Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things mixes up the Frankenstein story by turning the “monster” into an attractive young woman with the brain of her unborn baby surgically placed into her cranium. This role of Bella Baxter was certainly quite difficult on paper to portray, a character unlike any ever written before, and only somebody like Emma Stone could pull the role off perfectly. The filmmaking style is also unlike anything ever done before, with the whole first act being black-and-white, and everything after that exploding in repulsive color combinations. The colorful fisheye cinematography is meant to resemble Bella’s point-of-view as she explores the steampunk world, like how a small child sees everything for the very first time.
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At the beginning of her journey, Bella prances around with stilted limbs and a limited vocabulary, always referring to herself in the third person like a robotic toddler. But as she gradually gains her independence, she walks more properly like a grown woman and stops referring to herself in the third person. So that means she starts as a woman trapped in a restrictive box designed by men’s ideals, but then teaches herself how to break out of that mold to become her own woman. It’s a weird story indeed, but it’s also a beautiful testament to how sustaining a child’s fascination with life will restore the capacity to stand up for oneself.

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.

There was no screenplay, everything was instead laid out on detailed storyboards, which fit director George Miller’s artistic vision that depended on visual details to offer worldbuilding exposition. As Miller crafted his reimagining of his 1970s/1980s film series, production grew gradually more insane, seeing how the crew relied on practical stunts in the Namibian desert with elaborate large vehicles moving at a hundred miles an hour. Stunt actors had to leap from vehicle to vehicle in the air, and the climax utilized these long swinging poles that served as extra transportation between the cars and trucks. It got immensely difficult and dangerous to film the more than 300 stunts between the 150 uniquely designed vehicles for this motion picture, but it paid off.
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The action is unnaturally fast yet surprisingly fluid, the sound quality is earsplittingly loud yet crystal clear, and the views of the desert are every bit as spectacular and mesmerizing as a Renaissance painting. Every element chosen to make up this ambitious blockbuster is chosen with careful intentionality—the average person will be rewarded with multiple rewatches as new details will be spotted after every viewing that further illustrates this post-apocalyptic future where everyone’s been degraded to being mere things. So along with its pioneering new techniques in editing, sound design, and cinematography, Mad Max: Fury Road will continue to inspire other filmmakers on what “show don’t tell” really looks like.

With its anamorphic lens cinematography and its use of Ave Maria in the musical score, this darker take on the world’s greatest detective is essentially an independent art-house film that happens to have an enormous budget. As it lays out the story arc of Batman over a near-three-hour runtime, the story maintains a fast pace that balances its quicker moments with doses of symbolic imagery meant to represent the stark contrasts between beauty and death coming together. All these mise-en-scène elements work hand-in-hand to create some unforgettable adrenaline-heavy fight scenes, each held together by inky shadows that make various lighting effects such as flames and strobe lights stand out further.

​Yet it’s the designs that really shine the most, and not just because of the four hours’ worth of prosthetic work behind Colin Farrell’s Penguin makeup. The batsuit was made out of 3D-printed molded rubber and then stitched by hand, while Bruce Wayne’s eye makeup stayed on his face whenever he removed his cowl. Every location is the perfect stage for a spectacular action-packed sequence, each one sustaining a cold and grim color palette to match the way Wayne views himself amidst the city’s chaos. So even while this movie suffers from weak female characters and Colin Farrell’s ultra-hammy performance, The Batman deserves some appreciation for how it further elevates the artistic potential of motion pictures based on comic books.

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?

Forrest Gump is often known for its revolutionary use of actual archive footage, which was realized through a laborious augmentation process that at the time changed visual effects in movies. For these shots, Tom Hanks was filmed against a bluescreen, given a grain filter to match the archive footage, then put in with the necessary adjustments, such as when he had to shake John F. Kennedy’s hand. In addition, the art director had to recreate some of these locations exactly and the lips of these past figures had to be morphed to move to a recording replicated to sound like their voices.
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Yet there are more groundbreaking special effects in this ever-popular movie. That includes Lieutenant Dan’s amputated legs, which were realized by actor Gary Sinise wearing bluescreen stockings and elements painted into the frame digitally to sell the illusion. That includes the digital ball put into the ping pong matches. That includes putting Tom Hanks into the movie Birth of a Nation. That includes the crowd around the reflecting pool in Washington DC that was made with only a crowd of around a hundred people. That includes the intro shot of the feather—the longest special effects shot ever done at the time. There’s so much to this one-of-a-kind blockbuster that made it not only a dazzling spectacle but a textbook example of a universal crowd-pleaser that has something in it for everyone.

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.

Everyone knows Jurassic Park as the pop culture phenomenon that shook up the entire visual effects industry, yet it’s also a spectacular showcase for Steven Spielberg’s expertise in staging suspense. The first scene establishes the danger of the newly revived dinosaurs, the illusion of danger complete with the extra strange flashlight patterns. Then just a few scenes later, Doctor Alan Grant explains how vicious a velociraptor attack can be, using a claw fossil as a visualization, and the next velociraptor seen from there is funnily enough a baby fresh out of the egg. But then a reminder comes up again about the raptors’ destructive power when they gobble up a poor bull to the point where the carrying harness is shredded to ribbons. It expertly pays off in the climax when the velociraptors go after the kids.
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These techniques work as well to make the t-rex attack scene so iconic: the water ripples, the rain, the minimal lighting around the giant lizard, her toe on the wire to indicate the electric fence is out, the one flashlight, it’s a technical marvel in cinematography and editing. So it’s not just the revolutionary digital effects of the dinosaurs that made this so influential to how movies are made—the imagination behind these artists proved how magical a major motion picture can be, and how grand of a spectacle the theatrical experience still has potential for.

PG-13 (DLV)
Action/Sci-fi
2 hr. 7 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.

Numerous techniques were used to make this remake of the horror classic far more sophisticated than it was ever expected to be. For the stunt-heavy scenes with the Invisible Man, two separate takes were filmed of the same action on a robotic camera rig, one with a green suit actor, and one without, that way, the two takes could be combined digitally, giving the illusion that an invisible person was there interacting with Elisabeth Moss’s character. With numerous special effects shots like this throughout the film, that meant the look of everything on set had to remain perfectly consistent as those shots were combined.
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Also holding everything together was Elisabeth Moss’s performance, who at times acted like she was the real villain of the movie. Her PTSD from an abusive relationship causes her to do all the things other women spiraling down insanity often do; she never seems fully rested, spreads ground coffee around the entire floor, breaks plates, causes a kitchen fire, spills paint, and does other actions that can be blamed on the Invisible Man but also spark parallels to mental illness. By the end, she becomes the very thing that caused her the trauma in the first place. Therefore, the dark, disturbing, and imaginative reinvention of The Invisible Man is a gold standard for how to implement some genuine purpose into a horror movie, even one with a cheesyB-movie title.

R (LV)
Horror
2 hr. 4 min.

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