2018 movie favorites - 10 to 6

Someone once told me that a reviewer's job, be it for food or film or anything else, is to have moments where we can shed light on something that deserves to be experienced, something that should be rewarded and might go criminally unseen.  The best example of such a review, of course, is Anton Ego's critique in one of my personal favorites, Ratatouille.  I really only write about film because I love it so much, and the top ten list at the end/beginning of each year is one I enjoy quite a bit since it's one of the only times I feel free to voice a subjective opinion.  I had a difficult time honing the top ten list for 2018, but what I ended up with was a list that had mostly movies that were seen widely, but also mostly had one moment or one scene that really captured my heart. 

I don't expect everyone to feel the same as I do (god knows I've gnashed my teeth about Ladybird enough with people), but I'm thankful for the richness in film that allows us to feel differently.  Every single year, I hear people bemoaning the dearth of good film, but every year there is something to appreciate -- some old director coming into his own, or some new director innovating, or my eyes being opened to a completely unfamiliar life, or Tom Cruise learning a new death-defying stunt...and every year, I think:  What a year to be alive.


10. Shoplifters

There's a scene in Hirokazu Koreeda's latest film where we watch the family watching fireworks go off.  It's one of the most beautiful scenes in a film of wrenching and gorgeous scenes, and it's reminiscent of Florida Project's similar scene of the small ragtag family traveling to watch Disney World's fireworks from afar.  In Shoplifters, we don't see the fireworks at all, but Koreeda reminds us what is important is not the spectacle itself but how it makes us feel, and how that spectacle can transform us.  The wonder, love, and hope are reflected on all of the family members' faces.  Shoplifters is a lot about what we see but don't hear, what we feel but aren't able to express verbally, the things we want to say but aren't able to convey.  Koreeda has always been good at the driving/crippling force of loneliness, as well as the ties that bind and sever us.  Are the families we choose stronger than the ones we're born into?  How much do we owe to those we're tied to?  There are never any easy answers, and Koreeda masterfully builds the story from these moments, uncertainties, and what we believe of what we see before stripping it away from us.  It's a film that gives as many truths as fabrications.

9. Cold War

"It's a metaphor," a French artist tells Joanna Kulig's character, Zula.  "Time doesn't matter when you're in love."  But Zula has little use for the wishy-washy breathy aspirations of French music or its metaphors.  For her and Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), time is very much against them, and they are very much in love in this smoldering, devastating piece by Pawel Pawlikowski.  Like his Ida, Cold War is shot in a close 1.37:1, but while most films use that aspect ratio to evince an intimacy and claustrophobia (Andrea Arnold's American Honey is close shot after close shot of Sasha Lane's numinous face), Pawlikowski finds so much breadth in each frame it's incredible.  There's space in the noise of each shot, and every single second could be frozen as a piece of art.  His framing is a gift, given freely without begging for attention, and yet catching the breath every time - when Zula floats down the river singing, when the wheat rustles as a farewell in the background, and in the tremulous to searing truth of their music and their love.  Zula and Wiktor cannot exist apart, but they can't be together.  Emotionally and politically fraught, they are only able to save each other by hurting each other and time is not a luxury they can spend -- whether it's the span of fifteen years or the agony of a one-sided rendez-vous ended with a surprised "oh".  Cold War spans years, miles, and borders, and like each frame, the silences are as full as the movements.

8. If Beale Street Could Talk

Is there a bigger fanboy of Wong Kar-Wai than Barry Jenkins?  Thank god for it though, because If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterclass in color and impressions, washing us in warmth, longing gazes, and the most attractive smoke swaths since In the Mood for Love.  And as tragic as its story is, it's as unrelenting in its harsh reality as it is in its hopeful optimism, a balance we could all benefit to learn from.  Beale Street characters bare their souls to us, looking full on into the camera lens.  It's vulnerable and personal -- what we feel from that moment is very much our own experience meeting the gaze of Tish (KiKi Layne), of Fonny (Stephan James), and of Officer Bell (Ed Skrein).  Whatever our past, there is something in us that meets the tactile revulsion of Tish when her hand is brought to the noses of proprietary white men at the perfume counter.  And yet for me this movie works because of what it keeps to itself as much as what it gives us in those honest moments.  Fonny circling a sculpture that he shapes as much as he shapes the swirls of smoke around him is wrapped in a reverie that both he and Jenkins decide not to explain because that moment is his.  It doesn't belong to us as viewers, just like that last whisper in Lost in Translation isn't meant for us.  Perhaps more than any other movie, Beale Street is a bathing of color, music, and lush warmth.

​7. Roma

Formally and technically a flawless film, Alfonso Cuarón's deeply personal story is made all the more compelling because it's told from a viewpoint other than his own.  I overheard someone say of it, "It was everything that I wanted it to be", which pretty much sums it up.  A mastery of mise-en-scene and the kind of deep depth of field activity hitherto seen in the opening of The Revenant.  There's so much going on in each scene that shows both how small we are in the context of the surrounding world, and yet emphasizes how little essentially separates us from each other.  In one moment, we see a child in a full spacesuit playing at astronaut, and then in a different place in a far different circumstance, we see a child at the same play, costumed only with a bucket on his head.  Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) is mostly a passive player in this story as she struggles against the both metaphorical and  actual waves that try to pummel her into submission.  But there's a deep strength and undercurrent of love she holds and that Cuarón feels for her.  And those small moments that we are drawn close to her, like the full look of love she gives to her lover in a hotel room is all the more worshipful because of its rarity.  The opening itself is a killer, and although Roma seems like mere beautiful shot after beautiful shot at first, Cuarón allows the emotion and pathos to blossom into its powerful climax.

​6. Annihilation

Annihilation was one of the first films I saw of 2018, and I knew right away it would be somewhere in my top ten.  Unsettling and not one for easy answers, it reminded me of 2001: A Space Odyssey (and similarly, I could almost hear the audible disengagement of some audience members in its last act).  An extremely loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's book, Annihilation is a fever dream, a slow descent into hallucinatory madness, and an ascent into the destruction that is entwined with survival.  It's not a perfect movie by any means, one of its flaws being the jarring mundanity of its narrative framing, but it should be celebrated because of how unrelentingly strange it allows itself to become.  The different types of facades the four women hold before entering the Shimmer slowly disintegrate, but is it for a wondrous transfiguration or is it for the surrender to the terrifying unknown at the cost of self-annihilation?  Annihilation ​asks us: can it be both?

​Top five to follow next week.