“High Life” – The F*ckbox
When “High Life” premiered at TIFF in 2018, it provoked mass audience walkouts and a sharply divided critical response. There was also one part of the film you couldn’t avoid hearing about: The Fuck Box. Hearing that one of my favorite filmmakers alive, Claire Denis, was teaming with Robert Pattinson coming off the best performance of his career in “Good Time” was already enough to get me excited, but then you had to throw a contraption called a Fuck Box into the mix (not to mention the most cum since a Farrelly Brothers comedy.) Then A24 bought the US rights, assuring it would not only get a theatrical release, but a well-marketed one at that. “High Life” quickly became my most anticipated of 2019. Denis can craft a deceptively upsetting and unshakeable scene like few directors right now, and “High Life” isn’t short on them. Her most violent and nihilistic film since “Trouble Every Day,” the film is also one of her most indescribably complex narratives to date. Acting as a mash-up of a space thriller and prison drama, the film continues her theme of modern colonialist stories, this time taking on a prison system that has no interest in actual rehabilitation. There are countless scenes in the film that have stayed with me, but at the end of the day, it all comes back to that special Fuck Box we all heard whispers about out of TIFF. Even knowing it was coming, I was still giddy with laughter and awe watching Juliette Binoche place a condom over a metallic dildo, before riding it for 3 of the most insane minutes I experienced all year.
“Honeyboy” – Catharsis
I’ve gone to bat declaring Shia LaBeouf one of our best actors for over a decade now. I remember seeing him in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” on the eve of his “Transformers” fueled rise to leading man fame, and not being able to take my eyes off of him. Even in films like “Disturbia” and Michael Bay’s billion-dollar Hasbro franchise, LaBeouf is giving it his all. It’s not easy to run around a green screen pretending robots are chasing you and destroying civilization, but LaBeouf makes it look effortless. He’s just got it. The last few years of his career have seen him zig-zagging between battling his own public persona through self-financed art projects and working with directors like Lars Von Trier and Andrea Arnold. He’s given some of the most memorable performances of the decade, but his transformative, soul-bearing “Honey Boy” (a film he wrote and stars in as his own father) is his finest hour yet. Per usual, he’s simply magnetic in the role, but he’s also at his most giving in his scenes with Noah Jupe (portraying LaBeouf as a child actor.) Their final scene in particular, an emotional early morning confrontation with a severely hungover LaBeouf and exhausted Jupe, gives us not only one of the most perfectly acted scenes in years, but one that feels like a shared catharsis between LaBeouf and his audience. Anybody who’s grown up with a parent who’s an addict knows the uneasy sensation of never knowing what you’re going to get: is it going to be the loving, supportive cheerleader or the self-loathing bully? LaBeouf teeters the line of both in this scene and has the remarkably gifted Jupe to play off of, resulting in a moment that will break your heart and bring you that much closer to understanding LaBeouf, the performer, and LaBeouf, the human being.
“Hustlers” – Usher In The Club
I sat with a smile across my face for the entirety of Lorene Scafaria’s ultra-fun caper, “Hustlers.” It’s one of the most entertaining, well-made films of the year and offers a deceptively complex look at patriarchal capitalism in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. While there’s plenty of scenes that are both dramatically rich and broadly funny, it’s the moment early on in the film when Usher makes a surprise appearance at the central strip club, that had me in a state of absolute bliss.
“In Fabric” – Consumer Arson
Nothing took me on a ride quite like “In Fabric” this year. A film that can only be described as “Giallo Office Space” follows a killer red dress as it wreaks havoc on the lives of everybody it comes into contact with. British director Peter Strickland fetishizes his filmmaking inspirations more than Wes Anderson, yet here it feels like he’s come up with something wholly unique and both timely and timeless. A deliriously funny, downright horrific look at our obsession with appearance and consumerism, Strickland’s film culminates in a one of a kind, batshit crazy finale that feels frighteningly not too far off from the yearly Black Friday rush at Best Buy.
“The Irishman” – Fish
This was the hardest film to keep regulated to the “one film, one scene” rule because honestly, I could write about a dozen or more scenes in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece “The Irishman.” Most Scorsese films are jam-packed with memorable scenes, but “The Irishman” is a spoil of riches. There’s Al Pacino in 70s, absolute GOAT mode calling a room full of employees “dumb mother fuckers” and seamlessly transitioning from exasperated rage to a sobering “I’m gonna go to jail.” A meeting between Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa and Stephen Graham’s Tony Pro that goes off the rails when Pro arrives 15 minutes late, wearing shorts. Then there’s the final scene of the film, an all-timer for Scorsese, and easily the most haunting ending of 2019. But I had to go with the “fish” scene. It’s a perfect example of Scorsese’s mastery of balancing comedy, tension, and chaos. It also shows the full benefits of making a film like this for Netflix. I was able to see the film in a theater and I wouldn’t recommend not seeing it for the first time in a theater (obviously if you can), but it’s hard to imagine a world where a major studio would allow Scorsese this much time to let a scene about what kind of fish was in the backseat of a car, play out this fucking long. Yes, the small talk and banter surrounding the subject is meant to add an underlying tension to one of the most suspenseful moments in the film, but the sheer amount of time Scorsese allows it to go on for infuses it with an unexpected dose of surrealist comedy.