The Best Films of 2023

 The cinematic landscape of 2023 was all about past lives--and I'm not just talking about the movie Past Lives, although its tale of a unique connection between two characters in childhood that reasserts itself in adulthood makes it perfectly emblematic of a year in movies that was all about looking backwards in time to better understand the present. This trend is most clearly evident in the perceptive, relevant historical dramas Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest. But practically every genre incorporated this theme in 2023, from baroque fantasy (in Poor Things, Emma Stone's Bella Baxter ultimately had to reckon with who she once was to complete her journey of self-discovery) to the sports movie (the wrestling-world tragedy The Iron Claw is all about what's passed on from one generation to the next), to franchise action films (Keanu Reeves' John Wick and Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt both attempted to outrun the past in their respective sequels). So in that spirit, let's travel to the very recent past as I celebrate the best films of 2023:

1. Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan). This staggering portrait of the mastermind behind the atomic bomb (hauntingly played by Cillian Murphy) showcases everything that makes Nolan a top-tier director, including his flair for IMAX-sized spectacle (the Trinity Test is staged with awe-inspiring magnitude and force) and his inventiveness with non-chronological storytelling. Even more impressively, it finds him trying new things and succeeding brilliantly at them, like finding a cinematic analogue for the buzzing visions in Oppenheimer's head and upping his game as a dialogue writer. The torrent of morally and politically probing talk provocatively explores bureaucratic, agenda-driven scapegoating and how Oppenheimer's creation may ultimately be our undoing.

2. Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese). Now in his 80s, Scorsese remains a vital, towering American filmmaker who delivers a masterpiece nearly every time out. He does it again here, with a gorgeously cinematic, powerfully corrosive look at how murderous white Americans seduced and killed their way to oil profits belonging to the Osage Nation in 1920s Oklahoma. While it's true that this setting makes the film Scorsese's first Western, it's also, at its core, another of his enveloping, sometimes darkly comic crime epics. There's an allegorically rich complexity in the two-faced strain of American evil represented by Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro's characterizations (both frequent Scorsese collaborators are in top form), while Lily Gladstone, with her singularly expressive eyes and commanding stillness, provides the movie its piercing soul.

3. John Wick: Chapter 4 (Chad Stahelski). The John Wick series has consistently delivered balletic action, minimalist movie-star badassery from Keanu Reeves, and an intoxicatingly baroque visual style from former stuntman Stahelski. It's a sign of what a born filmmaker Stahelski is that when given the biggest budget of the series to date, he's crafted a peak achievement not just for the franchise but for the action genre in general. This is essentially the B-movie equivalent of Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly--a three-character-centered epic where the jaw-dropping, intricately choreographed action and colorful, maximalist style legitimately merit comparison to Leone's lyricism. As the Lee Van Cleef of the central trio, Donnie Yen gives an instantly iconic performance that deserved much more awards attention.

4. The Holdovers (Alexander Payne). A lot of movies and shows set during the holidays tend to be broad in pushing viewers' emotional buttons, which makes the quietly piercing melancholy of this story of a curmudgeonly prep school teacher (Paul Giamatti), a troubled student (Dominic Sessa), and the school's grieving cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) bonding over Christmas break all the more bracing and emotionally potent. And yet, in classic Payne style, this is also a supremely witty comedy. The central trio of actors couldn't be better in balancing the humor and the heartbreak, creating unforgettable characters who will be a joy to revisit every December.

5. All of Us Strangers (Andrew Haigh). There's a profound empathy and insight with which this subtly supernatural love story grapples with emotional extremes--the crushing isolation of loneliness, the euphoric bliss of connecting with someone you're attracted to, the difficulty of letting go of the baggage of the past in order to move forward--that reaffirms Haigh as an extraordinarily perceptive humanist. His precise, expressive filmmaking captures a limbo state between reality and subjective fantasy, while his script is casually wise and lightened with disarming humor. And as a gay screenwriter who seeks closure with the spirits of his long-dead parents, Andrew Scott gives a performance of such remarkable emotional nuance that it should be a crime that he didn't receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination.

6. Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos). A warped feminist fairy tale for adults, this one-of-a-kind epic follows the Frankenstein's Monster-like Bella Baxter (Emma Stone, flawlessly charting the maturation and awkward development of someone growing into personhood) as she ventures into the world to discover all of its inequalities and absurdities. Lanthimos' wildly imaginative world-building makes this his most ambitious investigation into what makes human beings tick yet, and he's found an invaluable collaborator in screenwriter Tony McNamara (who previously worked with him on the great The Favourite), who makes every line of dialogue hilariously bawdy and clever.

7. Past Lives (Celine Song). The year's most remarkably assured debut infuses the premise of reuniting with "the one that got away" with a rare depth and delicacy, and it offers an emotionally devastating conclusion guaranteed to linger with fans of romantic movies. Song's compositions symbolically combine signifiers of the modern world with reminders of the eternal natural world, and as a writer, she possesses the richness and humanity to make the third wheel in the romantic triangle (affectingly played by John Magaro) complex and sympathetic in his own right. This is a movie that understands that love is too complicated to be a matter of clear-cut heroes and villains and objectively right or wrong choices.

8. Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (Christopher McQuarrie). While this isn't the best film in its respective series the way that John Wick: Chapter 4 is--that title still belongs to McQuarrie's insanely rewatchable Mission: Impossible - Fallout--it's still more than great enough to maintain the series' status as the most simultaneously spectacular and sophisticated action franchise around. McQuarrie spins an intricate narrative web focused on the very real, topical threat of artificial intelligence, brings in vivid new characters (Hayley Atwell's cunning and ultimately heroic thief and Esai Morales' dapper villain among them), and stages enjoyably massive action set pieces (the train-set climax is a real humdinger) that demand to be seen on a big screen.

9. The Taste of Things (Tran Anh Hung). With its array of immaculately prepared, delicious-looking meals and desserts, this is naturally grade-A food porn. But it's also immensely rewarding on many other levels. The painterly beauty of Tran's compositions and graceful flow of his camera movements make it as much of a showcase for film art as it is for culinary art. And the effortless chemistry between stars Juliette Binoche and Benoit Magimel provides an essential layer of moving, bewitching, refreshingly grown-up romance. Thematically, the film is as rich as any of the dishes we see onscreen, acting as a testament to the pursuit of that which we love in life, even if they're irreplaceable, ephemeral pleasures.

10. Asteroid City (Wes Anderson). Detractors of Anderson's meticulously controlled, whimsically designed worlds accuse his aggressive style of cutting off authentic feeling. But with this film's ingeniously meta structure and story of a grieving family (with Rushmore collaborator Jason Schwartzman giving one of his most layered performances as the paterfamilias) witnessing an extraterrestrial visitation, Anderson makes an achingly personal, persuasive argument for the power of not just art in general but his divisive art to make sense of the scary unknowns of existence, from death to the possibility that we aren't alone in the universe.

And because I'm including a rare tie in the #20 spot, here are my next 11 runners-up, instead of the usual 10:

11. Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster). Because this darkly comic picaresque felt even more bold and audacious on a second viewing, I have a feeling that it'll age beautifully among cinephiles fond of auteurs making big swings. Aster took a risk crafting the most proudly juvenile and neurotic three-hour odyssey ever, but underneath the immaturity is a formally brilliant portrayal of how extreme anxiety makes the craziness of the modern world feel even crazier.

12. The Eight Mountains (Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch). This decades-spanning tale of how the friendship between two men (wonderfully played by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi) who first met as children and their connection to the Italian Alps, where they first met, evolve over time possesses the vast scope and rich thematic resonance of a big, great novel. But considering how stunningly van Groeningen and Vandermeersch visually capture the mountainous setting, there's ultimately no question what medium this belongs to.

13. BlackBerry (Matthew Johnson). There's been a surprising deluge of cinematic origin stories of corporate products lately, and the clear standout among them is this comedy about the genesis of the early smartphone model. It boasts the sharpest wit and is the most keenly perceptive about the corruption of corporate power. It's a fully satisfying rise-and-fall narrative, whereas its competitors are only interested in the rise. Plus, as a fan of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, it's hugely gratifying to see Glenn Howerton give a riveting, squirmingly funny performance as a profane, shark-like investor.

14. The Iron Claw (Sean Durkin). Zac Efron has always possessed charisma and a flair for musical roles, but it wasn't clear how much dramatic range he had until his touchingly soulful performance as Kevin Von Erich, one of four brothers groomed for a wrestling career by a domineering father (the terrific Holt McCallany) in this fact-based weepie. Indie-film veteran Durkin makes a smooth transition into mainstream fare, preserving his moodiness and formal precision while revealing a newfound emotional sincerity that ensures the film earns the viewer's tears.

15. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein). It makes a strange sort of sense that Daley & Goldstein would make such a satisfyingly above-expectations adaptation of the enduring role-playing game--they previously directed the pricelessly funny board game-centered comedy Game Night. For this big-scale fantasy, they successfully transferred over Game Night's key strengths--snappy witticisms, visually fluid action sequences, an ensemble cast where every member is well-used--while upping the level of spectacle and adding a surprising, affecting amount of heart.

16. The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer). It's typical of art films to use a static extreme wide shot to create a sense of detachment. What Glazer, who doesn't work often enough but always pushes the envelope cinematically when he does, brilliantly does here is craft a movie made up of those kind of shots that's also about detachment on a deep, chilling level. The images reflect the eerie compartmentalization of a family living right next door to Auschwitz during Hitler's reign, while the haunting, precise sound design captures the horrors that they choose to ignore.

17. Infinity Pool (Brandon Cronenberg). I love that Cronenberg is just as much of a sick puppy as filmmaker father David, and it's impressive that he's managed to forge his own artistic identity distinct from his old man's. While David's work is defined by a detached, surgical precision, Brandon's style is lush and dreamy in a Refn-esque way. Infinity Pool is a nightmarish trip that offers a scathing allegory on how they wealthy manage to evade accountability for their crimes, and Cronenberg gets career-best work from Alexander Skarsgaard and an unforgettably unhinged Mia Goth.

18. American Fiction (Cord Jefferson). As a satire of the narratives of Black lives that the marketplace typically responds to, Jefferson's auspicious debut is razor-sharp, full of dialogue that's simultaneously literate and laugh-out-loud funny. And as a family drama, it's heartfelt and remarkably lived-in, boosted by great performances from Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown. In conjoining these two strands, Jefferson has crafted a comedy whose bite is nicely balanced with a palpable warmth.

19. Showing Up (Kelly Reichardt). There's a gentle, leisurely sense of observation to Reichardt's films that always make them a pleasure to sink into, and with this newest work about a Portland-based sculptor (Michelle Williams, who is always at her most gracefully subtle when collaborating with Reichardt), the filmmaker provides a revealing window into the creation of art--and how life tends to both get in the way of it and inform it in ineffable ways. Even the flakiest, most pretentious members of the Portland art scene we meet here are embraced by Reichardt with open-hearted generosity.

20. TIE: The Convenant (Guy Ritchie) and Operation Fortune: Ruse De Guerre (Guy Ritchie). These two films couldn't be more tonally different--The Covenant is a solemnly gripping war drama about the bonds formed in combat, while Operation Fortune is a breezy, comedic spy caper--but they both find British veteran Ritchie working at the top of his game. The impeccable craft behind this duo include two great, enveloping scores from composer Christopher Benstead, so he's one collaborator that Ritchie definitely needs to keep on his Rolodex.

And here are 14 more standouts from the year in movies:

21. Still: A Michael J. Fox Story (Davis Guggenheim).

22. Godzilla Minus One (Takashi Yamazaki).

23. Perfect Days (Wim Wenders).

24. The Promised Land (Nikolaj Arcel).

25. Monster (Hirokazu Kore-eda).

26. Anatomy of a Fall (Justine Triet).

27. Anselm (Wim Wenders).

28. About Dry Grasses (Nuri Bilge Ceylan).

29. The Teachers' Lounge (Ilker Catak).

30. Jawan (Atlee).

31. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Kelly Fremon Craig).

32. Godland (Hlynur Palmason).

33. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Verena Paravel & Lucien Castaing-Taylor).

34. Magic Mike's Last Dance (Steven Soderbergh).

As Yet Unseen: Robot Dreams, La Chimera, Falcon Lake, Skinamarink, Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros, the four Best Documentary Oscar nominees other than The Eternal Memory

The Best Films of 2022

 Considering the threat that streaming and the inability to shake COVID-era habits have posed to the survival of the theatrical experience, it makes sense that movies in general have retaliated by going so ridiculously big that they demand to be seen on the most giant screen possible. Extravagant maximalism has been the dominant approach of this past year's films, exemplified by the Best Picture Oscar frontrunner and word-of-mouth box-office smash Everything Everywhere All at Once, which is true to its title in its multiverse-spanning size and scope. Every kind of movie imaginable reached for formidable grandeur, from sequels (Top Gun: Maverick) to biopics (Elvis), extending even to documentaries (the shot-for-IMAX Moonage Daydream). James Cameron demonstrated how massive he can go when given 13 years to perfect 3D-rendered spectacle with Avatar: The Way of Water, while Indian filmmaker S.S. Rajamouli emerged as a thrilling new voice in mammoth-scale action cinema with RRR.

But of course, even in a year defined by eye-popping and screen-filling hugeness, it's worth noting that bigger doesn't always mean better. After all, the best film of 2022 is focused on merely two feuding friends living on an Irish island so tiny that it feels like a land time forgot.

1. The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh). The escalating tragedies that ensue when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) forcefully cuts off ties with regular drinking buddy Padraic (Colin Farrell, both pricelessly funny and heartbreaking in a career-best turn) resonate with themes of mortality, the things we value most in life, and the pigheaded stubbornness of war. McDonagh, who's four-for-four in his filmmaking career, masterfully balances the piercing melancholy with hilarious, precisely structured verbal wit that shines even more on a second viewing. He also suffuses the film with a dark enchantment that makes it feel like a folk tale sure to endure for centuries.

2. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells). Delivering what feels like an instant classic with her feature debut, Wells digs into the knotty complexity of being an adult looking back at one's childhood and reckoning with who your parents really were and what they were going through in those formative years. The beautifully fluid editing glides between past and present with a poetic sense of how memory works, while the central father/daughter relationship (played with warmth and authenticity by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio) is captured with powerfully moving intimacy. With how this movie uses Freddie Mercury and David Bowie's "Under Pressure," it may no longer be possible to hear that song without instantly tearing up.

3. Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). There's a wild, exhilarating imagination to how the directing duo known as Daniels situate the story of a dissatisfied laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh, stunning in a role that showcases her gift for emotional depth while not skimping on her action hero chops either) who finds herself traveling through the multiverse within dozens of different scenarios, genres, and visual forms. But perhaps even more impressive is how they anchor it with a profound, moving human story of learning to embrace the universe you occupy and the people you surround yourself with. In a triumphant comeback performance as Evelyn's husband, Ke Huy Quan exudes pure decency--and gets to kick ass too!

4. Moonage Daydream (Brett Morgen). The singularly innovative rock icon David Bowie is honored with a documentary that miraculously manages to be as bold and form-busting as he is, courtesy of master non-fiction impressionist Morgen. Assembled as a dazzling collage of live concert footage, film clips, and psychedelic space oddities, this offers a visual and sonic experience like no other. And in the interview snippets we hear of Bowie analyzing his shape-shifting methods and admitting to artistic insecurities, the legend comes to life as both more human and even more of a mind-bending genius than he already seemed to be.

5. Avatar: The Way of Water (James Cameron). While the first Avatar stands as a unique achievement that introduced us to the planet of Pandora and to Cameron's pioneering use of 3D, this sequel manages to impress in its own distinct way, as perhaps the most lightning-paced three-hour epic ever, as well as a powerfully sincere hymn to the importance of family and of preserving nature. Cameron again manages to show us something truly new with the reach-out-and-touch-it vividness of his 3D underwater sequences, while the spectacularly executed, hour-long climax reaffirms him as a peerless director of action.

6. RRR (S.S. Rajamouli). It's a nifty coincidence to follow up one jaw-dropping, three-hour action epic on the list with another, though the ways in which RRR is different from Cameron's film marks Rajamouli as a genre artist with his own vital identity. There's a bit of George Miller and John Woo to the flamboyant delirium of his style, but also an infectious joyousness (exemplified by the spirited musical number that deploys Oscar-nominated song "Naatu Naatu") that's all his own. The warm buddy bond and vicious anti-colonial critique at the story's center ensure that the story is just as rousing as the ingenious action set pieces.

7. Benediction (Terence Davies). This indelibly haunting portrait of British poet Siegfried Sassoon (played as a young man by Jack Lowden, in the year's most undervalued lead performance, and in old age by Peter Capaldi), who goes from a traumatized World War I veteran using his art to object to the war's architects to a playboy within England's covert circle of gay artists to a tormented Catholic married to a woman, is so inventively shaped by Davies and alert to sad human truths that it transcends the biopic form. Davies' dialogue is addictively witty and sharp, while his charting of Sassoon's futile search for contentment is ultimately devastating.

8. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson). Daniel Craig's second outing as idiosyncratic, Southern-accented detective Benoit Blanc manages to improve on its predecessor by being both a more satisfyingly ensemble-cast-focused whodunnit (Janelle Monae is the acting MVP, in a shrewdly multi-faceted performance that was robbed of a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination) and a far more deviously twisty and dense feat of narrative engineering. Johnson's ingenious conceit is to make the story itself resemble a glass onion, revealing more to the viewer's eye with every new layer.

9. Bones and All (Luca Guadagnino). It takes a lot of guts to make a cannibal romance, but in the end, it's much more the heart that Guadagnino brings to this simultaneously bloody and swoon-inducing road movie that proves definitive. The self-identified "eaters" of his film are marginalized outcasts traveling an evocatively desolate stretch of middle America in an existence of melancholy loneliness, which makes it all the more cathartic when the two lost souls at the center of the story (Timothee Chalamet, as magnetically vulnerable as ever, and Taylor Russell, whose emotional directness allows her to steal the movie from her better known co-lead) cut (bite?) through each other's defenses and form a real connection.

10. Triangle of Sadness (Ruben Ostlund). As ruthlessly precise as he is playfully provocative, Ostlund confidently unfurls a savage class satire that plays out in meticulously deadpan compositions and a clever variation on the classic three-act narrative structure. While the third act may be the most incisive when it comes to the sad impossibility of shaping a utopian society without a strict hierarchy, it's the second act that delivers the biggest comic wallop: an utterly hilarious all-timer of a gross-out sequence focused on a storm-tossed captain's dinner on a luxury yacht that's downright Tati-esque in its Swiss-watch-timed physical comedy.

And here are the next ten runners-up:

11. Nope (Jordan Peele). While Get Out and Us firmly established Peele as a filmmaker naturally attuned to both popcorn movie pleasures and brain-tickling subtext, this represents his most spectacular and thought-provoking filmmaking achievement yet for me. He brings a legitimately Spielbergian sense of wonder and terror to the film's big-scale alien invasion sequences, while also interrogating the very nature of spectacle itself--how we culturally process it, who benefits from it, and who is sometimes exploited for the sake of it (with a certain chimp unforgettably symbolizing the dangers of that exploitation).

12. Jackass Forever (Jeff Tremaine). Sure, some may ask: is this too high a ranking for such a proudly juvenile blast of comic anarchy? Honestly, though, if I were judging solely on the criterion of what provided the most sublime big-screen experience of the year, this would place even higher. I haven't laughed as loudly or consistently at a comedy in the post-vaccine era as I did at this, and not only is it the most unrelenting attack on the funny bone of the four-film series, but due to how close these daredevils are coming to an age where they can't put their bodies on the line, it's also the most poignant.

13. EO (Jerzy Skolimowski). Naturally, it's easy to fall in love with any movie featuring a big-eared, fuzzy-faced donkey as the lead character. But it's how imaginative and stylistically adventurous this particular film is in executing its "cute animal on a road trip" setup that makes it special. Skolimowski distills the premise down to its pure cinema essence, enveloping the viewer in striking, trippy imagery and music. In the process, he demonstrates how an octogenarian veteran auteur can shake up the medium with an experimental vigor that puts younger renegades to shame.

14. Top Gun: Maverick (Joseph Kosinski). The awesome geographical scope and whooshing velocity of the aerial action combined with Tom Cruise's ageless star power make it clear why this attracted people back to movie theaters in droves. In addition to those considerable virtues, this above-expectations sequel possesses a mind and a heart that not all blockbusters (including the pretty-good-at-best first Top Gun) can lay claim to. In its most moving scene, a reunion between Cruise's Maverick and Val Kilmer's Iceman, it makes a case for revisiting and reckoning with the past that goes beyond one-dimensional nostalgia.

15. Armageddon Time (James Gray). Speaking of reckonings with the past that reject nostalgia, this stood apart from other recent auteur autobiographies (*cough* Spielberg's The Fabelmans *cough*) in being remarkably clear-eyed and tough-minded about the period in which its maker grew up. Without sacrificing his signature, textured classicism, Gray strikes a resonant modern chord in examining the bubble of white privilege that protected him during a childhood spent in 1980s New York City. As his grandfather, the formidable Anthony Hopkins is as staggering as he's ever been.

16. Elvis (Baz Luhrmann). It's easy to be cynical about rock star biopics--the undeserved success of Bohemian Rhapsody proves how formula can easily reign supreme--but then one comes around to invigoratingly shake up the form like Luhrmann's eye-popping, kinetic, inventive portrait of Elvis Presley (played by Austin Butler in a revelatory, soulful star turn). And in pitting the performer's countercultural, sexually liberated, Black-pioneer-honoring artistry against the conservative, capitalist maneuverings of Col. Parker (Tom Hanks), Luhrmann shows how Elvis' story is ultimately America's story too.

17. Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood (Richard Linklater). It's outrageous that the year's best animated movie by far didn't even score a nomination in the Best Animated Feature Oscar category! Linklater has experimented with rotoscope animation before with dreamlike mind-benders Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but here, in marrying that visual approach to the kind of disarmingly specific portrait of life in suburban Texas that he usually renders in live action (Dazed and Confused, Boyhood), he proves that he can be as precise a filmmaker as he is a disarmingly laid-back one.

18. Fire of Love (Sara Dosa). This offers all the visually stunning natural wonders that you'd want from a volcano-focused documentary bearing the National Geographic Films label, while also being more uniquely heartfelt and surreal to boot. Dosa captures how beautiful and how scary lava-spewing mountains can be with beautiful abstraction, while positioning the story of married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft as a metaphor for how a couple's shared passion can be so powerful as to risk the lovers' very lives.

19. Babylon (Damien Chazelle). Admittedly, it's easy to see why this poison-tipped valentine to the late silent-film era of 1920s Hollywood earned hordes of detractors, with its hard-R-rated focus on debauched excess and plentiful bodily fluids. However, underneath that focus is a rich consideration of the wide chasm between the magic of the movies and the flawed, fragile mortality of the people committed to making them. Plus, with its lavish period trappings, dazzling camerawork, and energetic editing perfectly matched to Justin Hurwitz's earworm of a score, it manages to summon real movie magic of its own.

20. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras). Adopting an ingenious, bifurcated structure highlighting both the artistry and the political activism of acclaimed photographer Nan Goldin, Poitras illustrates how those two strands of Goldin's life are inextricably intertwined. Even more impressive, the film emerges as an ambitious documentary epic charting how those who are marginalized and, in some tragic cases, left to die to serve America's conservative, corporate interests continue to fight for their right to exist.

And here are 11 more movie highlights from 2022:

21. A Love Song (Max Walker-Silverman).

22. Official Competition (Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn).

23. Resurrection (Andrew Semans).

24. TAR (Todd Field).

25. Speak No Evil (Christian Tafdrup).

26. Vortex (Gaspar Noe).

27. The Batman (Matt Reeves).

28. X (Ti West).

29. Cow (Andrea Arnold).

30. The Menu (Mark Mylod).

31. Apples (Christos Nikou).

Special Recognition for Non-Eligible Work: The Survivor (Barry Levinson). This powerful chronicle of how boxer Harry Haft (Ben Foster, in a physically and emotionally committed tour de force) made it out of WWII concentration camps using his pugilistic talents bypassed theaters and went straight to HBO, where I wish more people caught it. Levinson has long been criminally underrated, and this reaffirms his gift for bringing authentic humanity and vibrant cinematic craft to fact-based stories.

As Yet Unseen: The Eternal Daughter, We're All Going to the World's Fair, Lost Illusions, Navalny, Descendant.

The Best Films of 2021

 It's gratifying to be writing about the best films of a year in which we all got to return to multiplexes and art house theaters after a punishingly long period of dealing with their COVID-dictated absence. Seeing movies as they were meant to be presented, on the big screen, outweighed the anxiety of being around large clusters of people after extended isolation, at least for me. Considering this context, it's striking how many of the year's best films focus on unexpected bonds that reflect the tug-of-war between wanting to connect with other people and being too vulnerable to do so seamlessly. Whether these movies centered on a damaged killer rushing into the shelter offered by a fireman with a long-missing son, a grieving actor/director who's at his most serene behind the wheel adjusting to having a job-mandated driver, or a pair of new mothers who didn't plan on their lives intersecting beyond time shared in the maternity ward, they have in common an interest in relationships that begin with fear and hesitancy before blossoming into something more positive. Keeping that trajectory in mind to stay optimistic during still-very-insane times, here's my list of the best films of 2021:

1. Titane (Julia Ducournau). Pushing the body horror envelope even further than Ducournau's great, auspicious debut Raw, this uncommonly audacious follow-up finds imaginative new ways to shock the viewer with all sorts of fluids and flesh trauma. But what's most bracing about the film, which is crafted by Ducournau with intoxicating cinematic showmanship, is how tender, moving, and boldly progressive it is underneath the startling surface. In the closeness that a gender-bending fugitive (Agathe Rousselle, utterly fearless) and a loss-ravaged fireman (Vincent Lindon, in a performance of sublime gentle giant vulnerability) begin feeling towards each other, we're given a portrait of the fluidity of humanity and love that's much needed in these intolerant times.

2. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi). There's the risk of hyperbole in deeming a movie as truly nourishing for the soul, but this profoundly moving examination of grief, regret, art, communication, and the essential friendships that sustain us really is that rewardingly cathartic. Right from the post-coital monologue that opens the film, Hamaguchi demonstrates a patience, a flair for language and low-key atmosphere, and a wisdom about what goes unsaid in the lives of normally expressive artists that hooks you into the quietly momentous journey of stage actor/director Kafuku, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima with a heartbreaking, barely contained air of stoicism.

3. West Side Story (Steven Spielberg). Witnessing Spielberg apply his peerless camera and compositional sense to a big-scale movie musical results in a euphoric rush unequaled by any of this year's other big-budget spectacles. And beyond the sheer dazzle of its formal brilliance and dance choreography, the film also nails the tragedy of the doomed, cross-cultural romance at the center of Sondheim and Bernstein's musical, with writer Tony Kushner's typically eloquent and politically relevant script being indispensable in that regard. Ariana DeBose, infusing the role of Anita with fiery confidence and emotion, and Mike Faist, bringing simultaneous wiseguy attitude and affecting frailty to Riff, are stars in the making.

4. Licorice Pizza (Paul Thomas Anderson). There's such an invitingly loose and shaggy flow to Anderson's singular coming-of-age portrait that it would be all too easy to undervalue its ambition. In marrying the sprawling Valley epic frame of early work like Boogie Nights with the intimate, thorny two-hander power dynamic of a recent effort like Phantom Thread, Anderson thoughtfully juxtaposes the struggles of two youngsters figuring themselves out (Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman, both remarkably nuanced for acting neophytes) with the eccentric soul of a California region defined by its missed-it-by-that-much closeness to the center of fame and success.

5. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Amir "Questlove" Thompson). The year's most electrifying directorial debut came from The Roots drummer and The Tonight Show bandleader Questlove, who unearthed long-shelved footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival concerts and has fashioned it into a gorgeously mosaic-like documentary that magically combines you-are-there experiential purity with a journalistic density of historical context. The free-form editing and a sound design that ensures the live music is always there, even when relegated to a secondary track, are instrumental to achieving that balance. While Stevie Wonder, Sly & The Family Stone, B.B. King, The Chambers Brothers, and a piano-banging Nina Simone all deliver in grand style, the highlight may be The 5th Dimension's rousing, soulful hybridizing of two tracks from the Hair soundtrack.

6. The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier). There's such a clear-eyed sense in Renate Reinsve's performance as rudderless Julie--which deservedly nabbed Best Actress honors at the Cannes Film Festival and would receive Academy recognition in a just world--of how someone inching from twentysomething to thirtysomething status can be simultaneously so intellectually mature and emotionally insecure as to render the title's bittersweet intent immediately apparent. That's also a testament to Trier's ever-growing gifts as a writer of literate wit (aided by longtime co-writer Eskil Vogt) and a filmmaker of blazing inventiveness and kineticism.

7. The Green Knight (David Lowery) There's such a chameleonic versatility to Lowery's body of work, which encompasses the most sincere, distinctive Disney live action remake to date (Pete's Dragon) and a '70s-style Robert Redford bank robber yarn (The Old Man & the Gun), yet his singular voice unites them all. With The Green Knight, he's made a medieval fantasy like no other--majestic, forbidding, psychedelic, and utterly hypnotic. As cocky, immature Sir Gawain (Dev Patel, given his best showcase since Slumdog Millionaire) approaches his potentially fatal duel with the title character, classical themes of honor and mortality are richly explored while the movie's stunning imagery and enveloping rhythm keep surprising you.

8. Pig (Michael Sarnoski). When you hear the pitch "Nicolas Cage is on a quest to rescue his beloved truffle pig," you automatically assume you're in for a ludicrous B-movie. But Pig, crafted by debuting director Sarnoski with surprising gentleness and a vivid sense of place, isn't that movie; instead, it's a culinary noir that burrows into the Portland foodie scene and a genuinely melancholy reflection on the ineffable things that give our lives meaning and purpose. As for Cage, his masterful performance as reclusive former chef Robin Feld is a reminder that his intense soulfulness and eye for idiosyncratic detail make him a major, singular acting talent.

9. Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodovar). No one these days makes melodramas as deeply felt and vibrantly cinematic as Almodovar does, a tradition that continues with this ambitious, richly layered allegory that reckons with the reverberations of the Spanish Civil War while spinning a contemporary tale of two new mothers (Penelope Cruz and Milena Smit). The dual narrative tracks connect to powerfully ponder if reaching an ideal future is possible when we don't acknowledge the deceit of the past. Frequent collaborator Cruz turns in some of her best, most fiercely emotional work as a woman caught in that very dilemma.

10. Annette (Leos Carax). A madly inspired work of art that takes audacious risks at every turn, this acid-tinged musical with songs penned by maverick duo Sparks gazes into the abyss of the artistic ego at its most turbulent and toxic, and considers whether such a personality is fit for fatherhood. Oh, and the central child character happens to be a puppet. That's not the only daring conceit on display, and Carax's commitment to wild cinematic beauty ensures that the chances the film takes pay off wondrously. As monstrous if human stand-up comedian Henry McHenry, Adam Driver delivers a performance that packs the bracing unpredictability of a daredevil working without a safety net.

And here are the next 10 runners-up:

11. Copshop (Joe Carnahan). I'm always a sucker for B-movies executed at an A-level--hell, another one is right below this at #12--and none this year matched the genre-savvy craft and sheer fun of this largely single-setting triumph. It combines a Carpenter-esque compositional cleanliness with pulpy, hilarious dialogue that's like Tarantino or Zahler language distilled down to its pungent attitudinal essence and plenty of cat-&-mouse action and tension. The central quartet of actors deliver with enjoyable gusto, and Carnahan hasn't operated at this high a level since The Grey, which made my best-of-2011 list.

12. Nobody (Ilya Naishuller). Since this retains some key crew members from the irresistible John Wick series, including writer Derek Kolstad, it's no surprise that it boasts an iconic lead character and several dazzlingly choreographed, expertly edited action sequences (a fight on a public bus ranks as one of the year's best individual scenes). What is surprising, as well as deliciously entertaining, is that the iconic action lead is played by comic genius and Better Call Saul star Bob Odenkirk, who reveals a steely badass side that few could've guessed he possessed.

13. A Hero (Asghar Farhadi). There's something special and unique about how Farhadi can take seemingly mundane domestic and systemic conflicts and spin them into moral thrillers so dizzyingly complex and viscerally gripping that they make you want to shout at the screen to the doomed characters. With A Hero, he charts the rise and fall of sympathetic fuck-up Rahim (Amir Jadidi, impressively capable of going from pitiable to frighteningly temperamental) without letting him entirely off the hook, but also with a compassionate grasp on how ass-covering institutions, including social media lynch mobs, prey upon the vulnerability of individuals like him.

14. No Time to Die (Cary Joji Fukunaga). I make no apologies for being something of a James Bond fanboy, though less of one than when I was as a teenager, but even looking beyond that subjective bias, this still registers as an immensely satisfying send-off for Daniel Craig's singular embodiment of the special agent character. Fukunaga executes the globe-hopping action with fluid grace (the Cuba set piece involving a spirited Ana de Armas as a resourceful rookie agent is especially spectacular), while script doctor Phoebe Waller provides a character depth that honors the humanity of Craig's take on the tux-clad hero.

15. The French Dispatch (Wes Anderson). Even if this anthology-style tribute to The New Yorker and its endangered journalistic ilk falls a bit short of the masterpiece level of peak Anderson achievements like The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel, the writer-director still delivers so many densely packed, impeccably framed images and so much verbal wit that repeat viewings are a sheer pleasure and arguably necessary. Benicio Del Toro, as a feral convict, and Jeffrey Wright, flawlessly playing a James Baldwin stand-in, are excellent new additions to Anderson's usual band of repertory players.

16. Riders of Justice (Anders Thomas Jensen). While this offers some of the visceral satisfactions that you'd expect from a conventional revenge thriller, what makes it so original and thought-provoking is how it slyly subverts the genre by positioning the thirst for revenge as a form of imposing order on the chaotic uncertainty of the universe. Fusing buddy comedy and an affecting portrait of family along with its metaphysical inquiries and bursts of action, it emerges as a singular hybrid overseen by Jensen with deft tonal precision. 

17. The Power of the Dog (Jane Campion). Beautifully crafted by Campion with her signature darkness-tinged lyricism and driven by a committed, dagger-eyed lead performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, this modernist Western pulls off the impressive trick of making you realize that you've been watching a different movie than you initially thought in its final minutes. In an age where rampant streaming availability can dull cultural discussions of movies, the "Wait, did you get that ending?" water cooler chatter around this one proved that the new release model can still spur wide, thoughtful discourse.

18. The Mitchells vs. the Machines (Michael Rianda & Jeff Rowe). The year's best and most wildly entertaining animated movie imaginatively envisions a robot apocalypse for the smartphone era, sending a family that's wonderfully specific in its everyday dysfunction on a big-scale adventure full of thrilling set pieces and clever offhand wit (I love the robots assessing the family pug to be a loaf of bread). On top of all that, there's also a moving conclusion that admittedly got me pretty misty-eyed.

19. Dune (Denis Villeneuve). As much as I love David Lynch, his Dune adaptation--which even he's reportedly not a fan of--feels overly Cliff's Notes-y in its rushed momentum. Allowing the material to breathe more by tackling only the first half of Frank Herbert's novel, Villeneuve rewardingly allows the immersively detailed world-building and allegorical richness to really sink in. Also, working with gifted DP Greig Fraser, the filmmaker offers one stunningly immense composition after another, making this an ideal fit for IMAX screens.

20. Spider-Man: No Way Home (Jon Watts). It's nice when the year's highest-grossing movie also happens to be grandly fulfilling entertainment with a big, sincere heart at its core. This standout within the long-running MCU franchise also boasts plenty of rousing action and sly humor. The talented, ridiculously stacked ensemble cast contains some names that would require a spoiler warning if listed, and this is one case where that kind of surprise-laden fan service doesn't feel overly calculated and is instead executed with flair, wit, and soul.

And here are 10 more cinematic highlights from the past year:

21. Boiling Point (Philip Barantini).

22. The Velvet Underground (Todd Haynes).

23. King Richard (Reinaldo Marcus Green).

24. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Ryusuke Hamguchi).

25. The Disciple (Chaitanya Tamhane).

26. The Card Counter (Paul Schrader).

27. Benedetta (Paul Verhoeven).

28. Cruella (Craig Gillespie).

29. Moffie (Oliver Hermanus).

30. The Suicide Squad (James Gunn).

The Best Films of 2020

 To say that this was a movie year like no other is a massive understatement. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced movie theaters to shut down in mid-March, it led to a feeling of fear and hopelessness among habitual moviegoers like myself. Studios intent on waiting for the profits that come from theatrical exhibition immediately announced release date delays instead of offering home viewing options for film fans stuck in quarantine, causing despairing questions to arise: Will there be any new releases to dig into while we're all stuck at home? Since I always get into making my best-of-year list and even all the Oscars madness once the year's wrapped up, will there ultimately be enough titles released in 2020 for those occasions to still take place? And will I die of COVID before getting the chance to see Christopher Nolan's crazy-looking new movie?!?

If you're reading this, you know that I'm very much alive--and I've seen Tenet twice now! Also, thankfully, indie distributors and even a couple major studios eventually became more generous in delivering new films to quarantined consumers once it became clear that the pandemic was going to last a really long time. The Academy also saw fit to adjust its rules, granting eligibility to films that premiered via streaming as long as they had documented initial plans to play in theaters, and extending the window of eligibility to the end of February 2021. In that spirit, for this list, I'm also counting January and February 2021 releases as 2020 films. Sure, it feels a little strange considering a 14-month-long period as a year and writing this a couple months later than I usually do, but it's easy enough to adjust to. Besides, the extra two months allowed me to catch up with a healthy amount of 2020's releases--I've seen just over 160 of them!

What's much harder to adjust to is the blurring of lines of what's considered cinema and what's considered TV in this era where movies have only been watched on TV out of necessity. I'll get into that more in some of the more medium-ambiguous choices on my list below, but I might as well say right away that the five films that brilliant British director Steve McQueen made to be released on Amazon as anthology series Small Axe most definitely register as cinema in my mind. Plus, it's always fun to celebrate when a filmmaker at the top of his/her game makes more than one standout movie within a year; McQueen appears on my best-of-year list four times (and it's not like the Small Axe film I didn't include is chopped liver!), while Spike Lee makes two appearances, including one at the very top of my list of the best films of the year:

1. Da 5 Bloods (Spike Lee). At this point, Lee's command of the medium is so assured that he can organically combine classical and postmodern storytelling modes into one gloriously cinematic package. This is a big-canvas, visually transporting war-movie epic that incorporates a The Treasure of the Sierra Madre-influenced treasure hunt and elegantly arranges its five central characters in numerous immaculately blocked and framed classical compositions. But it's also thrillingly abstract in its archival montages, aspect ratio alterations, and jazzy sense of experimentation. Delroy Lindo gives the performance of the year as the PTSD-plagued loose cannon of the central veterans, and Lee vitally and provocatively explores how the Vietnam War represented yet another case of America sacrificing Black lives for its own interests.

2. Lovers Rock (Steve McQueen). The best of McQueen's Small Axe films is an immersive musical like no other that's ever been made. McQueen invites the viewer to a house party in an '80s London Black immigrant neighborhood, and he nails the vibe and the awe-inspiring choreography of the camera and the actors' moving bodies so thoroughly that you feel that you're on the dance floor yourself, soaking up the tangible sweat and hormones. When the partygoers partake in a singalong to "Silly Games," what transpires is a sequence of uncanny communal catharsis that literally made my jaw drop on first viewing; it's a scene so emotionally overpowering that I'll never forget it.

3. David Byrne's American Utopia (Spike Lee). There's a Zen calm and elder-statesman authority to the Byrne we see in this euphoric concert movie that contrasts nicely with the hyper, geeky eccentricity that the musician exhibited in director Jonathan Demme's landmark '80s Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense. Cementing this as the perfect bookend to that film is how Lee, like Demme before him, thinks beyond the proscenium of the stage to conceive of the concert as occurring in cinematic space. So while this premiered on HBO, it's definitely not TV in my mind. In fact, when watching this for a second time and noticing how Lee visually represents Byrne's plea for an America based in human connection, I made the choice not to consider the stylistically rudimentary filmed version of Hamilton for this list (but it may yet be mentioned below when I recognize non-eligible work...)

4. First Cow (Kelly Reichardt). Throughout her career, Reichardt has possessed a downright Malick-esque gift for beautifully capturing the natural world on screen. But her formal rigor, patient rhythm, and focus on the authentically inhospitable aura of certain environments--instead of the cosmic potential of nature that Malick draws from--makes her a singular, invaluable auteur in her own right, and this is her richest, most haunting film yet. She locates a potent metaphor for capitalism in how a cook (John Magaro) working for fur trappers and a Chinese immigrant (Orion Lee) in the depleted Oregon frontier team up for a culinary business venture that involves stealing milk from a landowner's cow. Even more powerfully, she finds within these two entrepreneurs a model of how friendship can be a sustaining force in fallow times.

5. Soul (Pete Docter). The best films from animation giant Pixar are as gently profound as they are visually wondrous and emotionally satisfying. This metaphysical adventure/comedy proudly continues that tradition, concerning itself with nothing less than the joy we take from life that makes it worth all the setbacks and disappointments. The relationship between a music teacher (voiced by Jamie Foxx) and an errant soul (Tina Fey) eager to get its journey on Earth started can be seen as representing either a mentor/protege or a parent/child bond. Either way, there's a genuinely wise sense of how older generations can gain a new appreciation of the world from younger ones. 

6. Nomadland (Chloe Zhao). It's always a special moment when an emerging filmmaker you're initially skeptical of turns around and proves to be the real deal. I felt Zhao's previous critical success, The Rider, was too schematic in portraying marginalized lives, but Nomadland manages to be both beautifully poetic and generously open-heated in depicting the wandering lifestyle of those living on the fringes of America. As Fern, our guide through this subculture, Frances McDormand achieves a magically unforced state of being that feels like it transcends acting. Zhao is as compassionate digging into Fern's past as she is in allowing the nomads who Fern meets tell their stories, making this a character study of vast scope and insight.

7. Palm Springs (Max Barbakow). This manages to be not only an endlessly fresh and inventive riff on the Groundhog Day premise of being stuck in a "same day over and over again" time loop, but also the funniest, most perceptive romantic comedy in years. Wedding guests Nyles (Andy Samberg) and Sarah (a revelatory Cristin Milioti) aren't squeaky-clean genre archetypes, but neurotic, dysfunctional messes we can all relate to. Writer Andy Siara's ingenious script has unintended resonance for viewers stuck in the monotony of quarantine, and on a more timeless level, gets at how weathering the repetition of life is more bearable with someone at your side.

8. Collective (Alexander Nanau). The moral urgency and engrossing procedural meticulousness of this Romanian documentary grab you by the shirt collar and leave you powerfully shaken by the end. Director Nanau executes a deft genre switch within his non-fiction storytelling, starting out in the mode of an All the President's Men-style journalistic procedural before shifting halfway through to the corridors of power to offer a real-life political thriller. What connects the two halves is a disturbing unmasking of the many-tentacled corruption of Romania's health care system. Nanau lays in glimpses of victims' fates with mosaic-like artistry, ensuring that his film hits the heart as mightily as it does the head.

9. Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg). Danish provocateur Vinterberg has examined man's capability for uncivilized beastliness in films such as The Celebration and The Hunt, so it makes perfect sense that he's made an uncommonly insightful, non-moralistic movie about our addiction to alcohol and the carefree youthfulness it can make us feel. While much funnier and more accessible than Vinterberg's past work, it also has a complex dark side acknowledging the collateral damage of its drunken middle-aged protagonists' carousing. I'm not gonna say which side of the expertly struck tonal balance the final scene lands on, but hoo boy--what an ending!

10. Mangrove (Steve McQueen). This marks the ideal entry point to McQueen's Small Axe, introducing us to the London immigrant neighborhood the films take place in via restaurant owner Frank Crichlow (an extremely moving Shaun Parkes) and showing us why the neighborhood is a home worth fighting for. In a year in which Black protestors have fought for their right to exist against the police, it's hugely resonant to show the seeds of necessary radicalism sprout within Frank as cops repeatedly tarnish his business and customers. And when Mangrove becomes a courtroom drama, it emerges as one with detailed specificity, huge emotional force, and the stylistic imagination and control of a master filmmaker.

And here are the next ten runners-up:

11. Dick Johnson Is Dead (Kirsten Johnson). The conceit of director Johnson coping with the prospect of her father dying soon by staging and shooting various scenarios of his demise may sound head-scratching, but you need only watch Johnson collaborating with her dad on this unusual project to understand how much the two are gaining from the experience. Ultimately, the film is a touching plea to celebrate those we love while they're still with us, and Johnson's adoration of her dad proves infectious.

12. Sound of Metal (Darius Marder). When Ruben (Riz Ahmed, in one of the year's most unforgettable performances), a drummer for a metal band, begins losing his hearing at an alarming rate, the way he lashes out with angry denial seems at once immature and also admittedly like how any of us would react to such a devastating development. That makes this a drama of complicated, strongly empathetic humanity, and the immersive magic of Marder's sound design makes it just as impressive on a technical level.

13. Quo Vadis, Aida? (Jasmila Zbanic). It's forgivable to hear the phrase "Bosnian genocide drama" and assume that what you're in for with this film is a dull, academic lecture--but luckily, that's not at all what Zbanic delivers. Instead, she's made a gripping, tense ticking-clock thriller in which every bad decision made by the UN as the Serbian army invades Bosnia has a visceral, enraging effect. Jasna Duricic puts a movingly human face on the tragedy as a UN translator fiercely dedicated to getting her family out safe.

14. Tenet (Christopher Nolan). When I first saw this, I was blown away by Nolan's characteristically intricate and spectacular action sequences, but honestly pretty damn confused and left wondering if there was any meaning to the beautifully orchestrated madness. On second viewing, though, it really clicked for me, engaging me much more with its crazed narrative density and revealing that Nolan's choice to name the hero literally the Protagonist (embodied with star-level swagger by John David Washington) is the key to what it's about thematically--the kind of rare heroism that finds moral value in saving a single life even as the future of the entire world hangs in the balance.

15. And Then We Danced (Levan Akin). "There is no sex in Georgian dance!" insists an instructor of Georgia's national dance troupe, which seems like an absurd statement to make, but it's indicative of the conservative extremism that dominates the nation. That gives this queer coming-of-age romance, which has been crafted by Akin with an excellent balance of authentic naturalism and expressive, dance-based formalism, unusually high stakes. As a dancing student (Levan Gelbakhiani, in an impressively modulated performance) falls for a new arrival (Bachi Valishvili), we fear the worst for their future. And in a climactic, defiant assertion of identity I don't want to say too much about, we get cleansing catharsis.

16. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman). Always a cerebral innovator in the comedy writing world, Kaufman had a richly productive year between his 700+-page (!) satiric epic novel Antkind and this layered, absorbingly puzzle-like curio. In Kaufman's hands, a woman's (Jessie Buckley) trip to meet her boyfriend's (Jesse Plemons) parents becomes a characteristically witty and melancholy reflection on mortality, the passage of time, and our personal relationship to the art and pop culture we love. I regret that I didn't get a chance to watch it again before writing this, to sift through its many narrative and thematic complexities with a more trained eye.

17. Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King). Simultaneously an impassioned, relevant history lesson and a robust, energized cop-movie epic, this fashions the true story of Bill O'Neal's (LaKeith Stanfield) recruitment by the FBI to entrap Black Panthers Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) as a gripping undercover yarn. King makes an auspicious impression keeping the film both vital and exciting, while the two lead actors deliver stunning work--Kaluuya exhibits fiery command and strength as Hampton, while Stanfield makes O'Neal a rivetingly, affectingly conflicted Judas.

18. The Assistant (Kitty Green). It would be all to easy to render the story of working for a Harvey Weinstein-influenced boss as tabloid sensationalism. Green's remarkably assured fiction debut excels by taking the opposite approach, capturing the daily routine of an abusive executive's assistant (Julia Garner) with exacting, dread-tinged minimalism. The precise deliberateness of Green's filmmaking is entrancing, and Garner's intuitive performance matches that artfulness with a quiet control all its own.

19. Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg). The son of body horror maestro David Cronenberg, writer-director Brandon Cronenberg proves to be a chip off the old block with this wonderfully trippy, imaginative sci-fi thriller, which fuses his father's tendencies with the stylistic lushness and splashy gore of Korean extreme genre fare. The core premise of an assassin who inhabits other people's bodies allows Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott to enact an expertly coordinated, All of Me-style acting duet, while Cronenberg's alternately gorgeous and disturbing imagery sears its way into your brain.

20. Beanpole (Kantemir Balagov). I'm not gonna pretend that this exquisitely directed post-World War II drama about two nurses (Viktoria Miroshnichenko and Vasilisa Perelygina) coping with trauma isn't bleak and occasionally hard to watch. But at the same time, it's beautiful to behold, with immensely gifted young filmmaker Balagov vividly using yellows and greens in his precise compositions, powerfully acted, and filled with guarded hope that the pieces of a broken land can be put back together. As we emerge from the other side of a devastating pandemic, here's a movie that attests to the potential for hard-won recovery.

And here are 14 more movie standouts from 2020:

21. Education (Steve McQueen).

22. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill Ross IV and Turner Ross).

23. Let Them All Talk (Steven Soderbergh).

24. Welcome to Chechnya (David France).

25. The Climb (Michael Angelo Covino).

26. She Dies Tomorrow (Amy Seimetz).

27. Gunda (Viktor Kossakovsky).

28. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Aaron Sorkin).

29. Alex Wheatle (Steve McQueen).

30. The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (Frank Marshall).

31. Deerskin (Quentin Dupieux).

32. Bad Boys For Life (Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi).

33. Circus of Books (Rachel Mason).

34. The Old Guard (Gina Prince-Bythewood).

Special Recognition for Non-Eligible Work:

Hamilton (Thomas Kail). Just because I earlier referred to this as more TV-like in its basic "filmed play" presentation doesn't mean I didn't fully love it as a way to experience Lin-Manuel Miranda's electrifying stage masterwork. It's so rousing I felt a literal surge in my chest after musical numbers ended.

Black Is King (Beyonce). The pop star continued her ascent as a filmmaking voice with this visually ravishing video album reimagining The Lion King as a celebration of Black excellence, which includes everything from Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain to Guadagnino's Suspiria remake as reference points.

We Are Who We Are (Luca Guadagnino). Speaking of Guadagnino, his 8-part miniseries following two kids figuring themselves out on an American Army base in Italy is as sensual and evocative as anything he's ever done, with a specific sense of place and a palpable sense of youthful abandon.

The Queen's Gambit (Scott Frank). We all watched this and loved it. 'Nuff said.

As Yet Unseen: The Dig, The Life Ahead, Lingua Franca, The Glorias, Vitalina Varela, Miss Juneteenth, The Mole Agent, A White, White Day.

The Best Films of 2019

It's a cruel, undeniable truth that we're all getting older, and even if we all had access to the de-aging CGI that Martin Scorsese deploys in The Irishman, it wouldn't really turn back the clock. As much as that digital touch-up technology has been discussed and debated (for what it's worth, I found it only disorienting at first, and then gradually easier to take than young actors in old-age makeup), what's more thought-provoking in Scorsese's newest film is how it finds the 77-year-old director exploring how the twilight years of one of his gangster anti-heroes would go--and it's not a pretty picture. While The Irishman didn't end up placing very highly on my list of the year's best films, as seen below, two master filmmakers who appeared in my top ten--Quentin Tarantino (hard to believe the Pulp Fiction "bad boy" is nearing 60!) and Pedro Almodovar--fruitfully focused on their own mortality just as Scorsese did. It's simultaneously rewarding and a little depressing to watch these auteurs acknowledge that death is knocking at their doorsteps.

On a more uplifting note, there are young filmmakers with plenty of future work ahead of them on this list as well. And considering that the end of a movie is a lighter topic than the end of a life, it's worth noting that what unites both the old pros and the gifted whipper-snappers behind the films on this list is the ability to deliver a knockout punch of an ending. Looking over these titles, genuinely perfect final scenes and shots come immediately to mind. So in bringing the film year of 2019 to its own closing, here's my list of the best movies from a hugely satisfying 12-month crop:

1. Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino). Set in a transporting, immaculately realized recreation of late '60s L.A. (props to production designer Barbara Ling!), this hangout movie par excellence exudes both humor and melancholy in juxtaposing a movie star (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt) approaching the point of obsolescence with ingenue Sharon Tate's (Margot Robbie) rise in the industry firmament. Even more affecting than the obvious contrast is when Tarantino finds the characters' common ground (like when Tate's hunger for validation in the Wrecking Crew showing is placed alongside that of DiCaprio's Rick Dalton on the set of Lancer), making the film a love letter to the insecure dreamers who create the dream of movies.

2. Portrait of a Lady On Fire (Celine Sciamma). So devastating and meticulously constructed that it already feels like one of the all-time great cinematic love stories, this period piece depicts the growing affection in the relationship between a young woman (Adele Haenel) struggling with a forthcoming marriage that she was forced into and the artist (Noemie Merlant) hired to paint her portrait. Sciamma, in only her fourth film, organically unites a cerebral study of the nature and creation of art with a swoon-worthy, romantic heart. Speaking of great final shots, this has one I may never fully recover from.

3. Parasite (Bong Joon-ho). Ever since seeing Bong's monster movie The Host twice in theaters, I've been an enormous fan of his imaginative genre smarts and astonishing filmmaking precision, so it's gratifying that his latest and most magically seamless film has been such a huge success in America. Parasite's biting portrait of the desperation with which lower classes compete for crumbs from the tables of the 1% obviously resonates here as potently as it does in South Korea, and the mastery with which Bong combines comedy, suspense, satire, surprise twists, and affecting family drama into one neatly arranged package transcends any language barriers.

4. Marriage Story (Noah Baumbach). And here's another writer-director that I'm proud I was in on the ground floor of, since I practically memorized Baumbach's 1995 debut Kicking and Screaming during my high school and college years. With Marriage Story, Baumbach's writing remains as witty as ever, though it's ambitiously boosted here with a mature dedication to capturing the unruly messiness of real life and how that which we don't plan for so often intrudes on that which we do. The film is honest and tough when it comes to portraying divorce, though Baumbach's complex humanism ensures that it can't be reduced to being a downer.

5. Ash Is Purest White (Jia Zhangke). Though there are early Jia films I have yet to catch up on, he's seemingly been fascinated with China's political and cultural landscape throughout his career, and with this film, he goes even further than he did in the excellent Mountains May Depart in embedding that interest within a grand "movie movie" epic. Part romantic melodrama, part gangster movie, and even dabbling a bit in the action and sci-fi genres, Ash Is Purest White offers a hearty cinematic banquet and thoughtfully reflects on what is and what isn't able to change as the years go by. In the lead, the luminously expressive Zhao Tao gives one of the year's major overlooked performances.

6. Pain and Glory (Pedro Almodovar). Antonio Banderas has memorably collaborated with Almodovar several times before, but he's never been as achingly vulnerable onscreen as he is in this powerfully moving autobiography, playing a fictionalized version of Almodovar. As this filmmaker character explores old memories and relationships left unresolved, Almodovar brings the mysteries of life, love, and artistic creation to the screen as confidently as he splashes it with his signature bold colors. This is a late auteur work as universal as it is personal.

7. Ford V Ferrari (James Mangold). Crowd-pleasing underdog stories don't get more heartfelt and intelligently crafted than this, which achieves the nifty trick of being both about the pursuit of excellence within a corporate sphere and a shining example of that very thing. Mangold reaches the peak of old-school classicism he's always been striving for, and the sharply edited, thrilling racing scenes gain extra investment from the script's funny and touching portrait of the sometimes-combative friendship between Ken Miles and Carroll Shelby (Christian Bale and Matt Damon, both in top movie-star form). Bound to be a basic-cable rewatch favorite.

8. A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick). Because of his uncanny ability to capture the beauty of the natural world, Malick always brings the past to life with tactile authenticity, and this account of an Austrian farmer (August Diehl) refusing to obey Hitler during World War II is no exception. But a big part of what makes this the auteur's best film since The Tree of Life is how it uses the past to provocatively comment on the present; its depiction of a populace all too eager to embrace authoritarian bullying is depressingly relevant. Thus, there's an uncharacteristic anger from Malick informing the movie, though his embrace of the unwavering love between Diehl's Franz and wife Fani (Valerie Pachner) proves that he hasn't given up on the way of grace.

9. Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller). This is the year's best documentary, and it's such an act of you-are-there immersion that it feels like a genuinely novel use of the form. Boldly eschewing interviews of any kind, Miller trusts in the storytelling power of astonishingly evocative archival footage capturing America's first trip to the moon, and uses skillful, lucid editing and a surging score from Matt Morton to turn real history into a wondrous cinematic adventure. Going from a nuts-and-bolts procedural to a triumphant showcase of how close we can get to the cosmos, this has the shape and force of great sci-fi while being quite the opposite in actuality.

10. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Marielle Heller). It's impressive that Heller has landed on my ten-best list two years in a row for refreshingly unconventional biopics, and doubly so that this PG-rated reflection on Mister Rogers' importance retains so much of the piercing urban melancholy of her R-rated Lee Israel portrait from last year, Can You Ever Forgive Me? But Heller's shrewd enough to acknowledge that the real world rarely feels as glowing as family-TV visionary Rogers (the great Tom Hanks, revealing yet more facets with a revelatory stillness here) sees it, via the ultimately inspiring arc of a journalist (Matthew Rhys, complex and undervalued) interviewing the icon of gentleness.

And here are the next ten runners-up:

11. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (Chad Stahelski). While the first John Wick boasts the leanest, most involving story of the series, this lays claim to being the most purely fun, exhilarating movie of the three. It offers even more elaborate and dazzling action scenes than its predecessors, while also amping up the color-drenched cinematic expressiveness. Keanu Reeves, of course, reigns supreme, and has excellent taste in sequels...

12. Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley). ...since he also pops up here, as a neglected Canadian Evil Knievel-influenced action figure, one of a handful of amusing, lovable new characters introduced here (Forky!). This fourth entry also knows just where to take its best known character from the preceding trilogy, cowboy toy Woody (Hanks again!), movingly making a case for him to live a blissfully independent existence, thereby turning a sequel we didn't know we needed (the third one ended so perfectly!) into an essential extension of the remarkably consistent series.

13. Uncut Gems (Josh and Benny Safdie). Comedy superstar Adam Sandler has done nuanced work in eccentric auteur projects before (Punch-Drunk Love!), but his brave commitment to the weaselly desperation of gambling addict Howard is something strikingly new from him. The Safdie Brothers audaciously get the viewer feeling Howard's adrenaline-rush existence with assaultive yet beautifully inventive style and a tense, unpredictable narrative path, making their best film yet in the process.

14. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (Dean DeBlois). The most consistent non-Pixar animated franchise around reaches a rousing conclusion with this final entry, which is just as driven by epic visuals, imaginative world-building, and resonant themes of co-existence vs. blinkered prejudice as the previous two films. Lovable dragon Toothless' wooing of the Light Fury is portrayed with exquisite non-verbal storytelling, while the core bond between Toothless and young Viking Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) is resolved to get-the-Kleenex-ready perfection.

15. The Wild Pear Tree (Nuri Bilge Ceylan). In his most assured, thought-provoking film since Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Turkish art-film master Ceylan compassionately depicts a recognizable kind of asshole--one who just needs to grow up a little to become a legitimately good man. Aspiring writer Sinan (Aydin Dogu Demirkol) returns to his hometown after college seething with resentment, and Ceylan charts his eventual maturation with gentle, observant wisdom.

16. Dragged Across Concrete (S. Craig Zahler). With his third, eloquent slice of pulp deconstruction, Zahler finds a unique, deliberate rhythm to show how the "jungle" of the crime world involves a lot of monotonous drudgery punctuated by quick bursts of life-or-death combat for cops and criminals alike. His dialogue remains singularly witty, especially when spit out by a hardened Mel Gibson (yep, he's great in this), and his geographically clean staging of the finale proves that his action is worth the (engagingly written and paced) wait.

17. Avengers: Endgame (Joe and Anthony Russo). From its audaciously quiet, character-driven first hour, driven by sincere, committed work from the vast ensemble cast, to its thrilling, time-travel mid-section that cleverly integrates memorable moments from past Marvel movies, and on through to its grand-scale finale, this is a hell of a wrap-up to over a decade of interrelated Marvel releases. Although the comics-based empire maintained a consistent level of quality in this key phase, this is only the second of its films, after Black Panther, where the level of gravitas matched the sheer spectacle.

18. Dolemite Is My Name (Craig Brewer). Something about playing an onstage performer--in this case, stand-up comedian turned amateur filmmaker Rudy Ray Moore--reawakens Eddie Murphy's own love of performing, and his joyousness proves infectious here. Writers Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's gift for affectionate portraits of real-life misfits meshes with Brewer's gifts for milieu-building to create a '70s-era wonderland where the tirelessness of a makeshift family trying to realize its dreams is equaled only by the love and passion that sustains its close-knit members.

19. Little Women (Greta Gerwig). As good as Lady Bird, Gerwig's debut, is, its clipped rhythm felt too mannered for me to find it fully great. This Louisa May Alcott adaptation, on the other hand, marks an auspicious maturation point for the writer-director, graced with the breathing room necessary for the uniformly excellent cast to shine and for Gerwig's brilliant modern touches--a non-chronological structure, the meta foregrounding of Jo (Saoirse Ronan) as a female author working within established conventions--to really flourish. There's a human warmth infusing the movie that makes it comfortingly blanket-like.

20. Long Day's Journey Into Night (Bi Gan). Since Oscar front-runner and one-take war movie 1917 is quite good, it would be a waste of time to whine about why it's not a masterpiece deserving of the industry's highest honor. Instead, I'll direct readers to a film with a roughly 45-minute-long take that's more pleasurably engulfing in its use of space than the two-hour one Sam Mendes artificially stitched together. Watching Long Day's Journey unfold is like blissfully flying around within a visionary filmmaker's dream. Its fragmented story in this context amounts to a virtue--this is cinema.

And here are nine more movie highlights of 2019:

21. Ad Astra (James Gray).
22. The Irishman (Martin Scorsese).
23. Long Shot (Jonathan Levine).
24. Ready Or Not (Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett).
25. The Farewell (Lulu Wang).
26. Gloria Bell (Sebastian Lelio).
27. Honeyland (Tamara Kotevska & Ljubo Stefanov).
28. One Cut of the Dead (Shinichirou Ueda).
29. Waves (Trey Edward Shults).

NOTE: Since I haven't yet caught up with big miniseries projects from Ava DuVernay (When They See Us) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young), I've decided not to give a "Special Recognition for Non-Eligible Work" shout-out to great TV work from notable filmmakers. I mean, in terms of standout TV from artists who don't dabble much in film, Watchmen and Chernobyl are staggering, but you likely don't need me to tell you that.

As Yet Unseen: Transit, Aniara, Sorry Angel, Light of My Life, Asako I & II, Give Me Liberty, Greener Grass, Fighting With My Family, Bombshell, Harriet.

The Best Films of 2018

Although it's distressingly hard to find encouraging signs of cultural progress in the reactionary muck of current America, a glimpse at the best films of 2018 offers rare hope that things are moving forward--at least in the realm of cinematic representation, anyway. Just three years after the "#OscarsSoWhite" controversy raised the troubling question of how few opportunities non-white actors and filmmakers get to put great work out into the mainstream, the film landscape of 2018 was utterly dominated by POC, international, and female filmmakers. Curiously indicative of the way oft-marginalized voices reigned over the film year is how the few contributions from white American male filmmakers to rank highly on my list of the year's best films came from such unexpected directors--a movie star who rose to fame when the loathsome The Hangover hit it big at the box office; an Oscar-winning screenwriter whose directorial debut, the indulgent genre wank The Way of the Gun, has been deservedly lost to the sands of time; and a twentysomething stand-up comedian.

Just as pleasantly surprising is the wide range of material tackled by the black filmmakers whose work makes up a lot of this list, from a mega-budget Marvel superhero movie, to a female-centered heist thriller that transplants a British miniseries to modern-day Chicago, to a based-on-a-true-story '70s police procedural. And at the very top of my list of the best films of the year is an adaptation of a celebrated novel from a black director whose last film won the Best Picture Oscar two years ago:

1. If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins). For any relatively new filmmaking voice, making two back-to-back masterpieces is already plenty impressive; when those two films end up being so different in scale while remaining identifiably from the same voice, the accomplishment ends up being even more staggering. Writer-director Jenkins follows up his intimate, three-act-beholden Oscar winner Moonlight with this more expansive, structurally bold, ensemble-driven portrait of '70s Harlem, adapted from James Baldwin's novel. When young, black lovers (played by the touching KiKi Layne and the absolutely electric, underrated Stephan James) are torn apart by societal injustice, Jenkins widens his compassionate gaze to show how their families and community keep them afloat, along with the strength of their unbreakable romantic bond. Cinematically expressive to a degree that makes you swoon anew over the medium and rich with powerful empathy, If Beale Street Could Talk sends you out of the theater positively glowing.

2. Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Marielle Heller). Making their own, female-centric contribution to the tradition of pricelessly witty New York literary comedy-dramas favored by auteurs like Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach, director Heller and writers Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty also manage to make one of the most quietly profound contemporary takes on the life of a writer. Melissa McCarthy is wonderfully intuitive and surprising from the first frame as real-life celebrity biographer Lee Israel, who habitually uses liquid comfort to cope with being beyond her professional and financial peak. Her fortunes improve once she connects with gay, rascally drinking buddy Jack (Richard E. Grant, perfectly matching McCarthy in humor and poignance) and funnels her talents into writing spot-on, lucrative literary forgeries. Without outright endorsing Lee's crime, this simultaneously melancholy and inspirational marvel illustrates how a writer's gifts can thrive in the unlikeliest of contexts.

3. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie). Although McQuarrie, best known for his Oscar-winning The Usual Suspects script, previously directed the excellent fifth entry in this series, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, few could've guessed that with this sixth entry, he would make not only the franchise high-water mark in a consistently entertaining series that directorial heavyweights such as Brian De Palma and John Woo have contributed to, but also the most purely exhilarating action-movie experience since George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road. As it happens, though, McQuarrie's screenwriting background is what gives Mission: Impossible - Fallout its propulsive kick--he crafts each whopper of an action sequence like a discrete mini-narrative with its own masterfully modulated peaks and valleys. Naturally, action hero par excellence Tom Cruise, as intrepid IMF agent Ethan Hunt, is a major factor behind the film's visceral impact too. Watching a legend pushing 60 dangle from a rope attached to a flying helicopter is the kind of jaw-dropping spectacle we've always gone to the movies for.

4. You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay). While the narrative synopsis of this dark visionary triumph--ex-military veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) rescues a young girl (Ekaterina Samsonov) from a child prostitution ring--makes it sound like typical vigilante fare, Scottish master of abstraction Ramsay thankfully doesn't do "usual." She instead artfully crafts You Were Never Really Here as an immersive character study that uses jagged shards of flashbacks, tactile textural details, and a chaotic, the-voices-won't-stop sound design to get us inside the tortured head of Phoenix's Joe. As for the continually committed lead actor, a 2018 acting MVP with three (!) appearances on this list, he alters his physicality to make Joe a beefy, frightening threat, and is just as thorough in investing himself emotionally, revealing Joe underneath his hulking build to be a wounded soul who saves another life so that he doesn't consign his own to eternal oblivion.

5. A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper). It would be impossible to top director George Cukor's 1954 take on this oft-told tale of performers in love whose individual career trajectories tragically diverge, which showcased a heartbreaking Judy Garland performance, so it's high praise to say that Cooper's remake succeeds so beautifully on its own terms that it feels vital and new instead of merely imitative. Lady Gaga brings a revelatory low-key authenticity to the role of a singer whose talent takes her from drag bars to sold-out stadiums, while Cooper as an actor turns in his most piercingly vulnerable performance as a rocker whose alcoholism is exacerbated by his dwindling popularity. And as a director, Cooper infuses the concert scenes with the lightning-in-a-bottle force of live shows, and unapologetically embraces the material's melodramatic foundation while modernizing it with an emotionally raw, rough-hewn naturalism.

6. Shoplifters (Hirokazu Kore-eda). Exploring how family is ultimately defined by something more ineffable than blood ties has always been one of the chief thematic concerns of Japanese writer-director Kore-eda, one of contemporary cinema's great humanists, and Shoplifters arrives as perhaps his most generous and profound expression of that idea yet. In charting the efforts of economically struggling outcasts who have formed a makeshift family unit to not just survive but form an emotionally sustaining life together, Kore-eda demonstrates a unique gift for finding the moments of gentle humor and tender connection that bond us to these characters as strongly as they're bonded to each other. He's just as skilled when it comes to withholding character and narrative details until he can spring them at just the right time for emotionally devastating detonation. He's invaluably aided by his lovable cast, in particular the incredibly moving Sakura Ando as a force of maternal love.

7. The Favourite (Yorgos Lanthimos). Anyone expecting stiff-upper-lip decorum from this period piece set in 18th century England is in for quite a shock, while those of us who welcome the subversion of middlebrow formula can embrace the savage wit and stealthy feminist kick of The Favourite wholeheartedly. Greek provocateur Lanthimos indelibly puts his own perverse, sinister stamp on this portrait of two social climbers (Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz) competing for the affections of the mentally and physically deteriorating Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). Writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara provide a non-stop barrage of hilarious, merrily profane one-liners, and collaborate with Lanthimos to reveal the corrosive effects of a society in which women have to fight tooth-and-nail to become anything other than a subservient wife on the souls of those women. The trio of actresses who breathe life into this vicious struggle could hardly be more impeccable.

8. Widows (Steve McQueen). This thrillingly dense and gripping slice of elevated pulp fiction about four fierce women (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, and Cynthia Erivo) who carry out a heist that three of their thief husbands planned before dying on a botched job audaciously begins with the editing juxtaposition of sexual intimacy with ferocious car-chase-and-gunfire action. Director and co-writer McQueen is no stranger to contrasts, having unexpectedly pivoted to this thriller from the Oscar-winning historical drama 12 Years a Slave, and he consciously builds Widows from that grabber of an opening onwards as a study of divisions--particularly those of race, gender, class, and political power in present-day Chicago. In bringing his long-take cinema to genre fare, he magically proves that art and entertainment are more easily bridged contrasts, while co-writer Gillian Flynn of Gone Girl fame supplies pungent dialogue to a formidable ensemble cast.

9. Black Panther (Ryan Coogler). The comics-based movies that comprise the Marvel Cinematic Universe are, with a few exceptions (I'm looking at you, Thor: The Dark World!), reliably entertaining, as the seemingly zillions of people loyally see each one can attest to. But none to date have had the epic narrative and visual scope or provocative political depth that Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole bring to Black Panther, a spectacular and complex gold standard in quality for the hit factory. In pitting superhero Black Panther's alter-ego, T'Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned leader of hidden African kingdom Wakanda, against the vengeful Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan, magnetic and rewardingly sympathetic), who is of Wakandan heritage but was raised in a hostile-to-black-citizens America, Coogler crafts a resonant popcorn-movie parable of how leadership is defined by the conflict between build-that-wall isolationism and compassionate outreach.

10. Mandy (Panos Cosmatos). There's something insanely gratifying about being in on the ground floor for a new cult classic, which the hallucinatory, mind-expandingly imaginative revenge movie Mandy--the rare earmarked-for-VOD-release independent film to get an expanded big-screen release by popular demand--certainly qualifies as. Cosmatos' singular visual design takes heavy-metal album covers and fantasy paperbacks as the primary forms of inspiration, while the bifurcated structure of his and co-writer Aaron Stewart-Ahn's script boldly shifts from the romantic transcendence of Red (Nicolas Cage) and Mandy's (Andrea Riseborough) secluded life together to the blood-soaked rage of Red's retribution once Mandy is taken from him. Such yin-and-yang storytelling renders this arguably The Most Nicolas Cage Movie ever made, playing into the interconnected sincerity and irony of his wild commitment to his craft. Mandy is radical drug-trip cinema of the very highest order.

And here are the next ten runners-up:

11. Eighth Grade (Bo Burnham). There's a moment in this uniquely evocative and touching coming-of-age portrait in which 13-year-old Kayla (Elsie Fisher, an uncanny natural who just seems to exist rather than act), while making the most brutally honest of her many online-video journals, compares her social anxiety to the feeling of waiting in line for an intense rollercoaster. That even many of us alleged "grown-ups" can relate to this comparison speaks to how effortlessly stand-up comedian Burnham has tapped the universal from the specific in his film writing-directing debut. Added bonus for fans of Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming: that film's oft-overlooked lead, Josh Hamiton, nearly steals the film as Kayla's dorky, loving dad.

12. Revenge (Coralie Fargeat). As much as I like genre fare, I wouldn't have guessed that an exploitation movie of the usually stomach-turning "rape-revenge" variety would narrowly miss out on my annual top 10. Credit for the anomaly goes to debut filmmaker Fargeat, who possesses a veteran's shrewdness at layering her vivid images and edits with gender-focused subtext. As for the text itself, it's a remarkably vicious, pared-down, and hugely cathartic yarn of one underestimated woman's (Matilda Lutz, absolutely not to be fucked with) violent payback of the trio of assholes who took cruel advantage of her. By the time she confronts her duplicitous boyfriend (Kevin Janssens), who's helplessly naked and slipping in pools of his own blood, you know you've witnessed an act of top-shelf genre subversion.

13. Won't You Be My Neighbor? (Morgan Neville). That we're currently enduring an era in which kindness and acknowledging each other's vulnerabilities are revolutionary acts makes this documentary portrait of Fred Rogers, the heartwarmingly decent patron saint of children's television, an emotionally cleansing moviegoing experience--you can hear every other audience member sniffling alongside you through the film's entirety if you see it in theaters. Expert non-fiction storyteller Neville weaves animated segments in with archival clips and endearingly candid interviews to create a collage-like flow. And in focusing on the messages of tolerance and unity that Rogers spent his career emphasizing, he's able to assure viewers of every age that things may just turn out okay in the end.

14. BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee). Ever since busting into the zeitgeist with the incendiary Do the Right Thing nearly 30 years ago, Lee has displayed a singular knack for combining kinetic, inventive style, dense and confrontational reflections on race in America, and epic, accessible storytelling into dynamite cinematic packages. He delivers another such combination with this simultaneously entertaining and infuriating truth-based story of a black Colorado cop (John David Washington) who infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan using a Jewish colleague on the force (Adam Driver, soulful and layered) as his public face. Moving with the tension and tough swagger of a fun cop movie, but buoyed by outrage over American institutions that normalize racism as matters of "policy," BlacKkKlansman confirms that Lee remains as scorchingly releveant as ever.

15. Game Night (John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein). It's near-impossible not to be in the mood for a breezy, well-cast studio comedy, which makes it all the more depressing that there have been so few great examples of the form in recent years. So when a verbally whip-smart, visually dynamic, constantly surprising laughfest like Game Night arrives, it's cause for celebration, not to mention endless cable rewatching down the road. When Scrabble-playing suburbanites (led by Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams, the latter having a blast flaunting her comedy chops) get roped into dangerous criminal shenanigans that they still believe to be just a game, directors Daley & Goldstein push the action to delightfully over-the-top extremes. As the kind of pathetic neighbor you perpetually avoid inviting to house parties, a deadpan Jesse Plemons registers as the cast MVP.

16. The Old Man & the Gun (David Lowery). The role of Forrest Tucker, a senior-citizen bank robber whose weapons of choice are his smooth-talking kindness and the charming twinkle in his eye, is perfectly suited for the legendary Robert Redford, eternally the Sundance Kid. That Redford in interviews keeps equivocating as to whether Forrest will be the last part he plays only furthers the connection--this is a character addicted to professionalism, to being damn good at his job. With Forrest, as opposed to Redford, there's something sad about such commitment, considering the sacrifices he must make in pursuing a life of crime, including his burgeoning romance with Jewel (the radiant Sissy Spacek). This gives The Old Man & the Gun a gentle melancholy to counterbalance its affable, often funny caper spirit. So while writer-director Lowery, who made the similarly big-hearted Pete's Dragon remake a few years back, beautifully replicates the style of the '60s and '70s films Redford is known for, he also makes sure to honor the humanity behind those classics.

17. The Sisters Brothers (Jacques Audiard). The Old West is a particularly incongruous setting to ask the question, can hardened men ever form a utopian society? Yet that's the conceit of this endearingly eccentric Western, which follows two closely bonded pairs of guys--the killer-for-hire brothers of the film's title (John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix), and a bounty hunter (Jake Gyllenhaal) who unexpectedly befriends his chemist quarry (Riz Ahmed)--as they gradually converge and test whether fellowship outweighs greed. A perceptive and expressive chronicler of the masculine psyche, Audiard gives the film a shadowy atmosphere reminiscent of '70s Westerns like Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller, while wisely keeping the focus on character idiosyncrasies over story and drawing finely detailed work from his excellent central quartet of actors.

18. The Other Side of the Wind (Orson Welles). It's a geekgasm-worthy quirk of film history that long-dead maestro Welles has a film that hadn't been completed and released until 2018 (courtesy of skilled editor Bob Murawski finishing up based on Welles' notes). That's still nothing compared to the hall-of-mirrors layering of the film itself, a dizzying cinematic feast revolving around a past-his-prime filmmaker (John Huston, in a majestic, warts-and-all tour de force) who is based partly on Welles himself (the filmmaker's protege is played by Welles acolyte Peter Bogdanovich) and partly on the kind of macho tyrant/artist best exemplified by Ernest Hemingway. Welles also has plenty of fun with movie-within-a-movie playfulness, and considering he shot this in the '70s, this is overall his attempt at the New Hollywood stylistic experimentation that defined the era. True to form, though, he can't help but be ahead of his time, cutting between various film stocks in a manner that resembles and predates '90s-era Oliver Stone. In less technical terms, this is pure cinephile nirvana.

19. Minding the Gap (Bing Liu). The inextricable link between living in poverty and the way domestic abuse cycles from one generation to the next is explored with clear-eyed empathy in this powerful documentary. Director Liu started filming the skateboarding adventures that he and two of his friends would embark upon to escape the harsh drudgery of their lives in economically ailing Rockford, Illinois when the three of them were young. As the trio grows older, Liu's observant camera catches something more profoundly sad--the despair of growing up with limited options for success, and the unfortunate tendency for that despair to manifest itself in violence. Minding the Gap is not without hope, however; its skateboarding sequences are joyous, and the fact that Liu made this film is proof that not all dreams die in places like Rockford.

20. The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci). It initially seemed like a possible career mistake when brilliant satirist Iannucci left his Emmy-perrenial HBO hit Veep before the series had ended its run. But while The Death of Stalin, the film he chose to make instead, may not be quite as hilarious as   his 2009 movie debut In the Loop (which isn't much of a complaint--it's still often very, very funny), it is far more cinematic, thereby justifying the director's defection to another medium. In portraying the power struggles within Stalin's Cabinet following the dictator's demise, Iannucci imitates the look and feel of a prestige historical drama, only to subvert the form by depicting the ministers as flailing nincompoops. A game ensemble cast, of which character actor Simon Russell Beale is a standout as secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, tears into the script's potty-mouthed witticisms with gusto.

And here are 12 more film highlights from 2018:

21. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot (Gus Van Sant).
22. Lean On Pete (Andrew Haigh).
23. Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley).
24. 22 July (Paul Greengrass).
25. First Reformed (Paul Schrader).
26. Shirkers (Sandi Tan).
27. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti & Rodney Rothman).
28. Isle of Dogs (Wes Anderson).
29. Jane Fonda in Five Acts (Susan Lacy).
30. Incredibles 2 (Brad Bird).
31. Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino).
32. A Quiet Place (John Krasinski).

Special Recognition for Non-Eligible Work:

-Atlanta, "Teddy Perkins" (Hiro Murai), a peculiar and haunting reckoning with Michael Jackson's legacy
-The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (Judd Apatow), in which one comedy icon pays comprehensive and incredibly moving tribute to another
-The Night Comes For Us (Timo Tjahjanto), a truly insane, inventively splattery Indonesian action movie that genre fans must seek out on Netflix

As Yet Unseen: Everybody Knows, Border, Western, Let the Corpses Tan, Thunder Road, A Prayer Before Dawn, A Bread Factory (Parts One and Two).