The best films of 2019 (you probably didn’t see)

Image: courtesy Anti-Worlds (Holiday)

Avengers: Endgame, The Lion King and Frozen II co-ruled the box office worldwide but there were plenty of smaller gems that didn’t get the same airtime or budgets but offered quieter wonders. Here’s our pick of the indies and arthouse films that stood the test of time in 2019.

Good Posture

Image: courtesy Pinpoint

The feature debut from actor Dolly Wells is a well-observed two-hander charting the uneasy relationship between introverted film student Lillian (Grace Van Patten) and feted writer Julie Price (Emily Mortimer). Despite a gratuitous ukulele singsong, this a perfectly pitched and played flick about the difficulties of adulting.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

Image: courtesy ICA Films

Photographer RaMell Ross charts the lives of the African-American residents of Hale County, Alabama in intimate, unforced moments. It’s the poetry of everyday life, spinning on a dime from joyous to heartbreaking, forming an important portrait of a forgotten community. The result is perhaps the most beautiful doc of 2019.

Beanpole

Image: Liana Mukhamedzyanova

Not a Peter Crouch biopic, Beanpole is set in a post-war Leningrad and explores the relationship between shy, freakishly tall nurse Iya (Viktoria Miroshnichenko) and returning soldier Masha (Vasilisa Perelygina). It’s slow and unrelentingly grim – maybe wash it down with some Gavin & Stacey – but the rewards, especially performance-wise, are so worth it.

Holiday

Image: courtesy Anti-Worlds

Holiday starts like an edgier version of Love Island as an abused gangster’s moll (Victoria Carmen Sonne) sunbathes and flirts around sun-kissed Turkey, before the film jumps into a different zone of intensity altogether. Cool, dispassionate, distinctly feminist, you’ll have to talk about it afterwards.

Styx

Image: courtesy 606 Distribution

German doctor Rieke (a terrific Susanne Wolff) single-handedly battles the elements as she sails from Gibraltar to the Ascension Island. So far, so brilliantly executed competency porn. Yet, when Rieke runs across a boatful of refugees, Wolfgang Fischer’s film slides into a seabound morality play. Gripping.

América

Image: courtesy Dogwoof

América is a jewel of a documentary. The story of three brothers struggling to take care of their 93-year-old grandmother América after their father has been wrongly jailed, it’s an accumulation of telling moments and beautiful imagery that turns a family drama into something warm and winning.

The Chambermaid

Image: courtesy New Wave

A lo-fi Roma, The Chambermaid is a precision-built character study of a maid (Gabriela Cartol) working in a luxurious Mexican hotel. Not a lot happens plot-wise, but it emerges as a poignant portrait of a woman on the margins, movingly marking the difference between the haves and the have-nots.

Sometimes Always Never

Image: courtesy Parkland Entertainment

A proper charmer in which Bill Nighy mines new levels of delightful distraction as a dad searching for his missing son. This underseen indie comedy warrants some hunting down of its own. Written by Frank Cottrell Boyce, it’s a study of English eccentricity, fathers and sons, and the too-rarely celebrated joys of Scrabble. We give it a triple film score.

One Cut of the Dead

Image: courtesy Third Window Films

The less you know going into Shinichiro Ueda’s unclassifiable gem the better. It starts with a film crew making a zombie movie in a factory once used as a site to reanimate dead Japanese soldiers, then fuelled by nutty energy and sharp satire, goes off in completely different, funny and surprisingly emotional directions. Hands down the best zomcom since Shaun of the Dead.

Donbass

Image: courtesy Eureka Entertainment

Sergei Loznitsa’s powerful depiction of the conflict between the Ukrainian government forces and the pro-Russia, Putin-sponsored separatists is an intense assault on the senses. More concerned with moods and landscapes than people, it’s cold but brilliantly calibrated filmmaking from frame one.

The Raft

Image: courtesy Modern Films

In 1973, anthropologist Santiago Genovés set sail across the Atlantic with 11 strangers – six women, five men – in a fascinating social experiment. Utilising archive footage and contemporary interviews, this compelling documentary hits still-relevant hot-button topics, from toxic masculinity to gender divides. E4 format – hosted by Maya Jama – ahoy!

Old Boys

Image: courtesy Verve Pictures

If you can stomach yet more posh public schoolboys on your screen, this comic riff on Cyrano de Bergerac set in an ‘If….’ – like boarding school is a small but perfectly formed joy. Alex Lawther, star of The End of the F***ing World, is the perfect guide through the venerable but oddly dehumanising rituals of a private school, delivering bemusement and timidity in the face of some extreme eccentricity. A romcom with a satirical edge.

The Candidate

Image: courtesy Signature Entertainment

Occasionally, this pulsing Spanish political thriller feels like eavesdropping on the kind of conversation that would have all its participants in jail. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen teases a nugget of scandalous gossip here, a whisper of corruption there. No one in his amoral maze is innocent – not even its protagonist, regional politician Manuel López-Vidal – it just takes a while to figure out who’s the guiltiest.

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