Here are the most underrated movies of 2019. In many ways, 2019 was a defining year in cinema. Not only did Marvel Studios break the ten-year-old record of Avatar’s status as the highest-grossing film ever thanks to Avengers: Endgame but Disney’s all-consuming domination of the international box office crowned them as the undisputed kings of the blockbuster, for better or worse.
As we look towards Oscar season, the offerings are plentiful and often deeply daring, from Bong Joon-ho’s gripping satire Parasite to Martin Scorsese’s Netflix exclusive gangster drama The Irishman to Lorene Scafaria’s unexpected breakout Hustlers. Intersecting those two areas is Joker, the comic book movie that aimed for prestige and won over awards bodies as much as it did general audiences. By the time Academy voters come to choose their possibly ten nominations for Best Picture, a lot of painful cuts will have to be made from the frontrunners.
On top of that are the films that didn’t get their dues. Some slipped under the radar during crowded weeks on the release calendar while others suffered from bad marketing, limited releases, or a lack of enthusiasm from audiences. Many received great reviews but didn’t crack through to the public consciousness, while others were more critically divisive but had much to offer beyond a Rotten Tomatoes score. You may not even have known that some of these movies had a 2019 release, such was their fleeting presence on the pop culture landscape.
The Kid Who Would Be King
In 2011, British writer, comedian and TV presenter Joe Cornish made his directorial debut with the inventive sci-fi thriller Attack the Block, a movie that helped to launch the careers of John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker. It would take him eight years to release his sophomore effort, after spending many years trying to get an adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi classic novel Snow Crash off the ground. His follow-up, The Kid Who Would Be King, was a very different beast from his previous effort but one that was worth the wait. Sadly, not many people sought it out and the movie only grossed $32.1 million from a $59 million budget.
The story follows Alex, a 12-year-old boy struggling with bullies at his new secondary school who stumbles upon Excalibur, the sword of King Arthur, and finds himself at the center of a plot to keep the wicked sorceress Morgana from taking over the world. The Kid Who Would Be King is the kind of rollicking live-action family adventure film we don’t get that much of these days without Disney’s involvement. It successfully repurposes a familiar story that audiences grew tired of long ago (see the lackluster responses to Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur movie), making it fresh, appealing to audiences of all ages, and adds a hopeful message of community and strength in the face of hopelessness that feels all too fitting for a Brexit era Britain.
In Fabric
2019 was a great year for the high-concept movie, but few had a plot as unique and instantly intriguing as In Fabric, a supernatural drama bluntly described as “the one about a cursed dress that kills people.” Writer-director Peter Strickland specialized in deeply sensuous films that draw heavy influences from European cinema, especially as the works of Dario Argento and Giallo horror. By even his surreal standards, In Fabric is particularly out there, taking that central concept and milking it for all its aesthetic and darkly comedic worth.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste stars as a woman who just wants a nice dress to wear as she goes on dates, which leads her to the strangest department store in Britain, staffed by lavishly dressed women in Victorian garb who talk in cryptic fashion and partake in very unexpected rituals with store mannequins. The gorgeous red dress she buys (and looks fabulous in) soon reveals itself to be violently evil. It’s an inherently ludicrous concept that In Fabric takes just seriously enough, giving the audience room to laugh but never diluting the central threat. Underneath its bonkers concept is a deftly handled satirical examination of capitalism and the over-the-top rhetoric that businesses use to try and tie a customer’s wellbeing to the stuff they buy.
The Wind
2019 was hardly short of horror films, from the continued domination of Blumhouse to It: Chapter 2 following up one of 2017’s biggest hits and concluding one of horror fiction’s most popular stories. There’s always space in the calendar for a horror title to plug a gap in-between blockbusters. Still, more than a few slid under the cracks when they easily deserved a bigger audience. Emma Tammi took her story to the American frontier of the 19th century with The Wind. A Midnight Madness selection from the previous year’s Toronto International Film Festival, The Wind perhaps suffered from too many comparisons to Robert Eggers’s The Witch.
It’s not hard to see why those parallels were drawn but they did a disservice to Tammi’s film and her intent. Focusing on two couples who live in solitude on a vast unpopulated area of New Mexico, The Wind sees them possibly tormented by a poltergeist or prairie spirit seeking to cause havoc. At its heart, this is a film about women’s struggles in an isolated world where their fears are dismissed and gaslighting often drives them to ruin. Tammi’s directorial debut reveals her to be an assured filmmaker with a strong grasp over theme and craft, and her characters are all richly drawn in ways that often subvert horror viewers’ expectations.
Missing Link
Laika is currently the only major American studio representing stop-motion animation right now, and sadly, their work has been released to ever-diminishing returns at the box office. The latest casualty of this was Missing Link, a sumptuously animated family film that easily rivaled anything Disney or Dreamworks put out this year. Missing Link was their attempt to be a little more mainstream than past releases like Kubo and the Two Strings, but that approach didn’t dilute their attention to detail or commitment to lush and deeply charming storytelling that takes its own unique path in the monopolized field of American animation.
Missing Link, with its winning and highly appealing story of an explorer who discovers and befriends a neurotic sasquatch, is the sort of movie that feels tailor-made for new generations of kids to discover and fall in love with it. If it were made by any other animation company, it would be an instant masterpiece. That it’s not even in Laika’s top three is a testament to their impeccable skill and commitment to pushing the boundaries. It would be a real shame if we lost stop-motion animation altogether in America, leaving feature films to be almost exclusively CGI, so there’s no better time for those who missed it to rediscover Missing Link.
Monos
Directed by Alejandro Landes and starring a cast of mostly unknowns, Monos is one of those films you can’t help but be stunned by and wonder how on earth it got made in the first place. Inspired by the upheaval in his native Colombia, Landes tells a fable-esque story of teen soldiers, each armed with guns almost as big as their bodies, stationed on a remote mountaintop as they watch over a prisoner (played by Julianne Nicholson) and a cow named Shakira. After an ambush drives the squadron into the jungle, their mysterious and somewhat inexplicable mission descends into chaos.
The Lord of the Flies and Apocalypse Now influences are obvious in Monos but this story is far more frantic and disorienting an experience. Set to a spine-tingling score by Mica Levi (the composer behind Jackie and Under the Skin), Monos is a film you’ll have a tough time getting away from long after it’s ended. It’s bold and daring in a way that makes those words feel almost too glib a description (and the making of the movie was a dangerous endeavor in and of itself, with the director himself driven to a physical breakdown by the difficulties of an on-location shoot in the jungle.)
Under the Silver Lake
A24 emerged as the coolest and most sought-after names in independent distribution this decade thanks to their savvy marketing and a shrewd eye for projects like Hereditary, Lady Bird, and The Lighthouse. Seeing the A24 logo on a trailer feels like its own sort of hype these days, but it doesn’t translate to every movie. Case in point: Under the Silver Lake. David Robert Mitchell’s modern-day neo-noir started off with plenty of hype, playing in competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.
Originally scheduled for a June 2018 release, the film was pushed back so that Mitchell could do another edit, and after further pushbacks, it was released in America to next to no fanfare on April 2019. Critics either loved or hated this one, with little space in-between, but nobody could deny the dizzying ambition on display. Andrew Garfield plays Sam, a slacker with an interest in conspiracy theories who sets out on a strange quest after his neighbor (Riley Keough) mysteriously disappears. A lot of Under the Silver Lake is deliberately aggravating but if you stick with its heightened style and accept its inherently baffling nature, you may discover something special.
High Flying Bird
Steven Soderbergh has never been a director who enjoys long breaks in-between projects. In 2019 alone, he released two new feature films for Netflix, doubling up on editor and cinematographer duties on both. While The Laundromat emerged with greater hype and ultimately floundered after premiering at TIFF, it was High Flying Bird that proved to be his most striking work of the year. Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, the playwright behind Moonlight, the drama took on the world of sports through a thoughtful and typically unexplored lens.
André Holland stars as Ray Burke, a hot-shot sports agent looking to break a basketball lockdown with the help of a rising rookie star by pitching a new business opportunity that will shake up the entire business of sports. This is a dialogue-heavy film that never feels overwhelmed by that, managing to provide an in-depth dissection of the entangled ecosystem of the sports entertainment complex and how it intersects with race, class, wealth, and activism. All that and it was shot on an iPhone, not that you would know by how crisp and vibrant the movie looks. Catch up with High Flying Bird now on Netflix.
Charlie Says
2019 saw the release of two movies that featured the infamous Manson family and their reign of terror over Hollywood in 1969. The most popular one was, of course, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which remains an Oscar front-runner as well as the director’s second-highest global grosser behind Django Unchained. That film ultimately doesn’t have all that much to do with Charles Manson and his family, choosing to subvert his ghoulish status in culture and focus more on a near-fantastical historical rewrite of the Tate-LaBianca murders. Fortunately, for those who wanted a deeper thematic exploration of the family and their horrific actions, there was the second Manson movie of the year, Charlie Says.
Mary Harron, perhaps best known as the director of American Psycho, has a particular skill in making biopics of oft-maligned women in history, from Valerie Solanas to Bettie Page. Here, she takes on three of the Manson girls, showing their early years in prison solitary and their slow realization of the unimaginable pain they caused, interwoven with flashbacks of their time with Manson (played by The Crown’s Matt Smith). What Charlie Says does so well is show why someone as obviously slimy and off-putting as Manson would be appealing to young women cast adrift by the world, as well as the process of indoctrination that left him unable to escape his thrall. It’s empathetic to these women without ever excusing their evil misdeeds and offers a much-needed flipside to Tarantino’s drama.
Her Smell
Elisabeth Moss has had arguably the best post-Mad Men career out of that show’s ensemble, thanks to her impeccable range and ambition to take on projects that prove especially challenging to actors and audiences alike. This year alone, she starred in four films and the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale. The most overlooked film of her busy 2019 came with Her Smell, which she also produced. Directed and written by Alex Ross Perry, this drama about a disintegrating rock star whose addictions and ego cause her and her formerly beloved band to self-destruct is sort of agonizing to watch, at least in the first half.
Moss plays Becky Something, a Courtney Love-esque girl rocker whose violent mood swings, drug use and drinking, and abuse of her friends and family have made her utterly unbearable to be around. The audience is forced face-first into the dingy world she inhabits, one where the noise never stops and nobody ever seems to sleep. Moss excels in playing a woman too used to getting her own way and devoid of guidance to help her out of her impossible state. By the time the first half of the film is over, the audience has been relentlessly attacked by Becky’s struggles and understands all too well how difficult it is to be around someone like her. And then the movie becomes very quiet, showing Becky in recovery and overwhelmed by guilt and embarrassment for the person she used to be. It’s a bewildering turn that reveals the true genius of Her Smell.
The Nightingale
Jennifer Kent made one hell of a splash with her directorial debut, The Babadook, a film that immediately became a horror classic (and a fabulous LGBTQ+ icon!) Following that up, Kent decided to take a totally different direction and directed one of the most brutal but crucial films of the year in The Nightingale. Set during the Van Diemen’s Land Black War - a period of violent conflict between the Aboriginal Australians of Tasmania and the British colonialists - Irish convict Clare Carroll (played by Aisling Franciosi) works for the British Army in the hopes of seeking freedom for her husband and infant daughter.
After the sadistic Lieutenant Hawkins and his soldiers violently rape Claire and kill her family, she decides to seek revenge with the help of an Aboriginal tracker named Billy. Out of all the films on this list, The Nightingale is easily the toughest to watch. Deeply vicious, immensely disturbing, and hugely controversial for its extreme depictions of rape and violence, this is a story of deep anger that could never be downplayed or softened for general audiences. It takes no prisoners because war and colonialism never did, and Kent has no interest in sugar-coating the heinous crimes of British colonialism against the Aboriginal people of Australia. In that aspect, its bravery cannot be undersold.
