Viewing entries tagged
The Irishman
I was able to tease out a distinct theme in over half of the movies on my “best of” list this year. The theme is a grandness of scale. A lot of the movies on this list are telling big stories. Either the ambition of the characters or subjects is larger than life, as in number 5, or the cinematic scope of the filmmaker is immense, as in numbers 2, 3, and 4. Or, it’s a little bit of both, as in numbers 1 and 6.
Even the smaller films feel big and important in their own way (numbers 8 and 9).
The North Texas Film Critics Association (NTFCA), of which I am a member, voted this month to honor the best films of 2019. As an organization, the NTFCA is proud to call attention to outstanding achievements in the craft of filmmaking. I consider movies to be not only entertainment, but in the best examples, they are also art. They teach us about the human condition. Here are the winners for each category in which we voted:
With his longest film to date, Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour crime saga The Irishman allows the legendary director room to stretch his creative talents in ways we’ve never seen, even from masterpieces like Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. You can feel in every frame the mastery over the art form that the nearly-octogenarian Scorsese commands from his half-century of making movies. The film also aches with a sense of remorse and regret which comes from its subject, mafia hitman Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran. Scorsese has always been interested in exploring the wages of his characters’ sins, but that’s even more acute here in The Irishman.
