Unless something amazing happens, early 2019 hasn’t exactly been the best slate of movies to watch this year. The best fare has been kid friendly, but sequelly. Many of these films in the top 10 are good, but flawed in some way. The biggest surprise is probably Netflix, who has a very high top 10 film and a couple honorable mentions, showing their growth as a quality production company.
It’s not as great as It Follows, but David Robert Mitchell’s film about male malaise, Los Angeles, and cultural obsession will not soon leave your brain after you see it.
It’s not easy to wrap up a decade’s worth of set up, but the Russo brothers somehow pull it off with this epic film. Endgame rewards years of fan investment with a story that’s full fan service and some more emotional character development than you usually get in a Marvel movie.
The most underrated of the animated franchises (by far the best of the Dreamworks ones) ends on a high note. This movie is beautiful, poignant, and continues to take storytelling risks, when it could just coast on its cuteness.
The first LEGO movie was something funny and clever, but so different and original it couldn’t help but be special. This LEGO movie isn’t as original, but it’s lost none of its humor and wit, while peppering in some emotion into the proceedings like the first.
This is the movie that is ground zero for career launching. Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails, and Jonathan Majors all should become bigger household names for their efforts here, which tells a San Francisco gentrification story as if it were about to be sent in sonnet form to William Shakespeare himself.
Haunting and more ambitious than Get Out, Jordan Peele’s 2nd film ripples with tension and suspense. Lupita Nyongo’o gives a spectacular, chilling performance in the movie that gives us new phrases like “the tethered” and makes scissors scarier than ever.
Superbad’s successor delivers the goods. Olivia Wilde’s directorial debut mines deft character development with pretty stellar humor to give us a new spin on the coming of age tale. This movie should get a bunch of these young actors more gigs because of how stellar they are in this film, especially Beanie Feldstein, Kaitlyn Dever, and Billie Lourd.
Netflix’s promotion of this movie was pretty lackluster. Don’t know why, because this movie’s merger of time travel with race relations storytelling is smartly conceived and executed very well. Props to Stefon Bristol; dude, where did you come up with this idea?
Yimou Zhang is not a filmmaker well known in America, but China’s medieval martial arts auteur does it again with this beautiful looking gem. Using epic storytelling and sumptuous visuals, Shadow can proudly stand among Zhang’s best work including Hero or Raise the Red Lantern.
It takes guts to follow up a perfect film. But Toy Story 4 pulls it off, again proving how Pixar’s master storytellers can continue to find a deep well of emotional truth in a bunch of plastic figurines or a spork with pipe cleaner arms. If this is Woody/Buzz/etc’s swansong, then it’s a perfectly sweet one to end on.
