FILM: The Best of 2019! Top 12! Plus runners-up ...

1 Parasite
Bong Joon-ho’s bizarre black comedy won Cannes, then stormed the US in a buzz of excitement. This shocking Downton-ish satire has a whipcrack script, perfect performances – and a goggling twist.

2 The Irishman
Martin Scorsese’s mob epic unites three legendary actors steeped in menace to spin a potent tale of crime and corruption – and mark the end of an era in truly masterful style. 

3 Marriage Story
Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver excel as a couple caught in the storm of an increasingly vicious – and often hilarious – separation in Noah Baumbach’s bittersweet heartbreaker. 

4 Happy As Lazzaro 

Grounded … Adriano Tardiolo and Luca Chikovani in Happy as Lazzaro. Photograph: Allstar/Netflix

Alice Rohrwacher’s mesmerising slice of magical realism slips across times and genres with a strange, fabled beauty that’s still grounded in here and now concerns. 

4 Little Women
Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of the much-loved Louisa May Alcott novel brings all the requisite festive bells and whistles but also manages to be sly, witty and swift on the price of feminism. 

5 The Souvenir
Tom Burke and Honor Swinton Byrne star in Joanna Hogg’s most personal and intimate drama to date: the extraordinary and excoriating story of her first major romance.

6 The Favourite Scabrous … Olivia Colman in The Favourite. Photograph: Allstar/Film4

Scabrous 18th-century black comedy from The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos, with Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone jostling for favour from Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne.

7 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Dazzling and disturbing, Quentin Tarantino’s love letter to 60s Hollywood comes with style, verve and a wildly disquieting violent final act.

8 Burning
Riveting … Jeon Jong-seo in Burning. Photograph: Allstar/Pine House Film

Sex, envy and pyromania make for a riveting mystery in Lee Chang-dong’s masterfully crafted Murakami adaptation.

9 High Life
Juliette Binoche’s evil doctor and Robert Pattinson’s monkish lab rat consider their crimes in space in Claire Denis’s stirring English-language debut.

10 Pain and Glory
Antonio Banderas gives the performance of his career as a quasi-Pedro Almodóvar in this tricksy yet sincere late stage elegy.

11 Midsommar
Terrifying … Jack Reynor and Florence Pugh in Midsommar. Photograph: Gabor Kotschy/AP

Florence Pugh is plunged into a terrifying pagan bacchanal in a magnificent folk-horror tale from Hereditary director Ari Aster.

12 Sorry We Missed You

A delivery driver and his care assistant wife are ground down by the gig economy in Ken Loach’s ferocious attack on Britain’s zero-hours society.

....


30 The Good Liar
 Twisty … McKellen and Mirren in The Good Liar. Photograph: Chia James/AP

Ian McKellen and Helen Mirren are delicious foils in Bill Condon’s expertly paced and twisty story about an elderly conman who may have met his match.

31 Loro

The film Paolo Sorrentino was born to direct and Toni Servillo born to star in didn’t quite live up to that billing, but this Silvio Berlusconi biopic is still a masterly and fascinating take.

32 Eighth Grade Growing up … Emily Robinson and Elsie Fisher, right, in Eighth Grade. Photograph: Sony

This sly and subtle debut from Bo Burnham boasts an astonishingly good performance from Elsie Fisher as a shy teenager struggling with growing up in the internet age.

33 Knives Out

Rian Johnson takes a breather from Star Wars to revisit his Brick roots with this wickedly entertaining Agatha Christie homage featuring a star-packed cast.

34 Amazing Grace

Had Aretha Franklin approved of Sydney Pollack’s transcendent 1972 documentary, it doubtless would have shown up on our list closer to the time it was shot. Still, better late than never.

35 Birds of Passage
Shocking … Birds of Passage. Photograph: AF archive/Alamy

The cost of the Colombian drugs trade to its indigenous people is uncovered in Ciro Guerra’s poetic and shocking drama.

36 Sunset

László Nemes follows Son of Saul with a cryptic and hyper-stylish study of the fracturing Austro-Hungarian empire on the eve of the first world war.

37 Diego Maradona

After Amy and Senna, Asif Kapadia tackles someone still alive in this gripping study of football, euphoria and catastrophe.

38 Apollo 11 Astonishing … a crowd watch the launch of Apollo 11.

A front-row seat for the moon landings? Few could resist this astonishing documentary featuring previously unseen footage, released for the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar walk.

39 Bait
This hypnotic take on tourists – and second home owners – ruining Cornwall launched Mark Jenkin onto the homegrown cinema scene with immense wit and monochrome style.

40 Foxtrot
Samuel Maoz’s fierce nightmare vision of Israel, where loss and pain are randomly distributed, offers an urgent and witty picture of futility.

41 Ray & Liz
Richard Billingham mined his own family for this bleak debut, capturing the claustrophobic loneliness of a couple cut off from everyone, including each other.

42 Us
Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out was a less obvious slam-dunk, but still an immensely skilful doppelganger satire with a gobstopping central turn from Lupita Nyong’o.

43 Colette
Kinky ... Keira Knightley and Dominic West. Photograph: Lifestyle pictures/Alamy

Kinky and invigorating, Keira Knightley and Dominic West make a fascinating married couple in this biopic – released last January – of the much-wronged French novelist.

44 Dolemite Is My Name
Eddie Murphy’s glorious return is the richly entertaining tale of cult 70s blaxploitation star Rudy Ray Moore’s rise from nightclub standup to the movies.

45 Rojo
Benjamín Naishtat’s satire, set before the coup that installed a military junta in Argentina, is an enraging – and informative – parable of iniquity about the fate of the disappeared.

46 Ad Astra Pitt goes intergalactic ... Brad Pitt.

Brad Pitt goes intergalactic in search of long-lost dad Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s thrilling Freudian mashup of Apocalypse Now and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Read the full review.
47
Atlantique

Mati Diop’s supernatural debut forces young Senegalese lovers to choose between love, duty and servitude, then adds a surreal twist.

48 The Nightingale

Jennifer Kent follows up The Babadook with some real-life monsters: the men who ran Tasmania’s penal colonies in the 1820s – one of whom gets some grisly, if just, comeuppance in this gothic thriller.

49 Avengers: Endgame
Debate rages ... Gwyneth Paltrow, Elizabeth Olsen, Brie Larson, Pom Klementieff and Letitia Wright. Photograph: Everett Collection/Alamy

Is it cinema? Or is it soulless bobbins that’s degrading the fabric of art and society as we know it? Debate still rages; both sides can point to the Russo brothers’ quasi-finale as evidence for their cause.


50 Rolling Thunder Revue
Two legends collaborate and a truckload collide in Martin Scorsese’s epic, freewheeling documentary unspooling on Bob Dylan’s 1975 tourbus.