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By Roderick Heath

2018 was a tough year.

I lost my father this year. My partnership with Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films came to an end, a rather gentler and less wrenching if still saddening end for an era. Too often the zeitgeist felt like a practical joke where everyone was the sucker. Watching things we love crack up and fail has seemed a little too often like the new state of things. Hell, the year’s biggest hit movie, Avengers: Infinity War, ended with half the universe exterminated. Granted, that’ll probably be reversed in the next movie, and yet it sat heavily with me when I realised my father, who always loved zoning out with the Marvel films, will never see it.
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But 2018 also saw some new beginnings, including the founding of my new site, Film Freedonia. The year’s movies often betrayed a pensive, roiling, deeply uneasy sensibility but often underscored with guttering expectation, perfectly in tune with such a backdrop. Many films spoke to a general hunger for justice and renewal. One major connective theme of 2018’s cinema meditated upon shambolic figures who find themselves at the mercy of fate at once leviathan-like but also often informed by seemingly trivial signifiers – a motif that connects a film as massive as Avengers: Infinity War and as rarefied as Lucrecia Martel’s Spanish Colonial tale Zama. The moment of crisis is one of the basic lynchpins of drama of course, but this year in particular the theme of imminent reckoning became a constant, unavoidable topic in movies – the moment when fair weather suddenly and cruelly ceases and for insular structures of families, friends, common causes, and communities, when agreed mutual fictions and sustaining myths must be abandoned and raw truths confronted if anything is to be salvaged. Such fulcrums were found in tales as diverse as Support The Girls, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Disobedience, The Party, The Rider, Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Black Panther, Colette, Blockers, The Endless, Bad Times at the El Royale, Double Lover, Cargo, The Ritual, Braven, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Breath, First Reformed, The Commuter, A Star Is Born, Widows, The Death of Stalin, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, The Kindergarten Teacher, and on and on. Hell, even ‘70s drop-in The Other Side of the Wind managed to fit in. Some, like Roma and Vox Lux, depicted mean scenes of personal reckoning but hinted at larger cultural moments still to come.
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This year I found myself growing frustrated with a dominant mode of realism celebrated in current cinema, where a certain droning, one-note experience was too often had, laden with a kind of false subtlety, and more attracted to films that attempted to capture states of mind and zones of interior fantasy and experience. Much-praised works like Roma, First Man, The Rider, Leave No Trace, The Guardians, and others featured fastidious depictions of exterior reality, but on close inspection their drama was familiar, even a bit trite. Roma and The Guardians for instance both revolved around quasi-saintly, servile female characters used and abused by the clans they’re attached to, scarcely evolved from types you’d find in Victorian fiction and silent films. More interesting, if not always more successful, were the spasms of creative flux and floundering expression apparent in movies like the scabrous surrealism of Sorry to Bother You, or the dreaming zones of On Body and Soul, the multitudinous layerings of Ready Player One. Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman wrestled not only with racial consciousness and real history but with pop culture modes as signifiers of substance. The Strange Ones tried to depict the world from the viewpoint of a damaged young mind, where reality becomes a splintered and nebulous thing. All were movies that tried to wrestle with complex ways of knowing self and others
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The makings of stardom and general heroism came under close scrutiny. Films like A Star is Born, Vox Lux, Bohemian Rhapsody, Colette, and Mary Shelley considered artistic fame and success as fields of violent and sometimes fatal contest despite their general reputation for being removed from gritty realities. Movies like Black Panther, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Red Sparrow, Tomb Raider, and The 15:17 To Paris, looked at protagonists who must fight tooth and nail to become the men and women they hope to be, and a telling number of “fun” films, including Black Panther, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Bad Times at the El Royale, and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, revolved around watching friends, doppelgangers, and loved-ones make unconscionable choices based in understandable if not condonable reasons. One unifying interest in several of the year’s comedies was a basic template of fretful, middle-aged people contending with their own unruly appetites whilst still trying to function as nominally mature entities, for the sake of those entrusted to their care, be it children or society at large.
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Kay Cannon’s Blockers was particularly interesting in this regard as it contended with reactionary impulses amongst the officially equable and aware modern brand of parent out in the swanky suburbs, and it managed to generate some real laughs amidst musings on what it’s like to be both a parent and a young adult today. The trouble was, the film cut itself off from the sexual anxiety that was fuel for its premise and so had to generate increasingly absurd and strained situations to justify itself. Terrific comic performances, particularly from Leslie Mann, helped a lot. Stephan Elliott’s Swinging Safari looked back to the 1970s milieu of Australian suburbia as a rambunctious Eden, and considered the opposite problem of kids adrift when parents exist within a bubble of self-interest. Elliott’s outlandish stew had moments, but it never knew when to quit or throttle off. Sally Potter’s The Party explored the crack-up of New Age mores in the face of a treacherously enticing promise from an unseen temptress, standing in for a fickle audience of voters and viewers; Potter’s wickedly funny script and trenchant camerawork instilled what might have been a minor exercise, a tribute to a very arch mode of theatre, with real cinematic meaning. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein’s Game Night felt agreeably reminiscent of a breed of shambling ‘80s comedies about everyday folk thrust far out of their comfort zone as it sent a crew of flaky gamers into the night to solve a mystery they think a mere fun exercise but turns out to involve real danger and crime. The film delivered a fun night at the movies thanks to snappy acting, particularly from Jesse Plemons as a discomforting cop neighbour, and Cliff Martinez’s vibrant electronic score exacerbated the ‘80s vibe. Trouble was, the script got too clever by half and what could have been a freewheeling outing kept tripping over its own feet.
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For comedy that tried to maintain a more authentic and quotidian vibe, Claire Scanlon’s Set It Up and Andrew Bujalski’s Support The Girls each tried to marry shambolic indie flick energy with slick, conventional appeal. Both studied small communities consisting of the self-exploited, in the former the overworked minions of New York office culture, the latter the young lovelies and their frazzled mother hen working in a Texas boobs-and-sports bar. Scanlon’s film sported fun performances and jolts of brazen humour, particularly from the ever-promising Zoe Deutch, but the film semi-accidentally made the case that none of these company creeps actually deserved love. Bujalski’s entry lacked the intricate humour and originality of his previous work and rambled on a bit, but its ripe, open humanism and liking for its characters were refreshing. Bujalski’s mumblecore fellow Aaron Katz made his own methodical play to go Hollywood without losing the vibe of his no-budget work with Gemini, a moody, sinuous, multifaceted send-up of celebrity culture that doubled as a parable for its own making, accumulating the paraphernalia of a traditional thriller much as its heroine dons the garb of a noir heroine, trying to work out how all the pieces fit together.
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Boots Riley’s Sorry To Bother You stood up for a more aspiring wing of comedy, and provided a shot of absurdist satire with a specifically black perspective, following Lakeith Stanfield’s antihero from garage-dwelling loser to wealthy telemarketer thanks to his talents at “white voice,” and finding himself an imminent tool in a plot by Armie Hammer’s loony corporate boss to foster a race of half-horse, half-human slave workers. Riley’s comic conceits were occasionally genuinely brilliant, like a central scene where the hero cynically improvises a rap verse that goes over a treat, and the film felt reminiscent in its ambitions of classics like O Lucky Man! and The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer as a scattershot takedown of an entire cultural moment. But Riley’s direction and script were both highly erratic, stumbling over dull conventions like Tessa Thompson’s girlfriend of articulate conscience and a unionising subplot, and badly dispelled its impact through over-length.
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Nick Park, one of the most creative filmmakers around, nonetheless proved that even he can have an off day with Early Man, a jokey prehistoric mini-epic that both teased and honoured the familiar underdog sports drama; whilst littered with Park’s usual ingenious figments, particularly his lovable menagerie of animals, nonetheless the result felt underdeveloped in too many regards, and the subject matter, football, proved ill-matched to Park’s usually dazzling instincts for action staging. Wes Anderson offered his own stop-motion animated film, in the style of his best to date, Fantastic Mr Fox, for Isle of Dogs, a parable for scapegoating wrapped up in a self-satirising Japonaise edition of Anderson’s picture book style. The lack of a solid basis like Roald Dahl was telling this time, leaving Anderson leaning even more heavily on pure aesthetic than usual for an occasionally droll if very minor exercise.
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2018’s crop of horror cinema continued the momentum the genre’s had in the past few years, performing well at the box office and galvanising filmgoers, although some of the more trumpeted efforts of the year felt bizarrely overinflated in rhetoric. John Krasinski’s mass audience-friendly A Quiet Place proved a fun exercise in gimmicky tension in depicting a rural family battling sound-sensitive monstrosities: Krasinki proved himself a surprisingly dab hand at staging thrills but the script was far too evasive when it came to providing logic and context. Ari Aster’s Hereditary aimed higher in both style and theme, depicting a family beset by awful events that prove to have a secret, incredibly malevolent unity. Aster’s filmmaking was intricate but onerous, his attempt to create a bleak parable for family secrets and the predestination of genetics big on laboured visual metaphors but short on convincing writing and detailed characterisations. Michael and Peter Spierig’s Winchester flew the flag for the old-fashioned haunted house rollick, building a story around an authentic location, the house built by the heiress to the Winchester firearms fortune (Helen Mirren). But the film proved flimsy and absurd on just about every conceivable level, failing to do any justice to its fascinating basis.
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Gary Bruckner’s The Ritual, a loose adaptation of a well-received novel, followed a well-trod path into the spooky woods it sent a bunch of urban twats out into the Scandinavian wilds to meet an ancient monstrosity and a perverted cult. Bruckner’s happy embrace of genre convention was at once limiting and faintly vexing given the more original pitch of its source, but also proved by the end a bit of a relief in comparison with the year’s more exhaustingly self-serious horror flicks, as it worked up genuine tension and sustained it to the very end. Post-modern freaks Justin Benson and Aaron Moorehead returned with their third feature, The Endless, casting themselves as twin brothers who feel compelled to return to the bizarre, cultish setting of their youth and find themselves confronted by segmented pockets of time and causality reigned over by an invisible, sadistic entity. The filmmakers cleverly augmented the meaning of their previous outings (including a salutary revisit to Resolution), but the human level of their drama remained sketchy, and the film kept blindly poking about hoping a tone would stick.
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An Australian entry in the zombie apocalypse stakes, Cargo, saw another collaborating duo, Yolande Ramke and Ben Howling, employ Martin Freeman’s specific everyman pluck in a tale of a solitary father trying to save his infant daughter from a cruel landscape. The attempt to adapt a very well-worn model to comment upon localised racial and environmental concerns honoured the Romero debt, but were never properly thought through and failed to mesh with the maudlin reflexes of the main story: the result grew tedious on the way to a finale that played like a parody of Woke cinema. Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane was bolder in extending its director’s recent penchant for interposing twisty, straightforward thrills with overt social issue-raising, tracking Claire Foy’s uptight heroine as she finds herself under the thumb of both a greedy institution and a ruthlessly controlling stalker turned nurse. The result wasn’t subtle and the choice of shooting the whole thing on an iPhone made for an occasionally grating, inflexible visual style, and yet it still built up a surprising charge of grimy excitement, proving perhaps finally that Soderbergh is at his best when he’s at his trashiest.
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Former Saw mastermind Leigh Whannell presented a new venture in low-down genre thrills with Upgrade, unfolding in the blurry margin between body horror and sci-fi. The product played as an update of a ‘80s Cannon Films video shelf filler, as its hero (Logan Marshall-Green), paralysed in the same vicious attack that also killed his wife, forms a symbiotic relationship with the AI installed in his body to help him walk again and setting out for revenge, only to find he’s being used. Upgrade was moderately engaging whilst unfolding, but bland performances and a strangely detached, ugly tone retarded hoped-for high spirits, even before the gracelessly cynical ending. Similar in theme and lexicon of influences if vastly different in approach, Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy was a far more arresting if also more heedlessly monolithic work, unleashing Nicolas Cage in a trippy alternate universe 1980s to battle demon bikers and malignant cultists whilst avenging his murdered wife. Genuinely strange, wild, and beautiful in a junk-art manner, it proved one of the most unique films of recent years.
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Steven S. DeKnight took over the Pacific Rim imprimatur with Pacific Rim: Uprising, subbing for Guillermo Del Toro who was presumably too busy making his Oscar and his Godzilla figurine fight it out in the bath tub. The sequel’s deliberately more naïve, youth audience-friendly tilt and DeKnight’s plainer visual approach meant it wasn’t as gaudy an entertainment as the original, but it still proved a decent piece of ridiculous fun, with a couple of neat twists and a finale that paid pure tribute to its roots in old Toho monster movies. Alex Garland returned for his second directorial outing with Annihilation, adapting Jeff VanderMeer’s acclaimed novel trilogy into a would-be mind-bending exercise where the psyche and the physical blend in bizarre and dynamic ways. Unfortunately, Annihilation merely confirmed Garland knows nothing about cinema, proffering a lumbering exercise in dingy-looking pseudo-profundity, embarking on a trek that ripped off several better films before arriving at a lightshow finale that aimed to inspire cosmic awe but only inspired extreme boredom.
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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald saw director David Yates and writer J.K. Rowling return with the second instalment of the prequel pentalogy set in Rowling’s Wizarding World, with introverted hero Newt Scamander contending with his heartier brother and other confounding human relationships whilst trying to stop the ascent of charismatic fascist Grindelwald. The instalment proved aggravatingly lumpy, betraying Rowling’s inexperience as a screenwriter to an excruciating degree and neglecting the best aspects of the first film. But eventually it got to an interesting keynote regarding good and terrible choices in life and political adherence based in the amount and kind of pain one’s suffered, and Eddie Redmayne and Johnny Depp gave sure performances playing perfectly contrasting antagonists. Anders Walter’s I Kill Giants went for a variety of magic realism reminiscent of the kinds of ‘80s fantasy movies young folk have fallen in love with through home viewing ever since, depicting a smart and disdainful adolescent who escapes harsh reality into a fantasy life so intense it borders on lunacy. Madison Wolfe confirmed she’s an actor to watch with her vehement playing of a spiky, troubling heroine, but the film around her proved too insistent and unsubtle and excessively indebted to directors like Spielberg and Del Toro, without any of their sense of intimate detail or storytelling savvy.
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Roar Uthaung’s Tomb Raider and Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story were both surprisingly good extensions of hallowed franchises, and both were relatively, sadly neglected by the mass audience they courted and served so well, telling tales of formative escapades for famed adventurers, with Alicia Vikander and Alden Ehrenreich filling a decent percentage of their predecessors’ very large shoes. Tomb Raider managed the faint-praise task of proving the best video game adaptation ever with its lean and intelligently restrained action sensibility, although it should have doubled down on its best impulses. Solo: A Star Wars Story proved that sometimes a sober, smart, experienced professional behind the camera can outpace showy tyros. Manhunt, John Woo’s belated return to the sort of hard-charging pulp fiction he made his name with three decades ago, proved a heady melange of Hitchcockian thriller, sci-fi-tinted social conscience tale, and straight-up Woo shoot-’em-up; the product was absurd and awkwardly acted in three languages, and yet I’ll be damned if it wasn’t a blast all the same.
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Lin Oeding’s Braven took on a weary action movie formula, if with the beguiling contemporary twists of offering up a family of protagonists where everyone’s a badass. The notion of staging an action film on such a homey, intimate scale was a good one, but the film kept hurting itself by not sticking to that brief. Christian Gudegast’s Den of Thieves flew the flag for hardboiled cops-and-robbers fare as it pitted a nefarious team of former soldiers turned bank raiders against Gerard Butler’s ornery rogue detective, with O’Shea Jackson Jnr as the low-rent criminal apparently caught between the two camps. The film had the right idea in serving up a desperately-needed shot of bloody urban action, and it promised an interesting portrait of warring subcultures and streetwise protocols. Sadly, it was beset by a plot that belonged in an Ocean’s film and far too much cliché macho posturing in the meantime. Speaking of which, Gary Ross served up an extension of the Ocean’s series with Ocean’s 8, with a driving idea right out of 1966 in putting together – get this! – an all-female team of thieves. Fun work from Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter, both making fun of their popular images with gusto, kept things modestly engaging. Hard not to notice, however, a fascinating lack of proper dramatic complication or real stakes in the drama, as if the film, under its frothy façade, was actually sustaining a subtly sexist notion that women can’t face a real challenge or danger, and a script that gave most of its entirely overqualified cast far too little to do.
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The Commuter was another essay in pressure-cooker situational action from Jaume Collet-Serra, pressing Liam Neeson into service again as a weary but able hero, this time on a train where he comes under the thumb of some villains who want him to kill an enigmatic passenger. The signposted class politics and late middle-age fretfulness promised new dimensions to a well-worn template, but were cancelled out by the need to keep the plot swerving. Script and handling were both way too formulaic and artificial, and the film urgently needed more of Vera Farmiga’s expertly galling voice of doom. Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary couldn’t even manage to provide solid Saturday night streaming fodder, holding out the promise of some flashy-trashy thrills in casting Taraji P. Henson as a hitwoman, but Najafi’s flavourless direction exacerbated a tediously generic product. Ted Geoghegan’s neo-western Mohawk at least had the virtue of wielding some great ideas and some riskiness to its historical perspective, as it portrayed a valiant female Mohawk warrior living in a ménage-a-trois with a brother brave and an English agent provocateur, taking on a party of ruthless Yankee warriors during the war of 1812. But hamfisted direction and a tinny, repetitive script meant it eventually degenerated into an overripe bore.
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When it came to the kind of big, immodest, special-effects driven spectacle you look for in Hollywood cinema, 2018 was a damn limp year. John Turteltaub’s The Meg set out with a simple mission: unleash a giant man-eating shark upon hapless submariners and swimmers for bloody hayhem and malicious entertainment. And it still managed to screw it up, unfolding with incredible blandness and perfunctory plotting, without any sense of how to use its monstrous enemy. Only one good phobic image, of the behemoth staring at a child through a wall of plexiglass as an impersonation of childhood nightmare, made it at all worthwhile. Shane Black returned to old stomping grounds as he took over a franchise he acted in way back in 1987, to make The Predator, a misshapen mutt of a movie sporting salty Black dialogue in spades and some fun performances, particularly from Olivia Munn. But the film’s tortured production proved very evident in a final product that never quite found its groove in pace or style, moving spasmodically through some half-chewed ideas and patchy action scenes.
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Deadpool 2 saw Ryan Reynolds now co-scripting as well as starring, evolving his smart-mouthed antihero into the personification of the internet, a one-man machine for snarky memes, callbacks, flames, and smarmy sentiment. The vehicle about him attempted a balancing act that was always going to be difficult, employing straight-arrow John Wick and Atomic Blonde helmsman David Leitch for action movie cred for a film that tried nonetheless to offer perhaps the most aggressively mocking deconstruction of a pop culture blueprint since the days of certain Swinging ‘60s lampoons, but desperately lacking their jaunty charm or panache. Star Josh Brolin dominated Deadpool 2 by playing his part completely straight, just a couple of months after doing the same thing in Marvel’s crowning colossus, Avengers: Infinity War. Speaking of Marvel, that studio’s domination of the box office epoch reached a new height with the astounding success of Black Panther and Infinity War just behind it, one powered on by its uniqueness as a cultural phenomenon as a tailored Woke blockbuster, and the other drawing on the momentum of the entire series. Black Panther was merely okay, save a rowdy car chase sequence mid-film and a potent performance from Michael B. Jordan as a villain whose smouldering sense of injustice encapsulated an entire sociological moment. The film’s status as a fanfare for the possibility of a black blockbuster sensibility was worth honouring but the minutiae of its efforts bore little scrutiny.
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By comparison, Avengers: Infinity War was widely criticised for being crammed to the gunwales, but that’s precisely what made it such a blast for me, the comic book movie’s moment of Neroesque excess that had the balls to leave its audience hanging like no movie ever has before, and stands as underrated despite its success for the way it made Brolin’s archvillain the propelling figure rather than all those pesky outmatched twerps in tights. Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man and the Wasp had the misfortune of looking rather shrunken (sorry) in contrast. Some find this branch of the Marvel universe the most personable and engaging, and I had some sympathy for that after the first Ant-Man, but this one I found almost torturously lacking when it came to plot, action, and repartee; only Hannah John-Kamen as a pain-wracked antagonist who could teleport at will wielded real spunk. Ava DuVernay returned after her potent work on Selma for a much-hyped leap into big-budget fantasy with a Disney-sponsored version of Madeleine L’Engle’s beloved book A Wrinkle in Time. Not perhaps since Heaven’s Gate has a follow-up to an admired hit seen a director’s stock drop so sharply, but by contrast with that flopped masterpiece, A Wrinkle in Time proved was rather the spectacle of talent gone screamingly generic and bland, toneless in script and performing, strangled by a would-be empowering gloss, with DuVernay’s direction at once fidgety and lumbering. And that’s before we even got to the attack of the fifty-foot glitter Oprah.
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J.A. Bayona stepped behind the camera for another venerable franchise extension with Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom, in which Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard returned as Owen and Claire to save their beloved dinosaurs from their exploding island, only to find themselves yet again the fools of corporate malice. Bayona’s strong dose of imported horror movie and dark nursery rhyme imagery, and a couple of plot twists with potential, brought this property to the brink of new territory, but it all still felt far too familiar and enervating, neglecting its real dinosaurs for yet another genetic chimera and wrapping up with a seen-it-all-before game of chase and chomp. Christopher McQuarrie reteamed with Tom Cruise and company for Mission: Impossible – Fallout, yet another go-round for the IMF adventurers that tried to offer closure for some dangling loose ends from previous entries. As usual for this series, the entry was zippy, well-made, and still absent any true personality, its characters still placeholders despite the attempts to provoke nostalgia. Surprisingly, or not depending on your viewpoint, by far the year’s best event movie was Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, a project couched in an unpromising basis, cataloguing tropes of ‘80s and ‘90s nerd culture, but which turned out to be only incidentally such a fetishist totem, with its inexhaustible director both lampooning and extending his own impact on pop culture.
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Francis Lawrence’s Red Sparrow showcased Jennifer Lawrence, improbably cast with her Crossfit build as a ballerina who turns to espionage at the encouragement of her Putin-lookalike uncle, in what seemed like a determined attempt by Lawrence to cast off her down-home sweetheart aura. The film’s lengthy, sleazy discursions to a “whore school” for spies proved something of a miscue in promising a ruthlessly kinky psychosexual escapade, and eventually revealed it had no game at all beyond a stock-standard tale of spy deceptions and divided lovers. Drew Goddard aimed someplace between fake Tarantino and devolved Robert Altman for Bad Times at the El Royale, a labyrinthine thriller unfolding at a depopulated hotel on the California-Nevada border in the late 1960s. Goddard’s busy intersection of characters and their attendant mystiques kept accumulating rather than enriching, and ultimately felt like plotline bingo. That said, the film sported some strikingly well-directed sequences and a terrific roster of performances, but only when Chris Hemsworth’s swaggering pseudo-Manson cult leader entered the scene did the film really find a focal point.
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Sibling filmmakers Eshom and Ian Nelms made Small Town Crime, a riff blending aspects of character drama and film noir, portraying a screw-up former cop, played in a perfect star turn by John Hawkes, embarking on a quixotic attempt to solve the murder of the girl he finds dumped by the roadside. The familiarity of the recovering drunk angle and neat obedience to basic genre precepts kept results modest, but within such limits the film proved one of the year’s quieter successes. Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds also juggled familiar tropes, if in a more unusual manner, depicting a pair of young women bound together by a common detachment from the usual laws of empathy and responsibility in a well-to-do environment where psychopathy might be an evolutionary advantage. The film proved too hermetic to really bloom as a pitch-black comedy-thriller, but it did find strange pathos in characters bewildered and exiled by their lack of humanity. Beirut saw one-time indie tyro Brad Anderson taking on a Tony Gilroy script, with Jon Hamm playing a former American diplomat forced to negotiate with the byzantine dramas of Lebanon during the prolonged and vicious civil war, trying to lay his own tragic past to rest at the same time. Good work from Hamm and Rosamund Pike as a roguish CIA agent kept the film buoyed, yet couldn’t paper over the fact Gilroy’s written the same movie about a world-weary wheeler-dealer over a few too many times, and the seemingly pertinent backdrop eventually felt incidental.
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Steve McQueen ventured into more mainstream climes for his first feature since his Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, with his big screen adaptation of Lynda La Plante’s admired 1980s TV series Widows, transplanted from England to Chicago. This film theoretically had everything: a meaty story, a great cast, and a top director, with a seam of intersectional angst to mine in following a gang of patronised criminals’ wives band together to outwit their foes and pull off a big score. But the result was perhaps the year’s most grinding disappointment, with characters who resolutely failed to become interesting, stakes that utterly fizzled in a rushed finale, and pretentions to sociological depth far too familiar. Only a couple of almost incidental elements, like Daniel Kaluuya’s sadistic goon and Robert Duvall’s mean old-school patriarch, galvanised at all. Blue Ruin and Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier and actor-writer Macon Blair returned with Hold the Dark, a bleak and savage tale in which Jeffrey Wright’s aging, alienated wolf expert travels to Alaska to hunt down a rogue animal at a young widow’s request only to find very different monsters are at large, in a film that eventually became an odd, antiheroic spin on First Blood. The director-writer duo revealed expanding creative horizons in their attempts not only to fuse genres but work in unexpected reference points, including a weird and unsettling nod to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, and political allegory, as the corrosive effects of social neglect on the home front and traumatising warfare combine to create several cold and well-matched killers. The lashings of portent, complete with constant suggestions of supernatural menace and threats to segue into horror, nonetheless highlighted the filmmakers’ confused intentions, and the result proved more intriguing than substantial.
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Much less grave and far more entertaining, Double Lover saw Francois Ozon bounce back from a recent spell of half-hearted movies with a psychodrama outing, employing muse Marine Vacth as an anxious young woman drawn into an affair with the aggressive twin brother of her kindly therapist fiancé, only to soon find all reality becoming blurred. Ozon had a ball using the feverish storyline, taken from a Joyce Carol Oates story, as an excuse for erotic provocations, including a hilarious fantasy of threesomes and twincest, and his visuals were often genuinely delirious, even if the film finally became a bit too silly and excessive to truly unnerve or add to more than a lark. Paul Feig stepped away from broad farceur duties to take a tilt at his own kind of droll domestic thriller with A Simple Favor, pitting Anna Kendrick’s Pollyannaish working mom against Blake Lively’s self-invented existential antiheroine. The project had potential as a partial send-up-cum-fantasy rewrite of the likes of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train with a number of interesting ideas on the simmer. Feig proved utterly incapable of sustaining a tone or structuring a thriller, however, and only Lively’s strident performance made results watchable.
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Clint Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris was the venerable auteur’s latest exploration of true-life heroism, in this case the three young American friends and patriots who successfully foiled a terrorist attack on a train, but this time Eastwood seemed finally set on moulding himself to the commonly deployed caricature of his efforts, wielding atrocious, conservative base-pleasing screenwriting and flimsy acting to dress up his tawdry insights. By contrast, Nicolai Fuglsig’s 12 Strong was a stab at making a cool, clean-cut war movie, depicting a Special Forces team forging an alliance with Afghan allies in the early days of the US-led war there. The corny Taliban villain didn’t entirely detract from Fuglsig’s otherwise surprisingly textured, atmospheric, good-looking filmmaking, and it finished up one of the few superior War on Terror-era films. Following his showy but shallow 2016 musical La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s First Man set out to depict one of modernity’s great events, the Moon landing, and the man at its heart, Neil Armstrong, in a biopic packed with sombre gravitas as it explored the way unspoken grief and emotional repression helped and hindered Armstrong in his titanic venture. Chazelle’s depiction of extreme physical straits through attentive filmmaking was persuasive. Nonetheless he foundered rather badly when it came to getting into his hero’s head, revealing himself as too temperamentally at odds with such a character to grasp it and too determined a showman to let it be, and so fell back on hackneyed devices to wring an acceptable Hollywood arc out of the drama.
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Spike Lee returned to find the times suddenly attuned again to his specific brand of sociologically attentive drama as he offered up BlacKkKlansman, an adaptation of former FBI agent Ron Stallworth’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Occasional flourishes confirmed Lee’s greatness as a stylist hasn’t entirely waned, and the film was at its best when playing out like a demented sitcom about self-creation through role-playing. But even after bolstering the material with imaginary characters and invented action, the story was thin, and I found Lee’s attempts to be simultaneously larkish and trenchant often cancelled each-other out. The more overt agitprop touches, like an interlude depicting diverse reactions to The Birth of a Nation and a coda leading into the Charlottesville riots, proved more successful than the film’s scanty attempts to analyse white nationalism, without much to say about the phenomenon beyond rednecks gonna redneck, and Lee’s greatest gifts, for dynamically portraying both personality and culture in flux, remained frustratingly scattershot. Actor Joel Edgerton made another foray into directing with Boy Erased, an adaptation of a memoir of a young gay man’s excruciating experiences weathering religiously-informed therapy intended to turn him straight, and fight to make his religious parents accept him whilst blowing the whistle on the sordid subculture. Intelligent performances from Lucas Hedges and Russell Crowe gave the film some meat, although Edgerton’s direction felt rather laborious at points.
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Jason Reitman returned with a movie perfectly on brand for his variety of vaguely topical, vaguely highminded pseudo-drama, The Front Runner, depicting Gary Hart’s collapse in the 1988 Presidential race in the face of media-fuelled innuendo about his private life. The film was initially absorbing with Hugh Jackman acquitting himself well in the lead, but finally proved little more than succession of pretences towards analysing the meaning of the event without a guiding principle, apart from generalities about growing media venality, and wouldn’t get to grips with the feeling Hart was destroyed as much by his own stiff-necked self-righteousness as anything else. Afghani director Haifaa al-Mansour took on the early life of Mary Shelley, with Elle Fanning playing the heroine on her path from the daughter to wife of radical thinkers before achieving her own revolutionary coup in publishing her epic parable Frankenstein. Fanning was good in the part and the movie pretty, but the numbing script made sure to make Mary mouth great hunks of modern-day critical discourse and moral repudiation of the sometimes injurious behaviour art and passion made her a party to.
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In another literary biopic about a transgressive heroine, Wash Westmoreland’s Colette profiled the early career of one of France’s most famous writers, including her multifarious sexual and artistic exploits and tendentious relationship with her indulgent but exploitative first husband. Ace performances by Keira Knightley and Dominic West made things bouncy and occasionally the film captured the heady flavour of belle époque gallivanting, but too often elsewhere it seemed incredibly tame and tawdrily middlebrow for such a spectacularly dissolute subject. Much the same could be said of Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody, a rumination upon the life and career of legendary Queen frontman Freddy Mercury, one that hit screens wafting a smoke trail of compromise and discarded stars and directors. The actual result proved chock full of music biopic clichés and shallow as a paint tin lid, but still it proved rather more entertaining than it had any right to be, as Singer gave it a dose of authentic swagger, and Rami Malek’s terrific central turn made its hero coherent in his mix of wounding vulnerability and performative zeal.
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Similarly obsessed with the problem of finding self through performance, if fictional this time, Bradley Cooper gained a popular hit and plaudits with the umpteenth version of A Star Is Born, casting a game Lady Gaga as the gutsy pop belter who falls for Cooper’s shambolic country rock star and finds herself catapulted to fame whilst coping with her husband’s collapse. Cooper displayed an inconsistent but occasionally fine-tuned touch for capturing chemistry and intimacy between himself and Gaga, and smarts for staging musical sequences (and the score was actually good). But Cooper’s relentlessly up-close-and-personal style grew wearisomely high-handed after a while, and the script made only scant gestures towards revising and deepening the very familiar melodrama of the storyline. Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux played as A Star Is Born’s instant critique, biting off a big chunk of contemporary angst in offering pop star Celeste (played by Raffey Cassidy whilst young and with amusing bravura by Natalie Portman in maturity) as the subject of a “Twenty-First Century portrait,” a girl put on the path to fame when she’s gunned down by a classmate in a school massacre, survives, and finds her gift for writing anthems unleashed. The film offered a coldly incisive proposal, that the current cults of empowerment and optimism in pop music are a bromide in an increasingly unsettled time whilst real trauma lurks untapped through the total exile of any kind of dark revelry, and Fassbender might have appreciated one twist, when terrorists appropriated Celeste’s imagery for their own counter-messaging. Corbet however skidded over such ideas and settled into an amazingly clichéd arc as heroic young talent evolves into a regulation jerk star, with the showy direction failing to venture beyond superficialities, interspersed with utterances of strained significance from Willem Dafoe’s narrator.
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The more ambitious American independent fare of 2018 betrayed depths of moral struggle not just between cultures and communities but inside individuals, psyches whiteanted by the manifold pressures of the age. The Strange Ones signalled real talent from collaborating directors Laura Wolkstein and Christopher Radcliff, in their attempts to depict the viewpoint of deep trauma through fragmented and elusive cinema, bolstered by intelligent performances from Alex Pettyfer and James Freedson-Jackson. Only the film’s uncertainty when and where to end degraded its carefully parsed sense of enigmatic desolation. Similarly obsessed with fragmented identities and perceptions, You Were Never Really Here was Lynne Ramsay’s first film in six years, a disturbing exploration of a psyche and a society equally damaged by misuse and iniquity. The careful, remorseless deconstruction of a standard genre story resulted in a movie that seemed wilfully offbeat and anticlimactic, and yet rewarded careful attention and receptivity to its portrayal of deep-riven spiritual and mental pain. The Kindergarten Teacher was an American remake of an Israeli film, adapted and revised by writer-director Lisa Colangelo. Her take proved an exacting portrait of a woman in the title profession, latching on to the astonishing poetic talents of a young boy in her class as a way of coping with her own growing frustration in life and outlook. Maggie Gyllenhaal’s terrific lead performance kept the character ambivalent even as she eventually did foolish and self-destructive things, and the story unfolded with a certain rarefied tension as it invited the audience to share her mania and know its urgency.
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Chloe Zhao’s The Rider and Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace were very similar experiences for me, as works made by talented filmmakers trying to unite methods derived from documentaries, in a careful attention to physical detail and authentic contexts, with a more elusively poetic quality, in depicting individual avatars of assailed and damaged subcultures in contemporary America. Both were interesting works but remained basic on the dramatic level, their central characters blankly alienated, noticeably avoiding examining the furore of individual personality and the way such people stand in context of the louder, uglier cultural brawls at large in the nation. Paul Schrader’s First Reformed was a more traditional brand of serious filmmaking, but one with a similar aim in describing a personal watershed, in this case the gyring mania of a troubled priest confronting both individual and systemic despair after the suicide of a young environmental activist whose welfare he tried to take an interest in. Schrader’s attempt to articulate a specific sense of crisis and a general state of contemporary existential angst provoked a great performance from star Ethan Hawke. But Schrader remains a frustratingly basic director in many ways, aping the haughty masters he’s long admired without their easy intimacy or sense of detail, and his script promised a forceful dialogue between value systems that never arrived, settling instead for a kind of religiously-tinted green-left rewrite of Taxi Driver. Only right at the end, as Schrader invited ridicule but gained real power in depicting the life urge breaking loose in all its unruly, irrational force, did he explode his own formula.
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Elizabeth Chomko’s What They Had occupied slightly different territory in the continent of awards season cinema, depicting the reunion of a troubled but loving family faced with the decline through dementia of its matriarch, played with skill and deftly obvlious humour by Blythe Danner. Robert Forster, Hillary Swank, and Michael Shannon were equally fine as her flailing family, and the film unfolded with a level of real feeling. And yet the cross-currents of life straits afflicting the various characters felt too stagy and designed, and made for a busy, slightly facetious dramatic landscape. In a similar vein of slickly-scripted, urbane comedy-drama, Tamara Jenkins’ Private Life depicted a pair of aging creatives (played, with stunning inevitability, by Paul Giamatti and Kathryn Hahn) trying to have a baby with increasing desperation and finally entering into a pact with their flaky but talented, hero-worshipping step-niece for an egg donation. The film never rocked the boat in filmmaking or narrative, and sometimes reeked of navel-gazing, but an acerbic sense of humour and accurate sense of people in different stages of life crisis kept it interesting.
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After a superlative 2017, what I saw of British cinema this year was much more awkward. Saul Dibb again proved his eye one of the more visually textured and purposeful amongst the current crop of vaguely prestigious Brit directors, as he took on a real war horse by remaking R.C. Sherrif’s Journey’s End, an appropriately bleak revisit to the trenches of the century-gone Great War. The remake proved solid enough, but the adaptation neglected the play’s central question as to the value of hero worship, and so added up to just another bummer war movie. Armando Iannucci, maker of cult TV satires and occasional movies, dared a more risky and insolent foray with The Death of Stalin, a depiction of that momentous event couched in terms of multiple farceur traditions, in recognising an aspect of the absurd to a terrible regime. But Iannucci’s filmmaking was shaky, and his enormous conceit eventually proved unmatched by any degree of real intellectual provocation or truly outrageous humour. Clio Barnard’s Dark River took up a similar story and setting to last year’s The Levelling as it depicted a troubled woman’s return to her home on a farm in the Yorkshire dales after many years, following her father’s death. The film was strong when depicting her haywire relations with her aggrieved brother, and sported gritty performances, but wasted time trying to play its abuse aspect as a formative mystery, and the stab at tragic grandeur at the end felt unconvincing, depending on twists of circumstance and character that felt rushed and arbitrary.
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Mike Newell’s The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society employed a great cast for describing an interesting but little-studied time and place, the impact of Nazi occupation on Guernsey, cut off from the mythology of resistance to blitz and tyranny and forced to find meaning in other ways. But the result was the worst kind of by-product of the current school of middlebrow British cinema, slinking through a lamentably dull romantic subplot and fragmented stiff-upper-lipisms, and proffering smarmily anachronistic congratulations for its presumed audience. Spanish director Sebastian Lelio landed in a fresh pasture, London, to focus on the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, for a drama invoking those frisson-inducing words, forbidden lesbian romance, in Disobedience. Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams played the former lovers thrown together again after the death of Weisz’s beloved rabbi father; Alessandro Nivola played the third corner of the triangle as McAdams’ husband and heir in scholarly repute to the late rabbi. Bodied, intelligent performances gave the film most of its muscle, which otherwise proved too inoffensive in its portrait of tested tradition and worrying desire, never really penetrating its characters and failing to ask really hard questions about how to reconcile self with community.
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In Australia, Breath saw Simon Baker making his directorial debut on home turf, adapting author Tim Winton’s fictionalised take on his own youth, depicting a pair of teenage boys falling under the spell of a former champion surfer and his damaged American wife. The brilliantly shot surfing sequences managed to trace out a zone of pantheistic poetry, and if he’d had faith to simply immerse his viewer in that zone, Baker might well have conjured a minor classic. But as the thin plot played out Breath proved overlong and eliding, failing to penetrate any character’s headspace or make the jailbait romantic twist of the last third feel believable. Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi captured the Berlin Golden Bear with On Body and Soul, her mystically romantic study of oddballs who find themselves connected on a sublime level despite being immersed in a squalid environment. The film was hindered by a slight feeling of inevitability, but it remained a lovely study in people pushed towards natural fulfilment in spite of their being misshapen by worldly standards.
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Perpetual provocateur Claire Denis made an unexpected pivot back to the wistful, urbane romanticism of her Friday Night with Let The Sunshine In, a study in middle-aged romantic frustration, readily communicated by Juliette Binoche as she contended with a coterie of potential mates who all prove mismatched to some degree. The film was witty in portraying its heroine’s frustration with a parade of men in love with the sound of their own voices, but it never wielded any clear design as a character study, and remained awkwardly perched between Denis’ impressionistic films and more conventional fare. Xavier Beauvois, who contributed memorably to Denis’ film as an actor, returned as a director with The Guardians, a film that applied the slow, elegant, patient tempo of his Of Gods and Men to a depiction of the French home front during World War I, where the rhythms of rural life unfold with stammering interruptions and transformations in a context of general dread. Beauvois’ attentiveness to detail was lovely and rewarding, but something about the drama remained frustratingly unfledged and obvious – like one character’s dream sequence of killing himself in battle – and it lacked the inquisitiveness of Beauvois’ precursor.
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Lee Chang-dong’s Burning extrapolated a short story by Haruki Murakami for an uneasy contemplation on a contemporary Korean social landscape litted with bewildered and alienated young folk, with its central character, a would-be writer and son of a hothead farmer, stumbling into a sort-of relationship with a girl from his home town who’s had so much plastic surgery he can’t recognise her, and her other pseudo-boyfriend, a blithe and mysterious rich kid who confesses to arson as a hobby. Lee’s patient, attentive filmmaking paid off in some extraordinary passages depicting desperation, both personal and in the zeitgeist, particularly when noting the flighty heroine’s various stabs at self-expression, all too incompetently observed by others. But of all the films I wanted to like this year, this one left me the most subtly frustrated. The hangdog blankness of the main character and the opaque smugness of his foe struck me as excessively calculated, sapping some of the power intended in the finale’s jarring, almost arbitrary eruption of overt violence, and the film was more interesting in its first half, when it was a study of confused and drifting types, before it became more an enigmatic thriller. Rungano Nyoni’s I Am Not A Witch was a broadcast from Zambia that noted with both puckish humour and a sense of desolate beauty the surreal collision between ancient and modern varieties of flimflam.
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Lucrecia Martel’s Zama was an equally perturbing study in social breakdown and personal ambiguity, albeit in a radically different setting, in this case an Argentine outpost in the waning days of Spanish imperialism. The titular hero, an ageing don eternally pining for escape from his supposedly respected but actually excruciating post but constantly missing the cues that might deliver him, rides his downward trajectory to the bitterest end. Martel’s striking images were vital in creating an increasingly surreal atmosphere, even if sometimes the story felt less like a tragedy of a ridiculous man than a hyperbolic castration fantasy. Some notable works of non-English language cinema seemed to think being in black-and-white was a serious cinematic gesture in itself. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski released Cold War, a follow-up to 2014’s Ida and a similar exercise in stringent, monochrome evocation. This time Pawlikowski focused on a pair of quarrelsome lovers, a hangdog music teacher in a state-sponsored folk culture conservatorium and his earthy student discovery, who criss-cross Europe and find themselves trapped both by political systems and by their own ornery personalities. Sharp performances, particularly from Joanna Kulig as the imploding heroine, and Pawlikowski’s gift for composing images by turns artful, abstract, and soulful, made the film a fascinating journey, and yet this time around the eventual recourse to tragedy felt unearned, the narrative too rushed and fragmented to add up to much more than an exercise in historical-aesthetic ventriloquism.
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Alfonso Cuaron returned for his first film since 2013’s Gravity with Roma, a fastidious recreation of the milieu of his childhood in early 1970s Mexico. A contemplation of domestic life as a manifestation of bigger things, Roma centred on a privileged but unstable bourgeois family and their maid Cleo, who does most of the real work of raising the rambunctious brood of kids whilst contending with her own troubles. Cuaron’s talents for staging and shooting episodes of spectacle were given free rein in a film that played less as dramatic entity and more as an attempt to submerge the viewer in a way of seeing and feeling. But for me the ostentatious style foiled the intended essence, the attempt to orientate according to a childlike perspective. Dramatic values remained obvious, the political backdrop never really developing beyond affected window dressing. Whilst Cuaron offered up the most artfully shot dog turds I’ve ever seen, his characters remained vague gestures, their world recreated but not made to matter. The very end, despite the apparently raw emotions involved, came perilously close to sitcom neatness as the family settled down with its two shaky but resolute matriarchs. Valeska Grisebach’s Western depicted a clutch of German labourers exiled to a Bulgarian backwater to build a dam, faced with language difficulties and character clashes, with one lanky worker finding tentative amity with the locals but also eventually catching the brunt of their pent-up ire. The title’s reference to genre mythology informed a wry sense of frontier isolation and episodes of physical struggle and communion over such raw essentials as water supplies, gravel, horses, and sex, and overall Western proved easily the best and least strained of the several films this year that tried to evoke a sense of workaday straits with a drifting, virtually plotless narrative, with a particularly astute use of non-professional actors.
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The most remarkable film event of 2018 was certainly the appearance of Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, methodically pieced together after decades on a variety of shelves. The result might have blurred the boundaries between archival rescue and accomplished film – I suspect Welles might have been a touch more brutal with his footage than the editing team, including costar Peter Bogdanovich, could bring themselves to be. But it was still a startling, blissful experience, joining Welles’ obsession with corrupt and compromised men of vision to a vicious meditation upon his own rare stature and the transformations sweeping the movie world at the time of shooting, filmed with his characteristic ferocity turned up to 11. I can’t bring myself to call The Other Side of the Wind a film of 2018, but it was still rather easily the best work released this year.

Performances of Note:

Nathalie Baye, The Guardians
Iris Bry, The Guardians
Nicolas Cage, Mandy
Olivia Cooke, Ready Player One ; Thoroughbreds
Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Claire Foy, Unsane
Ethan Hawke, First Reformed
John Hawkes, Small Town Crime
Maggie Gyllenhaal, The Kindergarten Teacher
Michael B. Jordan, Black Panther ; Creed II
Jong-seo Jun, Burning
Lola Kirke, Gemini
Rachel McAdams, Disobedience
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Leslie Mann, Blockers
Ben Mendelsohn, Ready Player One
Thomasin McKenzie, Leave No Trace
Meinhard Neumann, Western
Joaquin Phoenix, You Were Never Really Here
Linus Roache, Mandy
Dominic West, Colette
Ensemble: Bad Times at the El Royale
Ensemble: The Party
Ensemble: Support The Girls

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Favourite Films of 2018
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I Am Not A Witch (Rungano Nyoni)

Alternately beguiling in the often haunting poise of its imagery, and piercing in its darkly comic portrait of institutional corruption and prejudice in a context well off the beaten track, I Am Not A Witch contemplated the lot of an orphaned, wandering 9-year old Zambian girl accused of being a witch, exiled to a camp full of similarly accused women and exploited by various parties in the faith that her supernatural capacities can bring riches and dispel the parched and blighted pall over the locality. Debuting director Nyoni managed the fine art of blending potentially discordant tones – laugh-out-loud satire colliding with mystic sparseness and social issue movie – ultimately achieving a sense of enigmatic regret in questioning what we steal from ourselves when we fail to recognise wonder.

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Gemini (Aaron Katz)

From its early scenes, with their carefully woven sense of punch-drunk paranoia, to a droll last third where Lola Kirke’s kooky fool of fortune slowly refashioned herself into master of all she surveys, Gemini was one of the year’s most intriguing and stylish films. Katz offered a spry, twisty narrative that worked on several levels whilst never quite giving in to the temptation to become any one thing definitely. Katz made affectionate sport of noir film clichés, analysed the alienating precincts of an endlessly self-referential celebrity culture, and dramatised the uneasy process of his brand of filmmaker negotiating with Hollywood, contending with the problem of selling out even whilst taking charge.

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Mandy (Panos Cosmatos)

Often I hold the phrase “unique vision” in a certain dubiety as it’s by no means a guarantee a filmmaker who has one is necessarily also any good at making a watchable movie with it. But Mandy established firmly that Panos Cosmatos certainly has one, and moreover one that surely flaunts his touchstones and inspirations and yet also subsumes them entirely into his private universe. Starring a cunningly cast Nicolas Cage as wrath, backed up Andrea Riseborough and Linus Roache as grace and malevolence, Mandy promised and delivered a gory, gut-crunching genre film, but also successfully communicated something more elusive, about the transformative power of love and its eternal partner, loss.

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Manhunt (John Woo)

This whackadoodle excursion from an aging master seemed to be trying to singlehandedly invent a new variety of pan-Pacific action movie, as Woo remade an old Japanese film and used it as a template to study the uneasy relationship of modern Japan and China where the only common lingua franca is English in the boardroom and Hollywood thrillers on the streets. The plot was silly and the acting off. But the explosions of dazzlingly fluid staging, episodes of operatic showmanship, and overripe images of romantic annihilation made the whole thing a crazy treat of pure joy in the medium.

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Ready Player One (Steven Spielberg)

Spielberg’s best film since Lincoln and his most carefree since his tilt at Tintin, Ready Player One received a lot of commentary upon release that read more like polls over how much one liked its basic mission statement, as a film based around a certain period in pop culture (of which it proves, astonishingly, there are more fans now than of, say, Little Nemo and Biggles). Generally they ignored its actual form and function, as a swinging romantic adventure film and old-fashioned teens-fight-the-man comedy, ebullient spectacle mixed with lucid, affectionate satire on online culture and a surprisingly pensive sense of summation for its director, contemplating the hazy zone at the nexus of artists’ rights, open-sourced culture and fan provenance, and corporate domain defence. Plus it had Mechagodzilla and Chucky going apeshit.

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You Were Never Really Here (Lynne Ramsay)

Lynne Ramsay’s fourth feature gained a pitifully small viewership for such a well-reviewed and original effort, with its relentlessly interiorised, eccentric deconstruction of the purgation-through-violence noir tale, and its sense of psychic struggle with things both virulently ugly and ungraspably beautiful will probably remain too rarefied for a cult audience either. But it was still a major achievement, creating a sense of what it’s like to have a badly damaged and traumatised mind whilst still trying to act according to a potent sense of right and wrong. Joaquin Phoenix’s carefully recessive performance provided the axis around which Ramsay’s visions created a hallucinatory void where acts of decency skid across ice with a dark hell below.

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Zama (Lucrecia Martel)

Weird, painful, and ultimately perversely cathartic in studying degradation as a natural process, Zama had a basic storyline that felt on occasions like a Coen Brothers put-on about a character too dumb or blinkered to know he’s doomed. But Martel turned that journey into a fresco at once fetid and desolating yet also perfervid, with some of the most beautifully composed images in recent cinema, finding hues of surrealism in sights as disparate as a woman caressing a horse’s belly, lordly natives wearing bird-masks, or a man robbed of his hands but finally delivered from the tyranny of worldly cares. The film came ready-loaded with implications about hot-button issues, like the ills of colonialism and slavery, but Martel’s pictures dispelled all trace of thesis and instead became a shamanic invocation of a past lingering like mist in the dawn.

Added to 2018 Favourites List after 1/1/2019:

To be announced

Honourable Mention

If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins)
Leave No Trace (Debra Granik)
Solo: A Star Wars Story (Ron Howard)
The Strange Ones (Laura Wolkstein, Christopher Radcliff)
Western (Valeska Grisebach)

Rough Gems and/or Underrated

12 Strong (Nicolai Fuglsig)
Aquaman (James Wan)
Avengers: Infinity War (Anthony and Joe Russo)
BlacKkKlansman (Spike Lee)
The Endless (Justin Benson, Aaron Moorehead)
First Reformed (Paul Schrader)
The Kindergarten Teacher (Sara Colangelo)
Green Book (Peter Farrelly)
The Guardians (Xavier Beauvois)
The Mule (Clint Eastwood)
On Body and Soul (Ildikó Enyedi)
A Quiet Place (John Krasinski)
The Party (Sally Potter)
The Rider (Chloe Zhao)
The Ritual (Gary Bruckner)
Small Town Crime (Eshom Nelms, Ian Nelms)
A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper)
Support The Girls (Andrew Bujalski)
Tomb Raider (Roar Uthaug)
Unsane (Steven Soderbergh)

Disappointing and/or Overrated

Ant-Man and the Wasp (Peyton Reed)
Black Panther (Ryan Coogler)
Deadpool 2 (David Leitch)
The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci)
Early Man (Nick Park)
First Man (Damien Chazelle)
Hereditary (Ari Aster)
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (J.A. Bayona)
Let The Sunshine In (Claire Denis)
Mary Queen of Scots (Josie Rourke)
Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Christopher McQuarrie)
Ocean’s 8 (Gary Ross)
Roma (Alfonso Cuaron)
Vox Lux (Brad Corbet)
Widows (Steve McQueen)

Crap

The 15:17 to Paris (Clint Eastwood)
Annihilation (Alex Garland)
Mohawk (Ted Geoghegan)
Suspiria (Luca Guadagnino)
Vice (Adam McKay)
A Wrinkle In Time (Ava DuVernay)
Winchester (Michael and Peter Spierig)

Unseen:

22 July ∙ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs ∙ Can You Ever Forgive Me? ∙ Capernaum ∙ Crazy Rich Asians ∙ Destroyer ∙ Eighth Grade ∙ The Favourite ∙ The Guilty ∙ Halloween ∙ Happy as Lazzaro ∙ Madeline’s Madeline ∙ A Private War ∙ The Old Man & The Gun ∙ Revenge ∙ Shoplifters ∙ The Sisters Brothers ∙ Sweet Country ∙ 

The Best Older Films I Saw First in 2018

Anatahan (Josef von Sternberg)
Atlas (Roger Corman)
Les Anges du Peche / Diary of a Country Priest (Robert Bresson)
Aparajito (Satyajit Ray)
The Beast (Walerian Borowczyk)
The Black Room (Roy William Neill)
Boudu Saved From Drowning / Night at the Crossroads / A Day in the Country / The Crime of Monsieur Lange / La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir)
Cabin in the Sky (Vincente Minnelli)
La Collectionneuse (Eric Rohmer)
The Gun Runners / Edge of Eternity (Don Siegel)
Female Vampire (Jesus Franco)
Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa)
First Man into Space (Robert Day)
Fort Graveyard / Japan’s Longest Day (Kihachi Okamoto)
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram)
A Fugitive From The Past (Tomu Uchida)
Galaxy Express 999 / Adieu Galaxy Express 999: Final Stop Andromeda (Rintaro)
Heart of Glass (Werner Herzog)
Ikiru / The Lower Depths (Akira Kurosawa)
In a Year of 13 Moons / The Marriage of Maria Braun / The Third Generation (Rainer Werner Fassbinder)
The Iron Rose / The Grapes of Death (Jean Rollin)
The Lady and the Monster (George Sherman)
Les Vampires (Louis Feuillade)
Miracle in Milan / Umberto D. (Vittorio De Sica)
Ned Kelly (Tony Richardson)
Paisan / Germany, Year Zero / The Flowers of St Francis (Robert Rossellini)
Portrait From Life (Terence Fisher)
Princess Yang Kwei-Fei (Kenji Mizoguchi)
Rabid Dogs (Mario Bava)
Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom (Pier Paolo Pasolini)
The Sheik (George Melford)
The Soft Skin / L’Enfant Sauvage / The Story of Adele H. (Francois Truffaut)
The Son of the Sheik (George Fitzmaurice)
The Strange Door (Joseph Pevney)
They All Laughed (Peter Bogdanovich)
A Touch of Zen (King Hu)
Touki-Bouki (Djibril Diop Mambéty)
The Weary Death / Woman in the Moon / Spies / House By The River (Fritz Lang)
Whisky Galore! (Alexander Mackendrick)