It’s always hard predicting what all the must-see movies for a year are while still stuck in January. The simple truth of the matter is that we just don’t have a very good idea of what will and won’t make the cut. At this time last year, everybody knew, for a fact, that X-Men: Dark Phoenix, New Mutants and Alita: Battle Angel were all going to be 2018 releases. Nobody was sure whether The Mule would be finished in time for the end of the year. And nobody had even heard of festival darlings cum Oscar frontrunners The Favourite, Roma, If Beale Street Could Talk and BlacKkKlansman yet.
But while we don’t have the full picture yet, we do have the start of one. The opening months of the year have all been thoroughly mapped out, the major players of the Summer are all known quantities at this point and we’re even starting to get a trickle of titles coming in for fall Oscar preliminaries (at least those coming out from the major studios). In short, we know most of what we can expect from 2019, and certainly more-or-less everything that people will go out to see in droves. I have to say, from this angle, 2019 is looking to be another standout year at the movies.
10 . How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
It took me longer than most to warm up to Dreamworks’ animated movies. Although I liked Shrek (2001) well enough, it never quite snapped into place for me the way that it did for others. I was never taken in by the company’s blatant Disney-Pixar rip-offs and I always seemed to prefer something else. But How to Train Your Dragon (2010) really hit me where I lived, and showed off everything that animation was capable of doing beyond its rank approximation of live-action storytelling. And when How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) came out, I was amazed at how the filmmakers were able to progress the story, world and characters beyond the safe status-quo that most franchises are comfortable operating within. And now that the third movie seems to have taken that to its most logical extreme — the predictive endpoint for the world and characters that we’ve spent the better part of a decade living with — I can’t help but expect even bigger and better things than what we’ve seen already from this franchise.
9 . Little Women
Sometimes, all you need to be sold on a movie is the talent involved, and Sony’s Little Women has a-list talent in spades. The cast, for once, includes Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Laura Dern and Timothèe Chalamet. It’s director Greta Gerwig’s anticipated follow-up to her Best Picture nominated lady Bird (2017). It’s based on the celebrated novel that promises fertile ground for Gerwig and her team to do what they do best: craft intricate, deeply nuanced stories about complex women and their storied relationships.
8 . Captain Marvel
Although I am looking forward to that other Captain Marvel movie coming out this year (it’s a long story, but the movie’s actually Shazam!), it’s this Captain Marvel — Carol Danvers — that I’m most interested in. A shockingly complex character that has been rewritten, reimagined, recontextualized and reinterpreted more than perhaps any other in Marvel’s superheroic canon, Captain Marvel is rife with possibilities in the MCU (and not simply because her moniker bears the studio’s namesake). She’s a fun and fascinating cosmic character that has the potential to bridge the MCU’s terrestrial stories with their space-faring ones — a bit of connective tissue between the likes of the Avengers and that of the Guardians of the Galaxy. And, yeah, I can’t wait to see Brie Larson cold cock a sweet old lady on a bus full of terrified onlookers.
7 . The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part
2014 was a banner year for movies, but the biggest surprise from it was The Lego Movie (2014). Rather than just the shallow, feature-length commercial that it could have, and by rights should have, been, it was a thoughtful, creative and vibrantly entertaining masterwork of animation that perfectly crafted its idiosyncratic story around the way that kids actually play with their Legos: without any real credence toward preexisting notions of franchises, genre or aesthetics. If its sequel was just that a second time, it would still be one of the year’s utmost must-sees. But with its post-apocalyptic narrative turn and apparent lean-into its predecessor’s most bizarre tendencies, it looks to be something else entirely: what that is, I don’t know, but you can surely bet that I’m willing to pay to find out.
6 . Star Wars: Episode IX
Ever since it reemerged from the post-prequel scrap heap of pop-cultural mythology, Star Wars has become an indominable force of film culture once more. The annualized and ever-expanding franchise recaptured our childish love of the franchise with The Force Awakens (2015), utterly devastated our fan-fueled expectations for the forward-looking franchise with The Last Jedi (2017), proved that there was more to Star Wars than just the Skywalker saga with Rogue One (2016) and even proved that both the individual movies and larger franchise can survive creative setbacks with Solo (2018). But all things must come to an end, and this year marks the conclusion of the current Star Wars trilogy: one that should hopefully put to bed the redux story of empires and rebels rekindled in The Force Awakens and lay new groundwork for the franchise going forward.
5 . Glass
After hitting the movie scene big with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan had a monumental string of terrible movies: unprecedented in the world of good directors, and impressive enough in the world of terrible ones. Sure, Unbreakable (2000) and Signs (2002) were really good, but The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006), The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), After Earth (2013) and The Visit (2015) are among the worst movies of the past two decades. Then Split (2017) happened — not just Shyamalan’s best movie in decades, but one of the best movies of that year — and it turned out to be a secret Unbreakable sequel. And now, its follow-up, the conclusion to Shyamalan’s post-hoc superhero trilogy and one of the most exciting instalments in its genre, is set to come out later this month, finally giving everybody a reason to care about January movie releases.
4 . Avengers: Endgame
I’ll admit it, Avengers: Infinity War (2018) destroyed me: not physically — it’s not like I dissolved into a cloud of ash and drifted away on the wind — but certainly emotionally. I know that we had another Avengers movie on the docket for the following year, I know that we had two prequels in the meantime to keep me satisfied until then, but it didn’t matter. Marvel ended their decade-end celebration of their transformative meta-franchise by killing off half their bankable characters. The bad guy one. The good guys lost. Half the universe died. And now’s the Avengers’ — or at least, what’s left of them’s — last chance to set things right, and it opens up so many exciting possibilities for the series going forward. That this is not my most anticipated movie of the year is merely testament to how many other exciting features it has to compete with at the box office (although, to be clear, this movie will be the highest grossing film of next year, both foreign and domestic, so you might want to start planning what seats you’ll be buying tickets for when they finally go on sale for opening weekend).
3 . The Irishman
By rights, The Irishman is a movie that shouldn’t exist. Martin Scorsese’s passion project has struggled to get off of the ground for years, and when it finally did get studio approval, its ballooning budget and comparatively niche genre led to it getting scrapped by the powers that be in Hollywood. But Netflix, sweet Netflix, ever desperate for industry respect and exclusive, high-end content, snatched the film up from the Hollywood scrapheap and agreed to give Scorsese whatever budget he needed to get the thing made. And between its mobster obsessive director, its truly insane cast (which includes Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Harvey Keitel and Joe Pesci) and a plot concerned with the still-unsolved murder of Jimmy Hoffa, it’s sure to be one of the year’s most exciting features.
2 . Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
In much the same way that The Irishman seems like the serendipitous culmination of a dream creative team with a dream project, so to does Once Upon a Time in Hollywood promise to deliver one of the year’s absolute must-see films. From esteemed writer-director Quentin Tarantino, and a cast which includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Al Pacino, Kurt Russel and Bruce Dern (standing in for the recently departed Burt Reynolds), it purports to tell the story of the Manson Murders and the Hollywood that gave rise to them. Similarly a long-gestating passion-project for Tarantino, it promises to be the perfect storm of the exact right people for the exact right story at the exact right time. And if the man really is retiring after his tenth (ie, his next) film, the door is rapidly closing on seeing Tarantino films on the big screen.
1 . Us
Although 2017 gave us a number of big, bold, bombastic films, the story of the year was unquestionably Jordan Peele and his debut feature, Get Out (2017). Ultimately winning an Oscar for Original Screenplay and coming within a hair’s breadth of beating out The Shape of Water (2017) for Best Picture, it was a tightly wrought, suspensefully directed, mesmerically produced horror film about the everyday terrors of simply being Black in America. Some people didn’t care for its Stepford-indebted narrative, nor for its more fantastical twist near the end, but there’s no denying the power that this film had upon its release. And for Peele’s follow-up to that lofty debut, he gives us the same kind of fascinating, race-centered take on the slasher genre: in which a vacationing family is hunted down by their deranged, murderous doppelgangers. And between by general love of horror and my particular love of Peele, I can’t think of any movie that I would rather see this year.
Did you like this article? Follow us on Google News
Follow Us
ncG1vNJzZmispqTDpr7MoqWdZpOkunC5zqyrZpmeqbaktc%2Baq56cXaK8t7XErGSonl1nfXKFjK2fnmVhZXquwdKtZKydlWKzqrjMrGScp52eu6h5zq6rZqyYnsBuxcSaqWg%3D