The Last “Best Movies of 2018” List You’ll Ever Read
Wow, I’m late this year
Every year I swear to do one of these sometime between New Year’s Day and the Oscars. This year I took it down to the wire.
Two 2018 films with which I have a personal connection get special mention above and apart from any formal top 10: punk rock slasher The Ranger directed by the love of my life, Jenn Wexler, and trippy, social media road trip Like Me, directed by Rob Mockler and produced by Jenn. Despite differences in tone and style, both are ultra-colorful, both feature nuanced lead performances by talented young actresses paired against more established character actors given real red meat to play, and both have a lot to say about identity, self-knowledge, and age/gender/power dynamics. Watching Jenn and her talented collaborators achieve their vision and share their work with appreciative audiences has given me more joy than any film on my “official” top 10 list.
1. The Favourite
I’m in the bag for Yorgos Lanthimos. Dogtooth and The Lobster are two of my favo(u)rites of the last decade. High concept-meets-stone-faced absurdism has been a sure thing for me for as long as I’ve been aware that movies can be art, and few filmmakers do it better. His latest is also his best and most accessible work to date, abetted by a trio of stars at the top of their game (though I’m not sure Olivia Coleman’s game has anything but top), a whip-smart Wildean script, and sumptuous costume and production design to die for. It’s about a leader prone to infantile acting out (timely), and about the difference between getting what you want and getting what you need (timeless). Bonus: there’s a killer dance break.
2. First Reformed
It takes a wily old hand like Paul Schrader to show us how the unmaking of a world — through catastrophic, seemingly irreversible climate change — can also spark the unmaking of a man. First Reformed feels like the culmination of Schrader’s life — his religious upbringing, his study of “transcendental” filmmaking, his many lonely, self-justifying protagonists — using the very tools of cinema itself to create an experience that touches the divine through the simple act of watching a film.
3. Hereditary
Some horror films make you jump, some make you wince, some make you grip the armrests for dear life, and some make you forget how to breathe. The best do it all, and Hereditary is, for my money, among the best ever made. If third act floating character sawing off her own head is too over-the-top for you, too fucking bad. I am here for it. A movie this meticulous and controlled deserves to fly off the rails in its third act if it wants to, and soar, gloriously, into the stratosphere. Toni Collette has gears other actors can’t even imagine.
4. Cold War
An almost too cool, too smokey-beautiful film about a love that’s too wild to hold but too intoxicating to let go. Shot like director Pawel Pawlikoski’s previous film, Ida, in a retro 4:3 ratio and glorious, high-contrast (digital) black and white that makes me almost sad reality has to in boring, old color.
5. Shoplifters
A seemingly simply story about a family (of sorts) living on the fringes of society, enjoying one another and life’s basic pleasures — despite a lifestyle that necessitates not actually paying for things. Everything on display — acting, directing, production design — seemed so grounded and compelling that I had to keep reminding myself I wasn’t watching a documentary. The last act takes a surprising turn, adding new meaning to all that’s come before.
6. Sorry to Bother You
Boots Riley is the real deal. No film made me laugh louder or longer than his gonzo assault on the decadence of late capitalism — and racism, code switching, performance art, reality TV… You name it, Boots probably found a way to drag it. A great cast sells the humanity amidst the surreality. My only fear is that, in a few years, I’ll look back and wonder why I didn’t rank it higher.
7. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
With apologies and respect to the citizens of Wakanda (Wakanda forever!), Spider-Verse was the best damn Marvel movie of this year or any year. Sure, it may not have had the cultural significance of Black Panther, which opened the door to greater diversity in big-budget blockbusters. But it told a smart, funny, original Spider-person origin story in a vibrant, dynamic way that both honored the character’s comic book roots while inventing a whole new style of animation along the way.
8. Zama
A dry, dark comedy in a bright, wet climate. Don Diego de Zama stands like a man expecting his portrait to be painted, only no artist ever comes. As the local representative of the Spanish crown in some far-flung 18th century South American colony, he waits in vain to be relieved of his colonial burdens and summoned home. While he waits (and waits), his situation goes from bad to worse. Think Samuel Beckett meets Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon at the edge of the world. Zama captures some of the most stunning tableaus of the year, and that’s saying something in a year that gave us both Roma and The Favourite.
9. Madeline’s Madeline
Portrait of the artist as an unstable adolescent. Madeline, played by mesmerizing first-time actress Helena Howard, is a talented but emotionally unbalanced teen, caught between a mother she loves, needs but also resents (Miranda July) and a charismatic, experimental theater director (Molly Parker) who showers Madeline with attention but may be exploiting the girl for her art in ways neither fully understand. Director Josephine Decker uses expressive, fluid editing to put us in Madeline’s p.o.v. in a way that mirrors — and eventually merges with — the reality-blurring art Madeline herself creates.
10. Annihilation
There were a lot of contenders for the final spot (see Honorable Mentions below), but in the end I had to give it to Alex Garland’s haunting Annihilation, a brilliant work of big-screen science fiction, whose budget was perhaps too big for its arthouse soul. I see the film as remix of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with the life-altering effects of trauma (PTSD, the death of a loved one, the diagnosis of an incurable disease, etc.) as its central metaphor. Trauma that can strike out of the blue (in this case, literally) and forever change everything. The best you can hope is come out the other side, different but alive and stronger. (That mirror-self pas de deux counts as a dance scene, right?)
Honorable Mentions
Black Panther • Blackkklansman • Can You Ever Forgive Me • Crazy Rich Asians • The Death of Stalin • Eighth Grade • Game Night • Leave No Trace • Let the Corpses Tan • Lowlife • One Sings, The Other Doesn’t • Satan’s Slaves • Shirkers • Tigers Are Not Afraid (festival circuit) • You Were Never Really Here
