If you'll excuse the inevitably rapid senescence of this contextual gag, back when you could go to the cinema I went and saw a bunch of films. Many, if not most, if not all of them, are your usual Hollywood fare. But let's begin at the beginning, shall we?
Films I didn't see in 2019
The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
This didn't half bomb, did it? I only saw the first one shortly before the trailer for this one came out, and it looked reasonably amusing, I suppose. But then it came out and no one cared. I'm kind of curious as to why this did so badly at the box office, but all the articles I've read on the subject are rather wishy-washy. My gut instinct is that it was a combination of poor marketing and too great a distance of time between the first instalment and this. Market saturation has been blamed but I don't think anyone cared about Lego Batman or the Ninjago (?) movie. I think they just waited too long and didn't push hard enough. They probably didn't give the public enough of a reason to be interested in seeing the continuing adventures of Emmet, Wyldstyle and friends.
The Curse of La Llorona
I think I've given up on the spinoff parts of the Conjuring franchise after The Nun. Heard it was bad, didn't even bother. It's always directors with absolutely no experience doing these things, isn't it? Writers/script editors who are just dumped in the director's chair because James Wan and now David Sandberg are too busy making expensive films.
Dark Phoenix
Heard this was bad too, but admittedly I've never bothered to watch any of them at the cinema since either First Class or Origins: Wolverine, whichever came last. Might check it out one day if I'm really desperate for some X-Men. Wasn't this directed by the same guy who wrote X-Men 3, which was also about the Dark Phoenix storyline and was also bad? God knows what Fox were thinking there. "Give him another chance, eh?"
Annabelle Comes Home
See my remarks re La Llorona above. Even the presence of Wilson and Farmiga (which I assume was brief) couldn't entice me back. Plus they recast the role of Judy, yet the original actress is going to be in Conjuring 3, I believe. Hard to make it feel like an effective side story.
Zombieland: Double Tap
It's been obvious for years that a sequel to the original Zombieland was on the cards because the Facebook page has been maintaining a steady if low rumble of marketing for a long time. But in 2009 when the original came out I was 19 and the revived zombie apocalypse craze was at its height with the Left 4 Dead games and the like. Ten years later, my interest is just not really there.
Update: Yet I watched this a few days later. It's pointless, the cast surely all have better things to do, it has none of the freshness of the original, the plot is sloppy and lacking in structure, and virtually none of the alleged emotional moments are afforded any weight, yet I laughed and had a good time watching it. Perhaps it could have made more of the significance of the "evolved" zombies, of the relationships between the main characters, and the dramatic potential of the new characters, but evidently that wasn't really the point. Completely inessential, but surprisingly fun.
Update: Yet I watched this a few days later. It's pointless, the cast surely all have better things to do, it has none of the freshness of the original, the plot is sloppy and lacking in structure, and virtually none of the alleged emotional moments are afforded any weight, yet I laughed and had a good time watching it. Perhaps it could have made more of the significance of the "evolved" zombies, of the relationships between the main characters, and the dramatic potential of the new characters, but evidently that wasn't really the point. Completely inessential, but surprisingly fun.
Films I wouldn't mind seeing
Ophelia (maybe)
I don't think this is actually meant to be that good, but it'd be nice to see Daisy Ridley in a more serious role.
The Lodge
The trailers looked a bit silly but it got good reviews. And even "okayish" horror films are often more engaging or at least more atmospheric than "okayish" films in bigger-budget genres. I hope to check this out at some point.
Update in 2020: Having now watched The Lodge, I can confirm that it was an entertaining watch overall, engaging in an interesting navigation of predictable and unpredictable genre elements and leaving you, as the viewer, simultaneously sympathetic for and horrified by the actions of both parties in the film's central conflict. It feels like they were going for a Hereditary-esque vibe while also intersecting different types of horror tropes with each other. In this way, appropriately enough given the comparability to Hereditary, it shares some qualities with Midsommar (see below) in terms of creating a constant sense of unease and disquiet through the use of disparate horror elements. Worth a watch.
Films I did see
The Favourite
Technically a 2018 film, but I saw it in 2019. Everyone knows it was good. I just want to point out what an odd rarity it is to watch a contemporary film in which the historical background is the War of the Spanish Succession. Not my favourite Lanthimos, that's probably The Killing of a Sacred Deer (although I haven't watched Dogtooth yet), but it lived up to the hype.
Captain Marvel
It was decent, like most of the Marvel superhero films. See my review here.
Us
Like a number of people who saw Us, I fall into the "I wish he hadn't revealed what was going on with the doubles" camp. Other than that I thought it was pretty thrilling, maybe even better than Get Out, although they're both very much cut from that quasi-Twilight Zone mould. Plus this one had Tim Heidecker in it.
Shazam!
More fun than Captain Marvel, if a bit sloppy. Full review here.
The Wind
This originally came out on the festival scene in 2018 but didn't get a cinematic release in the States until 2019 and only got a DVD release here. It's a sort of dual narrative, with a present storyline interspersed by flashbacks, and this structure is laboured somewhat excessively in my view, but the present narrative is a great highlight with a terrible, crushing feeling of isolation and paranoia. This was brought to my attention by the tie-in game by Airdorf, maker of the excellent FAITH series of horror games, and I'm glad to have seen it.
Avengers: Endgame
Meh. Full review here.
Tolkien
It's a tepid biopic without much focus or direction. Is it about Tolkien's romance with Edith, his friendship with G.B. Smith, his writing inspiration, or his experiences in the war? The film doesn't seem to be entirely sure, and doesn't deliver much insight about the man. A particularly obvious issue is the fact that the film leads up to him starting The Hobbit, which is to say the work of his with which general audiences are familiar, and completely omits the decades of narrative writing he did, admittedly mostly for his private interest at the time, beforehand. If anything, the story of The Fall of Gondolin is the most immediately relevant tale of Middle-earth for his early life because it's the one he wrote first, but the film either can't mention this because of copyright issues or won't because it's scared of alienating the general audiences who probably wouldn't have gone and seen this film anyway. His life simply wasn't that interesting, and the film avoids real issues, such as much of the influence of Catholicism on his life and how that affected his writing and relationships. I know lots of people have said that, but a lot of people who have said that are, I suspect, Catholics who want to indulge in conspiracy theories about why the Church would be passé in a light biopic (as if any of us need more reasons). But I'm not religious and am certainly not a Catholic, yet it still stood out to me. It's just not much of a film.
2040
This is my local item, a nice little documentary about how already-existing technologies, if implemented more effectively and widely, could drastically improve the Earth's environmental conditions right now. I do feel like it was a bit soft, putting too much onus on the community and not enough on governments and industry or business, but it also implies that that is an additional benefit, i.e. that community environmentalism might foster the, ahem, withering away of such things. I appreciated that.
Toy Story 4
I was intrigued about this being a story reuniting Woody with Bo Peep, but I didn't feel like this added anything new to Toy Story, which more or less wrapped itself up neatly in the near-perfect third film.
Spider-Man: Far From Home
This was pretty good, confirming Tom Holland as most likely the best cinematic Spider-Man and presenting an effective continuation of the "cinematic universe" after Endgame. Mysterio was handled appealingly and his illusions made for some engaging set pieces, and the balance between the Peter Parker stuff and the superhero stuff was funny and reasonably heartwarming. Probably better than Homecoming and almost certainly the best of the three cinematic universe pieces of the year.
Midsommar
It's good! But so was Hereditary, and while Hereditary felt in many ways like a moodier, classier take on the classic familial deal-with-the-Devil tale, Midsommar was a little too familiar having seen the original The Wicker Man not too many years ago. That being said, it's visually striking and the representation of passive-aggressive mind games and gaslighting does give it unique qualities. Probably the best stuff, however, is the opening and the occasional flashbacks to the horrific family annihilation sequence that starts the film.
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood
It's okay? Yeah, it's cool that Tarantino still has enough clout to do his own thing, and parts of this, such as the cowboy show scene, were fun, but I found chunks of it a little too slow for its own good, and in my head it's completely melting into the Coen Brothers' Hail, Caesar! from 2016. But I get that the film is good (and also bittersweet) simply because it exists, even if it didn't blow my mind.
Joker
Taxi Driver with clowns. See my full review here.
Jojo Rabbit
Taikia Watiti takes what sounds like an incredibly disturbing novel about the Holocaust and turns it into a relatively light-hearted and life-affirming comedy. This was a fun watch, but it suffers from, in my opinion, the general issue with Watiti's films, which is that they become unfocused. The first act, with Jojo at the camp, is strong and clear, but after he goes back home things become rather more fragmentary just as the narrative actually gets going, with Jojo negotiating between his Nazi brainwashing and the presence of a Jewish girl in the house. As I say, it's quite funny, and Stephen Merchant's scene is great. It just feels a bit sloppy, Scarlett Johansson is hardly giving her all, and the young lead feels a touch out of his depth.
The Lighthouse
Much like Midsommar to Hereditary, The Lighthouse is perhaps not quite as good as The Witch, although it's still very tense and stylish. It just perhaps plays its "the characters are insane" concept a little too heavy-handedly. Dafoe and Pattinson play off each other very well, and the depiction of isolation, drudgery, sordidness and "cabin fever" are well realised. Visually it's also very tight and suffocating, in almost a square aspect ratio and entirely in black and white. A touch overplayed, but gripping nonetheless.
Marriage Story
"Being aliiiive! Beeing aliiiiive! Be-ing a-liiiiiiive!" Anyway, this is quite an engrossing character piece, although it's slow and, once again, I wasn't super impressed with Scarlett Johansson, but it was certainly the Adam Driver performance I preferred of the two I saw in 2019. In fact, Driver is the highlight in my view, although Laura Dern and Alan Alda both give memorable performances too. Not being either a divorcee or a child of divorce, I'm not sure this had the impact for me that some people have described, but it's still both moving and funny; however I think my attitude towards Joker might be applicable to this if you've seen Kramer vs. Kramer.
Knives Out
Whaddya know, Rian Johnson continues to be a good writer-director. Full review here.
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
It's dumb and squandered the best parts of The Last Jedi to make what is basically a DC fiasco in a galaxy far, far away. My extended thoughts are here.
1917
Watch out for those wicked Jerries! It's like watching someone play a video game, the Germans are cartoonishly evil, and the characters are pretty thinly-written, but it's visually engaging, fairly historically accurate in terms of costumes, props and the like, and you do feel the men's desperation. Definitely one of the stronger war films of recent years, and good to see the First getting some attention rather than the Second.
So that brings us to...
Worst 2019 film I saw
Easy. The Rise of Skywalker. And not because I think "Disney ruined Star Wars" or something; I mean I overall like... half... of The Last Jedi, for goodness' sake. No, it's because Rise of Skywalker was sloppy, lazy and dramatically inert.
Best 2019 film I saw
Maybe Knives Out? Nothing stands out as a particular highlight; a number of strong items such as Midsommar and The Lighthouse, plus some better-than-average Hollywood fare such as Spider-Man and Shazam! are at least worth mentioning. I guess more good ones are better than a bunch of crap and only a single highlight, maybe. Maybe I just need to watch a wider variety of films.
Update: I might be that guy and award "best of 2019" to Under the Silver Lake for its engaging portrayal of paranoid conspiracy theorising on the part of an understimulated layabout, although I thought it was a little too long.
