By Ezra Stead

By Ezra Stead
By Ezra Stead
As always, it is important to stress that this list is a compilation of my ten personal favorite movies of the year, and not necessarily the “best,” though I do consider the top three to be timeless, unassailable classics. The bottom three are, on the other hand, a few that I feel have not gotten the love they deserve on lists like this one. 2019 saw feature film conclusions to two of my all-time favorite television series in Deadwood and El Camino, both of which I considered for this list before ultimately deciding to count them as TV in order to make room for other, equally worthy movies. It is a bit of a cheat, necessary because of the difficulty of ranking my ten favorites out of the 113 movies I managed to see in 2019, so allow me to indulge in a bit more cheating….
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By Rachel Menendez
Last month, Elle magazine compiled its “Power List” of women in Hollywood. On this list, put together by Deadline.com’s Nikki Finke, were some notable mentions in Hollywood, ranging from the elite to the lesser known, but most notable to me was New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis. Dargis is a hero of mine, not only for her erudite knowledge of film but also for pointing out that, even in the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s Best Director win for The Hurt Locker at last year’s Oscars, there is still a glass ceiling for women filmmakers in Hollywood. In an Article she wrote last year, she points out that there is still a lack of opportunities to produce the kind of success Bigalow has had.
Dargis is not attacking men, either; much of her anger is directed toward women in the industry. Hollywood is not just made up of misogynistic men, it’s filled with people who come from many backgrounds. Many people are involved in making decisions about who gets opportunities to show what they can do, and women are just as much a part of that. To boil this problem down to sexism would be an easy answer and just another reason for many women trying to make a career in film to give up, but as Dargis points out, the scarcity of opportunities for women is a legitimate problem and worth talking about.