Indie Showcase: Did You See That? (2019)

The domain of horror, science fiction, and fantasy is something that had its golden age in the 1970s and 1980s with an array of amazing an amazingly bad movies. This naturally includes the weird and wonderful exploitation films that managed to influence entire generations of filmmakers and film fans. Did You See That? is a movie that has a strong sense of the very same sensibility. Here's how it describes its plot:

With the blood of her loved ones on her hands, Chaka, a young witch-in-training must team up with the Guardian Lamar (Powerman MC, Crossbones and Welfare to Millionaire) to stop a demonic entity, Thaddeus Ayromlooi (Dragon Dronet, Alien Resurrection) from mutilating the rest of her friends. Their only hope is the Riazza Themsla, a forbidden book of spells that released Thaddeus into their world in the first place. Time begins to run out as his tactics become more unpredictable, leading Chaka and her friends into doubting what is reality and what is an illusion.

Two-Paragraph Review: The King (2019)

David Michôd is a guy who gets cinema. His Rover was an amazing film that came out of the blue to the international crowd, while Animal Kingdom planted his flag locally a few years earlier. The King is a continuation of this amazing talent and a broad range of interests. Here, he was able, along with Joel Edgerton, who showed his writing kung fu in The Gift, to explore "Henriad" of William Shakespeare in a way that includes no archaic language or archaic acting. Smartly, the movie steers clear of all of those Shakespeare tropes and focuses on the thing that made them into timeless art: it's exploration of human nature.

Instead, the plot is a historical drama that takes in the Battle of Agincourt and puts it front and center into an amazingly engaging movie. The star of the film, Timothée Chalamet, does a marvelous job and he’ll be praised for it for a long time. His Henry is one of doubt, reluctance, and introversion, but also calculated violence and cruelty. Here, Chalamet is really excellent, but an equal level of craft and skill is provided by everyone else, offering authentic characters stuck in a world that is nothing like our own. In its genre, The King is most certainly the best movie of 2019.