Best Movies of 2019

I watched 44 movies in 2019 that were first made available to general U.S. audiences in 2019. Links to my reviews where available. Your thoughts are welcome as well.

1. Booksmart

2. Cold Pursuit

3. Best of Enemies

4. Tolkien

5. The Art of Self-Defense

6. Don’t Let Go

7. The Art of Racing in the Rain

8. The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot

9. Where’d You Go, Bernadette

10. Family

11. Astronaut

12. American Woman (the Sienna Miller one)

13. Driven

14. Good Boys

15. The Dead Don’t Die

16. The Hummingbird Project

17. The Kitchen

18. The Sun Is Also a Star

19. Replicas

20. The Mustang

21. Backdraft 2

22. The Vanishing

23. Captive State

24. Serenity

25. Stockholm

26. Breakthrough

27. A Vigilante

28. The Poison Rose

29. Fighting with My Family

30. Long Shot

31. Gloria Bell

32. Great, Great, Great

33. A Dog’s Way Home

34. The Untold Story

35. What Men Want

36. Escape Plan: The Extractors

37. The Weekend

38. Can You Keep a Secret?

39. Killers Anonymous

40. Drunk Parents

41. Corporate Animals

42. The Outsider

43. The Brawler

44. Benjamin

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Backdraft 2

Ron Howard makes art for the common man, so his films like “Backdraft” don’t get a lot of credit. In that one, there’s an awkward subplot involving a behind-bars arsonist played by Donald Sutherland. The scenes, which ape “Silence of the Lambs,” seem to exist mainly to give Robert De Niro more screen time. Yet, 28 years later, producer Howard signed off on a stripped-down, straight-to-video sequel that reshapes this subplot into a standalone procedural. And it’s actually a pretty decent, 101-minute TV show. “Backdraft 2” (2019) stars Joe Anderson (who?) plus Sutherland and another key 1991 player, William Baldwin.