The subtly apocalyptic tale concerns a vacationing family attacked by murderous doppelgangers, and it plays out like a feverish lucid dream, and yes sometimes the plot follows a certan dream logic. Lupita Nyong’o is so good that she deserves to win Oscars for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, and Winston Duke is no slouch either. This gorgeous and gripping “revenge of the underclass” tale is almost all metaphor, one that refreshingly offers few concrete explanations for its unapologetically fantastical elements. Jordan Peele followed up Get Out with a knottier, weightier and more complicated genre offering that’s also a “look what I can do” filmmaker flex. Lupita Nyong'o and Lupita Nyong'o in Jordan Peele's 'Us' COPYRIGHT ©2019 UNIVERSAL STUDIOS Shazam! showed that Wonder Woman and Aquaman were no flukes, and that the DC Films franchise was back on track. Operating like a bizarro hybrid of Spider-Man, Meet the Robinsons, Antoine Fisher and Gremlins, this “young boy transforms into a grown-up superhero” story also features the year’s best plot twist. It is an unapologetically raw and emotional story about an abandoned child and his challenges navigating the foster system, it is a robustly violent and scary fantasy that pulls no punches, it is a joyful celebration of found family and surprising kindness, and it’s also a pretty terrific superhero movie. David Sandberg’s kid-centric fantasy juggles several chainsaws without dropping any of them. Zachary Levi and Jack Dylan Grazer in DC Films' 'Shazam!' Warner Bros.Īll due respect to Avengers: Endgame’s cumulative achievement, DC Films and New Line Cinema’s Shazam! was the year’s best comic book/superhero movie. In terms of who it’s about, what it’s about, how it’s about it and who gets to tell the story, Queen and Slim is everything we say we want out of the Hollywood system. Queen and Slim is a political screed and a tragedy about the futility of activism in a world where the presumption of innocence need not apply. Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith (in her first leading role) anchor this blend of painful topicality and unapologetic romanticism, offering another example of how our oldest stories can be made new via new protagonists. It is a classic myth updated for our time, a western that deconstructs and celebrates the classic new wave cinema while redefining who gets to be legendary outlaws in a modern-day America.
Penned by Lena Waithe, Melina Matsoukas’s scorching directorial debut plays like a cross between Bonnie and Clyde and Thelma and Louise while forging an identity unique unto itself (rip-off, don’t remake). Parasite questions what those in the middle and upper classes are willing to tolerate, justify and/or ignore in order to enjoy the conventional comforts of economic security.ĭaniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith in 'Queen & Slim' Universal What helps Parasite work as more than a straight-up genre flick, although it’s very good when viewed as such, is how it refuses to outright villainize any of its characters. It’s a ticking time-bomb of tension brought about not by greed or vice, but by a scheme whose end game is mere economic survival. Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite takes a delightfully wicked high concept and spins it into a grimly thoughtful morality tale. The overriding theme in many of this year’s “big” movies (including Joker, natch) was how economic injustice wasn’t just rooted in Bernie Madoff-like con artists and Wall Street “fat cats,” but the structural inequities that allows the rich to remain wealthy while making it all-but-impossible for the poor to climb out of their economic situation. The Kim Family Woo-sik Choi Kang-ho Song Hye-jin Jang So-dam Park in 'Parasite' NEON In a world of IP-specific brands, John Wick became an A-level action franchise by sheer force of quality. The artistic and entertainment value offered in each successive installment of the John Wick series has led to unprecedented movie-to-movie commercial growth. The eye-poppingly beautiful Parabellum cemented John Wick as the best new franchise of the decade and Reeves as the greatest Hollywood action star of his generation.
The franchise offers spectacular action sequences, primal storytelling, subtle world building and beautiful production values that have given Reeves yet another wholly original marquee character to his name.
In a decade notable for branded franchises, PG-13 fantasies and the death of the “butts in seats” movie star, John Wick was an original, R-rated, star-driven action spectacular, rooted in a specific movie star (Keanu Reeves) playing an off-kilter variation of his star persona. Keanu Reeves, Yayan Ruhian, and Cecep Arif Rahman in 'John Wick Chapter 3 - Parabellum' Lionsgate
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