You can take most of what I said about 2019’s video games and apply it here. But I’ll spare you the read. I thought 2019 was a weak year for movies right up until I made this list.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to find a unifying reason as to why I thought 2019 was a down year for movies. Once again, annoying fandom reared its ugly head, be it Joker fans who’ve clearly never seen Taxi Driver or The King of Comedy or Marvel fans overreacting to what was ultimately a reasonable-though-not-particularly-well-thought-out point by Scorsese. Meanwhile, on the other end of the film spectrum, certain critical circles were vastly overhyping Joker and Green Book somehow won Best Picture.

But none of those things inspired that much ire in me. (Okay, maybe the Green Book thing did.) In the end, I think it was the movies themselves. To me, 2019 was one of those film years that was a very good but not great. Very little of what I saw sparked a burning passion in me, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s arguably worse than having a year where everything I saw was dog shit. I’m exaggerating, but hopefully you get my point. Disappointment has its own special sting.

But you know what? To literally copy and paste what I wrote in the video game top ten, once I was done ranking and nitpicking and cramming movies in at the last minute, I realized something. I love this list.

In a certain sense, it’s the strangest one I’ve made so far. There’s some critical heavy hitters that didn’t end up making it. There’s more movies from genres that usually don’t resonate with me as much. There’s more weirdness in general. Not arthouse weird, mind you. Most of these movies are known quantities, and the ones that aren’t should be. What I mean is that I found myself on the supportive side of a lot of polarizing movies, and my list is rather AV Club-ish this year.

Let’s get to it!

HEAVY SPOILERS BELOW!!!!

Runner-Up: Us

I’ve found a lot of the discourse around Us to be kind of annoying. A large part of it has to do with people putting way too much energy into logic nitpicking, but mainly, I feel that Us would’ve gone down smoother with a lot more people if they stopped comparing it to Get Out and judged it on its own merits.

That said, I would like to tell you about a nitpick I had with Get Out.

Throughout the beginning of Get Out, the conflict driving the story forward is Chris meeting his girlfriend Rose’s parents. Rose, not understanding the cultural nuance (at least on the surface), hasn’t told her parents that Chris is black, causing Chris a huge amount of anxiety on their drive to upstate New York. The police incident with the deer probably didn’t help either.

When Chris does finally meet Rose’s father Dean and mother Missy, it’s shown to us in a wide shot. To this day, that decision drives me insane. Granted, it’s ultimately revealed that we’re seeing the scene from the perspective of the “groundskeeper,” and it has a bit more kick on a rewatch. But this is the moment Chris has been dreading, and the subtleties matter. The facial ticks of the father. Whether or not the mother shows any hesitation to shake his hand. These details can define a scene, and I always felt the decision not to be with Chris in the moment was odd.

I mention all this because I have no such nitpicks with Us. In fact, from a technical and artistic standpoint, the opening sequence of Us was one the best scenes I saw in a theater in 2019.

In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that I like Us more than Get Out in every sense. I know I said that people should stop comparing them, but it’s kind of unavoidable at a certain point.

A few detractors I follow said that they found the message of the movie inscrutable, and they weren’t sure what Jordan Peele was trying to say. Part of why I get annoyed at comparing Peele’s two films is the expectation that people should be mining Us for Get Out style political subtext. It’s not that there isn’t any. There is. It’s just a little less direct.

Us, to me, is about repression. Repression of people of color and the non-wealthy for sure. But also repression in a general sense. Trauma. Depression. All the negative emotional stimuli you push beneath the surface that runs amok in your subconscious. All the parts of yourself that you need to accept and deal with in order to find some sense of peace.

However, even if the message didn’t resonate with me, I simply enjoyed watching it more. I saw it with a game audience in the theater, which is always a plus. I loved Winston Duke’s dorky dad character. I loved the set pieces. I loved Elisabeth Moss looking at herself in the mirror with the scissors. I loved every aspect of Lupita Nyong’o’s performance(s). I loved not knowing what was going to happen next. I loved all these things in the way you’re supposed to love something that’s supposed to be fun. Is that love deep? Not really. But it doesn’t have to be.

I was going to put Little Women in this spot. My enjoyment of that was more traditionally emotional. But fun is an emotion as well, and one that shouldn’t be ignored. Also, I remembered the bit where Winston Duke sprawls out in the bed and it made me laugh.

10. High Flying Bird

Last summer, I wrote an extraordinarily petty rant about Field of Dreams, and to a certain extent, sports movies in general. There was the usual moping about the formula and my limited capacity to feel anything on the rare occasions that I do watch sports. But mainly, it was about the mawkish sentimentality. The inspirational speech in the locker room and scoring the final point before the buzzer. All that shit.

Though I doubt the ability of these movies to tell affective stories or not rely on clichés, the one thing I don’t doubt, for better or for worse, is the sincerity. I don’t doubt that those who made Field of Dreams love baseball, and to me, there’s something admirable about that. Of course, the way those filmmakers channel that love is a little toxic and suffocating. But in the age of internet snark where irony means nothing and everything is sarcasm, I’ll take any sincerity where I can get.

Lots of art exists to tear things down. Sports movies, however, exist to build things up. The love of a game, and how it brings people together.

Thus, I can’t help but love High Flying Bird, a movie that’s found the middle ground in being the most cynical sports movies I’ve ever seen.

Many a sports movie stars an underdog. Our protagonist is Ray Burke, a relatively successful sports agent, dealing mainly with NBA players. He doesn’t fit the mold of what we think of when we think, “underdog.” He isn’t poor. He isn’t disabled. He’s not suffering in any immediately obvious way. He is, however, black in a world where black people, specifically the athletes, are treated like cattle. A world where human beings only have value if they can earn billionaire owners more money. Ray isn’t the best person, but you can’t help but root for him regardless.

The story takes place during a fictional NBA lockout, and as the story goes on, we watch Ray manipulate around the league to set up an opportunity where players can earn a paycheck for playing basketball, even though it’s not technically in a professional capacity. Essentially, he sets up a de facto side business where famous athletes play each other one-on-one and stream it on the internet. No league involvement. No contracts violated. The goal isn’t to see this business to fruition. It’s to get the owners back to the table.

Whether or not this would actually work is anybody’s guess, but that isn’t really the point. What’s more interesting is the motivation behind all of this.

There are times when Ray seems to be motivated by a genuine desire to help his clients. To end the lockout as quickly and painlessly as possible and get his players back on the court. There are times when Ray seems motivated by revenge. To stick it to the money men who regularly subjugate black athletes and rob them of their ability to earn money without their involvement. There are times when Ray seems motivated purely out of self-interest. To rise in the agency and make a little scratch for himself.

High Flying Bird then asks us a simple question: Why can’t it be all three?

Though High Flying Bird is incredibly world-weary, there’s a very clear sense that it still loves the game. That said, I’ve never seen a sports movie that so thoroughly loves its sport, and so thoroughly damns the organizations that run the professional aspects of it and the rich white men who keep the wheel of exploitation turning.

9. Midsommar

I ended up seeing Midsommar with my nearly seventy year old father.

Rarely does he get to go to the movies these days. Part of this is due to there being less to see, but it’s mostly a question of practicality. He’s had multiple surgeries over the last few years, as has my stepmother, and he doesn’t really have much of a desire to go to the theater by himself. Usually, he goes with me, but I live across the country. So when we are together, I take on the responsibilities of the dutiful son and take him to the most fucked up movie showing I can, and when he was in LA last, that was Midsommar.

We sat in the theater, we watched silently, then we got to the scene where the two seniors were about to jump off the cliff onto the stone platform below. My father leaned over to me and whispered, “I’m expecting a big splat.”

Now, I saw Hereditary, director Ari Aster’s previous film. I knew what Ari Aster was capable of when it came to the violence. My father wasn’t. If you know my dad, you know that he was making that comment in jest, confident that we weren’t going to actually see the gory details of those elders landing on the stone. Maybe we’ll get a reaction shot or a blood splatter. But surely we weren’t going to actually see the impact!

Somehow, I knew we were. I don’t know why. I just did. The elders jumped, we saw the shot of their faces umm… splashing, and I didn’t hear a peep from my dad for the rest of the movie.

I’ll admit that a large part of my enjoyment of Midsommar was at my father’s expense. (Don’t worry, he actually liked the movie, even though he might be a little reticent to admit it.) However, the elders scene is also exemplary of why this movie works so well for me. It’s a quality I talked about before when we discussed Richard Dawson’s album Peasant back in 2017. I appreciate commitment.

Most horror movies are made on the cheap, and thus the opportunity for detail is lost. Most are so quick to get to the “good stuff” that they blow past nuance or elements that might make the audience actually give a shit. Of course, there’s the archetypal horror fan who doesn’t care about that stuff. But some of us do.

Midsommar takes its time. It’s slow. It’s thought out the details and it makes sure to imbue them into every little corner of the screen. The paintings on the wall. What people wear. The rituals. The commune’s values. Their history. What they believe.

All these details are as fleshed as they possibly can be. Two and half hours is a long running time, especially for the usually short horror genre. But each and every one of those one hundred and forty seven minutes is used for maximum effect. Of all the movies on this list, Midsommar feels the most lived in. Or at least it would have, if it weren’t for the next movie.

8. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Read a screenwriting book or go to a screenwriting class, and at some point, someone will eventually invoke Quentin Tarantino. It may be the teacher or the writer of the book, who’ll talk about his dialogue and how to successfully build tension in a scene. Or it may be the overly enthusiastic film fan who watched Pulp Fiction when they were young and are hoping to learn the craft.

Pulp Fiction was one of those movies for me. Well, one of a few, and now it’s one of those movies that I’ve seen so many times that the thought of watching it again makes me want to puke. But I’ll always have a soft spot for it, and for Quentin as well.

Still, I’ve always wondered something about Tarantino: What would happen if he made a movie that didn’t have a plot?

At this point in my life, Tarantino is more a screenwriting guru to me than an artistic influence. No longer am I writing scripts about criminals exchanging witty banter and pop culture references. Nowadays, I’m a bit all over the place. But when I think of Tarantino as a filmmaker, my mind goes to structure first. Set-up and payoff and all that.

What would happen if Tarantino left all that stuff behind? What if he made something with a more arthouse sensibility? What if, for shits and giggles, he made one of those listless indie movies where it’s all about feel and tone over storytelling?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood isn’t quite one of those films. There’s still plenty of traditional storytelling to be found, and even if there wasn’t, it still feels very much like a Tarantino movie. That said, Tarantino is credited by some for coining the term “hangout movie,” and this is very much one of those. It has plot, but its goal is mainly to ground us in a sense of place and time.

Back in the hangout movie article, we talked about the stakes of hangout movies. Mainly, that we that audience worry that the hangout will end, and that we’ll be whisked away from this world if circumstances conspire the wrong way or someone makes a wrong move.

We know what happened to Sharon Tate in real life. If you’ve seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you already know where this is going. If you haven’t, then you know those stakes are a little more tangible than most hangout movies, and it isn’t a question of if, but when this is all going to come crashing down.

There’s an answer for that. I won’t dare give it away. But it might be the most gloriously stupid thing Tarantino has done in a movie and I adored it. Let’s just leave it there.

7. Her Smell

Alright guys, we need to start including Elisabeth Moss more in the greatest actress of all time conversation.

I know, I know. There’s a lot of recency bias going on here, what with the one-two punch of this movie and Us. On top of that, Peggy Olson is one my favorite characters in one of my favorite shows. There is, of course, the scientology angle to take into account. But that, to me, is a non-issue. No religion, evenly transparently scammy ones, is clean.

Still, if she’s in a project, there’s a decent chance that she’s the best part of it, and even when she isn’t, she more than holds her weight. Comedies. Dramas. It doesn’t really matter.

Which brings us to her performance in Her Smell.

I have some hot acting takes, and there’s been many an instance of me getting angry at the Oscars for giving the award to the wrong person. To put it simply, I prefer subtlety, and when it comes to awards, I prefer awarding best acting over most acting. To many people, Matthew McConaughey’s win for Dallas Buyers Club was a given. But I’ll resent it not going to Chiwetel Ejiofor for his performance in 12 Years a Slave for the rest of my life. It’s not that McConaughey’s performance is bad. It’s just that different things speak to me.

So yeah, I don’t necessarily love big loud performances or over-the-top feats of method acting. But if you must go big, you might as well go as big as possible, and Elisabeth Moss’s performance as rocker Becky Something is as big as big can get.

Part of the brilliance of the performance is how it’s framed. Becky Something is, essentially, a walking trainwreck. Substance abuse, a lack of connection to the real world, a daughter being neglected by her mother. She’s certainly the trope of troubled rock star, but Moss and the movie go so extreme in the portrayal that it becomes assaultive. The largeness of the performance becomes part of the tragedy. It’s hard to know where Moss’s performance ends and Becky’s begins.

Then it all comes crashing down, seemingly for good, and all the grandness of the performance is thrown out the window. From here on in, we’re spending time with a broken person trying to find herself in the wreckage. Of course, not all the craziness came from the drugs. If the person Becky is after she hits bottom is anything like who she was before the craziness, it’s easy to see how we got here, and it makes Moss’s performance all the more impressive.

Of course, we should also talk about Alex Ross Perry’s work as writer and director, as well as the performances of others involved. (I particularly appreciate Gayle Rankin and Agyness Deyn’s performances.) But when you have Elisabeth Moss giving that performance, how are you supposed to talk about anything else?

6. Under the Silver Lake

There are two avenues of approach I could take in talking about Under the Silver Lake, the pop culture hill I will give my life to defend. I’m not sure how to join these two ideas. Overblown critical analysis is hard some time, or I’ve been writing top ten lists for too long and it’s starting to rot my brain. So I’ll just write about these two ideas separately.

Aspect #1

I grew up in the DC suburbs in VA, I went to college a quick train ride outside of New York City, and I’ve been living in LA since the fall of 2014. I’ve lived in or around three of the biggest cities in America, and I’ve witnessed my fair share of weird pedestrian behavior. Of course, there’s the usual mentally unbalanced homeless people and aggressive salesmen of New York and DC has its own unique brand of douchebag Hill staffers and bizarre protesters who hang out by the Capitol. One time, I talked to a guy who wanted to elect himself president by constitutional amendment and wanted to create a 4th government branch whose sole job is to impeach the president. Maybe the latter isn’t the worst idea nowadays.

But nothing beats the pedestrians of Los Angeles.

At least in New York and DC, there’s a reason. New York is so packed and dense that of course things get weird, and DC can’t help but attract multitudes of strangeness, what with the whole concentration of power thing.

But in Los Angeles, there is no reason. It’s sprawl. All of it. Maybe it’s because of the entertainment industry, maybe it’s because of the weather, but that doesn’t explain the astounding randomness of the shit I’ve seen. There’s a woman that went to the Ralphs I used to frequent who regularly wore a crown of fruit like Carmen Miranda. At that very same Ralphs, I once saw a woman with a parrot on both shoulders. Earlier today, I took a break to go to the CVS, and I walked by a man wearing an expensive looking suit and a bicorne. That’s the kind of hat Napoleon wore. There didn’t appear to be any irony.

“What if,” Under the Silver Lake asks, “there was an actual reason for it all?”

To put it another way, there hasn’t been a movie that captures the feel of Los Angeles as well as Under the Silver Lake. To explain why would mean having to explain the plot, and there’s no way in hell I have enough time or mental bandwidth for that particular task. But my god does this movie nail it. It’s like a two hour twenty minute crash course in living here.

Aspect #2

This one’s much more simple. Under the Silver Lake is a movie about a pop culture obsessed asshole who just wants to get laid realizing that all the pop culture he loves was made by a group of even bigger assholes with significantly more money who also just want to get laid. As someone who spends more time being angry at fans than I do at the work itself, let’s just say it struck a chord.

It’s also the most insane movie I saw in 2019. That part also helps.

5. Uncut Gems

Introducing Howard by zooming into an opal and zooming out of his asshole during his colonoscopy might be the best way anyone has ever introduced the protagonist of a film. In a weird way, it says everything you need to know.

4. Parasite

Back in high school, I watched a movie called Memories of Murder, co-written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, in the living room at my parent’s house. It was a long time ago, and I don’t remember the finer points that well. But at the time, I didn’t really care for it. There were these weird injections of comedy and strangeness, and I wasn’t used to seeing these elements in my murder mysteries. So I couldn’t help but be a little down on it.

A few years later, I was on vacation with my family. My friend was there with us, and every night, we watched a movie that neither of us had seen before. One night, that movie was The Host, co-written and directed by Bong Joon Ho. There were parts of it we loved, but again, it was a bit too tonally strange. After all, this is a monster movie. Why was there all this comedy?

A few years later, I was in LA for the first time for a college program, and I watched a movie called Mother, co-written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, on my laptop in the apartment I was stashed in. You see where this is going. A few years after that, I was visiting LA in preparation for my move and I watched Snowpiercer on my laptop in my hotel room. (These details of where I saw them don’t matter. I just like that I remember them.) Same reaction, though that time, I had a bunch of structural issues and… it doesn’t matter.

I’ve always had a fondness for Korean filmmakers. Or it would be more accurate to say that I’m fond of the Korean filmmakers and Korean films that make it big (relatively speaking) in America. Oldboy was one of those movies that made me think, “Oh shit, movies!” and Jeon Do-yeon’s performance in Secret Sunshine is one of the most underrated performances of the century so far.

But let’s be even more honest. When I say “Korean filmmakers and Korean films that make it big (relatively speaking) in America,” I’m mainly talking about Bong Joon Ho and Chan-wook Park, two directors who experiment wildly with tone and subject matter and delight in presenting you with movies you’ve seen before presented in radically different packages. It doesn’t always work for me, particularly in Bong Joon Ho’s case.

I mention all this because I remember getting in my car after seeing Parasite and thinking that not only is this the most the tone blending has ever worked for me, but that it was a definite for this list, and that I need to revisit all those Bong Joon Ho films I saw and previously dismissed.

There are actual substantive points I could make about tension building and visual economy and all that good stuff. But Parasite is one of the most critically beloved movies of the year. Its praises have been sung and sung again, and by now, you probably already know why it’s on here.

So all that’s left for me is to rewatch those movies. I doubt I’m going to do a full one eighty on any of the movies I saw and previously disliked. But then again, I might, and that prospect alone makes me happy. As does the prospect of seeing everything Bong Joon Ho does from here on out.

3. Amazing Grace

When I see a movie in a theater these days, chances are I’m seeing it by myself, and at this point I have a bit of a routine. There’s a specific theater I frequent, and when I go, I book my tickets ahead of time on their site. When it’s available, and it usually is, I reserve seat M37a. It’s a seat in the middle of the theater all the way on the left side (facing the screen) that allows me to stretch my legs and get up and go to the bathroom without disturbing anyone. I reserve a middle seat when I know it’s one of the bigger screens, but most of the time it isn’t, and most of the time the left alignment’s not that big a deal.

There is one potential disadvantage to this system. The theater in question has a bit of an echo problem. It’s a fairly common one in movie theaters, and a potentially unavoidable one given advancing technology and the cost of retrofitting older theaters for newer sound. However, I said it was a “potential” disadvantage because I can’t tell if I’m making the problem worse for myself when I sit all the way to the left.

Amazing Grace was playing in one of those smaller theaters. I wanted the best audio experience possible. An Aretha Franklin concert movie deserves no less. So I may have gone a little overboard in overthinking my seat selection.

Rather than my usual left side seat in row M, I sat in the middle of row O. I noted that row O is more directly aligned with the speakers than rows M and N, and the reason I know this is because I saw a movie earlier in that theater knowing Amazing Grace was coming and I made a note of it. I also chose to see the movie somewhere in the 7:00 PM arena. I figured it was after work hours, so there might be more people in the theater, and thus the sound wouldn’t bounce as much. Of course, when I saw the movie, there were only two other people.

Was all this overthinking worth it? You bet your ass it was.

When it comes to these top ten film articles, I feel an obligation to talk about, you know… film stuff. Concert movies thus present a weird challenge. How do you separate freaking out about the filmmaking aspects from the musical aspects when the entire point of the former is to support the latter? When you have a concert movie like Dave Chappelle’s Block Party, there’s a little more to talk about because there’s a documentary edge to it. But Amazing Grace has very little of those aspects, and even if they were a greater part, that’s not what you’re going to remember about this movie. I did say it was an Aretha Franklin concert movie, right? For the Amazing Grace live album? The highest selling gospel album of all time and one of Aretha Franklin’s highest selling albums?

That isn’t to say that there isn’t filmmaking aspects to be praised. The decades old footage looks and sounds fantastic, and it’s been a great year for old film restoration. (Shout out to Apollo 11 and They Will Not Grow Old.) But holy shit, the music is this movie. I don’t know where to begin.

There are a few people who’ll be lost in the praise of this movie. The reverend James Cleveland on vocals and piano for one, as well as all the other musicians and the choir. And, of course, Sydney Pollack for shooting all of it, even though it appears that one of the reasons it took us so long to see this movie was because of a fuck-up on his part. (He didn’t use clapperboards, so the audio couldn’t be synced until later technology could save the day.)

All that said however, it’s an Aretha Franklin concert movie. What more needs to be said?

2. Birds of Passage

Birds of Passage is a crime drama where none of the characters are really motivated by money.

That may not seem like that big a deal. But consider the vast majority of American crime movies. What motivates the protagonists of those movies? Usually, it’s between one of a handful of tropes. Upward mobility. The nebulous desire to make something of oneself. There’s a loved one who’s sick, and the American healthcare system is completely fucked. Looks like we need to sell drugs. There’s a family to feed. Looks like someone has to die.

It’s always about money. Of course it is. Most of these movies are made in America. Anything is justifiable if there’s a dollar to be made, and even the crime dramas that aren’t made in America have some sort of financial motivation driving the story forward.

So if the characters in Birds of Passage aren’t motivated by money, what drives them?

The last time I talked about a movie directed by Ciro Guerra, it was 2016’s Embrace of the Serpent, my favorite movie of that year. It’s a film about the effects of colonization on an ancient way of life that’s existed far longer than any of the characters on screen. We watch, in two timelines, that way of life slowly being destroyed.

Birds of Passage tells a very similar story. Whereas Embrace of the Serpent shows us the destruction of a tribe in the Amazon in the ‘10s and the ‘40s, Birds of Passage shows us the fall of a Wayuu tribe, an indigenous peoples living in Columbia and Venezuela, in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Rapayet wants to marry Zaida, and in order to pay her dowry, he starts a seemingly harmless marijuana exportation business with some Americans in the Peace Corps. But after one whiff of capitalism, everyone’s lives plummet into chaos and violence.

This seems like the typical crime story. But it isn’t about one man and his downfall as he seeks to make a buck. It’s about the clash of a traditional way of life that’s dated back centuries and the new ideas of the west. As we’ve seen over and over again, this conflict never ends peacefully, particularly for the native peoples. Rapayet eventually finds himself in an impossible situation. If he does what his trafficking partners want him to do, he and his whole family will be murdered. However, if he does what the leaders of his tribe want him to do, he and his family will meet the exact same fate. And if it’s not them, it’ll be everyone around them.

At multiple times throughout Birds of Passage, Rapayet offers to give up his business, an extraordinarily uncommon move in crime dramas. Unfortunately, the wheels were set in motion long before giving up the business would matter. By the end, the dead significantly outweigh the living.

I said Birds of Passage is a crime drama where none of the characters are really motivated by money, and that may not seem true based on what I’ve said so far. However, the characters who are motivated only by financial gain exit early, and the ones who’ve known wealth their lives aren’t long for this world either. What motivates everyone else is pride. The need to defend a way of life and a philosophy of living. When the story concludes, those who still live are penniless. It’s not because they’ve failed. It’s because they’ve happily spent everything they had waging death on one another, and they’d happily do it again. Material gain and enormous compounds mean nothing when there’s revenge to be had or strength to be shown. The money doesn’t matter.

Put it another way: One of my favorite scenes in Breaking Bad is in the finale when Walt finally admits that he never cared about the money, and it was all about the power and a sense of honor. Nobody in Birds of Passage gives that kind of speech. Nobody in Birds of Passage has to.

1. Waves

Emily Williams, the character we follow in the back half of the movie, is one of the most likable people I saw in a movie in 2019.

At a certain point, her boyfriend Luke finds out that his estranged father is dying. At first, he has no interest in going to say goodbye. Luke’s father abandoned him, so why give him the courtesy he couldn’t show Luke when he needed it the most? However, Emily encourages him to go because she knows how precious these kinds of relationships can be, and that in the end, it’ll make him feel better if he can find it in himself to forgive.

Emily has a kindness and an emotional maturity that most people, let alone most teenagers, simply do not possess. It’s a quality you damn sure haven’t seen in most of the portrayals of Generation Z in dramas up to this point, and Waves is the first depiction of these young adults that didn’t make me furious at the filmmakers. (Don’t get me started on Euphoria or fucking 13 Reasons Why.) However, Emily wasn’t born kind. Though Emily’s arc prevents the movie from being a full-blown tragedy, Waves is a tragedy nonetheless, and part of that has to do with how Emily was shaped by witnessing the fall of her brother Tyler.

Unlike Emily, Tyler doesn’t know how to handle his emotions. He would rather suffer than show any signs of weakness or that he’s in desperate need of help, and even if he didn’t, he doesn’t have the emotional tools to express himself or empathize with others. In the end, all he has is gut level impulse, and those around him bear the brunt of his wrath. Mainly his girlfriend Alexis.

I went to a private high school in DC. Though it’s far from the most prestigious of the DC private schools, there’s still a sense of academic drive and a suffocating sense of wealth. I knew kids exactly like Tyler while I was there. Black kids slowly and quietly struggling with the pressure being put on their shoulders. Thankfully, none of them experienced the fate of Tyler, and none of those kids were capable of the kind of violence Tyler ultimately carries out. But this is America. Pointless violent tragedy seems to lurk around every corner, particularly when it comes to race. Looking back, one has to wonder if things could’ve gone a different way if just a few aspects of their lives have gone differently.

I’ve also had a back issue that I needed to go to physical therapy to help fix, and my father has had back, shoulder, and neck surgeries for what seems like his whole life, including a five level fusion. I’ve never personally experienced anything as serious as Tyler’s SLAP tear, but the specter of back and shoulder pain has hovered over me my whole life and I’m more than familiar with the reality of these kinds of physical problems. That wrestling scene scared the absolute fuck out of me.

All of this is to say that Tyler is a very tangible person to me, but I didn’t necessarily feel for him. He’s still perfectly capable of telling right from wrong, and what he ends up doing is unforgivable. In my mind, there’s a difference between humanizing someone and asking us to empathize. I didn’t, but I still felt the full weight of the tragedy. It didn’t have to be like this, and though I often demand more from my narratives, sometimes it really is that simple.

The question, then, is why is Tyler the way he is? A large part of it has to do with his father Ronald, an intimidating man who takes every opportunity to try to shape Tyler into his own idealized image, completely ignoring his daughter Emily in the process. Full physical and academic perfection, and nothing less than the best from his son. But I would say that an equally large part of the equation of why Tyler is the way he is, and Emily for that matter, is their mother, who died of a drug overdose before the events of the movie.

As you may have guessed, Waves is a movie about ebb and flow, and how we’re capable of passing the worst of ourselves down through the generations. The question then becomes why is Ronald the way he is, and why did his wife and the mother of his children turn to drugs? Given the history of this country, particularly when it comes to race, I don’t think it’s hard to guess.

However, part of the reason Waves resonated so much with me is that in the end, I think it’s a surprisingly hopeful film about how we’re all capable of change.

There’s a scene in the back half of the movie where Ronald takes Emily fishing. During this scene, Emily tells Ronald that she’s torn about what her brother has done to Alexis. She feels guilty because she thinks she could’ve stopped it. Moreover, even though she understands that you’re not supposed to hate your family, she can’t bring herself to forgive Tyler. Ronald tells her that he understands his role in shaping who Tyler is, and that he also understands that he’s been neglecting her.

Given who Ronald was at the beginning of this movie, it’s an extraordinary scene. It’s also extraordinary in the sense that depictions of positive black fatherhood in film are infuriatingly few and far between. Most importantly, however, it’s the scene that inspires Emily to bring Luke on the road trip that will end with him patching things up with his father. Ronald may have had a hand in shaping Tyler, but he also has a hand in shaping Emily as well.

It’s likely that Emily will forge a more positive bond with her father and her stepmother (the fact that she’s played by Renee Elise Goldsberry, the same actress who sang “My Home Court” in the Co-Op episode of Documentary Now!, makes me very happy), and eventually, she’ll learn to forgive Tyler. Though Tyler’s serving life with a chance of parole in thirty years, maybe he can find his own shot at redemption as well.

I feel this way because in the end, I think Waves is a movie about how we’re all capable of getting better. It’s a message I needed to hear. Especially these days.

Honorable Mentions

Ad Astra
American Factory
Apollo 11
Climax
Deadwood: The Movie
The Farewell
For Sama
Fyre
Honey Boy
Hustlers
The Irishman
Knives Out
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
The Lighthouse
Little Women
Marriage Story
Monos
One Cut of the Dead
Pain and Glory
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
They Shall Not Grow Old
Toy Story 4

Will Watch Someday

Asako I & II
An Elephant Sitting Still
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
One Child Nation
Peterloo
Will probably think of some more stuff later. I was actually a good boy this year and saw just about everything I wanted to.