2018 Movies: An Embarrassment of Riches

My non-definitive Top 10 is here. Many of the films in the list below had spots on the Top 10 until I had to bump them off.

But here are the films that were alternates for my Top 10, movies that were on there for a while until I saw something else and had to bump it off. See why I dislike lists? They shouldn’t be written in stone. That’s just silly. Believe it or not, there will be even more, movies I consider second- or third-tier, but still well worth seeing. Consider this a public service! And don’t let me ever hear you complaining about how there was nothing good in movies this year!

In the meantime:

Other Top 10 Contenders

Minding the Gap

dir. Bing Liu

Bing Liu, who grew up in Rockford, Illinois, has been filming himself and his friends – all skateboarders – since they were kids. Minding the Gap is, then, 10 years in the making. There are three main kids – Bing, Zack, and Keire. Details about their lives comes out slowly, as Liu starts to find his way as a filmmaker, and actually start to think of this as a documentary. He interviews his friends. He interviews his friend’s parents. He interviews Nina, Zack’s girlfriend and mother of Zack’s child. Pictures start to emerge of who they all are, where they came from (very little of it is good), how they feel, and what skateboarding has given them. This might make it sound shallow, or about a film focused on the awesomeness of skateboarders. It isn’t that at all (although there are many many beautiful shots of the boys twisting and turning down the empty streets, leaping up stairs, over walls, all shot by Liu – who is clearly on a skateboard himself while filming). What this documentary is really about is boys becoming men, in a rough world where there aren’t any father figures, and where the entire society, honestly, tells them what a man should be – which involves crushing your feelings, don’t be soft, and don’t drink margaritas because everyone will think you’re gay. The boys want to be free of all of that. All of them were physically and emotionally abused. They basically raise each other. But as they grow older, life gets more serious – Zack becoming a father the most obvious example. None of them know what they “want to do.” Only one graduated from high school. Rockford is nationally known as one of the most dangerous places to live in America. Dead end? Where to go, though? How are they supposed to be men when nobody taught them how to do it? Where’s the rule book? This film is such a beautiful and powerful experience that during the end-credits sequence, where you learn where each boy/man is at now, I was sobbing. I’m not a sobber. This one really REALLY got to me. We at the NYFCC voted it Best Documentary of the Year. Well-deserved.

A Star is Born

dir. Bradley Cooper

My old Actors Studio classmate done good. This is not the second iteration of this film (I am so horrified to discover that most people think the 1976 version was the first version, that they are not even aware of the 1954 Judy Garland version) but the FIFTH. For reasons which are not all that mysterious, the story itself – big male star in love with rising female star, female star eventually eclipses male star, mainly because male star self-destructs – has something timeless about it. As the world changes, as we change, these issues are still with us. As my friend Mitchell says, “Every generation gets its own A Star is Born, and ours is way overdue.” So here it is. What really matters in a film like this is that the love comes off, that we get what it is about him, about her, that draws them together. It’s not him being a vampire on her talent (although I’ve read critiques about the film saying that. The “discourse” around this movie has been one of the most boring movie-discourses I’ve ever experienced in my life. It was so predictable and so clueless I tuned most of it out. One writer was pissed about how much he loved her nose. His love of her nose seemed creepy to this writer. We are DOOMED if a man can’t adore a woman’s nose without being called creepy. He objectified my nose! No, he loved your nose. I mean … Most of this commentary will be extremely dated by, like, next week, so I do try not to pay attention to it.) He listens to her sing, and he falls in love with her. If you don’t hang around talented performer people, then maybe you can’t understand that this is often how it works. This is why people leave long-time partners to hook up with their directors or co-stars. Talent is the most powerful aphrodisiac of all. Lady Gaga is amazing – perfect, really – and so is he. The film is funny, HUGE, emotional, and heartbreaking. With lots of songs. It plays like a bat out of hell.

BlacKkKlansman

dir. Spike Lee

Some of these I have written up for my Ebert Top 10, but I’ll boil it down. Spike Lee’s film of this almost too good to be true real story of an African-American and a Jewish cop taking down a local Ku Klux Klan chapter by going undercover – like, really?? – has it all. It’s very very funny at points, with beautiful performances from the two leads – I loved them both so much! – but what’s most relevant, and important, is its point of view. Spike’s point of view, present in every frame, every choice he makes, the way he chooses to juxtapose different images and scenes, when he chooses to put on the brakes, when he chooses to let fly. It’s masterfully done. I love watching his films because you know you’re in such good hands. He’s dazzling.

Eighth Grade

dir. Bo Burnham

Bo Burnham, the director, is not – nor has he ever been – an eighth grade girl – and yet he proves that so much of art is about empathetic imagination, dreaming yourself into someone else’s shoes. This is a pretty explosive topic right now, and that’s fine, but I’ve got some stuff to say about it too. It’s not all that amazing to me that Bo Burnham has given us one of the most truthful portraits of middle-school-girlhood in existence. I read a couple of articles by women exclaiming how surprised they were that Burnham could imagine himself into a world not his own – which honestly makes me wonder if these people are interested in art at all. Or if they even understand what art IS. He has said that he is curious, and he treated the topic with curiosity, and consulted with Elsie Fisher, who plays the lead, throughout. He asked her what it was like, what would you say here, is this realistic or should I change it, and he listened to her responses. The result is truthful (sometimes excruciatingly so). The film does not judge her. She is, quite literally, 13 years old, with all that that implies, awkwardness, eyerolls, exploding acne. Hollywood has sexualized children to such a degree that we – as in everyone – forget how YOUNG these kids are. They are CHILDREN. They may experiment with expressing their sexuality, because that’s what puberty is about, but they still need to be protected, they are KIDS. Burnham doesn’t forget she is a child. He films her with love. He finds her funny – and sometimes cringingly so. Most of us will recognize ourselves SOMEwhere in Eighth Grade. But Burnham also respects her, respects this phase, respects where she’s at. It’s a very intense film, one of the best of the year. I reviewed for Ebert.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

dir. The Coen brothers

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs has six episodes, separated out by chapter markers. Each episode features a different cast of characters, a different mood, even – different underlying characteristics. What connects the episodes is the presence of death, death impending, death staved off, death waiting for you around the next hill. How the West was Won was a bloody affair. Nobody comported themselves well. The Coen brothers are not interested in re-litigating all of that, or maybe they are, maybe this is one way they’re doing it. In many ways, they accept the confines of the genre, the Western. There’s a bank robbery. An Indian attack. A hanging. A wagon train. A gold-digger. What all of this may have to do with anything is up for grabs, and it’s one of the strengths of the film: I keep thinking about it. I keep puzzling over it. I’ve watched it a couple of times now. It gets deeper with each re-watch. These episodes are, somehow, in conversation with one another. I loved Nic Rapold’s interview with Zoe Kazan in Film Comment, one of the reasons being Kazan’s thoughts on how these stories connect. Her “theory” is something I hadn’t considered, but I have enjoyed pondering it, especially during re-watches. When people complain about the Coen brothers’ “nihilism”, or say they’re “misanthropic” … I have a couple of reactions. One is: If they ARE misanthropic, what’s it to you? They’re allowed to be misanthropic. Not everybody believes in happy endings, not everybody needs their movies to provide an uplifting empowering message. Honest to God, it’s like a CULT sometimes, this positive-thinking bullshit. But my second reaction is: I don’t see them as misanthropic at all. I see them as realistic. There’s a difference. They even say that explicitly in Buster Scruggs, they put the words into the mouth of the title character, played by Tim Blake Nelson. People cheating at cards, acting poorly, whatever, is all part of “the human material.” People have been trying to make me believe in various Utopias, political and otherwise, since I was a teenager. So far, I haven’t bitten. I appreciate the Coen brothers’ outlook. I also think it’s far warmer than they are given credit for.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

dir. Marielle Heller

Marielle Heller is the real deal. I loved her Diary of a Teenage Girl (reviewed for Ebert), and now comes Can You Ever Forgive Me?, the fascinating story of forger fraud Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy, in a great performance. The film really gets the deep and dark world of a writer, a writer who can’t make a living. This is not to excuse her behavior (I hate to even talk like this, though: Who I am to “excuse” or “approve” a character’s behavior, and then base my review on whether or not they are a “good person”? Ugh.) I love a film with the courage of its convictions. Lee Israel’s “scam” was insanely audacious, and her partner-in-crime is an semi-lost gay man-about-town, played by Richard E. Grant, in one of the performances of the year (the NYFCC voted him Best Supporting Actor).

Death of Stalin

dir. Armando Iannucci

This movie is some kind of miracle. It shows the vicious power-grabs that went on in the immediate wake of Stalin’s death in 1953. The power vacuum was immediate, and in the couple of days that followed, power switched hands, Kruschev coming out on top. None of this seems like it would be funny. Death of Stalin is often uproariously funny – in ways I haven’t seen on film in a long long time. But it is also a serious – and gross – look at the monsters who made up the Politburo, the vicious toadies clustered around Stalin, laughing at all Stalin’s jokes, afraid to go home to their wives because nobody could leave before Stalin did. Disgusting people. But Iannucci has a slapstick soul, and knows how to bring that out, in ways morbid and absurd. The men clustered around Stalin’s dead body, wondering what to do, should they tell anyone? The moving-and-shaking, the whispered conferences in the sidelines, the switching of alliances, the backstabbing, the manipulations … The film plays like gangbusters, a maniacal frenzied ride, never taking a breath from the moment it starts until the very end. Great performances from all: Steve Buscemi – an unlikely choice for Kruschev – is perfect. Rupert Friend is HILARIOUS as Stalin’s wild son. But the hilarity is always mixed with darkness and horror. These terribly undistinguished men were in charge of millions of people. These IDIOTS stood by as Stalin killed millions. Every single one of them is a monster. And they turn on one another the second Stalin was gone. Fantastic film. How it manages its mood swings is one of its many beautiful mysteries.

Burning

dir. Lee Chang-dong

Definitely one of the viewing experiences of the year for me, and really deserves a place on any Top 10. Lee Chang-dong masterfully creates a mood of dread, but you can’t really point to the source. The threat is in the atmosphere. It’s the air the characters breathe. Steven Yeun gives one of my favorite performances this year. I reviewed for Ebert.

Monrovia, Indiana

dir. Frederick Wiseman

Wiseman is fascinated by how institutions work. How institutions work shows us how America works. Wiseman drops himself into the everyday lives of regular institutions – a high school, a mental institution, a city hospital, a police force. He’s been making documentaries since the 1960s. If you haven’t encountered his work, then I suggest starting with High School or Titticut Follies. A huge influence on a generation of documentary film-makers, his work is nearly impossible to imitate, because it comes from him, meaning: it is HE who can sit in a high school and capture what he does. Some of the footage he gets you can’t believe, like there’s no self-consciousness in his “subjects”. It’s like he’s not even there. And so people are laid bare. You love them, you cringe, you feel angry, you recognize yourself, it runs the gamut. His latest is a collage portrait of the lives and workings of the people of Monrovia, Indiana. He moves from culture to culture: auctions, the town board, the school board, baby showers, the Elks Club, the gun shop. The film moves slowly, it drifts almost … like you’re walking down the main street of Monrovia, peeking through each door as you go. Wiseman at his deepest and best. A major major career, devoted to public service (most of his projects began as public television programs and investigations.)

You Were Never Really Here

dir. Lynne Ramsay

I can’t get this film – or Joaquin’s towering performance – out of my mind. It came out so long ago (comparatively), that it’s not getting that much awards buzz. Not yet anyway. Don’t miss it. Find it. It’s, in many ways, a genre film – a “revenge” film, but it’s also a portrait of a loner, one of the invisible men in our world, out of focus on the periphery, filled with rage, longing, sadness. I reviewed for Ebert. Lynne Ramsay is an important filmmaker, with a unique fearless vision.

Zama

dir. Lucrecia Martel

I love Glenn Kenny’s review on Ebert about this extraordinary film from Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel. Kenny gets at the layers going on in this story, of a guy stranded in the “New World,” waiting to be called home, sucked into the strangeness around him. There’s brutality, increasingly so as the film reaches its climax, and the emotional devastation is almost as extreme. But it’s humorous too, and Martel is frankly voyeuristic in much of her approach (the first scene has Zama lying in a hill of dunes, trying to pretend he isn’t spying on the naked bathing “native” ladies). Her camera peeks through doors, through tall grass, trying to see what is going on … but you only get glimpses or fragments. It’s not possible to get the whole picture. Martel removes connecting links. Because connecting links don’t exist for Zama either, a stranded miserable man in a strange world, trying to understand the forces massed against him – or even if they ARE massed against him. So much of the agony in this world is random chance, the luck of the draw.

Vox Lux

dir. Brady Corbet

Unfortunately I saw this stunner from Brady Corbet (whose first film, Childhood of a Leader, was one of the best films of 2016) too late to include on my initial list. I put it on later lists. It’s bold, audacious, sometimes ridiculous, never less than 100% confident, even at its most bombastic. This is a film really about something, you can tell, although WHAT it is about is sometimes not terribly clear. And that’s fine. Vox Lux grapples with things that drench our culture: fame, violence, self-empowerment narratives, drugs, terrorist attacks: are these symbols or are these the things themselves? Is there any meaning at all to ANY of it? Vox Lux swims in those questions. I found much of it to be meaningless, and it’s why the film so disturbed me. It seemed to be saying “So much of all of this is empty.” I’ll have to think on it further (here’s my review), and it’s a movie I really look forward to revisiting.

Madeline’s Madeline

dir. Josephine Decker

Decker is on a pretty short list of directors where I await their next film with impatience, practically jiggling my leg because I want MORE, dammit, and NOW. (Paul Thomas Anderson is another one. Scorsese. Decker is in good company). For me, her best is still Butter on the Latch, which I don’t even think was released. No matter. There is something about her work – what it looks like – her eye – that is so unleashed from conventional filmmaking that it makes other things seem hide-bound, rule-bound. Who set UP these random rules about what a shot is supposed to look like, how a story should operate, long-shot-to-medium-shot-to-closeup etc.? I mean, sky’s the limit, right? Break rules. Do whatever the fuck you want to do. People may hate it, may not respond to it, but that didn’t stop John Cassavetes. Madeline’s Madeline is her most accessible work to date, with “names” in it (Molly Parker, Miranda July), and an amazing debut from newcomer Helena Howard. There’s a “meta” quality to it (there always is in Decker’s work), in its portrait of a New York experimental theatre company, and the “phenom” that is the teenage Madeline. Decker’s work defies easy classification, or even description. It’s all in how she sees. You could pull one of her shots out of a blind line-up, it’s that distinct. I really thrill to it. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, Butter on the Latch make an amazing double bill – I saw them back to back and almost felt like I was drunk on Decker’s visions. Flames came next, a documentary about her relationship with another filmmaker, and it’s navel-gazing but in a way I found interesting. It also was interesting because – in a Star is Born kind of way – she’s a better filmmaker than he is. It’s part of why they broke up, he couldn’t handle her pulling ahead. Madeline’s Madeline is a huge leap forward, but it’s still recognizably Decker-ish. Get on the Decker train, people. I don’t know if she’ll ever make it “mainstream” – I hope not – but what she does do is make us question why everything we see seems so rote and recycled? Where are the people with new visions, new ideas, and the boldness to accomplish what they see in their heads?

Annihilation

dir. Alex Garland

I really liked Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (review here), but Annihilation was overwhelming. It’s an extremely unnerving film, set up with “nods” to all kinds of different genres: sci-fi, of course, but also “the quest,” even a Western if you think of a Western as a group of pioneers stepping out into the unknown. The genre elements are there, but they’re suffused with such strangeness and intensity they start to feel like something else. I am still not sure how that occurs, and I haven’t seen it since my first viewing so it will take closer examination and deeper thought. What seems to happen, though, is that the entire world of the film – the quest – the environment beyond that shimmering veil – starts to reflect and mirror the psychological state of the lead character (Natalie Portman). All of this is handled in such a rich complex way, you get sucked into the quest, you forget what might be on the other end, you have no idea what’s coming, what they will find, what it will mean. By the end of the film, I was knocked absolutely flat. Among many other things, I agree with Angelica Bastien, who wrote that Annihilation was one of the best films she’s ever seen depicting what depression actually feels like. A resounding COSIGN. I saw this movie at a nearby movie theatre on a grim grey day. I took the train to the movie theatre because I live in the most inconvenient place known to man or woman. I wanted to see it. It was WEEKS after it had opened and it was still in the theatres, a sign that people were really grooving to this thing. It was playing in a small theatre and I got a seat in the front row. Every seat was full. Afterwards, the woman sitting next to me, turned to me and started talking to me about the movie. It’s that kind of movie. We ended up talking for about half an hour, 40 minutes, and ended up exchanging phone numbers. We are now dating. No, just kidding. But it’s not every movie that makes strangers start to talk to each other, not just about the movie, but what it made us think about.

Sorry to Bother You

dir. Boots Riley

It hurt me to bump this one off. It has nothing to do with the film’s merits and only to do with the fact that 10 means 10 and something has to go. Boots Riley’s film is as audacious as it gets, political, social, cultural, economic … and yet that might make it sound like its tone is serious, like “Here, let us speak about the important issues of our day.” No. Instead, it’s punk rock, revolutionary, imaginative in a way that pushes the boundaries of what that even means, a vision of a world falling apart, a world that needs to fall apart. Boots Riley was at Indie Memphis while I was there (he was the keynote speaker, and Sorry to Bother You was screening. Riley also chose a film to screen at the festival, a film he loved, and he picked Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, a major influence on him and on Sorry to Bother You). Of all of the films coming out which supposedly “speak to our era,” “the perfect movie for right now,” “relevant to our current situation” and blah blah blah … Sorry to Bother You is the only film where that really applies. It is such a blazing critique of the system the implications are inescapable. Other films “about right now” will date themselves very quickly. Not this one.

Happy as Lazarro

dir. Alice Rohrwacher

This is streaming on Netflix right now. Watching Happy as Lazarro, I had a variety of in-the-moment responses, impressions, fleeting feelings, sensations, ideas. The main thing though was: “HOW did Rohrwacher even DO this?” I had a similar feeling watching Chloe Zhao’s The Rider (in my Top 10), because her use of non-actors was so extraordinary I couldn’t believe she had even pulled it off. A similar thing happens here, although the two films are very different. I went into Lazarro cold. I had no idea what was coming, or what it was “supposed” to be. I had not read anything that “contextualized” the film for me. So it unfolded and each moment was a mystery, a miracle, a revelation. I’d think, “Oh wait … so it’s THIS kind of movie?” And then 20 minutes later, I’d think, “Wowwwww, so it’s THIS kind of movie.” It’s RARE to see something NEW, something that plays by its own rules, that takes existing storytelling modes – like fables – which Happy as Lazarro is – and infuses it with the new and modern. An absolutely extraordinary film, amazing in its broad scope but also in its particular details (the Marquise’s glasses! the pastry delivery scene! the bagpipes!). It’s something else, marches to the beat of its own dream.

Hale County This Morning, This Evening

dir. RaMell Ross

One of the documentaries of the year, and with Minding the Gap, Amazing Grace, Won’t You Be My Neighbor and Monrovia, Indiana, it’s a pretty crowded field. RaMell Ross moved to Alabama to teach photography. He documented the lives around him, the town, the scenery. Two “characters” emerge, two young guys, but the film is much more than a portrait of individuals. It is a dreamy poetic collage of disparate images: a streetlight, an empty road, a wasp crawling on a piece of wood, sunlight on fields, a child running back and forth in a living room as the adults talk, the laughter of girls singing a song outside a community center … It’s a collage. As my friend Odie put in his beautiful and insightful review: “The film has an unusual, time-jumping cadence that’s punctuated by strange sounds, odd music and beautiful, superimposed visions of sky and earth. There are unexpected camera angles and long moments that at first seem monotonous but pay big dividends. Ross weaves all these elements together in such a way that you eventually realize the film is teaching you how to watch it, subtly coaxing you onto its wavelength. Suddenly, you feel like an honorary citizen of the titular place, someone temporarily woven into its fabric. I understood this the moment that Ross’ camera sped down a street he had slowly perused in the film’s opening scene. Not only did I recognize buildings and stores, but I knew exactly when the car travelling this road would see the Alabama state highway signs.” In a way, Hale County would be a good companion piece with Monrovia, Indiana. Hale County takes place in a mostly African-American world, Monrovia in a mostly white. Both help us feel the rhythms of this particular place in this particular time. Hale County is that rarest of things, a true art film.

Beast

dir. Michael Pearce

This movie came and went. I reviewed it on assignment for Ebert, and it was one of those gifts that come when you are assigned to review stuff at random by an editor. I probably would not have sought this film out on my own. Judging from how little “play” it got, I may not have even heard of it. But it is a fantastic film – yet ANOTHER amazing directorial debut (there were many this year). It calls to mind all kinds of classics (Polanski’s Repulsion the main one, but there are others), but it brings its own weird mordant grubby mood. Jessie Buckley gave one of my favorite performances by an actress this year. It feels major, like she could be HUGE if she’s in anything that gets major play. She is so alive, so fearless, so unpredictable – it fills the entire film with sharp edges, ragged emotions, rage and dirt. Who is this girl? She looks so frail, but slowly you realize she is capable of almost anything. Beast doesn’t cop out, either. It goes the distance.

Leave No Trace

dir. Debra Granik

I love Granik’s work (Winter’s Bone!), and this one takes it to a whole new level. Grounded by two extraordinary performances from Ben Foster and Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie, Leave No Trace has a meandering structure, where things happen at random, haphazard, wandering about, appropriate for the lives of the two main characters, a father and daughter living off the grid, unconnected from society. Granik films it as though she feels zero pressure to “resolve” things, or to force some kind of plot onto these two. What interests her is their dynamic, the teenage girl and her PTSD-suffering veteran father, how close they are, how devoted, and also what it is like to be so far removed from civilizational structures. I wasn’t expecting the explosion of emotion that came at the end of the film. The only reason this occurred is because Granik works in such an unobtrusive and yet such specific way that you actually felt like you know these people, not because of what happened to them, but because of how she filmed them experiencing their lives and their extremely close relationship. It’s hard to describe what I mean – here’s my review where I did a better job of it – but all I can say is: she stands BACK from her characters, doesn’t FORCE anything on them, and allows what happens to happen. It’s an emotional whirlwind.

Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

dir. Morgan Neville

I saw this in the movie theatre and you could hear the entire audience sniffling. People walked out wiping off tears. I was emotionally exhausted afterwards and went to a nearby bar and had a delicious Bloody Mary and read a book. It felt AWESOME, a true catharsis. Fred Rogers was an extraordinary man (and a staple in our household), but I don’t think I knew HOW extraordinary until this doc. What you saw is literally what you got with him. He really WAS that guy, his sincerity was not a put-on, he was not “acting.” He felt children should be treated with respect and that they needed guidance navigating the shoals of life. He was a radical in that way. In 1968 (a bad bad year), after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, Rogers decided to address it headon, and put together a primetime special to help children deal with what had happened. Amazing. Kids’ shows up to that point had been cartoons and Soupy Sales shenanigans. This drove Fred Rogers crazy. Childhood is such an important time of learning, and children need to feel they are cared for. Fred Rogers represents the best in all of us.