Best Films Watched in 2019

Didn’t quite achieve my goal of watching a hundred films during the course of 2019, but at 92 I came pretty darn close.

Not as many documentaries this past year, which is somewhat surprising as it’s a genre that has long fascinated me.

I was blessed to view not one but two Stanley Kubrick films on the big screen, “2001” and “A Clockwork Orange”.  I’ve seen them both dozens of times but never in a theatrical venue. The former was a special thrill because I managed to get down to the Imax in Regina and watch it in 70mm, which made the experience even more awe-inspiring and powerful.

An interesting mix of movies made my final roster of favorites so let’s get right down to it:

Drama & Comedy

“2001: A Space Odyssey” (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)
“Capernaum” (Directed by Nadine Labaki)
“Ratcatcher”  (Directed by Lynne Ramsay)
“Ugetsu” (Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi)
“Roma” (Directed by Alfonso Cuaron)
“Happy As Lazzaro”  (Directed by Alice Rohrwacher)
“Leave No Trace”  (Directed by Debra Granik)
“Happy End”  (Directed by Michael Haneke)
“A Clockwork Orange”  (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)
“The Aerial”  (Directed by Estaban Sapir)
“Birds of Passage”  (Directed by Ciro Guerra and Cristina Gallego)
“Thunder Road”  (Directed by Jim Cummings)
“Zama”  (Directed by Lucrecia Martel)
“Her Smell”  (Directed by Alex Ross Perry)
“Smoking Aces”  (Directed by Joe Carnahan)
“White Boy Rick”  (Directed by Yann Demange)
“Galveston”  (Directed by Melanie Laurent)
“Under the Silver Lake”  (Directed by David Robert Mitchell)
“Listen Up, Philip”  (Directed by Alex Ross Perry)
“The Conformist” (Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci)
“The Favorite”  (Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos)
“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”  (Directed by Terry Gilliam)

Honorable mentions:

“Too Late”  (Directed by Dennis Hauck)
“First Man’  (Directed by Damien Chazelle)
“Triple 9”  (Directed by John Hillcoat)
“High Life”  (Directed by Claire Denis)
“Knives Out”  (Directed by Rian Johnson)
“Valhalla Rising”  (Directed by Nicholas Winding Refn)
“Vice”  (Directed by Adam McKay)
“The Banishment”  (Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev)
“Elena”  (Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev)
“Legend”  (Directed by Brian Helgeland)
“The Apostle”  (Directed by Gareth Evans)

Most disappointing movie of 2019:   “Ad Astra” (Directed by James Gray)

Best Documentaries viewed in 2019:

“Apollo 11”  (Directed by Todd Douglas Miller)
“Three Identical Strangers” (Directed by Tim Wardle)
“Last Man on the Moon”  (Directed by Mark Craig)

Honorable Mention:

“Ice Guardians”  (Directed by Brett Harvey)