Best Movies of 2018

There are almost too many interesting movies I still haven't seen from 2018 to count. And yet, I think this is one of the most solid lists of movies I've ever had in a post. A great year for movies.

Best of 2018

10. First Reformed


My familiarity with Paul Schrader prior to this is kind of weird. He wrote several great Martin Scorsese-directed movies from the 70's to 90's, and more recently he's made a couple of smaller movies I didn't really like at all. But First Reformed feels like the work of someone who's been at the top of their game their whole career. Ethan Hawke is quasi-secretly one of the best actors of his generation, and he is great once again as a reverend of a small but extremely old church who deals with a drinking problem, declining health, and a spiritual crisis in the face of climate change as he's expected to handle his duties at an important moment. For the most part it's very straightforward, which makes the few moments that depart in an unreal way hit a lot harder. One of the most interesting movies about religion that I have seen.

9. Roma


Alfonso Cuaron is one of my favorite directors, and in Roma he revisits his own childhood as he tells the story of a maid and nanny to a fairly well off family living in Mexico City in the 70's. I believe this is Cuaron's first movie that he actually shot himself (it's also the first he wrote by himself), and he's clearly learned a lot from cinematographers he's worked with in the past, because Roma looks absolutely stunning. The black and white photography is beautiful and he continues to be the modern master of the long take. In the past it sometimes seems like showing off, but in Roma it's more understated and always for a clear purpose. I wish I had connected with the characters a bit more, but Roma is still an impressive movie.

8. Black Panther


I hope that the huge success of Black Panther means we can see more movies with huge budgets that can have unique perspectives and settings that aren't just the same old thing as always. Black Panther is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's also an afrofuturist science fiction movie, and that departure and focus was maybe my favorite part of it. The cast was also very good, especially Michael B. Jordan as perhaps the MCU's best, and certainly its most sympathetic villain. The action was a bit underwhelming at times, but I'd still love to see Ryan Coogler make a sequel with these characters and this world.

7. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The reliable Coen brothers gave Netflix what is essentially a collection of six short Western films, and all of them have something to recommend. They range in tone from delightful to depressing, but each explores the theme of death and its sometimes arbitrary nature. I could say something about each of them, but I think it suffices to say that Buster Scruggs gives you a little bit of all the different things the brothers like to do, and the parts you like or don't like probably won't surprise you if you have any history with them.

6. Hereditary


First-time director Ari Aster is surprisingly assured in this film that is part family drama, part satanic horror. By the end the former fully gives way to the latter, but both elements work, and work together very well. Tony Collette plays a woman grieving the loss of her mother along with her family, and the things that happen from there are unexpected and develop into an intriguing mystery before they start spiraling completely out of control. Her performance could be over the top, but I think it works for where things eventually go. And I love where they go, because it's pretty damn wild.

5. Eighth Grade


First-time director Bo Burnham is surprisingly assured in this coming of age film. Most movies of this type focus on high schoolers, but Eighth Grade (obviously) goes a bit younger, telling the story of Kayla, a girl who struggles to make friends in a world of ubiquitous internet use and self promotion, but constantly strives to improve her situation. I could easily see this moving being sadder and harder to watch, but I found myself rooting for Kayla rather than feeling sorry for her, feeling bad about her setbacks but elated for her moments of progress and clarity. Elsie Fisher gives a remarkable performance, and Burnham's depiction of young adulthood is spot on.

4. Sorry to Bother You

First-time director Boots Riley is surprisingly assured in this bizarre satire of modern labor politics. There are basically two parts to this movie. There's the part where the main character, Cash Green, starts working for a telemarketing company at the same that some of its employees decide to start organizing and eventually strike, clashing with the police at the picket line. There's also the part where Cash learns to use a "white voice" to get ahead in the company and eventually becomes involved with the corporation that essentially found a loophole in modern anti-slavery laws and is dominating the global market. One of these aspects is very serious, the other is very silly, but they work together to the film's overall message, that companies and government will do anything they can in the name of profit and workers have to stick together and protect each other. It's a very funny and surreal movie with a real point.

3. Annihilation


People need to keep giving Alex Garland money to make science fiction and horror movies. Annihilation, based on a popular novel I have not read, does a great job mixing both. Natalie Portman plays a scientist who joins an expedition into a strange alien phenomenon that is constantly growing, and into which several previous expeditions have gone and not returned. Inside they find strange plant and animal mutations, some of which are beautiful, and some of which are terrifying. They begin to lose their grip on reality, and it's hard to say what exactly is real and what is not. There's enough ambiguity to keep an otherwise straightforward story mysterious, and the climax is exactly what it needs to be. Even if you don't get it, the movie is a lot of fun to look at.

2. Avengers: Infinity War


Yes, I am a Marvel fan. This is a damn good Marvel movie. Despite having dozens of characters the central story has room to breathe and develop, and pretty much everyone gets a moment to shine. The visuals are great and the action scenes are inventive and exciting. Thanos is a genuinely menacing villain, and while reports of his plan's viability have been exaggerated, I felt like I still understood his motivation in a way that his goals were clear and helped drive the story. And I appreciate any movie with this much money behind it going with that ending. We all know that what happens in comic books might not matter in the long term, but what does matter is what it means to the characters in the moment. And based on the showing I went to, this movie worked on people.

1. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse


On the one hand, Into the Spider-Verse is a stunningly gorgeous animated film that combines the strengths of computer generated and traditional cel animation along with the history of comic book art to create something unlike anything I've seen before. On the other hand, it tells a beautiful, heart felt story about how anyone given the opportunity can be a hero. And on the third hand, it's a comic book movie filled with so much love for these characters and their histories that as a Spider-Man fan it was just absolute delight to watch from start to finish. So you can see how difficult it is for me to find a single way to recommend this movie. I loved it. Oh, also it's laugh out loud hilarious the entire time. And the villains were all interesting and great! And the cast!

Delayed Entry

This is the best movie that wasn't released in 2018 but I didn't see until then.

Spotlight

Is it cool to like any movie that wins Best Picture? There are definitely things you can criticize about the Oscars, but their last few big winners haven't been bad choices. Spotlight tells the story of the newspaper that helped break the story of the Catholic Church molestation scandal, and while you can see how a movie about Serious Journalists Reporting Important Stories is easy award bait, it's really just an extremely well made film, with an exceptional screenplay and a cast that delivers from top to bottom. It balances the tension of a political thriller with the heartbreaking trauma of the subject matter. It's kind of amazing that Tom McCarthy made this and The Cobbler back to back.

Best Movies of 2013

What usually happens is I end up seeing a lot of above average mainstream movies during the year, and I don't really get caught up with the more prestigious films until after I've already made this list. While that's still somewhat true, as I managed to see things like Star Trek Into Darkness and Elysium while missing new work by acclaimed directors such as the Coen brothers, Steve McQueen, and Spike Jonze, I do think I did a slightly better job this year of seeing some smaller, really good movies. Mostly a fun year, even if the summer was a bit disappointing.

Best of 2013

10. Mud


Matthew McConaughey has always had a charismatic presence on screen, but he spent a lot of the last decade acting in movies no one cared about, playing regular charming guys and not pushing himself. That's changed in the last few years with roles like in Killer Joe and Magic Mike, and continues with Mud, and seeing him emerge as one of film's most captivating actors has been a real treat. I've noticed a trend recently of well made, independent movies set in rural America going around, and Mud fits right in there with the story of two boys in Arkansas who befriend a strange man living on an island who they slowly realize is a fugitive. The story is simple, but the performances are strong and it's a well-put-together coming-of-age tale worth checking out.

9. Spring Breakers


I guess Spring Break culture is still a thing? I remember MTV pushing it really hard about fifteen years ago. Spring Breakers is a fairly fascinating movie that completely revels in that culture while simultaneously mocking it and subverting it, and the effect is pretty remarkable. It's hard to know what to take from it at certain points, but at the very least, James Franco gives an unusual and memorable performance, there's some truly well crafted shots and moments, and it's a solid crime movie from start to finish. The girls, especially Vanessa Hudgens and Ashley Benson, are fearless in their roles, and despite the rampant sexualization of every woman on screen it somehow comes out feeling like a feminist work on the other end. You kind of need to see it to know where you stand on it.

8. Frances Ha


Noah Baumbach isn't as well known as his occasional writing partner Wes Anderson, but Frances Ha shows how much more human his work can be. He and star Greta Gerwig co-wrote this movie about a young woman struggling to live in New York, and like most good movies of this works well as a story about a young person struggling to do anything. She strives to be more than an assistant at a dance company, she has fights with her best friend, she misses opportunities that could have turned into something important. But the movie is far from depressing, with Gerwig's great, eye-catching performance, the pervasive little moments and snatches of humor, and the way that in the end it shows that, while it can be tough finding how you can live your life and be happy, it's always possible.

7. Pacific Rim


It's sort of funny how Guillermo del Toro left The Hobbit because it was taking too long to get into production, and then the first movie came out before the next thing he actually directed. It was worth it though, since Pacific Rim is one of the most jubilant and exciting original summer blockbusters to come out in years. It seems kind of odd to describe an apocalyptic action movie as jubilant, but I think it fits. The story here could have been stretched out into a trilogy, but they skipped all of the boring parts and went straight to giant robots fighting giant monsters, and express humanity's can-do attitude as the few people left capable of mounting a resistance against the Kaiju fight valiantly to do so. There's only three real fight scenes, and they're all darkly lit, and only the second one is truly of consequence and grandeur. But holy hell, is that ever an action sequence. The cast of mostly TV actors do a fine job of pushing the story forward, and it's a really fun world to inhabit for a couple hours. Again, despite the whole apocalypse thing.

6. Stoker


Park Chan-wook is at the forefront of the Korean cinematic movement that's going on right now, and his first English-language film is a big relief - it's his best movie since Oldboy, and it shows that he can keep his trademark style while working in a completely different system. It's kind of impressive how well that style translates - the actors are white and speaking English, but it really does seem to have an Asian sensibility to it. A fairly innocuous-seeming story slowly reveals its layers of darkness in more and more horrifying ways. It's not really a horror film - it's just horrific. It's unique as far as American movies go, and only gets better as it goes on.

5. Iron Man 3


After The Avengers, I was maybe a bit concerned that Marvel's Cinematic Universe would lose steam and lose whatever special extra kick they had that made them different from the other handful of super hero movies that get released every year now. That wasn't really a problem, though. Shane Black and Robert Downey Jr. reunited to create one of the best movies of this whole crazy Marvel enterprise, and the best action movie of the year. It's a movie that proves to people that Tony Stark is Iron Man, not the suit he wears, and does so by having him not actually wear that suit for a great deal of the running time. Along with some other diversions from what you'd expect based on the trailers, Iron Man 3 is the type of movie that could upset people who are maybe a little stuck in their ways. But I think it's exactly what Marvel needed, and has me excited to keep watching these things every time they come out.

4. Upstream Color


Shane Carruth's first film, Primer, was the essence of pure science fiction. It had a grounded take on time travel that it took very seriously, and was the basis and driving force for the entire story. Upstream Color also has an intriguing science fiction mechanism that kicks off the story, but it goes in a different direction, one that is completely human in a way I really didn't expect. Terence Malick definitely influenced Carruth, as there's a lot of dreamy, wistful sequences that resemble his work closely. But I'm not sure if I've seen Malick's style match the subject matter of his work as well as Upstream Color's does. It's at times terrifying, beautiful, haunting, mournful, and hopeful, and it has an inescapable grip that pulls you through a journey whether you want to go or not. It's kind of incredible.

3. The World's End


To me, The World's End is the best movie in the "three flavours" trilogy. Big fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz might disagree, because The World's End is not quite the pure genre exercise that those movies are (and excel at being). The World's End is secretly a character piece that uses genre (in this case, alien invasion) to explore its concepts of adulthood, addiction, friendship, and other important things, and it does a lot of it under the surface. It's also extremely funny, has Simon Pegg's best performance yet, and proves again that Edgar Wright is secretly one of the best directors of action working today. It's a god damned good movie and an excellent way to put a cap on the themes they started exploring nearly a decade ago.

2. The Wolf of Wall Street


After I saw this movie, it was sort of baffling to see that there were people who didn't get that it doesn't actually like or approve of the people or actions it depicts. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DeCaprio know they shouldn't have to rub our noses in it. Jordan Belfort and his cronies are inherently scum. They do tons of drugs, they will have sex with anyone willing, and they smugly give not a single shit while robbing people of their fortunes. The movie doesn't punish them because these people don't get punished in real life. That's the point. For crying out loud, Belfort's best buddy is married to his first cousin and starts masturbating in the middle of a party while high on Quaaludes. I'm getting away from what I wanted to say though, which is that Wolf is a great movie, and it's unfortunate that Scorsese is still having people react in exactly the wrong way after all these years. It has great acting from everyone, a great sense of humor, great pacing (three hours that feel like maybe a little over two), and... it's great. Retweets are not endorsements.

1. Gravity

Scientific accuracy is a funny thing. The closer you get to it, the more the deviations that remain feel like they could completely snap you out of the experience. Some people struggled with this in Gravity, even if they had to look up what the inaccuracies actually were afterward. But I appreciate that Gravity hewed as close to reality as possible, fudging the truth only when it was needed to make the story work. Gravity is one of the most tightly constructed and effective thrillers that has ever been made. Every big sequence is absolutely breathtaking, and the periods in between make for solid drama in bridging the gaps. The visual effects and long takes are exceptional, and at times I wondered how the hell they were doing certain things. The dialogue is a bit clunky at times, and there were a couple of places where the science probably could have been better without hurting the story. But they're very minor quibbles when you're looking at pure filmmaking that is this well done. I don't have any qualms with calling this my favorite movie of 2013.

Delayed Entry

This is the best movie that wasn't released in 2012 but I didn't see until then.

The Man From Nowhere

I'm not sure exactly why I love The Man From Nowhere so much. Well, that's kind of a lie. A big part of it is the fight scene at the end. It's seriously one of the ten best things I've ever seen in a movie. It's worth a lot. The rest of the movie is good too, though. While modern Korean cinema doesn't have the breadth of experience as Japanese movies did in their heyday, I'm still reminded of that movement when I see all of these movies by different directors with little previous experience and they all seem so good. This might be my favorite. It's sort of just a revenge movie, but a well crafted revenge movie can be a wonderful thing, and it's really a great example of what you can do with straight up genre filmmaking. Like a lot of my personal favorites, some people might not understand where I'm coming from. But what can I say. It's a great movie.

Movie Update 3

This post should catch me up with all the media I've been consuming, which would make posts in the future shorter.

Children of Men


I know director Alfonso Cuaron from creating the only Harry Potter movie I'd call good. The first two were too childish, and the last just wasn't long enough to give the story the care it deserved. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was by far the best in my opinion, it had its own style and the best supporting cast. When I heard about Children of Men, I was intrigued by the idea and liked the cast and director, so I made sure to see it.

Visually speaking, it's one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's not overloaded with expensive computer generated effects, it's just beautifully crafted. The sets and locations are all perfect for the story, and set the mood well. The framing and cinematography are just brilliant, and the whole movie is gorgeous to look at despite the gloomy backdrops. It's filled with long and excessively complex single-shot scenes, and you sometimes wonder how many countless takes it took to get them just right. These long shots aren't just impressive technically, they help contribute to the documentary feel that makes it even more harrowing. You can make legitimate comparisons to Half-Life 2 with both the dystopian setting and visual style, and that kind of helps to make me like it more. The camera work can sometimes feel kind of self-serving, but it doesn't obstruct the actual movie.

The story is fairly minimalistic, it's there and constantly pushing forward but takes a back seat to the emotional struggle of the characters in an eerily believable future we don't want to see. Clive Owen is again very good as the main character, a normal guy who's faced with protecting the future of the world. The whole cast is good, but they are all secondary to the film making that would make it a good movie even if the rest of it was garbage.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance


Another movie for class. Liberty Valance is a Western, but not a typical one. You have John Wayne as the typical rugged western hero who protects the town from evil men, but he's not the main character. That's Jimmy Stewart, a lawyer from the east who's come and is trying to change the town for the better. It's an interesting dynamic shift, and makes it interesting if only for how the genre conventions are played with. John Ford was the master of the western, and he'd done it so many times that he began playing with it just to see what he could do.

It's an entertaining movie, it's definitely not fast paced but it's one of those slower movies that manages to avoid boring you. The characters are well constructed, and it's just intriguing to see how the relationship between the two good guys plays out. The use of black and white is interesting with color being common at the time. It helps set the mood as an old western and also serves to hide the advanced age of the principal actors somewhat. Some of the twists on the genre are less fortunate than others. Most westerns basically end on a shootout, but this one keeps going for a bit after it happens. It seems weird, and it ends up making sense, but you still think it could have been handled better.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington


Hey class movie. It's James Stewart again, although over twenty years younger. I gotta say I love old movies like this, with clever, fast talking characters all over the place. It's still very funny close to seventy years later, which always has to be an accomplishment. I've actually seen a lot of the actors here in other good movies, and all of the big parts are played brilliantly. Frank Capra was much more of a theatrical director than a cinematic one, and he just lets the actors play their parts without trying to do anything too special with the camera.

Like a lot of great movies from the era, it's just as funny as a comedy without being one. The story is about a guy who wants to use his position to do some good for the country, but his path is blocked by corrupt, evil men. Instead of sitting down he fights back, and it's a great, inspirational movie that was banned in fascist countries for showing that democracy can work. I was a little disappointed by the ending, when he seems to triumph more from perseverance that an actual victory, but it's good nonetheless.

Serenity


You can't talk about Serenity without mentioning Firefly, the FOX series it finishes. Although finish is a bad word, since it's a rushed attempt to end a story way too quickly. For some reason, FOX seems to enjoy sabotaging and then canceling good shows that start with the letter F. Family Guy, Futurama, and Firefly all fell victim. Family Guy has been resurrected and is stronger than ever, although it's the least deserving, in my opinion. Things have been spotty with Futurama, but they're working on some DVD movies that will be aired as episodes on Comedy Central. Firefly got its movie, so all three got something, but Firefly got the least while deserving the most. Family Guy is completely random, and Futurama has some things going on but is still mostly just twenty minutes of jokes. Firefly's episodes stood on their own, but they were still driven by plot and character, and there are many story threads that will never get the chance they deserved to be fully explored. It's understandable, since it probably costs a lot more to do a live action sci-fi show than a cartoon, but it's still disappointing.

Anyway, the movie. Firefly is as much a western as it is science fiction, and it's a really interesting setting. The crew of Serenity speaks with a southern twang, and the dialog is a unique blend of informality and cleverness. It's as funny and smart as it is cool and action-packed, and the movie continues the tradition. Thanks to the big movie budget, the action is bigger and the special effects are more special. It allows for more impressive things to happen, and it makes the movie more epic than the show while keeping the same spirit.

It's hard not to be disappointed, but it's not the movie's fault. There just isn't enough time with one movie to do justice to the story. They do a good job filling some gaps and bring it to a respectable end, but I'll always wonder how it would have been handled if the series continued. Like the show, it's a fun, very watchable movie that definitely does more things right than George Lucas.