Top 10 - 2019

For whatever reason, it was the year of the pas de deux. From duos chummy (DiCaprio/Pitt in Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood) to psychotic (Pattison/Dafoe in The Lighthouse) to acrimonious and yearning (Driver/Johansson in Marriage Story) to aching from absences of affection (LaBeouf/Jupe in Honey Boy) to galvanized by the possibilities of a gaze fleetingly liberated (Haenel/Merlant in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, seen above), to... papal (those Two Popes), cinema in 2019 offered abundant proof that one of the medium's greatest effects is the frisson created by a couple of human beings interacting with each other.

It was also the year of auto-fiction, with a remarkable number of directors using the form to ruminate on their lives and careers, often in ways that seemed confessional and self-exorcising. In addition to Tarantino's grandiose ego trip, a paean to a lost Hollywood that was also, by extension, a fetishistic self-monument, there was Scorsese's autumnal gangster culmination The Irishman, Joanna Hogg's fictionalized origin story The Souvenir, Pedro Almodóvar's warm, wistful retrospective Pain and Glory, Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story, informed by the experience of his own divorce, and the wrenching Honey Boy, directed by Alma Har'el and written by Shia LaBeouf as a therapeutic exercise while he was in rehab.

Also, Netflix expanded its influence over the market, and Disney continued to grow its quasi-monopolistic media hegemony. But you've read about this elsewhere (resist!). All said, it was a pretty terrific year for movies.

My Top 10 films of this last year of the decade, to follow...

Horse Money

HORSE MONEY   ***1/2

Pedro Costa

2014

IDEA:  Cape Verdean immigrant Ventura moves between ambiguous but always entrapping institutional interiors and temporal realms, encountering figures from his and Portugal's past.

BLURB:  With its subaltern bodies drifting among deep-focus passageways and decrepit spaces, abstracted by engulfing shadows and shards of spectral light, Horse Money’s imagery suggests a haunted, postcolonial Caravaggio, or a petrified dystopian underworld. The look of Costa’s film is simultaneously harsh, alien, suffocating, and uncannily anti-naturalistic, which is to say that it’s an affectively astute visualization of the state inhabited by Ventura, who wanders this just-barely earthly purgatory as a spirit arrested by social and political systems that disavow his claims to the life-world. He is, in a very physical sense, smothered by darkness and stasis, his uncontrollable tremor a signifier of irrepressible historical trauma that cannot, in any case, break through the shadows that entomb him. That tension between trembling and stifled movement vibrates beneath almost all of Costa’s eerily sharp, torpid frames, whose fastidious compositions seem always under threat of either completely ossifying or being suddenly pierced by violence, evoking the fragility of so many marginalized people’s socio-historical positions as well as the visual mechanisms that often make them perceptible at the expense of their humanity. This fuzzy representational realm is navigated by Horse Money with such mannered aestheticism, one might wonder if the approach is less about suffocation than merely suffocating, obscuring its characters under a carapace of remote avant-gardism. One is also inclined to see this aesthetic language, indeed to feel it, as a bold phenomenological appeal to certain embodied experiences that demand their own singular, inassimilable articulation.