Films of 2018

I note 2018 as the year I crossed the 5000 film mark. Of my small group of readers, many have mistakenly thought the point of this blog was to review 5000 films, but it's actually to watch, and make note of, many thousands of films and then try to pick the 5000 best at the end (of life I guess). Still, seeing 5000 before age 50 seems notable and makes the goal of this project feel achievable. Of course, I can't trust my memories completely (I have probably forgotten a few movies I saw in very early childhood), but I think I can say within a 3 to 4 film degree of accuracy that the 5000th feature film I saw in my lifetime was Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. I wasn't aware of its status as #5000 when I saw the picture, but at the end of the year when I realized I was over 5000, I counted backwards in my calendar and landed on Beale Street.

If history judges 2018 by box office receipts and end-of-year lists from critics, commentators, and social media influencers, it will be remembered as a banner year for movies. But I would say that if it was a great year in cinema, it’s not because a large number of excellent films were released, but in terms of representation - the diverse array of filmmakers, actors, characters, and perspectives that appeared onscreen. We’ll see which much-lauded pictures from 2018 stand the test of time. But it’s certainly safe to say that 2018 was an exciting year and that we saw pictures by and featuring underrepresented communities in much higher numbers, with far greater visibility than in years past.

First and foremost: movies made by and about women. From the deliciously devious trio in THE FAVOURITE to the heist-crew ensembles of WIDOWS and OCEAN'S 8; to breakouts by newcomers Yalitza Aparicio in ROMA, Helena Howard in MADELINE'S MADELINE, Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie in LEAVE NO TRACE, and Elsie Fisher in EIGHTH GRADE; to knockout star turns by Toni Collette in HEREDITARY, Regina King in IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, Charlize Theron and Mackenzie Davis in TULLY, Lady Gaga in A STAR IS BORN, Michelle Yeoh in CRAZY RICH ASIANS, and the trifecta of Tilda Swintons in SUSPIRIA actresses dominated the year both artistically and commercially.

But the bigger news was the vast number of women-helmed productions that broke through the indie glass ceiling to reach audiences outside of the art-house. Lynne Ramsay's YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE, Debra Granik’s LEAVE NO TRACE, Desiree Akhavan’s THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST, Tamara Jenkins’s PRIVATE LIFE, Coralie Fargeats’s REVENGE, Chloé Zhao’s THE RIDER, Josephine Decker’s MADELINE'S MADELINE, Lucrecia Martel’s ZAMA, and Claire Denis’s LET THE SUNSHINE IN resonated both with critics and the public, working their way into the cultural conversation and leading to more major studio deals for women filmmakers. 

LGBTQ cinema was well represented across the spectrum this year, both subtly and explicitly, in awards darlings like the aforementioned THE FAVOURITE, as well as CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?, BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY, BOY ERASED, COLETTE, and, arguably, even Disney’s PADDINGTON 2. Queer-themed indies such as DISOBEDIENCE, WE THE ANIMALS, 1985, LIZZIE, and SCOTTY AND THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOLLYWOOD made their usual strong showing, but importantly, young adult pictures like LOVE, SIMON, ASSASSINATION NATION, A KID LIKE JAKE, ALEX STRANGELOVE, and THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST brought these themes to teenage audiences.

Marvel’s BLACK PANTHER led the charge of major hits starring and made by people of color. Alfonso Cuarón‘s ROMA, Spike Lee’s BLACKkKLANSMAN, Steve McQueen's WIDOWS, Aneesh Chaganty’s SEARCHING, Sylvain White’s SLENDER MAN , and John M. Chu’s CRAZY RICH ASIANS all cleaned up at the box office, while Boots Riley’s SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, Carlos López Estrada’s BLINDSPOTTING, George Tillman Jr.’s THE HATE YOU GIVE, Barry Jenkins’ IF BEALE STREET COULD TALK, Bing Liu’s MINDING THE GAP, RaMell Ross’s HALE COUNTY THIS MORNING, THIS EVENING, Jordana Spiro’s NIGHT COMES ON, Jeremiah Zagar’s WE THE ANIMALS, Crystal Moselle’s SKATE KITCHEN, and Chloé Zhao’s THE RIDER were critics’ darlings that crossed over into the mainstream.

Americans may be segregating ourselves ever further into our various siloed communities, but at least audience members from all the multifarious identity groups didn’t have to settle for just one movie to represent them this year. The films listed above were just the tip of the iceberg in 2018, with more diverse pictures getting easier and easier to find.

But you’d be hard-pressed to find uniformity of opinion on any of the releases of this year. For every person you talk to who loved The Favourite, Roma or Black Panther, you can find an equal number of folks who thought those films were terrible. And I don’t think it’s the typical backlash to hype. As viewership for cinema gets more and more niche-oriented, opinions on films become as polarized as everything else in today’s world.

Along that line of thinking, perhaps the film that best sums up 2018 is THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS, Joel and Ethan Coen’s subpar, straight-to-Netflix Western. Unlike most anthology movies, where most viewers come down in agreeing on which entries are the best, middling, and worst if you take a random sampling of critical reviews and reactions of audiences who saw Buster Scruggs and you’d get a fairly equal cross-section of which chapters were considered “the good ones.” Not that it would matter much, because I don’t think The Ballad of Buster Scruggs will merit much further discussion, even when cinephiles are still celebrating the work of the Coen Brothers. That’s another way in which this picture typifies the year: my suspicion about many of 2018’s biggest movies is that they’ll prove pretty forgettable, especially those that went straight to Netflix.

That ubiquitous streaming service may be viewed as a powerful force in the film world. Netflix’s pockets are bottomless pockets, and it pays huge sums for all kinds of small films and important documentaries and gives them a prominent place on their platform. But when it comes to shelf life, Netflix couldn’t care less. One of the most acclaimed movies of the year, Roma, was a Netflix release, and the company did concede to a theatrical rollout—even striking five 70mm prints for select engagements in properly equipped cinemas. But what will become of those prints is anyone’s guess. And nearly all direct-to-Netflix releases get buried on the platform after a week of visibility and then quietly and permanently removed from it a few years later, never to be seen again.

So just as die-hard fans of the Coen Brothers will be unable to place a physical copy of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs next to their DVDs and BluRays of The Big Lebowski and Fargo, it wouldn’t surprise me if, a few years or so down the road, revival houses, museums, and other theatrical venues wanting to book Roma - or David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King, Susanne Bier’s Bird Box, Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life, Duncan Jones’s Mute, Oz Perkins’s I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Susan Johnson’s To All the Boys I've Loved Before, and even Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind - may be out of luck. Those films may be lost and forgotten in the bowels of Netflix - that is if the company is even still around in ten years. Many will make the point that the films I listed might not have been made or distributed without Netflix, and that may indeed be the case. But with studios gravitating more and more towards creating their own in-house streaming services, movies may be transforming permanently into a temporary, ethereal medium.

BEST YEAR OVERALL:
Ethan Hawke: Gave his best performance in the year's best film, directed his first narrative feature, BLAZE, and was the best thing about the Nick Hornby romcom, JULIET, NAKED.

Andrea Riseborough: The chameleon actress gave three entirely different and striking performances in the comical THE DEATH OF STALIN, the haunting NANCY, and the whacked-out MANDY.