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Following our top 50 films of 2019, we’re sharing personal top 10 lists from our contributors. Check out the latest below and see our complete year-end coverage here.

The end of the decade has spurred reflection on what defined the last ten years in cinema as streaming wars commenced and the future of the theatrical experience was further questioned. It’s still too early to deduce such matters with any long-lasting clarity, so for now, I’ll take a look back at my perspective on the previous year in cinema.

Before we get to new films, my favorite few days inside a cinema in 2019 was at The Nitrate Picture Show at the George Eastman Museum and one can see my 100 favorite new-to-me films throughout the year. After the staggering first viewings of the sprawling masterpieces Berlin Alexanderplatz, Sátántangó, War and Peace, Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, Les Vampires, and Celine and Julie Go Boating,...

A thematic follow-up to his fiction debut The Demons (2015), Genèse is linked to Philippe Lesage’s earlier film in more ways than one – from a further exploration of the same generational themes, to the re-working of some crucial educational milestones and the role they play in shaping a person, to even a surprising appearance of some old characters. There’s a distinctive and original inter-filmography exchange between the two, which speaks volumes of the Montreal-based director’s supremely insightful and personal screenwriting after his documentary work earlier in his career.

Well-received in Locarno last summer, thanks to nuanced, convincing performances from young stars Théodore Pellerin and Noée Abita (here playing half-siblings undergoing parallel journeys of sentimental education), the award-winning film is wrapping up its festival-circuit tour with a stop in Rotterdam for Iffr, where I caught up with filmmaker to discuss teenagehood, the perils of love, and the genesis of his own storytelling style.

Los Cabos, Mexico — Adding to its burgeoning best picture trophies, “Genesis,” the consecration of Quebec’s Philippe Lesage, won Los Cabos Competition Award Saturday night.

“Genesis” scored at a busy Los Cabos Intl. Film Festival, given star gravitas by Spike Lee, Adam Driver and Terry Gilliam and whose hard-driving industry news flow, especially from the robust young Mexican industry belied Los Cabos initial positioning as a post-afm chill out.

Following on Lesage’s debut, “The Demons,” “Genesis” marks “Another rewardingly complex reflection on the emotional trials of youth,” Variety announced in its Locarno review. Superbly acted by Théodore Pellerin and Noe Abita, the chronicle of an ebullient brother and sister’s suffering from machista disdain and aggression was always a frontrunner at Los Cabos.

Otherwise, the other big competition winner – and doing its foreign-language Oscar nomination credentials no harm at all – was Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s Colombian thriller...

Madrid — Making good on the largely overlooked achievement of debut feature “The Demons,” Québécois Philippe Lesage’s “Genesis” swept the 63rd Valladolid Intl. Film Festival, winning its top Golden Spike, director and actor on Saturday.

One of Spain’s top three or four festivals, and a bastion of auteur cinema, Valladolid closed its official section Friday with an out-of-competition sneak peek screening of a preliminary version of Til Schweiger’s “Honey in the Head,” still to totally finalize post-production, starring Nick Nolte as a grandfather suffering Alzheimer who is taken off by his 10-year-old daughter to Venice where he lived the love of his life with his wife. Initial local press reactions speak of a “brilliant” performance from Nolte. Matt Dillon, who plays Nolte’s son was in Valladolid to accept an Honorary Spike for his career.

Valladolid’s main competition Audience Award, the prize many distributors are most interested in,...

In the grand scheme of things, teenage love affairs–together with all the raptures, jitters, devastations associated with them–probably don’t count that much. But then again probably everyone can relate to the sheer groundbreaking force of that first quickening of the heart, of that blinding rush of hormones that compels us to act with a recklessness that we’ll later learn to forever suppress. Quebecois filmmaker Philippe Lesage’s Genesis is an ode to that time in our lives when we still paid more attention to impulses than consequences. Trifling perhaps in terms of subject matter and scope, but it absolutely mesmerizes.

Set sometime during the flip-phone era, the movie centers on stepsiblings Guillaume (Théodore Pellerin), the prodigious, wisecracking class clown at an all-boys Canadian boarding school, and Charlotte (Noée Abita), a fresh-faced high-school graduate who seems not to have figured out her next step yet.

When we...

Québécois filmmaker Philippe Lesage quietly made one of the decade’s great narrative debuts with 2015’s “The Demons,” and distributors largely slept on it: A poised, perceptive study of childhood terrors both real and imagined, it made some waves on the festival circuit, but its discomfiting subject matter and stark structural breaks most likely held it back from the exposure it deserved. Undaunted, Lesage has doubled down on that film’s most challenging virtues to extraordinary effect in “Genesis,” a more diffuse but intricately emotive follow-up that extends the autobiographical focus of his debut into a yearning, bruising vision of unpracticed adolescent desire.

Though it’s partially an oblique sequel to “The Demons,” resuming its portrait of Lesage’s young alter ego Felix (Édouard Tremblay-Grenier) in the latter stretch of its luxuriant running time, the bulk of “Genesis” — a freestanding work, albeit enhanced by knowledge of its predecessor — is concerned with the respectively thorny,...

Locarno, Switzerland — Brit Richard Billingham’s “Ray & Liz,” “A Family Tour,” from Chinese exile Ying Liang, Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s “Too Late to Die Young” made some of the very early running in main competition at the 71st Locarno Festival, which saw a slew of negotiations kick off, and some deals go down, at its packed Industry Days which wrapped Monday.

The films world premiered at Europe’s biggest mid-summer film meet as Meg Ryan, Antoine Fuqua, Ethan Hawke and France’s Bruno Dumont rolled into town. Ryan talked of her new career as a director, producer, announcing a new project, half-hour comedy “The Obsolescents”: Fuqua, at Locarno for “The Equaliser 2,” talked intelligently about how to empower black filmmakers in Hollywood; Hawke, here to present “Blaze,” will receive the 2018 Excellence Award; Dumont, world premiering feature/series “Coincoin and the Extra Humans,” maybe the best received of Piazza Grande offerings to date,...

New films by Liu Hao, Joachim Lafosse and Peter Sollett join line-up.

Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, starring Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, is one of three new titles to join the Official Selection competition at the upcoming San Sebastian Film Festival (Sept 18-26).

Based on true events, the film centres on Us police lieutenant Laurel Hester (Moore) and her registered domestic partner Stacie Andree (Page) who battle to secure Hester’s pension benefits when she is diagnosed with terminal cancer.

The film, set to world premiere at Toronto (Sept 10-20), is one of several features announced in Official Selection that will compete for San Sebastian’s Golden Shell.

Other new titles in competition include Back to the North (Xiang bei fang), which will see Chinese director Liu Hao return to Seb Sebastian five years after Addicted To Love played in Official Selection in 2010.

The film is about a woman diagnosed with a terminal illness who is concerned...

Other new titles in competition include Rúnar Rúnarsson’s Sparrows and the first animated film to play in San Seb’s official selection.

Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise and Terence Davies’ Sunset Song are among the eight new titles to join the competition line-up at the upcoming San Sebastian Film Festival (Sept 18-26).

Wheatley’s adaptation of Jg Ballard’s 1975 novel stars Tom Hiddleston and is a dystopic depiction of a society that starts a class war in a high-rise apartment.

Davies’ Sunset Song, set to world premiere at Toronto, is a coming of age drama centred on the the daughter of a Scottish farmer in the early 1900s.

The new titles also include Mamoru Hosoda’s The Boy and the Beast. The Japanese anime is the first animated film to compete in official selection at San Sebastian and revolves around a boy who befriends a supernatural creature in an imaginary world.

Full list of...