Robs Favorite Movies Of 2018

by Rob DiCristino

These five, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Mandy, The Night Comes for Us, First Man, Wildlife, Unsane

10. Revenge (Dir. Coralie Fargeat)

The Witch and The Babadook, but its stark and uncompromising portrayal of grief and insanity reminded me more of The Shining or even my beloved Silence of the Lambs. It’s about the way resentments solidify over generations and cloud our ability to empathize and connect with those we love. It’s weird and risky and absurd. It’s also really, really scary. The images and tonal movements Aster creates are on par with the very best of the genre. You know, the horror genre. The genre this movie belongs to.

8. You Were Never Really Here (Dir. Lynne Ramsay)

Ex Machina was unceremoniously dumped by its studio earlier this year and left to those of us willing to champion its complex and vulnerable ambition to anyone who would listen. I can only hope its cult status will build and (like 2001: A Space Odyssey) we’ll collectively catch up to its brilliance over time. While its shifty structure and haunting images invite a variety of interpretations, I settled on mine after only one viewing. I felt it in my bones right away. There’s something very comforting about that, I think, to feel a movie like Annihilation without having to think about it. It’s about our human instinct toward self-destruction, a physical and emotional process from which we never entirely recover. When we cross key thresholds, we come back changed at a cellular level. We can rebuild, but we’re never truly the same again.

6. A Star is Born (Dir. Bradley Cooper)

Mad Max: Fury Road was released in 2018. Does it really feel like that, though? Box office success aside, have we really seen the level of conversation in the film community that Fallout deserves? Maybe the Mission: Impossible series is just a victim of its own success. Rather than dissecting and admiring the gears and pulleys that make this piece of mad genius tick, rather than celebrating the ways in which it humanizes an unkillable action hero, rather than analyzing its masterful composition of completely preposterous spectacles, it feels as though we as a popular culture have offered Fallout little more than a polite golf clap. “Good work,” we seem to say. “Keep it up.” It’s unfair, isn’t it? Maybe it’s just me.

4. Paddington 2 (Dir. Paul King)

Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle — a violent malcontent stalking the streets of New York — has more connectivity to the world around him than Ethan Hawke’s Ernst Toller, a Reformed church reverend whose military past and grief over his lost son have stripped him of his faith. As he struggles to attract sufficient atten&ce to keep his small church afloat, Toller is drawn into the complicated lives of environmental activists, megachurch CEOs, and a terrified (and unexpectedly pregnant) young woman played with grace and beauty by Amanda Seyfried. First Reformed has been referred to as “Grown-Up Taxi Driver,” which I can get behind. Paul Schrader is still angry, still existentially terrified, but now he’s trying to save our souls.

2. Eighth Grade (Dir. Bo Burnham)

Coming-of-age movies are tough. No matter how hard a professional (presumably adult) screenwriter may try, replicating an adolescent worldview is next to impossible. Even the best efforts are stifled by narrative convention: they’re forced to cast parents and bullies as cardboard antagonists to retain traditional story shapes. They fumble helplessly with slang and social media, hoping that cultural signifiers will function as appropriate stand-ins for character and theme. Worst of all, they inject overblown, unrealistic, often life-and-death stakes in order to confirm to adult audiences that, indeed, these kids today don’t know the half of it. Eighth Grade, however, speaks teenager with unmatched fluency. It respects their struggles and legitimizes their fears. It wants us all to understand, to remember, and to empathize. That it succeeds on all counts is one of 2018’s true miracles.

1. Suspiria (Dir. Luca Guadagnino)

Though I have seen it twice now, I have to admit that I have not yet fully digested Luca Guadagnino’s reimagining of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. I don’t have anything profound to say about it at the moment, nor do I know if my affection for it will stand up to a third viewing. All I know right now is that I have not been able to stop thinking about it. Its images have crept under my skin. Its soundtrack has haunted even my most innocuous daytime car rides. Its pulsating rhythms have seduced me in ways I’m not ready to talk about. It’s both sexy and disturbing, elegant and sloppy. It’s way too much and somehow not enough. It wore me out and kept me waiting. It exists in a space beyond my capacity for rational, critical analysis. That makes it mighty. That makes it terrifying. That makes it &gerous.