December 31, 2018–Year-end lists are such arbitrary business. What is the point if not to simply record the titles of favorite films as a combination declaration of personal preference, and “mass” recommendation anyway? In recent years, this very arbitrary nature is underscored by the fact that I’ve been unable to choose between the best film of the year and something that is similar in various qualities and, furthermore, I’ve frequently resorted to a “tie” for the best of the year and a close runner-up for second place. So it goes again this year, with the rest appearing alphabetically as a “top 10”, followed by a 15-way alphabetical Special Jury Prize. Ranking films in single file, perfect order has never made much sense to me; I personally don’t see how anyone can really evaluate films that way. Maybe it’s just me. Enjoy!
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The Top 10: |
1. First Reformed / BlacKkKlansman |
My two favorite films of the year were, in a sense, about issues of identity and personal representation. In two very different ways, they concerned what it means to represent certain ideologies and what occurs when those ideologies come into direct conflict with one’s actions.
Writer-director Paul Schrader’s masterpiece is a disturbing, thought-provoking, effective and affecting look at faith shooken, sanity cracked, grief and despair in an increasingly violent and unpredictable modern world – a 21st Century Taxi Driver in the best sense (after those critics who used the term for Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here this past Spring may have hyperbolized somewhat on that film). Ethan Hawke is shattering as a pastor in upstate New York who is not perfect, not even very pious, and ultimately very broken. He seeks to first help, then understand, and ultimately is seduced by the ideology of the troubled husband of a lovely young congregant (Amanda Seyfried) who is an eco-terrorist in the making. The ways in which his hopelessness, despair, anger and feelings of impending violence dovetail with the grief and frustrations of the pastor are astonishing to behold. This is a stunning film. Like Schrader’s film, the latest from Spike Lee (his most powerful and vital work since 2015’s Chi-Raq) is a hellraising firebrand of cinematic mastery depicting the true story of Detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), who in the late 70s, as a rookie in the Colorado Springs PD called up the local chapter of the KKK (represented here by The Blacklist’s Ryan Eggold, I, Tonya’s Paul Walter Hauser and a chilling Jasper Pääkkönen) and passed himself off as another redneck racist asshole. With his white (Jewish) partner (Adam Driver), he managed to create a combined image to infiltrate the Klan with and stop some racist violence, eventually even coming into contact directly with chapter director David Duke (Topher Grace, the epitome of the banality of evil). Tonally all over the place but predominantly a social commentary cum buddy comedy of sorts, Lee’s film is powerful, surprisingly entertaining and ultimately gut-punch stunning and moving. |
2. A Star is Born |
Bradley Cooper trades on his movie star cache for his directorial debut – a powerful, stunning iteration of maybe the single most remade original screenplay in cinema history (not the most durable of stories, it seems, since every iteration follows vaguely the same formulas). As Jackson Maine, a country-twinged rock star with a hard-living lifestyle to boot, Cooper goes warts and all as an alcoholic and substance-abuser who meets his match in a drag club when he falls head over heels at first sight for Ally (Lady Gaga in a star-making turn), a former waitress and amateur chanteuse of outsized talent and charm. Matthew Libatique’s nimble camera, Cooper’s confident writing and direction (which frequently recalls films such as Crazy Heart and, more recently, a couple titles on this list), and editing and music choices which occasionally recall Cooper’s work with David O. Russell (namely American Hustle, Joy and Silver Linings Playbook) all conspire with some very memorable and lovely songs of both the lively and melancholy variety to make this the definitive version of this age-old tale for our generation.
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3. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs |
Joel & Ethan Coen’s latest (their follow-up to genre mashup and Hollywood tribute/send-up Hail, Caesar!) is the duo’s gorgeous ultimate statement of personal obsession and expression: an anthology covering life in the Old West with each segment ultimately involving death. Tim Blake Nelson is the titular character in the titular first segment, a warbling gunslinger who plays a mean guitar (on horseback no less!) and rejects wholeheartedly the accusations against him of being a “misanthrope.” His deadly ability to defend himself against all comers rivals his singing, resulting in an award-worthy final song which brings a laugh to the heart and a tear to the eye. Further installments involve a bank robber (James Franco); an impresario (Liam Neeson) whose act involves a no armed young man reciting Ozymandius to dwindling audiences; a lone gold prospector (Tom Waits); a young woman (Zoe Kazan) facing the rough Oregon Trail; and finally, in something almost resembling Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, a stagecoach of strangers (Tyne Daley, Brendan Gleeson and Saul Rubinek among them) on a path to…well, I’ll leave that for you to discover. The results are frequently funny, melancholy and ultimately – quite unexpectedly – moving.
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4. The Favourite |
Yorgos Lanthimos is a visionary Greek filmmaker who may still be flying below your radar. With his latest, he takes an irreverent and playful approach to the rather static, musty old period drama. Working from a sharp, witty screenplay by Tony McNamara and Deborah Davis, and an impeccable cast, Lanthimos takes an only slightly less dry, deadpan, and darkly funnier than normal look at established systems of power dynamics and how people attempt to navigate and manipulate them. This approach has worked gangbusters in films like Dogtooth (2009), The Lobster (2016) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), and here yields his funniest and most accessible work to date. In the court of a harried, gout-ravaged, perpetually mourning Queen Anne (a stunning Olivia Colman, soon to take over similarly royal reigns on the Netflix series The Crown), her lady companion, political adviser and bed mate Sarah (Rachel Weisz) takes over in her stead, waging war with France and raising taxes on the countryside against everyone’s better judgement. Her consolidation of power becomes challenged by the recent arrival of Abigail (Emma Stone), her cousin, whom arrives seeking a job as a servant, observes, learns the ropes fast, and ultimately stakes a claim to Sarah’s place in Queen Anne’s favor. What’s ultimately quite moving: Anne proves herself, even in decline, to be quite adept – no matter how far up the ladder one gets, at the end of the day, she’s still the Queen. The film oscillates between sharp, wicked satire and bawdy, bodice-ripping period drama ala’ Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule (1996) and, in a funny way, makes for one of the year’s best times at the cinema.
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5. Game Night |
Comedy is such a subjective thing. But one can’t deny when something makes one laugh, despite themselves, and as silly and disposable and ridiculous and ultimately hilarious as this film is, I can’t deny I laughed throughout.
Slickly directed by John Francis Daley (formerly a star of TV’s beloved Freaks & Geeks) and Jonathan Goldstein (the duo teamed for the terrible 2015 reboot of National Lampoon’s Vacation, and co-wrote the Horrible Bosses movies), the film is well-made to boot. Max and Annie (Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams) are a somewhat boring married couple into extreme competition. They host a weekly game night at their home involving Lamorne Morris (of SNL) and Kyle Bunbury as a nerdy black couple, and their dumb blonde friend Ryan (a revelatory Billy Magnusson, who I’ve literally never liked before) who specializes in bringing Instagram models and girls he meets at Chipotle to fail at games like Charades. The group attempts, further, to ignore cop and next door neighbor Gary (Jesse Plemons, amping up his creepiness factor to an impressive new level), whose wife has left him and whose sole companion is a tiny white dog (also featured in Widows). When Max’s brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler), the slick, ostensibly more successful one, invites the whole group over to a house he’s renting in the area for an “epic” game night which will take the tradition “up a notch,” things go awry. To say the film delves into kidnapping, bloody violence, attempted murder, McGuffins and organized criminals with monikers like The Bulgarian and played by people like Danny Huston and Dexter’s Michael C. Hall is merely to hint at what happens. To say that the screenplay by Mark Perez is razor sharp, brilliantly plotted and fun is to attempt to do justice to just how effective this film is as something skirting black comedy. Oh, one could describe the almost Coens-esque circumstances which find characters bleeding all over a room while looking for evidence only to find themselves attempting to clean that very same white dog in the process, or troublesome efforts at removing a bullet from an arm turning more complicated and involved in the long run than one could’ve expected, but that would again only hint at what happens, without explaining the belly-laugh inducing, tears-in-the-eyes humor of it all. All the actors seem to be in their wheelhouse here, operating alongside Perez’s word play, and the way he builds up from the ground level of character rather than simple plot devices, allowing for shining moments of rapport for Magnusson’s idiotic Ryan, who finally brings along a “smart girl,” the Irish Sharon Horgan as Sarah, and hilarious impressions and paranoia on the part of Morris, and some great Bateman-isms as the would-be “smartest guy in the room.” This is, simply, the funniest film I saw all year by a mile. |
6. Hereditary |
No film I saw in 2018 was more disturbingly affecting than this astonishing horror debut from writer-director Ari Aster.
The film begins with an outsized obituary and a note of profound dread. In its tale of the Graham family, a fairly nondescript suburban brood who begin mourning the recent loss of their grandmother only to end the film in a bloody shriek of terror which had been largely psychological throughout, only to give way to a batshit insane finale, I found a distressing amount of things to relate to in my personal life. This got under my skin. The results are a hair-raising, nerve-wracking, heart-pounding domestic drama turned supernatural horror thriller featuring an astonishing award-worthy Toni Collette and Alex Wolff as her son (featuring pretty amazing newcomer Milly Shapiro as the troubled daughter, Gabriel Byrne as the husband and Ann Dowd to boot). Did my hair feel like it turned white while standing on end in the last half hour or so? Yes. Did my heart pound through my chest first in dread and then fear throughout? Yes. But that’s not why I connected with this on a deep, profoundly personal level. That takes a longer explanation… I’ve likened it in the past to living in The Shining. What I felt in this film, was a similarly inexplicable feeling of sudden mental and spiritual collapse on the part of first Collette, then her entire family, and the question of whether one is doomed to their pre-prescribed fate or if anything can be done at all. As theatrical experiences go, it will stick with me a long time. |
7. Lean on Pete / Leave No Trace |
Two of the year’s best films concerned those on the periphery of society, skirting the impoverished layers having fallen through the cracks, just outside my hometown of Portland, Oregon. The first, the thoughtful latest from writer-director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Weekend) adapts the novel by Willy Vlautin and concerns a young man (Charlie Plummer from All the Money in the World) who attempts to escape a fraught home life, evading the child wellfare system by running away. He soon finds a summer job working for a horse trainer (Steve Buscemi) and falls for the titular leading racehorse, fading in quality of life by the second. Things inevitably go sour, and our hero must run away again, attempting to make his way through a virtually indifferent world. Comparisons to Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (2008) are understandable. The results are profoundly moving, ultimately shattering even.
The second film in the year’s duo, another “made in Oregon” dramatic narrative with the attention to detail of a documentary, this film from writer-director Debra Granik (Down to the Bone, Winter’s Bone) concerns a homeless father (Ben Foster, continuing a promising career after bank robbery neo-Western thriller Hell or High Water a couple years back) and his daughter (astonishing newcomer Thomasin McKenzie) living on the fringes on public land (Forest Park in Portland’s outskirts) illegally, attempting to carve out some semblance of an existence. She is longing for something resembling a “normal” life for a thirteen-year-old as she cares for her PTSD-afflicted survivalist father, a homeless vet without any access to proper mental health treatment. One false move, and the authorities and bureaucracy will crash their world down around them. Stunning in the quiet way it sneaks up and floors you. It’s profoundly moving stuff. |
8. Mandy |
Let’s be honest. Nicolas Cage has made some poor choices in recent years. Whether they be personal or professional, Cage’s box office cache has been dwindling for some time now, but when he’s on fire, he’s on fire. For every virtually direct-to-video bargain basement piece of excrement the actor has headlined in recent years (here’s looking at you, The Humanity Bureau, 211, Looking Glass – and that’s just this year!), there’s a great, powerful, over-the-top bit of scenery chewing balanced by pathos to admire. When given the right material, married to a filmmaker of singular vision who’s willing to meet him on his own terms and give him the freedom to do what he does best, however, the star is peerless in today’s world of safe, cookie-cutter performances and shameless award-bait.
Panos Cosmatos’ film then, Cage’s latest, is as fearless as its star in its willingness to sail right over the top into sheer unadulterated madness and never ever look back. It’s also a dark, twisted fairy tale of mythic proportions with all the stylish rigor of a heavy metal album. |
9. Widows |
The latest from the British born art school grad turned filmmaker behind Hunger, Shame and 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen) is something he’s never done before – a thoughtful, artful thriller from Lydia La Plante’s 1983-85 TV series about a group of Chicago wives (led by an electric Viola Davis, including Michele Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki and finding powerful supporting roles for Carrie Coon and Cynthia Ervo) grieving the losses of their husbands during a heist gone wrong (Liam Neeson, Joe Bernthal and others fill out the male side of things) who must deal with a pair of corrupt, cutthroat black politician brothers’ vengeance (including Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya and Brian Tyree Henry) and the white son (Colin Farrell) of an Alderman (Robert Duvall) running against them for the position who has his own skin in the game. A crackerjack, fascinating, thoughtful thriller about race, politics, survival and above all grief, it grabs you from the first sequence and doesn’t let go.
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10. You Were Never Really Here |
Lynne Ramsay’s latest (following Ratcatcher, Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin) is another exploration of a troubled psyche. Joaquin Phoenix is Joe, an Iraq war vet now dealing with PTSD and suicidal ideations while acting as a violent mercenary for hire who must attempt to rescue a missing girl. Gorgeous, brutal and fascinating, the film has correctly drawn apt comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) for its depiction of an outlaw doing bad things for good reasons and dealing with his anger, fear and paranoia in a modern, “civilized” society which has seemingly left him behind. A compelling double bill (however unlikely it may seem) could be made of this and Leave No Trace.
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Runners-up |
At film festivals, juries often award a Special Jury Prize to a film that did not win first place and yet is strongly advocated by some of the jury members. It’s kind of a minority report. This year my own Special Jury Prize is shared by 15 films, some of which did not reach the audiences they deserved. In a lesser year, any of these would be in the first tier. |