3 Brothers' Essential Films of 2019
The Prestige Pic
Ad Astra
dir. James Gray
What It’s About: Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) sets out on a mission to Neptune to find his missing father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), and stop a series of devastating electromagnetic pulses relating to his father’s mysterious last mission.
What the Brothers Said: “Even though its thematic interests are more limited in scope than many science-fiction spectacles, it at least gets to indulge in marvellous worldbuilding and take us on a fantastic voyage along the way of exploring the emotional life of its protagonist.” (Anders and Aren)
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
dir. Marielle Heller
What It’s About: After being assigned to cover Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) for a magazine profile, a New York journalist (Matthew Rhys) starts a friendship with the children’s performer, which changes his life for the better.
What the Brothers Said: “That A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood encourages us to become better people after watching it is undeniable.” (Aren)
Ford v Ferrari
dir. James Mangold
What It’s About: Car designer Carol Stacey (Matt Damon) and driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) partner to win the 1962 “24 Hour of Le Mans” race while driving a Ford car, upsetting the supremacy of Ferrari on the racing circuit.
What the Brothers Said: An exceptionally entertaining Hollywood picture with thrilling races and a great performance from Christian Bale. (Aren)
A Hidden Life
dir. Terrence Malick
What It’s About: A true story about the struggles of Austrian farmer Franz Jagerstatter (August Diehl) and his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) during World War II, when Franz refused to pledge allegiance to the Nazis and ended up a political prisoner and religious martyr.
What the Brothers Said: “The total effect of A Hidden Life is overwhelming, both on a sensory level and on a more profound, spiritual level.” (Aren)
The Irishman a.k.a. I Heard You Paint Houses
dir. Martin Scorsese
What It’s About: The true story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a teamster who worked as a hitman for the Mafia from the late-forties onwards, and his relationships with mob boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci) and teamsters union president, Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino).
What the Brothers Said: “Scorsese has made a 209-minute thesis statement on the gangster picture” (Anders and Aren)
Joker
dir. Todd Phillips
What It’s About: Mentally-damaged low-rent clown Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) transforms from a social outcast to criminal icon in a squalid 1981 Gotham City.
What the Brothers Said: “It posits that superhero movies may be able to tell us something true about the worst of us along with the best.” (Anton and Aren)
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
dir. Quentin Tarantino
What It’s About: The lives of a washed up TV cowboy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman (Brad Pitt) collide with the schemes of the Manson Family in the fateful summer of 1969.
What the Brothers Said: “The movie is a strange affirmation of life, something I wasn’t expecting to find in a Tarantino movie.” (Anders, Anton, and Aren)
Parasite
dir. Bong Joon-ho
What It’s About: The working class Kims (Song Kang-ho, Chang Hyae-jin, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam) trick and lie their way into the employment of the ultra-rich Parks (Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Jung Ziso, Jung Heyong-jun) only for their long con to have unintended consequences on the lives of both families.
What the Brothers Said: “Parasite is a rare film these days in operating at a high level on so many different fronts.” (Anders and Aren)
Richard Jewell
dir. Clint Eastwood
What It’s About: Security guard and aspiring police officer Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) discovers a bomb in Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, saving dozens of lives in the process, but ultimately becoming the prime suspect after law enforcement and the media unfairly target him due to his social isolation.
What the Brothers Said: Featuring a terrific performance from Paul Walter Hauster, Richard Jewell is another fascinating portrait of heroism by Clint Eastwood. (Aren)
Rocketman
Dir. Dexter Fletcher
What It’s About: A musical biopic about Elton John (Taron Egerton), from his humble beginnings in England to his stardom as a musical icon.
What the Brothers Said: “Rocketman does not succeed through the originality of its storytelling, but through the verve of its presentation, which revitalizes the musical biopic through the power of musical theatre.” (Aren)
Uncut Gems
dir. Josh and Benny Safdie
What It’s About: New York City jeweler and gambling addict, Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), invests a fortune in a rare opal that he loses to NBA superstar Kevin Garnett (himself) during the 2012 NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals, setting in motion a flurry of transactions and bets that leave Howard’s life hanging in the balance.
What the Brothers Said: “It’s hilarious, riveting, and utterly exhausting.” (Aren)
The Pop Cinema
Alita: Battle Angel
dir. Robert Rodriguez
What It’s About: A young cyborg named Alita (Rosa Salazar) becomes a champion for the destitute as she works to discover the truth of her origin with the help of the scientist (Christoph Waltz) that found and raised her.
What the Brothers Said: A remarkable demonstration of visual effects and another example of James Cameron’s knack for creating fantastic worlds on screen. (Aren)
Doctor Sleep
dir. Mike Flanagan
What It’s About: Almost 40 years after The Shining, recovering alcoholic Dan Torrance (Ewan McGregor) meets Abra Stone (Kyliegh Curran), a young girl with the Shining, and works to save her from a vampiric cult that feeds off children with the Shining.
What the Brothers Said: Another horror masterclass from rising auteur Mike Flanagan and a savvy wedding of the artistic interests and impulses of Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick. (Aren)
El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
dir. Vince Gilligan
What It’s About: An epilogue to Breaking Bad focusing on the fate of Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul).
What the Brothers Said: El Camino offers the same exceptional genre filmmaking as Breaking Bad, while giving Jesse Pinkman the emotional sendoff he deserves. (Aren)
Frozen II
dir. Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee
What It’s About: Elsa (Idina Menzel), Anna (Kristen Bell) and their friends venture into an Enchanted Forest in the far north to heal the wounds of the past.
What the Brothers Said: Better than the first, Frozen II uses its well-established cast of characters to explore richer and more complex storytelling ideas and avoids the usual sequel traps. (Anders)
High Flying Bird
dir. Steven Soderbergh
What It’s About: The NBA agent (Andre Holland) to the number one first-round pick tries to leverage the NBA during a lockout by organizing one-on-one pick-up games live-streamed over social media.
What the Brothers Said: “It’s a winning combination of form and content, even if the film doesn’t entirely satisfy as a sports drama, since, by its own admission, it’s not about the game, but about the ‘game above the game.’” (Anders and Aren)
The Highwaymen
dir. John Lee Hancock
What It’s About: Two Texas Rangers (Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson) hunt down Bonnie and Clyde during the duo’s notorious run of bank robberies in the early 1930s.
What the Brothers Said: “There is a place for confident, middlebrow Americana that satisfies on a basic level while also scratching at the tensions beneath the surface.” (Aren)
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
dir. Dean DeBlois
What It’s About: The final entry in the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy finds Viking chieftain Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) working to save his village from a dangerous warlord who has learned to enslave dragons to fuel his conquest.
What the Brothers Said: An emotionally-satisfying conclusion to the popular children’s franchise and another remarkable demonstration of the advancements in computer animation. (Aren)
Missing Link
dir. Chris Butler
What It’s About: In this stop-motion animated featured from Laika, an ambitious explorer (Hugh Jackman) teams up with a kind-hearted sasquatch (Zach Galifiniakas) on a quest to find the fabled valley of Shangri-La.
What the Brothers Said: “It’s a hilarious, beautiful film about family and the need to belong, simple and familiar themes for children’s entertainment, but profound nevertheless.” (Anders and Aren)
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
dir. J.J. Abrams
What It’s About: This finale in the Star Wars saga finds Rey (Daisy Ridley), Finn (John Boyega), and Poe (Oscar Isaac) struggling against Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) and the resurrected Emperor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), who unveils a long-in-the-making plot to destroy the Jedi once and for all.
What the Brothers Said: As emotionally overwhelming as it is stuffed with plot and astounding visuals, The Rise of Skywalker brings Disney’s contributions to the Skywalker Saga to a close in rousing fashion. (Anders, Anton, and Aren)
Toy Story 4
dir. Josh Cooley
What It’s About: Woody (Tom Hanks) must mentor a new toy, Forky (Tony Hale), and grapple with his own changing role as a toy, as the gang sets out on a road trip.
What the Brothers Said: Against the usual diminishing returns of such a long-running series, Toy Story 4 offers humour, gorgeous animation, and thematic resonance that entertains and moves. (Anders and Aren)
Triple Frontier
dir. J.C. Chandor
What It’s About: A bunch of friends and ex military operators (Ben Affleck, Oscar Isaac, Garret Hedlund, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal) team up to rob a cartel boss in the dense jungle on the borders of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay.
What the Brothers Said: A muscular action film and an intriguing look into how greed can warp even the strongest of bonds. (Aren)
Us
dir. Jordan Peele
What It’s About: A well-to-do black family (Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) is terrorized in their vacation home by a set of exact duplicates of themselves.
What the Brothers Said: “If Us is not as satisfying as Get Out, it’s undoubtedly more ambitious.” (Anders and Aren)
The Arthouse
3 Faces
dir. Jafar Panahi
What It’s About: Jafar Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari head into the remote mountains of northwestern Iran to find a girl who sent them a video in which she apparently kills herself.
What the Brothers Said: Panahi honours his late-mentor Abbas Kiarostami with this fascinating examination of Iranian sexual politics and the malleable relationship between fiction and reality. (Aren)
Ash Is Purest White
dir. Jia Zhangke
What It’s About: A triptych narrative about a woman named Qiao (Zhao Tao) and her complicated relationship with her small-time gangster boyfriend, Bin (Liao Fan), set over three time periods in modern China.
What the Brothers Said: Jia refines the narrative structure of his previous film, Mountains May Depart, to tell a devastating story about being left adrift in a rapidly-changing modern China. (Aren)
Deadwood: The Movie
dir. Daniel Minahan
What It’s About: Set 10 years after the series finale, this sequel film wraps up the stories of Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert), and the other denizens of the frontier town, Deadwood
What the Brothers Said: “It’s a remarkable work and one of the best long-delayed sequels of recent years.” (Aren)
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
dir. Joe Talbot
What It’s About: A homeless man (Jimmie Fails) and his best friend (Jonathan Majors) work to reclaim the childhood home he lost when his family fractured.
What the Brothers Said: A visually-inventive and sensitive portrait of life in a rapidly-gentrifying San Francisco. (Anders and Aren)
The Lighthouse
dir. Robert Eggers
What It’s About: Two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) lose their grip on sanity as they weather out a storm on a remote island in the Atlantic Ocean.
What the Brothers Said: “Like the best blends of arthouse and genre filmmaking, The Lighthouse confounds and dazzles, both through its narrative and its artistry. There are few films like it.” (Anders and Aren)
Long Day’s Journey into Night
dir. Bi Gan
What It’s About: A man (Huang Jue) returns to his hometown of Kaili to go searching for his past lover (Tang Wei) who has haunted his memory ever since he left.
What the Brothers Said: An appropriately moody noir, and especially stunning for the hour-long single-take 3D tracking shot that ends the film. (Aren)
Non-Fiction
dir. Olivier Assayas
What It’s About: A witty comedy about publishers and writers in the modern lit industry.
What the Brothers Said: It’s lesser Assayas, but still a clever twist on a familiar type of highbrow comedy, as well as an honest commentary on a changing industry. (Aren)
One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk
dir. Zacharias Kunuk
What It’s About: A recreation of an encounter between an eldery Inuk hunter, Noah Piugattuk (Apayata Kotierk), and a government agent (Kim Bodnia) on a fateful day in 1961.
What the Brothers Said: “It’s slow-paced, beautiful to look at, and, most importantly, extremely funny, even if its minute attention to detail and modest concept demands a large investment of attention from viewers.” (Aren)
Pain and Glory
dir. Pedro Almodovar
What It’s About: A retired film director (Antonio Banderas) reflects on his childhood as he reconnects with an old colleague (Asier Etxeandia).
What the Brothers Said: “In Pain and Glory, every lived moment of a life, whether full of grace or despair, is a work of art.” (Aren)
Shadow
dir. Zhang Yimou
What It’s About: A wuxia epic set in ancient China about palace intrigue and subterfuge centred on the double of an imperial commander (Deng Chao).
What the Brothers Said: Zhang Yimou returns to familiar roots for Shadow, which utilizes monochromatic colour schemes and wuxia action choreography in a stunning manner. (Aren)
The Souvenir
dir. Joanna Hogg
What It’s About: This semi-autobiographical tale follows a young film student (Honor Swinton Byrne) who falls in love with a charming, but self-destructive, older man (Tom Burke), which destabilizes her life just as she’s discovering her existential purpose.
What the Brothers Said: An idiosyncratic take on a coming-of-age story that’s both narratively subtle and daring in its formal presentation. (Aren)
Sunset
dir. László Nemes
What It’s About: A young woman (Juli Jakab) tries to find the brother she never knew she had and uncover her family’s dark secrets in Austro-Hungarian Budapest on the eve of World War I.
What the Brothers Said: “Nemes proves that he has invented a new mode of historical cinema.” (Aren)
Transit
dir. Cristian Petzold
What It’s About: While attempting to flee a fascist invasion, a man (Franz Rogoswki) takes on the identity of a dead author to get transit papers, but ends up falling in love with the dead man’s wife (Paula Beer) while waiting for passage in Marseilles.
What the Brothers Said: Another example of Hitchcockian drama from Cristian Petzold, one that fascinatingly blends time periods in its depiction of a Europe haunted by fascism. (Aren)
Under the Silver Lake
dir. David Robert Mitchell
What It’s About: An obsessive young layabout (Andrew Garfield) tries to decode a secret pattern beneath reality and unearth a sinister conspiracy after his attractive new neighbour (Riley Keough) mysteriously disappears one day.
What the Brothers Said: In the tradition of Californian, sundrenched, stoner noirs like The Big Lebowski and The Long Goodbye, Under the Silver Lake draws you into its labyrinthian plot anchored in Garfield’s excellent performance and Mitchell’s assured direction. (Anders and Aren)
The Hot Doc
American Dharma
dir. Errol Morris
What It’s About: Errol Morris adds another entry is his catalogue of documentary portraits of important and controversial US political figures, this time interviewing former Brietbart editor, former White House strategist, and populist agitator Steve Bannon.
What the Brothers Said: “American Dharma is important viewing for anyone wanting to better understand the maelstrom of global politics since 2015.” (Anton and Aren)
American Factory
dir. Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar
What It’s About: This fly-on-the-wall documentary follows an automotive parts factory in Dayton, Ohio, where the American workers and Chinese supervisors bond and clash over economic and cultural differences.
What the Brothers Said: “American Factory becomes a loud statement about the dysfunctions of late capitalism and the need for a more humane way to engage each other and deal with competing interests in a globalized world.” (Aren)
Apollo 11
dir. Todd Douglas Miller
What It’s About: Drawing on the incredible film and video archives of NASA for the 50th anniversary, director Todd Douglas Miller constructs an account of the first successful mission to the moon, letting the footage speak for itself without an authoritative voice-over.
What the Brothers Said: “Its footage is so stunning that the film instantly becomes an essential document of human achievement, regardless of messaging.” (Anders and Aren)
The Hottest August
dir. Brett Story
What It’s About: In a series of conversations and interviews in the August of 2017, the director and crew probe economic and climate anxieties in and around New York City.
What the Brothers Said: “Like a hot, late summer day, [The Hottest August] never rouses, but rather leaves one restless at the constant, inescapable heat. (Anders)
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese a.k.a. Conjuring Rolling Thunder Re-vue
dir. Martin Scorsese
What It’s About: In 1975, Bob Dylan set out on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour to explore North America in the aftermath of Watergate and the Vietnam War.
What the Brothers Said: Scorsese and Dylan play with time and historical fidelity, altering the past and playing with Dylan’s own self-mythologizing, in this exploration of Americana and music. (Anders and Aren)
The Last Male on Earth
dir. Floor van der Meulen
What It’s About: An investigation of the conservation efforts and tourism industry that surrounded Sudan, the last male White Northern Rhino in the world, who lived at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya until his death in 2018.
What the Brothers Said: “A dryly humorous and quietly critical documentary, more of a moral investigation than a rigorous chronicle of factual events.” (Aren)