Helllo everyone and welcome to the ranking of my top 10 movies of 2018. With this said I want to point that this ranking was made according to my own list, independently of the reviews I made. So a 5 star movies does not automatically qualify for a high ranking. I made this list which includes the movies I remember most.
But first some honorable mentions. In 2018 there were 416 movies, I watched 353 and these are the ones which are not included in my very own top 10.
Widows was a brilliantly realized crime drama and feminist thriller with a spectacular lead performance by Viola Davis, but its ending didn’t resonate as it should have. Damien Chazelle’s First Man went the opposite way, building rather slowly from a prosaic beginning to a final half-hour - the recreation of the Apollo 11 moon landing - that was majestic, breathtaking and profound in a way we haven’t seen since Kubrick’s 2001.
On the other hand, Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer took a rather straightforward noir script and elevated it through a devastating performance by an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman. To counter that film’s almost too bleak scenario, I would suggest Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a charming and moving documentary about how Fred Rogers worked tirelessly to teach our children well. Also deserving respect and praise: Private Life (Kathryn Hahn has never been better), BlacKkKlansman, Foxtrot, Black Panther, If Beale Street Could Talk, Paddington 2, We the Animals, and The Wife.
10. A Star Is Born
After three previous versions, who would think that a fourth telling could offer anything fresh from this story? And yet, Bradley Cooper found a way to inject thrumming new life into the tale of a musician on the decline (Cooper) finding love with the new star he mentors (Lady Gaga), all while failing to escape his own self-destructive impulses.
Directing for the first time, Cooper captures the life of a touring rock musician almost perfectly and delivers another in a string of excellent performances. Meanwhile, in her first lead in a major motion picture, Gaga brings humanity, warmth and a kind of curdling innocence to the part of the reluctant yet forceful Ally (a nod must also go to the truly great Sam Elliott as Cooper’s loyal but no-bullshit brother). Cooper and Gaga’s chemistry is fabulous, and if the script seems to skate rather quickly over Ally’s rise to fame, it makes up for it with sheer energy and emotion.
9. Annihilation
As with the horror genre, science fiction cinema has taken a sharp step up in terms of quality, intelligence and meaning - getting away from simple battles in space with monsters and tackling bigger themes through both original work and surprising adaptations. Director and screenwriter Alex Garland has now done both: His Ex Machina was one of the best films of 2015, and now he’s back on the list with his version of Jeff VanderMeer’s genuinely eerie and thought-provoking novel.
Natalie Portman leads a team of five women who venture into a mysterious, expanding zone of mutating wildlife and bizarrely evolving landscapes, only to find that change will occur whether we want it or not. While freely diverging from the text, the movie is faithful to the book’s surreal tone and ambiguous nature, making Annihilation a challenging, bracing, and ultimately mind-bending experience - which is what we should want from all our sci-fi movies.
8. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
One thing that many of the films on this list have in common is that they are centered around one or two singularly great performances, a trend that continues in this sardonic, bittersweet and yet affecting adaptation of Lee Israel’s 2008 memoir of the same name. As played by Melissa McCarthy in a revelatory performance, Israel is a misanthropic writer of celebrity biographies whose livelihood is drying up - until she begins forging and selling letters from deceased writers and actors. She is joined in her scheme by a dissolute raconteur (Richard E. Grant), but their friendship is rickety from the start.
McCarthy’s talent has always been evident even in her most ill-fated comedies, but she takes things to a whole other level here with a complex performance that somehow makes you empathize with a pretty unpleasant person. Grant is fantastic as well, sad and hilarious at the same time. Director Marielle Heller (Diary of a Teenage Girl) also turns the film itself into a love letter to a now nearly vanished literary New York a place where Lee never quite fit in, as much as she wanted to.
7. Leave No Trace
It’s been eight long years since writer-director Debra Granik last wowed us with the riveting Winter’s Bone (which put Jennifer Lawrence on the map), and it’s with great delight that we can say her latest feature, Leave No Trace, exits 2018 as one of the year’s finest films. A sensitive portrayal of the profound but ultimately untenable bond between a deeply troubled veteran (Ben Foster) and his loving daughter (Thomasin McKenzie), Granik’s low-key approach makes what could have become an overwrought melodrama into one of the year’s more moving studies of PTSD and familial love.
Foster and McKenzie are downright brilliant as Will and his daughter Tom, who live in near total isolation in a remote area of an Oregon park until they are discovered and sent into social services. Despite many well-intentioned attempts to help them find a “normal” life, one of them must eventually make an agonizing decision. A compassionate, humanistic and powerful film.
6. A Quiet Place
A Quiet Place is a 2018 American post-apocalyptic horror film directed by John Krasinski, who wrote the screenplay with Bryan Woods and Scott Beck. The film stars Krasinski, alongside Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jupe.
The plot revolves around a family facing struggles in a
post-apocalyptic world inhabited by blind monsters with an acute sense
of hearing.
The movie is dramatic, fantastic, and the love between the parents and the kids can be felt in every second of the movie. A horror movie, which has way more elements that I still remember most of the scences. Fantastic.
5. Free Solo
A film that’s mere existence becomes a fascination unto itself, Free Solo is a remarkable achievement for subject and storyteller alike, which in this case refers to Alex Honnold, the young man who holds the record for climbing the tallest vertical surface ever without a rope, and the moviemakers who dared to hang just out of his reach with cameras. A deceptively complex narrative about human endurance and the drive to actualize one’s dream, directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are forced to place themselves into their own film as they discuss the ethical limitations of recording a dream with life-or-death stakes… and whether they should finish it if death actually enters into the equation (especially if their presence factors in).
A tense exercise in the morality of moviemaking, as well as a compelling story of a man who is only most alive when he could actually die at any moment, Free Solo captivates from beginning to end. And it’s dizzying height is reached in no small part due to the rock solid foothold discovered in the quiet love story between Alex and Sanni Mccandless, an infinitely patient woman who must come to terms with the knowledge that time and again, Alex will pick the mountain over her, just as he must come to accept ascending to the top only matters if there is someone to call afterward. There is, and for anyone lucky enough to see it on a big screen, they’ll never forget what he has to say. I love this movie because of the passion and most of all because of the landscape NG is puting in there.
4. Love Simon
Everyone deserves a great love story. But for 17-year-old Simon Spier it's a little more complicated: he's yet to tell his family or friends he's gay and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate he's fallen for online.
2. Hereditary
In this modern renaissance of thinking people’s horror movies, no indie studio is making us think more than A24. In that vein, writer-director Ari Aster knocks it out of the park with his feature debut in this vaguely perverse nightmare. A film derived from dread and the often overlooked storytelling tools that made Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist endure in our haunted subconscious beyond their mere red eyes and green plea soup, Hereditary is both a throwback and something original. Showcasing the slow descent into madness and despair of a family with an already tragic history, the film cheerfully muddies the water between supernatural and psychological terror, suggesting they’re one in the same.
Hereditary would be on this list no matter
what, yet the reason you’ll be thinking about it for years to come is
the tour de force performance by Toni Collette. Personifying the messy
overlap of trauma, guilt, self-loathing, and maybe even the insidious
notion of complicity acting as a connective tissue, it is a devilishly
layered turn that leaves no one, onscreen or off, feeling clean. Plus,
for our money, this movie has the most unforgettable shot composition of
2018, albeit once witnessed, you’re just as likely to wish your eyes
had never been so scarred.
1. Sorry To Bother You
Film criticism too often relies on the claim “you haven’t seen anything like this before,” but that would be putting it mildly in the case of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. Rushing onto the cinematic scene with more creativity and ambition in his debut than many directors can tease in a lifetime, Riley announces himself to film culture with a defiant and deafening mic drop. Sorry to Bother You is not only an original vision, but something even rarer in its industry: an actual subversive manifesto.
Merging magical realism with a joy for balancing multiple allegorical conceits, Sorry to Bother You is a pro-union, anti-capitalist, and fanged deconstruction of the corporate-labor-media triptych that grinds most Americans in their everyday life into dust. It is also funny, insightful, and features a fantastic leading man turn by Lakeith Stanfield. Armie Hammer similarly dominates in perhaps his finest work to date as the devil made white CEO-bro flesh. It follows Stanfield’s success as a telemarketer after adopting a white voice (an honest to God alabaster cadence, compliments of David Cross’ vocals), even as his Cassius Green becomes a scab during a union strike in the process. With a humor sharper than most comedies, and a Grand Guignol edge that can be more shocking than any horror, there simply isn’t anything else like Sorry to Bother You out there.
This is it. My Top 10 movies of 2018 and do not forget, that it is only my oppinion, it does not have to match you taste.
Thanks for a great year in 2018 and see you in 2019. WIsh you all a very happy new year.
A film that’s mere existence becomes a fascination unto itself, Free Solo is a remarkable achievement for subject and storyteller alike, which in this case refers to Alex Honnold, the young man who holds the record for climbing the tallest vertical surface ever without a rope, and the moviemakers who dared to hang just out of his reach with cameras. A deceptively complex narrative about human endurance and the drive to actualize one’s dream, directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi are forced to place themselves into their own film as they discuss the ethical limitations of recording a dream with life-or-death stakes… and whether they should finish it if death actually enters into the equation (especially if their presence factors in).
A tense exercise in the morality of moviemaking, as well as a compelling story of a man who is only most alive when he could actually die at any moment, Free Solo captivates from beginning to end. And it’s dizzying height is reached in no small part due to the rock solid foothold discovered in the quiet love story between Alex and Sanni Mccandless, an infinitely patient woman who must come to terms with the knowledge that time and again, Alex will pick the mountain over her, just as he must come to accept ascending to the top only matters if there is someone to call afterward. There is, and for anyone lucky enough to see it on a big screen, they’ll never forget what he has to say. I love this movie because of the passion and most of all because of the landscape NG is puting in there.
4. Love Simon
Everyone deserves a great love story. But for 17-year-old Simon Spier it's a little more complicated: he's yet to tell his family or friends he's gay and he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous classmate he's fallen for online.
Such a beautiful story of
love and acceptance! After watching this I love Simon, his family and
friends. Love conquers all. Everyone should see it!
3. Roma
It truly is a brave new world when Netflix releases the most exquisitely shot and breathlessly cinematic project of its calendar year. As the 2018 picture destined to be dissected and scrutinized in the halls of film school, Alfonso Caurón’s Roma is a wistful ode to his childhood that has the masterstroke of avoiding the urge to make his younger avatar the protagonist. Rather that duty, like so many others, falls to Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) the unsung and often unseen housecleaner and caretaker of an upper-middle class home in 1970s Mexico City.
An obvious tribute to the women who’s pain and suffering are usually a footnote in the fuzzier memories of those they thanklessly shaped, Roma is Caurón’s most personal film, which is marked by the fact that he, and not Emmanuel Lubezki, was cinematographer. And that photography is quite stunning, indeed. With the intimacy of a François Truffaut reverie and the sweep of a David Lean epic, the film takes over two hours to bring audiences to tears, but for those who surrender to its hypnotic thrall, it most definitely will. Finally the unseen has been made visible in this celluloid monument that is as irresistible as the rolling of the surf.
It truly is a brave new world when Netflix releases the most exquisitely shot and breathlessly cinematic project of its calendar year. As the 2018 picture destined to be dissected and scrutinized in the halls of film school, Alfonso Caurón’s Roma is a wistful ode to his childhood that has the masterstroke of avoiding the urge to make his younger avatar the protagonist. Rather that duty, like so many others, falls to Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) the unsung and often unseen housecleaner and caretaker of an upper-middle class home in 1970s Mexico City.
An obvious tribute to the women who’s pain and suffering are usually a footnote in the fuzzier memories of those they thanklessly shaped, Roma is Caurón’s most personal film, which is marked by the fact that he, and not Emmanuel Lubezki, was cinematographer. And that photography is quite stunning, indeed. With the intimacy of a François Truffaut reverie and the sweep of a David Lean epic, the film takes over two hours to bring audiences to tears, but for those who surrender to its hypnotic thrall, it most definitely will. Finally the unseen has been made visible in this celluloid monument that is as irresistible as the rolling of the surf.
2. Hereditary
In this modern renaissance of thinking people’s horror movies, no indie studio is making us think more than A24. In that vein, writer-director Ari Aster knocks it out of the park with his feature debut in this vaguely perverse nightmare. A film derived from dread and the often overlooked storytelling tools that made Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist endure in our haunted subconscious beyond their mere red eyes and green plea soup, Hereditary is both a throwback and something original. Showcasing the slow descent into madness and despair of a family with an already tragic history, the film cheerfully muddies the water between supernatural and psychological terror, suggesting they’re one in the same.
1. Sorry To Bother You
Film criticism too often relies on the claim “you haven’t seen anything like this before,” but that would be putting it mildly in the case of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You. Rushing onto the cinematic scene with more creativity and ambition in his debut than many directors can tease in a lifetime, Riley announces himself to film culture with a defiant and deafening mic drop. Sorry to Bother You is not only an original vision, but something even rarer in its industry: an actual subversive manifesto.
Merging magical realism with a joy for balancing multiple allegorical conceits, Sorry to Bother You is a pro-union, anti-capitalist, and fanged deconstruction of the corporate-labor-media triptych that grinds most Americans in their everyday life into dust. It is also funny, insightful, and features a fantastic leading man turn by Lakeith Stanfield. Armie Hammer similarly dominates in perhaps his finest work to date as the devil made white CEO-bro flesh. It follows Stanfield’s success as a telemarketer after adopting a white voice (an honest to God alabaster cadence, compliments of David Cross’ vocals), even as his Cassius Green becomes a scab during a union strike in the process. With a humor sharper than most comedies, and a Grand Guignol edge that can be more shocking than any horror, there simply isn’t anything else like Sorry to Bother You out there.
This is it. My Top 10 movies of 2018 and do not forget, that it is only my oppinion, it does not have to match you taste.
Thanks for a great year in 2018 and see you in 2019. WIsh you all a very happy new year.
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