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).
