Year in Review: Horror Actoring of 2019

by Jason Adams

Since it's the second to last day of 2019 and we already named our "10 Favorite Horror Actresses of 2019" last week I figured I'd give us a last second bonus and shed some affection on the best fellas of the year. I know, I know, we're all all more inclined towards favoring the actresses... well, so's the genre to be frank. Horror really does favor female stories and experiences, and it was I will admit much easier to come up with last week's list. Besides the magnificent duo that anchors my favorite movie of the year I had to dig a little deeper for this one. But once I began rifling around I managed to uncover some gems...

Willem Dafoe & Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse 

When forced to choose between the two (and no thanks to Awards Season I have had to here and there) I tend to choose Dafoe, but only because his magnificent to-the-moon work is more straightforward... as straightforward as anything is in this topsy-turvy madhouse of a movie, at least. Pattinson's work is trickier -- his accent and behavior is all supposed to be wobbly, as his character's unformed; a liar trying to pour himself into a new shape. But make no mistake these are the two best male performances of 2019 slapping against each other in slippery tandem.

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FYC: Robert Pattinson for Best Actor & Supporting Actor

by Cláudio Alves

Margot Robbie isn't the only actor with more than one performance in buzzy productions. 2019 has been a year full of actors with sterling bodies of work. There's also Scarlett Johansson, Laura Dern, Adam Driver, among many others. I'd like to shed light on the excellence of a star whose work is quite far from Oscar's presumed radar. I'm talking about a former heart-throb turned character actor who spent the year getting drunk with Willem Dafoe, facing the challenges of single-parenthood in outer space and casting aspersions at Timothée Chalamet's disproportionate genitalia.

That's right, we're here to sing the praises of the one and only Robert Pattinson. First, we have his adventures with a fuckbox, a mad scientist and a baby…

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Chris Gives Thanks

Chris here. Thank you to all of you wonderful readers that keep TFE alive and well, year in, year out! This year, I am especially thankful for...

- my new spiritual guru, Baby Yoda.

- the reunion of Salvador and Federico in Pain and Glory.

- the funny and furious female ensemble of Parasite: So-dam Park, Yeo-jeong Cho, Hye-Jin Jang, Jeong-eun Lee, and Ji-so Jung.

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TIFF: Robert Eggers' euphoric hell of "The Lighthouse"

by Chris Feil

As gloopy with various bodily fluids as it is with sea foam, Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse lulls us into insanity from its first foggy frame. Diverging from the more straightforward horrors of his debut The Witch, Eggers thrusts us into the isolate hellscape that is the male mind with this Mellville-esque absurdist dark comedy. The bizarre quotient is high, both in the film’s psychosexual hysterics and crusty verbal dexterity, as the film devolves into an abstract battle of the wits and wills of two men meant to preserve the titular phallic monument. It’s genius and a complete hoot.

Set over a century ago on an offshore island, this tempestuous and physically taxing setting plays host to the two male egos of Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s lighthouse watchmen. Dafoe’s superstitious, more experienced Thomas immediately puts Pattinson’s Ephraim to back-breaking arduous work, dominating him further over candlelit dinnertime monologues...

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NYFF: Claire Denis and the "High Life"

Jason Adams here reporting from the New York Film Festival...

We're all dying. That's the grand rule of everything that we do all we can to distract ourselves from. It might seem like some of us are dying faster than others from the position we're standing in at any precise moment, but time is, as the saying goes, relative. We're all of us on track to stardust, circling the drain of a black hole out here, hair stiff on end.

Leave it to Claire Denis to dream-weave a perverse space opera all about that stuff, then. Who else, really? High Life on its gorgeous scuffed up Rothko painting of a surface has all sorts of distractions from that central mission statement - Horny convicts in outer space! Juliette Binoche's infinite ponytail! Something called a "Fuck Box!" - that a smaller-minded filmmaker would've gotten caught up on...

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