Anna Menta’s Top 10 of Everything in 2019

I have to say this, right? I loved Knives Out for so many more reasons than the now-famous cream cable-knit sweater that Chris Evans wears in this whodunnit murder mystery. But the perfect plotting, pacing, and humor from writer/director Rian Johnson didn’t gain me hundreds of Twitter followers and prompt Lionsgate to launch a sweater-focused marketing campaign, now did it? Instead, my dumb viral tweet about Chris Evans’s sweater did, and I’m very grateful to it. (I’m also grateful to my new friend, Mashable Culture Reporter Nicole Gallucci, for her sweater appreciation.) And while Knives Out is not yet streaming, here are 10 other films where Chris Evans wears a sweater that you can stream.

I don’t play video games. Never in my life have I played a video game from start to finish until Untitled Goose Game. But this puzzle game—which I played with my partner on his Nintendo Switch—is, objectively, perfect. The entire premise is that you’re a misbehavin’ goose who wreaks havoc on the long-suffering citizens of a small Australian town. This is a game that lets you steal keys from gardeners and honk while simultaneously playing the harmonica. Like I said, perfect. And I won’t spoil it, but Untitled Goose Game has the best twist ending of 2019. I still get chills thinking about it.

This is not a reference to a pop culture moment, I just got really into eating lightly salted roasted seaweed in 2019. I stumbled across these bad boys—which cost about $1.50 a package—at my local grocery store and quickly became addicted. I now go through at least five packages a week. It’s the perfect salty, lightweight alternative to chips, and supposedly it’s actually kind of healthy! (No one tell me if it’s not. I don’t want to know.)

I loved Avengers: Endgame, which I thought was a near-perfect conclusion to a decade-long story with a few glaring faults. But what I loved even more than the actual film was the rush I got when I secured nine (9) tickets for myself and my friends to the opening night showing at the AMC theater in Times Square. Yes, these seats were all together, no, they were not front row, and yes, they were for the 6:30 p.m. screening, meaning that even though it was a three-hour film, everyone got home at a reasonable hour. To quote one of my friends in the email chain I started to organize this outing, “Anna Menta, you are a ticket goddess.” If you remember how hard it was to get Fandango to work the day those tickets went on sale, you’d be calling me a goddess, too.

Where to stream Avengers: Endgame

Do I expect Tom Hooper’s film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats to be good? No. But the Cats (2019) trailer debut was the most fun I’ve had on Twitter all year. In that moment—when we are all frantically trying to screenshot and gif the many horrific CGI cat moments—I felt truly alive.

I typically only cover films that are available on streaming for Decider, so I wanted to take advantage of this “anything goes” list to highlight my favorite film of 2019 that is tragically not yet available on streaming: Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Every single second of this queer lady period romance film from French director Céline Sciamma took my breath away. Not since Call Me By Your Name has the final shot of a film made me cry that hard. And Adèle Haenel saying “Turn around?” I gasped.

I don’t watch “Hot Ones”—the First We Feast web series that interviews celebrities as they eat increasingly spicy hot wings—religiously. But every time I do, it’s a god damn delight, in large part thanks to host Sean Evans’s insightful, well-researched interviews. This year was undeniably a breakout year for the show, and included my favorite meme of 2019: Paul Rudd saying, “Hey. Look at us.”

Noah Baumbach’s lovely film about divorce, Marriage Story, turned out to be much more controversial than I expected. But I wholeheartedly loved it. I particularly loved the scene in which Laura Dern and Alan Alda—who play the divorce lawyers representing Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver’s characters respectively—order lunch in the middle of arguing over divorce details. The disoriented look on Driver’s face when Dern cheerfully asks him if he’s ever eaten from a particular restaurant—which Alda interjects that he loves—mere moments after she calls him a bad father is everything. It’s a small but honest moment that speaks to the insightful authenticity of the entire film.

Watch Marriage Story on Netflix

I thought Good Omens, both the book and the TV show, were good but not great. David Tennant and Michael Sheen are phenomenal as the demon Crowley and angel Aziraphale, but too much of the show (a faithful adaptation of the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett) meanders slowly without those two charismatic stars on the screen. Thank god, then, for the Good Omens fandom, which not only cuts out all the bad but also greatly expands and improves on the good. Thanks to the extremely talented Good Omens fans—who are writing fanfiction, creating fanart, and making memes—Tumblr is back in my life in a way it hasn’t been since before Steven Moffat took over Doctor Who. I couldn’t be happier about it.

Watch Good Omens on Amazon Prime Video

Booksmart is my favorite film of the year, and I’ve already written about its potential as a cult hit, its refreshing depiction of teenage girls, and the two scenes that first-time director Olivia Wilde had to fight to keep in. One of those scenes was, in my opinion, the best part of this teen comedy starring Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever: the pool scene. It’s all about Dever’s character, Amy, finding herself, represented by this moment when she jumps into a pool at a high school party, and, for a few glorious moments, feels free. When Amy plunges underwater, time slows, accompanied by the uplifting sounds of “Slip Away” by the indie-pop musician, Perfume Genius. It’s a purely visually two-minutes without any dialogue, and it’s wonderful.

Where to stream Booksmart