Chris rounds out our year-end releases with his top 25 movies of the year (number 25 may surprise you!). Click here to check out all of our year-end lists.
25. Cats (Tom Hooper)
The first entry in a best-of-the-year list
8
CATS is an immeasurable, inscrutable, atrocious failure that I love.
8
Salacious and nonsensical in such admirable manners, the film sees Strickland harnessing his more obtuse qualities as a director and stylist to great effect.
9.5
Knives Out is an intricate murder mystery that revels in delightful menace while constantly subverting your expectations.
3.5
Like all great science fiction, The Wrong Todd asks the big questions, like "Is it possible to cuck myself?"
10
Parasite is a defiant piece of class critical cinema which features a director in obstinate control of his message, vision and artistry.
6.5
Settling comfortably into the familiar subject of a yakuza turf war, First Love sees eccentric director Miike delivering a standardized but darkly comedic action-crime odyssey.
2.5
Auggie broaches the issue of A.I. relationships with the diminutive, surface-level approach of a bad “Black Mirror” episode.
7
Deerskin is one or two expertly told absurdist jokes whose repetition comes close to tedium.
8
As a self-criticising exploration of travelogue shows and the internal biases that structure them, To the Ends of the Earth is an enlightening dialogue about being feeling lost in a foreign country.
8
Preying on the anxieties over religious zealotry, Saint Maud is an auspicious horror debut that burns with a quiet terror.
8.5
It is not everyday you walk away from a film and think the 30-minute, one-take aspect is the least interesting about it, but it is rings true for Ueda's layered horror comedy experience.
4
While a middling, inoffensive family comedy may be its aim, Where’d You Go, Bernadette allows its divisive filmmaker to make some broad, uncomfortable statements on the nature of genius.
6.5
Durst’s film shows a respectable ability to communicate what happens when the fantasy of celebrity breaks down on both sides of the spectrum.
7.5
With a narrative that feels uncomfortably ripped from the headlines, The Journalist reinforces the need for a critical and independent media through the tense lens of a bureaucratic thriller.
5.5
The rise of Japanese chess enthusiast Shoji Segawa into the cutthroat professional world makes for some predictable yet crowd-pleasing fare.
