2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #5

“Nancy Drew. Scarlett O'Hara. Scout Finch. Elizabeth Bennet. Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Each is unquestionably a charter inductee of the American Literary Heroines Hall of Fame, with each in their own way worthy being counterparts of the iconic Lady of Letters, Canadian Anne Shirley. Yet no less an enduring phenomenon is Jo March, who first appeared on the literary landscape in 1869 courtesy of Bostonian Louisa May Alcott. A kind of feminine treatise as spirited as Helen Reddy's song ‘I Am Woman’ and containing the defiant bravado of Virginia Woolf, Little Women, the novel showcasing the heroine's ascendancy to gender equality, has been one of the cinema's most attended literary properties, dating back to the silent era and including the beloved 1933 George Cukor adaptation starring Katherine Hepburn and a rightly venerated 1994 version directed by Gillian Armstrong and featuring Winona Ryder as the irascible lead. One of the country's finest contemporary female directors, Greta Gerwig won rapturous praise -even from Armstrong herself- for what must surely be counted as the most profound examination of Alcott's timeless work- one that expanded the physical parameters and has offered up some character revisions that have deepened the context and accentuated the atmosphere.

“First off, Gerwig opted to shoot the film in the area where Alcott lived, namely Concord, Mass with its ravishing autumnal color palette and scenic resplendence including the trademark fireplace and dinner table congregation for a Christmas lunch. Cinematographer Yorick Le Saux, composer Alexandre Desplat and Oscar winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran pressed all the right buttons to insure a sensory immersion to guard against any potential plotting convolutions. Despite a tiny minority taking issue with the film's ‘structure’ fans of Gerwig's revisionist opus were by and large elated with the central character’s metamorphosis from a love-struck novice in the way of the world to a fearless author proudly declaring her worthwhile negotiating her maiden publishing venture, which Gerwig poses as a much more satisfying finale than any romantic consummation.

“Though awards groups have chosen elsewhere for ensemble honors one need not look further than the dream cast Gerwig showcases headed by Saoirse Ronan as the incorrigible, rebellious Jo, in one of the year's best performances in any acting category; Florence Pugh (Amy) who transcends the character's previous incarnation as a spoiled and bratty child to become more well-rounded and a potential foil to Jo. Gerwig's Little Women it can be persuasively argued, is as much Amy's story as Jo's and Pugh (also superlative in Lady Macbeth and Midsommar) in her Oscar-nominated performance exudes a radiance as a gifted 23-year-old who seems much older and yearns for experience. It is of no small wonder that the normally exceptional Emma Watson (Meg) and Eliza Scanlen (Beth) are pushed to the background by the very comparative nature of their roles. Meryl Streep as the spangled Aunt March is typically splendid; Timothée Chalamet in another role that has both girls and boys fawning enters the costumed sphere with comprehensive appeal as Laurie the next door neighbor Jo ironically loves so much that she balks at marrying him; Chris Cooper delivers another extraordinary turn as a melancholic grandfather, and Laura Dern in her somewhat less famous 2019 performance. but one just as accomplished, brings her typical thespian command as the loving Marmee, whose role in life is to sacrifice.

“In the end Gerwig (like Quentin Tarantino in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, who ‘avenged’ the Manson family murders) brings full justice to Ms. Alcott's compromised ending with a free-spirited coda that should be an inspiration for future generations. This is the Little Women in thought, word and deed that has done the book's author the sturdiest measure of justice and it is unquestionably one of the very best films of 2019.” ~ Sam Juliano

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #6

“Ever since Laura Mulvey coined the phrase ‘male gaze,’ people have been theorizing about what its female counterpart could look like. In Portrait de la jeune fille et feu, Céline Sciamma simply show us – not in an academic, theoretical way, but in an emotional, moving, sensual way.

“The key scene happens later in the movie, once the subterfuge has been abandoned, and the three women – painter Marianne, subject Héloïse, and maid Sophie – form a temporary all-female community. So far the main ‘gaze’ shown on screen has the one Marianne trains on Héloïse, scrutinizing her to find out how to fix her essence in paint. But then Héloïse shows Marianne – and thus, us – that she’s been looking back, all along.

“There are many elements in this movie that show the hand of a female filmmaker, not least of them the everyday portrayal of an abortion, a chubby baby playing nearby. But perhaps this is Sciamma’s most radical statement: that to truly provide a viable alternative for the male gaze, it is not sufficient to look at different things, in different ways; it is not enough that the gazer is female, or even that the audience is presumed to be. It is only by allowing the gaze her own point of view that old ways of looking can really be subverted.

“Portrait de la jeune fille en feu – odd, that the title was translated as the more generic-sounding ‘Portrait of a lady on fire,’ when the literal translation is closer to ‘Portrait of the young woman on fire’ – would probably have been my favorite film of 2019 even without this scene. It is so tenderly and gorgeously filmed, so acutely observed, so achingly romantic. But that scene is one of a few that make this a movie more than just a beautiful love story; but also hopefully an inspiration to future filmmakers of any gender.” ~ Hedwig van Driel

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #7

“Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson recently went viral with a tweet complaining that Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story should really have been titled Divorce Story, and beyond Tyson’s usual dour literalism, the tweet points to a way that it could be easy for audiences to reduce the movie’s narrative to a simple binary choice. Is this a marriage story or a divorce story? Should we side with husband Charlie (Adam Driver) or wife Nicole (Scarlett Johansson)? Who wins and who loses? There have been passionate online arguments in favor of both Charlie and Nicole as the film’s ‘true’ protagonist, but one of the best things about Marriage Story is that way that Baumbach steps aside and lets the characters speak for themselves (through the fantastic, resonant performances by both lead actors).

“That starts from the very beginning, with narration of the two reading letters describing what they love about each other, opening the movie on a note of warmth and positivity, before recriminations and pettiness set in. That Charlie and Nicole decline to actually read those letters aloud creates a moment of bitter irony, but it also allows for the rush of emotions at the end of the movie, when Nicole’s letter returns in a way that points toward a future of compassion and understanding for the couple. In the middle, both characters behave reprehensibly at times, but they both also navigate a scary and intimidating process with the intention of doing what’s best for their young son.

“If there’s a villain in Marriage Story, it’s the divorce industry itself, and even the shark-like lawyers played by Ray Liotta and Oscar-winner Laura Dern seem caught up in a system out of their control. Marriage Story synthesizes the caustic emotions of some of Baumbach’s darkest films (including The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding) with the exuberant humor of his collaborations with partner Greta Gerwig on Frances Ha and Mistress America. Marriage Story is emotionally devastating at times (memes of its intense, tear-filled central fight have also gone viral), but it’s also funny and even heartwarming, or at least bittersweet, especially in the separate scenes of Charlie and Nicole breaking into songs from Stephen Sondheim’s Company. Neil deGrasse Tyson may want to put a label on it, but the movie, like all genuine human relationships, can never be reduced that easily. ~ Josh Bell

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #8

“There's a line in Pain and Glory where Salvador the director, played by Antonio Banderas, proclaims his love for scenes in which people hold back tears but never fully cry. It's in fact the entire focus of Pedro Almodovar's latest film, a movie that reveals more by how much it holds back than by what we're given on screen. Salvador is stuck in a creative rut, digging himself in further with every attempt he makes at self-medication. His habitual drug helps to ease his chronic pain but forces him to lose hours of his life. He tries to surround himself by adoring fans but finds it does little to soothe his imposter syndrome. At the behest of his actor friend Alberto who wants a meaty role, Salvador eventually works up the semi-courage to put himself out there in the form of an anonymous play. A play that magically attracts the one person in the world who just so happens to hold one of the missing pieces to the puzzle of Salvador's pain. Having tasted the glory of actually confronting the uncomfortable, Salvador develops a new addiction: proactively getting to the root of all of his problems.

“As we watch Salvador wander through his otherwise charmed life in a haze of heroin, pain and self-doubt, it's near impossible to not hypothesize on the state of Almodovar himself. Four decades into his illustrious career, Pain and Glory offers a lot of reminiscing on everything from family, lost loves and muses, along with sexual and mental awakenings. While he claims it's not fully autobiographical, there's so many layers to Pain and Glory that it's hard not to see it as some attempt at therapeutic healing. How else can you justify Almodovar directing Antonio Banderas playing Salvador directing Alberto reenacting Salvador's memories which in turn direct his memories of his mother who directed young Salvador? It's Almodovar at his rawest and yet most guarded– picking apart the misguided ideal of male stoicism while still playfully conforming to it.” ~ Jenna Ipcar

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #9

“Terrence Malick began the decade with the sort of unprecedented work of art people will be talking about their entire lives. The Tree of Life seemed to encompass the sum total of the middleclass American family experience before the turn of the century. So many people saw themselves in its kaleidoscopic view of existence, whether in the momentary thoughts of the beginning of creation building to the first instance of mercy occurring naturally, or in the reveries and small traumas of growing up with a distant and repressed father. The search for the beauties of existence when above you towered a thundering god of rationality and conflict so captivated audiences that anything Malick tried in its wake struck most as a paltry offering. When you had tapped into the mysteries of existence from the eyes of a child through to his adult reflection, it was difficult for most people to settle for less.

“Terrence Malick ended the decade with a film that once again captured the attention of the arthouse public. His goals were similar, to see pure love and show the excitement of being alive while a historical epoch killed millions all around his dreamers. His timeline is directly before his historical triumphs The Tree of Life and The Thin Red Line, suggesting strongly that style is only acceptable to some when safely nestled in antiquity, as if treating life now with the same wistful gravitas is somehow distasteful. Nevertheless, he’s turned his sights on the men and women who rejected the arc of time, the flattening power of a bigoted ideology, knowing in their hearts where it would lead. Years after the bodies had been counted in Germany, the people in Radegund would still find space in their hearts to look down on the family of Franz Jägerstätter, the man who refused to sign a loyalty oath to Hitler.

“Malick gently drifting through time and space throughout his most busy decade has made it easier to draw connections between his thematic bulwarks. A Hidden Life never shows the true violence of the Nazi party because I believe Malick no longer has the heart to film violence on that scale and I believe he respects the enormity of the suffering and death. He would rather show what was lost, what Franz foolishly believed he and his wife could escape high up in the mountains, the great fabled German strongholds. He believed that in the same logic that allowed the Nazi propaganda machine to create monstrous gods from petty men he might find refuge. Of course there is no escaping the times, not really. ‘They’re sending farmers home…for now at least…’ writes Fani, the long suffering companion. The mountains loom large behind her always, a reminder that their shelter was a lie, that the shadow of something mighty and unfeeling would always dwarf them. The mountain, the unchanging historical object, would laugh outlast their protest and their love. So too will the images captured by the Nazis of their historical wrongs. Love joins the unspoken eternal, and violence etches itself into the mountain.

“Malick’s focus in A Hidden Life is uncharacteristic. His perspective in twain, the wife left behind and the soldier who refused to go soldiering, and his photography of the world around them is his most impatient and hungry, to show that no gesture affects just one man. Each vista brings Malick the same joy Ford evidently felt filming the buttes of Monument Valley - this is the closest Malick’s come to making one of Ford’s pictures, somewhere between the bitter grace of the cavalry films and the arch negativity of the curios like The Fugitive, also about a man of god hounded by the state. His depictions of both evil and tenderness have a 40s Catholic chasteness to them that somehow makes their implications all the greater. When lovers are reunited, your heart races for them, bereft the language in their hungry eyes. That is truly what it feels like, to touch someone you fear you might never touch again. So much lost, now found only in recreations of the past just as ugly and just as lovely as our terrible present.” ~ Scout Tafoya

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Picture Countdown - #10

“Without question, the 2010s decade has been one of tumult and confusion, carried out from numerous different fronts and leaving one adrift in the chaos, struggling to hang on for dear life. I can’t think of a film that embodies that feeling better than Christian Petzold’s masterpiece Transit, whose central conceit deliberately mixes Anna Seghers’s source novel’s narrative of a World War II refugee attempting to leave Nazi-occupied France with what largely appears to be a present-day setting: modern cars, up-to-date military uniforms, flatscreen televisions hanging on a few walls.

“However, Transit can’t just be reduced to a well-executed conceit, no matter how daring and reorienting it becomes over the course of the film. For one, it is one of the most beguiling and mysterious cinematic romances in recent memory, all the more so because of how briefly it is consummated, how it appears at glancing moments throughout. Though Georg and Marie are very obviously intensely attracted to each other, the relationship is haunted by the bonds of history: her abiding pursuit of her (unbeknownst to her) deceased husband, his flight from the persecution he has suffered.

“Moreover, Transit interacts with its own shifting, spectral histories: World War II and the present, both separately and simultaneously; Seghers’s novel, which Petzold daringly and brilliantly distills on a narrative detail-by-detail basis; and perhaps most of all an entire cinematic and genre lineage. For Petzold, among his many staggering qualities, is the greatest practitioner of Classical Hollywood filmmaking today, in ethos if not in strict technical terms. His clean and gorgeous compositions and incredibly well-judged editing contribute to this, but even more important is his narrative sense, his genuine investment into the doomed desire for connection that acts as the driving engine.

“And at the head of this is Franz Rogowski’s performance, which fully inhabits all of the quiet strength, the fearful resistance that makes Transit so vital. The softness of his voice and the purely cinematic quality of his face — communicating an astonishing range of emotion with just the shifting of his mouth or eyes — pierce what could be an overly arch conceit, illuminating the political and interpersonal urgency with which Petzold operates. Both a state-of-the-world missive and a twist on classical filmic narratives, Transit defies all attempts to categorize it, continually evolving and complexifying the longer one looks at it.” ~ Ryan Swen

2019 Muriel Awards: Best Cinematic Moment

But before we get to the winner, here are some of our other favorite cinematic moments of 2019. SPOILERS ahoy!

“Heaven” - Her Smell


Henry Ford II takes a ride - Ford v Ferrari [#14]


“Being Alive” - Marriage Story [#11]


“Criminal” - Hustlers [#9]


Frank calls Jo Hoffa - The Irishman [#8]


Heloise hears Vivaldi (final shot) - Portrait of a Lady on Fire [#6]


Sharon sees The Wrecking Crew - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [#5]


Opening dance number - Climax [#2]


And the winner is…

The Flood - Parasite

Note: This is only part of the scene in question, but I think it conveys the idea for those of you who haven’t seen the movie. In which case… what are you waiting for?

Click here for complete results.