Top Ten 2018

Other Top Ten Lists

I abandoned Post-Credit Coda last year. Our driest year yet featured only seven reviews. These hobbies can take a backseat for life reasons from time to time, but we make time for what's important. Thing is, I wasn't sure how important this was to me. Film criticism typically comes from a place of knowing; in my other work (and life in general) I've been dwelling a lot on the power and honesty of coming from a place of not-knowing.

Still and all, it would be a shame to miss out on sharing my favorite films of the year with you. Just because I haven't been writing about movies doesn't mean I haven't been seeing them! Maybe I can introduce you to a new favorite. Before we get there, we're going to have some fun with the clunkers, and before we get there, here are some films I missed that may have factored in:

Madeline's Madeline, Night is Short, Walk on Girl, One Cut of the Dead, Aquaman, You Were Never Really Here, Blindspotting, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, Creed II, Anna and the Apocalypse, Venom, Burning, Shirkers, Paddington 2, The World Is Yours, First Man, Cold War



Untoward Awards

Most Disappointing: A Wrinkle in Time
Most Inane: Bird Box
Most Nonsensical: A Wrinkle in Time
Most Generic: Solo: A Star Wars Story
Most Infuriating: The Seagull
Most: The Night Comes for Us

Can't Remember: Ant-Man and the Wasp

Most Improved: God's Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness
Sophomore Slump: Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

Kindred Spirits: A Quiet Place + Bird Box
Kindred Names: The Nun + Apostle

Best Names:
3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
2. Hereditary
1. Sorry to Bother You

Worst Names:
3. God's Not Dead: A Light in the Darkness
2. Solo: A Star Wars Story
1. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle

Worst Superhero: Ant-Man and the Wasp
Worst Adaptation: A Wrinkle in Time
Worst Sequel: Ant-Man and the Wasp
Worst: Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle



Honorable Mentions

Isle of Dogs - It took me a whole year to realize this film's title is I Love Dogs. Oh well. I don't love dogs but I do love me some gorgeous stop motion animation. My favorite moments are when Isle halts to show us extensive scenes of master craftsfolk doing what they're best at, lovingly animated by master craftsfolk doing what they're best at. My Review.

The Favourite - Something felt missing, something that I can't quite put my finger on. Don't let that keep you away from this off-kilter raunchy period piece, far more daring and rude than any other of its ilk.

Mission Impossible: Fallout - It's as if Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie are one of two creative teams* in America actually invested in pushing the limits of action cinema.

*The other: Chad Stahelski and Keanu Reeves

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs - This fragmented film is the rare anthology film whose varying degrees of quality range from great to transcendent. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs's project is to deconstruct the western, which the Coens have been doing in various forms for their entire illustrious career. It's no surprise that they know their wagonwheelhouse.

Shoplifters - Probably the most subdued work you'll find on this list, Shoplifters is a Japanese film about a family-by-circumstance who do what they need to get by. It's a hang-out movie of sorts, and like the best hang-out movies, we are not prepared for the hang-out to end.

The Death of Stalin - One of the year's great tonal mishmashes, The Death of Stalin treats mass murderers as the subjects of light comedy. This could be morally disastrous, but Death is constructed so skillfully that the jarring dissonance becomes the point of the whole thing. It's almost like the theatricality of palace intrigue is a highly effective tool for propagating authoritarian regimes and distracting from systemic inequality. But hey, everything will get better once the bad man in charge gets impeached/burned alive, right??

I watched 38 movies in 2018. Here are my top ten.

10. Widows

Run.

The final spot in my list was a toss-up between five or so movies. I landed on Widows because the film is uneven, plotty, and drags in the middle--but the highs are higher. McQueen is shooting to make a pulp epic here, a goal which is supported with varying degrees of success by McQueen + Gillian Flynn's screenplay. My three highlights:

1) the commentary on the various facets of racial political strife in America
2) Daniel Kaluuya's horrifying torture-by-freestyle-rap scene
3) the first several minutes

That opening sequence may actually be my favorite opening of the year, with McQueen and editor Joe Walker cutting between Liam Neeson and Viola Davis's tender romance, and a chaotic robbery gone wrong. The violence oscillates between implicit and explicit, with so much [gendered] meaning generated by the edit itself.

9. Mandy

I'm your God now.

From the depths of hell comes Mandy, a psychedelic carnival ride shot through with howling tragedy. This is not the sort of film you watch; this is the sort of film that happens to you. To describe it would be to reduce it to a by the numbers revenge fantasy (plus the odd demon here or there). Mandy is more than that, an existential yell carried by enough left field elements to perpetually keep you off balance. It also contains the key performance in what has been a career best year for Nicolas Cage. I underestimated him as a performer once upon a time; now I understand that more than anything, he requires a director with a keen understanding of the raging off-kilter melodrama that courses through his Nouveau Shamanic blood. The scene, in the bathroom, with the bottle of vodka.......

8. Annihilation

Isn't self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each cell?

Every Alex Garland project leaves a distinct calling card: high concept sci-fi with extraordinarily difficult third act paradigm shifts. When he was only a screenwriter it seemed as if his third acts were too big for their britches. Films like 28 Days Later... and Sunshine start strong, but depending on who you're talking to either get rowdy or simply fall apart by the end. Now that he has begun directing his own scripts with Ex Machina and Annihilation, that misconception gets cleared up. It's not that his third acts are weak... it's that they require such a deft touch that he should have been the one directing them all along. Both of his directorial efforts swing for the fences in their finales so successfully that the entire project is elevated.

Annihilation's journey into the sickly sweet Shimmer is visually captivating. The sheen is beautiful but uncanny in a way you cannot quite wrap your mind around. The mysteries are tantalizing. The cast are playing their stock characters with alacrity. It's gripping entertainment. Then the climactic moment happens, which features--of all things for a Hollywood action climax to feature--what can only be called an existentially nauseating interpretive dance. I am thrilled with Garland's audacity, and I hope he never settles for anything less.

7. Eighth Grade

Do I make you sad?

Do you remember how carefree it was being a kid?

Then you're remembering wrong. I'm amazed by how universally adults repress the trauma of childhood. And I'm not just talking about the capital T trauma of bad shit happening to you. I'm talking about the everyday lower case trauma of being thrown into a social world that expects everything of you while giving little to no clarification in return. The trauma of being told by every media source that you should know yourself, and that that self should conform to some unattainable ideal--meanwhile every identity you try on fits as poorly as your dad's hoodies. The trauma of wanting so badly to understand, to excel, to fit in, yet still feeling gross in those rare moments when it does happen.

No film I've seen has ever captured the searing anxiety of pubescence the way Bo Burnham has with Eighth Grade. To have a deep empathetic understanding of an adult character is one thing, but Burnham has a stunning capacity for looking through the eyes of a child. This is not to short change the incredible work put in by Elsie Fisher, whose subtle, but crucially not too subtle, performance is the bedrock upon which this film is built. I was transported back, and it terrified me.

Speaking of creators with compelling career shapes, I am extremely proud of Burnham's unprecedented growth from nastyminded youtube musical punmaster to aggressively polished and insightful stand-up comedian to shockingly nuanced film director. At least there is a counterexample to all the online content creators who resort to nasty, manipulative schtick.

6. Suspiria

Why is everyone so ready to think the worst is over?

True, embarrassing story: I knew Tilda Swinton was playing two characters in this film, but I didn't realize she was playing three. I spent the entire runtime believing her Dr. Klemperer was actually an ancient weird-looking German man. Egg on my face, but that's a testament not only to the astounding make-up work in the film, but Swinton's unmatched protean brilliance.

Luca Guadagnino's decision to remake Suspiria was questionable. His decision to make it entirely different in just about every way was admirable. His ability to pull it off was incredible. Suspiria's creative team is in love with movement. Shape, color, lines, curves, all the conceptual tools of professional dance brought to bear on a morbid tale of women and witchcraft. The images are gorgeous, crisp, and deeply unsettling in a subconscious way--but the real standout is the editing. One sequence involves cross-cutting between a dance performance and a scene of surreal brutal violence. It is like nothing I've seen, and yet it pales in comparison to the climactic sequence. Never have I witnessed otherworldliness portrayed so viscerally. It would be the easy winner for most traumatic film scene of the year, were this not a particularly rich year for cinematic trauma (see: the next entry on my list).

5. Hereditary

And I just, I just feel like, I just sometimes feel like it's all ruined. And then I realize that I am to blame. Or, not that I'm to blame, but... I am blamed.

The opening shot of Hereditary pans around a room of dioramas, simultaneously bright and sepulchral. The camera fixates on one house, one bedroom in particular, and sloooowly zooms in until we are right there with the little humanoid dolls, and then... without cutting they have become live action people, kicking off the drama at hand. This is the first of countless tricks that Hereditary uses to build up an atmosphere of terrible unease. We've seen some of these tricks before, though rarely executed quite this well. Some tricks are entirely novel. Every trick feels exactly right, both for twisting the stomach of the audience and for driving home the themes of the film. There are scares here that are sublime in and of themselves, but each scare is laser focused in on the heavy subjects Hereditary has on its mind.

Hereditary is not simply a ghost story. It is an examination of socialized heredity. Yes, we inherit genetic mental health issues from our family, but we also inherit a culture. Abuse creates an environment in which these mania thrive. All considered, it isn't the spooky ghosties or naked cultists that shake us to our core; it's the broken people stuck in their inevitable mutual self-destruction. This is all wrapped up in two aching performances, one of which (Toni Collette's) is in my opinion the single finest performance of the year.

4. Roma

No matter what they tell you, we women are always alone.

Roma is a memory. Roma is myth masquerading as naturalism. Roma is a challenge to deeply examine the relationships in our lives. Roma is a symphony of images. Roma is a poem of sound.

Roma foregrounds a woman of great inner strength and despair. Roma does not fetishize this woman. Roma does comment on the fetishism embedded in this woman's profession.

Roma is the only movie that has made me cry from panic. Roma proceeded to make me cry twice more before it was through.

Roma is a career highlight from a master craftsman. Roma is the debut of an exciting actress who almost missed the Academy Awards because she is a foreigner. Roma is a foreign film. Roma is a universal film.

Roma is.

3. First Reformed

Will God Forgive Us?

An early scene of First Reformed finds a pastor and an activist discussing climate change in a living room. This sounds like dull moralizing tripe, but Reader I promise you that somehow, someway, Paul Schrader has filmed this dialogue such that it is absolutely gripping. Not in a flashy way--the shots are standard, steady, the cuts are perfect while being exactly what you'd expect. Yet we lean in.

First Reformed is a movie about despair. In the banality of a forgotten life, in the vast dark silences at the fringe of our awareness, in the depth of our doubt, Schrader accesses something painfully fragile in all of us. Never have I seen a movie attempt to portray run of the mill day-to-day existential angst, the kind that I and those around me struggle with constantly. What I'm trying to say is that the movie is subtle, so subtle that it hurts.

Until it isn't subtle anymore, in a gambit so risky that it could have destroyed the entire movie. Yet somehow, someway it is helps transform First Reformed from stuffy religious drama to grandiose meditation on the human condition.

In the film's stillness exists Ethan Hawke, delivering the only performance of the year that I would consider a contender for dethroning Toni Collette. And they couldn't be in more different registers.

I see so much art about religion that ridicules its subject matter with only the dimmest outsider's understanding of how religion functions. First Reformed is an antidote to that, a deeply spiritual movie that does not flinch away from the empty frustration that goes along with belief.

2. Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse

Anyone can wear the mask.

For as long as I can remember I've been a Spider-Man fan. My favorite television show growing up was the soap operatic Spider-Man: The Animated Series. My favorite movie was Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 2. This character spoke to me deeply, in a way that I didn't fully understand. I came to realize later that for better or worse, my own ethos shared a structure with Peter's: With great power comes great responsibility.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse is the movie I've been waiting for my whole life.

But that's not good enough, and Spiderverse knows it. So it endeavored to be the movie that so many people have been waiting for their whole life. People of color have been waiting their whole life to see themselves represented onscreen in a way that doesn't boil down to obligatory diversity and tired stereotypes. Women have been waiting to see themselves onscreen with agency rather than offscreen, fridged. Animation fans have been waiting for something that pushes the boundaries of the form in a way that's sure to cascade through the industry. Superhero cinema fans have been waiting for something that innovates rather than replicates. Spiderverse is all these things to all these people.

Fitting then that it should be built around a multiverse conceit that I was certain would break the film. I expected more needlessly cluttered force feeding of the shared universe trend. Instead, the premise works because the forces driving this project forward, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, insist on investing the high concept with solid storytelling, character drama, and resonant themes. Rather than simply a cool idea, the multiverse becomes a fun way of demonstrating the core conceit: heroism shouldn't be the purview of the privileged. Or, to quote Rosemary Harris's Aunt May, "I believe there's a hero in all of us."

And it's gripping, and it's funny, and it's jaw-droppingly gorgeous, every choice informed by the radical notion that what we've seen before isn't enough. We can do it fresh, different, spun around, upside down, fractured and sewn back together.

The film even knows when to get out of the way of itself. Despite all the cool concepts and characters it had in the wings, Spiderverse insists on spending its first act getting to know the real star, the beating heart of the story, Miles. Restraint isn't the word you'd think of in relation to a movie with a Looney Tuneian talking pig, but it applies.

It would take a truly special film for this not to be my favorite of the year...

1. Sorry to Bother You

You wanna make some money here? Use your white voice.

Where to begin.

I walked into Sorry to Bother You expecting a funny movie with some clever commentary about race and code switching. I did not expect a sprawling epic of high concept worldbuilding, astonishing craftsmanship, and satire sharper than any I can recollect. For Sorry to Bother You has the audacity to be a major American film that launches an open critique against capitalism. Not corruption, that's a critique against the actions of individuals and institutions within the system, we've seen plenty of that. I'm talking about a full-throated decrying of capitalism itself. The only other recent example of this I can think of is Snowpiercer, and that's not exactly an American film.

The reason is simple. Capitalist ideology suppresses anti-capitalist ideology, as well as the voices of any who are different enough to be oppressed. Boots Riley's portrayal of a society spiraling out of control is heartbreaking. Luckily Riley understands that the backside of tragedy is comedy. This is a riotously funny film--the gags, the slippages, the plays on words, the visual jokes, the performance tics, the sheer conceptual fuckery...

So it's hilarious. Bold. Insightful. The characters are sharp and immediately familiar. The structure is unique. The editing doesn't waste a single moment. The production design of sets seen only for a minute is richer than the design of most entire films. What else could Sorry possibly have going for it?

A real motherfucker of a twist. I'm not talking about a simple Gotcha twist. I'm talking about a twist that blasts the tone (and genre) to smithereens, fundamentally alters the world of the film, drastically changes the stakes, and instills in us a sinking feeling. Because as absurd and out of left field the twist seems at first... we come to realize that this is the world we live in. This is plausible. This is happening. How could we have become numb to such a world in our everyday lives? Well, Boots even sees fit to demonstrate how the media-political-industrial state weaponizes and normalizes horrors both seen and unseen.

This is a film drunk on its own playful brilliance, yet utterly sober with purpose. It tickles and stabs, it punches and caresses. It kills and kisses. And it's so goddamn packed with ideas that I sincerely believe we could talk for an hour about any randomly selected scene from the film.

I think Sorry to Bother You is the most important movie to come out this year. Maybe this decade. Rampant individualism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and an unshakable fixation on accumulation are tearing our existence apart, yet we refuse to acknowledge the systems and structures that shape our reality. No other film pinpoints this sociological dilemma with such clear-eyed exactitude.

Still, with so much on its plate, Sorry to Bother You never forgets to celebrate black joy and black excellence.