*From top left, clockwise: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Midsommar, Us, The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, 63 Up, Hustlers*

By Jake Skubish

The grass, the saying goes, is greener on the other side, and this is literally true in Parasite. Much of director Bong Joon-ho’s film takes place in a sleek mansion occupied by the Park family, and the lawn is always glistening and evenly trimmed. It’s a serene space that feels as if nothing could go wrong within its walls, which of course means that something will.

At one point the Kim family, employed as service workers for the Parks, must make a quick escape from the Park home, and Bong draws a sharp visual contrast to show just how much better the Parks have it. As the Kims scurry back to their shoddy apartment they descend lower and lower into the abyss of the city, as if they don’t even live on the same planet as the Parks. On the outside, it seems, even the rain is harsher.

At the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, Bong discussed how the anti-capitalist sentiment of the Korean film fueled its global success. “The film talks about two opposing families, about the rich versus the poor, and that is a universal theme, because we all live in the same country now: that of capitalism,” Bong said. In this sense Parasite is the most modern movie of the year; its focus is the economic rot of society now and into the future.

It feels odd to say, then, that Parasite feels less to me like the defining movie of the year than a total outlier. Bong’s film may capture modern anxieties better than any other movie this year, but it diverges from all of the other films I loved the most in 2019 precisely because it focuses on the present. Nearly all of the best movies of 2019 can be characterized by their reflections on the past and their desire to find lessons that could make sense of the present.

In the year’s best horror films, Jordan Peele’s Us and Ari Aster’s Midsommar, this reflection takes the form of confronting long-buried trauma. Us opens with a memory of childhood trauma for Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o): wandering off from her parents at a carnival on the beach, she finds her way to a funhouse mirror attraction only to discover something shocking inside: a demonic doppelgänger of herself. It’s a scarring experience she doesn’t reveal to a soul until she returns to the same beach as an adult and finds that the doppelgänger has returned with a vengeance.

Midsommar similarly opens with a traumatizing situation for our heroine, Dani (Florence Pugh), as her suicidal sister takes her own life along with the lives of her and Dani’s parents. To distract herself Dani joins her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) on a trip to Sweden for his thesis research, attempting to find solace in her relationship. And she does, in a way, but more from the support she finds in the commune than from her inattentive partner.

The films are dramatically different in terms of story and tone, but thematically can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Us is an exploration of the grave consequences of not confronting trauma that we ourselves may be culpable for. Past injustices will never be rectified, the film suggests, if we don’t examine our own role in the creation and perpetuation of those injustices. “It really is about looking within,” Peele said in an interview earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Midsommar shows the tremendous freedom that results when we have the capacity to admit how the past has affected us. The film’s iconic final shot of Dani smiling is a tidy visual representation of the idea that sometimes, to move on from the past, we have to burn it all down.

Not all of the films that reckoned with the past were quite so dour; the year’s best comedies, too, were all about reconsidering a past assumption in the context of new information. In The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Emmet (Chris Pratt) must confront the defining ideology, and jingle, of the first film: the idea that “everything is awesome.” Everything was decidedly not awesome in the first film, of course, but the sheer power of creativity and positive thinking made it so.

In this year’s sequel Emmet and Wyldstyle (Elizabeth Banks) once again face existential threats, but this time around find that oversimplified positive thinking cannot save them. Wyldstyle tries to rally the team by insisting that “it’s only over if we give up,” but that ethos is not enough. Eventually the team comes to reject their past outlook on life and crafts a modified version for the future: “Everything’s not awesome/Things can’t be awesome all of the time/It’s an unrealistic expectation/But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.” It’s a pivot to realism, but also to hope, maintaining that things can be awesome while shedding blind optimism.

The delightful Booksmart also manages to find wisdom in synthesizing old ways of thinking with new ideas. Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) have been straight-A, straight-laced students throughout high school, and they see their path toward elite colleges as not only correct but superior to all of the slackers that surround them. So when they discover that other students have been having fun and succeeding academically, their worldview is shattered, and they quickly realize they’ve been living the past four years all wrong.

With graduation looming they try to make up for all that lost fun in one night. They take psychedelic drugs, watch porn in a Lyft, and try desperately to fit in with the cool kids. But in doing so, they lose sight of what made them who they were in the first place. As in The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Booksmart adjusts a past worldview for the future: Amy and Molly can be their studious, nerdy selves and still have a little fun, too.

The other great comedy of the year, meanwhile, is not a synthesis of past knowledge so much as a complete unlearning of former ideas. In Jojo Rabbit, a young boy growing up in Germany during WWII named Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) bases his identity on the ideology of the Nazi party. With his father away at war, Jojo creates his own mentor in the form of an imaginary, goofy version of Adolf Hitler that pops up whenever he needs someone to vent to.

Things begin to change for Jojo, however, when he discovers there is a Jewish girl named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) hiding from the Nazis inside the walls of his home. Jojo had been fully indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda, and earnestly presses Elsa on all sorts of ludicrous questions, such as what her magic powers are as a Jew. As he comes to know her as a person, though, he grows to see how wrong he was and makes an effort to protect her.

It’s corny, yes, but also a poignant repudiation of fascism and a neat allegory for how falling for authoritarianism is akin to adolescent adulation. Further, it offers no singular corrective for overcoming authoritarianism. Jojo rejects the falsehoods he took to be fact in the past, but as far as the future goes, he’s determined to make a manageable change: “Today,” he tells himself at the end of the film, “just do what you can.”

But what happens when a film tries not to reject the past, but instead reclaim it? That’s the tension at the center of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, as Jimmie (Jimmie Fails) feels increasingly out of place in the gentrified city he grew up in. Jimmie’s grandfather built a beautiful Victorian home in San Francisco back in 1946, but his family has since been priced out of the neighborhood and Jimmie longs to return to his family home. He has an opportunity to do so when the previous tenants put the space up for sale, and before anyone else moves in he breaks in along with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) in an attempt to recreate what they had lost.

But Jimmie, of course, cannot conjure the magic of the past. To Jimmie the house represents the last sense of belonging he had in the city he’s lived his whole life, and by trying to win back the house he hopes to rekindle that feeling. But the film is fundamentally wistful, and director Joe Talbot is aware the city has been forever changed.

What The Last Black Man in San Francisco becomes is an ode to a city which will always be loved but for which the act of love is becoming more difficult by the day. It is full of love, but also full of sadness. It’s a love letter, re-read years after the romance has fizzled out. There is value in recalling the past, it seems, but no use trying to bring it back.

A similar futility to rekindle the past permeates Rian Johnson’s delicious mystery Knives Out. Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), the patriarch of a wealthy family, has seemingly committed suicide at his isolated estate, but a renowned detective named Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) believes there was foul play. He forces the whole Thrombey family to stick around for questioning, as well as Harlan’s personal caretaker Marta (Ana de Armas), who becomes Blanc’s de facto assistant in the search for the killer.

As the investigation continues it becomes clear the wealth of the Thrombey family is in peril, and the Thrombeys do everything they can to maintain it. But in doing so the stories they tell themselves about the self-sufficient nature of their financial ascent and their generosity toward Marta begin to unravel. The past is a lie in Knives Out, and any attempt to revive that false narrative will only bring out the truth.

Sometimes, however, the truth of the past is right there on the surface, waiting to be told if we are only willing to revisit it. This is the case with two standout crime films this year, Hustlers and The Irishman. Hustlers, based on a true story covered in 2015 in New York Magazine, follows the rise and fall of a group of strippers as they scheme to steal from the wealthy clientele that frequent their club. The Irishman tells the maybe-true story of a man’s introduction to and rise within the mob, and his connection to the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). Although they tell very different stories, the two films are structured in a similar way: the protagonist in each film, years removed from the events at the heart of the story, recounts what happened in the past and what went wrong.

In Hustlers, Destiny (Constance Wu) focuses the story on her relationship with Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), the ringleader of their operation and formerly Destiny’s closest friend. Initially in retelling this story Destiny is bitter, recalling Ramona’s perceived betrayal and selfishness. But in remembering the details, Destiny is able to see the past more fully, and recognizes how much love there always was in her relationship with Ramona. Capitalism is the insurmountable alienating force in Hustlers, and mutual love in the face of exploitation is its subjects’ defiant salvation. The lesson, and the magic of the film, is its insistence that we’d be wise to not forget about the value of such love.

In The Irishman, meanwhile, there are treacherous, violent acts that Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) would like to forget if he could. Recounting his rise within the mob from the lonely confines of a retirement home, Sheeran tells his story sadly, and in great detail. Does he learn anything from committing himself to a life of violent crime? It seems unlikely. He can’t even bring himself to talk about his actions with his daughter (Anna Paquin), and when a priest asks him if he feels regret about anything he’s done near the end of the film, he replies “I don’t … Water under the dam.”

But the film itself suggests, if not a moral failure, at least a pointlessness to the business Sheeran was involved in. As various mobsters pop up throughout the film, we unceremoniously see text plastered on the screen of when and how they died; most were mob hits, and most of the deaths are not shown on screen. And even though Sheeran himself makes it into old age, he does so sad and alone. Whether or not we choose to reckon with the moral shortcomings of our past, it seems the past will inevitably catch up to us.

But what about all of us, in real life? Must who we were at the beginning define who we always will be? That’s the question driving 63 Up, the ninth installment in the miraculous Up documentary series from the BBC and director Michael Apted. The Up series has filmed a group of British people every seven years of their lives since they were seven years old. The subjects are all now 63 years old and reflecting on their lives as they reach old age.

63 Up is structured such that we see clips of each subject talking about a similar concept over the course of their lives—for example, a seven-year-old Tony squirming about having a girlfriend all the way up through present day where we see him squirming about his relationship with his wife. At the end of each subjects’ section in the film, Apted posits that the original idea of the series was “show me the boy and I’ll show you the man.” He then asks the subjects if they think this is true, but they hardly need to answer: as we can see from the footage over the years, they are all roughly the same person at age 63 that they were at age seven.

Some are uncomfortable with this idea, or laugh it off, but most have bigger things on their mind: simply getting on with their lives. At 63 the inevitable tragedy of human life has begun to set in, and story subjects are getting sick, or dying. Put in this context, the original question about whether we remain the same over the course of our lives feels increasingly small. It matters not whether we remain the same, no matter how stifling or depressing that idea may seem. What matters is, regardless of how much we change, whether we are living a life focused on the people we love.

This is the sort of life we see actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) living in Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s nostalgic look back at the late 1960s moviemaking industry. Her scenes are filled with joy as she buys a book for her husband, grabs dinner with friends, and catches a movie. There’s a warm glow to Tate’s scenes meant to offset the impending doom we can feel: Tate was tragically murdered in August 1969, and that date in the film is fast approaching.

Tarantino has been no stranger to toying with history in recent films, however, and two fictional neighbors of Tate’s, an actor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman named Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), alter the course of Tate’s life. The film’s climax is thrilling for many of the reasons Tarantino set pieces are often thrilling: the raucous music, the over-the-top violence, the humor, the unexpected little touches that make perfect sense in hindsight. But it’s also one of Tarantino’s most tender historical manipulations because the film’s ending acknowledges the reality of Tate’s all-too-short life. It’s not just a cathartic rectification of a past injustice, but a mourning of the loss that was.

Is this of any use? Are any of these films? I’m not sure. There are many great movies that inspire action, that call for us to fundamentally change our ways in order to create a brighter tomorrow. But so often they do so without reckoning with the roots of the behaviors or systems that brought us to those mistake-riddled paths in the first place. This year’s slate of films stood out to me as a mature bunch because they all acknowledged that to achieve what we want in the future, we must first be honest with ourselves about what happened in the past.

But can reflection in a film inspire any such real reflection? Mr. Tarantino would like to think so, as would I. We think about our lives as stories, and I want to believe that the stories we tell can have an effect on how we see and act in the world. But it’s difficult to find the line between entertaining distraction and inspirational art.

And do we even have time to reflect, in film or otherwise? The world is dying ever more rapidly, and that is not hyperbole. We’re in genuine peril. I think back to last year’s best films, First Reformed and Sorry to Bother You, which were both calls to change now, or else. As Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke) would put it, somebody has to do something. I can’t decide whether this year’s inclination to self-reflect is a step forward or a step back from this appetite for action.

Maybe none of it matters, and we might as well just enjoy it while we can. I want to think the world can change, and I don’t really know if we have any option but to live our lives as if it can. But when I think back on a movie like Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, I think less about the ultimate fate of Sharon Tate than about the scenes in which she is simply basking in the glory of daily life.

It’s a nice idea to think that if we look back on the past we can really, truly change the future. But no matter how much we reflect on the past, life is always about right now. Sharon Tate knows nothing of the impending threat to her life nor of Tarantino’s plans to intervene in it. All she can do is enjoy the breeze as her convertible rolls down the sunny California highway, the Rolling Stones on the radio, singing to her what we perhaps already know but don’t want to admit, that maybe, baby, we’re just out of time.

The best movies of 2019 reckoned with the past. Did they learn anything?