Retrospective 2019- A Year in Film

June

Summer Breeze

Image sources: Disney, Universal, Altitude & Dogwoof

As the temperatures began to rise in a relatively quiet month for the industry, early summer as always delivered a mixed bag of UK releases with prerequisite blockbusters ranging from the lucrative and memorable like latest installment of the beloved Pixar animation series ‘Toy Story 4‘, through alien police reboot/sequel ‘Men in Black: International’, all the way to an inauspicious end for the mutant super-team prequel series ‘X-Men: Dark Phoenix‘.

On the more modest front, UK audiences were treated to horror fare like classic creepy doll reboot ‘Child’s Play’ and a dark take on the Superman origin story ‘Brightburn‘, as well as comedy/dramas like US talk show portrait ‘Late Night’ and Danny Boyle’s fantasy ode to the music of The Beatles ‘Yesterday’. But for us it was two of the month’s documentaries and their portraits of the past which made the biggest impact, as master archivist Asif Kapadia gave us a new perspective on the rise and fall of a football and pop culture legend with ‘Diego Maradona‘, and Todd Douglas Miller unforgettably added a fly-on-the-wall dimension to one of mankind’s greatest ever achievements with ‘Apollo 11‘.

Those We Lost

Image source: Redux, Warner, Getty & Paramount

June brought the loss of occasional film star/composer and full-time New Orleans music legend Dr. John (77) (The Last Waltz, Blues Brothers 2000), American actress Sylvia Miles (94) (Midnight Cowboy, The Funhouse) and Italian film and theatre director Franco Zeffirelli (96) (Romeo and Juliet, La Traviata), plus veteran Canadian character actor Sean McCann (83) (Naked Lunch, Tommy Boy) and American actor Billy Drago (75) (The Untouchables, Pale Rider).

July next page>

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