In significant ways, 2018 may be the end of an era for me with film. My involvement with the Cinematary site and podcast has deepened; Knoxville's Public Cinema, my local source for recent foreign and avant-garde cinema, sadly seems to have gone into hibernation for the most part; the Central Cinema's magnificent opening has drawn me away from some new releases in the interest of revisiting (or experiencing for the first time) some classics; and, most majorly, my wife and I are just a few weeks away (at most!) from becoming first-time parents. Needless to say, my viewing habits will likely shift radically in 2019, and at the very least, I will not have time to watch the literally hundreds of films that I watched in 2018. Which is great! I don't begrudge any of those changes (well, except maybe the retreat of the Public Cinema, which makes me sad). It's all part of life's rich pageant, etc. But I guess what I'm saying is that maybe this year feels special for me because I won't experience movies in the same way ever again.
We all change, as does the world around us, and in a way, my top 10 this year is obsessed with change: the apocalyptic visions of First Reformed and Sorry to Bother You, the institutional pandemonium of The Death of Stalin and The Other Side of the Wind, the personal growth-regression cycles of Leave No Trace and Support the Girls, the industry-paradigm-shattering Into the Spider-Verse—these are all films that, to one degree or another, force their characters to come to grips with a universe that is rapidly shifting, often for the worse, sometimes delicately toward the better. Stasis is sort of a paradox of the human condition—our deepest desire, while also the least attainable. And, I mean, that's cinema, right? Twenty-four changes a second.
Anyway, enough pretentious twaddle. Here are my favorite movies, plus some. Let me know what you liked this year, too! That's the point of lists like this: to share. So please do.
Oh, and don't forget about my other year-end list, My Favorite Music of 2018!
Favorite Movies
In updating both Winter Light and Taxi Driver for the 2010s, Paul Schrader threw his career masterpiece at the razor's edge of 2018 existential terror. This film hasn't left my mind since I saw it, and its rendering of activism and even terrorism as functions of the parallel tensions of hope and despair has never ceased stinging—to say nothing of the profoundly searing way with which it makes us (me) confront the ramifications of grace. Essential to my spiritual formation in the way that very few movies are.
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Still the scariest thing I've seen in a theater all year—probably all decade. I am not at all kidding when I say I sweat through my t-shirt. I almost left the theater before the film ended. Even better, it's still the most unshakable treatise on family and mental illness I've seen, possibly ever. First Reformed became more of a foundation for my interior life this year, but make no mistake, Hereditary has wormed its way deep into my psyche.
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Working food service sucks. But you know what doesn't suck? This movie. The warmest film I saw all year, for sure, and one of the best indie-film ensembles in a while. Rarely has the world of minimum-hourly-wage work been so carefully and compassionately evoked in a movie. It's funny, it's sad, it's cathartic, it's great. I think a lot of people slept on Support the Girls, but now that it's got a home release, here's your chance to catch up with it.
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I'm still waiting for the Equisapien Revolution to come and save us for our capitalist overlords. Because I don't know if you've noticed, but things are bleak, y'all. At least in the meantime, we have Boots Riley giving us some of the best satire in American cinema.
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This movie kind of makes me mad because it means that at the end of next year, I'll probably have to make room for two Mission: Impossible movies in my "Favorite Films of the Decade" list. I guess it's the price I pay for having experienced that helicopter scene.
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People say that avant-garde cinema is impenetrable and no fun; I say, "But you can remake Vertigo with film clips of Michael Douglas talking to a younger, more naked version of himself."
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Does a movie filmed in the '70s and edited in the mid-2010s count as a 2018 movie? I don't care. This frequently brilliant, often incomprehensible relic of Orson Welles's utter disdain for the Hollywood New Wave as well as for the old, corrupt studio system it replaced (Welles is nothing if not an equal-opportunity hater) is an experience from front to back, often funny, always bitter—visionary even forty years after its conception.
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All sorts of ebullient and ecstatic: drunk with the untapped possibilities of the animated medium and the whole wacky spectrum of comic-book history, Spider-Verse is the best superhero movie in quite some time and hopefully the beginning of a long and fruitful animated wing of Sony's Spider-Man properties.
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The craven power struggle following Stalin's death made in the image of In the Loop. Western countries have a habit of outsourcing the violence of our political systems to hidden corners and faraway countries, so there's something especially striking about the way that this movie infuses the very English idioms of high-class political plotting with all the violence that usually gets diverted into inner cities and Middle-Eastern realms. Frequently hilarious, if you can muster laughs among all the creeping horror.
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For a film with very few spoken words, Debra Granik's first film in nearly a decade (since 2010's Winter's Bone) is a surprisingly striking dialogue: between generations, between personalities, between worldviews. We cannot trust the modern world; but also, we must.
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Appendix: Miscellaneous Movies Also Worth Noting
Documentary Corner Award: Minding the Gap—This was a strong year for documentaries of all stripes, from mainstream fare like Won't You Be My Neighbor? and Three Identical Strangers to more off-beat stuff like Shirkers. But the one that stuck with me the most was this gutting coming-of-age documentary about a bunch of skater punks growing up.
Foreign Film Corner: The Guilty—I didn't get a chance to see as much non-English-language cinema as I'd have liked this year, but I saw a few, most of them good. People are going nuts about Lucrecia Martel's Zama, which is very good, but I won't lie to y'all: I liked this mean little Danish thriller better. The whole thing takes place in an emergency call center; it's a deconstruction of the stiff-lipped, rogue male hero archetype. I mean, what more do you need?
Best Musical Sequence: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs—Move right on over, A Star Is Born! The opening segment of Joel and Ethan Coen's western anthology film, wherein Tim Blake Nelson's titular outlaw sings and shoots his way through a frontier town, is one of the best and funniest pieces of cinema sent our way this year. The rest of the movie is good, too, but this is on a whole other level.
Best Cinematography: Roma—Alfonso Cuarón's black-and-white evocation of 1970s Mexico City has basically no competition for this award. Say what you will about the plot and characters, but my eyeballs were practically singing the entire film.
Best Superhero Action: Incredibles 2—For a genre often premised on its promise of impossible action sequences, superhero movies don't always take advantage of the full spectrum of what having super-powered superhumans means for the crafting of an action sequence. Say what you will about the narrative flaws of Incredibles 2, but it absolutely doesn't skim on the inventive superhero action, each character's powers utilized to maximum creativity in choreography in every one of the setpieces. Take notes, Marvel!
Best Job Sneaking Some Supremely Weird Material into Mainstream Multiplex Entertainment: Annihilation—Alex Garland's follow-up to the great Ex Machina is a deeply flawed riff on Tarkovsky's Stalker, but between the "bear" scene and THAT ending, it's hard to be too irritated at the movie's shortcomings. Would that all our existential nightmares looked so visionary as this film's final fifteen minutes.
Best Homeschooling: Little Women—I've become weirdly obsessed with how well this movie captures the sensibilities of a certain corner of the homeschooling world. Help.
"It Would Be Nice If This Were Trend-Setting" Award: Game Night—A tightly scripted, visually interesting American studio comedy? What is this, 1945?
Worst Time at the Movies Award: Eighth Grade—I feel like people have undersold just how hard to watch this movie is. Don't get me wrong: it's a fantastic film. But you'll forgive me for not calling 94 minutes of being forcibly reminded of the worst time of my life and some of the deeply scarring insecurities I emerged from it with an enjoyable experience.
Best Villain: Black Panther—A hero is only ever as compelling as his villain, and Killmonger, the charismatic, Michael-B.-Jordan-played foil to the titular hero, is pulling double time in making this movie work. The MCU has been doing pretty well in its villain game recently, but even then, Killmonger is on a whole different level, wielding a pathos and a political edge stronger than any of the weapons brandished by Marvel's arsenal of fighters. Without this guy standing as counterweight, T'Challa and Wakanda as a whole barely register.
Best Scenery: Crazy Rich Asians—That's "mise en scène" for all us film dweeb losers. But anyway, I wasn't super hot on this movie as a whole, but I think my jaw was always just kind of hanging open at how incredible the movie's sets and locations were. Crazy and rich indeed.
Most Prophetic Movie for Me Personally (Probably): Tully—Remember Tully, everyone? No? Well, it was a good movie. People seem to have forgotten it, but it was good. Pretty good depiction of parenthood, too—or, at least, I presume so. I guess my wife and I will find out here in a couple of weeks when our first child is born.
Most Misleading Title: The Endless—It did end, after about two hours.
Least Misleading Title: Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?—Yeah I did, as a matter of fact.
"Is the Disney Ride Over Yet? I'm Ready to Get Off" Award: Solo: A Star Wars Story—A surprisingly crowded field this year. But I've got to give it to this boy, probably the most tired piece of filmmaking Disney has allowed into one of flagship cash-cow film brands in at least a few years, in addition to being a completely pointless and cynical cash-in on fandom nostalgia. Now if only these God-forsaken live-action remakes can tank as hard at the box office as this one; Aladdin, I'm counting on you.
"I Don't Really Have an Award, but You Guys Should Check This Movie Out" Award: A Simple Favor—Some of the most effortless, effervescent fun I had at the movies all year.
Scariest Dance Studio: Suspiria—Only barely edging out Madeline's Madeline. Hail 2018, year of the weirdly frightening avant-garde dance sequences!
Most Unexpected Satire: God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness—This is not good; I repeat, not good. But it is bizarrely aggressive in the ways that it undermines its predecessors. A Light in Darkness : God's Not Dead 1 & 2 :: Verhoeven's Starship Troopers : Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Biggest Surprise: A Star Is Born—Was confident that this was going to be incurably boring and stodgy. It turned out to be great.
Biggest Disappointment: Mandy—I'm still waiting for my Progressive Rock Fantasia, and I thought this might be the closest thing to it yet. Alas, what we got was not nearly so interesting. Even putting aside the metric of Progtasia hype, this is so tiringly terrestrial compared to Cosmatos's previous feature, Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Best Non-2018 Movie I Saw For the First Time in 2018: Phantom Thread—I feel like I'm cheating putting this movie here, given that I saw it not even a month into 2018 and the movie had a late-2017 release, and if I was giving a more conventional answer for this category, I guess I'd go with Jonathan Glazer's gorgeous, ominous Birth. But back to my actual answer: a breathtaking, genre-fluid study of rich character foils? A weirdly tender love story wrapped in a (by the end literally) mortal struggle for sexual power? A covert ghost story? A sumptuous Jonny Greenwood score? Poison mushrooms??? It honestly might finally be Paul Thomas Anderson besting There Will Be Blood, so how could this not be the best movie I saw all year?
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