The Best Movies of January 2019

Ah January, you stinky, obnoxious turd. We meet again!

With the holiday season over, Oscar-hopeful films expanding into more theaters, and studios saving their marketing budgets for their bigger movies later in the year, Hollywood tends to toss out a ton of crap in the first month of the year, practically begging each of us to stay home so that each studio can mark down each January box office bomb as a tax write-off. Yet somehow, January 2019 wasn’t the worst, providing some decent — albeit largely unremarkable — works that kept all of us from going crazy. Thanks for not being awful, Hollywood!

Here are the best movies of January 2019 scientifically chosen by MovieBabble via rigorous testing that took approximately 58,960 man hours to produce (no animals were harmed during this process):

#3: Glass

I won’t lie to you, Glass is a bit frustrating. It’s a tad half-baked in its setup and definitely does not deliver on the film that the marketing promised, and that’s precisely why I’m so fascinated with it.

M. Night Shyamalan is a director that is constantly fighting his spirituality, struggling to make sense of his own worldview through his own art. All of his films have captured this notion in one way or another, and Glass feels like a culmination of sorts in that respect. It ponders the power of belief — a theme that was present in both Split and Unbreakable — together with a superhero movie, which is fun, odd twist (excuse my pun) on the genre.

Not to mention that both James McAvoy and Samuel L. Jackson are nothing short of miraculous in two of the lead roles, taking chance after chance with their characters and coming out of it with one of their finest performances in recent memory.

I see and understand all the complaints with Glass, but I still think there’s more to chew on here once the initial outrage dies down.

*To read the site’s full review of Glass, please click here.

image via Insider

#2: The Kid Who Would Be King

It’s such a shame that Fox couldn’t put together a solid marketing campaign for this movie, as it flopped HARD at the box office despite being utterly charming.

The Kid Who Would Be King won’t blow you away in any particular way, but it will absolutely delight with its odd specificities. Andy Serkis’ son Louis Ashbourne Serkis is the perfect doughy-eyed, out-of-his-element lead that a hero’s journey like this one needs, delivering all the charm one would hope for out of a child actor. Angus Imrie is also notable as the young version of Merlin as he steals just about every single scene.

It’s not often that we get a movie that is all about the idea of heroism. I imagine that this film would have become a phenomenon if it had premiered on Netflix, but as it stands, my guess is that it’ll develop a cult following in the years to come.

image via The Atlantic

#1: Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened

Whether or not you prefer the Netflix or Hulu documentary that focused on the botched Fyre Festival, we can all agree on one thing: Former Fyre CEO Billy McFarland has one of the more punchable faces you’ll ever see. Seriously! He looks exactly like the big-talking douchebag that we all consistently attempted to avoid at frat parties in college.

Fyre is a perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with culture today. People are ferociously hunting for likes on Instagram, looking to be apart of something that is only for the 1% of the 1% at all times. We’re reaching a point where we should start to consider changing the phrase “fake it until you make it” to “fake it as long as possible so that we can make more money off of suckers.” A lot of it comes from the desire for instant gratification that is seeping into all walks of life. I’m starting to become more terrified by the second.

If you want to see what’s wrong with young people today, look no further.

*To read the site’s full discussion of Fyre, please click here.

image via IndieWire

In Case You (Or I) Missed It

Sometimes you need to search long and hard for some great pieces of art in the month of January, so hopefully these honorable mentions will help you in one way or another:

The Wild Pear Tree

This 188-minute Turkish epic was submitted to the Academy to contend for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 91st Academy Awards, but was sadly unrecognized, leaving the film with a largely unceremonious release into theaters and streaming this month. Still, it has great reviews by some trustworthy sources, and it has become my new under-the-radar film that I must seek out this year. (I might be a closet hipster with my odd fascination for a film that I know next to nothing about.)

image via IndieWire

The Upside

Hey, The Upside wasn’t terrible! Good for you, Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston!

Ánimas

Ánimas is one of the latest Spanish-language Netflix films that you’ve either never heard of or scrolled passed because you were afraid to try new things and instead opted for the same episode of The Office that you’ve seen 34 times. But guess what, it’s actually pretty great! Go ahead, try something new for a change!

image via Popsugar

Thank you for reading! What are your thoughts on the best movies of January 2019? Comment down below!

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