Another year gone, another year closer to complete Disney domination. Death, taxes, and the house of mouse buying every remaining film studio, the three certainties. But 2019 still packed some surprises. Old hands Scorsese and Tarantino hit late career highs, while indie gems Bait and Burning found worthy mainstream success. As the year comes to a close, our team of writers appraise their hits and misses of 2019.
THE HITS
There have been countless film and TV adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved novel about four sisters coming of age during the American Civil War. This latest, by Greta Gerwig, may be the best of the lot. With its outstanding young cast and a modern sensibility that blows a feisty breeze through the well-worn period action, this is a joyful, moving, near flawless piece of filmmaking.
The Courier is a split entity that comprises two interlinked parts. One half involves a silent Gary Oldman who occasionally becomes hysterically enraged, the other a furious Olga Kurylenko who is never allowed a moment of silence.
Tom Hooper’s freakily phantasmagoric visualisation of an already strange West End smash is a high-wire act risking the sniggers which greeted its trailer. And yet it never falls, sustaining a subtly hallucinatory, wholly theatrical reality. Doubling down on the bizarre unlikelihood of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s original adaptation of T.S.
So here we are. The final instalment of a nine-film saga, three trilogies across 42 years. It’s debatable what would be harder – saving that galaxy "far, far away", or giving millions of Star Wars fans the send-off they crave. J.J. Abrams certainly had his work cut out. But, with a few provisos, he’s succeeded.
Putin and Mikhail Khodorkovsky are “strong”, a Russian journalist considers. “Everyone else – weak.” This is essentially Khodorkovsky’s opinion, too, after the former oil oligarch’s decade in a Siberian jail for suggesting the President was corrupt to his face on TV.
What Jenna (Tatiana Maslany, star of Orphan Black), likes doing is wrangling and coordinating, not creating – she hates that - which makes for a refreshing change in a heroine. Her new boyfriend Leon (Jay Duplass, pictured below, of the Duplass brothers), an ambition-free photographers’ assistant, tells her that, given her talents, what she must do is become a film producer and, in a lightbulb moment, her future is suddenly mapped out. They’ve just met while clubbing – he’s also a DJ - and there’s an instant attraction between them on the dance floor.
Two years ago Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle dusted off the Robin Williams vehicle from the Nineties with entertaining results, improving on the original with astute casting, a goofy script and special effects that didn’t take themselves too seriously.
