10
Isle of Dogs
Affectation is the name of the game in Wes Anderson land, but he makes it work by making everything in his productions surreal. Isle of Dogs, a claymation film cut from the same cloth as Fantastic Mr. Fox, allows Anderson this luxury with a near future (near racist also but not quite) Japanese dog ghetto island, where many mangy curs have been sentenced to exile after picking up the dog flu. Dogs are easy to enjoy and Anderson has filmed his funny diversion here with many well observed jokes about dog behavior and how they must view our bizarre habits. It’s a great comedy, perhaps distracted just a little by the heavy celebrity load it carries, but buoyed by the hundreds of opportunities for dry line readings and matter of fact cheeriness that always makes Anderson films a good time.
9
Annihilation
It’s a wooly film from Alex Garland, full of carefully limited scope and controlled performances contrasted with sudden explosive weirdness. It’s a discredit to the film to describe it much because Annihilation is a compelling mystery, but the opening of the film shows a shining meteor strike a remote lighthouse and emitting a continual glow and it’s up to Natalie Portman and a team of scientists to head into the jungle to investigate. There’s some great moments here, all from unexpected syntheses of things, such as the garden hedges shaped like people and a strange bear. The climax has strong shades of Arrival, where Garland is grappling with ways to show and describe something beyond our ability to possibly comprehend. My favorite line in the movie is “I’m not even sure it knew I was there.” It’s a visual treat too, a psychedelic Apocalypse Now but for science!
8
First Reformed
Paul Schrader’s late career renaissance has begun. Although it is tempting to draw comparisons to his own first written film, Taxi Driver, this character study of a lonely man instead draws heavy inspiration from Ingmar Bergman’s Winter’s Light, another excellent film about a priest in moral peril. The film hangs heavily on Ethan Hawke, a vulnerable but tightly contained mess who begins to spiral out. The words and the work seem empty to him, and therefore his entire life begins to be invalidated. It’s a little heightened compared to Bergman, but perhaps that is an appropriate update for our age of spectacle. This film is a serious thinker, a compelling examination of what faith is and how it enters and leaves us. Somehow Schrader makes the character beats of a few rural people in a tiny parish seem as volatile and profound as any of the other explosion-filled plots on this list.
7
The Wild Pear Tree
Nuri Ceylon (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) is Turkey’s finest working director, and he scores again with a shaggy film of a young pompous writer just kicking around his home town. Nothing much happens, and yet it ends with one of the most powerful and harrowing images committed to film. How do you achieve something like this? By making characters and situations that are painfully real, which Ceylon seems to have a singular ability to do. Even among all films from all countries, Ceylon’s films feel the most true. The Wild Pear Tree follows our young writer to sidewalk cafes and talks in the countryside, but while what’s bothering him is clear, it is never uttered. Instead we see the struggle on our young charge’s face as he argues frustratingly with the people around him and ultimately the world.
6
The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
On its surface, this is a Netflix curiosity, a work for hire type job by some famous people; the type of thing that Netflix was very industrious at creating for a few years when it used to crave legitimacy. Now that it controls the market, these audacious baubles have become increasingly rare (barring a few show ponies for the Oscar race each year). Forget the streaming wars for a minute though and consider this; The Ballad might be the last film the Coen Brothers ever make together, ending a 35 year cinema run that manifested 18 movies, a solid dozen of which are great and no less than 5 of which are all time classics for the time capsule. This anthology film is decidedly their work, the good and the bad. At leadoff, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs itself is over inside of 5 minutes but earns an incredible amount of good will. Meal Ticket, All Gold Canyon with a deliciously ornery prospector Tom Waits and the Gal Who Got Rattled are as good as anything they’ve ever done. The other two are soft to dud, though Franco’s effort does live on in memes, the first time for the Coens. Even though we’re looking at 70% of a great movie, I have to give the Coens some extra credit here for approaching a wily topic, essentially 5 anti Westerns that are more interested in exploring how people survived and finding their trademark irony of struggling so hard when lady luck decides most everything in the 1800s West. There’s great beauty and craft in this movie, and it will stick with you. If the Coen’s never make a movie together again, they went out on a high note.
5
Infinity War
With all of the Content ™ that Disney has been shitting out in the wake of Endgame, this culmination of the first twenty Marvel movies feels like it came to theaters decades ago. Nothing that has come out since has equaled the ferocity, pathos, and the stakes of this Infinity War. It is really a self-contained movie where the heroes lose much to a mad champion of a different philosophical bent, who changes the game so drastically that not even believing in yourself and coming together in the final minutes is able to turn the tide of battle. It’s one of two bummers that Marvel have yet permitted in its canon, with the promised part 2 ready to soothe your wallets and get the right action figures back on the shelves. But before that happens, it’s worth thinking about how the bummers, Ragnorok and Infinity War, are by far the best movies they’ve been able to make. Infinity War goes all out, turning all of the spectacle sliders up to max, fully utilizing its 20 movies of backstory fandom, its multimillion dollar effects budget, and its place at the crown of the series to have shocking plot movements that matter. This was one of the few movies I’ve ever been to where when the credits came on there was a feeling of electricity among everyone in the crowd. The MCU will never get better than this.
4
The Death of Stalin
Antonucci, the brain behind Veep and In The Thick of It, has never let our leaders get away with actually seeming impressive. Every human endeavor is characterized by absurdity, and that level only grows by measures when power is vested in individuals. Our inept representative governments are easy to pillory, with their self-serving two faced appeals to the public, but is life under an iron fisted despot any less wacky? The Death of Stalin suggests no, showing us a coterie of power grabbing dictators in miniature as Stalin unexpectedly lears into his final days. Among the best jokes; when Stalin falls ill, no one can bring themselves to check on him because of the risk of approaching him unbidden. The fallout from his death is the continuance of the Cold War and thirty years of East West paranoia, but it’s also a hilarious almost stooges-like scramble for power in Antonucci’s lightly fictionalized telling. At least until someone wins and everyone’s blood turns cold. The Death of Stalin is a hilarious tale cleverly written about a hidden moment in history, a rarity for stories of any type and absolutely worth making time for.
3
Hereditary
Hereditary is a horror movie, the trailer makes that pretty obvious. However the bones of the beast are the hours spent watching an amazing Toni Collete slowly fracturing. She’s a professional artist and the matriarch of an upper class family, an identity she has used to emerge out from under the shadow of her domineering, controlling and dead mother. She manages everyone in her own family with high congenial energy, just trying to live a nice normal life with no particular aspirations but mild success. Well, it turns out that might be too much to ask. Considered without the horror, Hereditary asks rather simply whether the tangle of our emotional logic and the circumstances of life itself will ever let us emerge from the jungle of the past. When the horror does arrive, you feel the sickening lurch, like a boat has just been struck and scuttled. You’re trapped too, and it’s not clear where it’s coming from, but Hereditary starts to sink you into the dark waters with the family. The alarm bells will be ringing and your pulse will shoot to 100 in one of the most visceral climaxes you’ve ever seen, as Ari Aster casts his spell. Despite the amygdala activation, the horror only works so well because of the wounded humans in its jaws. Truly a startling accomplishment that reveals new horizons for both horror and drama.
2
Burning
Burning strikes many chords in you, and some of them ring down so deep it's almost incomprehensible. Adapted from a Haruhi Murakami story by a famed Korean director, Lee-Chang Dong, Burning follows a young man trying to eke out a small bit of existence on the bottom rung of the ladder. He maintains an old defunct farm, works a minimum wage job, and has nothing going for him. Things change when he runs into an old friend of his, a woman for whom, like many, life’s promise has flamed out, leaving her to sell pieces of herself to keep afloat. Our young man finds her wearing a tight crop top and pushing raffle tickets, definitely a detour in the aspirations department, but she still has the dream in her head despite being on the same rung as him. That chance meeting rekindles a dreaminess in the young man, but it doesn’t get long to incubate before Steve Yeung’s rich interloper is injected into their lives. Yeung makes a case for himself as a gifted actor here, there’s a moment contained by a half yawn that informs the entire movie. I get chills thinking about it. There are many moments like that in Burning, moments of yearning, or boredom, or frustration, that just seem to drill right down into that place where our dreams live, that we like to protect. Time to crack it open and realize just how fragile they are. A little plotting ambiguity courtesy of Murakami is the icing on the cake. Well, what does the truth matter anyway when we feel the way we do?
The Best Movie of 2018
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Sometimes a movie just insists upon itself. But in a good way! This was the last film I ever saw with the man who raised me to love movies. I really wish we could watch more together but what a good one to go out on. Spiderman got itself 3 spidermen deep in live action with diminishing returns when suddenly this love letter appeared out of nowhere. This 3d animated spiderverse focusing on the youngest man to hold the mantle, Miles Morales, and paired with its young directors ended up more contemporary than almost any movie made this year, certainly in comparison to its superhero competitors. There’s a lag time in culture making it to the big screen, but Spider-Verse felt like one of the first movies of any kind that intrinsically understood the speed, information density, and disconnection of the modern connected era.
Beyond setting, Spiderverse is about the joy of motion and visual kinetics, finding excuses to explore those things using reality bending spiderjinks to crash various Spiderpeople into the film. Like Parker before him, Miles is anchored to the role by resounding grief, and a certainly melancholy plays through the film. But he keeps running forward, righting what once went wrong, living his life the best he can. Spiderverse hit like a meteor, changing all the movies around it for years to come, but it’s unlikely to be equaled. Every frame explodes like fireworks, the action is high velocity thrills, and it is deeply hilarious, full of laughter. What a film to ring in the new era! Love you dad.
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