Soundtracking: The Best Musical Moments of 2019

by Chris Feil

Another year of Soundtracking has brought plenty of reflection on music in the movies. From more milquetoast musical biopics to studio musicals to pop songs reinvented through their placement into cinematic narratives, songs on film in 2019 were as ripe for dissection as ever. Let's discuss the best musical scenes of 2019.

Honorable Mentions:

- Cats' thesis: "A cat is NOT a dog, OKAY?!"

- Ash is Purest White making "YMCA" cool again

- MidSommar's creepy folk songs and Frankie Valli irony

- "Thunder Road" catharsis in Blinded By The Light

- Knives Out punctuating its middle finger finale with The Rolling Stones

- Joni Mitchell's "Blue" distilling The Last Black Man in San Francisco's melancholy...

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Black American Film in 2019

Our Year in Review continues...

by Kyndall Cunningham

It’s hard to summarize the past year in Black American film as smoothly as I could if I was doing so at the end of 2018. It wasn’t just that this year’s most notable critical darlings failed to strike an emotional chord with Black audiences in comparison to recent years. There was also a lot of intense, misguided discourse online about the year’s most highly anticipated studio films like Harriet and Queen & Slim. The best of this year's crop - Fast Color, Luce and Little Woods - flew under the radar due to limited distribution and marketing. Even Jordan Peele’s ambitious Get Out follow-up Us, which was a huge hit, left a lot of people confused about its meaning. Needless to say, it was an interesting way to cap off a decade that slowly gave a new class of Black artists the freedom to make the movies they wanted without catering to a white lens. 

**This is not a comprehensive selection of films**

The Internet’s disdain for last year’s Green Book spurred many conversations about white filmmakers’ ability to accurately portray Black people in their art. So it was interesting that, once again, this year’s most highly acclaimed and talked about Black movies out of prestige festivals were written and directed by white men: Trey Edward Shults’ Waves, Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco and Craig Brewer’s Dolemite is My Name...

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Year in Review: Mainstream Box Office (feat. Lupita, Queen Elsa, and lots of Superheroes)

Our Year in Review party is getting off to a bit of a slow start (we launched with 50 biggest documentary hits) but we hope to speed up now and what better festive topic during the holiday moviegoing season than an audience participation one? Herewith six "top ten-to-twenty" box office hit lists regarding various subgenres of the mainstream and what we can learn from them... at least in terms of moviegoers today.

We're starting with female-led pictures because this should not be regarded as a minority or special interest topic given that half of the world's population is female! Little Women was a major late-breaking success in this arena but it wasn't the only success from 2019. Let's look at that chart first.

🔺= the movie is still in over 100 theaters. Figures are as of February 23rd

1. TOP GROSSING (LIVE-ACTION) FILMS WITH A FEMALE LEAD
(Excluding films where a male lead is just as prominent as his female co-star)

Captain Marvel

01 Captain Marvel $426.8 (Disney/Marvel, March 8th) starring Brie Larson
02 Us $175 (Universal, March 22nd) starring Lupita Nyong'o
03 Maleficent Mistress of Evil $113.9 (Disney, Oct 18th) starring Angelina Jolie
04 Little Women $107.1 (Columbia, Dec 25th) starring Saoirse Ronan
05 Hustlers $104.9 (STX, Sept 13th) starring Constance Wu & Jennifer Lopez...

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Horror Actressing: Lupita Nyong'o in "Us"

by Jason Adams

Most folks first reference the voice, the Batman-needs-a-lozenge croak that Adelaide's underworld doppelganger Red speaks with, when praising Lupita Nyong'o's dual performance in Jordan Peele's Us, and for good reason -- she put a lot of work into it, meeting with people who've suffered from the very real neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia that's brought about by trauma, and that work memorably shows. I made the Batman joke but only because it's very nearly already as iconic a choice as that one -- go find somebody and talk like Red at them and see how movie-savvy people will get it; the percentage won't be low.

You'd also get a lot of mileage talking about Lupita's physicality in the roles...

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Campaign flex - Lupita comes on strong

Between this hard-to-miss Variety ad and her recent campaign flex, reprising "Red" from Us at a haunted house, Lupita Nyong'o's Best Actress dream doesn't feel so far-fetched does it? Are you starting to be convinced that her second nomination could happen? We're getting there.

Horror is a great genre for actresses, as Jason's column often reminds us, but when it comes to Oscar nominations for the genre, they only happen if the movie was a huge hit (think The Sixth Sense, The Exorcist, Silence of the Lambs, etcetera). Us has got that part covered, too, since it's the only original film to secure a spot in the box office top ten of 2019 which is otherwise full of spin-offs and sequels.