Continuing with our 2019 list extravaganza, here’s Ken’s top ten movies of 2019. For more thoughts from Ken, be sure to give our year-end podcast a listen here or on your preferred podcast service. To check out everyone’s amazing 2019 lists,
8.5
The Blu-ray for THE CIRCUS by Criterion is a stellar, detailed release of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 film.
4.5
You can see the movie that Corporate Animals wants to be, as there are instances when its wild mixture of satirizing capitalism, horror comedy and peculiar banter create some moments that succeed in being uniquely funny.
6.5
The Criterion edition of Funny Games restores, and adds more context to, a still-polarizing film.
7.5
Wild Nights with Emily poses fascinating questions on how popular understandings in history are formed and often manipulated.
5.5
Inspired direction can’t save Yardie from a formulaic script.
In my introduction to last year’s Oscar predictions, I refer to the 2017–18 awards season as “one of the most tumultuous” in recent memory, a superlative that would almost seem too weak when discussing the events of this year. Each
8.5
The Criterion edition of 24 Frames is a fittingly superb tribute to a great artist.
6.5
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek is formally and aesthetically fascinating, even when its script feels a little incomplete.
Continuing our 2018 wrap-up spectacular is Ken Bakely‘s top 10 films of 2018.
5.5
Though the movie is capable, it’s missing the extra push to keep it away from using to the familiar tropes it wants to avoid.
6.5
Shebanow’s driving energy is always apparent although sometimes it’s left, frustratingly, just out of reach.
7.5
It’s a movie with an unwavering faith in the lessons we can learn from the past, but it shuns inappropriate nostalgia or uncritical revisionism.
7
Sadie is, above all, a meditation on life spent without access: to money, to answers, to safe outlets for confusion and anger.
7.5
The film’s greatest asset is its ability to convey the lively spirit of the conversations without feeling selective or artificially emphasizing points, beyond spare bursts of archival footage or the occasional question posed from Michell himself.
8
Cold Water is an absorbing, pensive look at what such desires feel like on the inside, with its handheld close-ups on faces and careful observance at objects and structures, as if to seek answers from everything in equal measure.
