Apollo 11
Cunningham*
Mike Wallace Is Here*

63 Up*

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am*

And, as always, here are my nominations for a category which doesn't actually exist but damn it, it ought to:

  

TITLE DESIGN

Captain Marvel
Earthquake Bird
Godzilla: King of the Monsters
Pain and Glory
Spies in Disguise

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MY FAVORITE MOVIES OF 2019

Ad Astra
Avengers: Endgame
Dragged Across Concrete
I Lost My Body
Knives Out
Marriage Story
1917
Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood
Parasite
Spider-Man: Far from Home

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THE WORST MOVIES OF 2019

Cats
Countdown
The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
King of Thieves
A Million Little Pieces
Rambo: Last Blood
Replicas
Serenity
6 Underground
Under the Silver Lake

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MY FAVORITE THINGS FROM THE MOVIES OF 2019

The action scenes in John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, particularly what is probably the greatest knife fight ever filmed.

Ad Astra. Far from perfect (that third act is especially slow going on a second viewing), but I'm a sucker for "serious" science-fiction cinema, and this was an honorable and often gorgeous attempt with some stunning setpieces.

Alan Alda in Marriage Story. ("If I was your lawyer..."/"You are my lawyer!") Noah Baumbach is my favorite current filmmaker and though I prefer his friendship movies (Kicking and Screaming, Frances Ha, While We're Young, Mistress America) to his marriage/divorce films, this is a typically excellent work from the director, and I'm thrilled by all the awards attention it's getting.

The amazing dialogue writer-director Peter Strickland provided for Fatma Mohamed as the sinister saleswoman Miss Luckmore in In Fabric. "The hesitation in your voice, soon to be an echo in the recess of the spheres of retail" being just one minor example.

Annette Bening as Dianne Feinstein in The Report. It would be nice if they would give her an Oscar someday, but since she didn't even get nominated for her wonderful performance in 20th Century Women a few years ago, all bets are off.

Another visually staggering collaboration between cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner -- 1917. Their earlier films together include Barton Fink, The Hudsucker Proxy, Skyfall and Blade Runner 2049, and it's hard to think of another contemporary team that consistently makes such amazing looking movies. (Yes, I know, having directors like Mendes, Villeneuve and the Coens helps too).

Clive Owen's entrance in The Song of Names.

Diane. A moving and unusual movie overall, but especially notable for its cast, with a rare lead role for Mary Kay Place and a supporting cast full of actresses one sees all too seldom, including Andrea Martin, Glynnis O'Connor, Estelle Parsons and Joyce Van Patten. 

Doctor Sleep. Not nearly as intense or emotional as director Mike Flanagan's series The Haunting of Hill House, and I liked it least when it was playing fan service to The Shining, but when it wasn't The Shining II it was a surprisingly effective horror film and for me much more satisfying than the Its.

Eddie Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name.

Elisabeth Moss in Her Smell. Not an easy performance to watch, but a remarkable one.

I Lost My Body. Probably the best animated film I saw in 2019, and possibly the most emotionally stirring film, animated or otherwise.

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. I don't believe the filmmakers really have anything more to say than that they've seen some of the same Scorsese films that I've seen, but as always this extraordinary actor elevates everything around him.

Joe Pesci in The Irishman.

Kaitlyn Dever and Beanie Feldstein in Booksmart. There's an early scene of them just dancing in front of an apartment building, and I could have watched them do that for the entire movie.

Knives Out, especially its screenplay (by Rian Johnson)

Michael Shannon as George Westinghouse in The Current War.

Michelle Yeoh in Last Christmas. Because every film is better with Michelle Yeoh, and it's an unexpected treat to see her play the cranky boss in an otherwise forgettable romcom.

Parasite. An excellent and wildly original movie. One should expect no less from Director Bong.

Rory Kinnear as Henry Hunt in Peterloo. Normally I'm a huge fan of Mike Leigh's history/biography based films (Topsy-Turvy, Mr. Turner) while his present-day, fictional-character-based stories leave me cold, but this historical drama about an infamous UK massacre of peaceful protesters, though beautifully mounted, was tiresome and endless, with skimpy character development that showed none of Leigh's usual strengths. However, Kinnear was spectacularly good as a real-life orator, making me wish I'd had the chance to see him on the stage (he was reportedly a superb Iago, but I tend to know him for less classical roles like the Frankenstein monster and Bill Tanner in the 007 films).

Sam Rockwell and Nina Arianda in Richard Jewell. One of the happiest things about the last few years of movies has been the satisfaction of seeing Rockwell get the attention he's so long deserved. And any movie where Arianda gets to do an accent is well worth watching for me.

The scene in Official Secrets where Keira Knightley's character confesses to her bosses that she is the whistleblower. A much better film than the reviews suggested, and in some ways the film The Post wanted to be but wasn't.

The sense of time and place in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.

The sound mix and cinematography of Aquarela.

The supporting cast of Bombshell. The leads are all first-rate, but the film is also amazingly full of welcome familiar faces in supporting roles, including, but not limited to, Connie Britton, Alice Eve, Allison Janney, Richard Kind (as Giuliani!), Malcolm McDowell, Kate McKinnon, Anne Ramsay, Stephen Root, Brooke Smith, Holland Taylor, Alanna Ubach and Robin Weigert.

The 3D cinematography (by Mko Malkhasyan) for the dance documentary Cunningham.

The use of real locations (hotels, shopping centers) to portray the interior of a massive spaceship in Aniara. One of the most haunting films of the year, and I have no idea why this got so much less attention than the predictable and oddly overrated Little Joe (though I must admit that despite its award from Cannes and largely excellent reviews, Little Joe ultimately came and went with little fanfare)

The visuals of Zhang Yimou's Shadow, the most stunning looking martial arts film since Hero (also a Zhang Yimou film)

There's an oft-quoted running joke in Mean Girls, where Lacey Chabert's character [not Amanda Seyfried's character, as I'd originally written -- thanks to SBD for the correction] keeps trying to introduce "fetch" as a slang expression, until an exasperated Rachel McAdams tells her "Gretchen, stop trying to make 'fetch' happen. It's not going to happen." There's a group of young actors -- including Garrett Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Taylor Kitsch and Aaron Taylor-Johnson -- whom I (and, I think, others on the Internet -- I don't believe I came up with this idea myself) tend to think of as "fetch actors," since talented as they may be, photogenic as they definitely are, they are probably not going to become box-office stars, despite the industry's attempt to convince us otherwise (This is hardly a new phenomenon, or limited to men. Remember Gretchen Mol on the cover of Vanity Fair? Remember Gretchen Mol? She was terrific in The Notorious Bettie Page, so I mean no insult to her talents). So it amused me no end that in films of 2019, Charlie Hunnam played both the brother of Hedlund (in Triple Frontier) and Taylor-Johnson (in A Million Little Pieces). It was like a fetch family reunion.

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MY TEN FAVORITE SOUNDTRACK RELEASES OF 2019

Archer/Warning Shot (La-La Land)
Dial M for Murder (Intrada)
The Disaster Movie Soundtrack Collection (La-La Land)
Dracula/The Curse of Frankenstein (Tadlow)
Howard the Duck (Intrada)
Mission: Impossible (La-La Land)
Minority Report (La-La Land)
Planet of the Apes: Original Film Series Soundtrack Collection (La-La Land)
The Quinn Martin Collection Vol. 1: Cop and Detective Series (La-La Land)
The Quinn Martin Collection Vol. 2: The Invaders (La-La Land)

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THE BEST SCORES OF 2019 COMMERCIALLY UNRELEASED ON CD

Captain Marvel - Pinar Toprak
Dolemite Is My Name - Scott Bomar
Frozen II - Christophe Beck*
Jumanji: The Next Level - Henry Jackman
Knives Out - Nathan Johnson
The Last Black Man in San Francisco - Emile Mosseri
Motherless Brooklyn - Daniel Pemberton
Peterloo - Gary Yershon
Spies in Disguise - Theodore Shapiro
21 Bridges - Henry Jackman, Alex Belcher

*There are rumors of a Japanese 3-disc set of Frozen II which features Beck's music, but if it does exist it's not exactly easy to track down.