I’m not much on introductions these days and I don’t want to get carried away with tying these ten films together. They were all exceptionally good and worthy of an inclusion on a list of the year’s best films. Honorable mention should go to Apollo 11, The Kid Who Would Be King, Missing Link, Jojo Rabbit, and Knives Out.

10. Uncut Gems

This film has bounced on and off my list for the last week and a half as I viewed more films, and like the film's protagonist, has withstood blow after blow and remained on my list. The Safdie Brothers follow up perhaps their most stylistically successful film, 2017's Good Time, with their most commercially successful, thanks in no small part to the film's star Adam Sandler. Sandler's commercial recognizability is subverted to its best effect since 2002's Punch Drunk Love, playing his typically repugnant behavior for actual life and death stakes. Its writer/directors' incredible knack for casting characters all the way down the call sheet gives the film a brilliant authenticity. Its true power is in how it resonates for days and how good Sandler can be when he taps into his childish instincts in a real world context. Needless to say, they don't go over as well as they do in your typical Adam Sandler vehicle, and there's something truly satisfying about it seeing it play out this way for once.

9. Cold Case Hammarskjöld

The age in which the internet has been our primary way to get information has given rise to countless hucksters employing the familiar documentary style to peddle conspiracy theories. I don't know if the film's Danish director Mads Brügger is a huckster, but his decidedly European take on Michael Moore's intrusively soft confrontational style plays well here. With Swedish private investigator Göran Bjorkdahl in tow, and a deck full of aces up his sleeve, Brügger travels to Ndola to investigate a fatal plane crash in 1961 that killed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. The film then takes several meandering turns before its filmmakers end up investigating a far different, seemingly totally disconnected crime. It ends up painting a disturbing picture of the African continent's exploitation at the hands of its former colonial powers as the two threads come together in devastating fashion. I don't know how much of what I saw in this film is true, but it never seems all that far-fetched, which is what its filmmaker excels at doing for the film's entire duration.

8. Midsommar

Anyone who thought the shadowy charms of writer/director Ari Aster's debut film Hereditary masked his talent can now judge him properly with the broad daylight terror of his follow-up, Midsommar. Aster's talent for ratcheting up tension is matched beat-for-beat by his tireless composition as a director. For the film's first thirty minutes or so, it is a deep domestic drama with the promise of sunlit climes in Scandinavia as a means of escape from the terrors facing the film's main couple, Christian (Jack Reynor) and Dani (Florence Pugh, an actress who was born for this kind of stuff). Instead, the real horror they thought they'd left behind is nothing compared with what awaits them in this incredibly frightening film. It's a cheat to call it a horror film, as it really only fits in that genre if you watch it with the sound off, but it is a film that understands and exploits the tropes of the genre in adept fashion. The gore is truly unsettling and haunting, but the film takes far too much joy in the set-up for increasingly absurd payoffs that you can't help but go with Aster on this journey into madness. It's disturbing, but it's also a blast, and that balance is nearly impossible to strike.

7. The Peanut Butter Falcon

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As the notion of family has begun to evolve in the world, so too has it evolved on film, and no film better demonstrated that evolution this year than The Peanut Butter Falcon. Steeped in folklore from Huck Finn all the way up to the world of dirt water rasslers, the film is sweet without ever feeling saccharine. Reveling in those same glorious real-world stakes of Uncut Gems, this is a few notches softer though not without its own sharp edge. Shia LaBeouf has had his personal and professional struggles, but one of the things that made him a star in the first place is his charisma. That's cranked to 11 here as a fugitive from backwater justice who teams up with a twenty-something man with down syndrome (the truly lovely Zack Gottsagen), who has escaped from an old folks home. The pair encounter many adventures and set-backs on their way to a wrestling training camp run by the Salt Water Redneck (a game and charming Thomas Haden Church), but it's a journey-more-than-the-destination kind of movie with empathy to spare.

6. 1917

So many great films this year dealt with its characters problems on a micro level, distilling big problems down to a very human level. 1917’s characters don't have time for that precious development, which is a tremendous part of director Sam Mendes' latest film's power. Moving at an unrelenting clip in what is designed to look like one single, continuous take, 1917 puts a human face on an inhuman task. Two young soldiers are tasked with carrying a message across enemy lines which are mostly abandoned, in hopes of stopping an attack on enemy forces that will turn into an ambush. With one soldier's older brother among the 1600 men marching toward certain death, time is of the essence in this propulsive, unrelenting film brilliantly shot by the always amazing Roger Deakins. Unlike Christopher Nolan's equally unflinching Dunkirk, Mendes has managed to make time in his relentless narrative for truly touching moments of humanity. With more than a few visual nods to things as far afield as Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood and newsreel footage of the era, this is an expertly crafted film by an ace student of the medium's limitations and possibilities.

5. Dolemite is My Name

1994's Ed Wood remains a gold standard in the movie biopic world for its unyielding love for the misfit band of characters who came together to make movies. It's fitting that the pair of writers who brought Ed Wood's story to the big screen now give his kindred spirit in the Blaxploitation world, Rudy Ray Moore, the same tender love and care. Eddie Murphy delivers his best performance since Bowfinger to bring Moore's goofy aesthetic as a born entertainer without an outlet to life. Surrounded by an outstanding supporting cast, Murphy may not look or sound like the real Moore, but his winning performance more than compensates. Director Craig Brewer brings the whole shaggy dog enterprise together with a plainly evident talent for recreating the feel of the period, and not just the look. Coupled with a game cast, a terrific script by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, and an unconditional love for the people it's depicting, Dolemite is My Name is a biopic done right. Now stop waiting to watch it and put your weight on it!

4. The Irishman

Having now spent seven hours over two viewings with Martin Scorsese's latest—and longest—epic, I am now in the camp that it is one of his best. Scorsese taught us how to watch mob movies when he revitalized the genre with 1990's Goodfellas, but the reason he is the revered master of said genre is because he's able to adapt to the speed of its story. "The Irishman," despite the presence of Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and countless other bit actors, is not Goodfellas. That was a frantic story told by a cocaine-addled man who still loved his time in the mafia. "The Irishman" is an old man's story, opening with a leisurely stroll through a nursing home that perfectly establishes the "let's slow things down" style of the film. In the same way The Godfather Part II does likewise by bringing us back to the old country and pumping the brakes immediately, Scorsese matches the speed of his narrator—however unreliable—and his tale of towering reverence for a pair of giants in the worlds of labor and crime. Everything else, including his family, is sidelined here, just part of the job. The film's bursts of violence come almost always at a distance, sometimes even off camera, because De Niro's Frank Sheeran was just doing his job. That's not the interesting stuff here, despite being incredibly interesting in and of itself. The truly compelling stuff is when two men sit in the booth of an Italian restaurant, dipping bread into wine in that most Catholic of ways, allowing the audience time to sit and contemplate with them for three and a half hours. And every last minute of it is riveting.

3. The Farewell

The most powerful movies sometimes sneak up on us in surprising ways. Prior to seeing writer/director Lulu Wang's tale of wrestling with her family over keeping a secret from her grandmother couldn't have seemed more foreign a concept to me. Without thinking the story would affect me emotionally, I was clearly going in naively, because Wang's family story is my family's story and yours, and that is why it resonates with me and the countless people to whom I've recommended the film. Every family is essentially the same and the joy of shared dysfunction is instantly endearing. As you begin to spend time with the brilliantly understated Awkwafina and her Nai Nai, played with beautiful ebullience by Zhao Shuzhen, and all the various uncles and cousins, you see the universality in the human experience. Everyone's family is kind of a pain in the ass, but the love overcomes enough of the petty squabbles to make the really big squabbles more passionate. The love, humor, and compassion of The Farewell stays with me for days after I see it, and I cannot wait to see it again.

2. Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

Every film lover knows the feeling of love at first sight. We long for that experience every time a movie comes along that we think is right in our sweet spot. Then there are the films that take a couple of weeks and multiple viewings to truly unfold their power, and that's what Quentin Tarantino's ninth film has done to me. I went in ready for pretty much anything other than what the movie actually was, and that is a loving tribute to a Hollywood before it "lost its innocence," so to speak. Tarantino rarely gives us a "day in the life" type of film, and while he's always been a dialogue driven director, here he becomes less concerned with plot and stakes, knowing that history itself will provide those. Tarantino gives not only his own creations Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth, played to perfection by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, a Hollywood ending, he gets to right some wrongs for real people who deserved a happy ending. His means of getting there may not please everyone, and I still have my own issues with them, but any chance I get to hang out with Rick, Cliff, Sharon, and the rest of these characters is a chance I'll take.

1. Parasite

In a year full of personal films from writer/directors, none held such glorious contempt for humanity as Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, a masterpiece in every sense of the word. In a year in which many films—including some on this list—began as one film before taking a sharp detour into becoming another film, none managed both ends of the equation, and the transition between them with such mastery as Bong Joon-ho. The film begins by siding the audience with a family doing what it takes to survive, borderline squatting in a basement apartment and folding pizza boxes to make money. When the son is given the opportunity to take over as an English tutor for a wealthy family, he uses it as a means to get his other family members employed. Then something happens that makes the family question whether their own methods were even dastardly enough to actually survive in this increasingly cutthroat world. Like a good number of films on this list, the film has empathy to spare for wholly unsympathetic characters, but Bong knows that the world has no empathy for them. The craft on display is second to none this year, with cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo moving his camera with such elegance that when it stops, it becomes an act of horror in and of itself. The power of "Parasite" in his how easily it earns an audience's empathy and how expertly it manipulates that empathy. I look forward to having that empathy manipulated again soon.