The 25 Best Films Of 2019 You Didn’t See - Page 5 of 5

5.Monos
Filmmaker Alejandro Landes’ searing children-as-guerrillas drama “Monos” was not selected by the Academy Awards for the Best Foreign Language shortlist and that’s just a shame the Academy is going to have to live with for years. On our list of the Best Films of 2019, we made the exception to place NEON‘s “Monos” here because it is just that good and that deeply underseen. Taking its unsettling cues from Micah Levi’s eerie, strange, unorthodox score (she did “Under The Skin”) —displacing as ever and once again confirming some of the best unusual music instincts in the music score industry— Landes chronicles the lives of child guerilla soldiers, conscripted and indoctrinated into living a life on a cold, remote mountaintop of Colombia. Stripped of their identity and using nom de guerre names like Rambo, Smurf, Bigfoot, Wolf, and Boom-Boom (one of them played by Moisés Arias of “Kings Of Summer”), these group of young kids keep watch over an American hostage, a doctor (Julianne Nicholson). Chilling in its depiction of violence, blind loyalty, and brainwashed minds, Landes’ arresting, incredibly cinematic movie is a haunting portrait of the child soldier, the dysfunctional families made by orphans and the brutal “Lord Of The Flies”-like structures of hierarchy that emerge when children, not equipped to face the evils of the world, are armed and tasked with fighting wars they could not possibly understand. – RP

4. “The Last Black Man in San Francisco
There’s a moment around the middle of “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” where a man starts crying; the overwhelming shift in emotion captured through a cinematic technique and tweak in the sound mix that accentuates the sensory feeling being experienced as the character collapses into grief. Joe Talbot’s astonishing movie on gentrification and racial class struggles features an incredible lead performance from the director’s childhood best friend, Jimmie Fails (playing a loose persona of himself) and is simply transcendent filmmaking. There are several instances where ‘Last Black Man’ will punch you right in the heart. It’s the kind of film you walk out of and feel more closely connected to the intimate details of the world around you – its folk art snapshots and soapbox empathy exuding utter compassion. Both the score and cinematography (by Adam Newport-Berra and Emile Mosseri, respectively) are simply on another level, and Jonathan Majors’ playwright character’s secret agenda will wreck your very soul. You don’t get to love something unless you know what it’s like to hate it if you ask Jimmie Fails. – AB

3.An Elephant Sitting Still
Long movies are not easy for some audiences to sit through (look no further than the Film Twitter fury brought about by proposing one watch “The Irishman” as a miniseries), but when the film is a 4-hour, minimalist, epic tragedy on the nature of suicide, and is entirely rooted in misery, finding an audience may prove especially difficult. Hu Bo’s first feature, “An Elephant Sitting Still,” will also be his last artistic statement, the filmmaker tragically having taken his own life at the age of 29 when producers insist he make cuts to his masterpiece. Hu’s only film is set across the course of a single day. After pushing his bully down a flight of stairs, a boy finds himself fleeing from the retaliation of his classmate’s older criminal brother, who feels responsible for the death of a friend after sleeping with his wife. A young girl becomes involved with her school administrator, and an aging man desperately tries to avoid being placed in a nursing home. But there is hope to be found beyond the horizon in the form of a metaphor. Local legends speak of an elephant that ignores the world, content to simply exist in the mountains of Manzhouli, representing something not unlike the Golden Fleece from “Jason and the Argonauts.” The movie is the furthest thing from an easy watch, but sports some of the finest cinematography of the decade, building laboriously to an indescribably powerful closing release of pure catharsis. – AB

2. “Birds of Passage
Some good movies do one thing incredibly well. “Birds of Passage” is the kind of film that does everything a movie can possibly do ridiculously well, putting the originality of so-called other original films to shame while doing so. A genre mash-up, retelling of the rise of the Columbian drug cartel, the film is split up into 5 “songs,” beginning with a blind shepherd waxing the word of old. Our story is framed like a Greek tragedy, hybridizing elements of gangster films and Westerns. A young man wishes to win the heart of a princess, so he treks up the Sierras, and soon finds himself peddling marijuana to American tourists in order to do so. One moment the movie feels like a cultural spin on “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” and then the next chapter more evokes the feeling of “City of God.” The cinematography is luscious, the production design outstanding; the sound mix and score draw you into another world completely. Directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra, have crafted the kind of film that truly only comes around every so often with “Birds of Passage,” a timeless tapestry of towering world cinema. – AB

1. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night
Drift off to a land where your memories can cast a spell on themselves. Bi Gan’s sophomore feature is a cinematic mic drop from an aesthetic magician that blurs the lines between the art of film, the act of dreaming, and how such imaginings inform the stories we tell ourselves as we walk down our singular path. A Haruki Murakami-like feverish trance of swirling melancholy, cavernous wonderlands, and eternal longing, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” follows a man who long ago fell into a world of crime, now chasing after the memory of a woman (Tang Wei) he once loved, who disappeared from his life, like so many others before her. Through reflective narration, weary detective work and symbolic visuals, fragments of the history of their fractured relationship are interspersed with our lonely lead’s fruitless search for his lost love. The, now famous, final shot of the film is an almost hour-long, unbroken 3-D take that transports the viewer across chasms of his unconscious, the camera gliding above broken allegories of an undead past and into a traumatic valley of deep-seated memories. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” uses the pure expressive power of cinema — light, color, shadow, and music — to examine the maze of myths and desires we create out of what we alone see when the lights go dark. Say the spell. Spin the house. – AB

Honorable Mentions:
All in all, this truly was a remarkable year for film (the world certainly needs art to escape into right now), and, while some of us aren’t exactly thrilled with the films getting the most awards attention, these smaller titles will forever live on in the hearts of their greatest champions. Some other, lesser-seen pictures we particularly loved include Ash Mayfair’s striking melodrama, “The Third Wife,” Bora Kim’s utterly wrenching “House of Hummingbird,” and Siew Hua Yeo’s fluttering tone poem “A Land Imagined.” A couple of auteurs we adore also released very strong films that some critics seemed a little harsh on; Asghar Farhadi’s “Everybody Knows” finds the Iranian filmmaker applying the soap opera-side of his sensibilities to a Spanish, telenovela-like project featuring two fantastic lead performances from Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem. Ira Sachs’ newest film, “Frankie,” is a wonderful Eric Rohmer-lite slice. J.C. Chandor’s “Triple Frontier” may have lost Netflix a few fat stacks of cash, but solidified our view that he’s one of the most underrated directors working with his impeccably crafted heist picture, and “Attack of the Block’s” Joe Cornish finally released a follow-up feature, family-friendly “The Kid Who Would Be King,” a charming take on the Arthurian legend. Lastly, from the documentary side of things, we must give a shout out to “What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” the inspirational love letter to ‘Trek’s long misunderstood, adopted middle-child, as well as Sasha Joseph Neulinger‘s incredible bravery in sharing his survival story with “Rewind,” a deeply powerful personal doc on sexual abuse trauma, addressing, still, all-too-relevant issues.