Based on the book “Erasure” by Percival Everett, American Fiction utilizes an ambitious narrative style to show a Black author named Monk combating the system of racial prejudice. Monk writes as a joke the most stereotypically Black novel ever written, which like in the climax of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, ends up a massive accidental success. Since Monk’s content lacks the Black stereotypes that bring White readers comfort, he’s mistreated by the publishing industry, which directly parallels America in the real world. This movie is careful to address how much White Americans promote mediocre, safe Black stories, then hypocritically don’t consider what the Black community believes which African American stories should be celebrated.
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Besides the hilariously unapologetic honesty this film expresses about America’s racial standards, it’s also greatly personal in depicting the confrontation between siblings as they deal with death and Alzheimer’s. With its heart in the right place, this motion picture bashes on the same Academy of Motion Pictures that routinely awards White savior drivel like Green Book instead of promoting stories about the true Black experience. Thus, it’s quite awesome to see this introspective satirical drama still receive much Oscar glory by winning the award for Best Adapted Screenplay! Its landmark win shall mark the instance when more courageous films in the future will be rightfully awarded for how they give minority groups their overdue opportunity to tell their own stories.

It made history as the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and director Bong Joon-ho is a big reason why it deserves that honor. He illustrates the differences between the upper and lower classes through complex yet subtle filming techniques, such as by dividing two actors with a vertical line hidden in the set. Yet there’s more symbolic imagery: Water represents capitalism pushing the already poor further down the economic ladder while those already high up get to remain above the rising floods. The poor people are always looking down at things while the rich people never look down at anything, and to enhance that detail, the poor people behave in ways that are comparable to bugs.
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Making the gears grind for the intense symbolic imagery required lots of preplanning and visual effects work, starting with the street of the poor neighborhood, which was built entirely from scratch inside a massive water tank. The house of the rich people was made up of the most expensive décor the set dressers could find while the exterior of that house was two separate sets combined digitally with the upper-level set on top of the lower-level set. The extreme expertise of how Parasite was concocted, as well as the moral grey in every single character, is evidence enough as to why this heavily entertaining art film deserves its title as the best movie of 2019.

While this famously underperformed at the box office, The Shawshank Redemption’s life on TV and video helped make it into the classic it’s known as today.  With its innovative use of cinematic spectacle that enhanced the story’s various complex morals, director Frank Darabont’s masterpiece presents a rich understanding of the rarely explored world of prison. Each of the stories and substories told within this overarching story about Andy ranges from suspenseful to heartbreaking, together encapsulating the most complete depiction of prison life in all of cinema.
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It's all thanks to the production crew that made this relevant character study tick; filming took place in a real prison facility that had been previously shut down, which must have created plenty of challenges for the cinematographer when it came to maneuvering through the prison walls with wide high angles. The soundtrack works just as well in giving the movie’s melancholy tone, not just because of Thomas Newman’s score, but also because of the iconic scene where Andy plays opera tunes on the speakers to demonstrate the therapeutic power of music. These examples were among the many sequences that clearly had to be difficult to realize in both sound and image, yet they all worked perfectly. Its ending leaves the viewer with a realization that when prison becomes all one has ever known in life, the outside world no longer feels so welcoming. It raises the question: What is freedom anyway?

This staple of the holiday season has a carefully effective way of structuring its complex story. First, the angels are framed front-and-center as the true heroes of the story until they introduce the character of George Bailey when they are set aside for the story to flow naturally. Then the rather long runtime surveys the relevant events of George’s life, with each segment feeling like its own contained television episode. When it reaches the point of George’s fateful decision to end his life, Clarence is casually reintroduced as the guardian angel who will save him, the point when the audience has already forgotten that this movie is primarily about the angels, not necessarily George. It subverts expectations while also reminding everyone watching the value of their life.
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While filming, director Frank Capra opted to film the outdoor winter scenes inside a refrigerated set to get cold breath from the actors. To create the snow, he went for a mixture of ice, gypsum, plaster, fomite, ivory soap, and water—a massive new achievement in producing cinematic snow. Yet other elements demonstrate why It’s a Wonderful Life eventually became the most famous Christmas movie ever made, such as the expertly staged scenes of dialogue and the angelic black-and-white cinematography. It may have been ignored for many years after its original release, but now it’s rightfully celebrated as the rare movie that’s capable of not just changing lives, but saving them.

PG (SV)
Drama/Fantasy
2 hr. 10 min.

Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY.
​Watch it to feel SAD.

This shook the world with its brutally realistic portrayal of the Holocaust, one that took filmmaking techniques from documentaries, including a handheld camera during more chaotic scenes. The gorgeous monochrome cinematography further contributes to the sensation of watching real archive footage of the horrific events, while the long 3+ hour runtime runs smoothly with the masterful editing. It certainly helps in the film’s authenticity that director Steven Spielberg is of Jewish background, which naturally led to a sharper recreation of the setting. Other Holocaust survivors were also there on set, including one of the producers, who spent three years in several Nazi labor camps as a child.
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The structure of this narrative is quite genius when promoting the true value of life: rather than a traditional story with a beginning, middle, and end, the stories of individual Jews at the concentration camps are used to tell the story of Oskar Schindler, who started off as a con artist intending to make money off of the war, but over time lets his mysterious character come out more clearly. While the cast does put on some pretty awful fake accents, and there are many historical inaccuracies (for instance, the real Oskar Schindler never even created this list of his), Schindler’s List is still a powerful, important story about the failure to act on injustice. Hard to believe that Spielberg made this while also managing post-production remotely for Jurassic Park!

R (DLSNV)
Drama/Historic
3 hr. 15 min.

Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to LEARN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD, and AFRAID.

Director Noah Baumbach gives this film a fine balance between feeling like a stage play yet also feeling like a documentary—achieved by lingering on the monologues and framing the two main actors in ways that depict their emotional distance from one another. The couple, played powerfully by Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, are shown either with walls between them or as close to the opposing ends of the screen as possible to convey just how separated they feel even when they’re together. It makes for an explosive argument between the two that may just as well be one of the scariest movie scenes in history.
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The screenplay is another factor in how the ultimate theme of romantic breakups works so effectively; there’s such keen attention paid to the character arcs, which often are illustrated purely by pictures and voiceovers in the form of montages. As it shifts attention back-and-forth between the husband and the wife, the audience is assigned the role of taking sides, just like in real life when friends are forced to take sides when a couple they know breaks up. While not a pleasant watch, Marriage Story proves why divorce is not always a failure, because, in the end, there’s still a wonderful collection of memories to think back to. No movie before this has ever given such a harsh depiction of divorce, but more depictions like this in the future will be guaranteed.

R (DLSV)
Drama
2 hr. 16 min.

Watch it to THINK. 
Watch it to LEARN.
​Watch it to feel SAD and AFRAID.

Based on the book, “I Heard You Paint Houses” by Charles Brandt, The Irishman covers over fifty years of the life of Frank Sheeran. Rather than casting different actors to play the characters as they age, or resorting to old-age makeup prosthetics, director Martin Scorsese did the reverse: use innovative de-aging technology on Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, and Al Pacino. The main approach to pulling this off was by using three cameras built into one, ergo, two of these cameras were infrared, and they were placed on either side of the main camera, which helped remove the shadows and made the de-aging process easier for the VFX artists.
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Scorsese knew that any use of motion capture dots would only hinder the performances, so he instead omitted any use of them to have everyone act on set as is. The only time modifications were made on set for the actors’ faces was by adding tiny reflectors on the faces and costumes that were meant for the infrared cameras to pick up as reference points. Then as the de-aging process went on, the VFX crew spent two years watching reference footage of DeNiro, Pesci, and Pacino’s younger years. The result is a lovely compilation of the successes of Scorsese and the three main actors over their entire careers, one that pays tribute to the old and opens up the exciting potential for this new technology.

R (DLV)
Crime/Drama
3 hr. 29 min.

Watch it for FUN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY.

Sound of Metal is the kind of low-budget movie that knows exactly how to promote self-acceptance, and it does so via the story of a man who lives a nomadic band lifestyle until he must adjust to his permanent hearing loss. Riz Ahmed plays this role to absolute perfection as he captures the frustration behind the man’s unfortunate predicament, while Paul Raci, who in real life is a child of deaf adults, plays his new mentor, and a cast of deaf actors plays the members of the Deaf community. There’s a great understanding of this community, that these sorts of people don’t despise their condition, but rather recognize the benefits that it offers.
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To further demonstrate the eye-level approach that director Darius Marder took with the Deaf community, he along with cinematographer Daniël Bouquet effectively frames the ASL communication as the sound design masterfully depicts what the world sounds like to a deaf person. It’s not like the loud concert scenes shown toward the start of the movie, the overall experience results in a careful meditation about the power of noise. It speaks directly to the minority group in focus and makes it accessible for both them and Hearing people to understand. It’s a celebration of Deaf culture while also a work of art that begs those with hearing to question, “If this happened to me, what would I do about it?”

R (DLSN​)
Drama
2 hr.

Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel SAD.

The two leads, Gary (15 years old) and Alana (25 years old), share an absolutely irresistible chemistry with one another that generates a careful ebb-and-flow of tension throughout the film. Gary feels sexually drawn to this woman who’s a full decade older than himself and tries to sound older than his age while motivated by his lustful puppy love. Whereas Alana knows how to describe a water bed to make it sound sexual, making her the perfect counterpart to Gary. The witty screenplay does more than just create engaging dialogue—it comments on the gas shortage crisis, which feels uncomfortably similar to today’s issues of limited natural resources.
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With more social themes like that explored, as well as the subtle use of fashion, director Paul Thomas Anderson makes everything about Licorice Pizza just scream the 1970s. The layers of authenticity lead to the credibility of the unbelievable story, and with the pitch-perfect acting, it could almost pass as a dramatized documentary. Overall, this work is pure genius; Paul Thomas Anderson mixes together these ingredients that to a sane person sound repulsive and makes them work in a way that bursts your bubble about our economy’s health, which in fact hasn’t changed much over the past fifty years. Other directors have managed to argue why pineapple on a pizza works, but Anderson used this movie of his to prove how licorice on pizza could work.

R (DLS​)
Comedy/Drama
2 hr. 13 min.

Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY.

This ambitious study on the unexpected virtue of ignorance tells its story with what is made to look like one long continuous take without any edit cuts. The clever tricks utilized to pull off this illusion included time-lapses to transition to a different time of day and letting objects move across the frame to hide swipe transitions between cuts. These shots lasted anywhere between 9-16 minutes long, and 90% of the film was digitally altered in some way, such as by removing the camera crew from the mirrors the actors constantly looked into. These mirrors were essential to achieve Iñárritu’s vision because they helped crop the actors without needing to cut or change the camera position, doubling as narrative symbolism to represent the ego of whoever is looking into those mirrors.
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Besides being an endeavor for the production crew, this narrative style was also a challenge that stretched the skill of the cast. Michael Keaton and Edward Norton both act their hearts out when they’re together, while Emma Stone delivers a monologue that’s guaranteed to ignite goosebumps. Yet there’s so much more that makes this movie so great: the dialogue is brilliant, the musical drum score is awesome, and the cinematography is among the most gorgeous ever put to film. There’s just so much about Birdman that makes it everything a movie should be, while also being a needed push for the potential of art.

R (DLSV​)
Comedy/Drama
1 hr. 59 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to LEARN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY.