ass. That’s the level we’re at here. 

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‘Little Women’ charming, too difficult to follow

Posted on January 8, 2020 by reelentropy

Look at the pretty dresses from the 1860s! Aren’t they so charming. Images courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

4/10 Louisa May Alcott’s original novel “Little Women” was published in two volumes in 1868 and ’69 straddling a three-year in-narrative timeskip, then published as a single volume in 1880. In this, the seventh film adaptation of the material, writer/director Greta Gerwig tried to keep things fresh by mixing up the framing device, and it doesn’t work even a little bit.

In Little Women, four sisters, Meg, Jo, Amy and Beth March (Emma Watson, Saoirse Ronan, Florence Pugh and Eliza Scanien), grow up during the Civil War. In a series of scenes set over a period of years laid out seemingly at random, they angst about women’s lots in life in the 1860s, disease, boys, money and other petty squabbles as they grow up to become little women.

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