2018 Year End Report: The Top 10 Films of 2018

And at long last, the 10 best films of 2018.

10. Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)

Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma is his personal magnum opus – a look back at the women who helped raised him, and the time he came of age in – but without the nostalgic sheen that so many filmmakers include when they make a film about their childhood. The black and white cinematography is clearly the best of the year – full of long, master shots, with meticulous editing, the film tells the story of a maid (a great Yalitza Aparicio) of a middle class family, the film details a year in their lives when everything gets turned upside down. The maid gets pregnant, and left by her boyfriend, the doctor husband/father of the family moves out with his mistress, and no one bothers to tell the kids. How these people navigate the most difficult years in their lives builds to a truly heartbreaking series of scenes at the end. I saw Roma at TIFF this year – I made it a priority, since I knew the film was coming to Netflix, but that I’d want to see Cuaron’s film on the big screen – which I hope those interested were able to do (not only does the cinematography look great on a big screen, the amazing sound design is even more impressive). But no matter how people see Roma, I hope they do. A big and bold film, that is also devastatingly personal.

 

9. Hereditary (Ari Aster)

The year’s scariest film was Ari Aster’s debut about a family reeling from one trauma after another – and really, how that trauma gets passed down from one generation to the next. Toni Collette gives one of the great performances of the year as the mother of the family, with conflicted emotions about the death of her mother who she had a strained relationship at best with, struggling with her own children now. She buries herself in her (very creepy) work, and can lash out in anger or grief at all around her, who don’t really know how to deal with what’s going on. As a director, Aster is able to build the tension slowly, with some great, creepy, nightmare inducing sequences (sometimes just images, or sounds). He is perhaps a touch ambitious with the writing, bringing in all sorts of elements and influences to the story. Regardless, the movie is nightmare inducing, terrifically scary and also incredibly smart in how it deals with families – and how they deal with each other.

 

8. Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham)

If there was a film that gave me more nightmares there Hereditary this year, it was Bo Burham’s terrific debut film Eighth Grade – the most honest, painfully awkward depiction of teenage life that I think I have ever seen. Elsie Fisher delivers a great debut performance as Kayla, a shy, awkward girl in the last week of eighth grade, trying in vain to be the person she thinks she is supposed to be – trying to make fit in with her classmates, fit in online, fit in at parties, looking forward to her high school years with dread and anticipation. The whole movie is painful to sit through in the best way possible – unless you’re as asshole, you’ll likely see a lot of yourself in the film, which is both tied very specifically to this moment in time, but also that awkwardness that is universal. As a filmmaker, Burham shows heart and empathy and restraint – but isn’t afraid to lay on the style when he needs to - he brilliantly shoots a pool party almost like a horror movie, and the one sequence that is truly dangerous feels it in every silence he chooses. A new teen movie classic – and one that is far more honest than almost any other teen movie I’ve ever seen before.

 

7. Annihilation (Alex Garland)

Alex Garland’s first film as a director – Ex Machina – was a small scale sci-fi masterwork, which won Alicia Vikander an Oscar (what’s that you say? She won for The Danish Girl that year instead? Never heard of it). With Annihilation, he expands the scale and ambition of his outlook, but still maintains something intimate and personal in his filmmaking. The movie, about a group of women heading into the “shimmer”, without really knowing what that is, and finding – well, kind of their dreams and nightmares come to life – earned comparisons to Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Garland’s film is mysterious and terrifying, often at the same time – and yet also strangely calming at times as well. It is an ambitious and challenging film, and doesn’t let up until the very final shot – which just deepens the mystery. The studio didn’t know what they had with this film – or knew, but had no idea how to market it – so it just kind of got thrown out into theaters (where it did surprisingly well). This is one of those films that people will be discussing the debating for years.

 

6. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)

Barry Jenkins won the Best Picture Oscar just two years ago for Moonlight, and he’s already back with an even better movie in If Beale Street Could Talk. Adapting a novel by James Baldwin (a feat in itself), Jenkins film is achingly beautiful – but not so much that you miss the tragedy it is documenting. It is a love story – told in beautiful colors that call to mind Douglas Sirk or Wong Kar Wai – between two young, black people in 1960s New York, whose love is torn apart by systematic racism. The ensemble cast is terrific, the filmmaking is impeccable, the film runs you through the emotional ringer – hitting both huge highs, and crushing lows. And yet, Jenkins film is never maudlin, or (overtly) manipulative. This beautiful, sensitive film truly is masterfully done by Jenkins – who has become one of the best filmmakers around in a few short years.

 

5. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)

In a just world, Lynne Ramsay would be talked about in the same terms we normally reserve for filmmakers like David Fincher or Paul Thomas Anderson – that is how good she is. Her latest film, You Were Never Really Here, is a truly virtuoso feat of directing – taking a fairly standard issue revenge story (think Taxi Driver), and stripping it down to the bone narratively speaking, and placing us inside the wounded protagonist’s headspace. That protagonist is Joe (a brilliant Joaquin Phoenix), a veteran who now makes his living rescuing young girls who have been kidnapped by abusive men – and dispatching those men in the bloodiest, most brutal way imaginable (it often involves a hammer). He finds that is taking a toll on him as well, as he falls deeper and deeper into despair and paranoia – and deeper into a conspiracy that he starts to unravel. Ramsay has only a few films under her belt – but she gets better with each and every one of them. If you haven’t already, see Movern Callar (if you have seen it, see it again – I liked it the first time through, and absolutely loved it the second) and We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her filmmaking is staggering – and this is her best work yet.

 

4. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (Joel & Ethan Coen)

Despite only being released in November, I have seen The Ballad of Buster Scruggs more times than any other 2018 film – as this strange anthology film keeps calling me back time and again. That’s the good side of it being a Netflix film – you could do that (the bad side is that it is the first Coen brother film in 20 years I did not see in a movie theater). This strange, funny, tragic film about the inevitability of death is an odd experience the first time through – as you try and piece together in your mind just what the Coens are up with this mixture of tones, stories and styles of the Western – starting with the title segment which envisions Roy Rogers as a Sergio Leone character psychopath, moving to a tragic comedy of errors with James Franco, the sad reality of showbiz in the old West, Tom Waits destroying the land to get what he wants, with ironic results, a tragic romance between Zoe Kazan and Bill Heck, and finally the long carriage ride we’ll all go on one day or another. But the more you watch, the more the connections and intentions become clear. The performance run the gamut from over the top nuts like Tim Blake Nelson to quiet and subdued like Heck and Kazan, and everything in between, Each segment has its own style – its own reference points. And yet, finally, it is all one big movie. One of the great modern Westerns – and one of the great Coen brother’s films.

3. BlackKklansman (Spike Lee)

Spike Lee’s best film since 2002’s 25^th Hour – and one of his very best ever – BlackKklansman is a film that is entertaining as it is enraging, as funny as it is disturbing – a big, ambitious film that seems like it shouldn’t all fit together, and yet, of course, does. Lee ventures outside of his beloved New York to tell the story of the first black cop in Colorado Springs (John David Washington, showing that he has inherited a lot from his father, including acting skills, charm and that swagger of a walk) who goes undercover to infiltrate the local chapter of the KKK. Adam Driver gives a great performance as his partner – the white face he needs when face to face meetings become real – who has to struggle with his own feelings as a secular Jew, having to confront his religion in the face of all the hatred. The film is a period piece, but it is has its eye very much on today – particularly in its depiction of David Duke (nice guy Topher Grace), who intentionally echoes Donald Trump (as does much of the film). The film is a big, entertaining ambitious film throughout – pausing sometimes for speeches (so skillfully delivered, and filmed by Lee, they don’t feel like speeches) – and then seemingly is about to end on a fantasy happy end – before Lee thrusts us directly in the ugliness of now in one of the most powerful sequences of the year. It seems like every time people want to write Spike Lee off, he delivers something brilliant and incendiary like this. A masterpiece.

 

2. Burning (Lee Chang-dong)

I’ve been a fan of Korean auteur Lee Chang-dong since I saw his 2007 masterpiece Secret Sunshine at TIFF that year, knowing nothing going in, and being absolutely blown away by his film. Since then, there have been long waits between his films – 2011’s Poetry is a subtle heartbreaker, and now with Burning, he has made his greatest film. Burning is a fascinating movie as it switches genres in each of its acts starting almost as a meet cute romance when Jong-su (Ah-In Yoo) meets a childhood friend Hae-mi (Jong-seo Jun) and they spark up a strange, kind of romance. That sours when she returns from a trip with a new man (Steven Yeun) – who he immediately hates. But does he hate him because there is really something wrong with him, or hate him because he’s now with the girl he wants? The movie will morph into a thriller of sorts in its last act – kicked off by one of the most haunting scenes of the year, a dreamy twilight dance. All of this really is a character study of Jong-su though – who he is, and why he acts the way he does, and how he reads the actions of others. As viewers, we’re put in the strange spot of examining everyone’s actions through his eyes – what does that really mean? Lee Chang-dong is a master filmmaker – his writing is brilliant (he is also a novelist, and he is adapting a short story by Haruki Murakami, transplanting it from Japan to Korea – and expanding and changing a lot, although strangely, it’s still somehow faithful to the tone of the novel). A haunting, ambiguous film that provides no easy answers – perhaps no answers at all – which shows once and for all than Lee is a master.

 

1. First Reformed (Paul Schrader)

I spent a month or so watching or re-watching every film Paul Schrader has ever directed – and newly appreciating just what a great filmmaker he is in his own right, while still acknowledging it is a filmography with a lot of ups and downs. First Reformed however is his masterpiece – the finest film he has ever made, and even in a year this strong, the easy choice for best of the year. In the performance of the year, Ethan Hawke stars as a priest who has basically been sleepwalking through life – his son is dead, his wife has left him – and he works at a tourist church without a real congregation. He is shaken to the core when a pregnant parishioner (Amanda Seyfried) comes to him and wants him to talk to her husband, who doesn’t want to bring a child into a world that humans are destroying. That conversation and its aftermath sets Hawke on a destructive path – one well-known to Schrader protagonists, and yet unique to him in a strange way. The finale is the most memorable of any film this year – but it is that haunting sequence (if you’ve seen the film, you know the one) in the middle of the film that is truly transcendent. Schrader is clearly paying tribute to his heroes – Bergman, Bresson, Dreyer – but is also making his own thing. First Reformed is a masterpiece – the best film of the year, the best film of Schrader’s career, and one of the very best of the decade.