2018 has come and gone, and while it was another mostly miserable
year for a mostly miserable decade where the world felt like it was more
divided than ever, it was at least an interesting year at the movies. Beneath
the ocean of sequels, reboots and remakes, there was a vibrant reef of unique
and original films to be discovered, from unexpected mainstream curveballs to
experimental indie ventures to unassuming little gems hiding in the crevices of
Netflix. And now it’s time for me to count down the best of them. Keep in mind
that I didn’t get to see everything I wanted to, hence why Paddington 2, Leave No Trace, Support The Girls, Mandy, The Sisters
Brothers, A Star Is Born, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Aquaman, Roma and Vice never got reviews, let alone made
it to the list. With all that said, these are the Top 10 Movies of 2018 (in my
opinion).
Is this cheating? Yes. Do I care? No. 2018 was the year
Marvel released two of the biggest juggernauts the superhero genre has ever
seen (and also Ant
Man & The Wasp), but Black
Panther and Infinity War were
both groundbreaking in their own right for very different reasons. Black Panther was the most culturally
relevant. While it isn’t the first major film to feature a black superhero, but
with its predominantly black cast and crew, Afro-futurist aesthetic and
socially relevant themes, it is the first where it felt like that detail means anything.
Even then, no one could predict the meteoric impact it would have,
reverberating so strongly that people are still talking about it ten months
later like it’s already a classic, and Disney even pushing an aggressive Oscar
campaign for it. Infinity War, on the
other hand, was something that sounded like a disaster on paper but ultimately
became the culmination of everything that made the MCU so beloved up to that
point, only to upend everyone’s expectations. It managed to bring a mammoth
cast together without it feeling too cluttered or distracted, everyone got
their moment to shine, Thanos is a strong contender for movie villain of the
decade, and the ending left half the audience speechless, and the other half… speechless
for completely different reasons. Here’s hoping that Endgame can make it all worth it.
Barry Jenkins’ follow-up to the Oscar winning emotional
powerhouse Moonlight is a
compassionate portrait of love in the face of discrimination and hardship. As a
young black woman in Harlem awaits the birth of her child, she also fights to
prove the innocence of her boyfriend after he’s thrown in jail for a crime he
didn’t commit. Easily the most romantic movie of the year, the love between
Tish and Fonny radiates whenever they’re onscreen together, brought to vividly intimate
life through the glowing cinematography and swelling score. But that same
technique is used to cast a shadow over their puppy love when it’s depicting the
struggles and injustices African Americans face at the hands of the criminal
justice system, a condemnation that’s more somber than scathing. In a year where black cinema was throwing its fists in the
air, sometimes while gripping Molotovs, Beale
Street offsets the bitter reality of our racist culture with love,
compassion, and community.
8. Apostle
This one’s a bit of a wild card pick. Netflix had a handful
of goodies this year, and while some of the more acclaimed, auteur driven films
like Roma and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will rightfully be making plenty of
year-end lists, I have way more affection for this scrappy little horror
thriller from the director of The Raid.
When a jaded former missionary is sent to find his sister after she was
kidnapped by a pagan cult living on a remote island, he also discovers the
secret to their sustainability and is thrust headfirst into a powder keg of karmic
retribution. Apostle is what you get
when someone skilled in action applies those skills to horror, something that’s
certainly been done before, but not with this amount of bone-crunching, white
knuckle intensity. The result is a potent blend of The Wicker Man, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, and Silence.
Admittedly it’s not as smart as it wants to be, and characters are defined less
by their personality and more by their capacity to take a physical or psychological
beating, but if you’re looking for something on the stranger side to add to
your watch list, give this one a go.
7. Isle
of Dogs
For the obligatory animated pick, it was a tough call
between this and Spider-Man: Into the
Spider-Verse, but Isle of Dogs wins
by just a hair. By now, most audiences are firmly grounded in regards to where
they stand on Wes Anderson. If you didn’t groove with his dry wit and
obsessively meticulous twee approach to filmmaking back when Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were the new hotness, chances are you won’t
be grooving with it in 2018. With Isle of
Dogs, Anderson’s style is so perfectly suited for animation that I’m
surprised he doesn’t do it more often, and the story is so far removed from his
typical comfort zone that if not for the glib dialogue, pastel color pallet and
symmetrical framing, you’d never think it was him. Beyond being a touching
story about a boy and his dog, this is also one of Anderson’s most politically
charged films, with the massive dog exile that drives this dystopia essentially
being a genocide, but it’s also a vehicle for all things that make dogs man’s
best friend: loyalty, friendship, and unconditional love.
6. Eighth
Grade
Growing up sucks, no matter where or when it’s happening.
While the trials and tribulations of high school have had their bones thoroughly
picked clean, Bo Burnham’s ode to the growing pains of adolescence is here to
remind us that middle schoolers don’t exactly have it easy either. As empathetic
as it is painfully awkward, this journey through one socially anxious 13-year-old girl’s final week of middle school is marked by its emphasis on the
role of the Internet and social media in the modern youth, not as a good or
evil, but a simple fact of life. Played brilliantly by Elsie Fisher, Kayla
suffers from social anxiety and has a hard time making friends, keeping in
touch with her peers mainly through the annals of Instagram and Twitter, and
dishing out life advice on her YouTube channel that she struggles to apply to
her real life. Despite its R-rating, this should be essential viewing for all
eighth graders, as a capsule of their adolescent angst, and a reassurance that
they’re not alone.
5. Widows
On the surface, Widows
is what happens when you apply an artistic eye to a journeyman’s script, but like
the titular women pulling off a heist to pay off their dead husbands’ debts, focusing
on that undermines the whole point. Steve McQueen managed to make a compelling
caper without sacrificing is artistic flair, where the final caper isn’t as
important as the circumstances surrounding it. These women aren’t driven by
greed, power, or any of the sexy motivations, but desperation. Desperation to overcome
their loss, desperation to pay their debt, desperation to not have their lives
ruined by their husbands’ mistakes, but most importantly, desperation to take
back autonomy from the men in their lives. Supported by an amazing ensemble
cast including standout performances by Viola Davis, Elizabeth Debicki, Bryan
Tyree Henry and Daniel Kaluuya, stellar, dexterous cinematography and a taut
script by Gillian Flynn, and you got something that will have your brain
running as fast as your pulse.
Anyone who reads my reviews or knows me personally knows
that I have an affinity for weird, outside-the-box movies, as my next four
picks will undoubtedly prove. (We’re talking about a guy whose
favorite movie of 2016 involves a talking, farting corpse, after all.) The Favourite’s basic premise isn’t nearly as out-there, but what makes it a truly
bizarre experience is the delivery. Yorgos Lanthimos takes the off-kilter style
that turned The Lobster and The
Killing of a Sacred Deer into critical darlings and unleashed it onto an
already filthy, viciously sharp period piece, turning it into an unpredictable mutant
hybrid of Jane Austen, Ken Russell and Hype Williams. The struggle between two
noblewomen (Rachel Wiesz and Emma Stone) for the affection of an ailing Queen
Anne (Olivia Colman) is framed by sickeningly gorgeous interior decorating,
lavish costumes, lesbian love triangles, fisheye lenses, and foppish men more
preoccupied with throwing fruit at each other than running a country. Like a
corset, it’s tense and fashionable, but will leave you gasping for air.
3. Annihilation
The hardest part of making this list was deciding the order
of my top three movies. Each held the #1 spot at some point, and even now I
feel the order I chose is arbitrary. Annihilation
is a hallucinatory sci-fi odyssey and a tone poem on love, pain, grief, identity
and self-destruction. The journey of a group of female scientists exploring a
terraformed area that warps and refracts the DNA of everything inside it rips a
few pages from the playbooks of Kubrick and Tarkovsky and fashions them into
origami. The deeper into The Shimmer they explore, the more impossibly deformed
everything becomes, resulting in some of the most beautiful and nightmarish
images I’ve ever seen on screen. And even ten months later, the bear scene
remains as soul shuddering as it was the first time. It is at once beautiful
and horrifying, dreamlike and nightmarish, alluring and unsettling, alien and
familiar.
2018 was a fantastic year for black cinema. There were
obvious successes like Black Panther and
BlacKkKlansman and underrated gems
like Blindspotting and The Hate U Give, but none reached the
level of Sorry to Bother You simply by virtue of not being as bug
nut crazy. Boots Riley’s satirical anti-capitalist screed is unapologetically
off the wall, subtle as getting smacked across the jaw with a shovel, and woke
with a capital WOKE. The basic premise, where Lakieth Stanfield as a down on
his luck call center drone works his way up the corporate ladder by using his
“white voice” dubbed by David Cross, sounds at first like a B-tier Saturday Night Live sketch, only to
reveal itself to have a lot to say about capitalism, consumer culture, the
co-opting of non-white bodies, the wage gap and social media, then hit you
again with one of the most jaw dropping, brain slapping, gleefully demented
plot twists of the decade. It’s Charlie Kauffman by way of the message alerting
mailman from Don’t Be A Menace to South
Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood.
1. Hereditary
If there’s one word to describe this horror masterpiece, it’s
“transgressive”. Its greatest asset is taking audience’s familiarity and
expectations of the genre and twisting them until its neck snaps. Hereditary breaks several cardinal rules
within the first 30 minutes and doesn’t stop there. Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation
once said of horror video games that “all a good horror game has to do is hand
you a piece of sandpaper and shout encouragements as you vigorously massage
your own undercarriage.” Ari Aster understands that this applies to horror in
any medium, as half of the movie’s modus operandi is watching this family
viciously tear itself apart, and having us ask ourselves if it’s their own
doing or that of outside forces. It’s a volatile examination of the legacy of
familial abuse that lingers even when the abuser isn’t there, and the vicious
cycle it can create. Toni Colette, giving the most powerful performance of her
career, is both a victim and perpetrator, seeking meaning in senseless tragedy
and shirking off responsibility onto something greater than herself. In a year
where everyone was put through the emotional wringer, this was an emotional
beating that will have you crawling back for more.
Honorable Mentions:
The Death of Stalin
First Reformed
Searching
Always love your end of year lists!
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