Year in Review: Top 10 Films of 2018

Another year is in the books, and here at Last Cinema Standing, it was a year less productive than I might have hoped. Less productive in the sense that fewer words were written and fewer films were discussed. However, I got married, traveled across Europe for the first time, explored Canada some, and never stopped going to the movies.

The cinema was there through every step of it, and though I did not check in here as I would have liked, the mission never changed: to explore the defining art of our time and to encourage interest in and enthusiasm for the artists who make it.

For this go-around, in lieu of the traditional series of top 10 lists and a sort of state of the cinema, I thought we would just jump right in with the Top 10 Films of 2018. Some may disagree – and I should like to meet them and discuss – but I felt this year was among the best in recent memory. Several masters of the form returned with beautiful new works, while many young talents announced themselves to the world with vibrant, vital pieces.

What struck me most in compiling this list was the manner in which these films reflect the many worlds that surround us, both far flung and close to home. The below filmmakers could serve as a case study in the desperate need for differing points of view and fresh perspectives – whether that be a Chinese woman reinventing the American cowboy picture or a black man changing the way we think about superheroes.

There was a time – and for many, we are still living in that time – when such voices would not have been heard on such topics. That’s a shame and a travesty. I feel sorrow for all the voices held silent throughout the years, voices that could have made conversations in and about the cinema that much more interesting and informed. However, I feel joy for the voices we will hopefully hear in the future because these filmmakers stood up and shouted above the noise, demanding to be heard. It’s a better cinema and a better world when all voices have a say.

First, five films that did not make the top 10 but which will have left an indelible mark on the year in movies no less (alphabetically): Pawel Pawlikowski’s devastating Cold War, a doomed romance that effortlessly makes the personal universal; Paul Schrader’s triumphant return to form, First Reformed, following a crisis of faith in a world in which faith holds little value; Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk, a quietly radical tale of two lovers’ strength; Bing Liu’s moving, years-in-the-making documentary of youth and young manhood, Minding the Gap; and first-time feature director Paul Dano’s searing portrait of mid-20th century family life, Wildlife.

Without further ado, Last Cinema Standing’s Top 10 Films of 2018:

10. Blindspotting, directed by Carlos López Estrada

López Estrada’s feature debut defines “blindspotting” for us as an inability to see two realities at the same time, to witness the multitudes that surround us, or to accept people for everything they are and not just the one thing we see them as. Written by and starring childhood best friends Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, Blindspotting makes a poignant case that we are all losing a piece of our humanity by refusing to engage with the humanity in others.

The film – part of an Oakland Cinema Renaissance that also featured in movies like Black Panther and Sorry to Bother You this year – casts a wide net, tackling topics as diverse as gentrification, racial profiling, the prison system, and identity. It does so with insight and ingenuity, grabbing our attention with story of ex-con Collin (Diggs) trying to make things right and holding it with an engaging exploration of the political and social realities that make that quest so difficult.

Diggs, perhaps best known for his stage work in Broadway smash Hamilton, draws you into Collin’s world and makes you feel the pain and persecution he lives with, while never letting you forget the resilience it takes to make it through the day. When the world tries to break him, it leads to a climax that is at once unexpected and perfect. Collin stands in for all those struggling to keep their heads above water while the weight of history pulls them down. The struggle is the story, and in that story are multitudes, there to see if only we chose to look.

9. First Man, directed by Damien Chazelle

Neil Armstrong’s voyage to the moon is among the defining moments of the collective human experience. It connects us all, striking at the thing inside us that demands to know what else is out there and whether we are capable of finding it. As such, it is simply shocking the story had not been made into a major motion picture, daunting as the challenge may seem. Leave it to Chazelle, then, to take the classic hero’s journey and turn it on its head.

First Man is thrill ride as character study. This is not The Right Stuff, an exhaustive historical accounting of the space program. Nor is it Apollo 13, a crowd-pleasing space flick about the power of human ingenuity and spirit. No, it is something else entirely. Coming off the $150 million-grossing La La Land, Chazelle’s latest effort was a surprise box-office failure. This, of course, says less about the film’s merit than it does about the audience’s desire for heroes to be bold and triumphs to be black and white (to say nothing of the inane flag non-controversy that dogged the film).

What the low grosses are proof of most of all, however, is the risk Chazelle took – undertaken as well by stars Ryan Gosling and Claire Foy – to tell an intimate tale of grief and loss across the backdrop of the most exciting adventure on which humankind has ever embarked. The great lead performances express all of the repression and fragility innate in these characters, trying to hold a life together while one of them travels farther from the other than any human has ever been from humanity. In the end, it turns out Chazelle was less interested in exploring that physical distance than the emotional distance between two souls and whether that gap can ever be bridged, here on earth or in the heavens.

8. Mary Poppins Returns, directed by Rob Marshall

It occurs to me how little unfettered, unabashed, all-out genuine joy many of us experience in our day-to-day lives. The world is not so peachy, and lives are hard, but it seems there must be room for joy. Never is that sense more palpable than when confronted with a pure distillation of exuberance, happiness, and, yes, joy. That is precisely what veteran musical director Marshall finds in Mary Poppins Returns.

Rare is the film that leaves you sore from smiling and happier for it. Rarer still is the film that accomplishes this without once feeling forced or false. Marshall, screenwriter David Magee, and star Emily Blunt approach the story with neither irony nor the winking snark that sours so much of today’s pop cultural landscape. Instead, the filmmakers embrace this bold, lovely tale in all its dreamy, technicolor glory, and they ask us to do the same.

The film version of Mary Poppins, that magical nanny who descends from the clouds, has always been about letting the pains and pressures that tie us down fade into the background and allowing the small pleasures to lighten and lift us up. It is a cheery message, to be sure. Some might say sappy or, worse, naïve. And maybe Mary Poppins Returns is the escapist fantasy its detractors claim it to be, but I say that is a feature, not a flaw. The sooner we can grab hold of that, the sooner we can all float on.

7. The Rider, directed by Chloé Zhao

White American men have not said all there is to say about The Western, that most American and male of genres. They have, however, said all they have to say about it – then repeated it and spit it back out ad infinitum throughout the history of the medium. It took Chinese émigré Zhao to find something new to say and, more importantly, a new way to say it.

This is a dusty, dirty tale of masculinity set in a frontier that is shrinking, in idea if not land. It is a cowboy picture of the highest order, but Zhao has no interest in the mythmaking that implies. Rather, her camera is fascinated by the hardscrabble lives of young men with few options or outlets and the rites and rituals they enact, more out of habit than desire.

With a cast populated by non-actors, all playing some version of themselves, The Rider tells the story of Brady (Brady Jandreau), who knows only one life and is one more bad accident from losing that life forever. If a rider cannot ride, who is he, the film asks. In so asking, it forces us to question how we define ourselves and those around us and what more there could be than what is there at first glance. At every turn, Zhao and her gorgeous film upend our expectations, and perhaps more impressive, they demand we set greater expectations, not only for ourselves but for the world we inhabit.

6. The Other Side of the Wind, directed by Orson Welles

The miracle of this film’s existence would be enough to make it a must-see. The long, troubled history of The Other Side of the Wind is by now common knowledge to those who would seek out such knowledge. For those wishing to know more, Morgan Neville’s superlative documentary They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead is an excellent starting point. All of this is to say to the film did not have to be a masterpiece to be magnificent, but in life, Welles could make nothing less. The same holds true in death, as the long-gone master delivers one last lesson.

Much has been said and will be said of the metatextual narrative of the film: An aging, legendary filmmaker is having trouble pulling together the financing for what would be his final film while critics and sycophants alike hover around like vultures, looking for scraps to gnaw from the carcass. But as much as we want to see Welles in his lead character, director Jake Hannaford (John Huston), the magician behind the camera is cleverer than that.

Welles weaves a shapeshifting tale of debauchery and hedonism among the Hollywood elite, an Eden overrun with sin. At the same time, he unleashes some of the most boldly satirical and astonishingly experimental filmmaking of his career in the film within the film, itself titled “The Other Side of the Wind.” What we are left with is the final document, the evidence – if there needed to be any further – of an iconoclast who pushed the boundaries of cinema right to the end and, it turns out, after as well.

5. Shoplifters, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

There have been films made before about how the best families are the families we choose. At this point, it is something of a clichéd logline. There are fewer movies – none comes to mind – about how difficult it is to keep that chosen family together. More than anything, Kore-eda, the humanist Japanese auteur, has made a film about the forces, internal and external, that pull us away from the things we need in this life.

On its face, Shoplifters does not appear to have much going on outside its central story of a family of thieves that takes in a young girl from the cold. However, in every new revelation about who these people are and what truly drives them, Kore-eda finds new meaning and new depth, which he mines for maximum empathy. It is a film of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, but it is also none of these things. We ultimately discover these are just people fulfilling that most basic of human needs: connection.

With a deft directorial hand and a storyteller’s knack for pulling you into the drama, Kore-eda, who also wrote the script, builds tension and anxiety until you fear you will jump out of your seat and leap to the screen, wishing to grab these characters and tell them someone out here cares for them. The very effortlessness with which Kore-eda communicates all of this serves as proof of just how difficult it really is. For, if were so easy to craft a gem such as this, would not we have more of them?

4. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler

There has never been a more important superhero movie than this. Some movies capture the zeitgeist. Black Panther simply is the zeitgeist. Coogler, named multiple times on this site as the best young director in the game, stands up and practically demands that title with this Afro-futurist pop fantasia that is as radical as it is crowd-pleasing. Black Panther – yes, the big-budget, comic-book behemoth – is certainly the movie of our time, but in a just cinematic universe, it would be the movie of the future as well. Every blockbuster should be so bold and brilliant.

The superhero formula – and the Marvel formula in particular – can sometimes feel like it was handed down from on high, etched into stone tablets. Coogler takes those tablets, destroys them, and rearranges the pieces into a new form that reflects not the cold calculation of a studio board room but the beating heart of an artist. With a predominantly black cast and a crew of collaborators of the kind overlooked by big Hollywood for too long, including cinematographer Rachel Morrison and costume designer Ruth E. Carter, Coogler smashes down the doors of the establishment and plants his flag.

The story of King T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and the usurper Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) is a story of African determinism and black activism dressed up in the robes of a high-tech, sci-fi shoot-‘em-up. Simply populating the world with strong, intelligent, relatable black characters would be radical enough in the history of Hollywood, but Coogler takes it the extra step further with a film that demands the viewer be actively engaged. It dares to challenge and subvert the standard narrative of all those films that look like it but could never be it. Black Panther requires your attention and your thought. And it gets it.

3. BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee

Lee picked up an honorary Oscar in 2016, a career achievement award from an Academy that had to that point failed to recognize duly any of the filmmaker’s career achievements. It is the kind of award given to artists toward the end of their careers, when their best work is behind them. How silly the Academy must feel now that Lee has produced his best film in years, a film that by all rights should be Lee’s first Best Picture nominee and earn him his long-overdue first Best Director nomination. Of course, it is not about awards. It is about respect – the respect Lee has gone too long without. Here, he garners it without compromising one bit of the vision that has made him who he is.

BlacKkKlansman is at once a buddy-cop drama, a ’60s radical picture, and a prestige period drama, all filtered through a lens that is best described only as Spike. Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) – a black man and a Jewish man – infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in a tale that if it were not true, would be impossible to believe. Lee exposes and dissects the dark heart of a nation still stained by the virulent plague of racism and which to this day, would rather look away than confront its deeply troubled past. ‘That’s a problem that existed,’ we wish to say, and Lee rebuts: ‘It is a problem that exists.’

The racist Klansmen of the film are buffoons, yes, but Lee never lets us forget they are well-connected buffoons, powerful buffoons, dangerous buffoons. It is not up for debate that the KKK is a terrorist organization that exists only to strike fear in the hearts of its enemies. Klansmen are terrorists who live here. Work here. Shop here. And march in our streets. It was true then and it is true now. And here is Lee with BlacKkKlansman, to show us how far we have not come.

2. Roma, directed by Alfonso Cuarón

Roma is a love letter to a place, a people, a history, written by the only filmmaker who could write so beautifully and so elegantly. Cuarón is hardly the first filmmaker to pen an ode to the times of his youth. On the contrary, the coming-of-age film is almost a rite of passage. This is not that, though. Cuarón is too smart a writer for that, too canny a filmmaker. With Roma, his masterpiece, he crafts a loving paean to the women who raised him, immortalizing their stories in ways the cinema has rarely seen.

Newcomer Yalitza Aparicio stars as Cleo, nanny to a wealthy family in Mexico City. Right away, we are privy to the visible and invisible class structures that define her life and the lives of those with whom she interacts. We see Cleo’s routine – she mops, she scrubs, she washes, she hangs the laundry out to dry – and we feel the rhythm of her day. All the while, the sights and sounds – oh, the sounds – of Mexico surround her and us, enveloping us and making the world of the story a fully lived in place, marked by hopes and dreams, loves and losses, life and death.

Immersion is too small a word for what Cuarón accomplishes with Roma. The film surrounds you, makes you a part of its whole, piling layer on top of layer, emotion on top of emotion, sensation on top of sensation. You are held speechless, breathless, enthralled by a new kind of cinema. Cuarón, who serves here as writer, director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, has dazzled us with his technical prowess before (Gravity and Children of Men spring to mind), but never before has he employed those gifts in service of a story this worthy. It is cinema and storytelling as high art, and with Roma, Cuarón has carved his name alongside the cinema’s foremost artists.

1. The Favourite, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

It was only a matter of time, really, before Lanthimos made the best film of the year. Every film he has made has been in contention for the title. Dogtooth was a bleak comic fable. The Lobster a moving meditation on romance and fascism. The Killing of a Sacred Deer a strange, haunting morality play. Now, finally, Lanthimos achieves full Kubrickian splendor with a daft comedy of royal intrigue that is as unabashedly entertaining as it is formally accomplished. Everything he has made has been building to this satirical haymaker that lands with the blunt force of a sledgehammer to the chest.

From a biting and brilliant script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, Lanthimos crafts a whole new kind of costume drama, one that isn’t afraid to roll around in the muck, literally and figuratively. It is the early 1700s, in the court of Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), and Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) controls the queen through sly mind games and overt sexual manipulation. Into this closed world arrives Abigail (Emma Stone), a ruthless social climber who will stop at nothing to achieve her ends. The power struggle that forms among these three women forms the basis of the wildest, most irreverent tale of the monarchy ever put to film.

Every element of the film has been fashioned to feed into the nightmare these characters have allowed to fester around them – the luxurious but tattered costumes; the fright-fest hair and makeup; the crumbling architecture of the set design; and most of all, that insane, near-fisheye camerawork that spins you like a top then stops you on a dime. Of course, it is the three-headed beast of a performance among Colman, Weisz, and Stone that ensures the film reaches its greatest potential, each actress delivering work that is by turns loony and lyrical, depraved and delectable.

From the irreverent title design onward, The Favourite is everything you could want from the cinema. It provides a sumptuous banquet for the eyes, the ears, and the mind. It is a gluttonous experience and a film filled to the brim with gluttons. Gluttons for food, power, wealth, influence, status, you name it. Lanthimos’ final trick is to show us the corrosive emptiness of getting everything you ever wanted – all it does is make you want more. And I will admit to suffering the same sin when it comes to films like this: Give me more.

Note: We will hopefully in the coming days explore the rest of 2018’s wonderful offerings, with discussions on the performances, moments, and quotes that stood out last year. The Oscar season will be fully upon us Tuesday with the announcement of the 2018 nominees, and we will be here to discuss that as well.

Last year, we got cut off in the middle of this. The goal this year is to make the workload more manageable so that it will not happen again. Let’s see how this goes. All I can promise is that I’ll be here, ready and willing, to talk about the cinema.