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Twenty-nineteen was another powerful year for world cinema, if not an entirely compelling one for American filmshence the fact that six of my entries for the past year were international movies. But its a masterpiece from one of the dominant voices of American independent cinema in the aughts that claims the No. 1 spot.

Ash is Purest White, the master Chinese director JiaZhangkes existential spin on the gangster epic, follows Qiao, the fiercelyfaithful girlfriend to Bin, a middling mobster. After serving five years inprison for firing a gun to protect Bin, Qiao must forge a new life, griftingfrom one mark to another while searching for Bin, whose allegiances haveshifted. Zhangkes direction and narrative preoccupations drift much like hisunorthodox heroine, following her on boat and train, and culminating in afascinating reversal of fortune. Doubling as a metaphor for Chinas owncomplicated growth over the 21st century, Ash is Purest White is a pristinejewel of movie with stylistic associations ranging from Antonioni to Scorsese.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults stirring Waves is acombustible family drama of unusual enormity, and one that hits literally closeto home: It was filmed in Broward and Dade counties. When a shoulder injurythreatens to derail a star athletes plans for the future, it sets off a chainof tragic consequences presented with almost unbearable tension. A diptych of amovie, its second half, which follows his sister Emily through her firstbudding romance, is more contemplative, but no less profound. Set against thebackdrop of the brutal Darwinism of the college admissions process and thedouble standards society places on black Americans to excel, Waves is aguidebook for coping in the 21st century. Its emotionally draining, and worthevery minute.

This German import marries the harrowing solitude of asurvivalist drama with headline-ripped social commentary. During a characterssolo voyage to lush Ascension Island, she faces a brutal stormone renderedwith a camera that yaws from side to side along with her yacht, and anunnerving sound design that places us among the creaking infrastructure of theboat and the apocalyptic torrents of Mother Nature. But the movies darkestturn arrives later, when she happens upon a wrecked fishing trawler ofabandoned passengers, of whose plight the Coast Guard seems curiously unmoved.Examining the human capacity to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, itsmoral heft reverberates like an unanswered SOS call.

In director Christian Petzolds slippery adaptation of AnnaSegherss World War II-era novel, he transforms her story about an unnamedFrench narrator fleeing the German invasion into a temporal jumble ofhistorical rhymes and repeats. It could be 1944, 1984 or 2014, and maybe itsall three of these. Petzold wants us to feel unmoored; this is a story, afterall, about dislocation as a permanent state. Transitis propelledby enough bureaucratic cul-de-sacs and absurdist ironies that its as if aKafka story was filmed in the slick style of late 1960s Hitchcock, to saynothing of the looming influence of Samuel Beckett. Petzolds unspecifieddystopia has plenty to say about the Nazi regime, about third-worlddictatorships, about todays unfolding migrant crisis, all of them connected bya universal condition ofstuckness.

Quentin Tarantinos black comedy, set against the backdrop of the Manson Family/Sharon Tate murder 50 years ago, is a chronicle of inside-Hollywood metafiction. Its a layered love letter to the films Tarantino himself famously binged while working the register at Video Archives in Los Angeles in his 20s, and is thus a cinephiles heaven. Tarantinos trademark leisurely pacinghis propensity to let scenes play out past other filmmakers expiration timesworks to the movies loosely structured favor. There is very little plot to speak of but a great deal of insightful observations, witty asides, and generous dips into kidney-shaped pools of Hollywood nostalgia. Yet the movies revisionist history, boisterous humor and self-referentiality skate over its blunt assessment of a studio system in its death spasms and a generation losing its innocence.

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Celine Sciammas historical romance is a defiant erasure ofthe male gaze, a domineering fixture and a theoretical bugaboo since the dawnof cinema. The story is simple enough: A painter, Marianne, travels to a remoteisland in Brittany to paint a commissioned portrait of the aristocraticHeloise, an unwilling subject who is soon to be shipped off to Milan in anarranged marriage. The women end up falling in love, which is, of course,forbidden. What could have been the stuff of Merchant-Ivory prestige cinemainstead borrows its syntax from rigorous filmmakers such as Ophuls, and Powelland Pressburger, co-opting their rigorous melodrama as a shot across the bow topatriarchies everywhere. Distinctions between artist and model, mistress andservant, and form and content burn away in the movies crackling fireplace,while its symbolic send-off is at once subversive and heartbreaking.

Greta Gerwigs masterly follow-up to Lady Bird extends her affinities for young women who chafe againstsocietys strictures. She shuffles the source material into an ambitiousbifurcated narrative that oscillates between the characters young adulthood,after three of the sisters have left the March family home, and a formativeperiod seven years earlier, when they all lived together as the Civil War woundto its bloody close. This approach allows past and present to rhyme in waysthat are both richly ironic and devastating, so that its themes ofproto-feminism, gender roles, sacrifice and patriotism can ripple across thecanvas like leitmotifs. Though in some ways her movie is a modernist, playfuladaptation, she is in the best way a reverential classicist, with countlessimages that evoke John Ford. Every shot resembles the sort of painting youwould like to step into.

Pedro Almodvars tender memory filmabout a reclusive,physically hurting filmmaker whose latest festival invitation prompts his past tolap against his present like waves on a beachfrontis unlike anything yet made from this naughty provocateur ofcandy-colored melodrama. Yet as a remembrance of things past and a lucidreckoning with the directors own weaknesses and misgivings,Pain andGloryis a pinnacle of autofiction, in many ways representingeverything his oeuvre has been building toward. He saves the films mostself-reflexive masterstroke for the marvelous final sequencean act of bravuramagic that, once you unpeel its layers, speaks to the curative properties offilmmaking.

WithParasite, the South Korean mad genius Boon Joon-ho has crafted a satire so funny, so savage and so necessary in our present moment of global unrest and anxiety that it makes Luis Bunuels bourgeois vivisections look almost tame. Think pieces will be written about popular cultures response to this young centurys grift, class envy and income inequality; many will lead withParasite. But its his refusal to demonize or caricature either of the movies warring families that renders the films pathos so powerful.Parasitehas a great deal to say about a range of other topics, toolike globalization American cultural appropriationbut its the moments of casual malice, whether delivered from the bubble of privilege, in one familys case, or by the need to feel superior toanyoneelse, in the others case, that condemn both sides.

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The title is seemingly cynical, as no movie has betterexplored the brutality and absurdity of the soulless divorce industrythanMarriage Story. Yet writer-director Noah Baumbach, whosescreenplay drew partly from his own divorce from Jennifer Jason Leigh, takesthe sober, cosmic view of marriages inextricable hold on people even whendocuments, and feelings, and life itself suggest otherwise. Marriage Storyischock full of lived-in insights that perhaps only a middle-aged person couldreliably write. And without much of a plot to propel the scenes forward, themovie assumes its power from its accretion of accurate details, its micro setpieces, its deadpan wit even in times of pain and sorrow. All of which is tosay thatMarriage Storyisdespite its achieved sublimity, thetears it will doubtlessly induce, and its characters (literal, in one case)open woundsan unlikely comedy.

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Top 10 Films of 2019 - Boca Raton