NPR's Favorite Movies Of 2019
NPR's movie critic and Pop Culture Happy Hour hosts picked 20 of their favorite films of the year.
1917
Working with stories his grandfather told him, Skyfall director Sam Mendes has crafted a World War I battlefield saga about British soldiers tasked with getting an urgent message to the front. About 1,600 lives are at stake, so there's urgency aplenty. And with Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins on hand, it was bound to have epic sweep. Mendes and Deakins employ all the usual war-movie tricks, with one extra: They've told the story in real time, contriving to make the film — from trench explosions to airplane crashes to waterfall slaloming — look like a single continuous shot. — Bob Mondello
Atlantics
Mati Diop's Cannes award-winning debut feature is a genre exercise in which genres morph at will, with Senegalese history twisting together with magical realism in a narrative pretzel. What begins as a labor-dispute drama becomes, by turns, a romance, a police procedural, a comedy and, finally, a haunting ghost story grounded in woman power, class resistance and the tragedy of mass migration. — Bob Mondello
Avengers: Endgame
Say what you will — you can't deny that the final was never about the villain. Nor was it about, which we can all now agree was pretty goofy, as heroic dilemmas go. No, it was about this roster of heroes we've come to know, each vibrating at his or her (but mostly his) respective frequency, converging one final time. The result was sad, and thrilling ("On your left!") and — most importantly — satisfying. —
